What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: the “Dead Internet Theory” Isn’t Real, I Swear

Is the Internet dead? Proponents of the dead Internet theory believe that the Internet as we understand it does not exist. He died around 2016, and since then, everything we see on the internet, from Instagram photos to this Lifehacker post, has been created by artificial intelligence and fed to consumers by a dark cabal of corporate and government executives to control people’s thoughts and keep them consume. They are partly right, but the mistakes they make are dangerous.

History of the Dead Internet Theory

The epicenter of the spread of the dead internet theory is a September 2019 thread on 4chan , in which anonymous users came together to try to figure out what part of the internet was legal. They came to the conclusion that it was almost all fake, but it used to be real. The evidence in this thread is scattered across the Internet – young people sensing something is wrong, older users remembering the glory days of the early Internet – but the 4chan posters managed to paint a rough sketch of an ongoing conversation. in academic and technology circles since at least 2010. Anyone paying attention can see that advances in artificial intelligence technology and the emergence of content management algorithms are transforming the Internet from a digital Wild West into something “safer,” softer, and perhaps more sinister. But the transformation is not complete, and this is not evidence of the imposition of the sinister plans of “The Man” from top to bottom, as most proponents of the “Dead Internet Theory” believe.

The problem with the dead internet theory is not that it is completely wrong—bots and algorithms are indeed fundamentally changing the online experience—but some proponents of the dead internet theory ignore context and draw unfounded conclusions to support a broader theory that is not true. is not supported by evidence, like any conspiracy theory. Like any conspiracy theory, the dead internet theory is used to justify prejudice and hatred.

The Internet is like this because people like it.

It’s easy to feel nostalgic for the days when you could post anything online. It was free! It was not created to sell you things! But the people who do this were not there, or they look at what was there through rose-colored glasses. In fact, the online world as a whole is going through a larger version of the process that almost every online space has always gone through when it became popular.

It looks like this: some small group meets somewhere to exchange ideas in a completely free, anywhere environment. It’s cool, but confusing: a lot of new, interesting ideas, but no real means of filtering them.

Over time, more people notice the space, and some of these newcomers turn out to be bad actors—spammers, trolls, or worse—and their conversations and ideas begin to crowd out the original posters, and the space becomes unpleasant and unusable.

This leaves the people who run the site with a choice: they can either adhere to the ideals of “free speech” and allow everyone to freely do what they want, or they can impose some rules and organization to try to preserve what people originally wanted. liked the space.

Neither option is great. If they take a hands-off approach, this space will become the property of trolls and bad actors, pushing the original population elsewhere (see: 4chan). If they moderate and install safety rails, they lose the freedom that made the place interesting in the first place, and the space becomes watered down and dull. It welcomes new users as long as they aren’t controversial (see: Reddit).

The problem is that those “new users” who prefer security over anarchy represent almost everyone. I think it’s fair to say that most people would prefer an algorithmically curated “videos I’m likely to like” channel on YouTube rather than one left in the middle of GeoCities asking to “dig something useful out of this giant mountain of crap.”

The Existence of the Dead Internet Theory Proves It to Be False

If there truly was a central authority controlling everything on the internet, you would think that videos and articles explaining the dead internet theory would be eliminated by the algorithm to prevent the sheep from finally waking up. But finding information about the grand plan (or any other conspiracy theory) isn’t hard because people can make money from it in a way that they can’t make money from hate speech and trolling.

Believers of conspiracy theories are infuriating, but not controversial. Anger at the injustice of the bad people controlling our lives is addictive, and the algorithms have been tuned to keep people watching and clicking. This terrible science is driving us all into smaller and smaller ideological echo chambers, but there is no central authority looking down on us and saying, “Okay! Now they will be obedient!” There are only us, our prejudices, our sloppiness and the people who profit from us by giving us exactly what we want.

NPC Ascension

One of the harmful offshoots of the dead internet theory is the idea of ​​NPCs. Taken from the initials of “non-player character”, the darker, dumber corners of the internet have been describing people they disagree with as NPCs since the meme first appeared on 4chan (of course) in 2016. According to the theory, most people are not completely human. Instead of thinking for themselves, they are programmed to “follow groupthink and social trends in order to appear convincingly human.”

While most people who started thinking of others as NPCs meant it in the “they’re just brainwashed sheep” sense that is so common among stupid people with “ideas”, some “Dead Internet” conspiracy theorists take it literally. They believe that anyone who disagrees with them on the Internet is an artificial intelligence. Dehumanizing ideological enemies is a disturbing step towards political violence, but in the sense of the Dead Internet it is also a contradiction. If you crave the freedom of ideas that you think the Internet once symbolized, why don’t you welcome people with bold ideas? If you like freedom, why create a worldview in which it is easy to brush aside inconvenient facts by saying, “That’s what the machines want you to believe!”

Solipsism and the Dead Internet

At its core, the dead internet theory is a kind of digital solipsism—the idea that the individual is the only thing that exists. Solipsism isn’t really falsifiable, but it’s hard to take seriously when you’re talking to another flesh-and-blood person. If you live full-time on the Internet, where computer tools already exist to fool most people most of the time, it’s easy to believe that these tools are always in use. That’s not true – I’m a real guy who actually wrote those words – but as more and more of the human element of the Internet is replaced by computer programs, a terrifying picture of a Dead Internet may emerge. But we have at least six months, so don’t worry.