We’re living in a time where the curtain of evil has been pulled back far enough that crazy theories really don’t seem all that far fetched. Dead Internet Theory is presented more like a creepypasta than anything else if you go by the first Google hits. If you try to use an unregulated search engine the hits are awash in Russian bot pages, or Chinese ones. It’s a mess at best. The overwhelming majority of comments on the internet, on sites that aren’t regularly scrubbed, are bots. If this site didn’t have a scrubber & me cleaning things up it would be a ridiculous mess. If you go by sheer volume of just comments AI makes up many times more activity than humans on the internet by far. The internet may not be dead, but it has cancer, and it may be terminal.
For a regular content creator like me the algorithm is a lot to contend with. Even if every single reader posted a link to their social media tonight chances are only a handful of people would navigate to the site, a few might look around a little, but that’s it. There’s just so much going on that one more thing that doesn’t instantly grab you is fighting a nearly unwinnable war. I’m lucky in that I started at a time when webcomics were fashionable and you didn’t have to excel at them to gain a following. If I tried to start today there’s really no way I’d be able to gain a foothold.
All that said, the algorithms that decide the fate of everyone online might randomly smile on me one day. Some person somewhere might see my work and write a favorable article. Then again it could also go extremely the opposite way. Someone could see my work and decide I should be bullied into killing myself. It’s unpredictable. The most likely thing is nothing will change and I’ll just keep going along at the same mid level of success. Which is perfectly fine really. It’s certainly better than being targeted for destruction.
As someone who lives or dies by the internet I’m obviously interested in ideas like dead internet theory. Parts of the internet die off as people move away from them & then bots tend to take over. Of course no one but bots are left to interact so it’s basically pointless. If they want to have their way with my old livejournal I’m not all that bothered.

Anyway, all that’s as may be. What I must focus on now is enticing you, who have not decided to support me via one of the above links, into doing so. How you ask? I don’t know. I was kind of hoping the comic would do it and I wouldn’t need to sell things any further. My plan is not well conceived… I would be very pleased if you did support my work though. It’s ever so cheap to do so & I promise I will misuse your money more or less the same way a charity will. What’s not to like about that?

Posts authored by Jackie

The Times Between 21.