In June we officially crossed the threshold from a predominantly human internet to a 'dead internet', a popular theory that purports the internet is mostly bots, and fewer humans. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, published the receipts showing agentic traffic crossing the 50% threshold.
Crazy! We should all go outside and touch grass now, right?
Trust is at all time low. AI can crank out content at the click of a button thanks to its free (or cheap) models ranging from AI influencers, digital dashboards, botted comments, etc., and companies are eating it up. Our economic reality demands an endless supply of moremoremore. Companies get a dopamine rush from seeing the squiggly capitalism line go up whether it's from clicks, follower count, or revenue.
The internet feels uneasy nowadays. Is the clip of lions running loose in Detroit real?What about political deepfakes showing Venezuelan citizens celebrating in the streets after the removal of President Maduro? Or even the absurdly cute animal clips like bunnies bouncing on trampolines? Are these too perfect to be true?
Chat, is any of this real?
The internet no longer feels intimate.
Attention is the new currency and commodity, and companies are paying a premium to control it. Attention used to be meaningful and precious; it's how you build intimacy with other human beings. Now connection is absconded in favour of a fast-moving algorithms that control your attention and hope you open your wallet for another hit of dopamine. Social media algorithms are evolving is a result of the new bank of attention. I theorise the next step of social media evolution will become dialogic. Algorithms will become conversations you input into the search bar similar to what Gemini and LLMs already do. YouTube has already implemented Your Custom Feed, which does exactly this, and Instagram, TikTok, and Meta are well on their way with implementing dialogic search.
The goal is for users to have a conversation with the AI like 'show me a positive news feed' – but people aren't searching that way. At least not yet. People are still using the internet like it's 2008, typing prompts of 15 words or less like 'best cat tree', 'cat tree near me', 'cat tree with a ramp'. They are not typing 'I have a 13-year-old fat cat. Compare the top 5 cat trees in Antwerp under $200 with the highest ratings that includes a ramp.'
Google (and AI companies like Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, etc.) want the dialogic conversation, and the user behaviour to change in order to accommodate their new models. You just want to type 'best cat tree' and get on with your life.
Which means the dialogic algorithm was never meant for you, despite what platforms like TikTok call their 'For You' pages. We still think the internet is human-to-AI search, but the real endpoint is AI-to-AI.
If the content is AI-written, the agent doing the retrieving is AI, and the algorithm is optimising for AI-legible signals, then, my friend, the dead internet is already here. It's not a theory anymore. The internet used to be a place of connection and storytelling; now content is made by bots, fetched by bots, for a human who has no longer has a place in the landscape.
We didn't kill the internet. AI kicked us out.