TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY
The attention economy was already broken. AI is about to break it much, much further.
The fundamental problem of the social media era was that the supply of content grew faster than human attention could process it. Platforms responded by building increasingly sophisticated recommendation algorithms to decide what each person should see — algorithms that, by design, optimised for engagement rather than truth, quality, or user wellbeing.
AI-generated content changes the supply side of that equation in a way that has no historical precedent.
The Volume Problem
A single person with AI tools can now produce more content in a day than a newsroom could in a month. That content can be tailored to specific search terms, specific emotional triggers, specific audience segments. It can be personalised, localised, and updated continuously at essentially zero marginal cost.
The result is an internet where the signal-to-noise ratio is deteriorating faster than filtering tools can compensate. The Dead Internet Theory — the idea that most online content is now generated by bots for bots — was fringe speculation in 2022. In 2026, it’s looking increasingly like a reasonable description of large parts of the web.
“The Dead Internet Theory was fringe speculation in 2022. In 2026, it looks like a reasonable description of large parts of the web.”
What Survives
The content that retains value in this environment shares a set of characteristics: it is genuinely specific (about a real experience, a real place, a real person), it is provably human (contains errors, personality, emotional texture that AI smooths away), and it builds on a relationship of trust that predates AI abundance. Community, specificity, and trust are the scarce resources now. Everything else is increasingly commodity.
Tags: Artificial Intelligence • Opinion • Technology & Society • 192.168.1.22/