Destructoid Checkpoint: Jean Phil and the Dead Internet Theory post

DestIt feels safe to say that we are hurtling past the predicted dead internet theory. In the age of AI, the growing trend is bot-on-bot action, but gamers can once again be proud, as we saw the earliest days of this new age playing out long before anyone else.

Purveyors of multiplayer gaming have long used bots to inflate the number of people that you will see when you are in a lobby. Now, it must be said that this is not always for nefarious reasons.

Bot lobbies originally became quite important to provide a sort of soft onboarding for players. Sorting them into appropriate skill levels while also being geographically close enough to provide good ping was legitimately difficult to do, and very few people want to stick with a game when they get punched around the lobby the first time they try to play.

As such, bot lobbies became a thing, one of the most famous examples being people's earliest games in Fortnite, which were tuned to provide an almost challengeless experience. Players were able to drop in and pick any POI. They wanted you to arm up almost completely unchallenged and then just take out the lobby on their way to success. It was an easy way to show what the game was all about and give newcomers space to learn the nuance of the game while they were still completely fresh, without ending up in some Twitch streamer’s montage.

Unfortunately, it feels like the entirety of the internet and social media in particular is becoming as soulless and bought-filled as those Fortnite lobbies.

In Blade Runner, the general premise is that human beings weren't quite violent enough to send across the stars to engage in all kinds of interstellar wars. Slaughter on that kind of a scale just doesn't really sit well with the general public or with shareholders. And so the Replicant was born. A thing that was in almost every way human, except you had the comfort of telling yourself that it had no soul.

If I might be so bold as to imply in an influencers were the effective equivalent of the slaughter hobos that were replaced by replicants in Blade Runner. They now have their day, as they are being replaced by AI.

That's right, influencers who are soulless to the point where they will shill for practically anything and anybody with the money to pay them, now find themselves being forced out of the market by AI YouTubers, TikTokers and Instagrammers.

You may have heard of Jean Phil and a bevy of similar influencers. What appeared to be smartly dressed men with goofy haircuts and a penchant for shadowboxing and choreographed dance routines turned out to be little more than a troop of AI influencers who had all been designed to push… you guessed it, crypto.

It's no longer enough to simply rely on the natural ability of the average human being to be willing to do anything for a dollar, and you have to be able to control and manipulate and poke and prod almost every aspect of product. Crypto companies can apparently no longer allow themselves to be represented by real human beings, who might someday grow a conscience about what it is that they're acting as the face of and turn around and start badmouthing the whole process.

Where still is just how believable all this can actually be. Despite looking strange and somewhat uncanny, there's obviously a tremendous amount of work going into making these look almost-but-not-quite believable. It's becoming very important, as a political, social and cultural tool, to not just be able to convince a subset of the population that what they are saying is real but also to have another subset of the population realize that it isn't.

For some years now, we've all been trained that the decisions that we make are not just correct, but they also make us better people than folks who make different decisions. This can be as simple as the console wars—which were never really entirely polite, even between companies themselves and especially not between groups of fans on the internet. If somebody has purchased a different console than you, they are a bad human being who makes bad choices, and they deserve bad things to happen to them. These are things that people on the internet will say and believe in all seriousness.

Extrapolate that out to more important issues, and you start to run into a bit of a problem oncethe people realize that characters like Jean Phil are fake. They've also been trained to think that the people who can't spot that are somehow stupid or ignorant or easily misled, and they're not to be trusted and they're certainly not to be respected.

What this then leads to is a level of admonishment for people who fall for these tricks and traps. Meaning that the next time something similar comes up, they don't listen to the warnings or to the interjections, almost as a defense mechanism. Few people enjoy being told that they're wrong, but far fewer enjoy being told that they are dumb.

It long ago became important that all the possibility and potential social upheaval that the internet could promise us was to be controlled tightly and completely by corporations. It's the same corporations that can hurtle us towards a completely dead internet where far more AI and bot traffic exists than any potential human being, neatly drowning us all in a swamp of misinformation because they don't need us to be informed; they just need us to be angry.

Instances like this will grow in regularity and severity over the coming years because they prove to be very interesting test beds for how people will and won't treat each other when they feel like somebody else is being left behind in their understanding of the world.

And all the while, these companies get more and more live feedback. That makes what they produce believable or not.

Thankfully the internet isn't quite dead yet, and there are enough people on it to keep it feeling interesting and authentic. The best way to keep it that way is to step outside the larger aggregators and social media platforms and pay more attention to the smaller, stranger, more interesting parts of the internet that still exist.

The Old Internet allows you to go back in time and look at how the Internet used to be. Lain Zine is about Serial Experiment Lain. The Internet is still brimming with fun, hyper dedicated sites like it. Check out the Useless Web. Go on, click the button.