Social media and the dead internet theory
When it comes to the internet and social media overall, my review is overwhelmingly positive for the majority. But looking towards the future of it... my reviews turn mostly negative. The culprit (to no surprise) Artificial Intelligence, or the lack of intelligence.
To elaborate, both are great alone as tools, social media is great for learning and growing small communities due to difficulty in popularity in region. AI is great for research and automation of repetitive task and to assist with learning and comprehension, but in no way what so ever should they ever have co-existed.
Now how does this tie into the dead internet theory, from my understanding of it the dead internet theory is the point of true brain rot content being churned out mindlessly for profit. The new name of the game isn't what kind of content can we make, but now how much money can we make from said content. The dead internet theory is true, people have made accounts and companies either for science or profit, Corridor Crew for example made a video proving how this is possible for scientific purposes, and it worked tremendously. I don’t know communities have also done this but the companies that have were doing it for one thing, profit.
Within the realm of trends and hashtags, we have become complacent to the algorithm and zombies to the wheel of profit. Words and phrases like “zoomer”, “booktok”, and “gooner” have given us a category easily identifiable to advertisements with our thumbs and wallets doing all the work. As consumers we tell the algorithm who we are and what we like with two taps of a screen. We live to work and work to live with the data we gave it being more useful even after death to train on leaving a vicious cycle of likes and dislikes, comments and suggestions, opinions and ratings, all for profit.
AI is the next evolution in this thing we call a tool or platform. Automating out minds to needlessly say more with no possible end. Social media is a perpetual motion machine that works perfectly with only modifications. AI can be good, depending on what field it’s implemented in; medical, agricultural, or lawfully. Change is inevitable and it can be good when its for the right reasons, profit and greed isn’t even a good reason for this kind of change. These platforms that we choose have more power over us than we are willing to admit; tiktok, instagram, youtube, are all just tools originally meant to share and teach twisted to take and sell.
We have tried time and time again to break the cycle we know as vicious and harmful to our future, from dumb phones to no phones. As a consumer I do want to do better but I also want change in the way I consume. Drastic measures like getting rid of or buying something different isn’t an option for some or any, but slowly and surely we will reach a plateau and experience and imminent halt.
The only thing that matters is how the machine stops, will it run out of the fuel we feed it or will we stop feeding it all together.