July 2025, 14 Minutes

Internet Mortis

Why is the internet so shit now? Ok, that question is both loaded and leading, as well as hyperbolic. But still, it kinda is, though.

Not to start off too subrationally here but, much like trying to watch your favourite childhood movies again, it just doesn’t feel the same anymore. What once felt expansive and organic, now seems to be excessively curated, smaller. It feels out of our hands a bit, like a bigger, unseen hand is guiding all our movements on the online spaces, subtly nudging us where it wants us to go, what it wants us to see, to buy. It increasingly feels bland, unnutritious, bleached, like white rice sandwiched between two slices of white bread. When “surfing the web” it can sometimes feel as though one is racing through a shopping mall, from one shop to another, quickly making consumption hits to activate dopamine pathways, always accompanied on our commercial trek by a blad soundtrack being pumped through Tanoy. There are boarded-up shops in this mall, doors to nowhere, windows painted over, abandoned hallways where lights flicker but don’t illuminate. This is the web we once knew. Where the surf was high, rapid, and even a little dangerous. Now we find ourselves in a theme park wave pool, recycled water, chlorinated, pressed firm against other bodies, fighting for space.

The sci-fi author, and general netizen, Corey Doctorow, invented a neologism for this, and it may go down as one of the most neo of neologism: enshittification. According to Doctorow, online spaces inevitably degrade over time — becoming increasingly exploitative, annoying, and unpleasant — as they shift from serving users to extracting value from them.

It’s not just a pithy word, it is a process, a cycle, and it goes something like this:

1. It’s good to/for users, in order to attract them. TikTok boosts new creators, Amazon offers free shipping and cheap prices.

2. Its priorities shift and it becomes good to business partners. Mulla, baby. Instagram shuffles in more ads; Google prioritises sponsored links.

3. And finally, it’s only good to itself, to extract the maximum amount of profit. This inevitably comes at the expense of user enjoyment and comfort. Reddit cuts off third-party apps; Amazon fills pages with sponsored products; Google buries organic search.

If this is ringing any bells then, congrats, you may now be a believer of the Dead Internet Theory.

Ghosts in the Machine

The Dead Internet Theory (DIT) suggests that most of the internet is no longer created or populated by real humans, but by bots, AI-generated content, and algorithmic repetition. According to the theory, authentic human engagement online has been quietly but steadily replaced by synthetic activity designed to manipulate trends, drive profit, or shape opinion. Here, the theory is capturing a real cultural anxiety: that the web feels emptier, faker, and more homogenised than ever before.

The origin of the theory, if not the subsequent name, can be traced back to 4chan, that user-unfriendly meme-factory for the hyperonlie. Sniffing a fed, discourse began to emerge questioning if the internet was becoming flooded with fake content by bot farms. It’s a bipartisan phenomenon: for every CIA-Vigilant fan of the Church Committee, there is someone checking for Russian or Chinese influence on Reddit through bot farms and flooding, especially around political matters. It’s a growing concern, in other words, and the noticing is coming hard and heavy.

The name can be credited to a certain anonymous user named IlluminatiPirate on the lo-fi retro forum, Agora Road’s Macintosh Café, in January 2021. The post claimed that most internet activity since around 2016–2017 was automated, synthetic, or manipulated; bots dominate forums, comment sections, and social media feeds bits and AI-generated content (as it then existed in its nascent form) and "slop" were used to influence users, control opinion, and create the illusion of human engagement.

To be frank, the original post reads like part digital paranoia, part cyberpunk fiction, but it resonated because it reflected real feelings of alienation, platform decay, and digital distrust.

As so often happens with the functionally undeniable, what began as a vibe, an impression, a whispered theory of conspiracy from the onion web, has recently gained mainstream traction.

A 2024 study by the University of New South Wales states that “The ‘dead internet theory’ makes eerie claims about an AI‑run web. The truth is more sinister” – UNSW’s analysis delves into AI‑generated posts like “Shrimp Jesus,” bot engagement cycles, and propagandistic potential. It also highlights the arresting claim that nearly half of internet traffic is bot‑driven

Another Australian sleuthing operation (our Antipodean kin appear to be leading the way on this topic…), this time conducted by the Courier Mail in annus mirabilis, 2025, came to largely similar conclusions. “The internet feels ‘less human’ – here’s why” discusses how AI content and bots now dominate feeds, eroding trust and promoting deceptive articles, and advocates for a “humanity‑prioritised internet”.

In that vein, this year the Financial Times published, “Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy”. This piece frames the problem in terms of “slop” and Doctorow’s “enshittification,” describing the current internet as a chaotic, bot‑filled environment where people are increasingly finding nothing but sales pitches and alienation.

“Slop” is worth discussing here. It’s a word I noticed emerging in the past few years, and has especially taken off this year. A shorthand for a certain kind of low-quality, mass-produced, algorithm-friendly content — particularly that which is designed to flood social feeds, optimise engagement, and suppress thoughtful or human-made work. Progressively, it is creating a zero-sum dichotomy between the good and the bad, the authentic and the fake. Lamentably, The good, by its nature, will always be forced out by the bad; wishing to preserve something precious, it will seek pastures new, until the process repeats. Unfortunately, those pastures are become rarer, and not as fertile as they once were. So, a fight may soon need to be had, but more on this later.

And the data supporting DIT continues to build. In January of this year, Cornell University published “The Dead Internet Theory: A Survey on Artificial Interactions and the Future of Social Media”. This is an academic paper that understands DIT as a symptom of engagement‑driven platforms prioritising bots over humans. Echoing the concerns of Doctorow, the authors state that, “This study redefines DIT in the context of social media, proposing that the commodification of content consumption for revenue has taken precedence over meaningful human connectivity. By focusing on engagement metrics, platforms foster a sense of artificiality and disconnection, underscoring the need for human-centric approaches to revive authentic online interaction and community building.”

This does all beg the question of the original DIT theorists were on the ground floor of a building that grew, or if the internet only began its death spiral in more recent years, sometime after the first claims of morbidity were made? I can’t conclusively answer this, and I expect the ever-fruitful Covid years greatly contributed to the phenomenon, but if the web-dwelling primogenitors want the credit, I have no problem giving it to them, if only for their foresight.

It’s Just a Baud Dream

Here, before we go any further, we need to talk about Jean Baudrillard. “The Gulf War did not take place”. Say what? I mean, it did, and Baudrillard acknowledges that it did, and yet he maintains that in a sense, it never really did. So what does he mean by this? Is he just being mad and continental? Not exactly - in classic postmodern fashion, he blows epistemology clean outta the water: the war, a very real event, was experienced by the public only through a sanitised media spectacle. This was not reality as has always been traditionally understood, but a hyperreal narrative.

The hyperreal - a state implying the death of the real real - is the baby produced by the marriage of Baudrillard’s two core ideas – the simulacra and the simulation. Simulacra can be understood to mean a copy of a real thing, or an imitation of a real thing; simulation is the process of creating a reality through signs and symbols.

Baudrillard proposed that in postmodern society (namely our society) we no longer interact with the real world, but with representations of it — simulations. He defines four stages of the “image” (a representation of reality): 1, It is a reflection of a basic reality; 2, It masks and perverts a basic reality; 3, It masks the absence of a basic reality; 4, finally, it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever — it is its own pure simulation

Are you with me? I’m barely with me most of the time, so don’t worry if not. To illustrate Baudrillard’s idea, let’s consider a leather handbag. Make it Gucci if you want, Ralph Lauren if you must, though I think Hermes may be more appropriate considering the inherent Frenchness of what it is we discuss here.

First up we’re reflecting reality faithful: the bag is made using traditional material and methods, perhaps in an artisanal fashion. The bag reflects real labour, craftsmanship and utility – it is what it appears to be. Next up the mask descends. We have a mass-produced leather handbag, made in a factory but is marketed as having handmade lineage - it claims authenticity and craftsmanship, but the production is industrial and cheap. It's a commercial fiction masking the truth. Thirdly, we find ourselves entering the wasteland of the unreal - a place pretending to be real, but which has lost all contact with the original authenticity. Now a designer handbag may be made of imitation leather but may still cost a pretty penny – its purpose is status and symbol. The fourth and final stage of Baudrillard’s theory finds us at the simulacra, or the pure simulacra. Now the leather handbag, made by expert hands in a small shop somewhere in the Old World, has become virtual: it is an NFT, or an in-game item to be bought and sold for virtual bucks in a videogame or the Metaverse. It is bought for real money, owned digitally, and no physical manifestation of it exists. It is now a symbol of identity and value. It is a sign of a sign of a sign…

So how does this connect with DIT? I believe that offers us a useful lens through which to see the topic. Whereas Doctorow’s analysis – valuable though it may be – falls chiefly under the economic canopy, Baudrillard’s (writing before the advent of the internet), is symbolic. DIT posits that much of the internet today is filled with AI-generated content, bots, and algorithmic loops — simulations of human interaction that have replaced actual people. In Baudrillardian terms, the internet has entered a phase of hyperreality, where digital conversations, reviews, and media are signs detached from real users. The web appears alive, but it is a performance of life — a simulacrum of the vibrant, chaotic, human-driven space it once was.

It almost goes without saying that I am not the first to make this connection, nor to make the connection in the best way. The Philosophy & Technology journal recently published an article, “Baudrillard and the Dead Internet Theory” which applies Jean Baudrillard’s simulation theory to explain how AI‑generated content strips human meaning from the web, leaving it a sort of badlands for those seeking to produce or engage with authentic content.

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Are me mislabelling here? Perhaps the internet is not just dead. Maybe it’s more sinister than that. Perhaps it died, but did not stay as such; a reanimated, hostile creature that wishes to consume us. To that end, Zombie Internet Theory may be a more appropriate term for the phenomena.

Dead things are, by definition, lifeless. They are inactive, they are ended. They used to be alive, but that state of being has changed and can never be changed back. Zombie (an African Bantu word – nzumbi – that entered the English lexicon through Haitian voodoo) things, on the other rotting hand, are indeed animated, yet still lacking the essence of life. They mimic life, in form if not in function, and for that reason they fill us with uncanny dread – how can something be allowed to so rebel against the natural order? It’s just not right.

In my estimation, if the internet was truly dead, like say floppy disks or Myspace, we would not even be having this conversation – the evidence would be there,

I don’t want this argumentation to veer too heavily into the long grass of semantics – that is a swardy place where conversations typically go to die, and where ideas are lost in the vast overgrowth. But there is still a place for semantics – it conveys precision of thought and meaning, and for that reason, just as it should not be used a mean to obscure or obfuscate, a plaything of the sophist, it should also not be discarded entirely, lest our minds, and or allegiance to accuracy, slacken too much. To that end, perhaps you will pardon my quarrel with the term dead and the desire to replace it with zombie for, as well as the above stated reason, I also think it has greater information power. Maybe I’m overstepping my (admittedly limited) talents here, but zombie has a touch more clout to it, it’s a tad zappier, has a bit more of a, dare I say, online quality.

Fons Stagnum

The Devil’s Hour has arrived, and time for critique. Theories are strengthened, not weakened, by inspection and exposure to scrutiny, and no theory that rejects the suggestion should ever be taken seriously.

Is this all coming from a narcissistic instinct, something solipsistic, myopic? After all, the internet was not “built” for any one of us, and subjective preference should not necessarily be taken all that seriously.

Here we may be exposing the egocentrism and romanticism that might underpin the theory’s assumptions. Rather than revealing the internet’s death, DIT may instead project the user’s loss of personal centrality in a digital world no longer shaped around their identity or particularism.

At its core, DIT reflects a fading sense of significance: early internet users once felt like pioneers — unique, visible, and vital — but now face an online environment saturated with algorithmic noise, mass content, and artificial chatter. The loss of that feeling is reframed as cultural decay, when it may simply be a decline in individual prominence. Instead of recognising the natural evolution of digital culture, DIT externalises personal alienation. Therefore, “I don’t recognise the internet anymore” becomes “The internet must be fake,” and “No one listens to me online” becomes “Everyone else must be a bot.” Additionally, and heralding the upcoming generational gap argument, it is easier to believe the internet is broken than to admit one has aged out of its cultural centre or, due to this ageing, been deprioritised by the Olympians of the online astronomic, algorithms.

In his 1979 cultural diagnosis, The Culture of Narcissism, Christipher Lasch argued that modern American society—especially post-WWII—had produced a new type of self: insecure, approval-seeking, and emotionally hollow, shaped by consumer capitalism, mass media, and the decline of traditional structures like family, religion, and community. It should be noted here that Lasch wasn’t using narcissist in the clinic, pathological sense (for one, one he had no qualification to do so), but in the broader cultural sense; a pervasive shift had occurred in his society, and he wished to understand why. Of course, considering many, or most, of us have lived under the American cultural umbrella for the past half a century, much of that down to the internet itself, Lasch’s nation-specific analysis can, I am confident in saying, be extrapolated outwards to the rest of the globe (though with caution, I must stress, as some souls are less touched with the blight than others).

Once again, as with Baudrillard, any analysis of the internet using pre-internet abstractions and trying to graft them onto our current predicament should be done with humility and prudence. We are now two generations since Lasch wrote his work, so the worth of applying it will full confidence would be debatable. But, the desire for admiration over intimacy, the fragile sense of self, and the obsession with youth, image and performance – all aspects of the homos novos noticed by Lasch – could easily be used as shorthand’s to describe what the algorithms of social media encourage in participants. These appear to be marketable and monetisable qualities, and to that end they are increasingly encouraged, promoted, even mandated.

Perhaps, in a turn of irony even Sophocles would appreciate, the narcissism feeding the Hungry Hippo engine of today’s internet, is the very same narcissism that harkens back to a previous instantiation. An electronic Arcadia, where nymphs, satyrs and centaurs roamed free and never had to agree to input billing info or confirm cookies.

A bit of pushback may be warranted here. The collective experience across ages and borders would suggest that the phenomenon of DTI is not merely coming from vain individualism. Now, as noted by Lasch, it is possible, though social contagion, to have mass explosions of negative personality traits, but collective wisdom has an uncanny knack of actually being right, as much as the idea may bother us. In 1907, the statistician (see: nerd) Francis Galton a now-famous (among nerds) experiment in which he asked 800 people at a country fair to guess the weight of an ox. While individual guesses varied widely, the average of all responses—1,197 pounds—was remarkably accurate, falling just one pound short of the ox's actual weight of 1,198 pounds. This result demonstrated the power of collective wisdom, showing that when many independent judgments are aggregated, individual errors tend to cancel out, producing a surprisingly precise estimate.

Certainly makes the grey matter light up, huh?

The Kids are Aight

Naturally, one may also notice the generational aspect to all this; would younger generations – Z, A, whatever is to follow – see the internet the same way as the balding and greying generations that preceded them? I suspect not, though in the case of Zoomer’s, the phenomena may be so new they are onto it as much as anyone else, and, having the vigour of youth, as well as being the first generation that can truly claim to have been born in the internet age, and who are no coming-to or of age where they are gathering institutional momentum and power (if only to store it for later), may have the required tools to effectivity fight it.

Looking at DIT from a generational perspective reveals that it often reflects the biases, nostalgia (more on this later), and anxieties of older internet users — particularly Millennials and early Gen X — rather than any objective or universal truth.

More than a diagnosis of the web’s “death,” DIT expresses a cultural mood shaped by personal experience and shifting digital norms. For older users, the early internet was a chaotic, decentralised, and DIY space: weird forums, personal blogs, and subcultural zones that felt raw but human. As the internet evolved into corporatised, algorithm-driven platforms, many of these users felt displaced, and DIT has become a way to claim ownership of a better version of the thing. For Millennials especially, the idea resonates as a kind of digital midlife crisis: burnout from hyperconnectivity, a loss of youthful digital idealism, and a sense that everything — from politics to tech to the web itself — has worsened. In this way, DIT becomes a symbolic container for broader disillusionment, a messenger we would oh-so love to shoot.

For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, however, raised on a steady digital diet of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and, increasingly, AI content, that earlier version of the web never existed. What feels “soulless” to one generation may feel seamless, entertaining, or even creative to another; younger users often expect curation, performance, and irony — they treat the internet not as a truth engine but as a space of layered spectacle, much as Baudrillard foretold!

Conversely, recent data may suggest otherwise. For instance, a May 2025 (fresh as baked bread out of the oven) British Standards Institute survey of UK youth (16-21) found that nearly half of them would rather be “young in a world without internet”. Moreover, in the same survey, 60% of participants agreed that a social media curfew (this one set at 10pm) was a good idea.

So, it seems the dissatisfaction is cross-generational. Of course, the reasons may be different, but the general malaise, distrust and cynicism towards the internet appears to be widespread.

Nostalgiashock > Futureshock

Are we actually all just victims of that poisoner-mistress, nostalgia? As Proust found, she can be terribly seductive, and though her position-mixing intoxicate us to the point of madness. But it’s a beautiful madness, all the same. Could the theory be understood as less a clear-sighted analysis of technological decline and more a longing for a past that may never have truly existed. As nostalgia is liable to do, it often blurs the line between memory and myth, and risks romanticising a version of the internet that was always, to some degree, flawed, fragmented, or inaccessible to others.

So, was there an online “Golden Age”? In truth, the early web was also filled with spam, scams, and disinfo. Trolls and anonymity-driven chaos have always been there. Additional, Surveillance and commercialisation began much earlier than DIT implies. 1995 gave us both Amazon and eBay, and in the 1990s, the U.S. and its Five Eyes allies (basically the Commonwealth Anglosphere) were already using ECHELON, a global surveillance system that monitored emails, phone calls, and internet traffic. 1997 gave us the FBI’s Carnivore system which tapped internet communications through ISPs — a precursor – or prototypical test-case – to mass data surveillance. The latter quarter of 2001 gave us the glories of the Patriot Act which Legalised wide-scale email and browser tracking and enabled deep packet inspection (basically opening digital envelopes in transit, reading the contents, and deciding what to do with them) and metadata collection.

DIT often conflates personal disconnection with a more global decline, turning subjective experiences into sweeping diagnoses: “I don’t enjoy being online anymore” becomes “The internet is fake and dead.” This transferal risks ignoring the structural and cultural changes that naturally occur over time — and that also occur within ourselves. As we age, our relationship to technology evolves; what once felt thrilling at 15 may feel hollow at 35. Thus, the loss of wonder we sense may be internal, not infrastructural.

Similarly, the internet once felt coherent, navigable — like a neighbourhood — but has since become vast, fragmented, and algorithmically curated. That disorientation may reflect the shrinking of our personal digital horizons rather than the death of the medium itself. Nostalgia, in this context, serves as a comforting illusion. In an era dominated by AI-generated content, surveillance capitalism, climate anxiety, and political fragmentation, longing for the “old internet” becomes a psychological refuge — a yearning for a time that felt freer, more open, maybe more human. Yet this sanctuary is often imagined: the internet we miss may not have existed for everyone.

So, It can be argued that, yes, a heavy dollop of nostalgia is in the mix here, and is sometimes used as a yardstick to measure moral worthiness, but it could also be claimed that it is that very nostalgia that is driving forward the dissatisfaction for what now is – remember, nostalgia is not inherently wrong (in a epistemic sense) and, through its extreme subjectivity, may still reveal a solid objective truth.

Sometimes it seems to me that we are in a stage of grief for gone things, each of us stuck somewhere on the Kubler-Ross spectrum, and that what we’re mourning isn’t just the internet’s transformation — it’s the loss of youth, unstructured time, possibility, and the feeling that we were once in control.

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DIT, I believe, reflects a broader fear — not of technological failure, but of the death of meaning in a space once defined by human presence. I contend that we need we need third spaces. We need them for socialising, creating, and having a place to just breathe. The world today is by most measure not the world of yesterday, and on e of the most noticeable changes is the loss of the physical primary third space, the town square – it has moved online, and it is our collective birthright to claim it for ourselves.

So how do we fix it? If we in fact do fix it – that is, If the premise of the argument is accepted, and that acceptance energises a drive to change. That is, of course, a political question. It’s not something that can be resolved by the individual, but by the collective, and in order for the collective to take action, it must first have two ingredients ready to start cooking with: will and consensus. There you have the why – the how will eventually reveal itself.

Behemoths, by their nature, are hard to fight. They are big and strong and scary. The forces that run the online space are oligarchal in scale and, as things stand, have little incentive to enact positive change. Without this turning to much into a political pamphlet, my suggestion to anyone wishing to enact change would be to change those incentives.

I suppose all of that is a conversation for another day. A wiser day. But the conversation will one day need to be had, for the internet slouches on, though perhaps this time away from Bethlehem.

Photo credit: Junior Teixeria