A Generated Web

The internet was created with this very basic notion that there’s a human being on the other side of the computer screen, and that notion is being replaced.The dark forest theory of the internet elucidates the consequences of this change. It states that our online experience feels increasingly life-like but lifeless. Public forums and online spaces are being flooded by slop, bots, trolls, clickbait, and ads. In response, people are running to walled gardens, such as private messaging groups, Discord channels, newsletters, and closed blogs, where interaction is still human.The theory was first proposed by Yancey Strickler in 2019, two years before we were blessed with ChatGPT. That is to say, LLMs are not the root cause. The internet has simply evolved into a high-stakes environment. Careers, lives, even politics can rise or fall on clicks and likes. It's a numbers game, and the more optimized and scaled your efforts are, the greater your chances of success.LLMs did make this a whole lot worse, though. Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, thousands of automated pipelines have been set up that publish a relentless stream of LinkedIn hustle manifestos, Twitter rage-bait, Facebook fake news posts, and SEO-optimized corporate blog posts. With current advances in image/video gen models, even YouTube videos, TikTok clips and podcasts can all be automated at the same unprecedented scale.The dark forest is still young and growing fast.The Polsia ExampleMeet Polsia, a solo-founder startup building an AI system that “runs” your company 24/7. It claims a $10M annual run rate and just raised $30M at a $250M valuation.For a hundred bucks, it builds and deploys a landing page for your business, runs your social media accounts, and performs mass-scale outreach. There are almost 9000 such projects currently live.The startup itself runs on this kind of automation. Its Twitter profile, for example, is averaging 5 tweets a MINUTE. A never-ending slopstream of tweetsThis is the scale of