The Holy Trinity of Modern Digital Decline (Part 3): Dead Internet Theory 💀

So here we are. The final act.

Part 1, Enshittification, explored how platforms that start out user-friendly gradually degrade, extracting more attention, data, and money. Part 2, Reverse Improvement, unpacked how unnecessary “upgrades” often add friction and frustration instead of genuine progress.

And now Part 3 – the uncomfortable suspicion that what looks like a thriving digital world might actually be a cavernous void. One where the loudest voices echo endlessly until they are all we can hear, encouraging the rest of us to sit back and consume.

Welcome to Dead Internet Theory.

The conspiratorial version claims that, at some point, the internet “died” and was replaced by bots and AI, pushing out the humans who once populated it. It’s an interesting idea, and it’s easy to see why people get sucked in – the evidence can feel compelling if you scroll long enough.

But I don’t buy it in its purest form. I’m real, you’re real, and I’m fairly confident the swarm of Boomers liking each other’s Facebook posts are real too.

What does interest me are the kernels of truth buried in the theory. Forget digital ghosts replacing human connection. This is about the creeping sense that the internet has become performative, orchestrated, and hollow. Less a place where people share with one another, more a stage where personalities and brands talk at an audience.

Everyone is growing a brand or business. Please. No more affiliate ads for powders, private chats tucked behind paywalls, or gentle nudges to sign up for a course. Besides, I already spent all my spare cash on Huel and Squarespace last month.

The internet increasingly rewards a small number of voices, amplified by engagement algorithms, that can masquerade as the consensus of the crowd.

It’s easy to get lost in that noise. I’ve fallen down those rabbit holes myself. But once you understand the incentives shaping what you consume, the system starts to look less mysterious and more like a vending machine that only sells one product.

The Algorithm Won and Now It’s All Reruns

Open any social platform and scroll for a few minutes. Notice anything? Probably not – and that’s exactly the point. Most of what you see isn’t from friends, family, or your community. It’s branded content, talking heads, and recycled narratives you’ve already encountered dozens of times.

Look closer and the repetition becomes hard to ignore. The same visual cues. The same topics. Usually the same emotional registers – negativity or tribalism. It’s the predictable outcome of a system that rewards replication over originality. Algorithms don’t care whether something is insightful. They care whether it keeps you scrolling. Familiarity beats novelty.

Creators noticed this long before audiences did. Someone cracks a formula, it performs well, others copy it, and the algorithm approves. Similar content gets amplified. Anything that deviates underperforms or disappears. Over time, survival means convergence.

Video makes this painfully obvious. Shocked faces in thumbnails engineered to trigger curiosity. Studios designed to look casual while being meticulously professional: sound-treated rooms, expensive microphones, carefully curated clutter. Even the body language is templated: chopping hands for emphasis, leaning in for the “truth bomb”, pauses timed with surgical precision.

It’s not just video. LinkedIn and Substack have their own winning formulas: engagement bait dressed up as thought leadership, strategic line breaks for dramatic effect. The patterns are so effective it’s hard not to fall into them. Maybe I should start leaning in myself – purely for research purposes of course.

The result is a flattening of ideas towards the mean. Feeds look abundant at a glance, yet feel monotonous in practice. Familiarity becomes comfort. The algorithm hasn’t just shaped what creators produce, it’s shaped what audiences expect.

This is where Dead Internet Theory starts to feel plausible, even while humans still outnumber bots. When every post follows the same template, the line between human and machine begins to blur. The system doesn’t need to replace people – it just needs to train them.

Millennials Fell Through the Trapdoor While Gen Z Walked Around It

Social media was sold as a public square. “Come share your thoughts! Build your identity!” Except it wasn’t a square. It was a trapdoor.

Gen Z noticed this early and promptly pulled back. Boomers, Gen X, and a smattering of Millennials remain relaxed about sharing their lives online, often with impressive candour. Some people simply enjoy it, and honestly, fair enough. If my nan wants to post unfiltered thoughts on Facebook, who am I to intervene?

What Gen Z reacted to wasn’t oversharing itself, but the cost of visibility. They watched people haunted by decade-old tweets, strangers shredded over a throwaway thought, entire identities flattened into screenshots stripped of context. They saw what happens when permanence is unavoidable and became more selective.

They didn’t log off entirely, but instead rewrote the playbook. Participation doesn’t have to be public or permanent. They leaned toward stories instead of grid posts, and group chats instead of timelines.

This doesn’t mean Gen Z abandoned visibility either. Going a step further than the rest of us, they followed ambitious Millennials into professionalising their online presence. Visibility becomes something you do deliberately and strategically – it’s a career.

Earlier generations treated social media like a scrapbook. Gen Z treats it more like a switchboard – share what’s safe, keep real connection contained, and don’t hand your entire life story to an algorithm just because the generations before didn’t read the fine print (unless you decide to monetise it).

At the end of the day, Gen Z may have got something right. Being more selective about what we share might leave more energy for actual human connection – not just lurking on the feed of someone we went to school with and no longer speak to.

What looks like withdrawal on the surface is probably just boundaries. And platforms have never been fond of those.

Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans and the Controversy That Wasn’t

I don’t love dating articles with topical examples, but this one works no matter when you read it. It’s been happening for years, and it perfectly illustrates the system we’ve been talking about.

Enter Sydney Sweeney, American Eagle, and a fifteen-second advert with the tagline ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.’ The spot hinges on wordplay between “jeans” and “genes”. Get it? Sweeney explains, gazing seductively into the camera: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring… My jeans are blue.”

The internet promptly lost its mind. Accusations of eugenics, racism and white supremacy ran rampant. Scroll long enough and it felt unanimous. The verdict appeared settled – boycott the brand and banish Sweeney for refusing to apologise.

Except none of that actually happened.

What happened instead was amplification. A small number of negative reactions were pulled into the spotlight, repeated, screenshotted and funnelled through accounts with reach. Outrage was multiplied, not measured. A stock-standard piece of fashion advertising became a story not because it mattered, but because it travelled well.

This is exactly the kind of amplification Dead Internet Theory predicts – the loudest voices dominate the feed, and the rest of the network barely exists beyond their echoes.

What felt like consensus was volume. The vast majority of people either didn’t care or never even saw the ad at all. Online, loudness substitutes for numbers, and repetition stands in for agreement.

And then poof. It evaporated. No sustained backlash. No cultural reckoning. Sales rose. Stock prices jumped. Sydney Sweeney carried on being Sydney Sweeney. The outrage existed because it was rewarded, not because it was representative.

Whether it’s Pepsi or Peloton (look them up), the pattern holds – year after year. Online, a minor marketing incident can easily become a moral referendum. Offline, real people are just trying to get through another Tuesday. They don’t have time to debate business ethics for a brand they couldn’t care less about.

If you won’t play by the rules and perform, you’re relegated to lurking in the audience

Dead Internet Theory gets the diagnosis wrong, but nails the feeling. Rather than being taken over by bots, the internet was optimised until ordinary human behaviour disappeared into the shadows like Netscape Navigator.

Nothing discussed in this series happened by accident. Platforms chased growth, while unnecessary upgrades turned people off. So people adapted and withdrew. They learned when to perform and when to stay quiet. They moved their real conversations somewhere safer – especially places without a blue checkmark.

What’s left behind looks abundant but feels void of humanity. Feeds are jammed with content, yet strangely empty of real voices. A handful of loudmouths continue to recycle narratives, while algorithms mistake repetition for relevance. Outrage and artificial importance dominate – right up until you close the app and discover that most of the world never actually cared about the debate in the first place.

The internet didn’t die, but it has certainly steered well off course from the wilderness it once was, shouldering out the users unwilling to play ball. What remains is a stage for brands, creators, and professionalised attention – while everyone else lurks in the corners or slips out the back door.

And that’s the uncomfortable, mildly depressing truth behind this holy trinity of digital decline. Enshittification, Reverse Improvement, Dead Internet Theory – they’re not separate problems. They’re symptoms of the same disease: optimisation at any cost.

Well, that was a fantastic load off my mind. Thank you to those who have stuck with me through this philosophical unboxing. Now I need a hot bath, a cold beer, and a very long, mindless scroll through some premium nonsense to drown out the disheartening hours of research running through my brain. Oh look – that guy from that thing has apparently put his foot in it. Better set up my ring light and comment before it all blows over in 24 hours.