Nothing on the internet is real
Twitter is a face-stealing monster
A year ago I received an email from a newsletter I didn’t remember subscribing to and clicked on a link I shouldn’t have.
I was promised an exciting new course and it was at 70% off for a limited time only, but what I got was a livestream with a timer at 5 minutes and counting down.
As the timer came down, the chat of the livestream began to fill with people, Bob saying hi to Mary, David saying he can’t wait for the stream to start.
Everyone is using their full names and faces like they signed up with their Facebook accounts or something and I’m starting to think I've stumbled across an actual internet cult.
But after a while the timer ticks down 3-2-1-0 and the whole chat is going wild for the start of a presentation I still don’t know the exact nature of.
A studio set fades in with a handsome sales-y looking guy who starts welcoming me to ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’ and tells everyone who’s been benefitted by the program to ‘put a one in the chat.’
The instant he says this the chat lights up with ones- which is wrong. A livestream should have a delay of some sort, but maybe my wifi is just bad and everyone else is ahead of me. I reload the page and there’s no change. I message people directly, I get no response. I message admins directly, and I still get no response. I write every expletive I know in all caps in the chat, and nothing happens.
And that’s when I realize that despite apparently being in a roomful of people, I am completely alone.
The livestream was only a video, and Bob and Mary weren’t ‘robotic,’ they were just robots.
‘Dead Internet theory’ is the hypothesis that nothing on the Internet is real. You are alone on websites populated entirely by bots and AI-generated content.
In experience, it’s not so much a hypothesis as a state which all online communities exist in to varying degrees at all times.
Just two weeks ago a video on X (the app formerly known as Twitter) received over 24k likes and 6k comments despite the video not having any sound at all.
Bots simply recognized the source of the video and posted comments from other platforms which performed well.
For me this was a brutal revelation, a flashback to that moment in the chatroom and a feeling of vertigo. Nothing there.
Fake content is endemic online as well.
An acquaintance of mine blew up on TikTok recently with a short clip of him yelling at a wedding. Then a random woman claimed that she were also at the wedding and told a crazy story. She also blew up, and instead of saying she wasn’t at the wedding, he built on the narrative in true ‘yes and’ style and started selling t-shirts.
It’s not out of the ordinary on short-form video platforms. All of the stories are fake, all of the fights are fake, and all of the pranks are fake. And all of that gets laundered into other sites which feed into podcasts and news articles which create narratives which support the next stories.
Beyond content and profiles that are literally fake, the organization of everything is constructed as well. The algorithm is not benign.
I’ve seen video of the last 90% of all of the most egregious police shootings that have occurred in the US since 2014, and you might’ve seen your fair share too.
If a single person personally witnessed 20 unjust shootings over 10 years, they would have reason to be concerned about the state of policing in their community, but through the algorithm we see all injustice everywhere and across time.
In some communities every instance ever of black on white crime or white on black racism or man on woman violence or woman on man prejudice is in circulation permanently.
If there’s a million posts you could see, and the algorithm selects which one you do see, you aren’t having a conversation with a person, you’re talking to the algorithm. A person might be behind the post or they might not be, but the intelligence that brought the message to you was the algorithm.
Everyday someone somewhere thinks the thought most likely to make you react and the algorithm plucks that thought out of a million and brings it to your doorstep.
Just like if I link you this passage from a website containing an essentially infinite combination of random characters, the message is from me and not the text.
The algorithm is not benign, it is an active agent.
In the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender the hero Aang must retrieve knowledge from the face-stealing monster named Koh.
Koh seeks to steal your face, but can only do this if you react to it and make an expression. It does whatever it can to make you react, and if you do your face joins its masks and becomes one of the many faces that it will use to affect other people.
This is the algorithm. This is ‘the discourse.’ When you react emotionally you give your face to the monster and you become complicit with it drawing attention into itself. You become a character in its narrative, caught up in your reaction to it.
A fake outrage presented by the algorithm and supported by bots gains real momentum through your participation. Even if you oppose the outrage, your attention and energy gives it legitimacy and cultural force. You must realize that the situation you have been placed in is fake so you can stop trying to affect the reactions of others and moderate yourself.
Many of the people you encounter online will literally not be real, and the vast majority of the rest will be people living in a fake context, reacting to fake people in a constructed configuration. They are stolen faces, and if you react with your face it will be taken by the monster to play a bit part in a world of caricature.
Do not trust the monster. Some of the faces have minds behind them, but all of them are fake, and all of them are organized by a malicious being that desires to add you to its collection.
Your lifestream story is terrifying. The ambition for people to pretend to have followers, pretend to be popular, and to live a lie is saddening and worrying. It's a scam that goes beyond the financial gains. It's a personality scam; it's a trust scam; it's a spiritual scam.
May we find our way to reconnect as humans.
This is an interesting comparison of The Dead Internet Theory to Avatar The Last Airbender, I loved that show growing up (and still do). I particularly liked the line "In experience, it’s not so much a hypothesis as a state which all online communities exist in to varying degrees at all times."
I've had similar opinions on algorithms, that they aren't just some passive experience, and believe this should be considered by more people. I've had the opinion that social media platforms should be help accountable to some degree for the content they promote and suggest through their suggestion algorithms.
Coincidentally, I also wrote about The Dead Internet Theory in January, if you have the time I'd like to hear what you think of it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cyberphilosophy/p/the-impending-solipsism-of-the-internet?r=1r9ccy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true