(1) Why 10 Million People Say Amen to AI Nonsense - YouTube
Transcripts:
You scroll past something that makes no sense, an image of Jesus, except he's made entirely of shrimp. Underneath thousands of comments, "Amen. Amen. Amen." And you stop. Not because it's profound, because something feels wrong. The wrongness isn't the image itself. It's that you can't tell if a single person commenting actually exists.
If you've noticed this, if you felt that uncanny recognition that whole sections of the internet might be performing for an audience that isn't there, you're detecting something most people scroll right past. You're seeing the edges of what's called dead internet theory. The idea that since around 2016, most of what you encounter online isn't created by humans or consumed by humans.
It's bots talking to bots about content generated by algorithms. And the entire system has become self- sustaining. Here's what makes this more than conspiracy. In 2024, Imperva's bad bot report found that nearly 50% of all internet traffic came from nonhuman sources. Not malicious bots trying to break into systems, just automated entities creating, sharing, commenting, existing.
Academic researchers have given this phenomenon a name, synthetic sociality. a term describing how the internet fills itself with the appearance of human presence. But here's what changes everything. In 1981, before the internet even existed in any form you'd recognize, a French philosopher named Jean Bodriard wrote that we would reach exactly this point.
Not through conspiracy, through something he called the logic of simulation. He predicted that we'd arrive at a stage where simulations would generate more simulations, where the distinction between real and fake wouldn't be hidden or censored or difficult to find. It would simply cease to make sense as a question. And he was right.
Bodriard described four phases of how images relate to reality. Understanding these phases means understanding why shrimp Jesus isn't just weird internet content. It's the inevitable end point of how representation works. Phase one, the image faithfully reflects reality. Think of the early internet, personal blogs, forums, geocities pages with terrible backgrounds and visitor counters.
people trying to represent their actual lives online. The internet as mirror. Your web page showed your real interests, your real thoughts, your real awkward HTML attempts. The simulation pointed towards something genuine it was attempting to capture. Phase two, the image distorts reality.
This is where social media enters. Your life but filtered. your face, but with the skin smoothed, the lighting perfected. Not lying exactly, more like emphasizing certain truths while quietly erasing others. Instagram in 2012. The pose you held for 30 seconds before posting the candid shot. The simulation still acknowledges the reel, but it's begun warping it, stretching it, making it perform.
Phase three, the image masks the absence of reality. Here's where it gets strange. By the mid2010s, the algorithm starts curating your feed, not to show you what's happening, but to show you what will keep you scrolling. The distinction between experiencing something and seeing content about something collapses.
You don't go to concerts. You watch phones recording concerts. You don't have political opinions formed through lived experience. You have positions assembled from algorithmically selected outrage posts. The simulation has stopped pointing to reality. It's replaced it. But there's one more step. One final phase where even replacement becomes unnecessary.
And phase 4, the image has no relation to reality whatsoever. Pure simulation generating more simulation. Bodriard called this the simulacum. The copy with no original. Not a photograph of a real person, but an AI generated face that never belonged to anyone. Not a fake version of something real, but something that exists only as simulation from the start.
This is where we are now. Consider what's actually happening with shrimp Jesus. An AI generates an image based on patterns learned from millions of other images. Images that themselves were often AI generated or heavily processed. This image gets posted by an account that might be automated farming engagement.
It receives thousands of comments, many of which are likely from bots programmed to say amen to anything containing religious imagery. Other bots see the engagement metrics and share it further. Real humans scroll past, maybe pause, maybe comment, but by the time you encounter it, there's no way to trace back to an original intent or creator.
There's no reality it's copying. It's simulation referencing, simulation, referencing, simulation. The Facebook spam pages posting 50 AI generated images per day aren't trying to fool you into thinking they're real. They're not trying at all. They're feeding content into an algorithm that rewards engagement. And the algorithm doesn't care about authenticity.
It cares about clicks, shares, time spent viewing. The system selects for what performs, not for what's real. And performance in this context means generating the appearance of human interest. You've probably seen this pattern elsewhere. AI influencers like Lil McKela accumulating millions of followers.
She never existed as a person, yet brands pay for her endorsements. People develop parasocial relationships with her. Arguments break out in comment sections about her views on social issues. The question, "But is she real?" Stops being relevant because the answer doesn't change anything about how the system functions.
Bodriard had a name for what we've entered. Hyper reality, not false reality. That would imply there's a true reality somewhere to compare against. Hyper reality is when simulation becomes more compelling, more functional, more real than the thing it supposedly represents. His famous example was Disneyland. Not because it's fake, that's obvious, but because Disneyland presents itself as imagination, as fantasy, as the opposite of real America.
And this lets real America pretend it's authentic by comparison. Disneyland is fake, so Los Angeles can feel real. But here's the trick. Los Angeles is just as simulated. The freeways weren't natural growth. They were designed based on modernist visions of what cities should be. The suburbs weren't organic development. They were manufactured from post-war economic policy and advertising images.
Even authentic Los Angeles is performing a version of itself learned from movies about Los Angeles. Disneyland isn't the copy. It's the most honest part of the whole system because it admits it's simulation. Transfer this logic to the internet. You encounter content that's obviously AI generated, obviously bot-driven, obviously fake.
And this lets you believe that everything else, your friends posts, the news articles, the comment sections must be real by comparison. But if nearly 50% of traffic is automated, and if most content is algorithmically curated or AI assisted, then what exactly are you comparing against? The hyperreal doesn't hide its artificiality.
It makes artificiality so obvious in some places that you stop noticing it everywhere else. If you've ever caught yourself trusting something just because it felt less fake than everything around it, you're navigating hyper reality. Comment human if you're real. Or comment human if you're a bot trained to say you're human.
Either way, let's see what happens. Here's where it gets personal. You've probably noticed you relate differently to images now than you did 10 years ago. You photograph your food, not to remember the meal, but to have the photograph. The photo becomes more real than the eating. You experience concerts through your phone screen while physically present at the concert.
The recorded version, the simulation, feels more substantial than the sensory experience happening in real time. This isn't pathology. It's not that you're addicted to your phone or living inauthentically. It's that you've unconsciously recognized what Bodriard articulated in hyper reality. The simulation actually is more functional than the real.
The photo of your food integrates into social networks, generates responses, creates social bonds, serves as searchable memory. The food itself just becomes blood sugar. The simulation does more work. It's not that you prefer fake to real, it's that fake and real are categories that no longer map onto how you actually use information.
The same logic explains why dead internet theory doesn't collapse when you point out that real humans are still online. Of course, they are. But when bots generate content, algorithms curate it, AI systems optimize it, and automated accounts distribute it. Where exactly is the authentic human presence located? When you interact online, are you expressing yourself or performing a version optimized by years of algorithmic feedback? The question isn't whether you're real.
It's whether the distinction between real you and performed you means anything when performance is the only mode of existence available online. Bodriard wrote that we don't live in the matrix. We can't wake up to the desert of the real. We live in a system where the desert of the real itself became a simulation. The idea that there's an authentic offline existence waiting if you just log off. That's the final simulation.
Because when you log off, you carry the logic of hyper reality with you. You curate your offline experiences to be photographable. You describe events in terms of how they'll sound when narrated. You measure experiences by their potential to become content. This video is part of that system. The script you're hearing was developed with AI assistance.
The images are AI generated. The music is synthesized. The research was compiled through algorithmic search. Does knowing this invalidate what you're hearing? Here's what Bodriard would say. That question only makes sense if you still believe in an authentic versus artificial distinction. If you think there's a way to discuss hyper reality from outside hyper reality, but there isn't.
The observer, the voice you're hearing, isn't standing outside the dead internet explaining it from a position of clarity. He's inside it, part of it, trying to understand it from within. And maybe that's the only honest position left. So what do you do with this? If simulation generates simulation, if the internet is increasingly bots talking to bots, if the distinction between real and fake has stopped being meaningful, what changes? Maybe nothing.
Maybe everything. Because once you see it, you can't unsee it. You scroll differently. That uncanny feeling when you encounter shrimp Jesus. It's not paranoia. It's pattern recognition. You're detecting the edges of systems that aren't designed to be detected. The question stops being, "Is this real?" and becomes, "What am I participating in when I engage with this?" Bodriard didn't think we could escape.
He thought we were already at the point where escape was simulation, too. the idea of authentic living becoming just another product to consume, another identity to perform. But he did think consciousness mattered, not consciousness that lets you exit the system. Consciousness that lets you see which game you're playing while you play it.
The internet didn't die. It evolved into something predicted 40 years ago by someone who never used a computer. It became a system where simulations reproduce themselves without needing an original. Where bots generate content for algorithms that serve it to other bots. Where your participation and a bot's participation become functionally identical to the system processing both.
And you're here in it thinking about it, which might be the only response that actually makes sense. Not escape, not denial, not celebration, just cleareyed recognition of what we're inside. The desert of the real isn't somewhere else. It's here. It always was.
