The Internet Isn't For Humans Anymore

Tonight, the Information Superhighway, and one of its main thoroughfares, an online network called Internet. And what about this Internet thing? Do you know anything about that? Sure. What the hell is that exactly? The variety on the Internet is one of its most incredible aspects, and there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of neat things you can do on it. The Internet gave us a whole world of exciting new possibilities, so I guess this is a story of how it changed our lives.

Maybe it will yours, too. Oh, my God! Is it just me, or is the internet getting worse? Fifteen years ago, you went on Facebook to stay in touch with high school buddies, but now they've all disappeared from your feed. You loved YouTube for its amazing, creative, and free content, but now it feeds you AI bunnies on trampolines and fake Bishop Robert Barron exercising toilets. When you sprinkle salt with prayer and faith, yes, even into your toilet. You are not performing a superstition.

You are declaring, I will not allow decay to reign in my home. I will not allow impurity to dominate. You used Google search to break out of the carefully controlled diet of network television. No longer beholden to ABC, NBC, PBS, or CNN, we could verify reporting, see the bigger picture, and alternative explanations of human events. We could find the latest information on everything and anything. Today, It feels like we're right back in the era of big media. You have to scroll through an AI summary and 16 sponsored ads before you get to anything remotely authentic or authoritative.

It's like it's all scripted. The internet is getting worse, and according to some people, when we go online today, we're basically entering a virtual dawn of the dead. Welcome to Dead Internet Theory. Yet another crazy tinfoil hat hypothesis that seems to be the only real explanation for why the internet feels so fake now. Now, when I first dug into dead internet theory, YouTube helpfully flagged it for me as a conspiracy theory, a clear algorithmic deployment of reverse psychological tactics designed to keep me clicking on every video it then fed me on the topic.

And I'm kind of convinced. The internet, the world wide web as we know it, is dying. And it's been replaced by a zombie bot apocalypse that's sucking the souls of its users. You feel it, right? We go online now and are immediately bombarded with stuff we didn't ask for. SEO bait, sponsored sites, pop-up videos. We're searching for information, and we end up scrolling through 500 sponsored sites you might also like, and AI-generated answers without ever connecting with an actual article written by a real person published after.

actual editing and careful thought. We're also seeing more and more ads. Some AI-generated blog posts estimate that we see 5,000 a day, probably not since you'd have to scroll for over 12 hours to see that many, but most likely you see in the high dozens, even over 100 for someone who's online three or four hours a day. Now, if you're a digital native who got online in the mid-2010s, This is just the internet you've always known. But if you're an older Gen Z or Millennial, like me, it's frustrating.

According to some people who subscribe to dead internet theory, in the next five to ten years, the internet as we know it will cease to exist. But wait! I thought the internet was the future! AI is the next big technology! It's the singularity! Are you telling me it's dead? Yep, and here's why.

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And now, what is dead internet theory? Before it had a name, versions of the theory percolated in the dark web, the 4chan-adjacent culture, platforms characterized by anonymity, pranks, and pattern spotting, where users swapped folk theories about how platforms and media manipulation really work. That brew of irony and paranoia was the perfect incubator for a thesis like The internet is dead, or the government is controlling the internet. The phrase dead internet theory took off after a long essay by the appropriately named and anonymous poster Illuminati Pirate was posted to Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe in early 2021.

Illuminati Pirate coined the phrase in his title, dead internet theory, most of the internet is fake. He, or she, or they, or it, stitched together earlier image board chatter from the early mid-2010s and statistics on verified fake traffic to argue that the web had become centrally steered and overrun by automation. The thread is still alive, sprawling now across many pages.

The Illuminati Pirate Thread pointed to real-world examples as proof of concept. For example, in 2011, journalists uncovered a U.S. military program contracting software that could run dozens of fake online personas for influence operations, Operation Earnest Voice. During OEV, the military spent nearly $3 million so that 50 U.S. operatives could create... 10 fake social media personas, known as sock puppets, to spread pro-US agenda messages worldwide. Whether or not that program reached your Twitter feed, its existence showed that governments, corporations, and ad networks, anyone with sufficient funds, had the means to simulate crowds, shape narratives, and make digital spaces feel alive, even if the humans had Quietly left.

At its spiciest, dead internet theory says governments and platforms collude to nudge our behavior and police thought. Classic psyops with viral reach. Regardless of who's coding them, dead internet theory rests on a claim that I find plausible. We are in the age of the algorithm.

But what's an algorithm? Well, simply understood, an algorithm is just any series of steps you follow to reach a goal. Want a peanut butter sandwich? Follow these simple steps. Need to jumpstart your car? Here's your checklist with steps in order of operation, very important for jumpstarting a car. So, to evaluate an algorithm, you need to know what its goal is. Then, you test the steps. Then, you can judge if the steps are effective and make adjustments. But when it comes to social media like Meta and online platforms like Google, What's the goal?

Well, it's money, which means keeping you on that platform as long as possible. To that end, their algorithms, which are always improving, serve up what flatters your worldview or enrages you enough to keep scrolling. Bots amplify it, ads monetize it, and the cycle repeats. Even if you don't buy into the death metaphor, the sense of being managed is the same as being managed. Rather than connected, rings true with a lot of people. Why does the theory resonate? Because it feels right.

Our feeds across all platforms feel kind of the same. That sameness feeling also has data to confirm you're not crazy. The 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report has the receipts. For the first time since we started tracking it, automated online traffic surpassed human activity on the internet. Bots now generate 51% of all web traffic, and 37% of that is bad, i.e. malicious bots designed to game the algorithm to steal data, inflate metrics, or hijack impressions. Even Google has had to roll out tougher spam and scaled content abuse crackdowns to demote AI-generated clickbait and parasite SEO.

Back in 2013, Google admitted that more than half of YouTube traffic was coming from bots, machines masquerading as viewers, inflating numbers, and fooling advertisers. Fast forward a decade, and the problem hasn't just persisted, it's metastasized. AI and bots are actively corrupting streaming platforms, with over 20,000 AI-generated tracks added daily on services like Spotify and Apple Music. On other platforms, TikTok is also riddled with recycled AI-generated clips, Pinterest is 60% ads, 30% AI slop, and only 10% actual posts. And whole swaths of Twitter, I mean X, range anywhere from 5% to 76% bots, depending on who's counting.

Even YouTube's comment sections, once the wild west of authentic chaos, now feel eerily generic. Peppered with spam and weirdly robotic praise. You see it in TikToks with 60,000 likes that clearly loop the same AI voice over stock footage, and in memes that repeat themselves across platforms with only the font changed. I feel it on a site that I manage, Catholic Votes Lifestyle page, Refine. Some days, I will get four or five thoughtful comments on a really good article. Other mornings, I wake up to 25 comments that all read like they were.

out of the same AI thesaurus. It's unsettling, like you're hosting a dinner party and half of your guests turn out to be mannequins. Full confession here, I am part of the problem too. I am a massive diaper diplomacy addict. Baby Elizabeth Warren cracks me up, and I will admit I have boogied to a good deepfake of Trump and Elon Musk staying alive. I also hate that I love that. In short, I'm sold. The vibe of dead internet theory rhymes with the hard cold metrics.

What has this done to internet users and creators? It's not great. Ask me how I know. This is my living, people. Goodbye networking and audience-centered programming. Hello algorithm-based feeds. Back in the early days of Facebook or YouTube, you saw content from the people or channels you subscribed to. And that can still be the case if you go in and adjust all your settings regularly or search for people and channels by name and go to channel.

But for a passive internet user experience, what you'll get is a feed based on an algorithm. On X, it's the For You feed, content based on your past clicks, comments, and shares. At the beginning of the web, anyone could create a website, like Blogspot, or make a channel. And based on consistency, networking, good content, and hard work, build a small empire. Today, 90% of websites never get traffic from Google searches, and they don't make it to the algorithmic feed. The age of the passive income stream blogs is over.

As a result, creators focus ...as much, if not more, now on gaming the algorithm, or paying to appear higher in your feed, as they do on producing unique creative content. Again, ask me how I know. It's not just writers and YouTubers. Streaming scams have spelled the death of indie artists by corrupting numbers, draining revenue, and fueling call-outs, like Drake's lawsuit over the alleged bot-inflated streams. As the internet died and bots took over, It became a pay-to-win environment. But why the shift?

Why would Google or Facebook or Instagram betray its content creators, the very people making them money and drawing users to their platforms? Is this a vast government conspiracy of the one-world order? Maybe. But given what I know of human nature, I'm going to keep following the money. Here's the truth. Internet platforms are not designed to make you happy or informed or even entertained. They are designed to keep your brain just stimulated enough that you don't log off. The longer you stay, the more ads you see.

The more ads you see, the more money someone else makes. There's even a phrase for this, algorithmic complacency. Tech critic Alec Watson at Technology Connections put it this way, Our feeds are tuned not to surprise us, but to soothe us into scrolling.

And scroll we do. Music, art, news, everything is for money. Every song, post, and click has been harvested and repackaged for monetization. Behind every ad is an incentive structure that doesn't reward your loyalty or your creativity. It rewards your addiction.

Platforms shifted from a subscription model, where you paid directly for what you wanted, to an ad-driven model. That's when the algorithm became king. If you're a creator, you learn quickly. Follow the algorithm or be buried. That's why every TikTok and Instagram video sounds the same, right down to the cadence.

One person stumbles on a trick, 300,000 wannabes copy it, and the system rewards sameness while punishing originality. Think about the incentives. Users are the commodity. Advertisers pay for access. Platforms build the machines. It's the Hunger Games, but with only three districts. Advertisers, users, and the platforms themselves, each exploiting the others while pretending it's all community. Take Amazon as a case study. It started with books, even losing money to lure you in. Then it offered everything, and then it locked you in.

Kindle, Prime, DRM. Soon you couldn't shop elsewhere. Sellers had no choice but to join Amazon's marketplace because that's where the buyers are. But once the sellers were hooked, Amazon turned on them. Nearly 45% of every sale from third-party sellers now goes back to Amazon in fees. Sellers even pay extra to appear higher in your search results, which means your shopping page gets cluttered with sponsored sludge. You pay to win, or you disappear. YouTube did it to early creators. Facebook did it to your grandma.

Even AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are stripping traffic from the original sources of information and keeping users on their own sites with the Cliff Notes versions of everyone else's hard work and research. Platforms harvest the surplus, whether from you or the creator or the seller, and they funnel it to shareholders. And here's the kicker. Even advertisers are getting scammed. When half of online traffic is fake, driven by bot armies and click farms in places like China, if you're a business spending millions on ads, you don't want fake eyeballs.

You want real human buyers. At some point, someone's going to say, wait a minute, the emperor has no clothes. But until someone says so, the machine hums on. So, let's begin. Optimizing you, monetizing you, fracturing your attention. Convenience culture whispers, why resist? Why not just submit to the bots? The algorithm is efficient. It feeds us what we want before we even know we want it. Creators like Mr. Beast say the internet is a mirror of us, but as Cole Hastings argues, it's a cracked mirror.

It reflects back our most addictive base impulses. Negativity, lust, envy, while also shaping who we become. These platforms aren't designed with a moral compass. They're just exploitative, like junk food. They hijack your brain chemistry for overindulgence and leave you sick afterward. But I think coal is also missing part of the picture. I'm going to go with my former druggie pal, Struthless. Sure, we're inundated with dead bots, and the bots are making us dead in our brains.

In our souls. And yes, the dead internet is shaping human souls. But there's also the alive internet theory. And I'm hopeful, because it seems like more and more people are saying enough. They are saying the emperor has no clothes. Part of that is stepping back from the internet, sure, but it's also creating a more human internet. We forget that if 51% of 10,000 hits on a YouTube video are bots? We're still speaking in front of 4,900 people, and that's a pretty big stadium.

I mean, Billy Graham would have leaped at that kind of an audience. We get to choose how we use and shape the internet. There are two ways of reacting to all this. The first is a very understandable despair. We're surrounded by the bot army. Humanity is doomed. I get that. But here's the other way of looking at it. We aren't defeated. Rather, we've been chased into reality. And now, we hunt. We hunt for real voices in the algorithmic sludge. And in a world full of clean, shiny, and fake, we touch grass.

Maybe grab a fistful of dirt and set out on a mission to recapture lost ground. The internet can't be where I go anymore for passive complacency. For better or for worse, it is now my battleground. Do you hate the feeling you get when you've been on your phone too long? Well, let's change that. I want the content online to help me live better. So much better, in fact, that when I'm done online, I get off the phone. I want to seek spaces online where the human signal is stronger than the digital noise, so I'm inspired to go out into the real world more.

In-person communities, face-to-face connections, church basements, and neighborhood dinners. So, if you're a priest and you're watching this, keep the light on in church. Refugees from the dead internet are going to be driven to the real, the tangible, the sacramental.

Yes, dystopian stories feel like they're coming true, but the longing for authenticity, to discover and nourish what is best in us, is stronger than darkness. So, practical steps for an alive internet theory? Build deliberate friction into your media diet.

Check your sources. Choose to be out of touch at specific times and in specific places in your home and work. And reject scrolling. Embrace full-length, thoughtful, real content. Kind of like we used to consume film. And above all, don't lose sight of the real. Because maybe the question isn't, is the internet dead? Maybe the better question is, can we make it human again? I think we can. Until then, the retreat to reality, face-to-face, sacramental, embodied, isn't just nostalgia.

It's resistance. I'm Erika with The Deep for LOOPcast. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don't miss a single episode.