The Internet Will Be More Dead Than Alive by 2028

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The Tipping Point We Never Saw Coming

In early 2024, something bizarre started happening across social media platforms. Users' feeds were suddenly flooded with hyper-realistic images of shrimp sporting the face of Jesus Christ. These "Shrimp Jesus" images weren't just weird internet ephemera—some garnered over 20,000 likes and thousands of comments. But here's the unsettling part: most of those interactions weren't from humans.

Welcome to the dead internet, where the line between human and machine has become so blurred that we can no longer tell who—or what—we're talking to online.

The Numbers Don't Lie: Bots Are Taking Over

The data paints a stark picture of our digital future. According to cybersecurity firm Imperva's 2024 "Bad Bot" report, the transformation is happening faster than anyone anticipated. In 2021, bots accounted for 42.3% of all internet traffic. Just two years later, that number jumped to 49.6%.

If this growth continues at its current pace—and there's no indication it won't—bots will constitute a clear supermajority of internet traffic by the late 2020s. We're not talking about some distant dystopian future. We're talking about three years from now.

The "dead internet theory," once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy, is rapidly becoming our reality. What started as a paranoid notion that the internet died around 2016 and has since been replaced by AI-generated content and bot activity is now backed by hard data and observable phenomena.

The Vanishing Human Web

While bots multiply exponentially, the human-made internet is literally disappearing. The Pew Research Center discovered that 38% of webpages from 2013 no longer exist—victims of what researchers call "link rot." This means that as AI-generated content floods the digital landscape, the authentic human contributions that once defined the internet are vanishing into the void.

"The internet is no longer for humans, by humans," observe researchers Jake Renzella and Vlada Rozova, who've studied the phenomenon extensively. The Shrimp Jesus images represent something far more insidious than mere engagement farming—they're symptoms of a fundamental shift in what the internet has become.

The Algorithm's Endgame

Taylor Lorenz, an expert on internet culture, pinpoints the moment things went wrong: "I think the internet was terminally ill before ChatGPT was announced and released. Algorithmic ranking systems, which are AI driven, really set the stage for just endless, worthless pieces of content and for the whole internet to be optimized in the most absurd ways."

The economic model is simple and devastating: attention equals dollars through ad revenue. In this system, it doesn't matter if the content is created by humans or machines, as long as it generates clicks. Bots can produce content, bots can engage with it, and bots can share it—creating a self-sustaining ecosystem that requires no human input whatsoever.

When Fake News Becomes Automated

The implications extend far beyond weird religious crustaceans. A May 2025 review by data analysis company NewGuard uncovered more than 1,000 news sites run almost entirely by bots. Among these, 167 were masquerading as Russian local news websites, publishing "egregiously misleading claims about the Ukraine war" while using AI to generate their content.

This isn't just about misinformation—it's about the complete automation of propaganda. When authoritarian regimes can deploy thousands of fake news sites at the click of a button, the very concept of truth online becomes meaningless.

The Tech Leaders' Blind Spot

Perhaps most tellingly, even the architects of this transformation seem caught off guard by its speed. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently tweeted that he "never really took dead internet theory seriously," but admitted there are now "a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts." The irony of his surprise is palpable—his company is one of the chief architects of the technology accelerating the internet's decay.

What We're Really Losing

This isn't about nostalgia for dial-up modems and GeoCities pages. It's about the fundamental promise of the internet: a space for human connection, creativity, and authentic communication.

"The freedom to create and share our thoughts on the internet and social media is what made it so powerful," Renzella and Rozova explain. "This is the sense in which the internet we knew and loved is 'dead.'"

Personal communications—messages between friends, private posts, intimate connections—will likely persist. But the public internet, the digital commons where we once gathered to share ideas and build communities, is being overrun by machines talking to machines about nothing.

The Three-Year Countdown

Based on current trends, we have approximately three years before crossing the threshold where bots become the dominant force online. This isn't a gradual decline we can ignore—it's an exponential curve that's accelerating every day.

What does a majority-bot internet look like? Imagine:

• Social media feeds where most posts are AI-generated

• Comment sections dominated by bot conversations

• Search results flooded with machine-written content

• Online reviews that are predominantly fake

• Dating apps where most profiles aren't real people

• News sites that exist solely to manipulate algorithms

Navigating the Dying Web

The challenge isn't just identifying what's real—it's maintaining the will to seek authenticity in an increasingly artificial landscape. Users must become digital detectives, constantly questioning whether that viral post, that perfect comment, or that news article was created by a human being or generated by an algorithm designed to maximize engagement.

The tools to fight back exist—bot detection software, verified human networks, curated content sources—but they require active effort and constant vigilance. The passive consumption model of the internet is no longer viable.

The Human Internet's Last Stand

We're not witnessing the death of all online activity, but rather the end of the internet as a primarily human space. The question isn't whether this transformation will happen—the data shows it's already underway. The question is whether we'll preserve spaces for authentic human connection or surrender entirely to the algorithmic tide.

The internet that brought us together, that democratized information, that sparked revolutions and created communities—that internet has perhaps three years left as a human-majority space. After that, we'll be visitors in a digital world built by and for machines, searching for islands of humanity in an ocean of artificial content.

The Shrimp Jesus phenomenon wasn't just a weird internet moment. It was a warning shot. The bots aren't coming—they're already here. And in three years, they'll outnumber us all.