Slop, Bots and Dopamine Deficiency: Welcome To the End of the Internet
Markus Spiske
Inside the chaotic decline of the internet and why humans are logging off.
The internet used to be a place of exploration, creativity and community, but it’s now a closed-off echo-chamber, feeding content through algorithms. Rage-bait and intrusive advertising are frustrating users. Negative mental health effects have led to people minimising screen time. Now with “AI Slop” and the even scarier “nonslop” which is indiscernible to the untrained eye, the human element of the internet is fast becoming as obsolete as an iPhone after two years. Seeing a video testimonial from a time-poor business owner only to realise it’s AI-generated, you quickly lose trust not just in the brand, but the platform itself.
A recent study by Imperva found that 49% of online traffic is non-human, so it begs the question: are we moving into a world where bots serve ads to other bots while humans log off for good?
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Since its creation by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, the internet has gone through several boom-and-bust periods, no more so than the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. Between 2000-2002, the Nasdaq dropped an incredible 78%, with speculation that the AI bubble burst will mirror this.
After the dust settled came the real magic. Between 2004 and 2012 – what many call the internet’s golden age – Myspace and Facebook filled our lives. This was a time when social media still felt social (outside a top friends list). YouTube brought viral videos to the mainstream, giving us everything from the cute and comical to the absurd, with videos like “Salad Fingers.” The web felt like the Wild West, full of connection, curiosity and creative risk.
The turning point came around 2017, when the internet stopped being a place you explored and became one that explored you. Facebook decided what you saw through algorithms. YouTube paid you to perform. Instagram made life a brand campaign through filters. Then smartphones arrived on the scene and served to amplify these platforms as people were constantly connected, with an instant ability to stimulate their brains.
YOUR BRAIN ON THE INTERNET
The internet is like crack to humans. And just like crack, our addiction to it has been monetised.
Due to humanity’s “negativity bias” (an evolutionary skill that had us scanning the horizon for sabre-toothed tigers), we are now scanning our phones looking for threats. These threats hardly affect us; some aren’t even real. Your amygdala is hijacked, which puts you in fight or flight mode – even when you’re in a cozy room in a perfectly safe home.
It can evoke anxiety, depression, anger, FOMO and more negative emotions. Everything from international politics to seeing an image of “the one that got away” with their new partner on Instagram. These small interactions infiltrate regular life. This is a time when we should be connecting, thinking, creating or indulging in life’s natural pleasures.
The weirdest part? We keep coming back as our brain releases more dopamine as a reward system. Our brains are simplistic and will gravitate towards the highest dopamine in the shortest time. Apps, websites and the phone itself are all designed to control this in the most simplistic form: they reward us with likes and keep us glued with the eternal scroll of algorithmically curated content. Add in a touch of confirmation bias, which is your brain being more susceptible to agreeing with content that suits your worldview, and you’ll find yourself in dopamine heaven.
Meanwhile, our attention is struggling. As far back as 2012, a study by computer scientist Ramesh Sitaraman surveyed millions of users and found people abandoned videos that didn’t load within two seconds; however, users with faster internet connections abandoned them even quicker. The study suggested we faced a future where faster connection speeds would mean shorter attention spans. Well, almost 15 years on, that future is now.
THE “DEATH OF THE INTERNET”
To quote Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption, “The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.” Tech companies began racing for clicks, traffic and attention, often by any means necessary.
Google has reported that the internet is inundated with websites that “feel like they were created for search engines instead of people.” False stories now bounce from fringe news sites to social media, get echoed by bigger outlets and stripped from their original source. The BBC highlighted one such case where reports that Olena Zelenska (Ukraine’s First Lady) bought a Bugatti with USAID money. The source was from a Russian-backed French news site that went live nine days prior, with no contact information and gibberish on many pages. That didn’t matter as a single tweet reporting this was seen by over 6 million people and took weeks to debunk. This same network is generating thousands of news articles across dozens of sites, even using quintessentially American names such as Houston Post and Boston Times, some of which were real newspapers that went out of business.
With AI Models now using an amalgamation of live data across the internet, less reputable sites flood our feeds with bogus stories that infiltrate AI sites and spread false narratives. Even the comments sections – once the last refuge of clarity – are now crowded by bots. A peer-reviewed Cornell study of 200 million users found that roughly 20% of posts were by bots. Another report from Ahrefs in 2025 reported that 74.2% of new web pages contain AI-generated content. We’ve built a feedback loop where rubbish content trains smarter machines to make even more rubbish content for human consumption.
HOW ARE ACTUAL HUMANS ENGAGING?
When Alexis Ohanian, the ex-CEO of Reddit, a platform with over two million monthly users, comments that most of the internet is already “dead”, you pay attention. This is all part of the “Dead Internet Theory”, a conspiracy originating in 2014, inferring that the internet was mostly made of bot traffic and artificially generated content, manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population. Sure, it came with some crackpot views, but now elements are becoming frighteningly real as we settle into this dystopian present.
Platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter are increasingly filled with AI-influenced posts, diluting genuine voices that may not suit the algorithm. Ohanian advocates a “proof of life” as a way to combat this.
A YouGov (UK) survey found that 52% of respondents aged 11 to 18 want to "break free from phone addiction". Almost half (46%) of respondents aged 16–24 in a “British standards institution” survey stated they would prefer a world without the internet altogether. Recent stats show that only 1 in 14 Instagram posts are from actual friends (Business Insider), illustrating why Social Media isn’t social anymore.
We’ve gone beyond “kids these days love their phones.” Half don’t want it at all or want to break free from its grip. Half the traffic online is being driven by bots and three-quarters of content is at the very least “assisted” with AI.
The portion of the pie that’s left for human content connecting with a willing human participant is becoming slimmer every day.
“HISTORY DOESN’T REPEAT ITSELF, BUT IT RHYMES”
Print, radio, television, vinyl, CDs, cassettes, landlines and letters were all once dominant forces, only to be replaced by the next iteration. Will there be another version of the internet, perhaps uploaded directly into our brains? Or will this be the first time we see people quitting something without an alternative being released? Perhaps the alternative is embracing the “real world”?
With the rise in vinyl, print media, social groups, film cameras and even “dumb” phones, we may be led into this new world by a cohort who have previously been referred to as “Digital Natives”. Let’s hope.
