The Internet Is Dead—and Apparently the Bots Forgot to Tell Us
The internet is dead. Please remain calm. You may continue scrolling. Its digital corpse is still producing listicles, recommending products, starting political arguments, and sending you notifications about people you have not spoken to since high school. It looks remarkably active for something that has supposedly passed away. Then again, movement does not necessarily indicate life. Sometimes it just means the algorithm found another way to make you watch a stranger clean a rug for nine minutes. The “dead internet theory” once belonged to the wilder corners of online culture. Its believers claimed that much of the web was no longer populated by ordinary people, but by bots, automated accounts, manipulated engagement, and synthetic content designed to influence what real users believed. It sounded appropriately paranoid when it gained attention in the early 2020s. Now it sounds less like a conspiracy theory and more like an overly dramatic product description. Welcome to the Internet’...
