wanna grab a bite after the Internet's funeral?
02/08/2025, at like, 2am
a death is usually a sad moment. but losing the internet feels like anything but a loss. what would we do with the freedom? how would we cope with the feeling of all the rocks being lifted off our chests? it'd truly be great, if only we didn't have to watch our asses because they were coming to kill our reality too.
this all started when I came across the banger wikipedia page for AI slop using shrimp jesus as the poster child. I've been thinking a lot about how we're getting to witness a really, really weird time in internet and technology history and honestly wondering where it's gonna go from here. that same wiki article on AI slop enlightened me about how AI-generated text/images/video are being consistently used in triple-A games, ads for humongous international brands, scientific articles supposedly being published in reputable journals, and god knows where else. and I'm not even surprised. I think I find myself asking "is this AI?" at least weekly, and in increasingly depressing offline situations like restaurant menus, posters on the street, and product labels in stores. it's already clear that we're basically at a point where generative AI has just gotten good enough to be indistinguishable from real creations. it was easy to hit that point with text since it has fewer embedded clues and interpretations can be more subjective. but there are incredibly real and detailed AI-generated videos out there right now that you just cannot tell from reality. but so far, I was used to seeing this phenomenon only online, within the confines of my screens. I wasn't prepared for it to start ambushing me from the outside in!!
going further in tonight's rabbit hole, I'd bet that most everyone (who is probably relatively young and is in touch with online culture) knows about the dead internet theory by now. wikipedia describes it as a conspiracy theory, but really, the point where AI material became indistinguishable from reality is, I'd say, equivalent with the death of the Internet. content farms have an easy and reliable way to keep pumping out whatever freaky videos kids end up watching on ipads at restaurants, inflammatory facebook posts for all the other AI pages to interact with, and fake comments that mess up social media algorithms which leads to all of this artificial crap to keep floating on the (already polluted) surface of our homepages. call it the Great Digital Garbage Patch.
can we talk about this? i know it's not directly AI, but, the counter strike sound effects? the Rest of the sound effects?? the repetitive dopamine cues as each track resolves and you get to see what happens at the end???
but, for me, this kind of sounds entertaining and exciting. I've been keeping current trends and Internet culture at an arm's length for a while now, only seeing whatever ends up reaching my tumblr bubble, if even that. sometimes I feel like I'm out of touch, not knowing what labubus are until, like, two weeks ago, and missing out on "the meme of the day/week/month". I used to be very up to date with these things when I was younger, and I enjoyed being a part of the culture. god I had so much fun with the apyr meme. granted, i was also like, 14. I've since learned that it's alright not to catch onto every trend and meme, and right now, I'd have a lot of fun watching Internet culture collapse and implode in a big satisfying disaster. we all need to get dumbphones and meet up at the park with a blanket and snacks to celebrate the funeral. but unfortunately, the death of the Internet won't happen this cleanly and quickly. it'll probably keep being slow and agonizing, and it'll probably keep clinging on until the very last moment.
anyway, the next link I clicked was the page on italian brainrot. and this is where it all fell into place.
for a while, I had been seeing this funny shark plushie in various markets and street stands selling low-quality children's toys around my city. it had three legs and it was wearing sneakers, which was really weird, but my boyfriend and I would always get a laugh out of it thinking it was some random bootleg creation to go with the thousands of backpack-wearing capybaras. but no. I click on the Italian brainrot wikipedia page and there it is. staring me right in the face. the freaking three-legged shark, in all its AI-generated glory, with a stupid ass name. tralalero tralala. and it has siblings too. a whole zoo of AI-generated creatures, many of which I recognized from the toy stands I had been passing. I first encountered these things as real, physical things I could buy, only to find out their source was an AI image accompanied by an AI voice that had gotten popular on tiktok. I don't know about you, but I find that incredibly disturbing and angering and dystopic. why is AI slop bleeding into my reality?? why have I reached a point where I have to doubt whether all of the things around me were thought up by a human or not?? I've been far away from these parts of the Internet, and yet they find a way to reach me through completely offline means. can I get away? is the Internet gonna die, or will it become a battered zombie crawling out of its grave, looking to catch your attention by any means necessary?
this is really bothering me and it makes me feel weird. tl;dr, I really don't like that ideas that a machine came up with are so prevalent in my real environment right now. I'm tired of scrutinizing everything to check if a human actually put effort into it, especially when it turns out they did and I ended up doubting them for no reason. I want Internet culture to die and stay dead! we should all just go back to using the Internet as the tool that it is and take our entertainment somewhere else. it's not fun nor good anymore. let's get away from it all
