According to Wikipedia, the dead internet theory is a conspiracy theory suggesting that the internet died sometime around 2016 to 2017 and is now largely dominated by bots and AI -generated content rather than people.
But there's something even more surprising about this theory that nobody's talking about.
Now, I'm not sure why we still label this as a conspiracy theory because most of the internet is made up of bots and AI content.
And it will only get worse, but honestly, I don't really see this as a problem.
In fact, it could present one of the greatest opportunities for creatives, and entrepreneurs, and founders, and everyone else to stand out.
on the other hand there is an endless supply of hyper -addictive brain -dead content that people can scroll through at any given time it's a little insane to me but the average screen time for the average american is a little over seven hours and sure some of that may be work -related but we all know that the majority
of it even if you're at work is spent on social media Reports of depression, uncertainty, and stress have gone through the roof, especially with the threat of AI replacing human jobs, leaving us grasping at our last sources of purpose even when most people say they hate their jobs.
The thing is, people don't want to change.
People become so accustomed to pain that it feels like home, and leaving it seems like the real suffering.
And with AI breaking record -high benchmarks every other week, individuals and companies can churn out hundreds to thousands of pieces of content every day.
Now, since this content is so addicting, the stress and depression and uncertainty and anxiety will only continue to get worse unless we learn to control ourselves.
The question is, is this actually a problem?
Because we've all thought about it.
Is society really going to end up like that scene from WALL -E where everyone is obese, floating around in a chair, being drip fed sugary beverages and entertainment all day long?
I'm not so sure. Processed food is bad.
That's obvious. We all know it.
But that doesn't mean we can't have a cookie or two or maybe an entire butter cake to yourself at 1am watching old episodes of The Office after a few birthday espresso martinis to balance out the over optimization of our lives.
The problems start to spring up when we can't control ourselves for an extended period of time.
And that's very easy to do.
Fast food chains, streaming companies, gaming companies, and social media companies pour hundreds of billions of dollars into optimizing dopamine -driven feedback loops designed to keep consumers addicted.
Facebook alone spends over $20 billion annually on research and development.
Now, what makes fast food particularly addictive is this brutal combination of fat, sugar, and salt.
These were scarce resources that humans aren't adapted to have in abundance in today's world.
We're adapted for survival.
Scarce ingredients, when found, spurred dopamine into our brain to signal that we found something to aid in our survival.
And once companies discovered this mechanism, they could now test and create combinations of these ingredients that kept consumers addicted and coming back for more.
The internet companies did the same thing.
They adopted an advertising model for monetization and soon found that polarizing and inflammatory headlines led to capturing the most attention.
Now all they had to do was serve more of what users liked to an instantly accessible screen.
And that was the birth of the For You page.
Now there's processed food, and there's also processed content.
Digital, fat, sugar, and salt.
Cheap dopamine, instant gratification, entropy.
Quick and shallow content is just that, entropic.
The more you consume, the more chaotic your mind becomes.
There is no long -term sensemaking, just a bunch of useless ideas filling your brain without any goal or vision to apply them to.
The digital food doesn't energize you or build muscle.
It makes you feel so sluggish you just want to lay down all day and gain fat.
Being a WALL -E citizen, drooling over a curated algorithm that feeds you short -term gratifying content keeps you in a state of stress and survival.
The combination of fear and desire pull you away from the present moment and psychic entropy, or disorder in the mind, increases.
What you thought to be one harmless post was actually a combination of 50 posts you read in unison that silently induces chaos.
You You regress. You stay the same.
You lock yourself into a paradigm of political ideologies and static opinions that aren't conducive to achieving anything worthwhile in your life.
The sad thing is you don't care and you probably didn't even realize you got yourself into the situation or you did and you forgot about it shortly after and then just got back into the situation.
I'm the same. It happens to all of us.
That's why I'm creating this video, but there is a bright side to this.
You already know that you can't trust social media companies to change their incentives, but you can and must take matters into your own hands.
Now this is a tweet the other day that I saw from Kevin on Twitter, and it was called thoughts on building a personal brand.
And based on my other videos like the death of the personal brand and a lot of the one person business videos that I've made, I agree with a lot of his points.
Over -optimized profiles equals try hard equals low status.
Chasing engagement trades off authenticity.
Writing about others is lame and has no moat.
I see this all the time.
People just write about other people rather than build authority and talk about ideas that they like or share their interests or skills.
Being an expert is overrated.
Just be yourself in public.
Being a hypocrite for your team equals you're a loser.
In other words, if someone that you like says something that you don't agree with but you agree with them, you're a loser, reputation beats reach every time, and posting should be downstream of doing.
And the most important one, if you even try to build a personal brand, you are by definition less authentic than someone who doesn't try to build one, yet has it.
We're going to go over some examples of these soon, but it's just a great way to frame what we're going to talk about in terms of the difference between creators and AI -generated content.
And the point with me saying that is those kinds of personal brands the the people that shape what's posted on the internet because the ai content is following the trends that the personal brands and the influencers create but they can't replicate that beautiful authenticity so shop at digital farmers
markets because on the flip side of processed food and content there's organic food and content and organic content is centropic unlike entropy that leads to disorder and chaos centropy leads to order and clarity but you can't expect the For You page to feed you this content.
You must actively search, curate, and nurture your digital feed, especially as AI content starts to ramp up.
Now how do you spot organic content?
First, it is useful.
It aids in the achievement of your goals.
The caveat here is that you actually have to have self -generated goals.
If you don't have a vision, most content, aside from that which helps generate vision, is useless.
Go read a philosophy book.
The second thing is that it is often long -form.
Books, articles, newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube videos, it has enough room to deliver something of sense and value.
However, the thing here is that many short -form creators can post insights and education that act as a small puzzle piece for your mind.
So there is short -form centropic content, but if it doesn't act as a puzzle piece, if it's just an idea floating off and it doesn't connect to anything you want to do in your life, then it's not doing you any good.
But the third thing, it is authentic.
It is not created because it has to be.
It is created because the creator deems it valuable enough to share with an audience that may benefit from it.
One last thing here is that organic or delayed gratification content can still use attention and marketing tactics to hook your attention in.
That's the game you have to play.
Technically, any book that hooks your attention is using these tactics, whether they're trying to or not.
That's how you create an interesting story is by doing those things.
So the attention grabbing headlines and stuff isn't the problem.
It's the content within it.
It's whether or not that content is actually suited for you and what you want to do in your life.
So you aren't just being manhandled around and being programmed by your digital feed to want things that you don't actually want.
And that's what makes you feel lost.
And I have to say it here, but if you want to learn how to write these articles, newsletters, posts that are syntropic, that actually help people, check out the Writer's Bootcamp, which is a cohort that we run along with our writing software, Cortex.
And by popular request, the next one starts on March 4th.
So enroll before then, because it will close on that date.
The point with all of this is that social media is not bad by any means.
It's actually an incredible way to tap into an infinite source of knowledge.
Because where else can you find information from people who have done what you want to do in your life.
Most successful people are self -educated, and most self -education today is done through a screen.
Royalty and Roman civilization, like Marcus Aurelius, had access to the best teachers to prepare them for the throne.
And now that you have access to the best teachers online, you decide to scroll videos of hot and dumb people dancing.
Make it make sense.
Nobody is talking about the fact that AI -generated content could actually be a good thing.
Because here's the thing.
It doesn't matter if the internet is flooded with a ton of garbage content.
It already has been for years now.
Even further, if this actually posed a problem to the social media companies, as in people didn't like it, so the social media companies started to lose revenue, they would be able to solve it.
They could use cryptography or biometric passes to prove that you're a human when online.
But it clearly hasn't gotten to be enough of a problem for them to do that yet because it's not a problem.
It's fun to whine and complain about this dead internet reality to distract you from what you can do about it.
You're worried that these bots and AI -generated content have removed your ability to find the information you want to find on the internet when that's not the case at all.
That couldn't be any further from the truth.
Most people just want most things fed to them, and the social media companies are giving them just that.
As I mentioned in the beginning, we become so accustomed to pain that it starts to feel like home.
And leaving that pain feels like the real suffering.
On top of that, think about how people actually view content.
There's a ton of content.
Nobody's arguing about that.
But you can only view so much at any given point in time and you can only follow so many people.
The reality here is that AI does not generate good content on its own.
I've tried to get it to replicate my writing, I've engineered simple prompts and prompts the size of a mini course on social media, and out of 100 posts that the AI spits out to me, maybe one can be posted.
The rest are useful ideas that I completely rewrite, some could use minor edits, but there's a crucial point here.
AI content isn't good unless you are good at content.
Most of it goes straight to the bottom of the barrel and isn't seen by human eyes.
The dead internet is like an iceberg, and the majority of the dead content is so deep that nobody will ever see it.
And if the AI content was actually good, would it matter?
If I were to create this exact video, word for word, scene by scene, with AI, would it matter?
If it gave you the value that you were looking for, I would guess that it wouldn't.
You wouldn't care. But to that, you may say, oh, well, if I knew it was AI, then something would feel off.
And that worry stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI is.
Because hype, the hype around AI, oh, these new models are hitting new benchmarks, oh, all the jobs are going to be replaced.
It's very good at clouding perception because intelligence is only one resource, and it's proving to be a pretty poor one in isolation.
It falls flat if there is no vision, taste, or agency.
If you aren't already good at the thing, AI won't be good at the thing.
If I created this video with AI versus someone else, the AI can't just do that on its own.
I would have to orchestrate everything from the images, the scenes, everything else.
It's still technically me creating the video.
I'm just not in front of a camera anymore and I can create them faster and distribute the knowledge that I have faster.
And that's just the thing.
AI hasn't replaced content.
It's just made bad content easier to create and people don't care about that.
The fact remains that if you are inexperienced and unskilled and you're trying to use AI to get a quick result like you have been with the Get Rich Quick courses and everything else you can get your hands on to not commit to something long -term, centropic that brings meaning and purpose to your life, you're
going to fail. The principles haven't and won't change ever.
But Dan, the first jobs that AI is going to replace are social media managers, copywriters, and content marketers.
Correct. They're going to replace the formulaic ones.
You know, the social media managers who post a fancy image made in Canva that gets absolutely zero results for the client.
Or the content marketer who puts a picture of a pretty girl on a screen with a Gen Z caption that people are already tired of and this can already be done with something like Real Farm.
Or the copywriter who posted blog posts for that one company and got fired because AI could do it faster.
If you're writing simple blog posts to just allow the company to have an online presence, then yeah, you're pretty replaceable.
Think of AI as a ghost writer or a ghost designer or a ghost coder or a ghost filmmaker.
A ghostwriter doesn't create the entire story.
They just write it.
James Patterson, and this is a shock to most people, uses a ghostwriter for his novel.
The thing is, James still orchestrates the plot, the characters, the lore, the marketing, the sales, the business, and the rest.
The ghostwriter simply strings this together in writing.
That's exactly what AI will do, not just for writing, but for all of the above, allowing Patterson to do this all by himself if he wants to.
Now here's the real kicker.
AI lacks a coherent vision and philosophy.
People don't follow creators for one piece of content.
They follow for their body of coherent work.
You don't find value in this video because it's the first one you've watched.
You find value in the entire philosophy I've strung together over the past three to four years that helps specific creative individuals make sense of their place in the world.
If you're new here, you may find some value but it compounds the more you watch.
It's centropic or at least that's my hope.
The good news is good writers or creators won't be replaced.
They will become more powerful and dynamic.
Artificial intelligence has allowed one person to create more faster in a company or not but only if they value agency and self -development.
The ultimate goal is getting paid to be yourself.
That's a previous tweet of mine to frame exactly what we're going to talk about because most people won't like to hear this but it's ironic that the only way out is through to battle this processed content flood you must contribute to humanity by posting organic content now contribute to humanity may sound like
a strong line here but when social media is the media now and you are the media and media shapes culture and culture shapes everything from politics to the economy, something as simple as posting online can be pretty important.
Now, it's my personal belief that this is one of the few ways forward to become a value creator.
And this isn't anything new.
This is what the most successful and happy people have done throughout history.
Why? Because happiness stems from resistance being overcome and a connection to something greater than yourself.
In other words, creativity and contribution.
When you create, you solve a problem.
When you pass down that creation to someone else, you solve their problem.
When you become a person who has value to give and then give it consistently, you learn what it means to be happy.
Now, the thing is, this wasn't very accessible in the past, but evolution is creative and thus it solves problems.
And this was a set of problems that's been brewing for a long time.
The problems of work you hate, a lifestyle you don't control, and a lack of access to opportunity.
And then in comes social media as a solution and you just think of it as this platform that is extremely toxic.
The good sides of social media continue to go underappreciated because one, anyone can learn.
You have intelligence on tap, especially with AI.
You can find any information you need to achieve what you want to achieve.
Two is that anyone can create.
You don't need permission to post who you are, what you do, and why you do it in public.
And three, anyone can be discovered you no longer need a publisher job board or record label to write a book find work or make music your personal brand is your public resume but again referring back to kevin's tweet if you try to build a personal brand instead of just being yourself online your online
character because social media and the internet is so ingrained in our lives that that's kind of just what it is your personal brand your profile on social media is just an extension of yourself And it's an incredibly challenging one at that because you actually have to improve You have to get better
at writing and speaking If you want to contribute any kind of value and make any kind of independent income from your creative work Then you have to learn marketing and you have to learn business You have to create a product You have to be okay with people criticizing you and calling you an idiot in the comments
It's a very vulnerable position to be and it creates diamonds because of all the pressure Now, the thing here is that social media is where the attention is.
In the past, it was on things like the TV and billboards and the radio and the newspaper.
The average person often didn't have the opportunity to be in those things to promote their work.
The other thing here is that AI is continuing to replace lower level jobs.
And the other other thing here is that the top paying jobs are reserved for the elite in skill.
It's the top 1%, even the top 0 .1%.
It's like getting into the NBA.
Go look up the statistics on that.
You're probably not getting into it.
So the path forward, in my opinion, lies in what Naval has been saying or hinting at, what I've said many times in the past, that I think everyone should become an entrepreneur slash creator slash business owner.
The future of work has been moving toward that enough time.
Just look at remote work statistics and freelance statistics.
And when big companies continue to outsource their work, the low -level work to AI and other things, that's a great sign.
You don't have to work a job you hate anymore.
You can create your own work.
And there's a lot more to that.
It's not just a place to promote your work.
The internet is a decentralized school system.
Creators are the teachers who can teach relevant and useful information whose sole purpose isn't to make you a useful worker like schools.
The internet is a public town square where your value can be discovered by those who need it.
Building an audience is the new resume and status symbol.
Followers are less about vanity and more about social proof that people find value in your ideas.
And what ties this all together is that anyone can be an entrepreneur.
Because when the novelty and challenge of schooling and job advancement come to a halt in your mid -20s, causing a lack of meaning and purpose, entrepreneurship is how you continue to develop yourself and control your future.
I created this graphic in the past that shows that after being in a job for a specific amount of time, your progress starts to plateau.
The reason that you liked going to school so much.
