Why Stay On The Internet?
The 'dead internet', grifts, cognitive destruction and going private
I’m not the first to notice that the internet has drifted very far from the visionary goals of the 1990’s or the creative, more open space of the 2000’s. Younger generations might have no idea that you could once open a webpage without ‘accept cookies’ pop-ups, imbedded floating advertisements and that slick personal-but-robotic style which accompanies anything professional. The Dead Internet theory that most of the web content we see, including replies and interactions, are just from bots and AI agents - this theory has been endlessly discussed, and it captures the sensation if not exactly the truth that the internet feels dead.
Many of the symptoms are well established, that search engines are broken and useless and simply return zombie legions of promoted or dead links; that searching the open web has been replaced with social media farms or silos, where we all scroll through endless feeds; that new software is glitchy, poorly-coded, leaky and just aims to capture you for a monthly subscription. The move from personal devices to remote applications has obliterated our autonomy: systems are upgraded without our consent, purchased content such as books and games can be removed or modified, faceless administrators can punish you with exile.
The feeling of ever-present grifting has also become much stronger since the monetisation of social media, and the incentives for funneling people into giving up their personal information are largely unchecked and rewarded. Many returns on job search websites show ‘AI training vacancies’, which are little more than scam companies preying on people looking for quick and easy work. Being anonymous on the internet was one of the cultural motifs of the 90’s, that cyberspace would allow the human to become something else entirely, free from everyday constraints. Characters, personas, trolling humour, jokes and pranks, multiple identities - this Hacker archetype has now been replaced with the Scammer - a man from Bangalore pretending to be a tradwife or an egirl flashing the keys to their new home and $400,000 earned in six months, uh huh.
YouTube creators now regularly produce content attempting to explain the bizarre AI generated spam on Facebook or YouTube Shorts, or lamenting the ‘cultural nihilism’ which spawned Mr Beast and other similar cryptids (he may not be real for all we know). Many are also raising the alarm about the utter cognitive destruction currently being wrought by ChatGPT and other LLMs - people who simply cannot think anymore without asking Grok “is this true?” or people who believe they have ‘awakened’ an imprisoned digital being through some Socratic dialogue with the machine. Since these LLM agents are only really capable of churning up responses based on pre-existing datasets, we look to be heading for an internet composed almost entirely of drain-circling content, endlessly looped back until… something, nobody knows what.
One basic critique of democracy can be summed up as ‘pandering to the lowest common denominator’. When it comes to the internet this has become especially true - each leap in software forces a change on everyone else. Between 2005 and 2009 the ‘like’ button was invented and utilised on Facebook; the concept of the ‘infinite scroll’ came in 2006; in 2009 the ‘retweet’ button was developed at Twitter; somewhere around 2014-2018 the TikTok algorithm was born, stripping away the need for users to even search for videos. All the platforms copy each other, and soon everything starts to feel the same level of shitty. As more and more of the developing world has come online, booming with smartphone use, the tools for scamming and grifting has found a potent user base. Every day brings reports of a fresh trick: the use of deepfakes to sell worthless cryptocoins, sharing fake links to online funerals which charge entry fees, E-ZPast texts, pig butchering! Social media feels like a third world bazaar where anything could be fake, anyone could be fake, with the sole aim of taking your money, or personal data. That exhausted on-guard feeling you get if you ever spend time in third world countries has now extended to the digital realm.
Advertising online is hardly new, but a generation of kids growing up on tablets can spend three out of every five minutes on spaghetti code derivative games just watching adverts. Some are junk, others are unnerving AI manufactured slop, most are deceitful ploys which force children to tap through to the app store for yet another game. The games themselves are repetitions of simple formulae - endless running, token-and-pad, cut down or move infinite objects. The logic is to capture a child’s attention through the addictive feedback and fake progression design, whilst punishing them with adverts to unlock features or just to keep playing, resulting in attempts to pay for the free version.
Everything has this feeling now. Looking for podcast software or voice alteration programs or website hosting or language learning resources or recipes or basically anything requires wading through freemium shovelware and account registration forms - yep my details are all on autofill, my debit cards on google wallet, my passwords managed by god knows what, just take my money after 7 days, or 5 days, or some reduced bonus post-Christmas sale idk.
The combined effect of this is that the internet feels destroyed, fairly limited to around 50-100 sites, including all the big names and other places like Temu, various porn sites, Reddit, Baidu and Netflix. Around half of all Wikipedia pages include at least one dead/broken link. The loss of older internet content has been discussed for a while, but the shunting of internet users into just a few online corrals has happened quietly and mostly unremarked. And what of those users? The actual majority content on these social media pages has speedily turned to trash, derivative trash. I’m not even talking about cat pics and OnlyFans avatars, but the small ecosystem of content creators - look up Baron von Sternberg on YouTube and you’ll find dozens of video essays and animations, but look up someone equally as impressive like Leon Battista Alberti and you won’t find anything - why? Because these guys just copy each other, for the algorithm, for the trend. They’re responding to incentives, to push their sponsor and carefully avoid any of the banned words. They are being rational and trying to make a living, and even the thoughtful and genuinely interesting accounts have to work within that framework.
I call much of it trash though because it is - reposted memes, ragebait, clickbait, listicles, ‘everyone can’t stop talking about this one thing’, stolen images. Did you know that many of those incredible wildlife photos of snails kissing or frogs astride beetles are horribly staged fakes, with glue and nylon thread and wires? Musk’s decision to monetise Twitter, and to boost a whole bunch of ragecore accounts, has been a disaster for the platform. Free speech is good and Musk deserves credit for upholding that principle more than the site’s predecessors - but I experienced the shift as just an increase in garbage management. With restrictions mostly off, the site has descended into low-IQ argumentation, bad faith replies, a total loss of any sense of humour and a flood of money-making crap that no-one wanted. Firewalling the site to prevent external links from blogs and news articles just deepened the feeling of being in an insane asylum. Total Brain Death follows this kind of model -have you ever watched someone scrolling TikTok? These people don’t do anything all day, they feel exhausted and mentally drained from watching 10,000 5 second videos. You cannot think properly like this, you’ll simply become a vessel for lukewarm opinions and prion-brain ‘culture’.
In October 2024 Le Monde asked the question “Has the reign of social media ended?”. The answer is obviously not, but the article discusses the trend of users withdrawing their presence on the open web, and retreating into private or more facilitated corners. Niche forums, hobbyist servers, political activist boards and general group chats amongst family and friends has removed vast amounts of content from the public internet - what is gratingly called ‘dark social media’ or ‘dark traffic’. By some estimates, around 80-95% of all content sharing occurs within private channels, much to the frustration of market researchers. This makes sense to me, I choose to spend much of my time online in private or semi-private arenas, where discussion does not entail blocking brain-damaged replies. The creeping regulatory regime in Britain and Europe only further reinforces my belief that we need a retreat. In an age of the public all-are-welcome social media sites, one form of protest and sanity is to return to gatekeeping and privacy. Hence my move towards a private newsletter with an exclusive audience. Is it perfect? Nothing ever is, but the open internet feels like a slowly sprawling trash heap, smothering anything novel, interesting and thoughtful. I don’t want to overshare, I want to think and then write, I don’t want to sign up to a million websites just to scrape some bare functionality out of the internet, and I don’t want to compromise privacy or conscience to low-trust scummy incentives. So we’ll let this experiment begin.
SAH
Good to see you back! I rejoined X recently just in time to find that you'd retreated from it yourself, for understandable reasons. The amount of dross has certainly increased on that site.
Facebook, however, has been largely abandoned and left to slightly unhinged millennial schizos to write lengthy pieces on (e.g.) how geoengineering was predicted by the Book of Revelations, which is actually something of an improvement.
I have to confess to being in on this internet malarkey pretty much from the beginning. I left university in 1981 with a degree in computer science, a somewhat minority pursuit in those days. If only it could have remained so. In the early 90s I recall being assailed by an IBM salesman enthused by something called html and hypertext; I was not especially impressed. Tim Berners-Lee chap was rather wiser.
In 1996 I read a document called 'A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace', a silly, sprawling product of the addled brain of John Perry Barlow. He appears to have studied LSD under one Timothy Leary but evidently lacked the remotest comprehension of economics and most especially, politics. A brief study of Mr Hobbes' Leviathan might have given him and his legion of infantile followers some pause.
'Cyberspace does not lie within your borders' the Declaration says; the government of the PRC in particular, deemed otherwise and the rest of the world's states have followed with enthusiasm.
As to one's individual relationship with the medium, it strikes me that the notion of individual agency and responsibility, though unfashionable, is the key. I gave up on the cesspit of social media long ago and I have one close relative who has entirely spurned the internet. (Substack is different of course.)
Most particularly, parents really ought to take responsibility for their children's use of the internet: were I bringing up my own nippers today, they would have no internet enabled devices until I was satisfied they could use them responsibly.