We have all seen gym cats, the shrimp with the face of Jesus and the monkeys with the Banana body. They invaded social, platforms and are slowly corroding the web, transforming it into something else. It is the so -called theory of the death of the Internet: the suspicion that the network, from free and human space, is becoming A huge automated machine. The Internet, in fact, is like the canvas of a spider, built to depend on itself, more pages, sites, posts, human tweets disappear more increases the risk of triggering a domino effect. The result is that the Internet in the next three years could be more dead than alive.
According to a 2024 ratio of the Cybersicacy company, he impeccwards, almost half of global internet traffic is already automated: The bots were 42.3% in 2021 and have reached theL 49.6% in 2023. With this pace, within a few years most of the online content will no longer be “human”. On the one hand, therefore, we are witnessing the invasion of photos, articles, artificial articles, on the other the web is being consumed. According to a search for the Pew Research cente 38% Of the pages created in 2013 he has already disappeared, the victim of the so -called link Rot. We are talking about links that today lead to removed errors or content. It is a natural process of the web, where sites close, platforms change and the digital archives empty over time. The result between erosion and invasion is Inteet’s death.
The explosion of digital garbage
According to the American journalist Taylor Lorenz The decline started well before the arrival of Chatgpt: “The algorithmic systems of ranking filled the network of material without value, optimized in the most absurd way possible.” According to a recent newsguard analysis (May 2025), over a thousand information sites would already be managed largely by artificial intelligence.
Not only that, the generative IA is also used for Amazon product reviewsa way to make it go back and make scandal products more visible with positive comments. The “is increasing the”artificial garbage“Published on the web, come on fake books written with the IA, To the images that violate the copyright of the artists. The explanation is cheap: if online attention translates into advertising earnings, then use bots and generative systems to “manufacture” content Become a money machine.
When the web only sells dopamine
The increase in these contents marks the beginning of a new phase of degradation of online content, defined as “en Gittyification”term coined by the writer Cory Doctrow. “The Slop invades the web with poor material, damaging community and artists and saturating platforms such as YouTube of poor quality content,” he explained to the Guardian Akhil Bhardwajprofessor of the University of Bath.
The dementia video created with the IA represent represent the last frontier of the dopamine capitalism. There are no more products, nor stories, but chemical discharges. They are not narration, they are not art, they are not satire. I am pure stimulus.
Personal communication – chat between friends, private messages, post -family – will not disappear. But the romantic idea of an Internet as a free space of collective creativity seems to belong to the past. “It is in this sense that the web we knew died” wrote the researchers Jake Renzella and Vlada Rozova on The Conversation. And nostalgia for that “human” network risks growing, just as the new internet It is filled with digital crustaceans with the face of Jesus and sharks with sneakers.
