The Internet isn’t just dead: It’s full of zombies

By now, we all know about dead internet theory, a conspiracy-turned-reality that asserts that most Internet traffic and content is driven by bots. But something that is dead is fundamentally harmless, even beneficial. After all, death is a natural part of life. 

What the Internet has become is far more dire than simply no longer being alive.

The dead Internet theory is a concept that asserts that the Internet consists primarily of bot activity and automated content manipulated by algorithmic curation. Originally conceived as a conspiracy theory alleging that the phenomenon is a coordinated effort to control the population and reduce genuine human interaction, the concept is also employed colloquially to describe the impacts of generative AI, emphasizing only the core observations without speculating on the driving forces.

Imagine a wide-eyed man walking up to you and telling you that “they” control what you think and feel. You’d probably back up a few steps and look around for help. I’m that wide-eyed man. This isn’t a conspiracy anymore; it’s the way that we live our lives. We know it, we accept it, and we’ve normalized it.

We know that our social media feeds are designed to alternately enrage and entertain. But we can’t help but keep scrolling. We joke with our friends and family that “they” are listening to us on our phones, televisions, and laptops. We have large swathes of evidence—and class action lawsuits—that indicate that social media platforms are not just trying to control our emotions, but are actually being pretty successful. All these things are in the background of our day-to-day lives.

We know that what we experience is being controlled. But the Internet isn’t dead because that 

Grab your cold iron

But here’s what I mean when I say the Internet is “undead” rather than dead. Because people conceptualize “dead internet” as the idea that the Internet is primarily bot traffic, but that’s not the primary issue. The primary issue is that the bots are influencing real people.

Zombies, in this case, are real people who now hold bot-led opinions and reiterate bot-led talking points. These are opinions that they might not have otherwise, but they’re nevertheless beholden to now.

Critically, a zombie never has to interact with a bot at all; they may simply have interacted with another zombie. A very savvy person may be able to identify a bot immediately, but they may not be able to recognize that their opinions are being shifted in this way.

And the infrastructure of our digital world is now purpose-built to create zombies.

Let’s consider this: The earth itself has been beset by a plague of tribbles. They’re replicating like crazy everywhere. They’re damning the streams, they’re rolling down hills, you can’t get down the interstate. It’s annoying.

And let’s say these tribbles are the result of a private company unleashing a horrendous experiment, but that private company really, really wants people to believe that tribbles are a natural occurrence that just sort of happens every 10,000 years. In fact, tribbles are what killed the dinosaurs.

What are they to do?

• The company releases hundreds of bots to flood all the major social media platforms with information about how tribbles are in the fossil record, actually, and therefore, this has always happened.
• Real humans see this information and latch onto Natural Tribble Theory.
• Those real humans will be boosted by an algorithm that looks for authenticity and real people with reach.
• Other humans start repeating those humans because they trust them—they’re generally reliable sources, and they know that they’re real.
• The company then releases hundreds of bots to attack those humans with superlative levels of disagreement; “Only a child abuser thinks tribbles are even real.”
• The humans who believe in Natural Tribble Theory now double down and start pushing themselves into even narrower positions; tribbles caused tuberculosis, actually.

In just a few short phases, not only has the company deflected successfully, but they’ve created advocates. These advocates won’t just parrot their beliefs, but they’ll double down regarding things that are more extreme than they could probably even imagine.

And they’ll be real people.

Your money or your life

There are two motivations degrading our web experience: profit and control. And, of course, control is just more profit and profit is a means to control. 

Bots are around to do a lot of things. They’re around to shift political consensus. They’re around to sell an electric spatula. They’re around to stoke gender, race, and class division. They’re around to sell an 18-week LeanFIRE seminar. 

But it’s not, of course, just bots. It’s also AI overviews. It’s also chatbots. Companies and governments now do control everything we see and hear online. And since we have an increasingly digital world, that makes us incredibly vulnerable.

We can’t, now, know why people are manipulating us through bots, because there are too many angles and vectors for manipulation. It’s hard to identify why “someone” is lying to us because we can’t even begin to guess and their motivations. Sure, there are broad things like class division. But there’s also a subreddit that’s designed solely to sell you an acrylic Spider-Man lamp.

And we may think that because we are savvy, we can identify these bots. But what is much, much harder to identify is when a friend or colleague we trust is replicating a bot opinion—when they’ve been compromised.

We pay attention (well, theoretically) to what we eat. But we may need to put just as much thought into what content we consume.