Intro
Has the internet felt more ‘dead’ or ‘lifeless’ to you in recent years? More devoid of personality in some way?
When you get into an argument or debate online, how do you really know it’s a person?
Could it be a bot? Could it be a young kid in his mom’s basement looking for laughs? Could it be an agent of the state keeping tabs on dissident groups?
The same thought exercise can be had for all online interactions.
We’re not in the early days of AOL chat rooms or the heyday of r/conspiracy before it became infiltrated by bots, the aforementioned basement dweller, and likely various state actors.
Technology has gotten so advanced that it’s not exactly a straightforward answer to the question – who am I really talking to on the other side?
I even ask myself with readers of this blog – given the sensitive topics covered, I imagine a certain percentage of readers aren’t exactly friendly to me but are there to keep tabs. To them also, I hope they at least subscribe and leave a like and a comment!
The only places of the internet that have any ‘life’ to them are found in fringe areas that, for the time being, seem to be too under-the-radar for the Eye of Sauron to either find, or to be concerned with.
Origins of the theory
Mainstream articles will call this a conspiracy theory, which just means: 1) They don’t understand it; 2) It goes against what the establishment’s narrative. And with how correct the so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ were with COVID I think we might be onto something here.
It seems this idea stems from a few of the old ‘chan’ websites. It was then posted on the Agora Road Forums in 2021 and received hundreds of thousands of views. That’s where the theory took off.
The summary of that thread is that the majority of supposed human generated content on the internet is, in fact, produced by AI in conjunction with paid secret social media influencers in order to manufacture consent/opinions/beliefs. Some would say it’s to manufacture desire for various products and services.
I tie this back to Walter Lippman’s and Albert Bernay’s work about manufacturing consent. This is a tactic of the social engineers to steer (control) the public through mass media towards their desired goal. As I’ve written about repeatedly, they see the masses as livestock that they’re put on this earth to shepherd – they’re eugenicists after all.
But they also know how few of them there actually are and how many of us there are, and thus they have an underlying fear of the masses revolting so they use mass media to keep us distracted on trivial matters, instead of focusing our energies towards them.
Here’s an overview of the timeline involved along with ties to intelligence, from that Agora Road thread:
But back to the dead internet theory.
Reasons to believe it’s ‘dead’
As I mentioned above, the social engineers manipulate us every second of every day, or at least the attempt to. Many are waking up to their tricks.
But look at how effective ‘the current thing’ is, whatever it is at a given time – most people are still falling for the manipulation. They’re too deeply embedded in the matrix to break out anytime soon. They’re fully dependent on the system for sustenance and to tell them how to think.
The NPC meme is also applicable to the ‘dead’ feeling of the internet. Read my NPCs are real article here to further see how this ties together.
We also know the tech giants are basically front companies for the intelligence agencies. They have a long history of treating the masses like mice in a giant lab experiment. They use PsyOps setup to confuse, manipulate, and gaslight the populations.
And look at how various celebrities are trotted out in support of ‘the current thing’. The reasoning is bigger than ‘it’s just a paycheck’ or that they align with a certain ideology – it’s part of the mind programming / social engineering by players well above them. It’s an attempt to mass-manipulate the public, to manufacture consent.
The early internet was a decentralized amalgamation of user-generated content. Message boards and fringe sites thrived. Then it became more and more centralized and manipulated by the big players in the tech space and intelligence agencies. Then AI and bots come into play and can act as a feedback loop to show a certain amount of upvotes or thumbs ups to further influence public opinion.
In those early days, the internet had a sense of life to it. When YouTube recommendations gave you an incredible watchlist of conspiracy-related content – and when it didn’t have a disclaimer under the video pointing you to an establishment approved site such as the WHO.
Nowadays, the internet does feel incredible fake. Like a sanitized version of reality.
Fake Twitter users
In 2022, when Elon Musk was in negotiations to buy Twitter, he raised the point about fake users. This opened a can of worms but didn’t get nearly enough attention. From a Time.com article,
Spam bots are the “single most annoying problem” on Twitter, Musk tweeted earlier this month. He later affirmed his commitment to weeding out fake accounts in a statement he gave announcing his deal with Twitter on Monday.
“I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans,” he said. “Twitter has tremendous potential—I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
Spam bots on Twitter are automated accounts that mimic the activity of real people on the site, but are programmed to engage in malicious activity ranging from spreading misinformation to promoting money-making schemes.
The article mentions that about 50% of his followers at the time were fake. Before Trump was booted off the platform, the article mentions it was estimated that 61% of his followers were fake.
That’s a lot of evidence for the ‘dead internet theory’.
Echo chambers
For those seeking any semblance of an alternative viewpoint, we need to search out pockets of the internet. Substack has provided a great outlet. Niche forums do the same.
The issue with these pockets is that they become echo chambers. These echo chambers simply reinforce various narratives, and naturally tend to push things towards an extreme. This isn’t good for society/humanity in general because it doesn’t facilitate any discussion of ideas. We become even further divided from each other. Look at how friends and families were impacted during COVID times – some of these relationships were forever broken as a result.
These echo chambers also become easier targets for various infiltrators.
A hallmark of humans is our ability to reason. To use logic. Wrestling with ideas and making sense of the world is what philosophy’s purpose is.
This requires open dialogue.
As a result of these echo chambers and lack of lively discourse, the dialectical process of improving ideas never occurs. This means that when two conflicting perspectives of a concept/idea come into contact, a better version (called a synthesis) results. This is critical for the progress of ideas and humanity. It helps weed out bad ideas and replaces them with better ones.
If you look around and see humanity seemingly regressing, considering this lack of dialectic in the world as a prime reason.
Conclusion
Do you think the internet is ‘dead’?
Is the world just more fake in general? Are there more NPCs today? Did COVID and the related government responses (lockdowns, medical interventions) kill a part/all of people’s soul in some way?
Are botfarms really that powerful in manipulating public opinion?
Or has the internet progressed from a wild west platform of adventure into a top-down, centralized wasteland that’s purpose is to manufacture consent?
Another theory is that ‘the powers that be’ are losing control of the ship. That it’s leading to a Great Awakening, or as some would call it, the Christ consciousness returning and the social engineers can’t stop it. As a result, they’re causing mass confusion and chaos to keep us distracted. That they’re using such a strongarmed approach to control the internet narratives through such ‘dead internet’ tactics as a last hoorah.
I don’t know for sure. I can draw conclusions based on evidence and relational thinking, but nobody really knows.
What I do know, however, is that everyday that passes and I see what’s going on in the internet zeitgeist, it does feel incredibly dead / lifeless. Let’s hope we can return to a more lively version of the internet in the years to come.
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Spot on! Really enjoyed this article.