Cindy Steinberg and the Dead Internet Theory
By 
“Cindy Steinberg,” the monstrously heartless leftist with the very Jewish name, whose tweet celebrating the death of children at Christian summer camp in Texas helped Elon Musk’s generative AI chatbot Grok make the transition to a fully Nazi identity (man I’m already tired and this sentence isn’t over yet), turns out to be an imaginary person, or more precisely, a troll account created by somebody trying to fan outrage on the right about monstrously heartless leftists with very Jewish names.
The account’s photo was stolen from an OnlyFans account, and the real person it depicts has been bombarded with hate messages, because of course, as has the most prominent of the many real Cindy Steinbergs in the so called real world.
This lovely little interlude brought to my attention the Dead Internet Theory:
The dead Internet theory is a conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.[1][2][3][4][5] Proponents of the theory believe these social bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumers.[6][7] Some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception.[2][6] The date given for this “death” is generally around 2016 or 2017.[2][8][9] The dead Internet theory has gained traction because many of the observed phenomena are quantifiable, such as increased bot traffic, but the literature on the subject does not support the full theory.
A side point: calling something a conspiracy theory is not in itself derogatory without more, or at least it shouldn’t be. After all, the world features both plenty of actual conspiracies, and theories about them. For example I believe that Elon Musk et al are part of an informal and loosely organized conspiracy among various leaders of the tech plutocracy to take over as much of the American government as they can get their hands on, and that at this point this isn’t so much a theory as it is an easily observable fact.
Anyway: after doing my own research, I would say that the Dead Internet Theory features a lot of exaggeration, hyperbole, and paranoia, but also an uncomfortable amount of truth. How much of the internet now consists of imaginary persons of one kind or another yelling at or past each other? How much of the “information” on it is simply the product of troll farms or the like, rather than actual interpersonal communication of some sort between actual persons? It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out, or that’s the working theory at least.
Relatedly, a friend who has thought about this stuff a lot suggested the following about the social effects of life in Cyberland:
We are hardwired to consider the world in terms of us vs other. We have made progress (against racism, etc.) because we live in increasingly diverse communities. We don’t overcome “us vs them”, we just come to accept more people as “us”.
But because of advances in technology, our community is no longer the people we live amongst. It used to be that our community was our family (of course) but also our neighbors that we chatted with or , the colleagues we encountered at the office, the people we met when we went into town to shop.
But now we don’t do that. Family, yes, still. But so many of us don’t encounter colleagues at work, we work from home. We don’t encounter people at the stores, we shop online. Our interaction with restaurants is saying our name and having them hand us a takeout bag of food we ordered on our phone. We barely even know our neighbors.
So that forced interaction with a diverse community is dying. Instead, we’ve replaced it with online interactions. Our community is family plus Facebook friends plus Facebook groups plus Instagram feeds plus YouTube videos.
In the past, if we went into town and shared strong political beliefs based on bullshit lies, the people we ran into would say something. Challenge us. Roll their eyes, something. But now, we can choose to only interact with people who won’t make us feel bad that way. And the algorithms they use make sure that they only feed us the things we agree with.
That basic thing that made our world better, forcing us to confront diversity and different opinions, has been killed by allowing us to choose our community, and reinforcing it via algorithms.
If Philip K. Dick were still alive, he would have written We Can Distort It For You Wholesale.