What once felt like wandering through a whimsically vast and wild forest kingdom with new and exciting things to discover the further you walked is now more akin to a carefully manicured walled garden. Journeying through the forest, one gets the impression nobody "owns" what lies beyond the next forest clearing. Each domain, the caves, the rivers and creeks, the canopy, and the mountains are independent while interconnected. 

 

Contrast with the walled garden. Hedgerows, stone walls, and iron gates delineate outside with obvious distinctions. You stay on the pathways in the garden and admire the carefully planned and manicured horticulture. The brickwork and fountains are beautiful, perhaps enough to make you forget what is beyond the garden walls. That might be the point, certainly part of the allure of the walled garden. 

 

Walled gardens have a clear end as well. You walk the paths, as expansive as one may be, imagine the Gardens of Versailles, they will bring you back to where you started. You will know when you have seen all there is to see. When you're in the forest, you move slowly, unsure what may dwell beyond the light. The beginning and the end blur quickly, almost as if they could go on forever. 

 

The internet feels like it is shrinking. I used to joke with a couple of friends about how we have "read the entire internet." Meaning we would check for updates on websites we frequented to find no new articles or information. At a certain point, it felt like we had seen all there was to see, like a museum that never changes installations. Worse, a museum that slowly removes some of your favorite exhibits without replacing any of them.

 

I had thought this was perhaps in my imagination, or maybe the novelty of "going online" wore off. Yet the feeling that the internet is smaller than it was in the late 1990s is one I could not quite shake. Several different thoughts and experiences led me to the view I hold now. In 1998 when I was little kid, I would search things like "are UFOs real" and "where bigfoot lives.” I would get all sorts of fun and interesting results; personal blogs, articles, book reviews, message boards of enthusiasts, encounter stories, cryptid tracker societies, now I see pablum from prominent news sites.

 

First, I realized the common notion that "the totality of mankind's knowledge is online" was simply wrong. Some version of this statement has long been repeated about living in the information age. It might even be the defining meaning of the information age, but it's wrong and always has been.

 

There is much that is not online or available. Many things are rightfully copyrighted and protected. You may disagree with the philosophy and laws around intellectual property, but that doesn't change their inaccessibility. For example, regarding those items, textbooks, even if you had the text, would not replace, say, a university course on the topic. What you can learn about Constitutional Law, for example, online or via books available to the wider public will merely scratch the surface of what you would learn in a year's worth of lectures in law school. The internet cannot replace the way knowledge is passed in certain ways. 

 

I once set out trying to perform clean-room level hard drive recoveries on failed disks. This caused me to run into another barrier, trade secrets and specific processes are guarded by companies or industries. These will never be online. Much of the "deep information" humans have will never be online due to people wanting to retain the ability to make money off something or for the fact that some skills and information require an interactive process to learn. Not everything can be learned and understood in front of a computer screen. These facts alone undermine the concept of the information age as it was marketed to me.

 

What we are left with, to start, is a much shallower pool of information. The internet looks deeper than it is. Far from containing the entire breadth of human knowledge, we are presented with the Potemkin village version of information. You can gain a superficial understanding of most topics, but when you look behind the façade, there is surprisingly little online. Often only clues and the necessity to carry on in the real world.

 

There’s a fascinating little experiment you can do yourself, pick a topic to Google search, I’ll pick “ford mustang.” The initial results generally show over one billion, in this case, 1.42 billion. Then click the next page until the end… it's not as crazy as it sounds. My search for "ford mustang" ended on page 13, with 125 results returned. Google will display a message at the bottom saying similar results have been omitted, but you can repeat the search with previously omitted results -- great! I click that link. Google now says there are 1.4 billion results, somehow less than initially returned. Now, my search ends on page 42, with 418 results returned. I’m not sure what to make of this. Neither 1.42 billion nor 418 can be accurate. But I know there is a fiction that the internet is impossibly large with the ability to learn everything there is to know. 

 

And this is all before censorship began. 

 

 

Much has been written on what I call overt censorship. That is banning social media accounts, various de-platforming schemes, denying services such as PayPal to people and organizations based on their legally held political views, protected speech, and the like.

 

Not much has been said about what I call covert or latent censorship, which is, in my view, far more insidious and where the walled garden turns more into a labyrinth in its difficulty to find anything. 

 

Over the past few years, I have noticed Google search changing for the worse. What once was a tool I could use to navigate the forest became something that would only display a curated set of seemingly pre-approved results. First, I noticed what wasn't being returned anymore or suggested. There was a period in the early 2000s to mid-2010s when searching a controversial or politically incorrect topic would return results from forums such as 4chan's /pol/ (pol short for politically incorrect), bodybuilding.com's /Misc/ (short for miscellaneous), and even the infamous Stormfront. If I searched for a contentious topic or video, I began to notice that I would no longer see the piece itself but mainstream commentary discussing the content I was seeking. Often an SPLC or ADL article editorializing the website would appear, or a mainstream news outlet discussing a certain video, instead of the source video or material itself. And most recently, I've found that even mundane and non-political content is more difficult to find, to the point that Google search is nearly useless. 

 

Searching anything tends to return little more than a handful of mainstream media articles telling you how to think about a certain topic and shopping recommendations from box stores. There was a time when you could Google a forum post in a thread, and it would find the exact post in a multi-page thread on a forum. 

 

I thought this was all in my head. That is until I made a post about all of this on Twitter that went viral with over 250,000 impressions in a couple of days, thousands of likes, hundreds of retweets, and comments of others noticing the same trends. Then, just over two weeks after my Twitter thread on the topic, The New York Times ran a piece called “Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo.”[1] Mr. Thompson calls it a conspiracy theory that people have noticed Google is manipulating search results. He then quotes studies and statements from Google that affirm that search results are indeed manipulated.  

 

“In a statement, Google said, “There is no merit to the suggestion that search results were manually edited.” But the company added that its algorithm would automatically adjust itself in some cases, shifting to rank trustworthy links higher than more relevant ones.” Because of the tags and signals, nothing needs to be manually edited, only the weight given to certain tags and signals in the algorithm. Although what Google is saying is technically true, there is a sleight of hand taking place. When something is tagged as “untrustworthy,” it never needs to be manually edited, the display algorithm takes care of the rest. 

 

The “open and free internet” theory of the internet has been discarded and replaced with a more “curated” approach, creating the walled garden. Google decides what it sees as "trustworthy" and "relevant." DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced similar measures to down-rank what they deem "disinformation." DuckDuckGo also said they are working on ways to limit the “spread of false and misleading information.” In a statement from Bing, “Finding the right balance between delivering authoritative results that match the intent of a search query and protecting users from being misled is a very challenging problem,” and “We won’t always get that balance just right, but that’s our goal.”

 

After the 2016 election, the open and free internet was partially blamed for Trump’s win and Clinton’s defeat. Jack Goldsmith wrote an essay called “The Failure of Internet Freedom,” where he blamed the openness of the internet in part for Trump’s election and undermining democracy.[2] The social media and tech companies took note. The open and free internet might allow things to get away from them, something they wish not to happen again.[3]

 

In late 2016, after Donald Trump won the election, there was a bit of a Google search kerfuffle. The issue was around the most sacred of topics, the holocaust. At some point, a journalist realized if you typed "did the hol…" into Google, not only would Google autocomplete the search to "did the holocaust happen?" it would return results from websites such as Stormfront, The Daily Stormer, among others. Sites that question the official narrative put forward by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The History Channel, and Steven Spielberg. The story of Google results returning results of people discussing holocaust skepticism and revisionism was a massive story at the time, with dozens of outlets partaking in outrage and calling for Google to censor the sites and change their search algorithm to “fix this problem”. On The Guardian, "This is hate speech. It’s lies. It’s racist propaganda. And Google is disseminating it.” The same author wrote a story detailing how the rightwing websites have “colonized vast swaths of the internet.”[4] Cadwalladr argued that Google is not simply a search engine or platform, but something that “frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world.” And she is entirely correct, for better or worse.[5]

 

Cadwalladr tried another Google experiment, typing “are jews,” to see what the autocomplete suggestions would be. They returned results such as “are jews white?,” are jews a race?,” and “are jews evil?” She was distraught as many results on the first page of Google results confirmed that, yes, jews are indeed evil. She was again aggrieved to find people online suggesting Hitler was one of the good guys.[6]

 

Writing for MIC, one journalist wrote an appeal to Google to alter results favoring "authoritative" sites, meaning ones that agree with her very liberal and Jewish view of history and politics. She wrote, "Google is a tech company, not a media outlet, but users trust the search engine to return accurate information, not false, hateful content highlighted by algorithms that can't discriminate against anti-Semitic lies. When conspiracy theory outranks truth, that isn't just irresponsible — it's normalizing hate.”[7]

 

One Twitter friend commented on my thread about Google search saying as recent as a few years ago, YouTube would recommend him videos that offered a different view of the holocaust. He wrote, "admittedly, I was partially radicalized thanks to YouTube a decade ago." 

 

Today, if you Google search "did the holocaust happen?" the results return no revisionism or skepticism. You will instead find links on how to fight holocaust denial and studies suggesting not enough people are educated about the holocaust. I guess, in a peculiar way, I can agree with that. However, somewhere between being able to find people questioning historical events and crimes, to today, something has changed. The vast forest has been cut down and manicured. You are now led down a garden path seeing what they want you to see, in an attempt to ensure you think what they want you to think.

 

Two recent examples of how Google search failed:

 

Somebody asked me for an article I wrote a few years ago. I  typed in the exact name of the article, the website, and my name on Google search. The article was not returned via search results. Often the exact title of certain articles or links will fail to return the piece, only mainstream commentary on the general topic of the article. 

 

Around the same time, I read a book published in 1924 Germany, "Atlantis, Edda & Bible." The book I was reading cited another German text from 1921 called "A giant crime against the German people." I wanted to find the book cited, I searched Google, the results were nothing but articles and books about Hitler and the Holocaust. The book I wanted to find pre-dated the Second World War by twenty years. Pre-dated the 1933 election by nearly a decade and was earlier even to the Beer Hall Putsch. Based on the Google results, one might get the impression history started sometime in the 1940s. Instead of giving me clues to finding an exceedingly rare book likely housed in some Black Forest monastery, I was instead given what they think is appropriate for me to know of German history. This is many things. Insulting. Deceptive. Corrupt. 

 

 

The specter of data rot haunts me like a ghoul in the night. It's always there, yet difficult to point to or explain. It's the surreal nature of ephemerality that constantly flashes before my eyes as phantasmagoria.

 

The transitory nature of the internet became increasingly apparent to me over my time as a writer. From the time I wrote a manuscript in its initial draft stages to the time for a final review, I realized a great number of citations had invalid links. The articles or studies were either removed or moved to a different URL. In a couple of instances, more controversial pieces were removed entirely from the web. In many instances, the titles or text itself changed. I started to archive every link I use for a citation or anything I find interesting. Things that are of particular interest to me I download to keep a local copy. Still, this is not satisfactory, knowing that even solid-state disks are not a permeant solution. 

 

Several studies on links going dark provide more insight into the issue. Somewhere between 44 days and 100 days is the average lifespan of an internet page.[8] Analysis by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group in 2011 looked into link rot and found after one year, 8.3% of links they sampled were dead. After two years, 14.3% were gone. And after four years, over 30% of the links were invalid.[9] Link rot affects governments sites, university sites, and dot com sites at the same rate. According to a Harvard Law Review study, web links found in Supreme Court decisions, some of the most important documents any American government entity publishes are invalid at a rate of nearly 50%.[10] Nobody is immune. 

 

This heightened my fear of data rot – the gradual deterioration of a data medium over time until the eons eventually consume it. Hard drives experience bit rot over time, discs rot, batteries inside things like video game cartridges die, and the save files become erased. Even your old cassette tapes will eventually stop working even if they have been sitting entirely unused. The transition to digital mediums presents a serious problem for the posterity of anything we wish to preserve as a people. 

 

Letters sent to loved ones and friends from hundreds of years ago are still around. My dad has a box of letters from his time in Vietnam that have survived all these years. Emails I’ve sent of similar importance to my life and things I’ve published online all face an uncertain future. On top of the normal issues of being lost, destroyed, and forgotten, data rot becomes an even more looming threat with time on its side. 

 

 

Dead Internet theory is an idea that I first noticed circulating message boards in the summer of 2021. The theory is straightforward enough that part of the reason the internet feels perhaps hollow, empty, static, or like a re-run is because it might not be as real or human as we have believed. 

 

The theory is that artificial intelligence generates a substantial share of the content online, from articles to posts in the comment sections. Comment sections filled with bots spamming advertisement links and the proliferation of promoted ads and content is a fact of the internet today.

 

Internet content has drifted towards centralization for years. This is partially a function of shifting from Web 1.0, where personal web pages and static content was the norm, to Web 2.0, which introduced social media platforms and new ways of interacting. Many of the various message boards for hobbies or personal blogs are now on social media sites, where they can be monitored, censored, and deleted easily. 

 

And finally, to my point, search engines make obscure and independently written articles and posts more and more difficult to find, favoring affiliated content and sites over everything else. Part of the reason the internet feels so much smaller and as if it is closing in on us is that instead of having a selection of sites and forums you might visit, we are corralled together on a handful of common sites. Add in data/link rot, with search engine optimization designed to make non-approved content difficult to find, and we have the phenomena of a dead internet or one that is akin to walking a walled garden path. 

 

Although artificial intelligence-generated content seems a bit far-fetched, it's a reality. There are companies that specialize in natural language generators. If you've been online for a while, you might recall the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) bot called SmarterChild. That was over twenty years ago. 

 

If you search Google, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex for “dead internet theory,” the results are quite different, which I take as another clue in solving what many of us have experienced. On Google, the first page of links is filled with articles “debunking” the idea of dead internet theory and claims that it is simply an incorrect conspiracy theory. One link is to a video that discusses the theory with sincerity. 

 

DuckDuckGo (powered by Bing) fares a bit better. Like Google, the first result is from The Atlantic, claiming the theory is flat-out wrong. The other links are to sites discussing the idea. 

 

Finally, on Yandex, the compiled Agora Road thread that primarily started the discussion is found as the first result. And this feels the most correct. If I search for something, I want the root source, not journalists telling me what to think about it. Following the original thread on Yandex is a Reddit thread on the topic, then the article by The Atlantic, followed by more articles discussing dead internet theory. Results on Yandex are the most similar to how I remember the internet. Real people on message boards and forums discussing a topic. That experience is fading.

 

I often wonder about old blogs I used to read and follow that suddenly went dormant or were taken down by the owner. What happened to them? Why did they leave? Are they still online but under a new persona? Are they okay? Offline for good? Dead? I have an old blog or two I've left without explanation. Sometimes, rarely, a blog receives a message or comment years since the last post. Looking at them feels like looking at a past life. I wonder if any of the people who followed me on any old blogs have found me here. Maybe others came back as "somebody else" too in the way I have through the years. Perhaps that's simply what people do who have been online for a long while—a sort of online pseudo-reincarnation. I hope in this life I find enlightenment. But I'm not counting on it. 

 

The internet as a tool for individual users is still valid but largely betrayed in favor of use for those with leverage, like Google, for political and financial ends.

 

Once an interesting and exciting experience, the new internet feels very sterile. It’s the same experience over and over. The sterility is partially due to a heavy-handed moderation and censorship regime that includes manipulating search results to prioritize official outlets to push particular narratives and incessant advertising.

 

There was a time when you could search for a current topic, particularly contentions one such as a Black Lives Matter riot, a racially charged violent crime, or divisive elections, and the results would return forum topics with real people giving their opinion on the matters. One could get a better sense of what normal people thought; for these purposes, we will not consider mainstream journalists as real people. It was much easier to have your thumb on the pulse of what middle Americans were thinking and feeling. Instead of an article telling you what to think and feel, you might find forum posts of somebody who had a transgressive opinion or first-hand knowledge of how violent a "peaceful protest" actually was. 

 

Now, in addition to being difficult to find anything, especially what real people are thinking and saying, the public record is being heavily corrupted by censorship which includes the latent censorship of search result manipulation.  

 

As an aside, censorship of politically dissident views corrupts the public record in an odd way. It might appear at some point in the future if one were researching historic events online, that the views surrounding a given topic were entirely uniform. This is odd to me because it seems that acknowledging the existence of opposing views is important to contextualize any disagreement. There is a disingenuity surrounding a topic when you can only find one side of the story. The censoring of dissident views almost undermines the position of the censor and lends inherent credibility to the censored. 

 

Much of what made Google the premier search engine, so much that the name became synonymous with the word “search,” was their intricate and clever use of signals. There is a geographic signal, for example, meaning if you’re searching for “pizza” while in Cleveland, Ohio, that should return a different set of pizza restaurants than if you were to search it from Hollywood Hills, California. Another signal is how words might be defined by their context. “Bio” when placed after a historical figure such as "Henry Ford bio" means biography. But "bio" placed before "chemistry" or "hazard" no longer means biography but biological. 

 

Google has a signal that gives extra weight or removes weight from sites they deem to be true or not. There are hundreds of signals that interact and intersect with each other that all have various weights to produce the result of links after your search. 

 

Search algorithms are not so much about matching what you typed in exactly, but about what you meant and what you are trying to find. With that philosophy in mind, we can understand why my search for a rare German book from a century ago might have returned results about the Third Reich. Or why when searching for an interesting theory about the internet, the first result is an article from The Atlantic assuring me it’s not true. At a certain point, Google stopped weighing what I wanted to find as heavily as they weighed what they wanted me to see. And that changed everything. 

 

With results censorship and how weighted results are for money or political ends, even non-political searches are failing. Sometimes dozens of sponsored ads and articles appear before what we might have once called “organic results” appear. There was an era when YouTube would recommend very controversial videos to a user if they were searching for such content, it was organic, the search algorithms were responding to what people wanted to find. Now they respond to what they want you to find, in spite of your intent. Google purchased YouTube in 2006.

 

There is a point of profound irony in how I learned about the way Google’s algorithm operates. It was not online at all. In an era when we are told everything we might want to learn is online, I learned this information from a hard copy of Wired Magazine from March of 2010. A featured story from the over decade old magazine I had in my library titled “Inside Google: An Exclusive Look At The Web’s Ultimate Algorithm.” Much of what helped me to understand and unravel the mystery of the changing online experience wasn’t found online, the place we are accustomed to looking for everything. It was found the way we have always found information, on print in a library.

 

The internet started as a method for communication, not a library or method of storage. It might be prudent to keep that in mind. There were many grand ideas put forth and promises made, most of which never came to pass. The entirety of human information is far from being available online, and if it were, it would be ever fleeting. There is no doubt the world was changed by the internet, yet as a tool, it is a mixed bag. It's still useful and saves time. The speed at which I was able to find sources for this article was far higher than my days as a kid at the library doing research for middle school papers. With that speed and convenience also comes the ability to alter the public record and even perception of reality itself by those in control. Perhaps as we transition into Web 3.0 and beyond, the issues of data rot and search manipulation will ease. We can hope anyway. 

 

I do not believe the internet is entirely "dead." But there is something to the theory. The proliferation of automated bot replies, similar articles, and the increasing difficulty to find what individuals have written, such as their blogs or forum posts, are not easy to find. Everything seems to be from the corporate media, businesses, or governments. Perhaps "dead" isn't the most accurate phrasing. Maybe Zombie internet is more exact. On top of being wiped out entirely, the information left online is walled off from us intentionally through manipulating search results and blacklisting. There are certain websites that Facebook, and thus Instagram, will not allow you to message another person privately. Counter-Currents is one of those sites. You will see a red "x" next to the link with a message that could not be sent. It is possible, and part of my theory, that the internet may be functionally smaller now than it was ten or twenty years ago. While the total number of websites is, of course, reported at an all-time high, there seems to be little that is new. Everything is copacetic if you are trying to find something from a box store for sale, pornography, or mainstream media content. 

 

As for the rest of us among the living, we walk the walled garden -- hoping for a glimpse beyond the high walls and all too well-manicured hedgerows. 

[1] Stuart Thompson. February 23, 2022. “Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/technology/duckduckgo-conspiracy-theories.html [https://archive.ph/plnDg][2] Jack Goldsmith. “The Failure of Internet Freedom.” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. June 13, 2018. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/failure-internet-freedom[https://archive.ph/aLLBr][3] David Wakabayashi. “As Google Fights Fake News, Voice on the Margins Raise Alarm.” The New York Times. September 26, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias-claims.html [https://archive.ph/86cko][4] Carole Cadwalladr. “Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.” The Guardian. December 4, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook [https://archive.ph/OJRlA][5] Carole Cadwalladr. “Google is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world.” The Guardian. December 11, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/11/google-frames-shapes-and-distorts-how-we-see-world [https://archive.ph/cyjws][6] It’s me, I’m people online.[7] Melanie Ehrenkranz. “Did the Holocaust happen? Google’s top search results still say it’s a hoax.” MIC. January 10, 2017. https://www.mic.com/articles/165038/did-the-holocaust-happen-google-s-top-search-results-still-say-it-s-a-hoax [https://archive.ph/7ldrt] Melanie Ehrenkranz. “Google’s acceptance of Nazi search results is normalizing hate.” MIC. December 13, 2016. https://www.mic.com/articles/162116/google-did-the-holocaust-happen-search-results-normalizing-neo-nazi-hate-is-the-holocaust-real[https://archive.ph/hLPyp][8] Brewster Kahle. “Preserving the Internet.” Scientific American. https://web.archive.org/web/19970504212157/http://www.sciam.com/0397issue/0397kahle.htmlRick Weiss. “On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral.” The Washington Post. November 24, 2003. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/11/24/on-the-web-research-work-proves-ephemeral/959c882f-9ad0-4b36-88cd-fb7411db118d/ [https://archive.ph/JxwYv]Mike Ashenfelder. “The Average Lifespan of a Webpage.” Library of Congress. November 8, 2011. http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/11/the-average-lifespan-of-a-webpage/ [https://archive.ph/MnRWw][9] “Link Rot” and Legal Resources on the Web: A 2011 Analysis by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group. http://worldcat.org/arcviewer/5/LEGAL/2011/06/15/H1308163631444/viewer/file2.php [https://archive.ph/88t6d] [10] Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert and Lawrence Lessig. “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations.” Harvard Law Review. March 17, 2017. https://harvardlawreview.org/2014/03/perma-scoping-and-addressing-the-problem-of-link-and-reference-rot-in-legal-citations/ [https://archive.ph/0Evs4]