Is the Internet dead? (Illustrative image: Unsplash) 
“I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now,” wrote Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, on X. A few weeks later, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian warned that much of the internet is now “dead”, dominated by bots and AI-generated content.
Sounding the death knell for the internet seems a little extreme. Dead internet theory is, after all, a phrase that originated in obscure internet forums; the idea that, since about 2016, most of the web is already fake, dominated by bots, automated content and covertly controlled discourse. First articulated in 2021 by a forum user named IlluminatiPirate on Agora Road, popularised by The Atlantic and unpacked by academics in The Conversation, the theory was dismissed by most as a conspiracy until it was publicly resurfaced by two major architects of the web and AI revolution. Oh, the irony.
I do not subscribe to the DIT (not yet, anyway), but critical thinking urges one to question, consider and challenge. I do recognise the concern it gestures towards: the internet may not be “dead”, but it is increasingly polluted.
Death and rebirth
The internet has “died” many times before.
The rich, eccentric sprawl of Web 1.0 message boards collapsed into the portals of AOL and Yahoo. Blogging culture shrank as Facebook and Twitter centralised discourse. The chronological feed gave way to algorithmic curation. Each shift felt like something authentic had died.
But unlike the natural world, these deaths are rarely final. The internet doesn’t collapse like a fragile ecosystem. It consolidates. Google, Meta, TikTok and now AI-powered feeds replace what came before. Something is lost, something else emerges.
I have been tracking social media intensely for a decade as a leader in online safety in schools. I dived into apps, platforms, games and settings to see what creators were coding, shaping and publishing, and helped kids understand the ocean they were floating in, with many sharks circling them (the project garnered 16 global award recognitions).
Climate change
When coral reefs die, they rarely vanish overnight. They bleach. Warming seas driven by climate change stress the coral, forcing it to expel the algae that give it colour and life. The skeleton remains, but the ecosystem collapses. Biodiversity drains away. What was once teeming with life becomes hollow.
Take a look at “shrimp Jesus” as one example. The parallel is tempting.
Our feeds still exist, platforms still look colourful, but the vitality, the human diversity, feels as if it is draining out. We scroll past synthetic memes, bot accounts and AI-written posts, marvelling at their creativity yet feeling the space become strangely hollow.
Yet honesty matters. The parallel could be classed as weak or hollow. Coral death is often final, taking decades to recover if at all. The internet, by contrast, is cyclical: forums give way to social networks, Facebook, to Instagram, to Discord, TikTok and on and on. Coral ecosystems collapse, but the internet centralises, often concentrating power in fewer hands. And coral has no choice; humans do. Regulators, leaders and businesses can shape what comes next.
The metaphor is not perfect.
What it does capture is the risk of hollowing out: a digital bleaching that feels lifeless. The crucial difference is that, unlike coral, the internet can recover if leaders act wisely. Australia is the first to take a stand, banning social media for those under 16 at the end of this year.
I fear it’s too late.
I do not write this as a casual observer. Before co-founding an AI agency, the eight years in schools training young people showed me the staggering belief they have in clickbait, outrage cycles and addictive algorithms. Teenagers absorbed it, often without the tools to interrogate what they were consuming.
Leadership looks different
This is why critical thinking is not just for schools. It belongs in the boardroom. C-suite leaders must interrogate whether their AI initiatives are theatre or transformation. They must hold outputs against outcomes: does this tool deliver revenue, loyalty or learning, or does it simply dazzle?
AI, the fastest-moving technology in history, rewards the leaders who discern inputs and outputs with rigour. The winners of this next chapter will be those who resist the magpie effect and choose partners, tools and campaigns that deliver measurable impact, not slush.
The dead internet theory is not literally true… Surely. Well, let’s hope not. But it names a feeling that many of us share: that the internet is losing more of its (already diminishing) humanity, although many are utterly mesmerised by its new vitality and colour. The internet won’t vanish, but it could calcify into a shell of what it once was.
The responsibility is with governments and big tech platforms. But their race to the summit of Mount Ego will not be stopped. The power that we have is to know what is unfolding, and to see through it, make wise choices, train our kids to read the subtext and the misinformation, and apply the technology for good – their own mental, emotional and digital scaffolding (known as Digital Quotient), and for others too. In Africa, there are plenty of people who need a helping hand, even if it is artificial. DM
Dean McCoubrey is the co-founder of Humaine.