Just at the end of Summer 2021, heading into the Fall, I couldn’t help notice a new “star” conspir-shhhh theory popping up in several places online after The Atlantic did an article about it (to read it click here).
The original post that supposedly kicked off this whole Dead Internet Theory can be found on Agora Road’s Forum (to read it click here).
I encourage everyone to at least read the original post found on Agora Road, but for the rest of this post I am going forward after a brief description of what Dead Internet Theory is, as if you’ve already read the original post.
What Is Dead Internet Theory?
Dead Internet Theory suggests that a large part of the activity or traffic on the internet is fake. Fake, as in A.I. or bots.
How much fake internet traffic are we talking about?
Taking a look at this article from Imperva.com is where we are starting, specifically looking at this graphic. (the full article can be found by clicking here).
From this graphic, we learn that over the year 2020 bot traffic or fake traffic on the internet accounted for a total of 40% of all internet traffic with a whopping 25% of fake traffic coming from “bad bots”.
Now what’s interesting to me is noticing that this is over the same time-frame that da Rona drama began. This means that most of us (at least in the beginning) were shuttered away in our homes. Yet when looking at this graphic, we see that overall internet traffic from real people went down 5.7% and traffic from bots overall went up.
Something is off about this when looked at in this context.
Now, I’m not saying there is anything “off” about the data being presented, just that the whole idea of there being close to 40% of all internet traffic being fake especially during 2020…that is what seems so “off”.
Overall, the Dead Internet Theory is proposing that the internet has become almost unrecognizable, at least from the perspective of those of us old enough to remember what it used to be. Social media has had a great deal to do with this as well, but it’s more than that. Since we started with the bots, let’s talk a little more about them.
What do “bad bots” do?
Leaving the good bots aside, what are these “bad bots” doing creating 25% of all internet traffic over 2020?
The creepiest thing these “bad bots” are doing is pretending to be real people on the internet.
The original post on Agora Road brings up examples of how many real people have witnessed these bots enter into forum discussions pretending to be real people. Other examples are noticing the exact same comment being posted simultaneously across many social media platforms, by several different “people”.
You may have seen examples of this and not even have been aware of it.
Here is another small example…timestamps on a comment string on a newly uploaded video. Just a timestamp for a comment, have you ever seen that?
Usually this has happened to me when I have unknowingly spoken or written a “no-no word” in a post.
This quickly gets us into another “no-no word” many independent content creators have already learned they are not supposed to say… censorShhhhip.
Not so much fun to be had when these bots are treating real grown people like little kids to be shushed so that other grown people can’t hear what is being said unless they start speaking in code or spelling out certain words so that the kids they are speaking in front of don’t catch on.
Independent content creators aren’t being given a list of “no-no words” in advance, not updated when the list changes, and we’re also finding out these bots are not very discriminate about the shushing they are doing either.
Here’s just a personal example I can point to of this kind of thing we have recently experienced.
We began our website and YouTube channel about 6 months ago. We had to start it from scratch because we learned the hard way from our old channel how careful we had to be to not step on any “no-no words”.
Yet despite our being so careful over this time, I apparently stepped on one of those “no-no words” anyway. It happens to appear in the subtitle of our book series.
That one word, circled there, you see? It is used in context of astronomy, meaning “unaided by any technology” eye.
Did the bots who tagged this one word as a search term, putting a hashtag on it in the backend of our videos, discriminate about how this word is being used and in what context? No, it obviously didn’t. Is this having an impact on the number of people we want to reach with our content? My guess is yes.
I realize these are just a few of my personal examples, nothing to get us leaping into “buying” this Dead Internet Theory, but they are happening nonetheless.
The thing is, I’ve worked on more than one YouTube channel and websites going back to 2007, on a variety of topics from personal to business and what I’m seeing lately is that this is more than bots tagging certain words or topics for censorShhhh.
This is effectively shutting down many independent content creators, simply because they are independent…no matter the topic.
So many online are giving advice about how to please the Al Go Rhythm which is so ironic, given this context, isn’t it? Knowing these bots, this A.I., this Al Go Rhythm is effectively making it so much harder for independent creators to get their new website or YouTube channel any traffic while favoring big, mainstream corporations.
Organic traffic to new projects has never been so difficult to get and keep in this full of bots online environment. Yet, the advice you will continually hear is to use these new A.I. tools and bot technology to compete, don’t complain and just keep dancing to the Al Go Rhythm. Crazy irony, isn’t it? Here’s even more…
If you take a look at our current subscriber count and view counts on our YouTube channel, you can clearly see we did not pay for any fake views or subscribers, but I have gotten many emails from people who want to sell them to me.
What this tells me is that there is now a large industry of selling fake bot traffic so as to fake social proof.
I know from what I’ve seen that many independent creators are turning to these kinds of tactics to get their website or their YouTube channel “off the ground” and growing. They have learned that without that “social proof”, their content will likely remain unseen. Yet, no one wants to talk about this.
Faking social proof with bots or A.I. to build an audience of real people…anyone seeing the real problem with this?
When looking at what is actually going on, Dead Internet Theory is starting not to look so “fringe” at all.
What about social media…is it “dead”, too?
Social media has become the place to be online. I would argue that most people are only on the internet when they are scrolling through their favorite social media platform.
This means that most independent creators have been moved on to these private corporations online properties.
This means that these private corporations set the agenda and make the rules, keeping your attention on certain topis and away from others in the process.
For those already aware of this, I think we would agree this is in itself a form of thought control and social engineering.
We did this piece as an encouragement for those independent creators out there who have noticed this fakeness or “deadness” they are experiencing online in reality. Noticing what is happening does not mean you are a complainer or a “crazed conspiracy theorist”…it just makes you aware and naturally intelligent.
This is where we end this post for the beginners. For those receiving our private videos, we will be looking into this deeper and answering questions specifically like, Why is it named Dead Internet Theory? Why did the story “break” when it did? and “Why is this story a new “star” conspiracy theory? We have some astronomical connections to make in this one that you will find in your inbox soon.
Until next time…stay lit and be well,
shannon
For more information about our books, free Alternative Astronomy courses and more click here.
If you prefer to watch the video version of this post, you can find that here: