Habr Published Translation of Essay on 'Dead Economy Theory'—Extension of Dead Internet Theory

Habr published in translation an essay that expands the known "dead internet theory" to the so-called "dead economy theory". The key figure on which the author relies: according to analytical company Graphite.io, more than half of all new content on the internet was generated by artificial intelligence over the past year.

What is dead internet theory

Dead internet theory is the idea that the vast majority of what users encounter online is created by bots and for bots, and the role of living people has shrunk to an audience of machine-generated noise. The author of the essay describes it this way: people still exist on the network, they scroll pages, but the pages themselves have turned into a performance staged by machines for an audience that has not yet realized the show was not put on for them.

• Key source of statistics — report by analytical company Graphite.io
• According to its data, AI generated more than half of all new internet content over the past year
• Author of the essay — translated material, the original publication is dedicated to the phenomenon of AI content online
• New concept introduced by the author — "dead economy theory"

How the author describes the degradation of digital spaces

According to the author's thinking, the promises of the age of "superconnectivity" of people turned out to be the withering of our shared physical spaces — and the digital societies that were supposed to replace them turned into something like one large advertising billboard that is increasingly read and created by bots rather than people.

"Having heeded the promises of an age of human hyperconnectivity, we

permitted the withering of our shared physical spaces, only to find that the promised digital societies have become one large advertising billboard, increasingly read and created by bots," the essay says.

It is from this thought that the author draws off, introducing the theme of "dead economy" — by his formulation, the phenomenon of "something even more lamentable" than the clogging of the internet with AI content, but revealed in the article already beyond the quoted introduction.

What this means

The statistic of half of all new content generated by AI, which the author cites with reference to Graphite.io, is not an abstract observation but a measurable shift: the internet as a space for communication between living people and as a marketplace for business — this, strictly speaking, is already two different things, and the boundary between them continues to blur.