Unfortunately, the best days of the internet appear to be behind us—along with objective reality.

We are now entering the era of the “zombie internet.” It’s not dead, as some proponents of the Dead Internet Theory suggest, but it’s certainly not buzzing with the life it once had.

It’s undead.

In September 2024, I concluded that AI would make the internet so unusable that you’d need an AI agent—or even a team of them—to fight the hoard of zombie content and retrieve the information you need.

Why?

Because it will be so flooded with misinformation, AI-slop imagery, and fake personas that using it will become both painful and pointless.

I wrote:

‘The end state of the internet will become so toxic and rammed with ai slop advertising that you’ll pay AI agents to fetch internet based information for you. They’ll present it to you in any form you like. Written, podcast, film, cartoon, newspaper, AI news anchor etc. Agents will compete on efficacy, bias, intelligence, news org deals, price and style (attractiveness, delight etc). Certain groups may choose to pool their agents so the info they all receive is aligned.

Using the internet without AI will feel horrible.’ 28/09/24

AWFULNESS CONFIRMED

Since then two key developments have confirmed that this truly is the future of the internet.

  1. Meta has confirmed that it’s wants a significant share of the $21 billion influencer market by populating its platform with AI-generated profiles. The level of control this will grant these platforms is staggering. The best way to sell things is to make your buyers think they need it. Controlling digital reality makes this effortless. Election manipulation and cyber warfare via Russian bot farms were merely a glimpse of what this future holds.

🔗 LINK: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2025/01/02/meta-opens-floodgates-on-ai-generated-accounts-on-facebook-instagram/#

  1. The Browser Company designed a browser called ARC that “browses for you.” At the time, I didn’t think much of it, but now I see it as the future interface for the internet.

🔗 LINK: https://arc.net/blog/arc-search#

If you’d like more evidence, This thread documents our direction of travel: 🔗 LINK: https://x.com/mprinparr/status/1840037559272915107?s=46&t=J1Wx7HzVGQfupOOieFH3GQ

DEATH OF OBJECTIVE REALITY AND MISALIGNED GEOGRAPHY

Many of us have complained about the fracturing of shared experiences and the loss of an agreed-upon reality. In polarized countries like the U.S., it’s now cliché to say there are two distinct American realities.

I’m now convinced that the “zombie internet” will accelerate this fracturing and decentralization—it seems inevitable. What intrigues me is how long it will take for these separate digital realities to manifest as separate geographic realities: distinct neighborhoods? Entirely new cities? New nations?

For decades, great tech thinkers like Balaji, polemicists like Curtis Yarvin, and sci-fi writers like Neal Stephenson have speculated about corporations creating new cities and nations in response to the collapse of traditional nation-states. Or cryptocurrencies becoming so powerful that they establish physical territories to ensure and maximise their utility. Both scenarios are highly plausible and are happening.

However, I now believe the zombie-ification of the internet will be the most powerful driver. Normal people simply won’t be able to reconcile the dissonance between their aligned online realities and their lived, misaligned geographic realities.

And with advancements in telepresence technology, remote work, decentralized organizations, and autonomous economic activity, they won’t need to.

GSTK @mprinparr