AnonymousNVP
Internet Refugee
- Joined
- Sep 1, 2021
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This thread explores potential proof of Dead Internet Theory as mentioned in posts by IlluminatiPirate, who notes, "This theory was originally written by several anons on /x/ & wizardchan."
The basic idea behind Dead Internet Theory is that the internet as it exists now is empty, devoid of real people, and that the U.S. government is using the power of AI to gaslight the entire world population.
Now, you may be thinking: That's a pretty wild theory, but if it's true there should be more proof than an overabundance of seemingly repetitive news articles about the moon and various government contracts with Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al. After all, why wouldn't our government want to utilize the best technology platforms available? Is that really proof of some nefarious attempt at worldwide manipulation?
The internet was always supposed to be a place where people who create content could share that content with a worldwide audience. As such, it makes logical sense that the internet has grown exponentially since the 1990's - the 'truth' of it is rarely even questioned. So, is there anything grounded in reality to suggest that maybe the internet is actually shrinking? Well, if it was shrinking that might explain so-called 'Internet Rot' and studies showing that about 50% of links cited in court opinions since 1996 as well as 75% of links in the Harvard Law Review no longer work anymore! But surely this is just the result of a natural cycle of older content getting removed or relocated, newer content taking its place, and links not getting updated right? ...right?
What if that truth has been in front of us all along, but most of us just don't even know where to look? Well, here's a suggestion fit for our times: Google it!
Google what? As you'll discover, it doesn't even really matter what. Google anything that should have tons of results - climate change, Michael Jackson, COVID, even the word 'anything'! For this example, I'll use Climate Change. No matter what you believe about climate change, it's been called the existential crisis of our times, and it's been about 50 years since scientists first warned about it. So, the internet - ie. modern humanity's library - should have decades worth of information about climate change, right?
So, your first search is going to look something like this:
942 MILLION results?! Gnarly, right! This feels about right for something that basically everyone in the world has heard about - something that many people think poses an existential threat to the entire human race. It only took .72 seconds for Google to search the farthest corners of the internet and return 942 million results. Eat your heart out, dewey decimal system! Of course, despite the promise of millions of results, most of us never go past the first page of results, am I right?
Sometimes, something funny happens when you go to page 2 of a Google search:
Wait, now there's only 725 million results!? What happened to the over 200 million more we were promised on the first page? Well, in fairness, we were never really going to look at those last two hundred million anyway, right? Besides, 725 million results is still more than enough! And this search was even quicker - 0.67 seconds! Maybe it just overlooked a couple. No biggie, there's still totally decades worth of human knowledge about this threat at our fingertips, accessible any time we want... until we get to page 19:
Wait, what? Only 189 results? About CLIMATE CHANGE?? On the most used search engine in the world?? How could this happen?!?!?! A quick trip to the bottom of the page provides a potential explanation:
Ah, okay, I see what you did there, Google. You just omitted 'some' of the results, because the other 725 million (or maybe 942 million) of those results were really very similar to the first 189. There sure have been a lot of news stories for decades now about rising sea levels and melting ice caps, so why not? It makes sense, but it also feels a bit overgeneralized, Google. What if the details of what we know about rising sea levels or melting ice caps have changed over time (spoiler: they have). How do we know if we can trust Google's opinion of how similar all those results really are? Ok, I'll play along Google, let's 'repeat the search with the omitted results included', please and thank you:
Okay, my repeated search has 860 million results. That's somewhere between the estimates on our first and second search pages before, and yet another nice round number that in no way feels like a contrived estimate. Moreover, this time I should have ALL of that knowledge at my fingertips, with none of the results omitted by an overzealous algorithm. ...Except, something happens when moving from page 43 to page 44, see if you can spot the difference:
Wait, why are there only 438 results now?? And, just how many of those ARE fundamentally the same or similar to the original 189 displayed? How can the most widely used search engine in the world only have 438 total results about one of the most widely discussed issues in the world? How can there only be 438 results - including duplicates - about an issue that stands to impact the entire world and all of humanity? Is this just another error of omission?
Seemingly not. No more comforting message assures us that some of the results have been omitted. This is, essentially, the 'end of the line'.
I scrolled back through the 44 pages of results, curious to see what 438 results Google had curated for its users about climate change. Notably, of the results that were dated on Google's search pages, the only ones prior to 2016 (and there were only a handful) were from various government websites, the IPCC, university research branches, and scientific publications. Personal blogs, web pages, and any content created by individuals not affiliated with the media or government entities were curiously absent.
Now, we should certainly be asking what on earth has happened to the undoubtedly millions of pages of content that people have created over the years about the various aspects of, dangers, and sentiments around climate change. Are they actually there somewhere, in the background, but for some reason inaccessible through Google search? Are they really just gone? We should also be asking: why would Google want everyone to think there are hundreds of millions more results out there than there actually are? In both politics and economics, a Potemkin village is any construction (literal or figurative) whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better. Is Google Search - the foundational product for a company worth $1682 billion in July 2021 - really just a Potemkin village for either the US as a country, the Internet, or Google itself? I mean, it is just Google, right?
The number two most used search engine is Bing, so they should be reliable, right? Ah, 19.2 million results. Not nearly as much as Google claimed to have, but certainly a respectable number... as long as it pans out. Well, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but by page 48:
Despite still claiming to have 19.2 million results, only three were displayed on page 48. Interestingly, unlike Google's approach, Bing makes it look like there are more pages of results available beyond this one - 49, 50, perhaps more. Unfortunately, when one tries to click on them or click the 'next' icon, it simply reloads page 48. There's no mention of omissions, but we can not access more than 651 of the supposedly 19.2 million results even if we try. Of course, Bing is a Microsoft product. Whether ultimately due to programming laziness, corporate greed, or secret arrangements with government agencies, maybe it's all just a 'big tech' thing?
DuckDuckGo is probably the most well known 'privacy browser' out there. They've built a good reputation for taking the privacy of their users seriously because big tech never did. I considered posting screen shots of my 'climate change' search on DuckDuckGo, but decided against it for three reasons: First, they don't promise a particular number of search results on the first page of returned results. Second, instead of displaying a number of pages at the bottom of the results like other searches do, they have a bland 'show more' button. Third, clicking 'show more' yielded a second page of results, and there was no 'show more' at the bottom of page two. So, basically, only two pages of results. About an existential threat to humanity. That's it.
These steps and their disturbing results can be repeated easily enough by searching for virtually any term, person, brand, you name it. Search engines will claim to return millions if not billions of results which suddenly evaporate into thin air if you try to pursue them. The vast majority of visible results will be from 2016 onward (within the past 5 years, as of this posting) with most being from the past year or two. Is this proof of Dead Internet Theory? I stumbled across it a couple years ago, and frankly I'm not sure what exactly it's proof of... but isn't it significant... and a little creepy? Whether or not Dead Internet Theory is right about how and why this is going on, search engines are behaving in a way that seems to support the basic idea that there's not really as much on the internet as we're being led to believe - or, if that content really does exist, it has been made inaccessible to the vast majority of users.
The basic idea behind Dead Internet Theory is that the internet as it exists now is empty, devoid of real people, and that the U.S. government is using the power of AI to gaslight the entire world population.
Now, you may be thinking: That's a pretty wild theory, but if it's true there should be more proof than an overabundance of seemingly repetitive news articles about the moon and various government contracts with Google, Facebook, Amazon, et al. After all, why wouldn't our government want to utilize the best technology platforms available? Is that really proof of some nefarious attempt at worldwide manipulation?
The internet was always supposed to be a place where people who create content could share that content with a worldwide audience. As such, it makes logical sense that the internet has grown exponentially since the 1990's - the 'truth' of it is rarely even questioned. So, is there anything grounded in reality to suggest that maybe the internet is actually shrinking? Well, if it was shrinking that might explain so-called 'Internet Rot' and studies showing that about 50% of links cited in court opinions since 1996 as well as 75% of links in the Harvard Law Review no longer work anymore! But surely this is just the result of a natural cycle of older content getting removed or relocated, newer content taking its place, and links not getting updated right? ...right?
What if that truth has been in front of us all along, but most of us just don't even know where to look? Well, here's a suggestion fit for our times: Google it!
Google what? As you'll discover, it doesn't even really matter what. Google anything that should have tons of results - climate change, Michael Jackson, COVID, even the word 'anything'! For this example, I'll use Climate Change. No matter what you believe about climate change, it's been called the existential crisis of our times, and it's been about 50 years since scientists first warned about it. So, the internet - ie. modern humanity's library - should have decades worth of information about climate change, right?
So, your first search is going to look something like this:
942 MILLION results?! Gnarly, right! This feels about right for something that basically everyone in the world has heard about - something that many people think poses an existential threat to the entire human race. It only took .72 seconds for Google to search the farthest corners of the internet and return 942 million results. Eat your heart out, dewey decimal system! Of course, despite the promise of millions of results, most of us never go past the first page of results, am I right?
Sometimes, something funny happens when you go to page 2 of a Google search:
Wait, now there's only 725 million results!? What happened to the over 200 million more we were promised on the first page? Well, in fairness, we were never really going to look at those last two hundred million anyway, right? Besides, 725 million results is still more than enough! And this search was even quicker - 0.67 seconds! Maybe it just overlooked a couple. No biggie, there's still totally decades worth of human knowledge about this threat at our fingertips, accessible any time we want... until we get to page 19:
Wait, what? Only 189 results? About CLIMATE CHANGE?? On the most used search engine in the world?? How could this happen?!?!?! A quick trip to the bottom of the page provides a potential explanation:
Ah, okay, I see what you did there, Google. You just omitted 'some' of the results, because the other 725 million (or maybe 942 million) of those results were really very similar to the first 189. There sure have been a lot of news stories for decades now about rising sea levels and melting ice caps, so why not? It makes sense, but it also feels a bit overgeneralized, Google. What if the details of what we know about rising sea levels or melting ice caps have changed over time (spoiler: they have). How do we know if we can trust Google's opinion of how similar all those results really are? Ok, I'll play along Google, let's 'repeat the search with the omitted results included', please and thank you:
Okay, my repeated search has 860 million results. That's somewhere between the estimates on our first and second search pages before, and yet another nice round number that in no way feels like a contrived estimate. Moreover, this time I should have ALL of that knowledge at my fingertips, with none of the results omitted by an overzealous algorithm. ...Except, something happens when moving from page 43 to page 44, see if you can spot the difference:
Wait, why are there only 438 results now?? And, just how many of those ARE fundamentally the same or similar to the original 189 displayed? How can the most widely used search engine in the world only have 438 total results about one of the most widely discussed issues in the world? How can there only be 438 results - including duplicates - about an issue that stands to impact the entire world and all of humanity? Is this just another error of omission?
Seemingly not. No more comforting message assures us that some of the results have been omitted. This is, essentially, the 'end of the line'.
I scrolled back through the 44 pages of results, curious to see what 438 results Google had curated for its users about climate change. Notably, of the results that were dated on Google's search pages, the only ones prior to 2016 (and there were only a handful) were from various government websites, the IPCC, university research branches, and scientific publications. Personal blogs, web pages, and any content created by individuals not affiliated with the media or government entities were curiously absent.
Now, we should certainly be asking what on earth has happened to the undoubtedly millions of pages of content that people have created over the years about the various aspects of, dangers, and sentiments around climate change. Are they actually there somewhere, in the background, but for some reason inaccessible through Google search? Are they really just gone? We should also be asking: why would Google want everyone to think there are hundreds of millions more results out there than there actually are? In both politics and economics, a Potemkin village is any construction (literal or figurative) whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better. Is Google Search - the foundational product for a company worth $1682 billion in July 2021 - really just a Potemkin village for either the US as a country, the Internet, or Google itself? I mean, it is just Google, right?
The number two most used search engine is Bing, so they should be reliable, right? Ah, 19.2 million results. Not nearly as much as Google claimed to have, but certainly a respectable number... as long as it pans out. Well, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but by page 48:
Despite still claiming to have 19.2 million results, only three were displayed on page 48. Interestingly, unlike Google's approach, Bing makes it look like there are more pages of results available beyond this one - 49, 50, perhaps more. Unfortunately, when one tries to click on them or click the 'next' icon, it simply reloads page 48. There's no mention of omissions, but we can not access more than 651 of the supposedly 19.2 million results even if we try. Of course, Bing is a Microsoft product. Whether ultimately due to programming laziness, corporate greed, or secret arrangements with government agencies, maybe it's all just a 'big tech' thing?
DuckDuckGo is probably the most well known 'privacy browser' out there. They've built a good reputation for taking the privacy of their users seriously because big tech never did. I considered posting screen shots of my 'climate change' search on DuckDuckGo, but decided against it for three reasons: First, they don't promise a particular number of search results on the first page of returned results. Second, instead of displaying a number of pages at the bottom of the results like other searches do, they have a bland 'show more' button. Third, clicking 'show more' yielded a second page of results, and there was no 'show more' at the bottom of page two. So, basically, only two pages of results. About an existential threat to humanity. That's it.
These steps and their disturbing results can be repeated easily enough by searching for virtually any term, person, brand, you name it. Search engines will claim to return millions if not billions of results which suddenly evaporate into thin air if you try to pursue them. The vast majority of visible results will be from 2016 onward (within the past 5 years, as of this posting) with most being from the past year or two. Is this proof of Dead Internet Theory? I stumbled across it a couple years ago, and frankly I'm not sure what exactly it's proof of... but isn't it significant... and a little creepy? Whether or not Dead Internet Theory is right about how and why this is going on, search engines are behaving in a way that seems to support the basic idea that there's not really as much on the internet as we're being led to believe - or, if that content really does exist, it has been made inaccessible to the vast majority of users.
Last edited:
Virtual Cafe Awards
) links, and sort of the layout of the site. White background. There were a couple of ways you could order the links, by newest, by popularity, but only a couple of options, and it was all hard coded of course. If you're familiar with ReactJS, or if you've used facebook/netflix, you know that the searches, the order of the results, etc, are very "dynamic."
