Once upon a time, the internet shimmered like spilt milk under the fridge – messy, chaotic, iridescent, and alive. – it was amazing. But now…
The “Dead Internet Theory” – a name far too theatrical to take seriously and yet, like a clown at a funeral, disturbingly fitting – suggests the internet has been consumed, not by trolls or malware, but by something far more repugnant, – indifference masked as efficiency. Bots, AI, synthetic murmurings of a life once lived, like a ventriloquist performing in an empty theatre, the web continues its performance, but nobody’s clapping.
Once upon a digital dream, Newgrounds, Albino Blacksheep, even the primitive bowels of forums like Something Awful, were our Sistine Chapels. Artists animated with MS Paint, musicians looped eight-bit symphonies, teenagers penned unreadably brilliant fanfics. Not for profit, but for the tragic, tender absurdity of creation itself.
Now, I log into YouTube, and I’m greeted by thumbnail faces frozen in eternal orgasm, holding up dollar bills like they’ve uncovered the Ark of the Covenant. They haven’t, it’s just a sponsored unboxing, like a game of pass the parcel, except each pass requires you to stare at the corner of the box, “skip ad in 3, 2, 1” yay – surprise! It’s a parcel of disappointment. Why not watch my next video of me reacting to this video? The focus has dropped from “I made this for me” to “I made this for you”, with monthly, weekly, no daily uploads.
And now comes AI. Cool, clean, calculated. Efficient in the way that death is. It can do everything now – write, sing, paint, animate, make you eat rocks. But it does none of it with meaning. It is the world’s most articulate coma, and soon it’ll be behind every “content creator”, until all content is just a husk –
like a photograph of a meal – it’ll look real, but it’ll taste like a papercut.
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