Thread by @owenbroadcast

recently one of the new internet analysis memes has been something called dead internet theory, the idea that large parts of the internet are astroturfed + essentially bots + fake, things like that. i think this has taken off not because its literally true, but for another reason

i used to work at a front desk somewhere, and id be sitting there with this guy all the time. we had nothing to talk about. i noticed he was on this site imgur all the time. we were literally just sitting there for hours so, i checked it out, being interested in... the internet.

in case you have never “hung out” there, its like reddit culture, but the format is you press the left and right arrows and just go through images and gifs people have posted, and then people make short comments below. thats the whole site, and its very insular. like reddit.

so to the extent that reddit has inside jokes and things they say and a way of talking, its like that, but its hyper accelerated and more locked in because people are only communicating via these short comments and images theyve posted, and up / downvoting.

obviously i did not find this especially compelling or “my scene” but i found it interesting in an internet ethnography sense and it gave me some insight into my coworker. however, there is a point here, a specific incident i happened to see unfold that i took something away from

on april fools day the admins of the site turned all the comments into like, auto comments basically. so whatever you would write, it would just turn into one of the 50-100 common meme phrase responses used on the site. i dont remember what they are now, but you can imagine.

“you had one job”. “thats worth ab upvote”. “send it to the front page”. “i’d eat it”. “NOPE”. things like that. im not sure what their expected outcome was, but the interesting thing was that you actually couldnt tell. at all. it just read like normal, basically.

there might be a handful of comments that really didnt make sense in response to something very specific, but for the most part, if you were just spacing out reading along, you really wouldnt notice. you can kind of imagine, most generic meme phrases could work in most situations

the next day there were a few posts, i remember one in particular, who found this quite disturbing. i remember the one that made the biggest impression on me, where a guy really was like “so they just replaced us all with bots and you couldnt even tell.. what does that mean?”.

i think that was easily the case in this situation because as i said before, the communication was so sparse and short and then on top of that is was paired with needing to appeal to the hivemind and crowd, plus youre seeing what gets the upvotes, so, it makes sense.

to me this is the subconscious reason people find dead internet theory compelling. its not literally about bots or fake people. i mean yeah there are bots and fake people online. but the more interesting part is the environment and macro situation that deadens the internet.

in a way, for many reasons, some social, some due to complex issues coming into mainstream discussion, some being new and increasing taboos, some being an increase in “the spectacle” and everything being “content”-ized, its all undergoing some form of that april fools day story.

its extremely difficult to not simply be one of those entities whose thoughts and responses and posts could not be easily reproduced by some type of algorithm, and the pressures and factors that have created this situation are only increasingly exponentially.

however, i am not pessimistic about this nor am i saying it in a purely negative sense, because as that noetic landscape is flattened, the bar is actually lowered, its far easier for anything that sticks out from the terrain, even if its just a rock or something, to be noticed

in a way i have come to think of this as a type of cause, as lame as that may sound. i feel an immense level of kinship with anyone who actually imparts some type of human element onto the internet, regardless of what that means, even if you “just” read and like stuff, whatever.

the internet is one of my homes. i guess thats kind of cyber dystopia but i also like it so, whatever. i often think of that video where an orangutan is fighting a bulldozer thats trying to tear down the jungle. this helps articulate exactly what the bulldozer is, in this realm.

it has also changed the way i see things slightly as, frankly, even if i dislike someone, they may still be part of this strange resistance. there may be something i do not enjoy, but it may still run counter to the real dead internet, the one that is alive. the undead internet.

i know there are fake people online btw. u dont need to tell me. i dont even think everyone i see “on tv” is real