The dead internet

There’s a theory that’s been circulating for a few years now. The dead internet theory. The basic idea is that most of what you encounter online isn’t real in the way it used to be; that the content is automated, the engagement is manufactured, and the feeling of a living, breathing internet full of people is increasingly a carefully maintained illusion.

It’s framed as a conspiracy theory, which makes it easy to dismiss. But you don’t have to believe the more elaborate versions of it to notice that something has changed. That the internet feels different now. Flatter, somehow. More repetitive. Like you’re moving through the same spaces rearranged slightly differently each time.

Most people experience this as users. They notice the feed feels off, that search results have got worse, that everything seems to be pointing them somewhere they didn’t ask to go. It’s a vague unease, hard to articulate, easy to shrug off.

Working in IT makes it harder to shrug off.

You can see more of the machinery. You know what content farms look like at scale. You understand how recommendation algorithms work well enough to recognise when you’re being steered. You’ve seen what SEO optimisation does to information quality, what engagement metrics do to editorial decisions, what the incentive structures actually are behind the platforms people spend their days on.

You can’t unknow that. And once you know it, the vague unease becomes something more specific. Less this feels off and more I know exactly why this feels off, and it’s not going to get better.

That’s a particular kind of exhausting.

Most fields have a version of this, the vet who can’t watch nature documentaries the same way, the chef who stops enjoying restaurants. Professional knowledge changes how you experience things. But most of those examples involve seeing through something and then being able to leave it behind.

With the internet, you can’t leave it behind. It’s the infrastructure. It’s where the work lives, where communication happens, where information comes from. You have to keep engaging with something you’ve partially seen through, every single day, often as part of your job.

There’s also something specifically demoralising about watching what the internet became.

A lot of people in IT came up during a period when the internet felt genuinely open. Not perfect, not without problems, but open in a way that felt meaningful. Decentralised enough that interesting things could happen in unexpected places. Built by people who were, at least partly, doing it because they found it interesting.

That version still exists in pockets. But the dominant experience now is platforms. Walled gardens with engagement-optimised feeds, designed to keep you inside and make the outside feel less accessible. The interesting, weird, human parts of the internet didn’t disappear. they just got buried under an enormous amount of content that exists primarily to exist.

And the people who built the infrastructure for that, or who maintain it, or who spend their days working adjacent to it, have a front row seat to the gap between what this could have been and what it is.

This isn’t nostalgia, exactly.

It’s more like working in a field you chose because you believed it was pointing somewhere, and watching it point somewhere else instead. The technology got more powerful. The reach got broader. The capability is genuinely extraordinary in ways that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago.

But somewhere in the process of scaling up, a lot of the soul went out of it.

The dead internet theory might be wrong in its specifics. But as a description of a feeling, the feeling of an internet that used to seem alive in a particular way and now seems to be performing aliveness instead, it’s not far off.

And if you work in IT, you probably felt that shift before most people named it.