Now that the Internet is Dead, It’s Time to Buy Stock in Your Eyes

Let “Dead Internet Theory” lead to you to trust your own eyes. It’s incredibly valuable!

“Dead Internet Theory” is the conspiracy theory that nothing you see on the Internet is real. The theory suggests that while the Internet used to be filled with people, it’s now entirely the creation of bot armies, paid for by corporations and governments to sell products and shape public opinion. While I personally don’t think that literally everything you see on the Internet is inhuman and fake, that’s certainly the direction we are trending in, and what was once conspiracy becomes closer to reality every day. Even before the explosion in AI, the Internet was a very untrustworthy place. Corporate consolidation took a once free and open place into a hostile algorithm driven culture. What used to be a decentralized way of opening new avenues for communication and commerce became a very impersonal way of selling ads. Where you once could go to the Internet to get alternative viewpoints, social media is now where most people receive their news, surpassing cable television as the source of news, real and imagined. Their influence is far beyond that of Fox and CNN - While less coordinated, online influencers and propaganda networks are influencing and manipulating people on a level that would make Nazi propogandist Joseph Goebells jealous. 

2022 was a transformative year for big tech. The 2010s saw exponential rises in social media use, with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram leading the way. As Facebook and bigger firms bought up smaller sites and apps, innovation became largely centralized and stalled out. These once entrepreneurial endeavors became behemoth corporations with expanded staff, and their own beuearacracies. During the pandemic, people were forced onto their screens, and the role of big tech, and their share of the economy got bigger and bigger, as did their cultural importance. Data breaches became a huge issue, as exemplified by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Social media networks started massive “content moderation” teams and cracked down on some free speech. With some government pressure, they became “fact-checking” organizations, taking on a role that had once been done by the New York Times or CNN. This state of affairs was very unpopular, and for good reason. To many people (and not just conservatives), social media in 2020-2021 started feeling like an Orwellian nightmare, a place chalk full of ads and constant data moderation but with limited human freedom and interaction. And as society started its return to “normal,” social media in 2022 did the previously unthinkable - it started declining. Facebook was especially hit hard, as it lost some users, but saw a huge decrease in the amount of “active users” or people that spend big chunks of their days on the network. Twitter also saw major decreases. Twitter had once been a hub for following celebrities, immediate breaking news, and funny jokes, but it had become taken over by constant political arguments. With its reputation in the gutter, they jumped on an overpriced offer from Elon Musk to sell the company, which was soon remade in Elon’s image. Following drops in big tech’s stock, the beginning of 2023 saw large, industry specific layoffs for Meta, Twitter / X, Amazon, and more. It was clear that big tech was in trouble. But luckily for them, there was another major development that came about in the end of 2022 - the release of Chat GPT. Technically, the release of Chat GPT 3 - but this one was unlike anything we had seen before. Mark Zuckerberg had spent the last couple years dumping money into the failing Metaverse, but in Artificial intelligence, the industry found a new golden goose. And they invested billions and billions in it. Not (for the most part) in the sort of Terminator style robotics we think of when we previously thought of AI, but in online AI driven tools - ones that mimic speech, writing, and art. And despite the many impressive things that AI can do, it also helped turned the Internet from a place that was already untrustworthy and lacking in humanity into an increasingly unrecognizable, dystopian scene.

I could go on and on about big tech and the rise of AI. If you’re interested in the subject, you’re probably sick of hearing about it. But I instead want to talk about another development that has been especially noticeable post-pandemic - the renaissance of live events. If you look at the graphs below, you can see that while live music took a big hit during the pandemic, it bounced back stronger than ever.

This might not seem like a huge jump, but given how much these events declined during the pandemic, it is notable that they sprung back up like nothing had happened. Live sports similarly hit a record high in 2024. And this is just the USA - if we take a look at the world at large in the chart below, we can see an even greater example of this trend. Restaurants too saw increases in popularity, despite all of the inflation facing consumers around the world. 

This is an admittedly broad chart. But you don’t need to be a statistician to see the obvious pattern - despite so-called “experts” and futurists telling us that the future would be more and more online, with social networks overtaking real communities, the Metaverse encroaching on the physical world, and AI replacing human art, people still want to see each other in person. They still want to shop in stores and go out to eat (as seen in the chart below), despite the fact it’s not really “essential” from a purely practical perspective. For millions of people, the pandemic gave us a glimpse into what was often marketed as “the future” and the people rejected it. Billions of dollars are now being spent by the biggest corporations in the world to try and keep people endlessly plugged into the matrix, with artificial intelligence as the new “Golden Goose.” And to be clear, AI has some real benefits, and some aspects of AI will be implemented in the long run. But the more that the powers that be try to force it down our throats, the more it will backfire. The more people see how fake the online world has become, the more they long for something real. These are all generalized statements, of course, and not everyone agrees with me. But I hope that these charts can at least give statistical proof that I am not just expressing my personal feelings. 

If anyone should be pushing back against AI, it is the influencers in the new “influencer economy.” They might think that their jobs are revolutionary and indispensable, but in reality, they have some of the most easily replaceable fake jobs in existence. To be, for example, a pro-Trump political influencer, all one needs is a few talking points, and you can plug that into a bot to reasonably resemble a heavily online Trump supporter. This isn’t unique to politics; if you want to be a Taylor Swift fan account, a bot can just collect a bunch of favorable comments and trends around her and say the same things over and over, and it will be largely indistinguishable from something a real account might say. Some major brands, due to costs, are already pivoting away from human influencers, and using artificial ones. AI influencers may for now be an interesting trend, but their ultimate impact will be to kill the human online influencer by limiting their value in the marketplace. We thought for years that AI’s lasting impact would be to replace manual labor, but it turns out that it’s a bit harder to use a hammer and a nail then it is to attract attention on the algorithms. Because we are seeing just how inorganic and inhuman this system is. It is becoming harder and harder to tell not just what is real and fake, but who is real, versus who is a bot, as even the humans online are sounding more and more like bots each day. Instagram is being taken over with “AI models” and content is increasingly written via Chat GPT and Grok. When you no longer can trust your lying eyes, trust your real, physical ones. Because that’s a lot harder to automate away.