In what might prove to be one of the lesser-talked-about aspects of the dead internet theory, the demise of surfing itself. As a child of the early 2000s and 2010s, I spent hours moving from one site to another. A session would start anywhere – 4chan’s /b/ board, a forum about sword canes, a dead link someone posted in IRC – and lead to somewhere completely unpredictable. You’d click from a bizarre post to a Google rabbit hole, end up on a weird blog, skim Wikipedia pages that took strange detours, all while Winamp looped a sketchy MP3 named “new_eminem_2004_final.mp3” that was definitely Romanian dance music. Ten websites later, three “hot single aunties near you” pop-ups later, and you’d emerge slightly wiser, slightly crazier. Dark web pages made a fourteen-year-old me feel like a hacker. OG Aishwarya Rai edits on Pinkworld were my first taste of adulthood. Omegle was a roulette wheel of human weirdness at 2 a.m. I surfed rabbit holes – dancing frogs explaining quantum mechanics, blogs about raccoons in Morse code, Soviet sleep experiments – reckless, ridiculous, intoxicating.

The dead internet theory argues that most of the web we browse today is generated or amplified by bots, scripts, and AI systems. The “real” internet – the one where humans wandered freely and discovered weird, absurd corners – is shrinking. What remains is curated, manipulated, and optimized to keep attention. Algorithms now decide what you see, what you click, what you “like.” The alley bazaar of oddities has been replaced by sterile, well-lit corridors. Reddit, Instagram, TikTok – these aren’t chaotic anymore; they’re efficient, predictable, and safe. The thrill of stumbling into something bizarre, the sense of true free will online, is fading.

Worse still, the web has become synthetic. AI now produces over half of online content – hallucinated articles, blog posts, fake studies, AI images, SEO sludge. Kürzgesagt breaks it down: AI tools reference AI-generated misinformation, compounding errors with the misplaced confidence of a friend’s older brother claiming the pyramids were built by lizard people. Google doesn’t list millions of links anymore; it summarizes, giving you AI-generated answers instead of a universe of human-curated chaos. And then there’s Sora 2 – a social network of friends who never existed, and quite frankly, something no one asked for. AI-generated profiles scroll past you like uncanny mannequins, posting memes you don’t remember seeing, chatting about inside jokes that were never made, laughing at opinions nobody holds. It’s intimacy simulated, hollow, grotesque, like social media vomit engineered to feel just familiar enough to make you uneasy. You don’t wander anymore. You’re fed. The internet, once a dark alley bazaar, is now darker still – a place where everything lies with perfect confidence.

It’s tempting to think this is unprecedented – this flood of fake studies, hallucinated citations, and AI-generated sludge. But history has a way of remixing its greatest hits. This isn’t the first time humanity has been buried under a landslide of beautifully packaged bullshit.

Medieval Europe was lousy with holy relics – every monastery claimed a nail from the crucifix, every dusty village church swore they had a saint’s femur tucked behind the altar. There were enough “True Cross” splinters to build a respectable log cabin. And people believed. Why wouldn’t they? There was no central archive, no way to verify. Belief reinforced itself through repetition. AI content works the same way: one bot hallucinates a study, another cites it, a third summarizes it, and suddenly Wikipedia footnotes fake authority.

I miss getting lost. I miss the accidental absurdities that made the internet feel alive. I miss surfing in the pure, chaotic sense – everything moved too slow to worry, anything could happen. No algorithm, no curated feed, just curiosity and chaos. Now every corner is curated, filtered, fabricated. Surfing, not scrolling, was alive; now it’s a shallow pool, staring at the same walls, while the thrill of discovery quietly dies. The internet has become a landscape of ghosts, mirrors, and hallucinations – and we are left scrolling, endlessly, through perfection and lies.