Dead internet: will we return offline?

We treated the internet as the main road. The place where work, relationships and entertainment now happen.

What if it was only a temporary side road?

THE INTERNET IS NOW A GAME FULL OF NPCS

A year ago I wrote that the internet reminds me more and more of the online games we played around the year 2000. What you see there is, in the overwhelming majority, artificial content, and you rarely interact with real people.

Since then it has only sped up. Most of what you see on the internet is, or soon will be, AI-generated: text, images, videos, profiles, comments. The characters and the content. Exactly like NPCs in a game, that is, non-player characters: a character that no real person controls. They look like players, but they are not.

YOU WILL NEVER HAVE CERTAINTY AGAIN

In those old games we had one near certainty. When someone was labelled a real player, that was usually true.

That certainty is gone. Today you cannot be sure about anything online, that a human is on the other side. Not with text, not with a voice, not with a face on video. With nothing.

And that certainty will not come back. Whatever verification tool appears, there will always be a tool that fools it.

THERE WILL BE LESS WORK AT THE COMPUTER

There is a second force, a quieter one. Tens of percent of jobs today are tied to routine work at a computer. A large part of it is being automated.

Not all of these people will find another job in the online space. Some of them will end up elsewhere, in work that is away from the computer, in the real world.

That in itself is a shift offline. Not out of a belief that the offline world is better, but because there will no longer be as much work in the online world.

WHAT STAYS VALUABLE: A PRIMARY SOURCE

When most content is artificial, only one thing stays valuable: real human experience. Something that someone genuinely lived, thought through and wrote themselves.