Hi friends! Happy Friday!! And Happy Valentine's Day!
In this week's edition of Freaky Friday Files, we are going to take a look at the dead internet theory.
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The Dead Internet Theory
What is the dead internet theory? According to Wikipedia, the dead Internet theory is "a conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity." It is believed that this was done to be able to manipulate consumers, but I do have to emphasise here that this is a conspiracy theory - it hasn't been proven true. The date of when the internet's "death" was is allegedly around 2016-2017. The origins of this conspiracy theory are unknown. However, it is thought that it comes from a post back in 2021 called "Dead Internet Theory: Most Of The Internet Is Fake" which was published on a forum known as Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe. One journalist Kaitlyn Tiffany who wrote about this theory for The Atlantic was able to get in touch with the Original Poster (OP) and described the dead internet theory as "ur-text" (aka, original), meaning that this was the start of a big conspiracy theory to come. OP was a man from California who believed wholeheartedly in the words he wrote, and described a sense of paranoia, loneliness, unease, and disappointment in today's internet. To him, the internet is merely something that has drowned out "human-ness" and turned it into a controlled, algorithmic form as a way to sell products and ideas - it's all consumerism.
But the theory is definitely a lot deeper than just being tied to consumerism. It's about how we rarely interact with humans online anymore. How do we know when we're talking to a real person versus a bot? What's even scarier about this theory that OP created was he wrote it before the rise of AI apps like ChatGPT and Gemini - it was before the time where Google just had an AI overview for everything. Creepy right? Although not hard to predict.
Does this conspiracy theory hold any weight?
Well, yes and no.
Not everything is black and white. I don't think the majority of the time I go online and interact with other bloggers or go on Reddit and talk to other users, that I am talking to a bot (if I am I have been fooled, as Penn & Teller would say), but this theory does highlight something interesting - the commodification of content consumption for revenue rather than just consumption, has taken precedence over meaningful connections that happen to be human (Muzumdar et al., 2025). It's always back to capitalism and in this case, digital capitalism. Walter (2024) says "The advent of what is here referred to as “AI influencers” signals a paradigm shift in social media, transforming it from a space for genuine human interaction to a sophisticated domain dominated by consumption-driven algorithms." Therefore, this demonstrates how this shift in what we see online is more driven toward selling and less genuine human to human connections and authentic experiences. We really are living in a real life Black Mirror, thanks Charlie Brooker.
I write a lot of content for the internet and I'm a real person, we want authenticity and a more genuine human connection, so is the real question we need to ask, are we present ourselves? Rather than, is anyone out there?
Some other questions we may want to consider:
Is the internet going to change in the future to fit this theory more? Most likely.
Do we need to be more critical of what we read on the internet? Yes, but we still have to believe some things otherwise we will go insane.
Are bots going to replace humans? I hope not.
How much of today’s internet traffic is actually bots versus human users?
How have large corporations influenced online discourse and visibility of content?
How does internet nostalgia (e.g., early 2000s web culture) play into this theory?
Are people falling for confirmation bias when they believe in the Dead Internet Theory?
If you are interested in some examples that help reinforce this theory then I highly recommend checking out Reddit.com/r/deadinternettheory - there's some freaky AF examples on there that help highlight the concerns of this theory. I'll post some of my favourites below.
Looking at this subreddit has been eye-opening. And I think this year in particular I have been seeing a lot more AI-generated content on social media. And it's funny, especially on Facebook. because some people will believe anything they see online. As I've said in a lot of my posts lately, it's important to critically think and analyse things.
One last thing is that these social media platforms are purposefully putting this theory into action i.e., the rise of the AI influencer.
Thanks for reading,
Much love,
Ash
Readings/References
Muzumdar, P., Cheemalapati, S., RamiReddy, S. R., Singh, K., Kurian, G., & Muley, A. (2025). The Dead Internet Theory: A Survey on Artificial Interactions and the Future of Social Media. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.00007.
Walter, Y. (2024). Artificial influencers and the dead internet theory. AI & SOCIETY, 1-2.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/01/16/the-dead-internet-theory-explained/
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/internet/67864/dead-internet-theory-ai
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3632173/meta-puts-the-dead-internet-theory-into-practice.html
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Hey Ash! Great post! AI can be great but it can be a big problem too. I think it’s sad that we are getting to the popping where people don’t care about being creative. They just want to put content out. I like when people are at least honest when they use ai. I feel like if people are not honest they make things hard for people who are genuinely creative because people will not know if their work is real or not. Another problem is that people just want to pump out content without making connections. Part of being a content creator is the building connections. Some people are just not interested in building connections anymore.
Another problem is…
Very interesting read about is the internet dead. I do agree that in some ways it's hard to discern the fake from the real. Nowadays there is so much AI that can easily fool us.