Episode 9. The Internet Is Already Dead And We're The Ones Who Killed It

The internet used to be a massive, weird frontier. Now it is a consolidated feed trough run by five companies, designed to eviscerate your dopamine baseline and keep you catatonic. We talk a lot about the "Dead Internet Theory" and bots taking over, but the reality is much darker: we are the dead internet.In this episode, we are diagnosing the death of cyberspace, the absurdity of algorithmic slop, and how to actually escape the digital animal farm.Chapters:00:00 - Intro & The Peter Thiel Origin Story00:57 - The 5 Apps Controlling Human Attention01:57 - The Real Dead Internet Theory03:52 - RIP StumbleUpon & The Lost Cyberspace05:25 - The Clockwork Orange Dopamine Machine08:23 - The Surviving Ruins of the Old Web11:57 - Why Algorithms Don't Understand Humans13:39 - Marshall McLuhan & The Shrinking Window15:20 - How to Actually Escape the Feed TroughLinks Mentioned:Luke Smith’s Website: https://lukesmith.xyz/Project Kamp: https://projectkamp.com/Low-Tech Magazine (Solar-powered server): https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/If you know of any other weird, brilliant, or brutalist corners of the internet that haven't been swallowed by the algorithm, send them my way!