Surviving the Dead Internet
It's 2025, and Meta (maybe) has announced a bunch of AI users to Facebook and Instagram. What is the point of this?
Obviously, the point is to make our lives a little worse. It certainly isn't going to make our lives better.
Now, I haven't done much research on the AI user story except what I have seen on social media. Maybe it is all bullshit. Maybe the users aren't actually run by Meta. Maybe it is a piece of performance art. Who knows.
However, on all the stories about these AI users, there were a number of comments all saying similar things: "These are just for lonely people so they have someone to talk to".
Why do these people all have the same comment? Are they bots? Did they read a comment on the first story and think "ahah, now it's my turn!"? It's not like they have any evidence, there are no sources.
And, if your opinion is indistinguishable from a bot, is it worth even commenting?
So ... Dead Internet Theory: the idea that, already, fifty percent of all interactions on the net are just bots. Bots taking to us, bots talking to each other, bots talking to nobody.
What do we do?
The first thing is to leave social media. Great. But then what? Our loved ones are still on social media. Governments still use social media for official communication (ridiculous, isn't it?) How do you find stuff without social media? It is getting harder and harder. So you can't quit social media. You can refuse to engage, but part of your life will involve social media.
And then there is AI. Even non-social sites are being plagued by AI. How will this affect things such as Wikipedia? It won't be long before AI will be writing articles -- probably not as part of Wikipedia policy, but as bots. You know it is going to happen. It probably already is happening.
What about textbooks? What if your physics textbook was written by AI? Would it matter? It might -- AI gets things wrong and is very convincing about it. Would you want the engineers who built the bridge you are driving over to be trained by AI?
And so the Dead Internet Theory becomes a problem for the offline world. Information leeches out. The people we talk to will spend all day arguing with bots and not even know it -- and then they will come home and argue with you, and what will the bots have conditioned them to say? Or how to vote? Or what brands to buy?
This is already an existing problem: talkbalk radio has stolen the minds of old people for fifty years. Tabloid newspapers have done the same thing for the gossip-set. And we have no way to fight it, even though we know the end game: distraction, coercion, influence. The bots are just going to drive this process into overdrive.
I don't have any answers, but I ate my first wild blackberry in my garden yesterday and that is as far away from the dead Internet as I can get.
So I think Step 1 is to do more of that.