“All the fun accounts are gone.”
“This site used to be fun.”
“Their search engine is broken.”
If you’ve made any of the above complaints, you are justified, and it’s not just you.
The Dead Internet Theory is a loose term used to describe a range of changes and oddities in the structure and content of the internet, which have become increasingly prevalent in the last decade.
This includes:
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A massive increase in bots, including the idea that their presence and activity may now be far greater than that of actual people, or at least to a much greater extent than people have been led to believe.
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The homogenization and centralization of online content.
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The death of a once-rich landscape of smaller communities dedicated to a vast array of subjects, hobbies, niches – all now replaced primarily by disorganized, impermanent, and easily controlled discussion on platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
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The idea that AI, considerably more advanced at present than we have been led to believe, is being utilized online for subversive or malevolent purposes, including the creation of increasingly bland and mindless media of the modern world.
This take largely jibes with previous reports of algorithms run amok and social engineering carried out by those haywire algos.
The OP opines on the root cause of the Internet’s demise.
In my view, this was caused more by the economics of the internet itself. The model of a decentralized community works when people are of roughly the same ability level and inclination, as they were back in the 1990s when most were Anglo-American college students.
Once AOL came around and the internet was opened up to the general population, following the idea of Crowdism, the medium adapted to the audience: the internet came to resemble daytime television more than a Wild West of outlaw intellects.
With the rise of internet companies, the need to earn advertising income took over, and consequently, the message tailored itself to the wishful thinking, emotions, and shopping habits of the audience, but this audience was defined by media, which wanted to find a new set of hippies to use as its rebellious sub-culture in order to promote liberalization, or erasure of cultural norms so that more products can be sold.
Those dynamics are certainly in play. However, assigning an economic motive to the internet’s murder smacks of the same reductive logic that leads basic Conservatives ascribe 19th century political ideology to the Death Cult.
Twitter didn’t purge everyone who had anything remotely interesting to say out of greed.
YouTube doesn’t push Death Cult propaganda for money.
Google didn’t have a profit motive for making their search engine useless.
If you’ve gotten the sneaking suspicion over the past couple of years that the internet is purposefully being changed to make you miserable, you’re right. Because the internet has fallen into the hands of oligarchs that hate you.
If you don’t know what a company you deal with produces, you are the product.
If you don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you.
Don’t pay people who hate you. Support creators who entertain you.
https://wiby.me is a search engine for “lightweight” websites, which largely means personal pages developed in a “Web 1.0” style. As far as I can tell it’s also an old school search engine, meaning that rather than using any fancy “machine learning” algorithms it simply returns websites where the keywords you searched for appear frequently or prominently.
At first this seems like more of a nostalgic oddity than anything, since many of the sites in its database are of low quality. A lot of the sites haven’t been updated since 2008 or even earlier. But if you stick with it you’ll start to notice that even the poor quality sites are easier to navigate than modern sites, and feel more unique. Eventually you’ll come across some sites which are legitimately great. When that happens, try searching for those sites on a major search engine (whether it is google, bing, duckduckgo, whatever). The majority of the time you’ll never be able to get them to come up, no matter what combination of keywords you use. The only way I’ve been able to get these sites to come up on a conventional search engine is to put an entire sentence in quotes, though sometimes even that won’t do it.
See what happens when you search for “youtube.”
It is the nature of a frontier. The Americas were a land of adventure and hardship, even after the revolution(s). The steam ship trivialized the trans-Atlantic journey and made European good cheaper, urbanizing the East Coast.
Similarly, the Trans-Continental railroad, a celebrated achievement for the U.S., flooded the West Coast with people who made little effort to get there (in contrast to the Oregon Trail) and nearly drove the North American bison to extinction.
The frontier will always be gentrified. If Jesus tarries, and if it is possible, we’ll reach a point where the whole galaxy is gentrified, homogenized slurry while people sick of it all work on how to get to the next one over.
People say society is so good we have to spread it wherever we go, the bigger, more generic, and more ‘globalized,’ the better, but they can’t explain why people will literally risk their lives to get away from it.
It’s an American problem. Everything that America touches becomes the opposite of gold—and the Internet is how America spreads its filth overseas.
My own online life actually started in the BBS world of the 1980’s. Then the stand alone systems came (QLink and Compuserve), followed in the mid-90’s by the Internet. I’ve seen things go from having to configure your own modem to pressing an icon on a phone. Yes, in the beginning it was a very self-selected hobby. Now it’s pretty ubiquitous.
If it were just a matter of lots of normies invading a place only geeks like me used to inhabit, that would be one thing. In the beginning, such people (particularly the female variety) were quite welcome. What we are really talking about is an online world that is now tightly controlled by people who hate us. That control extends beyond our lives on the web thanks to the cancel culture.
It’s all related. The second it is no longer hard to live/work in what was a frontier, the place gets flooded by opportunists who eventually find a way to implement all the same command and control structures the original frontiersmen were trying to escape.
It’s not just America, either. Every civilization in history has been interested in conquering ‘those barbarians’ living in the wild places of the world, because who wouldn’t want to live in society? (it never occurs to them that the question might not be rhetorical).
With every spit of physical land charted, occupied, and claimed by some kleptocracy somewhere, the internet was the closest thing we had to a frontier.
Now that it’s closed and run by the kleptocrats, is it any wonder that private space flight is gaining steam? Hell, if I was about 20 years younger and childless, I’d be looking to see how realistic my prospects were of living in the SpaceX Mars colony.
Instead of chasing endless frontiers, you should control the kleptocracy. That’s what Napoleon did.
D al
Hoexexactly did Napoleon control the kleptocracy? He just threw out the established ones with his family
xavier
I suppose it should come as no surprise that the old techno-libertarian saw about the internet defeating censorship should fall as flat as everything else. “The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it” seems plausible if “the internet” is a massive collection of small sites – what the user used to see – and not an amorphous but still limited hierarchy of ISPs, backbone providers, and media-industrial conglomerates – which is what it really is. On the other hand, using the term this way equates “The Internet” with its user-maintainers and presumes to know their values and motivations. It’s as vapid as invocations of “democracy,” or “the wisdom of the crowd,” and rests on the assumption that people are basically good.
It’s true that the discovery of the internet by John Q Public, and the advent smart phone, and of cloud computing all represent trends that made the Internet a stupid, silly, and artificial place, but I think they only reinforced the artificiality, silliness, and stupidity. As soon as horny nerds started posting porn on Usenet, it was over, long before the eternal September of 1995.
They’re now making the same predictions about crypto. Those will fail, too.
Blockchain is the new dot-com, which was a tulip bubble. Crypto as whole is worthless if every piece of cheap Asian hardware has a backdoor and the NSA/GCHQ are in the habit of weakening crypto protocols to their own advantage.