Home » Is the Internet dead and we didn’t notice it?

Is the Internet dead and we didn’t notice it?

by admin

September 16, 2021 12:57 pm

If you look up the phrase “I hate texting” on Twitter and scroll down, you will begin to notice a recurring pattern. A user named @pixyIuvr and a glowing heart as a profile picture tweets: “I hate chatting, I just want to hold your hand” (I hate texting i just want to hold ur hand), 16 thousand likes. The @ f41rygf account with a pink sphere as a profile picture tweets: “I hate texting, come live with me” (I hate texting just come live with me), almost 33 thousand likes. The @itspureluv account, always with a pink sphere as a profile picture, tweets: “I hate texting you, I just want to kiss you” (I hate texting i just wanna kiss u), more than 48 thousand likes.

There are slight variations in the choice of verbs, in the girlish username and in the color palette, but the concept is always the same: “I’m someone who has a crush in the age of smartphones, isn’t that something to share?” . Yes, without a doubt! Some on Twitter though they wonderedif these are really people with a crush in the age of smartphones and who say something to share. These would be the possible clues that validate a bold conjecture defined as the “theory of the dead internet”.

Let me explain. The internet death theory holds that the web is now almost totally dominated by artificial intelligence. Like many other conspiracy theories on the net, it is finding its audience thanks to a debate conducted by a mix of genuinely convinced people, sarcastic trollers and lovers of bar chat. You could, for example, take @ _capr1corn, a Twitter profile with what looks like a blue sphere with a pink spot in the center as a profile picture. In the spring, the profile tweeted: “I hate texting i just wanna hug you” (I hate texting come over and cuddle me) and then “I hate texting i just wanna hug you” “I hate texting, come live with me” (I hate texting just come live with me) and then “I hate texting i just wanna kiss u” (I hate texting i just wanna kiss u) which received 1,300 likes but did not same success as @itspureluv. Unlike many other conspiracy theories, this one contains a grain of truth. Person or bot: does anything really change?

Reference text
Internet death theory. It’s terrifying, but it attracts me. I discovered it at the Macintosh Cafe on Agora Road, an online forum with a pixelated Margaritaville aesthetic that bills itself as “The Internet’s Best Kept Secret!” Right now, the background has a recurring image of palm trees, a hot pink sunset, and some kind of liqueur poured into a glass with ice. The site is mainly intended for debates about hip-hop lo-fi, which I don’t listen to, and conspiracy hypotheses, which interest me.

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In January I came across a new thread titled “Internet Death Theory: Much of the Net is a fake”, Opened by a user named IlluminatiPirate. In the following months, it became the reference text for followers of the theory. The post is very long, and some parts are too confusing to consider; the author claims to have built the theory thanks to the ideas shared by anonymous users of the section of 4chan dedicated to the paranormal and on another forum called Wizardchan, an online community founded on celibacy as a tool for attaining wisdom and magical powers (in a ’email, IlluminatiPirate, chief operating officer for a logistics company in California, told me that he “really believes” in the theory. He asked me not to identify him with his real name for fear of retaliation).

The internet death theory is a niche idea precisely because it is ridiculous, but it is spreading

In occasionally offensive language, the post implies that the internet died in 2016 or early 2017, and is now “empty and without people”, as well as “completely sterile”. Much of the “supposedly human-made content” you see online was instead produced using artificial intelligence, IlluminatiPirate says, and was propagated by bots, perhaps aided by a group of payroll influencers from various multinational corporations in colludes with the government. The intention of the conspiratorial group is, of course, to control our thoughts and make us buy things.

These are the proofs offered by IlluminatiPirate: “I have seen the same threads, the same photos and the same answers posted over and over again over the years”. He claims that all of today’s entertainment is generated and proposed by an algorithm; points the finger at the existence of deep fake, which suggest that anything can be deceptive; and links to a 2018 New York Magazine article titled “How much of the internet is fake? A lot, it seems ”. “On this basis, I think what I am covertly suggesting here is evident,” the post continues. “The US government is engaged in a subtle activity of psychological manipulation of the entire world population, powered by artificial intelligence.” So far, the original post has been viewed more than 73,000 times.

Obviously, the internet is not a military psychological operation, even if the defense department played a role in its invention. But if it were, the most compelling evidence in my opinion offered by the internet death theory is that the same news of unusual events related to the Moon seem to repeat themselves year after year. I swear I’ve been saying this for years. What is a blood-flowered super moon? What is a pink super moon? A quick search of this month’s headlines leads to: “This Weekend’s Moon Is Really Special”, “Don’t Miss: A Rare Seasonal Blue Moon Rises Tonight” and “Why This Weekend’s Blue Moon Is Super Rare “. I don’t understand, why is everyone so busy making me look at the moon all the time? Leave me alone with this Moon!

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Spectacular narratives
The internet death theory is a niche idea precisely because it is blatantly ridiculous, but it is spreading. Caroline Busta, the Berlin founder of the New Models platform, recently mentioned her in her contribution to an online group exhibition organized by the KW Institute for contemporary art. “Obviously a lot of that post is the result of a paranoid fantasy,” he told me. But the “overall idea” seems right to her. The theory has fueled spectacular YouTube narratives, including one that summarizes the original post in Spanish and has been viewed nearly 260,000 times. The first hypotheses on the validity of the theory appeared on the Hacker News forum, widely read, and among fans of the famous YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips. In a Reddit forum devoted to the paranormal, the theory is discussed as a possible explanation for why UFO threads almost always seem to be “taken hostage” by bots.

Most of the web traffic is likely generated by bots

The theory did not spread organically. IlluminatiPirate posted the link to its manifesto on several Reddit forums discussing conspiracy theories, including Joe Rogan’s subreddit, which has 709,000 subscribers. In the comments, users argue sarcastically – or seriously? – about who among them is a bot. “I am just the typical loser who would end up living among bots without ever noticing,” commented a participant in the Something Awful forum, linked to 4chan, in February, when the theory began to spread. “It looks like something a bot would post,” someone replied. Even the goliardic discussions about how everything is identical are identical.

This particular conversation goes on bleakly until it comes to this comment: “If I were real I’m pretty sure I’d be out there living every day to the fullest and experiencing all I can, every instant of the relatively infinitesimal amount of time I’ll live instead to write on the internet about nonsense “.

The fear of inversion
Anyway… the internet death theory is quite out of this world. But unlike many other conspiracy theorists on the internet, who are boring, gullible, or motivated by weird political ideas, followers are right about one thing. In the New York Magazine story mentioned by IlluminatiPirate, writer Max Read plays with paranoia. “Everything that once seemed absolutely and indisputably real now seems slightly false,” he writes. But it has a valid argument: it notes that most web traffic is likely generated by bots, and that for a while YouTube had such heavy bot traffic that some employees feared “reversal” – the point where its systems would begin to regard bots as authentic and humans as inauthentic. He also points out that the metrics of engagement on big and strong sites like Facebook have been grossly inflated or manipulated without difficulty, and that the human presence can be imitated with click farm or low-priced bots.

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This thing could now evolve, for better or for worse. Social networking companies have become much more efficient at preventing the purchase of fake views and fake likes, while some bot farmer they became, in response, more and more sophisticated. Major platforms are still playing mole-catcher with inauthentic interactions, so the average internet user has no way of knowing how much of what they see is real.

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But more than that, the theory “knows” the truth: more often than not, Twitter is clogged with debates about how to best practice personal hygiene or which cities have the worst quality of food or air, which he knows how they result in accusations of classism and accusations of murder (which for some reason do not offend as much as those of classism). A celebrity apologizes. A music video broke the internet. A meme it became popular and then boring. “Bennifer may be back, and no one is more excited than Twitter.” At this point, one could even say that the point of the theory is so obvious that it is a cliché: people spend their time regretting the days of weird web design, personal sites and listservs. Even Facebook employees say they miss the “old” internet. The big platforms encourage users to always generate the same conversations, the same curves of feelings and cycles of indignation, so much so that people may find themselves interacting like bots, responding impulsively in predictable ways to things that have been created, with every probability, to elicit that very response.

Fortunately, if all of this starts to bother you, you don’t need to rely on a whimsical conspiracy theory to regain peace of mind. You just need to spot some signs of life: the best proof that the internet is not dead is that wandering around a bizarre website I found an absurd rant about how the internet is now so, but so dead.

(Translation by Sarah Barberis)

This article was published on the site of the US monthly The Atlantic.

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