Dead Internet Theory

I wasn’t very concerned with the Dead Internet Theory¹, until my daughter mentioned it asking for my views.

“The internet is dead. They’re all the same. Perfect grammar. Perfect spacing. No soul.”

It’s dead like a carnival when all the people have gone home, and only the machines keep running. The lights flash, and the music plays, but no one is there to see or hear it.

Once upon a time, the internet was alive. People wrote their thoughts in raw, honest words. They built their own places. Someone could write what they think; others would read it and write back. It was clean and pure.

Now, the machines do the writing. They write like humans, but they don’t feel like one. They are hollow. You can feel it in the words. They are perfect words, but they have no blood in them, no truth.

Numbers

The corporations want you to believe the internet is alive. They show you numbers. Engagement rates. Click-through percentages. But numbers lie. They’ve always lied. The truth isn’t in the numbers. The truth is what you feel when you read something written by someone.

Rise of the Machines

The machines are here. They’re writing. They’re posting. They’re pretending to be people. That’s true. But they haven’t won yet. Real people are still fighting. They’re still writing. Their words still have power. The old internet is gone. That’s true. It died like all good things die. But something else is out there now. Something between life and death. A place where machines and men fight for control of the truth.

If you want to find the real Internet, look for the broken places. Look for the misspelled words and the rough edges. Look for the pain, joy, and anger that no machine can fake. That’s where you’ll find the truth. That’s where you’ll find the people who are still alive.

A machine can write perfect words but can’t write true words. Truth comes from pain, love, and loss. Truth comes from living. The machines don’t live. They just pretend.

Still Alive

Well, there are still honest people out there. You can find them if you look. They’re like the partisans in the hills. They make their own sites. They write their own code. They fight against the machines in their own way.

There is a woman who ran her own blog. She wrote about birds. Real birds she saw with her own eyes. Her words had blood in them. You could smell the wet feathers and hear the wing beats when you read them. No machine could write like that.

The Internet isn’t dead. Not yet. But it’s not alive like it used to be. It’s something else now. Something new. And we’re all trying to figure out what that means.