edit: Hah. I notice it suggests using it at the top of the page if you use 'site:..." - and I only get 5 results for my site when the console claims to have indexed 10 times that many!

edit2: Also duckduckgo returns more like 15 hits ...

Who's the silly one now?

"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content, marginalizing human activity. The date given for this "death" is generally around 2016 or 2017."

Not sure I'd call it a conspiracy theory.

What I find funny about that framing is that, regardless of whether or not the theory has merit, a conspiracy theory by definition asserts that there exists two or more people conspiring with the intent to produce the alleged outcome. From what I understand, dead Internet theory alleges no such collusion or intent. I could be wrong but I believe that it merely suggests that the amount of bot-generated activity has come to dwarf human generated content to the point where the Internet is effectively "dead" from the perspective of its original purpose: humans sharing human knowledge.

But what I'm curious about, whichever number is true, is whether people mean "malicious bots" when they say this, or just any kind of autonomous agent. And also whether they are counting volume of data or simply network requests.

Because if by "bot" they just mean "autonomous agent making a network request" then honestly I'm surprised the number isn't higher, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Every search crawler, every service detector, all the financial bots, every smart device (which is now every device) and a thousand other more or less legitimate uses.

Thoughty2: The internet has died

In this video they rename it from 'theory' to 'prophecy'. As in the internet isn't quite dead yet, but its rot filled bloated body is near its dying breath.