Dead Internet Souls

In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few years by government employees traveling across the empire and doing counts; a manual map-reduce of epic proportions. If a person was dead, it would often be years before the government cleared the cache, so to speak, and landowners continued to pay taxes on these dead souls.

Alexandr Pushkin, the greatest living Russian-language author at the time, heard a story about how landowners took advantage of this by buying up dead souls from landowners, and passed this story onto fellow writer, Nikolai Gogol as an idea for a book or play, which resulted in Gogol’s seminal satirical work, “Dead Souls.” Gogol meant dead souls on two levels: both the serfs, and the banality and falsity of Russian landowning society at the time.

The internet today is filled with dead souls. Or, more accurately, souls who were never alive in any sense of the word: text copypasta from LLMS, slop artwork generated from generative art tools, and bots on aging social networks that are quickly emptying of real content as real people migrate to group chats.

It used to be different. In the beginning, the internet was made of people. I came online in the mid 1990s, along with the rest of America, and for the first few years of my internet experience, my primary threat model was someone on AOL finding out that I was 12 (A/S/L , and also where I live. After all, no one on the internet knew if I was a dog.)

Based on my priors, I thought that this would be the world my kids would grow up into as well, and as they got older, I started preparing them against the dangers of strangers on the internet.

But the explosion of generative AI over the past two years has brought to light something even worse: the problems we encounter on the internet today are not because of people, but because of the lack of them, and now the danger is not that you will find people who want to do you harm, but that the amount of slop will overwhelm us all: Not 1984, but Brave New World.

It continues to get worse, and will get much worse before it gets better.

But the good news is that, when there is a lot of noise, it is even easier for people who have original thoughts to stand out. As Justine writes in this important and thought-provoking piece,

In a world of infinite automation and infinite surveillance, survival is going to depend on being the least boring person.

If you are a human out there in the vast wilds of the new internet of dead souls, speak up. We are still out there, on the small web, being ingested into indie search engine indexes, on blogs, on websites.

The machines are thinking, but so are people, and they’re still much better. I’m still out here. Come be out here with me, too.