The internet feels dead

Lately, the internet feels very dead to me.

Short-form content is the digital equivalent of zombie artefacts — AI-gathered, AI-edited, AI-posted for those of us flesh to consume.

(Don’t research the effects of doomscrolling on the brain. You won’t be happy.)

LinkedIn feels dead. Or at least the vast majority of it does. It’s mostly people generating slop, writing slop, or writing for themselves to themselves, hoping something eventually comes out of it. Some financial benefit, some opportunity, some vanity metric, whatever. There are rare cases where I find gems in the mud, but that happens like once every few weeks.

X felt dead too, but in a different way. The algorithm keeps surfacing war, outrage, scary news — whatever it knows will keep me scrolling because, like most people, I have some degree of morbid curiosity. So I have to fight back, mute, block, and report so I can get access to the information that actually matters.

I don’t want this to turn into some gloomy ‘everything is terrible’ session, but the dead internet theory doesn’t really feel like a theory anymore, and I’m not a fan of it.

What I’ve found as an antidote is keeping contact, 1-on-1 contact, with people on the web — maybe a couple of small group chats — is potentially the only thing that still gives me the sense that the internet is alive.

Am I doing something wrong?