Dead Internet Theory

Baked and Awake Podcast 121

October 14 2021

 

Algorithms, Bots, Corporate, Internet, Social Media, Content Drift, Link Rot, Internet Rot, Potemkin Village , Google Search results, Deepfakes, Misinformation, FB Whistleblower, The Dunbar Number, Social Engineering Theory, COINTELPRO, Forum Sliding, Gaslight culture, Straw Men, Memetic weaponization, Devils’ Advocate, Verifying the identity of someone on the internet is hard! Voice actors

 

In politics and economics, a Potemkin village is any construction (literal or figurative) whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country that is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better. The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built by Grigory Potemkin, former lover of Empress Catherine II, solely to impress the Empress during her journey to Crimea in 1787. While modern historians agree that accounts of this portable village are exaggerated, the original story was that Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the Russian Empress; the structures would be disassembled after she passed, and re-assembled farther along her route to be viewed again as if another example.

 

Dead Internet Theory- what is it and why do we care? 

Hello, welcome back once again to the Baked and Awake Podcast. I know it’s been a few weeks since I read you all the story of The Smoky God, which if you missed it came back in September in two parts- but we are back together at the desk today to talk about a number of more contemporary matters, some of which I’m openly asking for your assistance with as regards fully understanding the matters described in the contents of one particular website I found recently while researching the initial topic, The Dead Internet Theory. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?  Dystopian even.  I’m sure there’s an episode of Black Mirror about this out there somewhere, you know I never finished that particular anthology probably because it was all too believable to me, maybe. So, to explain a bit- the Dead Internet Theory seems to have come into existence just over the past year now online in forums like 4chan, reddit, and one much lesser known and truly unique community that I learned of called Agora Road, where threads discussing the extent of the theory have been written and heavily commented upon. Personally, I think I came across this on YouTube, where just a few but quite decent short pieces have been made on the topic, and I’ll leave links to them below- and those videos sent me off a researching, including to a referenced recent journalistic piece written on The Dead Internet that was printed in The Atlantic back in August. I’ll also be linking to the full article, but please be advised I believe The Atlantic only lets you read one or two articles per month without subscribing to the mag, so if you’ve just been bouncing off their website daily lately reading all their content like some kind of High falootin news addict, well you might just bump up against their paywall.  In that case I guess listen to me for a few more minutes then go find those videos in the description or show notes.  Long time listeners of the podcast will probably be well on their way already in terms of deducing what this is all about.  This theory is right in line with topics we have been talking about for years now here on the podcast, right?  Deepfakes, Artificial Intelligence, Pervasive Mass Surveillance and Social Engineering- Cybernetics, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. Those are all homework assignments for new listeners by the way.  Pretty much every phrase I just uttered there is a past show topic on one or more occasions, so feel free to dive into those archives because that’s what they’re there for, and every show I’ve ever produced includes a detailed show notes section with the resources I used to come up with the episode you’re listening to. 

 

And now, let’s have a look at the think piece from The Atlantic to get a clear picture of what this dreadfully believable theory is all about. The piece was I think very well written by its creator, Kaitlyn Tiffany, so let’s, shall we? 

 

Former Colleague of mine from LinkedIn: Last summer googles results after the 5 or 6 item totally turned to garbage link bait, ripped and sliced diced sentence fragments that had logical meaning to the index but only negative net value. Especally frustrating if it was a technical paper that had citations, references to it were always to some sort of site that was craled and had its ip address in the results. Its gotten better, but it was a dark hole there for a while.

 

DEADGPK YT: I have only heard of it a few weeks ago as a full theory. Before there have been many things about AI being able to create things such as music, art and I believe there's an AI that even runs a YouTube channel. I have also looked into the digital influencers that have become popular or the years and they started around 2017 if i remember. While it's an interesting theory and definitely worth discussions, I'm not totally convinced it to the point of total AI take over. But it seems that it is definitely headed in that direction. Much of the interaction on social media seems manufactured to the point where you will see several accounts post the same exact thing. Bots are definitely used these days and it for the spread of misinformation imo. 

 

Anecdotal from Nicole: Yesterday Nicole told me that she saw a post (likely on IG) that said something about “Conservatives are now waiting for Progressive accounts on Twitter to promulgate tweets that they know to be false out on the platform, and only when they know the meme has gained sufficient traction to maybe get to trending, they mass report the posts therefore often causing many people to be either suspended or banned from the platform. I said “that sounds like Culture Hacking to me”

 

What is Cult State?  A Website I found while researching The Dead Internet.  Help me understand what we’ve got a hold of here, and let me tell you what I’ve seen so far. 

www.cultstate.com

https://jigsaw.google.com/issues/#project-shield

 

https://therules.org/culture-hacking/

This is the article you need to read. “Welcome to The Butterfly War” https://www.cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/

Pseudiom YT Channel and Dead Internet Theory Video: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEIZHlfjAT8

 

A White Paper cited early in Pseudiom’s excellent video is itself a treasure trove of insight, and dated back to 2001: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0007.104?view=text;rgn=main

Agora Road’s Thread about Dead Internet https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/page-6#post-15579

 

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