Adpocalypse Now! and the Dead Internet Theory

 

"I was on the verge of eternal diarrhea last year, living in my car and pooping my pants daily. Then I found the Abundant Power of Colonic Manifestation by Wheezano and contacted a spiritual advisor on TikTok and now I'm making 300k+ bi-weekly and enjoying the solid bowel movements of my dreams!"

We've all seen the comments in various comments sections. They can have hundreds of likes and what follows is inevitably a chain of replies by other bots culminating in a giant line of bot conversation pushing someone's name so poor suckers will go buy some three page ebook with AI cover art or contact some crook on social media.

Dead Internet Theory is essentially a theory that the majority of content and interactions online is done by AI programs and not real people. I don't think we're quite there yet but I believe it's where we're headed. Eventually, the sheer volume of fake bot accounts pushing various products will be so overwhelming it will drown out the real human voices and may very well devolve into Skynet bots pushing spiritual advisors and useless ebooks upon each other.

There's a fantastic science fiction movie called Screamers where in a remarkably short period of time, killer robots upgrade themselves to be so good at mimicking us they eventually pass for human beings. Imagine meeting the girl or guy of your dreams online only to find out once they dump you, the goal all along was to push you towards an online dating app. Yikes!

The future is here and baby, it got real ugly.

Then again, maybe it isn't all doom and gloom. After all, don't we escape into the web to get away from human interaction? 😅