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"The "Dead Internet Theory" is a concept suggesting that the internet has largely been abandoned by humans and replaced by non-human activity. It posits that most online content, interactions, and engagement metrics are driven by bots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, creating the illusion of a vibrant, human-driven web."
The problem of the dead internet isn't that there are no human users, but that the human users are isolated from each other or herded into ideologically suitable echo chambers, where misinformation and lies can be harder to resist because they already have momentum. It's also hard to prove because we've demonstrated the inclination to do it to ourselves even without malign orchestrating influences like giant corporations.
An indicator of a dead internet wouldn't be that no one in your IRL experience uses the internet, but that either A) their experiences are extremely congruent with your own (you're both in the same bubble) or B) their experience of the internet reality has no shared basis with your own (only one of you is in a bubble, or you're both in separate bubbles). Which... does happen to me occasionally, especially with older folks. A lot of people are caught in the dead internet of facebook, and are being groomed and manipulated like cattle. The export products of the bot farming industry are influence, votes, hatred of minorities, etc. I suspect a lot of the MAGA elements of my family are deep into dead internet traps, though of course it's hard to get an accurate picture of their media diet because they don't trust me enough to share it.
Do I think this means the internet is now Certified Dead? No, but I think it's a sliding scale of deadness and it's somewhere between 0 and 100 percent. Where on that scale we are is difficult to pin down.
I still have Facebook because its somewhat useful to me sometimes. Only visit it once or twice a year. Saw my aunties page the other day, and its filled with "drill baby drill why aren't we exploring north sea oil" and "RIP Charlie Kirk you were a hero to us all!" and shit like that. Which are exact opposites of what I could consider acceptable opinions given what I "know".
I couldnt work out if I've been lied to or she has. Surely at least one of us has been fed the wrong information because shes not a horrible person.
It's very confusing when it happens to someone you know because they usually aren't horrible people. Nor are they particularly stupid, at least not more or less than your average human.
I think people in left-of-center spaces like to say things like "The Republican party is a cult" as a sort of disparaging cliche without really appreciating what a cult is or how they operate in real life. They see things like "Donald Trump ate a live baby on camera today, also his support among Republicans is at 90%" and assume that 90% of Republicans are cool with infant cannibalism, when in reality those Republicans just don't see the same news we do. They are actually in a cult, which means (among other things) that they are conditioned to believe the cult leader (Trump, at the moment) and his approved mouthpieces, and only them. They're reminded, constantly, that the left is deranged and willing to say anything to make Trump look bad, so when Trump does something so heinous it actually does penetrate their media bubble, it gets brushed off as more evidence of the left's lunacy. It's a very resilient form of conditioning and it's been going on way longer than the internet's been around, and it's... really hard. Because they aren't horrible people, mostly. They're mostly scared, and broke, and confused about the world, and they flock to people like Trump because they have been told by their handlers that he's their best bet. Once he's dead or too toxic even for the Republicans, they'll be reoriented toward the next leader.