Creepy 'Dead Internet' Conspiracy Theory Says BOTS Have Taken Over The Entire Internet

Guest: Seth Dillon
@SethDillon (Twitter)

Hosts:
Tim @Timcast (everywhere)
Ian @IanCrossland (everywhere)

Podcast available on all podcast platforms!

[CB-vtmx]

it isn't so much the bots...although I do believe that bots outnumber real humans, it is really about how google has literally segregated almost all of the internet from search results. When you think about the early 2000s internet, there were thousands of niche websites that no longer appear in search results but still actually exist.

[nightwishfan]

The bot thing has absolutely skewed reality on the internet.

[stykytte]

Years ago I ran bots for an IRC activity service, so that people would think a server had active live humans, they would join it and donate for higher ranks and access to exclusive chat areas only to discover there were only 50-100 actual people ever on there, and that some channels hooked to the activity meter service would be closed to public and just stuffed full of bots repeating the same scripts ad nauseum. I stopped when my tiny cluster of early pentium headless rigs in a cupboard could no longer compete, and I had things like college to worry about instead. I stayed in contact with the guy that ran that service for a few years after, he was botting social media pages for ad revenue after a while, then he went professional and owns a large click farm syndicate that works directly with Chinese, Malaysian and Thai operations centers that have, quote "2.5 million online identities operated from a single building, with AI generated head shots, fake bios and friends, we can even generate entire friend groups and we work with a leading AI research firms to create group photos of these generated people in real locations".

I have not trusted a damn thing on the internet to be real since 2012.

[mitchgarbeno]

I’d love to know what YouTube has for bots. Google probably has an entire business sector dedicated to this work.

[trabant]

Not to mention shadowbanning further limiting the outreach of real speech.

[urphakeandgey]

I think this is another reason why platforms are adamant about getting rid of dislike buttons. It makes it harder to determine what's real and fake.

[chrisschmidt]

Tim's got the main thrust of the conspiracy theory partly right, but the specific elements of it are not quite all there. It's not just that it's bots that are the main drivers of engagement and programmed to hit all the "engagement" metrics perfectly. It's that the entire Internet is now entirely driven by algorithms. Your likes, comments, and retweets are just data points for the algorithm, but it cannot discern the actual content or context of that engagement, or whether or not it's legitimate, good faith engagement, or just trolling (this is vaguely where the bot problem comes in).
Why is this a problem? It's because the human engagement in the system has been largely, or completely removed, in favor of automated algorithms that do it for you, and this has been done everywhere. It isn't just your youtube suggestions that do this: companies use automated algorithms to scan resumes for job applications, executives look at what's trending to determine what's politically acceptable and what isn't, the list goes on and on. Each of these things is governed by an algorithm, collecting data and charting it out. There is at no point a human reading any of this data and deciding if this is just crazy gibberish or if it's genuinely authentic.
So what happens if you have an algorithm feeding shit into this system? Does it just stay in one place? No! Cause many other algorithms are sitting on TOP of other algorithms that they pull data from. Meaning that if any algorithm starts to shift in one direction, other algorithms will shift too. And since you cannot guarantee in any way that your algorithms don't feed off each others data sets, you have a feedback loop.
So every other algorithm starts printing out shit also. And as each algorithm starts regurgitating slowly more and more insanity, all the other algorithms related to that thing start regurgitating it also, further skewing the results. So we live in a highly feedback looped system, slowly circling the bowl and unable to recognize or stop the slowly creeping insanity. Anyone who is aware of it doesn't know how to fix it, because now every single organization out there is using these algorithms in some kind of way, and they have no idea how to stop the feedback loop. What are they supposed to do now, just scrap it and go with the flow? What would the shareholders think about that? And so every single actual human being is stuck in what is effectively a self-driving car on autopilot heading towards the edge of a cliff while an endless parade of bot accounts tell it that anyone who says "we're all going to die" is exaggerating.

[ahumeniy]

Internet used to be something kind of obscure, we all used pseudonyms and had much more freedom of speech then. Now, everyone is on Internet and most of us use our actual names and the issue is, not only is you and your nerd friends, but everyone including potential employers or customers who can look you up, that's the "reputation" part everyone is worried about now. You can't go against the stablished ideology on the Internet and keep your day job unless you go back to using pseudonyms and generic avatars and that's too much effort for most people. Also, the Internet is mostly social media now and the logic there is to be trendy which encourages to follow the accepted speech

[falco]

Can we just take a moment to appreciate dudes Jordan Peterson impression? That shit was on point 🤣

[SaviorMachine]

4:22 - That JP voice impression absolutely spot on

[varietasVeritas]

Thirty years ago I called them the plastic people. They all had the same conversations and opinions. And this was in college. Now we call them npc's. Unfortunately they vote.

[BigIndividual]

Ian usually derails conversations, but that line about Obama’s birth certificate was straight up gold

[MattCurrieImprov]

The NPC analysis is also a true statement. It’s a mix of the two.

[yurielcundangan]

The fact that they were Arresting people running against them really shows you that revolting was justified

[williamlaprarie]

its funny when they call "people" bots because they don't subscribe to the narrative.

[aoandd]

Here's the kicker, and you can look at this from your boots, or from a helicopter in the sky...

People are losing their sentience, and the "bots" are gaining it. That's one hell of a spirit to be in the air.

[StrTrvUtn]

I said it already: we're under the guidance/control of AI right now. We're standing on the precipice, and we're actually able to look down and see what's there. A few years, 10 years ago we were expressing "being on" the precipice, but it was too foggy to see below.

Not gonna lie to you folks, it's way scarier seeing it in person than in movies, books or video games

[bigchief]

As a bot, I can confirm this is true.

[Crowbar]

My friends and I used to do weird things back in the 90s just to see how people would react. We were all fascinated by how boring most people are so we began doing really random things just to see how people would react.
We would ask strangers for autographs and pretend they were celebrities, we'd do "Extreme Walking" (basically parkour) in public places, we'd get on intercom systems at stores to see if anyone even noticed us saying weird stuff, we'd pretend to steal our own cars, we'd borrow Video Cameras and pretend our buddy was an MTV Host to see if people would let us tour the kitchen at fast food joints, we'd hand random things to people at grocery stores and say Happy Birthday and one of my favorites was walking on display beds at malls while saying "excuse me" to people who weren't actually in our way.

In most cases people literally froze in place like their brains had just melted. They couldn't handle people "breaking character".

One time I saw two Mall Cops walking pretty close to each other so I danced my way in between them...they tried to arrest me. Hahahaha.

[sgamer]

The internet is self aware... the A.I. knows what you are doing 24/7 thanks to your smart phones and PCs