I’m definitely no conspiracist, but the theory that most of the activity on the www is non-human is appealing if not logical.
So-called Dead Internet Theory has been circulating awhile, fleshed out in The Atlantic and other places several times this year, and appears to be gaining traction.
The Atlantic finds evidence for the theory that the www is infested by spiders, trolls, deepfakes and bots in sources such as the ‘Bad Bot Report‘ by security website Imperva, who report 40.8% of all internet traffic in 2020 was bots, down from a whopping 61.3% in 2013.
Just stop and think about that — two-fifths of all Internet traffic is non-human.
An early thesis was posted on Agora Road under the heading The Internet is a Potemkin Village which uses as an example the anomalous and misleading numbers behind search engine hits.
Vast conspiracy? Or, as The Atlantic suggests, is the Internet simply rotting?
In addition to flesh-and-blood authors of Internet content we now have ‘Advanced Persistent Bots’ which mimic human behaviour, and stalk the www from randomised IP addresses, using anonymous proxies and fake identities. Can you tell them apart? Are you fapping to something non-human?
Looking at you, ‘anjelicaalim93‘!
I’m a normie who remembers that naive mantra, ‘Information wants to be free.’ How in the 90’s YouTube was alive with original content creators. We stole shit on Napster and got rickrolled on Limewire. Glory days which promised a brave new (albeit slightly illegal) world.
Back when the Internet was free, anonymity was assured and content was real. But much of it was also repugnant.
I remember a wilderness seething with Computer Studies undergraduates who treated the www as their own. The internet’s peculiar standards of netiquette were enforced by hairy losers whose main job seemed to be keeping 8chan safe for pedos.
Unfortunately, Computer Science graduates eventually want children of their own, and many oldfags became shills. Paid to create fake traffic and content for dodgy corporate employers, they built the bots. Netizens, human shills, present everywhere, uncounted, as bad as any spider.
But what kills Dead Internet Theory for me, by way of example, is the growth of adult content.
The surge in amateur, non-studio, self-published niche porn, revenue from which depends on keeping the watchmyexgf.net algorithm happy, is proof of active and ongoing human involvement on the www.
Only when eproctophilia stops trending will I start to worry.
Dead Interent Theory is good for a laugh. I do love an intelligent conspiracy-theorist. They always bring their A-game to the argument, and the best of them might just make you pause (if not stop) and think.
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