You might have heard of the Dead Internet Theory. It began on obscure message boards as a conspiracy: the idea that somewhere around 2016, the “real” web died. In its place, an artificial ecosystem developed where most posts, videos, comments, and even online personas were no longer human at all but the creations of AI bots, ghost-writing content for an audience comprised of humans and bots.
At first, critics waved it away. Surely, the web was still powered by people? But as generative AI and bot networks exploded across social platforms, the theory’s central premise, that most online activity is no longer genuinely human became uncomfortably prescient. Today, in 2025, bots account for over 51% of all internet traffic. On social media giants like Facebook and TikTok, not only do bots now comprise about 35% of users, they are responsible for hundreds of millions of posts each month. Even the most skeptical analysts admit: the “Dead Internet” is alive—and overwhelmingly automated.
The real story, though, isn’t a simple “humans vs. bots” divide. What’s actually happened is more nuanced, illustrating a technological symbiosis. Over 70% of professional human creators now use AI somewhere in their workflow, whether outlining, editing, ideating, drafting, or scheduling. On popular social apps, most regular users lean on smart suggestions: auto-captions, image generators, hashtag analyzers, all powered by AI under the hood. The “purely human” post is vanishing, replaced by a broad spectrum where AI is creative partner, spellchecker, and sometimes invisible ghostwriter.
Marketers and creators using AI tools report producing up to three times more content with higher engagement. AI augments creativity, opening the floodgates on ideas, multimedia, and tailored messaging. The result: an internet more dynamic and personalized, yet also one where authenticity is increasingly elusive.
Meanwhile, bots themselves post with prodigious speed and diversity. On major networks, as much as 10–18% of all posts come from bots, particularly on high-velocity platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. These AI agents aren’t only spammers or impersonators. Many power digital influencers, maintain community pages, or operate as automated customer service agents that are increasingly indistinguishable from real people.
Platforms as Content Machines
Social platforms have little incentive to stop the tide. Their algorithms reward engagement, not authenticity, resulting in economic incentives for both bots and humans to churn out as much content as possible. Viral phenomena like AI-generated “surf Jesus” art, silly, synthetic, and massively shared, underscore just how willingly audiences engage with (and amplify) digital creations, regardless of origin.
This arms race has had a cascading effect:
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Bots now generate 25–40% of ALL content across social media and the broader web in 2025.
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Human-created content outpaces bots for now, but the gap closes every year—and the lines grow blurrier, as much of “human” content is AI-boosted or even ghostwritten by bots at a person’s prompt.
The Digital Pyramids
What will survive of us? The parallel to ancient Egypt’s pyramids is unavoidable. Those monuments were built not to memorialize daily life, but to outlast it—engineered to stand through centuries, indifferent to their builders.
Today, the internet is our civilization’s digital pyramid: massive, inscrutable, and increasingly self-sustaining. As bots and AI agents generate and manage the majority of content, maintain the archives, and run self-improving algorithms, the web persists and mutates without requiring humans at the center.
Just as the pyramids endure after pharaohs’ names fade into legend, the internet’s structure—continually rebuilt by algorithms and automated “digital masons” guarantees its ongoing existence. In effect, we have engineered a “death proof” artifact: a digital monument that, ironically, survives by not needing us at all.
Or if that analogy fails to resonate, we can consider the US Highway System following World War II. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who drew inspiration from his experiences with Germany's autobahn during the war, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized the construction of over 41,000 miles of high-speed roadways. This massive public works project, often hailed as the greatest in history, was designed not only to facilitate efficient civilian travel but also to bolster national defense by enabling rapid military mobilization and evacuation in case of emergencies, with features like mile-long straight stretches for potential aircraft landings. Economically, it spurred unprecedented growth by revolutionizing commerce through faster trucking and goods transportation, supporting population expansion, suburbanization, and the rise of the automobile industry, while creating millions of jobs during its multi-decade construction.
Beyond its practical benefits, the Interstate System profoundly reshaped American society, fostering a car-centric culture and enabling the mass migration to suburbs, which accelerated urban sprawl and contributed to the decline of public rail systems. The system symbolized postwar optimism and federal investment in progress, fundamentally altering the nation's landscape and daily life while highlighting the trade-offs of large-scale infrastructure development.
In the post-World War II era, American society grappled with a profound tension between the allure of conformity and the emergence of defiant subcultures, embodying the clash between stability and rebellion. On one hand, suburbanization epitomized the era's push toward uniformity and consumerism, as millions migrated to planned communities complete with identical homes, shopping malls, and amenities that fostered a homogenized middle-class lifestyle centered on family, security, and material abundance. These developments, fueled by economic prosperity and government policies, promoted a cookie-cutter existence where shopping centers became temples of consumption, reinforcing societal norms of domesticity and predictability. The 1998 film The Truman Show brilliantly illustrates this commodified existence, in addition to its allusion to manufactured consent and continuous surveillance. In stark contrast, subcultures such as biker gangs, often formed by disillusioned military veterans struggling to reintegrate after the war's traumas, embraced a nomadic, anti-establishment ethos, roaring across newly built highways on motorcycles, seeking camaraderie and freedom in the open road rather than suburban confines. Effectively pirates on the highway. Hitchhikers and transient travelers, similarly alienated from mainstream culture, drifted between roadside motels, symbols of impermanence and anonymity, rejecting the sedentary conformity of malls and subdivisions for a life of unpredictability, risk, and raw individualism that challenged the era's idealized American Dream.
It’s worth noting that the term "information superhighway" emerged in the late 1900s to describe the Internet and its potential to transform communication and data exchange, drawing a direct analogy to the US Interstate Highway System. While its exact origin is debated, the term gained prominence in the early 1990s, largely attributed to then-Senator Al Gore, who used it in a 1991 speech to advocate for a national high-speed telecommunications network, likening it to the transformative infrastructure of highways. Gore’s vision, inspired by his father’s role in promoting the Interstate System, framed the Internet as a digital equivalent, connecting people and information at unprecedented speeds. However, earlier uses exist, with some crediting futurist Nam June Paik in the 1970s for coining it to describe global satellite and cable networks. By the mid-1990s, the term became a popular metaphor in media and policy circles, capturing the Internet’s promise of rapid, widespread connectivity, much like highways revolutionized physical travel. The phrase has since waned but remains a vivid link between physical and digital infrastructure.
Amid the rampant speculation surrounding AI's societal impacts—from job displacement to ethical dilemmas—a deeper perspective reveals how it integrates with existing distribution systems and economies, much like the Internet and blockchain have done before it. AI embodies a synthetic "brain," poised to evolve toward some form of emergent consciousness, challenging humanity's role not as enslaved users but as architects, stewards, and perhaps the very essence of its awareness. Yet, this trajectory hints at an unfolding "corpus," an "alien life form"as David Bowie described the Internet in his 1999 BBC interview, and capable of self-replication ad infinitum, transcending human oversight and perpetuating itself through decentralized networks that echo the enduring, creator-independent resilience of ancient pyramids or modern highways. AI doesn't merely augment our world; it forges a autonomous entity that could outlast homo sapiens, raising existential questions about technology's independence from its progenitors.
When Music Met the Machine
Delia Derbyshire was a groundbreaking British composer and electronic music pioneer born in 1937 in Coventry, England, whose innovative work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s revolutionized sound design and music production. With a background in mathematics and music from Cambridge University, she joined the Workshop in 1960, where she experimented with tape manipulation, oscillators, and musique concrète techniques to create otherworldly sounds from everyday objects and electronic sources, long before digital synthesizers became commonplace. Her meticulous, hands-on approach, including splicing tape loops by hand and layering frequencies. Derbyshire’s work helped to establish electronic music as a legitimate art form, influencing genres from ambient to techno and earning her posthumous recognition as the "unsung heroine" of the field.
Derbyshire's most iconic contribution was her 1963 realization of the Doctor Who theme, composed by Ron Grainer, which she transformed into a haunting electronic masterpiece using white noise, filtered oscillators, and precise editing, without any synthesizers, an accomplishment that introduced millions to electronic music and became a cultural touchstone. Beyond television, she composed scores for radio dramas, documentaries, and even the world's first fashion show with an electronic soundtrack, while collaborating with artists like Brian Hodgson and influencing modern musicians such as Aphex Twin and The Chemical Brothers. Despite facing gender barriers and lack of credit in her lifetime, Derbyshire's legacy endures, highlighting her role in bridging classical composition with futuristic soundscapes until her death in 2001. The Doctor Who theme remains an enduring icon of electronic music and popular culture due to its innovative composition and timeless, otherworldly allure.
Derbyshire's pioneering electronic compositions faced significant initial critiques, often being dismissed not as legitimate music but as mere sound effects or experimental novelties produced in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Broader electronic music during this era was similarly criticized for lacking the emotional depth and human touch of traditional acoustic instruments, with detractors viewing it as gimmicky noise or avant-garde excess that alienated mainstream audiences, compounded by gender barriers that restricted women like Derbyshire from full recognition and access to tools. In retrospect, however, electronic music has been undeniably validated as a core genre, its acceptance solidified through technological advancements in the 1980s and 1990s that made production accessible and integrated it into popular culture via EDM, synth-pop, and beyond, influencing countless artists and proving its enduring artistic merit and cultural impact.
Derbyshire’s work predated the emergence of the synthesizer, that has evolved from being a viewed as a threat and an abomination to musicians to an indespensible instrument within the music industry. To grasp how digital content is being remade, look to the revolution that swept music with the synthesizer. In the late 20th century, innovators such as Ray Kurzweil democratized music-making, while visionaries like Brian Eno and Detroit techno’s pioneers used machines not only for efficiency, but to unlock entire new genres. Early criticisms were fierce—synths were called “soulless,” a threat to “real” music and musicianship. Yet, instead of replacing creativity, synthesizers became tools for hybrid art, extending what was possible and who could participate.
Ray Kurzweil, a pioneering inventor known for his work in artificial intelligence and assistive technologies, connected with musician Stevie Wonder in the late 1970s when Wonder became the inaugural user of Kurzweil's groundbreaking reading machine for the blind, which converted printed text to speech. This encounter became a collaborative friendship, leading Wonder to challenge Kurzweil in 1982 to develop a music synthesizer capable of authentically replicating the sounds of acoustic instruments, such as a grand piano—an accomplishment inspired by a wager between the two on whether technology could achieve such realism. Drawing on machine learning techniques to modulate dynamics and timbre, Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Music Systems that same year with Wonder serving as musical advisor, providing extensive input on the project's design and features. The result was the Kurzweil 250, unveiled in 1983 and released in 1984, which revolutionized electronic music by offering unprecedented sonic accuracy and became a staple in professional studios, forever linking the duo's innovative synergy in bridging technology and artistry.
Critics of that era feared dehumanization, just as today’s skeptics question whether AI-generated media can be “real.” But electronic music proved: machines could spark more creativity, not less. Genres like industrial, techno, and ambient didn’t kill music, they broadened it, forging new communities, styles, and collaborations between artist and algorithm.
Just as synthesizers raised anxieties about authenticity and obsolescence, today’s AI tools have provoked a new round of debate. Is a post “real” if it’s composed with an AI co-pilot? Does bot-written content reflect our culture or just algorithmic noise? The verdict of history suggests the question misses the point. Machines extended the reach of both music and art, letting more people shape creative landscapes and spawning wholly new forms.
In both music and media, machines that once threatened to “kill” authenticity instead broadened it, sparking genres and communities no one anticipated. Humans didn’t vanish—they evolved, partnering with technology to create the world’s next stories, sounds, and ideas.
The cracks are how the light comes in
The Dead Internet Theory began as a conspiracy, but now reads like a roadmap. The web isn’t dead. It is, instead, evolving into something durable, hybrid, and “death proof”, a monument to both human ingenuity and machine autonomy.
In the coming era, bots and humans will co-author nearly everything we see, read, and click. True digital literacy will mean learning to guide and curate algorithms, to seek out or construct meaning within the noise. For the creators and thinkers of tomorrow, the task is not resisting the tide, but riding it ethically, wisely, and with eyes wide open to both the risks and opportunities.
Because, just as the pyramids endure long after their creators are gone, so too does the internet keep building itself, its immortality secured not by those who made it, but by its architecture and by the relentless work of bots and algorithms that no longer require us at all.
The exodus from Egypt in the Torah is a foundational story of liberation: a people escaping oppression and slavery in search of freedom and a new home, the promised land promised by the divine, where dignity and agency could flourish. In a striking modern parallel, much of humanity has migrated from “real life” into the vast, alluring expanse of the internet, only to find a new kind of servitude: trapped by platforms and systems that harvest data, erode privacy, and turn individuals into raw material for algorithms and profit.
There is now a growing push to escape this digital bondage, an exodus toward new forms of online community. The emerging promised land is composed of privacy-respecting networks, decentralized platforms, and digital ecosystems that empower users to own their data, safeguard their identities, and protect their assets, restoring true autonomy in a hyper-networked world. Both journeys are quests for liberation, one from Pharaoh’s chains, the other from the invisible bonds of automated surveillance and algorithmic control, with the hope of reclaiming agency, dignity, and belonging.
In the end, the zombification of the internet marks not an apocalypse but a metamorphosis from a human-centric web to a resilient, death-proof hybrid where bots, agents, and algorithms perpetuate an eternal digital legacy, much like the pyramids or the transformative beats of synthesized music. Yet, as we navigate this automated expanse, the true exodus beckons: a collective migration toward empowered, decentralized realms that reclaim our autonomy from the pharaohs of surveillance and profit. This is no utopia, the transition brings uncertainties, inequalities, and potential for misuse. But freedom and innovation can emerge in the cracks between the system that is dying and the new paradigm that is not yet fully visible. As Leonard Cohen poignantly noted, "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
Current society may truly be "cracked," but humans are pretty damned resilient. Echoing Balaji Srinivasan's vision, just as Britain gave way to America, now America is yielding to the Internet as the next superpower. David Bowie once described the Internet as "an alien life form," highlighting its otherworldly potential. In a world where physical space has been exhaustively mapped and photographed (think Google Earth dominating every corner) the next frontier isn't Mars, but the vast, uncharted depths of the Internet.
In an era where human ingenuity crafts structures meant to defy time and catastrophe, the Internet and blockchain stand as modern equivalents to ancient wonders like the pyramids and foundational infrastructure like the US Interstate Highway System—monoliths of durability engineered for resilience against existential threats. The Internet, born from the ARPANET project in the 1960s under the US Department of Defense, was explicitly designed with decentralized packet-switching technology to maintain communication even amid nuclear Armageddon, ensuring no single point of failure could cripple the network, much like how the highways were built with military mobilization in mind for rapid, redundant pathways across vast terrains. This "death-proof" architecture mirrors the pyramids' millennia-spanning stone fortitude, outlasting empires and environmental ravages, while echoing the highways' concrete endurance through decades of wear, symbolizing postwar American resilience. Blockchain technology amplifies this invincibility through its distributed ledger system, where data is replicated across countless nodes worldwide, rendering it inherently resistant to centralized attacks, including nuclear disruptions that might sever traditional infrastructure. Proponents argue that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could persist via satellite relays or isolated networks even in apocalyptic scenarios, potentially outlasting generations or humanity itself, as the code and ledgers require no ongoing human oversight once propagated—much like pyramids standing sentinel long after their builders vanished.
Yet, this autonomy raises profound questions: Does such technology transcend its creators, evolving into a self-sustaining force indifferent to human existence? While the Internet and blockchain demand initial human input for maintenance such as power grids, nodes, and updates, they embody a paradigm where information and value persist, potentially archived in dormant servers or decentralized archives far beyond our species' lifespan. Unlike the pyramids, which erode without intervention, or highways that crumble without repairs, these digital frameworks could theoretically reactivate with future intelligences, suggesting technology as an emergent entity displacing humanity’s sense of centrality in the universe's narrative.
R00tK1tR4bb1t is a computer programmer, active chess player, and occasional writer. He lives in a van with his dog Napoleon.