The end of the human internet

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Start building at MongoDB.com slash AI. Support for the show comes from Atteo, the AI CRM. What if all that annoying prep work was just finished the moment you walked into the office? Whether it's cloud, Slack, or with any other agent you build, you can access your customer data wherever you work through Atteo's MCP and API. Everything you'd normally miss gets flagged. And overnight, Atteo reads your whole pipeline and tells you what needs your attention in the morning. Tomorrow is just a click away. You can go to Atteo.com slash decoder, and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash decoder. Hey everyone, this is Nick Statt, senior producer on Decoder. Nilay's out for vacation this week, and we'll be back next week with new episodes. We're very excited for what we have on the schedule. In the meantime, we wanted to share an episode from the excellent podcast The Gray Area, with host Sean Illing. Sean sat down with The Atlantic journalist Charlie Warzel to talk about the state of the internet in 2026, and what it means that it feels increasingly overrun by non-human actors. Sean and Charlie dig into some classic web culture concepts, including the dead internet theory and the connect that idea that most of the internet is now just bots in disguise, to algorithmic recommendation, AI slop, and why it feels like the internet you grew up with is now gone, replaced by something more manipulative, deceptive, and in many cases, outright fake. Okay, The Gray Area with Sean Illing, interviewing The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel about the increasingly inhuman internet. Enjoy. This is The Gray Area. I am Sean Illing. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie wrote a piece about AI and what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this feeling that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms, and various AI-generated content. Everything feels a little fake, a little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the internet feels so strange right now and whether it's still possible to build spaces online that feel genuinely human. Hope you enjoy. Charlie Warzel, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, man, it's been a while. Let's talk about your recent piece in The Atlantic. There is a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under-discussed, which is the increasingly weird bot-haunted internet we all live inside now. So let's just start there. What is the feeling you are describing in this piece? The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation, but also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the internet right now is this paranoia. And I started the piece with a callback to a piece by the internet tech writer Max Reed, who wrote in New York Magazine back in 2018 about what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by you or me, human beings, may like surpass some of the content that we all make and that the internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or majority automated. And that at the time, I remember, was a real revelation for a lot of people, this feeling that, whoa, so you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff, that a lot of websites are populated with automated comments or whatever it is. And now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're going to call it or whatever we're in, basically since the arrival of ChatGPT, but even before it, you have an internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways. So you have synthetic texts, all the things that we would call AI slop, right? And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button to promote something that either isn't real or that is a scam or pretty awful. You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that Google search, most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Then you have synthetic music, AI slop videos and things clogging these feeds. And you have organizations that are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts to seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes, the algorithm thinks, oh, this is a popular song. And then when other people start posting it, it gets priority inside the feeds. So it's this idea that what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings, they're marketing to these algorithms. The end result of all of that, right, this idea that everything around you might be fake, it creates this sense of paranoia. It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about. It's that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a psyop. It's fake. Somebody has seeded that, right? And that, to me, is a change. It is a dramatic change in the way that people behave online, and it really affects everything from our politics to our culture because you walk around with this feeling. There's this great term, the liar's dividend, right, which is the idea that when there's so much garbage out there, people can cast aspersions on things that are real, right, and say, oh, I think it's fake. I think it's a lie, right? You can sort of completely blur and warp reality. And I think that that's the way that culture works now. So not that we can know this really with any precision, but if you just had to guess, if you just had a big giant pie chart of all the shit on the internet, roughly what percentage of that pie chart do you think would be synthetic stuff? Oh, that's such a good, such a good question. You can't take the temperature of the entire internet, right? But you're seeing this play out in music with, I interviewed on my podcast this guy who is the frontman of a very beloved progressive rock band, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. And they took their music off Spotify in protest of Spotify funding, their founder funding a defense company. And when they left, they had domain squatters basically, King Gizzard squatters who came in and took their page essentially by creating AI slop music that sounded similar to their stuff and was making money off their streams and all that. And it had to fight Spotify to get it taken down, which they did. You have so many different playlists on Spotify that are, I've done some reporting into this. You go into especially like jazz or just instrumental type music, classical music, and you start clicking around on some of those artists and you don't see anything, any human beings there, right? Like you don't, you go to these, they're YouTube page and then the YouTube page is just, you know, like the, when you don't, when you don't put a profile picture on it, right? And it only directs you back to the Spotify link. There's no, you know, manager page or anything like that or label. And you start to realize, oh, well then I guess, I guess that's fake, right? And so you have, so I'm listening to jazz music that I think is made by another human being and it's not. And again, that sense of paranoia creeps in when you start to recognize some of these things. I think a lot of us want to walk through the world and say, listen, I've got reasonably good taste. I've got reasonably good judgment. I'm not sitting around listening to, you know, fake jazz music. And you might be, right? We all might be. It's not a question anymore of taste because there's so much volume. It's just so strange. You know, I mean, I know what you mean, but it's very hard to name, you know, somehow the internet feels fake and real and dead and alive all at the same time. You know, people are clearly still there, but you're never really sure like who or what is speaking. You're never sure who made the thing you're looking at or why it appeared in front of you. It seems like we should definitely take a step back maybe and just think about how bizarre this situation is for our primate brains. Yeah. And that, Plug into whatever discourse or conversation, and, you know, I write about the internet. I'm not terminally online in my real life. Like I go there for the purpose of understanding it, you know, reporting on it, studying, seeing things that bubble up. I like to be outside in my other times. People constantly will say, like, dude, you got to get off the internet. And I think that that is, in some ways, a response to what you're saying makes me uncomfortable, not only because I maybe disagree with the information, but because your experience is clearly so different than mine that it's awkward for me to imagine that we are existing inside the same culture, or that we have to interact with each other and talk about these things. Yeah, I mean, it's not really post-truth. At this point, it's post-real or post-human. Like how much of the internet at this point is basically just like machines performing humanity back at us under the guise of being people, right? So for the piece, I referenced this researcher named Aidan Walker. He's a Gen Z online researcher. He's extremely smart about memes and it's a great example of someone who takes something that's like kind of silly in concept and actually gets to the philosophical human understandings of all this. And he came up with this theory. So what we've been talking about with the, you know, there's machines and algorithms are just kind of like running the whole show, right? That's been referred to as the dead internet theory, the idea that there's really not a lot of humanity on the internet. It's all the bots. And we kind of just sit there. Aidan Walker took that a step further recently. And his theory, it's somewhat colorful, is that it's like the cuck internet theory. Say more. Yes. We'll have to say more, which is that the product, the synthetic product of these artificial intelligence things, be it like, you know, a slop video of a cat, you know, dancing on a street in Paris or whatever, right? That a bunch of people are flicking through, you know, Instagram reels or Facebook and just, you know, hitting like or whatever, or, oh, that's cute. I'm going to forward that to whatever. You have that, which is synthetic. It's machines. It's machine-made. It's trained off of all of these other machines. Then you have the algorithm, which is predisposed to like that stuff because that stuff is all trained off of what the algorithm has already shown you and given you, right? You have this, when you, what's happening is those things are meeting. Those things are in the room interacting with each other. And the human is sitting in the corner, in the chair, watching that. The human is the consenting observer to an interaction, a melding of sorts, of these two machines that have been predisposed to do this in service of viral advertising revenue. And that is a lot of what the internet is. The internet isn't dead. The internet is really active. It's moving. It's doing stuff. These two elements that aren't human are, you know, doing it all night long. And we, the human, are just sort of sitting there like, okay, yeah, no. I'll have some more, I guess. Yeah, sure. You know, we are consenting to it in some sense. Other people would argue that, you know, we're being coerced. You know, in the old internet, you had the capacity to explore, truly, right? You would stumble and click around and kind of get lost. And now so much of it is just a giant sprawling machine designed to mainline into your veins as much content as possible, content optimized for engagement. So you're not really exploring or participating in that way. You are just a passive product. I mean, as you put it in the piece, right? We basically now exist, humans, to feed data into the machinery. That is what we are doing. And it is keeping us stupefied and entertained along the way. But that's fundamentally what we have been reduced to. Yeah, I don't know that all is lost yet. But I think that what I described this moment as is as a crisis of agency. Not that it's over, but we are all really concerned about our future agency. Like, I don't think these tools are powerful enough yet. Like, I think it's giving these tools in Silicon Valley, it's buying too much into the narrative to say, we're all automatons. Like, you know, I think from a culture standpoint of consuming, you know, endless scroll vibe, like the best example of this is you go on a social media app or something like that, or you're just wasting time on your phone and you, you look up and you go, man, what, like, that was not how I wanted to use those 20 minutes, right? Like, that's like that feeling of regret that you might have. That's an example of that consuming part of the agency. But on the side of, of jobs and, you know, and, and AI job loss, things like that. I, I don't think these tools yet. I mean, maybe if you're, if you're, you know, a programmer or someone in this highly technical space where these agentic coding platforms are doing such a good job of cranking out inhuman amounts of code so quickly. I can understand that there's fears, but it's more the anxiety of what is coming. We are in this, this crisis of like, yeah, generative AI is making us ask this, this really weird question. Which is what is a human for? Right? And that's, that's, that's a wild thing to have, you know, publicly traded companies asking you, right? What is the human for? And I think that is what we are feeling right now as a, as a society, whether you are a booster who is worried and has a little bit of the doomerism stuff in it, or you're somebody who's out protesting data centers in your town. It's a lot of it is centered around this, this idea of like, what is a human for? Support for the show comes from Upwork. Here's the thing about scaling your business. It doesn't have to happen in a chamber. You'll eventually reach points where hiring quick expert help isn't just necessary. It's the key to unlocking your growth. For that, you can turn to Upwork. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across more than 125 categories. Find talent and start filling those skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. You can browse profiles, review people's past work, and get help scoping the role. Hire confidently while sticking to your timeline. 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Agents in Framer work alongside teams to streamline collaboration on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings, and ship everything all in one place. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash decoder for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash decoder for 30% off. Framer.com slash decoder. Rules and restrictions may apply. I wanted to go back to the idea of PSYOPs, right? And maybe the answer really is just the paranoia. But that word, PSYOP, has broken containment. What exactly does that mean? And also, why has it become so prevalent now? Is it just everyone's paranoid of everything? Well, PSYOP is like a, you know, it's kind of like a military-grade, you know, it's an operation that is meant to, you know, trick you psychologically. I don't have the definition, you know, in front of me. Like a clandestine manipulation campaign. Yes. Great way to put it. And I think that, again, that when we talk about anything that's happened in a technological, cultural sense, it all builds off of the stuff that came before it, right? So, like be an unbelievable amount of corruption just happening in plain sight, like rug pulls from the president of the United States and his family and no real accountability for that, such that society just goes, ah, well, nevertheless. And after a while again, people are gonna internalize these lessons and say, well, if this is what I can see, if this is what I am allowed access to, then I'm pretty sure this is just how the world works. And so the things that I don't have the tools to explain, that's, you know, in some ways it's a rational response to some of these things that are that are happening, even if they tend to be, you know, irrational theories. What makes something slop? Is it just bad AI content? It really feels like slop is broken contain in terms of, you know, nomenclature. I'm inclined to say that it follows that pornography standard of, you know, when you see it, right? You know, when you see it. I think what, for me, the way that I think about slop, what a sense. The way that I deem something as slop would be having a kind of contempt for its audience. Right. Like, you're an idiot, you don't care, you're just scroll, like, I'm gonna, yeah, here's Shrimp Jesus, you know, dummy. Like that, when you feel that thing from someone who's like, I'm doing click volume ad arbitrage from the Philippines, from this, you know, center, building as many different Facebook pages to spam, you know, unsuspecting older people without this media literacy to just, you know, oh yeah, like, you know, did, did you see that Garth Brooks spoke out about the Supreme Court case at, you know, at this sold-out concert in South Africa, you know, like something totally random that didn't happen and just like shoving it down people's faces. Cause, not cause they have any particular political ideology, but they're just trying to make a quick buck. That is what I consider to be slop. You know, I think when you look at, very recently, there's been a spate of either sanctioned or non-sanctioned campaign videos that have come out, like for, for Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles is one of him, like as Batman, totally AI generated, would have taken, you know, millions of dollars to make. Now somebody can just make it on the outside of the campaign, can promote it for itself, goes viral. I don't see that, like, it is slop technically, but I see it slightly different, right? Like that's like almost just propaganda or all that stuff, those Lego videos of Donald Trump coming out of Iran to sort of, you know, knock on the US military response there. I don't see that as slop as much as, as propaganda, as a tool. For me, slop is, has to have contempt for its audience in this sense of, it's just like really low rent. I'm wasting your time and energy in order to make some money. Well, you may have just answered this, but people seem to get hung up on whether AI can make good art. Do you have a strong take on that, whether something vaguely sloppish can count as good art? You know, I just, I just read this new book coming up by Corey Doctorow, the activist writer, science fiction writer who coined the term interestification. And he notes in the book, and I, I, I think this is a pretty incisive observation, that AI art is supposed to be, it's not good, but it's like, it's good enough to be offensive and that AI art, I may be, you know, slightly butchering his, his understanding here, but it's really, it's a proof of concept. It's supposed to make people, a certain group of people, really mad, right? It's supposed to have someone see it and go, oh man, they're gonna put everyone who can draw out of business. It's gonna change all this art because that's really useful marketing for these companies. It's a really useful narrative. It's, oh, look how powerful this stuff is, right? And I think what's interesting about that is that a lot of this isn't, is it good or is it bad? Is it, it's, is it powerful? Is it, does it have the ability to disrupt livelihoods? For me, it's still like the deeper, probably slightly nerdy question is, you know, like, is art still art if you don't experience it as an encounter with another person? Like, I don't really think it is, but I also can't really explain to you why it isn't. I just know a piece of art that didn't come from a human mind, that wasn't rooted in human experience, it doesn't mean anything to me. It is literally meaningless. But again, I don't really know why that is. I just feel it. And isn't this part of what's so exhausting about this moment that's been foisted on so many of us who enjoy the human stuff? Like, you're describing why that conversation is really so, so hard. And it's that, that there's like something ineffable about human contact, right? And like, that's why we're all here. We're all here on Earth. Like, I think so much nowadays of that, again, I'm butchering it, but the Kurt Vonnegut quote that, like, we're put on the Earth to fart around, right? Yes, I can go have somebody mail the letter for me, or I can send an email, or I can go down to the post office and interact with some weird people and see some stuff and then get a sandwich and then watch the birds, you know, and do all, and it's like, and then I get a flat tire and then I have to call someone and then they help me, you know, on and on. It's like, that's why we're all here, right? To do that, to have those, those weird, unexpected interactions. And this, this machine's like, what if I told you, you don't have to do any of that ever again? And then you go, what is a human for? Uncovered windows can make your home feel up to 20 degrees hotter. Stay cool and save up to 45% off custom window treatments during the summer Black Friday mega sale at Blinds.com. From outdoor shades to room darkening blinds, finding the perfect fit is easy. Get free samples, expert design help, and professional measure and install services. 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The asset compliance lets you sleep soundly at night and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com slash AI. What's your favorite part of the internet now? I mean, like, the pods, newsletters, Reddit boards. I mean, is there, like, where's, like, the little pocket of, like, the old internet on the new internet that you retreat