Maybe your Internet will be dead, but mine will be alive in the corners that corporats [sic] don't care about.

Popular Mechanics is like tech coverage from “Weekly World News”.

Or, in more realistic terms, the internet is already mostly dead. Half of the stuff that should be available on clearnet or the visible web is now hidden in Discord chats. The hope lies in things like Gemini, Tor, and Freenet, but even there the braintrust is in Matrix.

Can we go back talking to... you know... real people? Like, in person?

At the rate AI slop is taking over, I think 3 months is more likely.

Government ruined that too.

It's been kind of shit lately anyway, so meh.

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• First surfacing in 2021, the “dead internet theory” is the idea that the future internet will be largely driven by autonomous bots rather than real-world humans, creating an endless content factory driven by the engagement of solely digital entities. 
• Although first inspired by the rise of algorithmic ranking systems (which are themselves autonomous), the arrival of large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has made the problem even worse. 
• Report after report suggests that human-made content pre-AI is slowly dying due to link rot, and steadily proliferating bot content is taking its place, meaning the internet could be theoretically “dead” by the end of the decade.