Are you absolutely the type of loser who would get swindled into living among bots and never realize it?
Let's be straight: A considerable amount of the traffic generated over the Internet is made by bots. By the end of this year 2021, most probably 50% of the Internet will be generated by automated bots which means, (at least for me) that the Internet is a huge empty place that is already ruled by “non-human” entities. The dead-Internet conspiracy theory suggests that the Internet has been almost entirely taken over by “Artificial Intelligence” (with quotation marks because bots are not really something to be considered truly AI), which is utterly terrifying, but 90% true in my opinion.
The conspiracy also says that the Internet died in 2015 or early 2016, and that now it is “empty and devoid of people,” as well as “entirely sterile”. Much of the apparent human-produced content you see online was actually created using “AI”, and was propagated by bots, possibly aided by a group of “influencers” on the payroll of X corporations.
While the conspiracy theory tends to be exaggerated for many reasons that I will not discuss here, in fact if we try a little research over social media, we can easily find the same threads, the same pics, and the same replies reposted over and over across the years in different platforms; all modern entertainment is generated and recommended by an algorithm, and the same news/articles repeat over and over again. One hilarious example is the moon itself; I am pretty sure everybody has read the following year after year: “What is a super flower blood moon?”, “What is a pink supermoon?”, “Don’t miss: rare, seasonal ‘Blue Moon’ rises tonight,” and “Why this weekend’s Blue Moon is extremely super rare and will not be seen in 300 hundred years”.
Another clear example is YouTube, every single person I have met has seen a video there, but once, they had such high bot traffic that some employees feared phenomenon known as “the inversion”, the point when its systems would start to see bots as authentic and humans as inauthentic. Even engagement metrics on sites as big and powerful as Facebook have been grossly inflated or easily gamed because human presence can be mimicked with click farms or cheap bots, which is insulting but accurate due to the current level of intelligence we display as mankind in general.
At this point, you could even say that the theory is so obvious, it’s cliché because every person can immediately understand the Internet is already mostly bots, overalls since people may find themselves acting like bots, responding on impulse in predictable ways to things that were created, in all likelihood, to evoke that behavior.
If it is still not so obvious for you the best proof I have that the Internet is “dead” and it is mostly for bots is this comment: “If I was real I’m pretty sure I’d be out there living each day to the fullest and experiencing everything I possibly could with every given moment of the relatively infinitesimal amount of time I’ll exist for instead of posting on the Internet about nonsense.”