Angel from Instagram suggested that I blog about this ‘Dead Internet’ theory. I’ve researched what it means on Wikipedia, and I am excited to say that I found out there was a creepypasta written about it too.
Here is what Wiki says:
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity to manipulate the population. Proponents of the theory believe these bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumers. Some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception. The date given for this “death” was generally around 2016 or 2017.
– Wikipedia
I mean, is this a theory or is this the truth? I don’t think the internet is entirely dead… I think there are people still swimming around in it, which is why group chats are important. You can foster some real relationships from Discord alone. I remember I used to play a lot of Minecraft in middle school, and I actually made some real friends on this one server… It’s sad because I can’t remember the exact date I stopped playing on that server, life just sort of made it fizzle out unnoticed.
The number one thing about is internet that you have to understand is that everybody is on there for some sort of self-fulfilling purpose; whether it’s raising attention/ awareness or to monetize something. I honestly think a lot of the internet is not real. You can start with some web browsers like Google. If I Google how to cook chicken, I get so confused by large the amount of recipes with these irrelevant blog sections before the actual ingredient list. They do this in order to increase SEO to make their link pop up higher on the Google listing, thus increasing traffic to gain revenue from the Google Ads on the side of their page. Lowkey, I think I am going to start a recipe section of this website and post pictures of food because I can.
From a web development perspective, every website is just a formatted HTML page with Java Script (to make it fancy). Websites exist to act like a digital book to convey information or make someone do something. My blog exists because I would lose my mind without telling the world what is on it. I also do this to promote my music because I pray and I pray that this will one day be my main career.
Now lets direct the conversation towards what the Dead Internet theory is describing above; individual user profiles that may or may not be bots. I think the internet can turn you into a bot with all the mindless scrolling… I mean just look at the Snapchat news menu on the app; everything is fake and all of the ‘articles’ have like a million different snaps included in them about literally nothing. They do this in order to keep you on that News Snapchat Story for as long as possible, and they will put the headlining image at the end. It’s so obvious. This is how I perceive the internet, everything is so obviously self-fulfilling and ridiculous. It’s brain rott. It’s like going on the explore page and seeing clickbait; what gets people’s attention? Is it a gym mirror selfie video of a person with cellulite? Is it a million pictures of a Capybara because I programmed Instagram to only present me with Capybara images on my explore page? Is it yet another Soundcloud rapper that people secretly do not care about but only follow to maintain some sort of online community/ reputation through association??
The expressionism through social media profiles draws parallels with what you choose to wear at the grocery store when you need a place to go in order to feel like yourself. We change our profile picture according to what we want the world to think of us, but in reality, everyone has a different perspective on everything and people are going to think what they think. I think that is why social media is so isolating; it’s because most of the time, you are actually just talking to yourself because you are perceiving people the way you want to perceive them rather than what they’re actually trying to say. Texting is already bad enough, just leave it to the Instagram comment section to start as many fights as humanly possible because there is no body language or context clues on how to interpret something.
So do I think the Dead Internet Theory is true? In part… I think people should just honestly go outside.
