The theory goes like this: sometime around 2016–2017, the internet died. Not literally — the cables are still there. But the soul of it? Replaced. By bots. By algorithms. By synthetic content engineered to capture engagement rather than reflect humanity.
What we call “the internet” today is largely an artificial environment. The feeds are loud. But nobody's really home.
Algorithms don't reward truth — they reward engagement. And engagement is most reliably produced by content that provokes: outrage, anxiety, tribalism. Bot networks exploit this, flooding platforms with engineered content that drowns the slower, more human signal.
Astroturfing campaigns — coordinated inauthentic accounts operating at scale — manufacture the appearance of organic consensus. When enough accounts repeat the same position, the algorithm reads it as popularity. Popularity attracts attention. Attention becomes belief. The loop closes. The conversation was never real.
Generative AI in 2022 accelerated this by orders of magnitude. Content that once required farms of humans now requires one prompt. The synthetic web scales infinitely. The authentic web does not.