Most recently, as in the last few weeks videos from all sorts of creators (even today) are cropping up talking about the dead internet theory.
Most of them are defeatist and doomer filled.
Its not the slop that is ruining the internet, the slop can be easily avoided, but when respected creators talk doom and gloom that i actually follow?
Thats the ones i cant apparently escape from.
I do not give a shit why you think “the internet is doomed” or how the dead internet theory is destroying the internet, all yall are doing is contribute to the problem with not as many as they should talking about how to do anything about it, yall rather get those sweet sweet doomer clicks.
I just want them to do the shit they are creators in the first place and leave it at that.
Unfortunately, Doomerism is a vicious circle, just keeps feeding itself over and over again - Doomers wanna Doom, creators provide said Doom, Doomers wanna Doom even harder because feeding on horror becomes escapist precisely through the desensitisation, so on and so forth.
I agree with you. I mean, it’s empirically false, we’re still alive and kicking. Sure, as you said there are some AIs in play, but to be brutally honest… the people who would fall for AI lack a vital amount of critical thinking. I’m not saying it’s not getting better at mimicking human expression, but it can’t yet formulate its own cogent ideologies, so it’s still just shitposters with, this time, more expensive puppet accounts.
Pseudo-philosophical diatribe starts here, feel free to skip (seriously…):
Unfortunate symptom of the times, I’d call it. An almost perfect convergence of panicked, frantic denial and a system geared toward providing every escapist solution under the sun for a fee.
Was just watching an interview with Slavoj Žižek (link here if interested) where he said, and I paraphrase: “we must be pessimistic in thought and optimistic in action.” I think this whole dead internet thing and the Doomerism which fuels it is exactly the kind of thing his idea covers. We can assume that the internet is filled with AI, yet still behave as though we were interacting with a human being just in case they really are one! At the very least, hallucinations are inevitable on their end given a long enough discussion, so it can act as a filter. And thusly, the entire postulate is rendered irrelevant!:))
But, yeah, again, it’s a confluence of factors, one of which being the fact that critical thinking seems to be an endangered skill…
Edit: rewatched, he was quoting Horkheimer: “pessimism in theory, optimism in practice”
While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the entire internet is doomed and that every user is an AI, there is some truth to it. Even before the surge of AI content around 2020 with ChatGPT and the likes, the internet was already full of bots and troll farms were already a menace. This video is from 7 years ago, and the problem has only grown since then.
