Marketers in a dying internet: Why the only option is a return to simplicity

There’s a famous saying: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The quote—taken from a New Yorker cartoon published in, if you can believe it, 1993—made a simple point about the anonymity provided by the internet: Shielded by a monitor, you could be anyone.

I had assumed this quote would remain eternally relevant. Not so. In 2024, a person might be a dog—or they might not even be a person at all. Around half of all internet traffic in 2023 came from bots. AI-generated content has bled into every corner of the internet, from Wikipedia to the first page of Google Images, further distorting our ability to perceive truth from fiction online.

Admittedly, hoaxes and misinformation were always part of the online landscape. The 1990s and 2000s gave birth to websites like Time Cube and Infowars. In the 2010s, Facebook and Twitter turbocharged the spread of disinformation, giving a platform and distribution to bad actors—and, in some cases, algorithmically boosting their reach.

This moment feels different, however. Big Tech—rather than being a victim, or a coconspirator in misinformation—is now an active participant, developing and promoting the generative AI models that are actively ruining the Web. When Meta AI can interject in a conversation and pretend it’s a parent, and then recommend a school in the New York area, it’s enough to shake your faith in a human-centered web.

There’s a growing body of evidence that suggests people—ordinary people—dislike AI. They loathe AI customer service bots, think AI-generated art and music threatens their humanity, and believe brands that fail to disclose AI-generated content are actively lying to them. These sentiments are, obviously, incompatible with the direction of Big Tech, which has gone all-in on generative AI, spending hundreds of billions on infrastructure to support it.

Marketers need to understand the forces at play. Generative AI, though superficially impressive, is actively undermining the trust that people once felt towards tech platforms. With machine-generated content now cluttering the most visible online touchpoints (like the frontpage of Google, or your Facebook timeline), it feels inevitable that consumer behaviors will shift as a result. And so marketers need to change how they reach target audiences.

The Dead Internet Theory

If you spend any time on Reddit or Hacker News, you’ll find a growing consensus that the internet is a bleaker, less authentic place. Those looking to explain this downward (and seemingly universal) trend now subscribe to the Dead Internet Theory, which postulates that bot-driven activity now accounts for a majority of online interactions, perhaps due to nefarious intent on behalf of governments or corporations.

This idea—which Wikipedia describes as a conspiracy theory, and likely originated from 4Chan—has gained surprising levels of traction in polite spaces, earning the attention of respected academics and mainstream news publications alike.

The theory itself isn’t nearly as interesting as the fact that, to many, it feels credible. A reasonable person—someone who isn’t typically conspiratorially minded—could hear the Dead Internet Theory and say: “Yeah, that makes sense.” It explains the gnawing sense of unease they feel about the modern internet, where things just don’t look right.

The issue is, fundamentally, a problem of platforms. The big tech sites—the ones with the most eyeballs, and those that consume the majority of ad spending—have failed to rein in the bots. They’ve spent billions in pushing the same generative AI products that have contributed to the growing phoniness of the web. And, most damning of all, they failed to consider the consequences.

The transformation we’ve seen is irreversible. You can’t uninvent ChatGPT or Midjourney. Whereas humans can often identify AI-generated imagery, typically by looking for telltale signs like misshapen hands and incomprehensible lettering, machines can’t. At least, not with any degree of reliability. Generative AI and bots are to the web what PFAS chemicals and microplastics are to our water supply.

There’s a pervasive sense of distrust and ennui clouding the internet, and marketers ignore it at their peril. There’s a genuine chance that, in the short-to-medium term, consumers change how they consume online content. Moreover, as a consequence of this, consumers will become harder to reach through tech alone.

At one point, marketers could depend on behavioral targeting and vast, platform-centric ad networks. That era is coming to an end, and we need to prepare for it.

A Dying Web Reborn

Ultimately, I believe that we’re reaching a point where monolithic platforms (particularly social media platforms) are losing their power. As their users and activity shrink, the usefulness of these platforms to advertisers will wane, forcing them to rethink their strategies.

Since 2022, we’ve seen a continuous decline in the amount of time spent on social media platforms. Gartner expects this trend will continue into the future.

This decline is certainly multicausal. The link between social media use and mental ill-health is now widely understood. Gartner, when making the prediction mentioned earlier, highlighted two interesting points. First, 53% of consumers think “the current state of social media has decayed compared to either the prior year or to five years ago.” An additional 7 in 10 consumers think Generative AI will make matters worse.

Many people who limit their time on one platform—whether it be Facebook or X—ultimately conclude that they don’t need a replacement. A recent Financial Times investigation found that the number of U.K. individuals who stopped using Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk is vastly larger than those who signed up for Threads or BlueSky.

Additionally, we’re witnessing a redefinition of what constitutes “social networking.” Rather than use large, monolithic sites for their online interactions, I suspect that people will instead revert to their own curated communities centered around specific interests and niches. These could range from simple web forums to Discord servers and Telegram groups.

These spaces are, for obvious reasons, a lot harder for advertisers to penetrate than, say, Facebook or Twitter. Moreover, whereas advertising is considered an unavoidable element of social networking, it’s likely that intrusive personalized ads would be less warmly received in these smaller, more intimate communities.

The prognosis for search-based advertising is more complicated. Whereas you can quite easily—and quite happily—live without social media, it’s hard to imagine a world where people don’t use Google to look up phone numbers, or try to find information from the wider web.

In February, Gartner predicted that search volume will decline by 25% by 2026, due to the rise of “AI chatbots and other virtual agents.” Given the steep cost of running AI models, their propensity to “hallucinate,” and the aforementioned consumer distrust (or dislike) of AI, this prospect seems unlikely.

Far more likely is the erosion of Google’s position as the default, with consumers switching to alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, and Bing in search of better results. As the search market fractures, search-based advertising will inevitably become more complex.

It’s also conceivable that consumers become more suspicious of the content they see in search results, and become less likely to engage with sponsored content.

Real-World Authenticity

There’s a real, tangible unhappiness with the current web. Although generative AI drew much of my attention in this piece, I think it’s worth noting that the origins of this unhappiness are likely much, much older. This phenomenon too is also multicausal, driven by clickbait-spewing chumboxes, algorithmic curation of our social media timelines, and the gradual worsening of the products we rely upon.

The difference is that now, things are worse than they’ve ever been. We’re at a turning point and consumers will respond by changing how they engage with online content. The next incarnation of the web will be fractured, where people are less likely to engage with content beyond their chosen communities, or their trusted sources. Anything outside their “bubble” will be met with distrust and skepticism.

In many respects, it will resemble the web of the pre-social media era—only much more paranoid.

For marketers, the only option is a return to simplicity, while also empathizing authenticity. This could mean a return to channels that had fallen out of favor with the rise of digital advertising, like TV, radio, and out-of-home.

Or recognizing the advantage in things like word-of-mouth marketing, which, while complicated and time-consuming, has the advantage of feeling distinctly human in this unhuman era of the internet.

Similarly, we must understand that while social media may be dying, social networking itself isn’t. It’s a nuance worth recognizing. People sought community online long before the World Wide Web was a thing, congregating in the USENET communities of the 1980s. And it’ll continue to exist in a similar form, taking place in niche websites and messaging groups.

The challenge for marketers isn’t just identifying these places, but understanding how to operate within them. And that won’t be easy.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91220148/marketers-in-a-dying-internet-why-the-only-option-is-a-return-to-simplicity?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss