There was a time when the internet felt like a vast frontier, a lawless jungle, an anarchic free place where new ideas were spawned and everything was open season. Brave explorers logged on through those wonderful screeching modems to discover entirely new lands populated by animated GIFs of dancing hamsters and forums devoted to the deep philosophical question of Goatse. It was chaotic, exciting, and, most importantly, new.
Those days are way, way over.
After decades of relentless creativity, humanity has finally done everything possible on the internet.
Every joke has been told. Every opinion has been expressed. Every photograph of a cat wearing a tiny hat has been uploaded. Every selfie is just another selfie amongst the trillions and trillions of selfies.
The digital well has run drier than a nun’s snatch. People are now simply standing around the empty bucket, lowering it repeatedly and hoping for the comforting splash of originality that never comes.
Not only has the creativity vanished into the internet bucket of doom, most of it is fake now. Farms and farms of mobile phone farms are spamming the shit out of everything, playing on the gluttonous greed of fake influencers and their equally fake followers.
Scroll through any social media platform and you will see the evidence. The same videos appear again and again, just slightly altered, like a theatrical production where every actor has been replaced but the script remains stubbornly identical.
One person posts a clever remark, another copies it, and within 48 hours the entire internet is solemnly repeating it like monks chanting a sacred text. Big fucking echo chambers repeating the same old shit ad infinitum.
Even memes have begun to look tired. Once upon a time they arrived fresh and surprising. Now they resemble photocopies of photocopies, each one slightly blurrier than the last. Someone takes a meme from 2014, adds a caption about inflation, and suddenly it is considered cutting-edge satire — more like rehashed bollocks in reality.
The great tragedy is that the internet has not stopped producing content. Quite the opposite. Billions of posts and AI slop appear every day. The problem is that they all appear to be the same five posts, rearranged endlessly like digital furniture in a very boring room.
Take the modern online argument. It begins when someone declares an extremely confident opinion. Within minutes, thousands of people arrive to explain that the opinion is wrong. Then thousands more appear to explain that the people explaining it is wrong are themselves wrong. By the end of the day the discussion has expanded to include geopolitics, pineapple on pizza and the collapse of civilisation. The following morning the exact same argument begins again, word for word, somewhere else.
Meanwhile, the plethora of performing monkey ‘influencers’ are constantly attempting to create novelty or internet clout by executing increasingly elaborate versions of things that were already done in 2017.
A person films themselves pointing at floating text explaining five secrets to success. Another films themselves, pointing at the same text but with better lighting. Soon the entire internet consists of people pointing at text that other people wrote yesterday or that AI has rehashed from its massive scraping efforts.
Even the supposedly infinite world of online video has begun looping. There are only so many things a human can do in front of a camera before the format collapses in exhaustion. At this point the options appear to be cooking something, reacting to someone else cooking something, or reacting to someone reacting to someone cooking something. There is no real value anymore to any of the rehashed videos or the trillions of faceless AI-created videos cooked up by some boy in a Mumbai slum.
Scholars may eventually divide the history of the internet into three phases. The Age of Discovery, when everything felt new. The Age of Platforms and Regulation, when everything became organised into feeds. And the current era, known to historians as The Great Recycling.
The internet has become daytime television.
Of course, some optimists insist that innovation will return. They say the internet will continue to evolve and produce strange new forms of creativity. These people are admirable, but unfortunately they have already posted that exact hopeful prediction twelve years ago, and someone else reposted it last week with a slightly different font.
For now we must accept the truth. The internet has completed its mission. The thrill of telling someone else halfway across the world in whatever country to “fuck off!” has simply died and gone to the cosmic internet swear box of history. Humanity has collectively explored every possible corner of the digital landscape. All that remains is the quiet, dignified business of repeating ourselves infinitely.
If you have read something like this before, do not worry.
So has everyone else.
