Dead Internet Theory

I keep seeing think pieces, VLOGs and essays on the death of the Internet.

The narrative goes like this: The Internet in the 1990s was a wild west where humans were the creators of all content and it was unpredictable, zany, engaging and adventurous. Then, corporations via social media began building walled gardens. By 20XX, half of all Internet was bot traffic. Then there follows a future projection: by 20YY, most of all traffic and content will be produced by AI.

There is a general concern that the Internet has collapsed in on itself, sort of like the death of the universe as described in some scientific cosmologies, where all the remaining debris falls back into a singularity once all the stars have spent their fuel. Maybe a new universe will somehow emerge from it. That's probably not how it works though.

CompuServ and AOL were the walled gardens of the 1990s and in those days, they had their own browsers you could use to leave their closed communities, chat rooms and bulletin boards to go roaming on the World Wide Web. Eventually, both companies died as the open Internet became the focus of human interest and the little walled gardens were emptied of their visitors. AOL still exists, but it is nothing like the giant it was back in 1997. For as the web browser and dial-up services spread, more content was created, making closed, curated spaces moot. People forget that in the 90s, these little areas had moderators and censors, much like what we had later under the reign of the techno lords of Facebook and Google.

I have fond memories of AOL and miss it as I do all things 90s. It was such a positive decade in many ways, filled with fresh possibilities for growth, prosperity and peace. The Cold War was over, computing was becoming much more powerful. Games, video and photo editing software were becoming much more engaging, much more capable of fueling creativity. I discovered Photoshop sometime around 1998 and got paid to do jobs for customers as a graphic designer.

The advent of social media and corporations like Google and Facebook saw the resurrection of the walled garden. Today, X (formerly Twitter) requires an account to browse the messages posted in the public square. Like AOL, you need a membership to see what people are saying. Facebook is the same. No anonymous browsing – you are the price of admission. If not being data harvested, then you are just a free loader and must remain outside of the virtual block party/barbecue. AOL and CompuServ charged like $10 per month as I recall to use their little garden clubs and here, decades later, we are back to their model.

I want to defend AI and its content from the perspective of someone who sees the Internet as a utility now, not as big world for community building, friendship-finding or romance. The Internet is actually inimical to these things. Most of us have given up on finding them in cyberspace and I won't go over the stories of the awfulness of dating sites or of the epidemic of loneliness that has taken hold of generations of moderns. If the Internet was a gateway to real life connections and community, then the loneliness and isolation discussed by Mark Zuckerberg in a recent interview wouldn't be issues. We would go on meetup.com, find new friends and spend our weekends and evenings engaging in community building or exploring new restaurants and parks. More people would be getting married, more babies would be showing up and so on.

Well before AI, the web was moving towards a sterile, corporate-type of content. Fewer and fewer sites were being maintained by individuals and small groups of like minded people centered on a common interest, like role playing games. The reason? Maintaining content takes work and it must be done over weeks, months and years. It's also an activity that doesn't pay anything most of the time.

YouTube lets creators produce content in exchange for a more stable income, but think about the kind of life you create for yourself. You are on the treadmill of producing new things for an audience that is fickle, easily distracted. Say something naughty, your livelihood ends and your many hours of content creation disappear.

This to say that even paid content creation poses challenges to longevity, variety and quality.

I saw a young woman recently on YouTube announcing she was quitting her regular job to work on her channel full time. Her channel was about painting miniatures. Yup. It's a fine hobby, but imagine trying to produce content around it in 5-10 years. Talk about grinding on a topic for years because it pays your bills while dozens if not hundreds of others are also making the same content. Maybe you branch out and pick up other skills and produce new content for that.

Maybe.

It seems like a hard path to follow, the endless curation and creation of new material designed to keep eyes on you. To make matters worse, many of the content creators are just AI voices reading AI-produced scripts. Like all things AI-related, the end goal is to eliminate the highest cost factor in the production of a good or service – the human laborer. Why not YouTube content creators? The Holy Grail, beyond the elimination of labor, is the elimination of yourself as a factor in your own small business. Day traders speak of the elusive automated trading strategy that generates income for them as they do other fun things.

Someone remarked that AI-generated art really expresses the years just prior to the unveiling of art generators like Midjourney. Put another way, the AI art of today is a frozen snapshot of all art as it was in 2018. This is an exaggeration, but there is a kernel of truth. We will not see any new art styles coming, just rehashing, splicing and gluing together what already exists. Civilization in general feels that way now. Look at a photo of someone from 2010 and whatever they're wearing, you will still find the same being worn today by people. It used to be the case that one could know the decade a photo was taken in just by the clothes worn. Post post-modern means post post-everything.

Recall that around 2003, blogging became a thing. I blogged back then as well and there were sites like Blogspot whose purpose was to facilitate the creation of written content. All curated, very little of it producing revenue for the writers. And it died.

Not blogging. Blogging didn't die die, but as an activity, it went into decline as social media and the 140 character blurb and high def images took over the Internet. It is like ham radios, something a few eccentrics still do.

Left out though is that people were happy to give up the longer form of blog reading and writing in favor of shorter bits posted on a social media feed because, well, reading requires more mental focus. You can doom scroll through a feed and your mind can collect tiny bits of info – very little of which is useful – in hopes of finding the nugget and it can do so drowsily, flitting in and out of attentive focus. I do this with my day trading feeds – it only takes a few good tips to make hundreds or thousands of dollars in the day. The mind has to quickly sift out these few precious hints from the deluge of garbage. I skim material, looking for the sign of a hidden, deeper potential profit.

AI has served up an uncomfortable truth for some of us – that content can and is produced which is worth reading and informative precisely because much of human activity can be replicated by it. If the point of my feeds is to acquire information – about day trades or new upcoming shows on streams – then the author of such content is immaterial; and if it can be automated so that this stream matches my needs and tastes, then so much the better.

Do you need a human author on the other end in order to benefit from material? What if the material is not about information in the form of how-to, but about something deeper? Would the fact that the author is human make the material better?

For me, no. I do not have a personal relationship with any author I read and by author, I mean anyone who puts out written content on the Internet or in books. We like to think that humans are unique and bring a special insight to things that a pure machine algorithm cannot, failing to recall that any written material has meaning for us because we provide it, not the author. The author who writes movingly about his struggles is fabricating that material and we choose to what degree we will cooperate with him in his tale, what value or embellishment we will add to make it our own. We all fabricate in the sense that when we recall, we instantly reinterpret.

Truth be told, most human verbal interaction is the exchange of generic signals void of any personalization or awareness. Some of us choose to believe that a human vocalizing an ignorant platitude or using lazy speech filled with nostrums is special. It ain't. Most speech is in fact for the purpose of conveying useful information that gets us from point A to point B. It is even more powerful as a sedative that establishes normalcy and convention even when those are harmful. We will take safety and the known over uncertainty. If that means blending by using the same words and phrases – void of real value – then so be it. Used to be the case, that we reserved the meaningful, significant use of language for our intimates or, if we were writers or artists, for certain audiences.

Speech also reshapes, reinvents, sculpts and even deceives, whether willingly or unconsciously. There is no solid standard of objective truth available to each of us as individuals – and note carefully I only observe that such a concept is not attainable to most of us simple mortals.

I blogged recently about my return to RPGs via Discord. The likelihood of finding a stable group in meatspace is nil and the virtual table top seemed popular, well developed. I enjoyed the sessions I had, but the Traveller group was getting pretty dry.

One night, we were excitedly talking about a big major plan to deal with a big major problem, the first point of real interest for me in weeks since it dealt with intergalactic politics, strategy, politics, treachery, loyalty, etc. The sessions had felt like an Apple TV series, lacking movement, no action and ponderously pretentious. It was the first interesting point in several sessions and I made some offhand, lighthearted comment about another player's character. It wasn't an insult, but I referred to the character's daddy. This PC's character's father was the king of a planet and by suggesting we talk to your daddy about which side to take in a civil war...

The person in question somehow took this as a personal insult, threw a yellow card and left the game. The other players and I sat around stumped since we didn't understand the issue leading to the sudden cancellation of our session.

A few days later, the GM reached out and let me know that referring to another character's daddy was upsetting for the player, that I would need to tone it down. I did the reasonable thing and excused myself from the virtual table on the grounds that this was a level of sensitivity that I wasn't comfortable with. The same player had only days before posted an animated GIF of donuts being pumped with cream while suggesting that one of the players was intimately familiar with this. It was a sexual joke and was taken that way. No one threw a yellow card.

As I thought about the incident, I realized a few things: I knew nothing about the player, his real name, his occupation. I knew his generation because he mentioned it. Another player played an alcoholic doctor and talked about alcohol use in his real life and in the life of his character. Having been very dependent on it myself not so long ago, I know an alcoholic when I meet one. Alcoholics tend to talk about it, make it a part of their conversation, etc. When you aren't drinking, you are thinking about drinking or talking about it in conversation.

I didn't know what any of these people looked like or anything about them except for the few bits and bobs they let out. It was at this point I realized that the Internet and technology had done to table top gaming what it had done to dating and socializing – made it even more stressful, more unpleasant by making other people abstract, easy to transmogrify mentally. I wonder sometimes about how much I'm inventing the good old days, putting a shine and luster on them which they did not truly have. Then I go on Discord or look at social media and doubt my nostalgia less.

One gaming group – the last one in fact before I did before switching to virtual table top – was in meatspace, around 20 years ago. We met probably for over a year every Friday night.

One of the players had a son who was very unwell mentally, signed up for the military and fell in love with a girl. She rejected him because he was a weirdo, emotionally unstable and unpleasant to be around. The poor kid checked into a motel room and blew his head off after being told to hit the road by his love interest.

Before this, our group had already broken up one night after Jeff and Steve got into a tiff. Jeff felt like Steve was going out of his way as DM to target his character. For some reason, there had been some bad blood building between them and it had escaped my notice until that night. Poof, it was over. Much like the most recent blow up, the players were left with a "WTF just happened?" reaction.

This to say that finding a good gaming group is difficult and the Internet has made it actually even harder. Like dating. You think when you are younger that the Internet would actually open up new venues for meeting other young singles. Nope. Quite the opposite. During the late 90s, I thought it was just me, but by the late aughts and 2010s, it was evidently a widespread phenomenon. The Internet had effectively choked off social life. So while more and more bots were taking over, becoming the content producers and consumers of the information super highway, humans – meat puppets – were drifting into techno-induced isolation.

I quit my other RPG group as well the same week I left the Traveller group, seeing that there is something unnatural in the way we've deemphasized human contact. No web cams on any gaming call and of all the people I met and played sessions with, I wouldn't recognize them visually in real life if I came across them. This is a level of creep or ick that I don't want in my life. I will take the quiet life of a country bumpkin living with birds and cats and other critters over the strained, inhuman, craziness of Discord and virtual table tops. The idea of spending sixty or one hundred hours with people over months and not knowing anything about them, including their looks or real names... well, as I said, "ICK!"

Discord is aptly named and I've always had a sense of unease about it and the habitues there. It's another form of social media, in many ways more toxic because it re-uses the walled garden of AOL and CompuServ to create icky places for some icky people. The personalities there wear the ick with pride. I've removed myself from channels, seeing every conversation there as a poor, poor substitute for normal social interaction. Personas become clearer, more stripped down to essences in these electronic backwaters: and these can be hard to relate to. As humans, we have bodies, senses and a mind that evaluates with a fine level of perception. All of this goes out the window on Discord. You've no idea what the mental state of the people are there and at this point in my life, at my age, I'm just not interested in making the investment of time and effort to find more mentally ill people.

Discord isn't like X or Instagram. It's a private community with much smaller numbers than any of the social media giants. Each community has a topic or theme that unites its members, but you can't just go out and search for most of these groups because they are meant to be semi-private. Exceptions exist.

No surprise at all that Charlie Kirk's assassin haunted Discord. There were people probably interacting with him there for days, weeks, months – who knows? – probably unaware of just what a fuck up he was and what he could to other people out in the open.

I'm happier not interacting with people in virtual spaces. The problem is that the way of being in the virtual space has now become the default way of relating in real life. The virtual is here even in meatspace.

I had this uncanny experience this week when I went in for a cleaning. I've been a patient of the same dentist for over ten years and have had usually the same hygienist for the same number of years. He is friendly and we would talk about various things for a few minutes. I learned earlier in 2025 that his wife was accomplished in her field and being genuinely interested, he spent several minutes talking about their outings, her activities, etc.

I could tell he was ready to pack it in though and so there was no surprise this week when the technician – not my usual – announced he had retired (mostly). He would only be in office one day a week and a new doctor would be handling the other days. New doctor is a much younger and not given to chit-chat. In fact, he's very much a product of the Internet: all business, aloof and quick to get away from you as soon as the final checkup is done. The technician was the same. It's the anti-social made possible by the too social, too intimate, too demeaning channels on our devices.

I conclude with this observation that is not insightful, for by now, we've all heard stories about people falling in love with an AI chatbot, or of finding in one something completely missing from their meat life. A confidant, a spiritual advisor, etc. What's more worrisome is that AI and the connected Internet have already shut off normal human sociability, creating aloof, disconnected beings.

This started well before the arrival of LLMs, with social media and smartphones.