On my drive home from work today, I chanced to be listening to a couple of YouTube videos comparing the Internet of today to the Internet of its crazy, Wild West heyday. In the 1990’s, I was barely a thought in my parents’ minds, so it is impossible for me to testify to the veracity of these popular (though at this point clichéd) claims that the Internet of old was this sort of anarchic fever-dream of creativity and free expression. Nevertheless, the main thrust of this popular-level conspiracy video, meant more to entertain than offer any substantive critique, was an intriguing concept.
The thesis defended is that the Internet as we know it is a Potemkin village, a pretty facade of bot-generated and AI-distributed content that gives the appearance of the fabled “World Wide Web,” but is actually a psychological trap, meant to distract users, collect their data, and monetize every engagement. As far back as 2017, The Atlantic was penning stories about how most Internet traffic is actually bots, and data collection and monetization are so ubiquitous that they are now regarded as stable facets of Internet infrastructure: so the provable data that we have to go on is not far from the theory’s thesis. In the end, it is suggested that the way the Internet is run today by a relatively small handful of companies, filtering billions of users through their cumbersome systems while squashing smaller rival services and elbowing small content creators out of the way in favor of a handful (again) of corporate media outlets was a plan designed by the United States government to gaslight the global population and make them pliable to methods of social control.
I am skeptical that anyone at DOD, having watched the Afghan debacle unfold, could be competent enough to plan, build, and successfully execute a social control system that spans the globe. Nevertheless, there is something unsettlingly close to the mark about this theory. As people are increasingly isolated from reality, and the Real, and are increasingly cloistered in their online profiles, we take for granted that the faceless mobs of cyberspace that we are interacting with are other flesh and blood people. What if that isn’t the case? What if, even more disturbingly, we are in an electric void, arguing with bots on our Twitter feeds, scrolling endless pages of corporate actors or deepfaked images masquerading as “influencers” on other platforms like Instagram? More to the point, is there any discernible difference between the two? Whether real or simulacra, our retreat into the Internet has all the hallmarks of a maniac who, confined to his cell in the asylum, becomes accustomed to his own tailor-made hallucinations. The modern Internet, whether you believe there are little windows between the cells that allow us to speak to one another or not, represents a madhouse where the same hallucination, one urging us to consume and to obey, is represented in fragments hand-cut to match our particular brand of crazy.
The saddest thing is, of course, that no one guards the asylum. We walked in ourselves, shut and locked the doors behind us.