ONE FOR THE ROAD
Have you heard of the Dead Internet Theory?
Simply put, the Dead Internet Theory suggests that a significant portion of the Internet, once bustling with human-generated content and interaction, is quickly becoming a hollow echo chamber dominated by artificially generated content and bots, designed to create an illusion of human activity and engagement to boost numbers and influence human behavior through fear, hate, and a collapse of reality.
Many feel we are already there. I mean, just imagine having a serious conversation with someone just five years ago about whether or not men can get pregnant? Or that aliens live among us. Or how not having symptoms for Covid was one of the symptoms of Covid. These are just some examples of countless conversations happening all across the Internet that have already become mainstream.
Latest numbers show that more than half the content consumed online is now artificially generated. And with the rise of AI over the last few months, that figure is rising exponentially. So as frightening as it is to admit, it is safe to say that at this point, we are being programmed by AI and not the other way around.
And it couldn’t have come at a worst point in time, either. After more than two years of being blatantly lied to, sanctioned, censored, shamed and ostracized for not going with the official narrative, the biggest side effect to come out of the pandemic has been the loss of trust. People just don’t believe what the mainstream media, government and our institutions have to say anymore. We are officially in a trust crisis.
So they turn to the internet. Only to find that this has also become a cesspool of disinformation and deep fakes, mostly controlled by the institutions that drove us to this desolate state in the first place.
So what do we do? And how can this be a good thing?
First thing we need to do as humans is accept that this is all fake. Before anything, we need to finally agree on this shared reality. Kind of like how we did with WWE. Or when you found out Santa Claus wasn’t real. It didn’t make us stop watching, appreciating or celebrating, we just saw it through a different lens and interacted with it accordingly. And this is how I think we should look at the Internet.
Once we accept that the people, we are trying to win an argument with in the comments section are not human, or that latest fear mongering piece you read was done by ChatGPT, you can disengage and interact accordingly. Like how you would on an automated call. Soon enough, we would understand that the Internet is not a place to live in or socialize in, but a place solely to extract information — much like a library was before.
Eventually, once we see it for what it is and treat it accordingly, I could see a world in the not so distant future where instead of interacting with each other online, we would interact with our own personal assistants (like a highly evolved Siri) that would ‘fetch information’ from the Internet for us as we required it so we didn’t have to interact directly — allowing us to finally build our relationships offline and just treat the internet as a tool to facilitate that and not a replacement of it.