The Dead Internet Theory
In: Technology
At any moment, lots of material is being posted to the Internet: text, images, videos, messages. Plus a lot of “behind the scenes” stuff that you may never see directly, but maybe it’s code that generates content, or it’s metadata for search engines.
At the same moment, lots of material is being viewed on the Internet. A zillion requests to a zillion servers to show me this, log me in to that, and so on.
It used to be that humans were the ones doing this. He posts, she reads, they talk. But now, most content is generated by bots, and most views come from bots.
Search for a banana bread recipe, and the results simply aren’t for you. A program generated the text, a program ranked it for search, a program injected ads, a program tracked how long visitors stayed… and none of these programs knows what banana bread is.
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