Enshittification’s Final Form Is The Dead Internet Theory

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Do you notice how there are twice as many ads on YouTube videos? Or how almost everything is a subscription or behind a paywall? Have you ever thought at least or longed for the good old days of the internet? If you ever feel like your experience with a platform has degraded over time, you’re not imagining it; that is what we would be exploring.

In today's piece, we will explore the concept that The Dead Internet Theory is the final form of The Enshittification of the Internet. I will explore the separate concepts of each and the convergence of each.

By definition, the Dead Internet Theory (DIT) is the idea that much of the internet’s authentic, human-created content has been replaced by AI-generated noise (AI Slop) and manipulative algorithms. In essence, it suggests that much of what appears to be organic human activity online is, in fact, artificial. Enshittification describes the life cycle of digital platforms: they begin by providing real value to attract users, then slowly degrade the experience in pursuit of profit once users and advertisers (ads) are locked in.

My Thesis, due to the life cycle of enshittification of the internet and its digital platforms, in addition to the speed and proliferation of AI slop, the entirety at worst, and a significant majority of the internet and its platforms would be filled with AI slop.

In this essay, I will explore the concept of enshittification and discuss how each phase works. I will then explore case studies of enshittification. These case studies would explore examples from former startups that are now mega-corporations, such as Uber, Amazon, and Meta. Then we would explore younger corporations that are in the current throes of enshittification, which are Duolingo, Twitter, and Reddit. After this, we would then explore why companies enshittify their platforms and their programme.

I will then discuss the divergence of Enshittification and AI. By this, I will be discussing and showing how the enshittification of the internet was turbochrged by AI. I will then discuss the evidence of the proliferation of AI slop on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, and what the consequence of that would be, ergo, the dead internet theory.

I, I will reach the crux of the show, how the dead internet theory is turbocharged by AI, as the final cycle of enshittification. I will first show evidence of DIT pre-AI, such as fake reviews, fake likes, and bots. Then explore how the capacity of AI to generate photos, videos, text, and entire social media profiles.

Finally we give our stance with AI. We at Read It And Eat have to disclose our own use of AI, with a focus on it being an efficient tool and not a crutch. We ensure not to outsource the thinking part of the content generation and newsletter writing to the LLM. In terms of grammar and correction, and conciseness, we lean on these platforms for it. We also feed these expert analyses, including all of our research, into Google’s LLM that enables us to generate the podcast you are listening to, so even though it is summarised and voiced by AI, it is an augmentation to well-researched ideas and strong fundamental analyses. We call it bringing the Intelligence back to Artificial Intelligence.

Finally, we would then explore any pushback and resistance against Enshittification. We would explore what governments are doing or trying to do to curb these excesses with such things as the enforcement of anti-monopolistic actions and policies, demanding transparency within algorithms, and the enforcement of regulatory safety standards for members of society who are more vulnerable to the negatives of AI, such negatives like fraud, misinformation, and tyrannical conspiracies. We would also discuss what upstart companies are doing to ensure they buck the trend of enshittification, and the return to the nostalgia of the early internet such as, dedicated retro style forums. We would then discuss personal anecdotes we have or have seen online that we agree with, whereby people are seeking human-curated and human-verified spaces that they are allowed to detach from AI slop and seek to consume works and pieces that are still distinctively human.

Enshittification:

This is a relatively novel theory by Cory Doctorow. In a 2023 piece for his website, he starts with a powerful but apt phrase: “Here is how platforms die.” In his piece, which we recommend you read, he simplifies enshittification in a few sentences: “first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

To simplify, consider the Venus Flytrap; it lures insects with a sweet nectar produced on the inner surface of their leaves, and the reddish coloration of the inner leaf lining also attracts insects. Once the insect lands and gets comfortable drinking the sap, they lose all situational awareness. The inner surface of the trap lobes contains sensitive "trigger hairs". When an insect touches one of these hairs, within 20 seconds the plant snaps shut, slowly digesting the insect. In this analogy, the platforms are the Venus Flytraps, while other smaller businesses and regular customers are lured in and squeezed for every bit of money and attention.

The Phases of Enshittification

Per Cory Doctorow, the three phases of Enshittification are the user growth and abuse stage as the first, the business partners growth and abuse stage as the second, and then finally the death of the company. I do not necessarily agree that these companies die; I just think they either pivot into another revenue-generating area, shrink to a fifth of their original size, or be bailed out by the government. As such, I propose a slight alteration to the phases of enshittification:

1. User Growth Phase: At the start, the platform needs its users, so it offers exceptional service, generous terms, and extraordinary discounts, it tweaks its algorithm to ensure that the results produced are relevant to the user, the user is also locked into a free, freemium, and/or free with ads version and the ads on the platform are very minimal. This stage is typically fuelled by rounds of venture capital funding. At this point, the product is amazing, its offering and the perks it gives when signing up are so generous that you, if you’re anything like me, briefly think about how unsustainable this entire phase is.

2. Business Partners Growth Phase: Now that the customers are locked in, the company and or platform turns its focus to growing its business partners, the second side of the market. This includes them having generous sign-on benefits such as free shipping, free returns, and a reduced commission paid on the items sold. There would also be incredible bonuses and promises of even more money/benefits if they switch from their competitors’ platform to theirs. Furthermore, the business gets their products placed on the first page and they do not have to pay even more to have their products show up first on the said platform

3. Extraction Phase: At this stage, the platform has gained enough users on both sides of the market and has become the default in their industry. Even though they have competitors, they hold so much market share that there’s no need to compete. Almost overnight in some instances, or maybe over a year, the platforms become worse. In the case of the ordinary consumer, they start off as mildly to moderately inconvenient, such as the introduction of unskippable ads, a $2 increase in the price of the subscription, or a feature you’ve been using for years that is suddenly paywalled/put in a more expensive tier. Then, it goes to being grossly unjust, such as having ads in a subscription tier that you are already paying for, or the multiple fees that ensure the product or service becomes, on average, 60% more expensive. In the case of businesses, the platforms also become mildly to moderately inconvenient, such as an increase in the commission paid to the platform, being pushed from page 3-4, or having a lower take-home pay per gig. Then the platform becomes incredibly unjust with policies such as using tips to subsidise drivers' pay, having an algorithm close down your entire business account for no reason and without recourse, or Amazon’s Most Favoured Nation clause, which prohibits sellers from selling their product cheaper on any other platform than they do on Amazon. This is to extract as much value as possible in terms of money or attention that can be monetised.

Enshittification obviously isn’t just theoretical, but it is happening within established trillion-dollar tech giants, and also the newer and smaller platforms. Below, I will highlight briefly instances where these platforms deliberately enshittified their platform. The goal is to get as many people on their platform as quickly as possible

Trillion Dollar Behemoths

• Amazon:

You might call this the lowest-hanging fruit to use as an example of enshittification, but it cannot be avoided. Amazon might be the personification of enshittification. To their users, they offered them the exact products they’re looking for at a reasonable price with the added convenience of next-day delivery, at some point they were selling products at a loss. They also produced and bought a solid roster of content for their Prime Video, grouping it with the cost of your Prime membership. Returns were hassle-free, and you had the Alexa, a personal assistant for you. In essence, the regular consumer was their customer. Then the extraction occurred first with advertising bloat (making almost $60 billion in 2024 in ads alone), starting with an increase in the cost of prime membership, a tier for Prime Video where you paid for it but still had to watch ads, just fewer ads than the free version. Then, the invasion of sponsored listings on their website, these days taking up about the first 1-1.5 pages of the search results. These sponsored products are not even from reputable brands, or are of low quality and or counterfeit; it is usually just from those who have the money to pay for the coveted sponsored space. At this point, you are no longer the customer; you are the product. If you wish to dive deeper into that, we wrote a piece about it here

In relation to the small businesses on their platforms, they initially offered commission-free product placement, hassle-free logistics handling, and even storage in their warehouses were reasonably priced. Furthermore, the business just had to name the product accurately to be discovered on the platform, plus they did not have to compete with Amazon-branded products, which typically would be placed in the first few pages of the search results. Now, with fulfilment fees, advertising costs, and higher storage charges, competition from drop-shippers to Amazon itself, small businesses find themselves dependent on a platform that actively competes with them. In addition to the Most Favoured Nation clause and the fact that an algorithm can unilaterally temporarily/indefinitely suspend your business account. Furthermore, the placement in the search results is going to the highest bidder and not necessarily the highest quality product.

I have barely even scratched the surface of the Enshitification of Amazon. If this piques your interest, then you can watch the video below.

• Google:

With such market dominance in the world of advertising and the search engines, Google’s deliberate enshittification has become clear to those who are able to spot patterns. Initially, their search engine was constantly outranking the market; they had a wonderful product, it was so good that in 2002, the American Dialect Society chose it as the "most useful word of 2002". It was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2006. Google was synonymous with search. Google started paying Apple to be the default search engine on Apple devices in 2002, initially for free, but later with revenue sharing from search advertising. By 2021, Google was paying Apple over $1 billion per month. In 2022, it was revealed that Google paid Apple $20 billion to maintain its default search engine status on Safari.

That money had to be recouped somehow, and unfortunately, the ordinary consumer who uses the site for free is, just like with Amazon, the product being sold. The quality of the search results shown has declined over time; it is so bad that Google is being described as “An ad delivery company that occasionally shows search results.” In this pay-to-play system, Google allocates the best spaces to those willing to outspend everyone else in ad spend, rather than prioritising the quality of the search results.

In terms of smaller businesses, they used to be able to count on the fact that if their pages were unique, directed at the niche, and cross-linked for verification, then they would have a shot at being on the first few screens of the Google search; there was no need to have an employee or a team for the purpose of ensuring you are at the top of Google search results. That was until they changed their algorithm and inadvertently created the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry that is predicted to reach a market size of just over $100 billion in 2025. Even though descriptive in its wording, it may be imperative to explain what SEO is; it is the practice of improving a website's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). It's a digital marketing strategy focused on increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through unpaid, or "organic," search results. In simpler terms, SEO helps make your website easier for people to find when they search for things online. However, all the technicalities and loops to ensure that your page and product get shown first have been done away with virtually, and it is now an extraction form, for those who wish to have their products and pages at the first few places on the Google search results, if they are willing to pay just a little more than their competitors, a price that only continues to go up. Furthermore, if you are a business relying on Google AdSense revenue either online or on YouTube, the payouts have gotten progressively smaller per view.

There is so much more to discuss when it comes to Google’s Enshittification, whether it is within their search engine, their ad spaces, or even the vast amount of customers and users’ data that has been used to feed their language models and build their AI systems. If you wish to delve deeper into Enshittification as it relates specifically to Google, then you can watch the video below.

Billion Dollar Upstarts

• Duolingo

Even if you have probably never used Duolingo, you have probably heard of it or even seen the bird, Duo the Mascot, on social media, or have probably heard the high-pitched jingle by someone using it near you. The platform has done an incredible job at gamifying the language learning experience to ensure that users keep returning day after day.

For users, it had multiple cycles of popularity. For starters, users felt like the time spent on Duolingo was productive compared to the time spent on other social media platforms, as they felt they were learning a new language. In addition, they introduced streaks, a record of consecutive days a user completes at least one lesson on the Duolingo language learning platform. It's a motivational tool designed to encourage consistent daily practice and is represented by a flame icon.

In addition, there's the mascot Duo, who would send you reminders as notifications that became even more unhinged as the day proceeds. The reminder is to finish a lesson and maintain your streak. By reason of knowing the nature of the freemium business model, paying for use not by cash but attention via the forced watching of inconvenient ads, I wasn’t too bothered by the ads, and their frequency was mildly invasive. I had maintained on two separate occasions streaks longer than 300 days, and there certainly were many days that I had opened the app at 11:57 pm and did the lesson that was fastest to complete just so that I could maintain my streak. Via social media, Duolingo had also gained a brand identity of being edgy and mildly unhinged in their responses, usually having edgy responses to their users on TikTok. Their mascot also grew into being a cultural icon itself as it inserted itself into trends on TikTok while playing into the encouragement of doing the lesson. Their marketing, which seemed part planned and part organic, was grown by Zaria Parvez, garnered tens of millions of followers and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of views. A lesser-known fact is that Duolingo’s lessons are run by an unpaid community of people who volunteer their time to build, update, and improve the language lessons, which are monitored and cleared by the Duolingo employees, in essence, your lessons were built and improved by natives who spoke the language and had the capacity to build lessons that ensure you learn the language and its nuances voluntarily, I found this out when I wanted to have my local dialect added as a language on Duolingo

Inevitably, the deliberate enshittification happened, and the value extraction machine was turned up. First, a keen eye would notice that I stressed the premise that you feel like you’re learning a language; that is deliberate. With Duolingo, there is the illusion of learning a language, which, if you are a consistent Duolingo user, you might agree. It can be argued that finishing a lesson for the sole purpose of maintaining my streak would obviously mean that I am truly not learning the language; however, it is far more than that. I could counter by pointing out the missing cultural context and nuance, or the changes in pronunciation and accents [for example, the Spanish word “Hacer” meaning “to do” is pronounced “ah - thehr” in Spain and “ah - sehr” in Latin American Spanish-speaking countries]. However, I would state that fundamentally, as a business model, Duolingo is “an ad delivery company that occasionally teaches you a language.” Their primary aim is to ensure you return to the app daily via the notifications and then keep you engaged on the platform as long as possible to serve up to you a myriad of ads until you cave and pay their subscriptions or just leave. When asked about maintaining/managing the conflict that arises between gamification and engagement on one hand, and the education of its users on the other, he said “Very easily, Always go with engagement.” his argument is that “It doesn’t matter how effective you are, you can’t teach someone who’s not there.” To simplify, choosing between teaching its users a new language or keeping them engaged, Duolingo focuses on maintaining engagement, but its okay because you can’t teach someone who isn’t there.

Secondly, the quality of their lessons has deteriorated greatly. Their push to not only use AI but reorient their business strategy to become AI-First has led to the dismissal of human translators and content creators in favour of AI-generated materials. They have also removed the forums from volunteers, and their moderators, both contracted and permanent, have been let go. This has led to the deterioration of the quality of their lessons, which, in my experience, looks like the translation of meaningless sentences, repetition of entire lessons at higher levels, and overall, a feeling of the same fatigue after an unplanned scrolling session on social media. There is also uncertainty as to the social media strategy going forward with Duolingo, as the brilliant mind who created and executed such virality, Zaria Parvez,  surreptitiously resigns. There is much more to discuss in relation to the Enshittification of Duolingo and the methods used to extract value from its customers than I can use this essay to say; however, the video below would provide an excellent analysis.

• TikTok

Regarding the Enshittification of TikTok, many things can be said, however, it seems only right to provide an excerpt from Cory Doctorow himself, especially because in the 2023 article which he coined enshittification, he titled it TikTok’s Enshittification.

TikTok is many different things, including "a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.” But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, TikTok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good. By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, TikTok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like YouTube and Instagram. Now that TikTok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to YouTube and Instagram.

Forbes's Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, TikTok's parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a "heating tool" that TikTok employees use to push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers' feeds:

These videos go into TikTok users' ForYou feeds, which TikTok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos "ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behaviour in the app." In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that TikTok thinks will add value to your experience – the rest of the time, it's full of videos that TikTok has inserted in order to make creators think that TikTok is a great place to reach an audience.

"Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

However, TikTok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. TikTok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximising artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. TikTok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetise it.

[Interrupting the excerpt to comment] I was one of those who adopted TikTok pretty late, only making an account around 2022. Between then and now, TikTok has enshittified so much that I use it only as a search. Engine. Anecdotally feels like I watch 3 ads for every one video. My “For You” page is a video from a big account (heating tool), the first ad, User Generated Content for a brand (another Ad), another video of someone promoting their small business, and then finally a video from my friend; it is practically unusable. If you wish to read the entire Enshittification of TikTok article, click here.

Why Do Companies Enshittify?

There are a myriad of reasons as to why companies deliberately enshittify, and remembering that companies mainly exist to increase shareholder value, it is easy to assume the justifications for it.  The thing about enshittification, once you observe and experience it in one area, you become aware of it in almost everywhere else. That being said, I will highlight two reasons for Enshittification:

• Monopoly Power

Lina Khan, the previous (and also the youngest) Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, when discussing big tech, argues that some dominant tech companies have become "too big to care" about consumer needs, a phenomenon, as she describes it, that allows these companies to potentially stifle innovation and competition without facing significant consequences.

Tech companies have grown so large and so market-dominating that it is akin to an Oligopoly. This leads to coordinated price fixing and enshittification broadly. Each of these companies has this thing called an Ecosystem, whereby it's easy and frictionless to begin using their products and or platforms, but making a switch is incredibly difficult. It’s called the “Switching cost;” simply put, everything that you have to give up when you leave a product or a service. In essence, just like in an abusive relationship, these platforms are offering a worse service, asking, “Where are you going to go?” And then proceeds to further taunt its users by raising prices, just because it can.

• Shareholder Pressure

Ever since I started covering public companies, I have always been fascinated by investors’ not just desire but demand for infinite growth. It fascinates me deeply because it takes a certain level of cognitive dissonance to know that nothing grows forever, yet still demand that the company you are invested in grows infinitely every quarter. If there is no growth within the company, then there needs to be either a growth (organic or artificial) in the price of the share or an increase in the profits shared via dividends.

It is because businesses are incapable of growing infinitely that they have devised methods to increase the stock price to appease their investors artificially. This is achieved through a mechanism known as stock buybacks or Share repurchases. As the name states, it is when a company repurchases its shares off the open market, which (artificially) increases the price of each share to accommodate the new demand. The money set aside could have been reinvested back into the company via salary raises, increases in bonuses, or other benefits to encourage staff to produce better quality services or improve their platforms. Growth in this case demands extraction and not innovation.

Enshittification Meets AI

A few years ago, I wrote a piece about shrinkflation, and even though more things are being produced overall and at an increasingly rapid pace, the quality of what is being produced has greatly deteriorated. In the article, I gave an example of how the rise of Temu and Shein has shortened greatly the lifecycle of fast fashion. It is the same thing with AI.

An example that may resonate with many readers is the fact that for years, news outlets reported that recruiters and hiring managers were using AI to sort and screen through the applications online that they receive. These AI tools usually cross-reference your CV against the job description, including a checklist of other custom filters, and then give you a ranking in which only the CV with top marks of similarity get seen by the recruiter, not necessarily the most qualified. Seeing this, applicants begun using AI-generated CV’s based on the job description to fool the AI that parses through their CV to get an even higher similarity score, thus leaving recruiters in a mess of their own making, whereby they are overwhelmed by AI-generated CVs.

I need to clarify my stance on AI, it is a tool, a revolutionary, a game-changing tool. The same way that a hammer can be used to both build a house, or commit murder, it doesn’t change the fact that the hammer is still just a tool. It is excellent in the ways I rely on it, and has helped me cover blindspots as it knows much more than I do. It is also helpful with increasing efficiency, such as grammar, conciseness, and punctuation. I use DeepSeek to flesh out ideas for pieces while maintaining creative control. In essence, it has its good and I am excited to see how much better it can get.

However, it’s both good and bad, it just depends on how we as a collective society decide to use it. The reason I have a cap on my excitement for AI, is because historically, it shows that every tool and invention, regardless of what we call it always has the fundamental flaws of humanity such as bias, overconfidence, violence etc. Examples can be seen in all great inventions from nuclear power to the internet. That is why sadly believe that AI would be built I with those flaws, regardless of how excellent the tool ends up being, I do believe AI would be a net positive to humanity.

The Dead Internet Theory

It can be argued that the Internet is on a downward spiral of both quality and quantity in the past decade. Do you remember when each social media platform was siloed from the other? The days when you go to Instagram to see what and how your friends are doing, and going to use  Twitter as a public diary. Unlike now, as it has decayed, to just viral tweets showing up on your Instagram feed or what Tom Eastman calls “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.”

It suggests that the World Wide Web has strayed so far from its initial construction and is now overrun by bots and automated activity that the supermajority of all online content is now fake. It posits that, when browsing online websites or even social media, you are most likely not interacting with humans; instead, the theory proposes that you are trapped in a cycle of robotic interactions with digital programs where the end goal is to either manipulate behaviour, retain attention, and/or generate profit. Generating online content through the mass propagation of bot networks and artificial tools allows people to manipulate search results, algorithmic promotion, and consumer behaviour, which ultimately leads to profiteering via ads, affiliate sales or even malicious attacks.

This is beyond theoretical, as an analysis by cybersecurity firm Imperva revealed that automated and AI-powered bots accounted for 51% of all web traffic in 2024, with so-called “bad bots” at their highest level since the firm started tracking them in 2013.

It gets much worse, using Facebook as an example, in the third quarter of 2024, Facebook took action on 1.1 billion fake accounts, down from 1.2 billion in the previous quarter. A record figure of approximately 2.2 billion fake profiles were removed by the social media platform in the first quarter of 2019. Meta considers fake accounts to be those that are created with malicious intent or created to represent a business, organization, or non-human entity. As Facebook is the most used social media platform worldwide, it is not surprising that the service is a target for inauthentic activity and potentially harmful content. Per Statista, between 2017 and 2022 (5 years), Facebook has suspended over 27 billion fake accounts. These numbers, staggering as they may be are just the ones that Facebook is aware of and catches.

DIT Meets AI

Even if you do not wish to, you most likely have seen, interacted with, or even consumed content made by generative AI. It's one of its major use cases for AI. Every step of the process is outsourced to AI; 11 Labs’ AI platform for the voice, ChatGPT then generates the script, Midjourney’s AI platform for the visuals. The concept of generating fast, easy, and most especially low-quality content (slop) and then monetising it via advertising, affiliate marketing, etc, is not just limited to social media platforms but is proliferating across the entire online world.Terms of Service for a specific AI-powered article generation platform called Byword says

"When we're talking about thousands of pages, it's simply not viable to edit all of them prior to publishing.

This is partially because SEO is a long-term game, and the benefits of having pages rank sooner will likely outweigh the costs of having unedited content live. Equally, though, not many brands can afford the sheer amount of resources required to edit that much content.

This is why my advice is to typically not edit the content and just put it live. As and when pages start to rank, prioritise your editing based on what's generating the most traffic.”

In essence, they are suggesting that you generate as much low-value, low-quality content as you can, fact-checking and editing none of it, and releasing all of it.

When considering you can have your AI Agent (a more efficient automated bot) can build and repeat the cycle tens of thousands of time per day, you can then begin to understand why everything you watch feels soulless and AI-generated from start to finish because it is. People are outsourcing the thinking to AI and even more nefarious people are generating deliberately unintelligent conversations via a very intelligent tool and at an increasingly rapid pace.

The Dead Internet theory is the final stage of the enshittification of the internet itself. The internet grew via the network effect for people, leveraging the need to stay connected with their friends and documenting their lives, it also presented the opportunity to find anyone, buy anything, and know anything. Then the Internet as a collective started prioritising and monetising itself, ads placements being even more invasive, while the consumer was being abused the businesses saw growth and the fact that rather than selling to just a few people around town they can sell half across the world to anyone. Then both smaller businesses and consumers were being squeezed by higher fees and competitors who are willing to overspend to sell their low quality products. Both people and organisations are hurriedly extracting from the internet as much as possible using scale via AI bot farms and AI agents to do even more to extract without providing any value. The internet has now become the Disinformation Age, where attention and ad space is really the only currency.

Our Stance on AI Use

Here at Read It And Eat, we do not frown at the use of AI; we embrace the benefits of speed and efficiency. There are guardrails to its use; it is a tool, not a location to outsource thinking. As such, we use it to elevate the quality of work that we produce as efficiently as possible.

For these analyses, I typically have an idea of the topic or concept I wish to discuss, then I research around it, develop a narrative, and make some rough notes. I then ask AI to rearrange the notes to ensure coherence and to build an outline of subtopics and areas of research. Then the junior writers also do their own research around that topic and produce an essay style report, this enables me to see my narrative fleshed out in different writing styles and with different areas of focus, then, using my research, sources and these reports I produce the article and use AI to give me feedback from the perspective of a professional in that industry. AI is also leveraged to produce critiques on coherence, grammar, spelling, and storytelling ability. With the feedback implemented and the article ready for publishing, we then feed the entire article into our AI platform of choice, which, using this article as the source, produces the podcast you are listening to.

Even though we don’t believe Artificial Intelligence has lost its intelligence, we just believe that by using AI as a tool the way we do, we are actively bringing back the intelligence to content made with artificial intelligence.

Conclusion

The enshittification of our digital world has reached its logical and terminal conclusion. The platforms that once connected us now trap us in a cycle of extraction, trading genuine human interaction for algorithmic engagement and profit. This deliberate degradation, from the unskippable ad to the paywalled feature, has systematically dismantled the internet we once knew. It has created a vacuum of value, a barren landscape ripe for colonization by the most efficient and soulless of settlers. That settler is artificial intelligence, flooding the zone with content that is cheap, scalable, and utterly devoid of meaning. The Dead Internet Theory is no longer a paranoid fantasy but the inevitable destination of this journey, the final form of a process that prioritizes scale over substance.

Yet, even as this tide of AI slop rises, resistance flickers in the digital gloom. A growing hunger for authenticity pushes users toward human-curated spaces, niche forums, and platforms that promise a return to genuine connection. Legislators, however slowly, are beginning to confront monopolistic/oligopolistic power and demand algorithmic transparency, however fraught those efforts may be. This pushback is a testament to the enduring human desire for community and creativity that the early internet embodied. It is a recognition that value must be a two-way exchange, not a one-way extraction. The fight is not to destroy the tool but to reclaim its purpose.

Ultimately, the future of the internet remains a battle between its worst impulses and its best promises. We stand at a crossroads between a dead internet, a sterile wasteland of automated engagement, and a living one, augmented by intelligence but built by humanity. The outcome hinges on our collective choice to demand better from the platforms we use and to support those that buck the trend. It requires us to be intentional consumers, to seek out and champion the distinctly human in a sea of automation. The internet can be saved from its enshittified fate, but only if we decide to build it back, with intention, together.