Hi,
Four years ago I wrote about a train engineer who derailed his train near the port in Los Angeles.
He was attempting to slam thousands of tonnes of screaming metal into a docked Navy hospital ship, because he thought it was involved in some shady government conspiracy theory. He thought it was filled with trafficked children that needed rescuing.
I’m sometimes tempted to think the bonkers conspiracy culture that Webworm used to cover a lot has somehow faded. That our brains healed.
But this week, back in Los Angeles, Danielle Johnson pushed her two kids out of her speeding Porsche (one of them, an infant, died) before she slammed into a tree and ignited. Earlier, she’d murdered her boyfriend.
“Astrology Influencer Upset At Eclipse” read various headlines, painting a picture of a person clearly suffering a mental health crisis. But looking further into her life, she was also primed to absorb some of the worst ideas the internet had to offer. “Get to know Danielle”, offered her website:
Danielle is a certified Reiki Master Teacher, who is also trained in over 10 different alternative healing modalities. At a young age, Danielle had a near death experience at 3 years old, which served as her rite of passage into Shamanism.
I’ve written at length about the correlation between wellness woo and conspiracy chaos — which is exactly where Danielle had gone. A brief look through her Twitter timeline (where she goes by “Ayoka”) shows her in the same spaces the train engineer had frequented:
“DO NOT LOOK AT THE ECLIPSE. SOMETHING BIG IS COMING” said a QAnon account Danielle had shared. “WAKE UP WAKE UP” screams the last tweet she sent before throwing her kids onto the freeway.
Something about this story really crept under my skin, and solidified something I’ve been thinking about a lot: That the internet isn’t just full of bad ideas: It’s dying.
When I first got the Internet nearly three decades ago, it cost $5 an hour and looked like this:
I was a lucky kid in that my dad always saw the potential in technology, and wanted his kids to have a head start.
And so when New Zealand’s main telephone company, Telecom, launched its dial up ISP Xtra in 1996 — we got on board. Our freshly installed 14k modem would hiss its digital distortions, taking over the phone line and delivering us “X World” — Xtra’s visualisation of the internet shining out at me from Netscape Navigator.
I was a nerdy kid, and I felt a growing sense of awe that the world’s information was at my fingertips. I didn’t have to go to the library to look up a topic I wanted to find out more about: It was all here.
Three years deep into my Jurassic Park obsession, I was able to search for information about chaos theory and fractals, pretending for a moment I was some kind of genius mathematician. On internet message boards I was able to connect with people from all across the planet, learning about ideas and pop culture I’d never heard of.
In 2024 when I log into the internet — I mostly just see photos of birds with giant testicles.
In amongst all the terrible AI art, an army of bots and humans asking me to look at the pussy in their profiles. It’s unrelenting and increasingly makes apps like Facebook, Instagram and X unusable.
And Danielle? Well, everywhere she looked it was fictitious conspiracy theories and end-of-days nonsense that helped trigger an mentally unwell person to kill her family.
The idea of a dead internet isn’t new, and full disclosure — it started life as its own conspiracy theory. Dead Internet Theory posits that most of the internet is just bots — and that these bots are being used to manipulate the human population.
While I don’t see some grand scheme playing out online to infect the internet with garbage, I think it’s happening organically and it’s happening fast.
Add to this a growing mistrust in the “mainstream media” — which in the past has helped hold those in power to account — and I think we’re in a really precarious position where people are desperately seeking information — and it’s increasingly just not there.
Instead: Bird testicles.
In New Zealand it’s been confirmed that more than 350 journalism-related jobs will be axed as TV3 kills its news division entirely, and TVNZ cuts things back:
New Zealand’s news media has been dealt a major blow after two of its primary news outlets announced programme closures and hundreds of job losses between them on the same day, leaving the country with just one state-owned news television service and many senior journalists out of work.
Over on Facebook, a great deal of the online population is reacting with cries of “Go Woke Go Broke” — a reminder of Trump’s “fake news” catchphrase he made so popular.
Everywhere I look, I see people bristling against the things I find so important in my own life.
Verified information.
Sanity.
Logic.
I’m not quite sure how we navigate this new dead internet, and how we rescue those already too far adrift.
I’m curious what your experience is like online. I’m here to have my mind changed on this — to rekindle that dream of an internet full of hope and good ideas.
David.
A Dead Internet?