The Internet Is Not Dead, But It Is Going Underground
On the "Dead Internet Theory", conservative astroturfing, and AI.
A dangerous conspiracy theory is making a popular resurgence, including and especially among left-wing commentators.
If you’re online as frequently as I am (first of all, get help, but also), you’ve probably seen an alarming amount of AI-generated content in your feeds. As DALL-E, Midjourney, and other image-generation tools become more accessible and easy to use, more and more of our digital landscape is being populated with uncanny images like the ones documented by my TikTok mutual Hazel below. Worse, most of social media seems to only exist for content farming by bots…
