SUNDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER 2025

Using the internet has always involved balancing the benefits of our access to its wealth of information with the problems of the surfeit of this information and the difficulty of evaluating its quality and honesty. For me, as for most regular users I imagine, this balance has always tilted towards the positive until now, but the scales are starting to tip downwards, especially with regard to social media.

Recently, Dead Internet Theory has spread beyond a tiny online minority to reach the fringes of the mass media. Some experts estimate that at least 50% of the content on the net is now automatically generated by non-human agents. In everyday use, this means that a reply to your Facebook post from someone you don’t personally know or to a comment you make on a YouTube video is as likely to come from a bot pretending to be human than a fellow human being. Put simply, almost everything on the internet now has a huge credibility problem. AI, and particularly generative AI, has exacerbated this trend, since it enables anyone to create reams of material at the click of a key which can then be uploaded onto the net. The result is fake novels, fake paintings, fake articles and fake news, in an exponentially fake universe where bots communicate with other bots and real human beings only occasionally intrude.

The strongest concerns of the theory focus on social media. I may not be the best person to comment on this since the only social media I’ve ever used, except for my Norwich City football forum, is Facebook (unless we count YouTube as a form of social media), and I’m seriously considering leaving Facebook. Why? Because I can see how it is cheapening my personal relationships. I originally joined Facebook because it would allow me to stay in contact with many of the friends I’d made from living in various countries teaching English. It seemed an unalloyed benefit. But when I look at how I interact with them nowadays, all I ever do is click on ‘Like’ when I agree with something an old friend has posted or use that angry emoji if they comment on the latest anti-democratic power grab by the UK or US governments. There’s no real contact at all and I may as well have no way of connecting to these people from the past for all the genuine communication that takes place. I know I’m ultimately to blame in the sense that it’s my responsibility not to behave in such a shallow manner, but, as so often with modern technology, the whole set-up of Facebook, with its ‘friends’ and ‘likes’ and ‘stories’, is geared towards narcissistic display and emotional superficiality. In a sense, it’s a work of genius, but the genius isn’t Einstein, it’s Machiavelli.

What has recently earned the label of ‘enshittification’ is sending YouTube on a similar downward spiral as Facebook. There’s still a load of fascinating and useful stuff on there if you can find it, a task which is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack (the search feature is laughingly incompetent, perhaps deliberately?). A forest of ‘shorts’ has appeared among the recommended videos, all lasting for less than a minute, reducing our attention span still further, but representing more clicks and advertising revenue for YouTube. At the same time vlogs have become increasingly visual and fragmentary and multi-sensorial rather than just a talking head, which in the hands of artistic hosts can make for highly creative pieces of online theatre, but in the hands of the lumpen majority, means a barrage of images and sounds which are distracting and deleterious to serious thinking since they take our attention away from the ideas of the speaker. YouTube is turning into a circus, full of bells and whistles, but not a place for meaningful thought and discussion.     

No attempt is made to gatekeep other than to cut out ‘naughty’ words and aspects of life which we’re asked to pretend don’t exist as long as we don’t use the vocabulary to name them (e.g. porn). This lack of moderation means the content is often highly questionable and geared towards polarised positions: for every interesting debate between two people with different views, there are thousands of hatchet jobs of opponents on the other side of the fence (grandiosely labelled ‘debunkings’) by a menagerie of cartoonish ultra-rightists spitting feathers and ridiculously right-on liberals with nose rings and more tattoos than an ancient Maori, both of whom trash rival posters by means of straw man putdowns. Meanwhile, YouTube’s algorithms decide what will be offered us as recommendations for further viewing to keep us trapped in our echo chamber. If you doubt this, try the following experiment: click on a couple of videos that attack J.K.Rowling and soon your feed will be flooded with trans rights stuff; then enter under a different account and click on a couple of videos which see Rowling as a heroine fighting woke, and the feed will transform into J.K. hagiography. Under the pretence of guiding us towards other material that we might enjoy, we are being played for fools, not in order to help us, but to serve the advertisers.

There was a lot that was undesirable about the traditional gatekeepers in our society: the universities, publishing companies, government departments, much-derided ‘experts’ and so on, who had the power to exclude from the magic circle anyone who held contrary opinions and had unconventional ideas, or lacked the right credentials, or went to the wrong school. But the internet’s lack of any effective gatekeeping has led to a disintegration of trust where people either don’t believe anyone at all or choose to believe only those who say what they want to hear. Modern techniques like photoshopping and computer-generated video is used to bolster time-honoured methods of deception such as insinuation and downright lies, while the endless proliferation of AI junk is turning the internet into a hall of mirrors at a fair, where we have no idea what is true and what isn’t. This is a perfect breeding ground for those who want to do mischief, or make personal financial gain, or have ambitions to gain power for nefarious political purposes.

Speaking of power, in the early days of the internet we were told it would be a revolutionary force for change because it would lead to a fairer distribution of cultural capital and access to the public sphere. But the opposite has occurred and the internet is now dominated by a handful of mega-corporations who continue to consolidate their position and would almost certainly be subject to more monopoly regulation if they were standard bricks-and-mortar units. We’re partly to blame for this: we naively believed the lies internet entrepreneurs told us and have willingly placed ourselves in the hands of fakes and toadies who are no different from the CEOs of the most meretricious multi-nationals. The world is in their grip and they’re not going to willingly let go, and if this means a bit of neo-fascist suppression of the plebs, what do they care? They are important cogs in a system that will keep the masses in their place and rich enough to buy the politicians off (although perhaps they should consider the fate of certain oligarchs in Russia – long spoons and those who sup with the Devil and all that).

Governments are starting to dip their mucky fingers into the pie in order to stake their own claims to dominion. Whatever their official designation – democratic, right-wing, left-wing, socialist, communist, fascist – they all see their citizens as the enemy which needs to be monitored and controlled, and modern electronic technology offers the perfect route to this. Never before in history has total control of the people seemed so possible. You’re probably thinking that this sounds paranoid, but then consider the UK’s Online Safety Act requiring us to hand over ID to dodgy private companies if we want to access certain sites (and similar initiatives will almost certainly appear in a host of other countries soon). And imagine trying to go off-grid these days. It simply couldn’t happen because of the technology we need to function at even the simplest level in this brave new world. What would you do for money once society goes cashless? How would you get into any government building, even a museum or a library, without swiping the QR code on your smartphone? How would you even take a bus or a train? Only those at the very top of the tree could hope to escape these technological shackles. Feudalism is back, but this time not under a monarch with the divine right of a king but under dictators and despots whose ball and chain for the masses will be electronic.

And often also psychological. I’ve written in other blogs of how I feel that modern technology, and especially the virtual world online, is unhinging our sense of reality and we are hurtling towards a schizoid existence in which the ground is being swept from under our feet. Once everything can be true, nothing is true: the concept of truth becomes at best a nostalgic memory, at worst little more than a sick joke. Once there are no moral standards to act as a guide for humanity, or intellectual and philosophical certainties to anchor our reality, all that remains is naked power. Meanwhile, there is an epidemic of mental illness in developed countries, especially among the young, and we wonder why this is happening in an atomised society where community has collapsed and in which friends sit opposite each other in restaurants and don’t even bother to speak because they’re too busy scrolling on their smartphones.

Genuine creativity is becoming another casualty of an internet gasping for air and an ever-expanding generative AI filling its vast space with junk. It may seem at first that only writers, musicians, painters and creative artists of all kinds who are due to be made redundant by the billions of ‘works of art’ that are flooding the virtual world will lose out from this proliferation of trash. But giving AI instructions and waiting for it to churn out a detective novel or a scene from a 40s film noir or a painting in the style of Degas is not creativity. It’s a divertissement. Meanwhile, the readers and viewers of this ‘art’ are fixed ever more firmly in their role as passive consumers of images that flicker past for an instant but have no real meaning, the virtual equivalent of the grey goo that might result from tiny, self-replicating machines in molecular nanotechnology according to the fears of some scientists in the field. Art, and our belief in Art, is the loser in all this: it has become grey goo. And even if, like me, you care about Art, your confidence in its world is shaken. For example, if I see a painting online by an artist I know fairly well, but I’m not familiar with this particular work, my first thought now is to doubt it and question if it’s been manufactured by AI.

I chose the word ‘manufactured’ quite deliberately to highlight the difference between merely putting bits from other works together in a machinic process and what happens when a human being forges something truly unique. Yes, mixing disparate elements is an important part of artistic creativity, but it is only a relatively small part of genuine originality, which needs the brains and hearts and hands and imaginations of human beings and grows out of the wider culture in which these artists grow up and spend their lives. Perhaps the future will prove me wrong, but I doubt that AI will ever be able to create something as groundbreaking as Les Demoiselles D’Avignon or Trout Mask Replica or The Trial because these works use past artworks as influences but the creative process behind them is far more than one of mere accumulation and juxtaposition. AI will slowly decompose Art until only the shallow commercialism of ‘the creative industries’ remains as a kind of simulacrum of what once existed.

The sciences are faring a little better at the moment, partly because scientists seem happier to ignore the noise and quietly get on with their work, but eventually they’ll be told what to think or else, just as they were in fascist and communist countries in the past. In theory, the internet eulogises science: everyone on YouTube is quick to claim that their arguments are ‘based on science’, but this recognition of its value is often paper-thin, more of an advertising ploy than stemming from a genuine high regard. It is telling that Wikipedia, an attempt to build a trusted source which could balance the desire for open and collective input with the need for responsible gatekeeping, was among the sites first subject to the Online Safety Act: the last thing that corporations and governments want is an intelligent and questioning populace with access to information that aims to be as unbiased as possible. So in order to ‘protect the children’, the UK government is preventing people under 18 having access to an encyclopedia – that’ll learn ’em.

One idea often advanced by supporters of Dead Internet Theory is that its users (us) are now the product and not the customer. As we click and scroll and type, every keystroke is monitored and collected, usually without our consent or even our knowledge, in order to sell our data to corporations who then use it to try to flog us stuff. I understand that websites need capital to function, and that the only reason that the internet is ‘free’ is that advertising funds it, but this means that it is becoming little more than a vast billboard, a kind of virtual shopping mall where all relationships become purely transactional. Let’s not pretend that the internet is any longer about people, it’s about big business; and nothing can equal big business in its ability to turn what is real and true and valuable in life, and even sometimes beautiful, into a gigantic steaming turd. And let’s not pretend that the mega-businesses which dominate the internet are any different from Monsanto and Nestlé and the tobacco giants. The only difference is that the latter group target developing countries in order to evade the stricter laws of more developed nations, whereas Amazon and Google have their eyes on the entire globe. Sadly, the Dead Internet Theory seems more and more a prescient statement of reality: we have indeed become the product.

Little corners of genuine contact, places where people gather not to make money but to share a common interest, will remain, at least for now. A good example of this is the many posters on YouTube and on self-made websites who are filling the gap left behind by the traditional press abandoning football in England outside of the Premier League, and there are now a large number of these sites featuring clubs further down the pyramid all the way to non-league. How long these amateur sites will be allowed to continue, at least under a bigger umbrella such as YouTube, is doubtful, however; for instance, one of the most popular sites for the Championship (the second tier in English football) was recently demonetised by the YouTube hierarchy without any clear reason why (thankfully, this decision was rescinded after an appeal). But this makes clear how smaller, homespun ventures are totally at the mercy of the giants, especially as search engines necessary to spread the word of these websites morph into yet more advertising space.

As I’ve written this blog, I’ve become increasingly convinced that I should spend less time online and replace that time with books once more. And probably give up my Facebook account. The internet is now dominated by a few enormous businesses, and the only thing big business ever responds to is a drop in consumer purchasing. Of course, my doing this will be the tiniest drop in the ocean, one molecule in the Pacific, but, if the theorists of Dead Internet Theory are correct and the internet becomes less and less accessible and useful and desirable to ordinary people as it fills up with more and more junk and becomes even more of an advertising board and loses its feeling of authenticity, eventually there will be a mass reaction and people will begin to drift away, a trickle at first that develops into a flood. I’d like to think that the novelty will also finally wear off and people will start to recognise what they have lost and go back to real human contact and the benefits of a local community, or at least find a better balance between the online and offline worlds. Maybe the scientists, who were the first to use the internet, will be the last to switch off the lights.

Ultimately, we can’t just gripe about technology and its iron cage: it’s up to us to change it. The internet belongs to us all and not to Amazon or Facebook or Meta, and, although collective action will always be hard to co-ordinate, much harder than it is for these companies to find new ways to enslave us, let’s hope human beings realise that they are much more than cows to be milked and reject en masse their role as units to be farmed and then discarded, and that the nightmare future of a dystopian, technologised autocracy never arrives.