The Dead Internet Theory 

The internet used to be a place you go to escape reality. Now you go outside to escape the internet

Robots reading articles written by robots while chatting with robots and viewing ads generated by other robots...

I was a web designer in the Late 90's. There was so much more creative freedom in interactivity, motion (Flash) sound effects, and colors. For example I made a fishing website where a fisherman on a boat on the top would the catch the fish you wanted to know more information about. The internet was really an adventure with so much to explore. Now, everything is cookie cutter, looks the same and is so drab. It's like we now live in a world where everyone lives in a gray house and drives a white Prius.

Honestly, I think we're at a breaking point of this capitalistic system we live in. Every single thing we have now that started to develop in the 90s and early 2000s is basically dead or slowly dying. The housing market is impossible to navigate for young people, people are more depressed than ever, and there are growing tensions among world powers. We're probably in the frontline for a completely new world in the next 15 to 20 years.

I always thought everything on the internet stayed forever but thats not the case , half the things you have seen and read are gone forever

Bot comments on top and yt algorithm deleting real comments. Dystopia...

I'm a very early adopter of the internet ( and indeed, personal computers). I left social medias behind a few years ago. I'm streaming less and less, especially with AI taking over everything. I have rediscovered the love of reading real books with real pages and riding my bicycle in my 60s.

"The internet is dead & we are the killers…" Aperture Nietzsche, 2024.

CAPTCHA probably gatekeeps humans much more than the AIs.

If Portal taught us anything, just don’t allow the AI to obtain deadly neurotoxins

I remember hearing everything you put on the internet stays on there forever , that’s a lie just due to the sheer amount of stuff we have lost , link rots , un-archived stuff and general things not being saved

The irony of the comments on this video...

AI wasn't the cause but it definitely became the end

Small correction - "robota" literally means "work" in Czech, not "slave". So "robot" is essentially "a worker".

I think the most important change is how we use the internet. Instead of actively researching things we like and choosing what we consume, we now passively consume what algorithms feed us. Also one of the important thing is the monopolization of sites. Instead of vibrant forums, blogspots, and personal sites nowadays, everything is owned by few very big corporations.Most internet users don't use anything other than 3-5 sites. My last observation is the amount of sterilization of the internet. You can't be anonymous; there are lots of rules you need to obey; you can't say things you think...That's why most popular contents become homogeneous,standardized,souless slop. Basicly, what we lived was a taming of the wild west named the internet. I don't know what will happen to AI in the future due to data corruption. Anything done after 2022 is possibly Aİ generated, and feeding this data to Aİ models doesn't produce good results, so will Aİ become obsolate? Who knows. Other than that, the master-slave dynamic changed long ago when algorithmic feeds were created. After that tipping point, Aİ has way more power over humans than realized. They caught us by our most primitive desires and used it to make us addicted to them so they can continue to make money.Average global screen time is approaching 7 hours,they cause enormous damage to humanity's attention span with short content which they pushed and no one opposes them. To be honest, I don't see a bright future.

Maybe it's for the better, honestly. People might go outside and breathe and have real interactions. It's no secret that social media makes people unhappy. Maybe there will be a resurgence of what the world was like before common Internet usage.

this might be a good thing, once the internet becomes unbearable enough, maybe people will start logging off and checking back in to the real world.

"And acknowledge humanity is more important than profit" Too bad human history is rife with people in power choosing self benefit over people. I'm sure many people believe where we are headed is a problem, the issue is that the small fraction of people in charge and in control of the system have very little incentive to change or improve it and are usually encouraged to make it worse for every one else for their own benefit.

The fun is gone from the internet... Now it's just a chore.

I'm in a Facebook group where we share the dumb auto generated Facebook AI pages that share very dumb AI images with wild captions and hashtags. Kinda scary.

Plot twist: this is an A.I. generated yt video

"There was only one problem, greed.. just like with radio a century earlier" Very glad to hear others recognizing this pattern.

"15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet." and the phrase "go touch grass" is proof of this statement of "take a break from internet"

The problem is that as organisms evolve they become more networked; as civilisations evolve in nature they become more hive-mind like (or perish). The internet is simply the latest iteration of an evolving planetwide network, not really different mycelium, the ocean or forest ecosystems. The internet is a colony/zooid/hivemind that uses humans as neurons.

Around 5 years ago I was in high school and I watched your videos for the first time, since then things have changed so much RU-vid, internet everything has evolved🫤 but it gives me peace amd relief to watch creators like you who did not adapt change or upgrade their content just to get more views and are still original and posting valuable content even when that they know very few (comparably) people are gonna click on it and keep watching due of our shortening attention span. Please keep it up, as it is the only channel that makes me realise that everything is still the same and how valuable videos can be ❤

In the past we used the internet. Today the internet uses us. - Rico Cancun 2024

I'm only 21. However about a week ago, got rid of Instagram. Never had TikTok. Spent my fair amount of time on Insta though. Watching as the first top 3 comments were always heavily liked bot comments. "Brownie recipies." As the captions. Scariest of all these algorithms. Carefully crafted to sway and manipulate you. Probably run by ai. Raw unfiltered intelligence. I began noticing the cycle of memes. It listened to me. I picked something back up. It was all over the explore. My friends still use it but i'm not going back on it. Started reading and not scrolling on RU-vid or anything. During a time on Instagram. It mentioned the themes and brutality of people in the comments. So of course it manipulated you into always looking at comments. Emptier and emptier it got. Depending on how some of my friends are. Users of it. I know that cultural disconnect is coming. Mental disconnect and age from lack of use is coming. I'm fine with it.

Robota means "hard work", not "slave"

That does explain a lot why I feel bored and lonely with internet, unlike back in the 00's and early 10's when I did made loads of friends through internet. Perhaps it is time to just give up social media altogether, and let it burn

The introduction of SORA made me think about this video's concept...the future is daunting😢

People cannot say or share what they want anymore. The internet became a place for AI content, videos of people dancing and pics of cats. Finding true good content is quite difficult. I get really pissed off when I need some urgent help in a customer service and what I get is an useless AI Chatbot instead of a human.

Basically HALF OF ALL INTERNET traffic is BOT's let that sink in.

7:33 "Backpacks are just as effective as parachutes when jumping out of a plane." I think the poor fellow with the backpack is going to notice the difference pretty quick! Hahahaha!

"The internet is dead and we are the killers" "God is dead and we have killed him "

The internet is not dead, its just some of the services on it are rotting.

Plot twist: this video was made by AI

And everything changed when the fire nation attacked

What Music was used around 8:22?

idk why, but I feel like this video is made using AI.

결국은 인터넷 여론이나 언론사의 기사가 현실의 어떤 사실을 보여주기 어려워지고 사람들은 오프라인 여론을 믿게될거임.지금은 유튜브나 언론사의 편향된 정보제공으로 편향된 시각을 지니고 있지만 결국은 실명제로 가야하지 않나 싶음.

The one big thing we can do as individuals - besides leaving the internet behind - is to install adblockers wherever we can, use addons/software to block as much tracking as possible, falsify fingerprinting in browsers (while using VPNs) and use fake information wherever you can. If a product is free, then you are the product. But you don't have to be.

The access to information somehow made everyone stupid.

I slways liked the personalized myspace sites with the customized song list, backgrounds, sparkling floweres and things. It was much more vibrant. The only people I knew who had it were musicians for their bands; so I thought that was a requirement. It was a great way to sample local bands sndcget concert notices. Tom was great!

The dead internet theory has been around since way longer then 2019

Hey there, at the 1:08 mark you talk about the ARPANET connecting two universities, "The University of California and Samford" but I wanted to point out that there were four intial hosts for ARPANET, University of California, Los Angeles, the Augmentation Research Center (at Stanford University), University of California, Santa Barbara and University of Utah School of Computing, all in the western united states. Samford University is a small private Bapitist university located in Alabama that did not figure into the early formation of the internet. Thanks!

The internet has been dead. Before AI, back between 2008-2016 india got mainstream use of internet. Most people say "Well in 2008 the iphone made even old and dumb people able to go online", but if you look into the number of indians online between those dates, you'll realize how bad it is.

One of my earliest entries into the internet as a young child were social video games. Club Penguin, Toontown, and most specifically, World of Warcraft. Its something that the game deals with now, where there is very little social interaction in the game nowadays. But when I was a child, talking to people online felt genuine and real. Every interaction was an absolute fact that there is someone behind that character model. The game today even has an issue with bots, where people are just AFK and the game is playing itself.

I wish people would stop calling chatgpt and others AI. Its not AI and never has been. It is an LLM large language model. It just uses massive threads of language to generate responses based on similar responses already given. The massive data sets used to train these models just increase its massive library of language threads. Its just seems intelligent but its not.

I really enjoyed the video. One thing you might investigate is that because of the Wild West nature of the 90/00’s Internet, surfing for a layperson (such as my boomer parents and to an extent younger individuals) was constantly fraught with pop ups, viruses, and adware/spyware that would ruin/clog/debilitate your machine rather quickly if you didn’t take maintenance and cautionary steps every time the computer was used on the internet. My parents bought a new, expensive desktop computer every 2 - 3 years throughout this period. Granted, processing power and memory is advancing at a ridiculous pace throughout this time, but it is interesting to make the connection that once AI and computing power get to a point, they have amalgamated the human experience to will smith eating spaghetti

Nietzsche 1.0: god is dead and we killed him. Nietzsche 2.0 the internet is dead and we are the killers

Perfect example is Myspace vs Facebook. Myspace you could have an entire personality to your profile. ie, music, background wallpaper, color schemes. It was awesome Then Facebook came in around late 2007 early 2008 (open to everyone, not just college kids) and I didn't understand it, until eventually everyone switched over because of the brand. I miss those days

Wait, i think there is a way to save the internet from this pest, couldn't we (supposing we can detect botted videos with fairly high acurracy) use bots to boost every video/post except the botted ones? Basically making it less beneficial or even counterproductive to have bots, so even if we cant save the internet from it we can slow it down

It's interesting to think. When I was a kid in the late 90's, I had access to the entire knowledge of the world. The only thing missing was the ability to have it in the palm of your hand via smartphone. Really, apart from any new knowledge since the year 2000 to now (which the vast majority of people will never need), everyone who had the internet had the same ability to access information as today!

Tim Berners Lee created the internet…

Excellent Analysis, Deployed Worldwide Through My Deep Learning AI Research Library. Thank You.

the Turing test doesn't really work anymore. And it doesn't really show that a machine can think or do anything outside of it's very specific programming. Chatgpt is just vomiting things back to you after searching them online. As more AI garbage gts uploaded online, the less useful chatgpt or generative AI is. that's why the art has already peaked, and its getting more wrong now in searches than it did 2 years ago.

Money and profits became more important than human lives a long time ago... There is no going back

See the theory had originally cropt up in 2014, but it didnt gain traction until before the pandemic. And I personally choose to believe it happened much earlier. I took several breaks from social media and even the internet as a whole. From 2011-2013 I was in a semi-successful band, which necessitated being active online. Then after my band imploded, I got depressed and scrubbed the internet of our band. Social media, streaming sites, all of it. Then I joined the Navy in late 2015, and didnt have access to internet for 9 months. When I got back on, there was already a stark difference in the overall 2 years with little to zero internet contact. Comments weren't as fleshed out, content was becoming less engaging and more showy. Then in 2020 in an effort to save my mental health, I deleted my social media. I had to make them again this year to be an admin on my non-profits social media, and all of the problems I started seeing back in 2013 were compounded severely. There are billions of users on the internet, but there is realistically only 1 billion humans actively on it. For context, thats like living in a small town of 100 and everyone is hundreds of miles apart. The internet can never go back to what it was

The epidemic we're scared of started long time before we knew about it

the bots especially on X or whatever its called feel like they are the majority of users, like you scroll the feed and its 3/4 bot posts its crazy

I really wish I had the link, but there was a super cool, albeit educational, website that was basically a small galaxy you could move through and get close ups of celestial bodies and learn more about them. I think I encountered it when we were learning REACT, so it was supposed to be a "cutting edge" website. Man that certification was worthless

Good luck on that people are more important than profit stuff. I’ve been banging that drum for over 20 years to no avail.

The end is nigh

Its so scary to me that some of the content we watch and the posts we see and the comments we interact with are made by AI , not a living thing using our language , seeing robots with human faces makes me freak out tbh

5:05 "According to the theory something changed around 2016..." We miss you Harambe!

How are you gentlemen? All your base are belong to us.

I had a channel like this one and made a few videos i worked really hard on and i thought were interesting and extremely original. They got zero views because the algorithm hates originally. I have a different, very successful channel where i just do what i see working for more than one channel. Thats the future unfortunately. And i know i probably would have done better eventually but "doing better eventually" doesn't pay the bills due this month.

ChatGPT, and AI in general, is a classic example of "Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD."

We've had this version of the internet at home for like 30 years now, clearly we need someone to go Gold with internet 2

This is surprisingly informative

It was Stanford in Palo Alto, not Samford which is in Alabama

Google and YT used to give pertinent search results; " " around a search meant only returning results with that exact phrase in the quotation marks. Not anymore. Now searches feel more like walking through Walmart. Glitzy ads, brain rot, plastic everywhere.

7:27 The part about Google AI giving out ridiculous info is because people were using inspect element to modify the responses and make them funnier. Though, I won't deny it didn't work as well as Copilot for example. The slander is crazy and y'all will believe anything as long as a person said it and not AI

0:54 the old but gold days....my country was fierce and ready to defend our country, sadly our demise happened in 1991 But there is another cold war brewing and if it means having to stand by it, defend it or die trying, so be it

I’ve been on the internet since the nineties and there’s definitely a lot of information you can’t trust on the platform.

To be honest, wouldn’t it be good if the Internet actually died ? Humans would have more social interaction and no more people scrolling on their phones while hanging out with someone else

The thing that absolutely baffles me is that a lot of platforms that should‘ve protected their services with all their power just have been letting ai taking over in an nonchalant way. Like Adobe Stock for example. It‘s 70% shitty ai footage now and they have the audacity to want 80$ for a disgusting picture that anyone could’ve made. Or Pinterest. I don’t want to see artificial garbage, I want to see real photography and art.

Tf2 is a proof of concept

great video! drew gooden also recently posted a very eye-opening video on the topic, im glad people are talking about this!

change for systems that have had such a huge influence in our lives feels strange... i feel like the internet and all energies not anchored in truth... will fall back into the void...

Yeah i dont even use the internet much anymore. Literally since I stopped consuming Porn its like 70% RU-vid, 20% ChatGPT (and other AI), 5% Reddit and 5% Google Apps (Search/Email/Pictures).

"Greed killed the internet." also "Our Patreon..." You guys have to learn to just give quality content away. That's the anti-greed move.

As i once told my friends while in college in 2009 "the internet is a place you go every day to hang out with people you hate" but now it's more like uncanny valley where you feel like you are surrounded by the same old shit but once you see they are all bots you have like a weird "wake up" moment and realize maybe going outside was better after all.

It feels so crazy to think I’m part of the last generation to grow up before social media (born 2005) edit* Apparently people still aren’t understanding what I mean. Yes obviously we had the internet and social media growing up like the birth of RU-vid or facebook and MySpace BUT many people my age didn’t have a smartphone till maybe middle school. My childhood was spent outside at parks like older generations. No one “grew up” on the internet or social media as much as the generation AFTER me. You have kids today that’s 1-5 on TikTok, when I was that age I was outside🤷🏾‍♂️

Mid to late 90s internet was peak internet.

And this video consists totally of a faceless talking head and endless stock B-Roll to attract clicks. I think you protest too much.

That's why im for 3rd places. Place in between home, and job. Place where people can go and see other people. There are some already, but they are not just pubs, or cafés...

run hamster run.

Just a note, "Robota" translates to "Work" instead of "Slave" in czech

Interesting 😮

It was a connection between UCLA and Stanford. Your video says Samford, a university in Alabama.

It's incredible how so many channels will make a video on the same topic. This has been talked about to death, be more creative.

I feel like some of my coworkers are bots. I work remotely, and some coworkers I've never personally met just seem to be bots to me. No sense of humor, very bland personality, fast workers that can do things at such a fast speed that i don't understand. It's just a feeling that i have, and it scares the heck out of me. Does anyone else feel this way?

This seems like a ai channel ngl

Some dead internet theorists go a little to far thinking that majority of interactions are bots and it’s completely dead. When it’s most likely like he said around 50-60% populated by bots, meaning that there could be a bot on the internet for each person on this planet , with around 7 billion bots active. But with the part where Meta was having to remove 28 billion bots? It may be worse then we can imagine with our future internet possibly having trillions of bots populating the internet.

Gone are the old days of the internet that I experienced in 2002-2009. You were cautious still, but it was actually a tangible experience, with the variety of stuff out there, and the feel of actual community spaces on some of these sites. It's not felt anything like that for for the last 15 years, certainly not the last 10. The reasons why are perfectly explained in this video. I use the internet less and less now, which isn't a bad thing, but it's a shame looking at what it was and its potential, to see it now. It's been absolutely hollowed out of any real goodness and stuffed with mediocre, homogenised 'content'. My internet use is now RU-vid, ebay, and checking my bank and emails. Fun 😂

Like this comment so I'm know I'm not shadow banned

"And so the population was gradually led into the demoralising temptations of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The Britians spoke of such novelties as civilization when, in fact, they were a feature of their enslavement." Tacitus 68 BCE The humans always adapt. Things will be just fine.

It's an issue of corporate media consolidation, which also completely envelopes social media now. But the influence of totalitarian hellholes like China and Russia doesn't help.

What did you expect from the system that gave us “High-fructose corn syrup”? THAT is the real problem.