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The Dead Internet Theory

We all love the Internet. If you are a Gen-Z, a digital native, you were born with the internet and you can't imagine how this world could even function correctly without this technology. If you're a millennial, you surely remember the dial-up connection, the sound of the modem, the annoying chat nudges from your MSN friends, and your excitement when you went to Google Earth and traveled the world from your slow computer. If you're a Gen-X or a baby boomer, your first email was probably a revelation, and you've seen the internet evolve from a simple communication tool to a vast network that connects billions of people and devices around the globe. Imagine for one second that the same internet you used to love is dead. Not just slow or censored, but dead like a body without a soul. A decomposing body that attracts only vultures and scavengers. This is what the Dead Internet Theory is about.

In reality, the Internet died in 2017 according to the supporters of the theory. They believe the internet has been replaced by a series of intranets controlled by powerful corporations and governments. The World Wide Web, as we knew it, is no more. The internet has been fragmented and is controlled mainly by bots spreading automated content everywhere: social media, news reports, blogs, and forums. The internet has become a vast wasteland, algorithmically generated and curated by manipulators who control the flow of the global narrative.

"Dead-internet theory. It’s terrifying, but I love it." ~ Kaitlyn Tiffany, Journalist at The Atlantic

The origin of this theory is hard to pinpoint, but it seems to have been initiated on discussion boards like 4chan, WizardChan, and Agora Road. The theory's advocates argue that what's happening on the internet is not just a psyop (psychological operations) but a full-scale war on reality. They advance many arguments to support the idea that the internet is dead, for instance, the fact that the CIA is an investor in companies like Narrative Science, a US-based natural language generation company, or that the US abandoned the DARPA project Lifelog in 2004, the same year Facebook was created. The Atlantic popularized the theory in 2021, and it has since gained traction among conspiracy theorists and skeptics.