The internet is facing many of the same problems as the American Western Frontier, more commonly known as the Wild West, which was brought to an end by rapid privatization and growing industry. Once a space of exploration and discovery, the internet was home to thousands of niche communities, encompassing chat rooms, question boards, forums, and blogs. Together, they created a homogeneous internet culture with a shared love for the digital realm. In its most primitive state, the internet was a digital escape from the real world.
Twenty years later, the modern internet seems to have lost the essence of its former self. Cynical phrases such as “brain rot” are appearing throughout internet culture, and more people are taking on negative mindsets with questions such as, “why does the internet make me depressed?” or, “why does the internet feel boring?” The truth is, similarly to the Wild West, privatization and growing industry are slowly killing the beloved internet with algorithms and bots.
(Official Mt. San Jacinto Community College website during 2006 via Way Back Machine)
While the memory of the internet’s golden age is slowly withering away, many still mourn the freedom offered by the internet in the early 90s and late 2000s, including Nicholas Moreno, a high school English teacher. “I think what made it so special was the sense of discovery,” he explained. “Search engines weren’t great, and there were so many little niche communities online that you could randomly stumble on. (Plus) everything was user generated. Websites were unique and janky, but fun because of it. Nothing was streamlined to the point that it all felt the same.”
By the end of the 2000s, most web browsers were on the same playing field, and users could choose from a plethora of web browsers including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google. In 2025, this is quite the opposite, and according to Statistica, Google currently dominates the web browser market with 65% of the global market. The earlier iterations of these browsers weren’t as streamlined as they are today; algorithms were nonexistent, and users had to get creative to find what they were looking for.
During the early 2000s, Google averaged seven million searches a day, but only allowed non-intrusive advertisements on the browser. These came in the form of either text-based advertisements, or moving sponsored results to the top of a search query, with licensing making up the other portion of their revenue during the time. Other search engines hosted banner advertisements, which were slightly more intrusive, but the difference was minimal.
In the modern day, Google is also the largest digital advertiser, advertising for more than 1.2 million businesses, with 63% of internet users having clicked on a Google advertisement. Modern advertisements are far more intrusive than their counterparts in the 2000s, noticeably increasing the loading time of websites and plastering them. The most intrusive advertisements, though, aren’t the ones you can see but rather the ones that you can’t.
The majority of websites utilize algorithms to curate content based on individual users’ behavior, interests, and disinterests. While the early Internet required users to explore and put effort into what they were looking for, the modern Internet instead feeds it to them.
Moreno continues to explain, “Lastly, everything didn’t feel advertised or monetized to me.” Moreno continues, “There was so much free and easy information without a subscription to a news agency. There were free browser games that weren’t pay-walled or made so hard that you had to spend money. Information felt truly free and unbiased to a point that censorship or one-sided information that there is now.”
(Original image uploaded along the Dead Internet Theory)
The decline of the internet has led to users embracing conspiracy theories, such as a user named Illuminati Pirate, who posted onto the online forum, Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe, proposing the Dead Internet Theory. Illuminati Pirate believed that the internet was no longer controlled by humans, and instead controlled by bots. They went as far as to say that many of our day-to-day interactions on the internet were with bots rather than humans. While this conspiracy theory is just that, a conspiracy theory, there is some truth at the root of it.
Currently, according to World Bank Open Data, 65% of the global population (5.56 Billion people) use the internet. The United States alone has seen a 152% increase in internet users since 2000, and the growth of bots on the internet is just as jarring. Imperva, an American cybersecurity company, released their annual Bad Bot Report for 2023, and discovered that bot activity accounts for 49.6% of global internet traffic. This was up 7.3% from 2021, when the Dead Internet Theory was posted, and up 6.6% from 2013, when Imperva originally began to conduct these reports. More notably, Bad Bots, which are categorized as malicious, were up 8.4% from 2013, and up 4.3% from 2021. This report suggests that bot activity is rising for the fifth consecutive year.
Good bots, which are usually put in place by website designers for website indexing, are declining, making bad bots the majority of bot activity. These bots engage in scalping, account takeovers, scams, and even acting as real people on social media. With the addition of artificial intelligence, there is no telling what these bots will be capable of further down the line. According to an anonymous professor at MSJC, Bad Bots can spread dangerous misinformation and steal data. Some cases are already appearing, and according to tech journalist Kevil Hurler, Chat GPT convinced a real person to solve a CAPTCHA for it.
“I think that it’s lost to time,” Moreno concludes, “In order to return to the original internet, we would need to solve the bot issue and over-monetization, which I don’t believe is feasible. It would be easier to start a new version of the internet than fix the current.”
Will the internet end just as all frontiers before it? In time, will it become as romanticized as the wild west? It’s already happening, but only time will tell if the internet will really die.
