Dead Internet Theory: A McLuhanian Update

If a decade and a half ago you were old enough (or had permissive parents) and had unrestricted access to the internet, you might recall with a hint of nostalgia the adventure of diving into the web, an agora of pure information exchange. With just a simple tug on a thread like a search on Google or another more sophisticated engine, you could unravel layers and layers of forums, connect with other internet users, hyper-specify subcultures, and embark on expeditions on video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo, which at that time still functioned as windows to the world. The feeling of gazing into infinite possibilities was as dizzying as the transformation that digital technology underwent, driven by a shift from analog to wireless connections, transcending limits that were once unimaginable and are now taken for granted.

From those forums, now underground yet vibrant and alive, visions and perspectives still bubble up to the surface. The crazy, the marginalized, the visionaries—they're still there. The Dead Internet Theory emerges from these realms. User iluminatipirate developed the hypothesis that the web is increasingly dominated by automated entities and that all new content is generated by bots, leading to a human withdrawal from virtuality, leaving the internet as a purely robotic environment.

As the years have passed and the dynamics in these realms have progressed, this “conspiratorial” theory has only gained strength and substance. Just last year, 53% of traffic was generated by bots, automations, and machines. Such a figure implies that these have interacted with each other, as well as with humans. The focus of the forum post was more oriented towards the reality encountered by an average user, emphasizing content as the central unit of a macro phenomenon. The total mechanization of the web, evidenced in any bit of information, with social media as the nodal point of machine interaction, where humans tend to be spectators and secondary actors.

Just last year, 53% of traffic was generated by bots, automations, and machines. Such a figure implies that these have interacted with each other, as well as with humans.

The current landscape is similar to what can be interpreted from McLuhan's original theory, although the focus on certain aspects and their diagnoses requires an update. The internet and virtuality, understood as an environment, have only grown, expanded, and embedded themselves in every nook and cranny of real life, to the point that the adjective real for what happens in materiality and everyday life outside of screens seems somewhat outdated, or like a manifestation of resistance or escapism. The virtuality is terrifyingly real. Its development, though immaterial, still impacts everything concerning the world outside it, assuming that something like the real exists and is delineable. They are two sides of the same coin, only distinguishable in analysis, inseparable and dialectical with each other. The internet, then, is the dimension where virtuality unfolds, understood as a facet constituted of the real world and not as an underground field, dissociated or hierarchically subsidiary.

Dead Internet Theory and McLuhan

The Dead Internet Theory, understood not as a paranoid sketch of an angry internet user, but as a conceptualization that managed to capture the Zeitgeist of a discontent or the spirit of a phenomenon, is more of a manifestation or diagnosis of a larger conflict than the problem itself: it correctly diagnoses a symptom but is mistaken about the disease. Botification is more a consequence than a cause of death.

To understand its central nature, we can turn back to Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadian philosopher scorned in his time and vindicated over the decades, among other things for the relevance of his theories or, as he called them, probes. He emphasized, among other things, the centrality of the medium over content and identified media as “extensions of the human being,” understood as anything from television to clothing. Their existence, he says, has always shaped societies more than the information they convey. Hence his well-known maxim, “the medium is the message.” This lies in the acceleration and alteration that they, as extensions of the senses, insert into the dynamics of the society that created them and which are never mere transmitters of information.

A central example he uses to ground his view is that of electric light: a pure medium, which does not inherently transmit information but is a necessary condition for any other medium/content to occur. For instance, a football match needs lighting to take place if held at night, so he considers it as “content” of electric light, yet it remains invisible. Thus, all content of a medium is another medium.

The era of electricity that begins with the invention of the telegraph, which McLuhan identifies, is the third media revolution in his series, preceded by the invention of the alphabet and the advent of movable type. In the “electronic communication era,” the transformation was total and instantaneous. When a medium settles as the extension of an organ or a sense and establishes itself in an environment, it penetrates and modifies our “sensory balance” and becomes invisible. At the same time, the body “anesthetizes” that part, numbing it to protect and isolate it from change, something akin to a state of shock. Taking an interpretive leap, several parallels can be traced with the internet, in the instance of wireless metamorphosis with smartphones, moving away from the ubiquity of the desktop computer. An era of numbed cognition.

The world wide web, in itself, is not so much a fourth transformation in the McLuhanian series, but rather the nitro stage of the electric era, assuming an absolutely unprecedented and incomparable speed.

To talk about electricity, the author notes the following: “the electric speed mixes prehistoric cultures with the dregs of industrial commercialization, the alphabet with the literate and post-literate medium. Mental collapses of varying degrees of intensity are a very frequent result of uprooting and flooding with new information and a myriad of new information patterns.” Let’s replace “electric speed” with “internet.” In this vein, the world wide web, in itself, is not so much a fourth transformation in the McLuhanian series, but rather the nitro stage of the electric era, assuming an absolutely unprecedented and incomparable speed. An extreme phase of the very evolutionary process of the internet, data-driven, automated, algorithmized, and transversal, in which it assumed its electric condition in an exorbitant manner. A media evolution in which it multiplies in size exponentially, while becoming increasingly invisible.

So, is the internet dead?

The internet has transitioned from being a place in itself to being everywhere: on your phone, in your television, in your refrigerator, in your air conditioner, in your robot vacuum, in the form of wireless waves that are currently passing through your body. The short circuit with the notion of its death is evident. How can it be dead if it is everywhere?

The content-focused approach of the original theory is put to the test or, rather, when viewed through this prism, it highlights its emphasis on content as a dilemma and central diagnostic territory rather than as a stage where a larger problem unfolds. The transversality and continuous connection lead to a flattening, so to speak, of that content, which responds to a constant nature of attention structured in short and immediate bursts. It did not die as infrastructure or as a medium; it died a certain way of inhabiting it: navigating, searching, discovering, and producing content from a predominantly human agency. Humans cease to be the sovereign subjects and progressively become inputs of the system.

It did not die as infrastructure or as a medium; it died a certain way of inhabiting it: navigating, searching, discovering, and producing content from a predominantly human agency.

To understand the interrelation between contents and how this forges a new instance or way of navigation, we can complementarily draw from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), another renegade thinker, and his diagnosis of hyperreality, corresponding to his 1978 book “Simulacra and Simulation.” We are traversing an era of simulacra, where truth loses its strength against copies and symbols completely replace it, with signs referring to other signs, drifting further away from the real thing. Currently, we are in an era of hyperinternet, where content refers to other content specifically by its structure and not by what it says, referenced in an algorithm that rewards what is seen and retained, what makes you stay still and electrified, regardless of what you see or what it is about.

Each reel responds in its organizational structure and generalized narrative to serve what “works.” A good hook to capture attention, editing with continuous and rapid cuts to keep the viewer engaged and not lose them, subtitles so they can hear what is said without needing to pay attention. More views, more watch time, more interactions, more likelihood of being shown. The result is that these forms are replicated ad infinitum, laying the groundwork for the creation of new identical contents, funded by money injected by the thousands of marketing agencies worldwide that base their operations on the recommendations of a generative artificial intelligence.

All indistinguishable from one another, but generated by humans, imitating the forms suggested by bots, which other coordinating bots of that algorithm select to show to more humans, who will create their own reels in the same way to promote their venture or streaming program. All respond to the same logic and the same loops of positive feedback, leading humans to behave like the supposed robots that are ¿destroying? the internet. This dynamic is fully deployed in massive social networks that base their interface on scrolling, which implies a machine-like movement of the thumb in parallel to total bodily paralysis, at any place and moment within two taps on your phone.

All respond to the same logic and the same loops of positive feedback, leading humans to behave like the supposed robots that are ¿destroying? the internet.

This vicious cycle takes on a different dimension when we consider the advancement of new technological forms like LLMs, which present themselves as extensions of cognition and language. In this framework, the importance of who (or what) created what you see is minimal, as the units of content, so to speak, have been shaped to fit an environment that favors and encourages their transmission and circulation if they assume certain characteristics, which are molded and organized by the encompassing medium. Assigning it a process of death, then, due to a trend towards automation is far from the quid of the process itself. Botification is far from being an internet-exclusive process, with companies racing to automate processes or local businesses generating essentially similar designs with ChatGPT, and human behavior responding more to a total electrification of the medium and its current form of existence.

The problem lies not in what content machines produce, but in which parts of our own capacity to think and create we begin to delegate to them. This transformation, speaking in McLuhanesque terms, corresponds more to the evolution of the medium than to the content itself. This expansion, its dimension, capacity, size, and transversality, paves the way for social and dynamic changes within it. These are not innocent changes, allowing for self-governing models, massive data extraction, and a new business landscape of power, Google, Meta, techno-feudalism, et al.

Stop being a bot

Navigating has become impossible, at least in the terms of what it was several years ago. What used to be a dive and stroke after stroke to move from one site to another is now more akin to the overweight people in Wall-E, where consumption is a violent torrent in one direction (toward our faces), for which no movement is needed to consume tons of immediately digestible information. The era of electric internet, the hyper-internet of hyper-navigation, where the human, the human being, is expendable (except for their data). Even the simple act of googling a recipe turns into an odyssey: a response from Gemini, sponsored site, sponsored site, reel, reel, TikTok, an AI-generated article from a media outlet, and, honorably holding the fort, Paulina Cocina's blog with a post from 12 years ago.

The vertigo of this phase has nullified any gradual assimilation of the transformation of the environment, more invisible than ever. The “pain” it entails could not be weighed in a stepwise manner. Back in the 1960s, McLuhan described his historical time as “the age of anxiety” and, in turn, as “the age of apathy and alienation.” Again, let’s replace electricity with the internet. This lack of warning leads us to the danger of looking back to account for the current phenomenon, which the author calls the tendency toward “rearview mirror vision.” We notice the change in the environment only when we see the previous one, now old and outdated, and we turn to it to seek answers and comfort from our new environment that we cannot fully understand. Taking a fatalistic stance, veiling the old network with a nostalgic spirit, prevents us from looking at the present, at least to be aware of the near future.

We have witnessed a dizzying metamorphosis. The McLuhan prism for discussing the death of the internet can lead us to other questions. What does it mean today to be connected? How can we do it when the existence suggested there, driven by unbeatable algorithms, is a constant swimming with the current? The variations in the environment, says the Canadian, generate agitation and loss of identity, so if “we understand the changes that new media provoke, we can anticipate and control them.” If we do not break the trance, if we continue to be electrified watching TikTok after TikTok, if we cling to content as the axis of the problem, “we will be their slaves.”

How can we confront this reality, considering that wishing for decentralization or the withdrawal of the internet and social networks from daily life is almost as absurd as wishing for the disappearance of electricity? If you’re not going to live in the mountains with four candles, a rifle, and a garden, digitality is inevitable, and its constant growth and multiplication is inexorable. And, clearly, the fact that the figure of the human is becoming less and less central there indicates nothing but its more latent vitality as a medium and as a phenomenon.

How can we confront this reality, considering that wishing for decentralization or the withdrawal of the internet and social networks from daily life is almost as absurd as wishing for the disappearance of electricity?

Swimming against the current, no matter how costly and exhausting the strokes may be, is essential. Inhabiting virtual reality outside of the immediate surfaces proposed, avoiding the reification of informational consumption, and digging back into its ancient forms that, although they may seem less powerful and relevant, are still alive. Practicing intertextuality, but challenging the algorithmic torrent that takes you from one thing to another: diving deeper into that artist you liked, reading something else from that blog that interested you, exploring outside of Instagram that topic that caught your attention, watching movies that are outside of the suggested logical continuity, not overly rejecting current dynamics, and trying day by day to make the most of them without relinquishing control. Grasping at the threads that appear and pulling them in the opposite direction, taking the reins of what you see, or at least trying with all your might to ensure that your own interest or concern is the main exploratory axis. After all, they already have your data.