Screaming Into The Ether

The Internet has always been dead and AI has proven it.

Photo by Frankie Cordoba on Unsplash

The Internet is a strange place.

Just the other day I was scrolling through Instagram and I came across a post from an account that I followed. It asked a very simple question and of course I gave my answer. I typed in my thought, look over the spelling and hit send and that was it. I never really thought about it and as you do with social media nowadays, you just move on. It wasn’t that long until I saw a notification come up on my phone that someone commented on the message that I sent. Again, I took no real notice of it but the back of my mind was curious to what the response was. So I clicked on the notification and it took me to the comment that was left under my message. What I found wasn’t a comment, I wouldn’t even call it a response. It basically was a insult. This person just called me a name and that was it. No rebuttal of what I wrote, no follow up after the insult, just comment and dash. Curiously I clicked into the profile to see who this person was that left the random comment. Turns out the person account is locked, has less the 20 followers and their profile picture was an still image of a man with the purge mask(like the one from the movie) A normal person would feel shocked, annoyed and maybe feel that they were intruded on. How could a random person just leave a comment like that on someone’s profile that they never met?

Fortunately, I don’t take the social media as serious as others. I shrugged of the comment, did not reply and went on with my day. It’s not that I am strong minded or have a coping mechanism to deal with random comment’s left by faceless accounts. I just know one simple thing that I heard years ago and since then l can’t see, hear or care really about social media and what really goes on in the comment sections of major accounts. That simple thing that I was told years ago was this:

The Internet Is Dead.

You are not commenting with actually people. You are engaging with fake profiles, fake accounts, bot farms who run wild to such an extent that everything may feel real and show that interactions are up, but 90% are fake bots that are also interacting with each other. Once I heard this, I saw social media in a completely different light and also I put into practise what I heard to see if it was true: Was the Internet really dead? and if so? Then who is talking, engaging, interacting with and being on these platforms?

It was only recently something popped into my head. An idea, maybe, shall I say… a conspiracy? Were chat bots, bot farms and paid follower companies all….. AI all along and we didn’t know it? Is this just one massive experiment that we have all been apart of since it’s inception? Have you been screaming into the ether, not knowing you were talking to a robot this entire time? Lets dive into this new, maybe even odd thought that formed in my head.

Just to clarify, This is a opinion piece that I am writing. I do not have any new breaking news that I have obtained and releasing through this article. I am just a man with a creative mind who just had this thought pop into my head one day while drinking coffee and watching my cat run around the back garden. (She had a great time, btw, if you were wondering) So before I go on any further, let me give a quick breakdown of what I heard quite along time ago by someone, somewhere that I can’t remember, that told me that stuck with me ever since when it came to approaching the internet in general.

He explained to me that there were more accounts on Facebook then the population of some countries. He explained interactions, engagement, traffic, clicks and trends. The more a post has engagement the more views it gets and the more attention it gets. Engagement drives views, views drives attention, attention gets eyes and eyes get money ( depending on the account/profile) Everything made sense so far because I knew how Facebook worked. You post a comment, someone replies, they like it and then share it if they found it good. He didn’t explain anything that I didn’t know before or breaking ground.

until,

He told me about this theory that has been floating around on chat rooms for years, even back in the days pre-Facebook, just strictly online forums and small website’s. He told me about this theory called : “The Internet Is Dead Theory” and it was then something clicked in my brain after he explained it all to me. I came away from that conversation with more questions than answer’s and the willingness to actually do some research myself and see if this man was just a telling me bullshit or was there actual some claim to the words that he was saying.

So, what is this jargon that this random man told me one night many years ago in a pub somewhere in Dublin? I had to see what this was and as I said before, do my own little research and I did. So, let me give you a small synopsis of what this theory is about and hopefully I explain it well for you all.

The Internet Is Dead theory premise is that the internet itself has been taken over by the likes of fake engagement,bot accounts and farms, Algorithms and AI ( which I will touch on later). The whole point is that everything you see online is not driven by actually people and the natural interactions within online spaces, but curated slop, synthetic environments and fake manufactured article’s, think pieces, memes, culture norms and radical thoughts. Basically, everything is not real. None of it is real. The comments, the views, the engagements, followers, the arguments and the down right horrible vile comments and opinions is all done by bots. It’s a world that is made to see as if the wider public hold the same views, see the same things and interact with, thinking that the are actually talking to like minded people but it is nothing. You are not talking or interacting with anyone. It is all fake. All of it.

This is nothing new that I am presenting. This whole internet is dead talk has been going on for years at this point,even as far back as the original Youtube days and Facebook era. People questioned about how some songs on Youtube were receiving hundreds of millions of views but the ratio of likes to dislikes of the song were staggering. It was all bot farms liking, sharing and engaging in the comments to make it seem like the interactions were real, but they weren’t.

Facebook had a problem with something similar when protest groups were told to met up at a certain location and time only to see, another protest taken place. The two opposite groups would see each other and unfortunately tensions would rise and actually clashes would break out. It would later find out that the rallies and marches were made by fake communities/ activist groups on the site posing as real people. Their main goal was to cause division. It succeeded.

Twitter back in the day (I refuse to call it X) was a beehive of unbelievable bot activity to the point it was creating multiple accounts and attacking people for their Political views, Social views, Religious backgrounds, race, sex, even going as far as publishing personal information about someone for the mass to see.

Can you imagine, your a normal person that made a comment on a post, an opinion that you had and wanted to share and did. Next you are getting berated by comments left, right and it’s non stop, constant and gets worse and worse as time goes on. Now Imagine you find out: that everything is fake, most of the activity was done by a bot farms aimed at you specifically or you got in the cross fire of the rage bots. Not saying that real people cant do the same, but it literally takes just one person to start an avalanche, why not let it be a bot?

In 2018, The New York Times did an exposé on the going on’s of behind the scene’s of some massive social media platforms and what exactly some were up to and how they were moving in the online spaces. An American company called Devumi was exposed for creating several thousand fake profiles, bot accounts and selling fake followers to a global audience. They would make celebs, politicians, business companies, entrepreneurs and even influencer’s (no surprise there) seem like they had a natural following compared to the next person. Promoting their profiles and using many bots to prop up their account’s, their views and even in some case’s reshaping a certain narrative of ongoing news stories, political and social issues. This whole incident with Devumi made social media companies, governing bodies and Federal crackdown on companies that were like Devumi that ran all of these fake accounts. At one point Facebook even said that is had more then 60 million fake accounts running riot all over the platform.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube and others were forced to crack down on these account’s and revalue what exactly what was going on in these online spaces. They did a had to clean up the mess that they let run wild for the past few years and with that they deleted, cracked down and purged so many accounts. Shutting down bot farms, fake accounts and anything that was related to all of it. In the aftermath, A- list Celebs, Youtubers, online guru’s and influencer’s saw their audiences either reduce back to a normal number’s then before or completely getting wiped out altogether. Along with the bots, some of their carer’s went with them.

That was just 2018 that this happened. We haven’t even gotten into my theory yet: AI has been playing us along and we feel for it hook, line and sinker.

As you may have read some of my previous articles on here, and if you haven’t you can check them out later, I have a problem with AI. As someone who sits down every day and does my best to get my thought’s out on a laptop, to creative and use my brain to write stories, I find that AI is dangerous when it comes to the arts. I don’t like how it can generate a “story” or a “image” within seconds of asking for it. I don’t like that it takes away the creative journey of the creator, the writer and the artist. There is already people who are pro AI that are in the writing world and that is a seperate issue I have that I may do a article about another time, but either way, I have a problem with something that can create sentence’s, stories and pump it out in seconds. I’m getting to my point, so hang on.

If an AI engine can be used to generate sentences within seconds, art within seconds and even good talking points within seconds. Could It also create … fake scenario’s?Fake interactions? Fake incidents? maybe shall i say…. Fake news? If I write a prompt into an AI search engine and it pumps out something within seconds, can you imagine doing that hundreds, thousands of times within minutes?

Imagine that all along the whole internet is dead theory was real and all these bot farms, fake accounts and communities were all AI generated content that was thrown into these spaces in order to cause chaos and division all along. Where the bots of the early days of social media that ran up until the great bot purge of 2018, just a … experiment for us to take part in, to see if we could tell the difference of what actually was going on to what was been fed to us?

Look at what AI is doing now across everyone’s feds. AI has pumped out more content the year (2025) then any other year previously. It is probably back to 2018 levels of fake accounts but this time they bots are not just commenting on random posts, their actually putting out endless content that evokes a reaction, gets interactions and gets people to share. So, what has happened is that, we have replaced bots wit AI now and everyone seems ok with it? Does that not ring alarm bells with anyone?

It is like we are sleep walking into a dystopian novel and everyone is too distracted by the AI videos of cats slapping their humans, to care what exactly what is going on. You can spend hours upon hours of going through videos on Youtube, scrolling on Instagram or Tik-Tok and see so much negative comments, vile opinions and just downright disgusting behaviour and it all could be generated by AI engines( not all, there are some vile people on these platforms) that have pumped out so much content that everyone had fallen into the trap.

How do you know what is real and what is fake anymore? When you are interacting with the constant rotation of AI content that has flooded every part of social media that it makes the bot farms of the old days seem tame.

When there is so much content being put on platforms and even the fake account’s are interacting with fake account’s to drive engagement, views or just to clearly cause a divide, you cant say, that AI is not a problem.

It is already one and when it is affecting actual real peoples lives and people’s daily interactions, then that is a problem. When real people engage and get into these spaces, they are sucked into a world that was deliberately made to keep them in it’s grasp. For every real user on a social media site, there is definitely at least ten bots or AI content.

How can you compete with that? here’s the answer:

You can’t.

Thank you for reading this article of mine. Please let me know what you think and thanks for taken the time to do so.

Slán Go Fóill

-Marc Sean

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