‘The dead internet theory’ has gained momentum over the last few years and suggests that the internet has crossed the threshold from ‘real’ online human interaction to ‘fake’ interactions. The internet and especially social media once opened doors for expression, interaction, inspiration and openness in a way that just wasn’t possible before, with sites like 4Chan, Reddit, and YouTube functioning as communities for likeminded people, offering spaces of acceptance and comfort. As the internet has evolved and higher powers have capitalised on its functions, those days of organic online interaction seem distant. Instagram learns from users’ habits and funnels them into an algorithm that essentially constructs an online echo chamber for each individual, resulting in reality now being the escape from the internet as opposed to the other way around. Instant dopamine hits, mindless scrolling, toxic online conversation – the internet has seemingly been reduced to a loop of cut and paste content, tailored for every individual and re-designed to capitalise on everybodys habits for profit.
The quote below is a frightening truth considering we haven’t even properly entered the phase in the internet canon where AI comes to totally dominate everything.
“Imperva Inc. recently released 2023 Imperva Bad Bot Report, a global analysis of automated bot traffic across the internet. In 2022, nearly half (47.4%) of all internet traffic came from bots, a 5.1% increase over the previous year.”
Deep Fakes, AI chatbots, bots that direct and take advantage of platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram – the fact that these generated, artificial entity’s make up almost half of the traffic on the internet is a worrying reality. This supports my idea of feedback loops, maliciously engineered by hyper-capitalist companies to con us into our own aimless cycles. Furthermore, the reliability of information is completely unstable, and this applies to both casual social media scrolling and vital legal and academic fields. It feels as though cyberspace has descended into a limbo mirroring the final dream realm in Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Inception’, where reality is so distorted but familiar that it is virtually impossible to tell if it is real or not.
In the essay “Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?”, by Hany M. SalahEldeen and Michael L. Nelson, it is estimated that “over 20 years, 98.4% of web links will suffer from [link] rot, becoming totally inaccessible to future generations”. Link rot is when a link that has been used in any context becomes impossible to find, and shows up with the text ‘404 error – site not found’. Moreover, in the same essay, it is said that “50% of U.S Supreme Court opinions contain dead links, and so do 70% of Harvard academic journals” – so for fields that rely so heavily on supporting evidence and historical archiving to support data, discoveries and opinions, link rot will actually render most of this evidence obsolete, as if it never existed. To push this point further, the same idea applies to everything on the internet, with most of the current content either being AI generated, advertisements, company-led propaganda or just blatant ‘Fake News’, with peoples reactions online as a result being totally based off of misinformation.
If we are to look at this as how it is, the result is we are essentially tapping into a Matrix-esque simulation everyday, feeding into the larger cycle that creates our own internal cycles. Even the quotes and stats I am using here aren’t 100% likely to be true, which both dismantles and supports my argument in a way. The very notion that most of this information could be fake is disturbing, and ties into Mark Fisher’s idea of ‘Capitalist Realism’, where he argues that “Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.”
This “massive desacralization of culture” that Fisher refers to is evidenced in the dead internet theory, where the internet, which used to be a hub of cultural activity, has descended into a capitalist machine. De-coding human interaction and basically gaslighting the general population, feeding the cyclical serpent that only thrives through swallowing itself whole – to put simply the system only functions by capitalising on all that lives and codes within it.
This research firmly supports what I want to communicate with this project, and subsequent projects, as it reinforces the notion that we are living in a feedback loop that we knowingly or unknowingly contribute to but cannot detach from because we are being conditioned more and more from generation to generation.
Fisher, Mark (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Zero Books. Hampshire, UK.
https://securitytoday.com/articles/2023/05/17/report-47-percent-of-internet-traffic-is-from-bots.aspx#:~:text=Imperva%20Inc.,increase%20over%20the%20previous%20year.
SalahEldeen, H.M., Nelson, M.L. (2012). Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?. In: Zaphiris, P., Buchanan, G., Rasmussen, E., Loizides, F. (eds) Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. TPDL 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7489. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33290-6_14