Cultural Context & Sighting
The prompt in the wild.
“A post has two thousand comments. Each says roughly the same thing in a different brand voice. Someone types “dead internet” and everybody understands the feeling, even if nobody agrees on the theory.”
Why AI brought it back
Generative AI made it cheap to produce endless convincing text and images, so the theory became a shorthand for feeds full of AI slop and bots replying to bots.
Use it as a folk diagnosis of the web’s uncanny atmosphere, not as evidence that a secret cabal replaced every person you meet online.
