Habr publishes translated essay on the "dead economy theory," a sequel to the dead internet theory

Habr has published a translated essay that extends the well-known "dead internet theory" into what it calls the "dead economy theory." The key figure the author relies on comes from the analytics company Graphite.io: over the past year, more than half of new internet content was generated by artificial intelligence.

What is the dead internet theory

The dead internet theory holds that most of what users encounter online is created by bots and for bots, and that real people have been reduced to an audience for machine-generated noise. The essay's author puts it this way: people are still online and still scroll through pages, but the pages themselves have become a performance staged by machines for an audience that has not yet realized the show was not put on for it.

• The key statistical source is a report by the analytics company Graphite.io
• According to its data, AI generated more than half of the internet's new content over the past year
• The essay is a translated piece; the original publication is devoted to the phenomenon of AI content online
• The new concept the author introduces is the "dead economy theory"

How the author describes the decay of digital spaces

In the author's view, the promises of the age of "hyperconnectedness" ended with the withering of shared physical spaces. The digital societies meant to replace them have turned into something like one giant billboard that bots, rather than people, increasingly read and create.

"Having heeded the promises of the age of hyperconnectedness, we

allowed our shared physical spaces to wither, only to find that the promised digital societies had become one giant billboard that is increasingly read and created by bots," the essay says.

This is the thought from which the author moves on to the "dead economy," a phenomenon he calls "even more deplorable" than the clogging of the internet with AI content, though the article develops it beyond the introduction quoted here.

What this means

The statistic the author cites from Graphite.io, that half of new content is AI-generated, is not an abstract observation but a measurable shift. Strictly speaking, the internet as a space for communication between real people and the internet as a marketplace for business are already two different things, and the line between them keeps blurring.