The other day, I saw a tweet that said "The Tumblr NSFW ban was a domino that got knocked over causing everywhere else on the net to be infected with fandombrained nonsense. I can't prove it, but the vibes are there"; this immediately transported me back to December 2018, the day Tumblr (which had just recently been bought by Yahoo) banned every single NSFW account on the platform. I wasn't even a purveyor of NSFW content on the platform, but I know that was an incredibly dark day, we lost a digital third space that day. That in turn, as the twitter user highlighted, caused a small but powerful domino effect that rippled across multiple platforms.

That ban was a perfect case study of platform enshittification, to appease faceless shareholders and executives who had probably never even used the app, Tumblr torched a core part of its ecosystem. A multitude of digital subcultures, from adult content creators, to whovians, to fanfiction writers all built around niche interests were suddenly platform-less. Some users went to X, bloating its fandom corners, joining the K-pop netizens, others fled to niche sites and discord servers. The vibes were, in fact, everywhere. One domino fell and suddenly the cultural topology of the entire Internet shifted.

The de-sexification (don't quote me on this word) of tumblr is a painful microcosm of the Dead Internet Theory. The "Dead Internet" isn't just about bots or the recent onslaught of AI slop, but about the collapse of the organic ecosystem that fostered culture on the web. A significant portion of the internet's content and traffic these days is now generated by AI bots, often for commercial or manipulative purposes and that organic human connection/activity is a shrinking minority. We've also recently seen this with the oopsie update made by X, which revealed that supposed local accounts in specific countries were actually halfway across the world in bot farms.

The Internet used to be a subculture making, subculture fostering space, which is now slowly being dismantled, if not already, by platform consolidation, algorithmic feeds and now the mass integration of AI. We lose our digital third spaces daily, which are replaced by odd apps made by STEM dropouts that have never taken a humanities class. AI now fills that void with synthetic content, completing the cycle of the death rattle.

The concept of the Dead Internet Theory was born in the exact type of space it mourns: a niche, text-based forum. Specifically, the Agora Road's McCleod Forum, which was & is now a forgotten Vaporwave community forum. A user named "Illuminati Pirate" published the piece that gave shape to the creeping dread. The irony of a post lamenting the death of the Internet, now becoming a dead digital space is not lost on me at all.

I believe the death of the Internet has come in three waves.

First, we lost our digital third places. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg defined "third places" as the cafes, pubs, and town squares that were distinct from home and work. The early Internet was built from and to mimic these: forums, chat rooms, independent blogs. They were public, indexable, and stumble-upon-able. You could get lost and find yourself.

Their replacements? The corporate digital mall. Think Discord servers (private, gated), Telegram channels (weird), and Twitch chats (which are algorithmically driven and unique to very specific users who dominate the platform). These are the mall's backrooms, they feel like third spaces, but they're not the open, interconnected public squares of yore. They are spaces optimized for engagement and monetization, not community. The result is a flattening. We've all been banished to the same sterile, uncharted floor of Dante's Inferno.

This is the process writer Cory Doctorow brilliantly calls enshittification (I love this word). Platforms lure us in, then slowly degrade to serve advertisers and shareholders at our expense. Our personal and meaningful digital pubs are bought, branded, and turned into engagement optimized food courts.

Then, AI arrived to finish the job. AI doesn't create culture; it synthesizes and regurgitates existing culture, creating a feedback loop of the uncanny and unsettling. It churns out lifeless travel blogs to nowhere, political rants, strange videos that dominate your explore page and art with no author & shitty hands. This erodes the foundational layer of the web, which I know may be crazy to say is trust. Can you even tell if this article is written by a human? Could I? Our shared digital reality dissolves.

Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and author of 'Simulacra and Simulation (1981) described the simulacrum, as a copy without an original, a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The simulacra being a place where images no longer represent reality, but mask the absence of any underlying reality. AI-generated content is the ultimate simulacrum: a person who never existed, an essay with no mind behind it. The Internet, once a map of human thought and culture, is being replaced by the map itself. A screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot. We are haunted by specters on the web. The enshittification was the first wave; the AI slop being the second.

All isn't lost though, at least I hope it's not. As the indomitable human spirit persists, it enmeshes with the soul of the Internet, giving us a new kind of digital experience. I believe we've entered a third wave: a post-post-Internet phase (not a typo).

This new phase isn't necessarily defined by creating the next big platform, although M*ta and the like would try to convince you otherwise. It's defined by a new, almost archaeological relationship to the web itself. We've all become not just users of the current Internet, we've become its archivists, its mourners and its curators in real time. This is most evident through platforms like the Internet Archive, which I believe to be our modern day Library of Alexandria. We experience the live archiving of the web through it, inhabiting a state of perpetual preservation of the Internet.

So what do I think the post-post-internet actually looks like in practice? It's a digital culture forming with a critical awareness of its own fragility and its archival footprint. Its the rise of new and conscious spaces, like River, where you're reading this, Substack and the resurgence of private blogs. The people have things to say and they want their words to stay. A perfect example of this would be IndieWeb, a community of people who build software to enable independently hosted websites to maintain their personal social data on their web domains rather than on large, centralized social network platforms (digital corporate malls). Their community has 10 core principles which I think perfectly befits the post-post-Internet phase:

1. Own your data.
2. Use & publish visible data for humans first, machines second.
3. Make what you need.
4. Use what you make.
5. Document your stuff.
6. Open source your stuff.
7. UX and design is more important than protocols, formats, data models, schema etc.
8. Modularity.
9. Longevity.
10. Plurality.

and an informal eleventh: "Above all, Have fun."

These principles are a wonderful foundation to build upon for this post-post-Internet age. The bots have won the old web, but we have the opportunity and the tools to build a new one they can't easily occupy or overrun. The dead Internet is a graveyard of lost platforms, lost communities, lost words, but we can reform it into a web that remembers us because we built it with meaning and to last.