Night of the Living Dead Internet Theory

April 12, 2026

For those of you who get grossed out easily, there will be NO images of zombies in this blog post!

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Dead Internet theory has been around for a while, and there might be something to it. Ten years ago, dead internet theory referred to the proliferation of bots and other kinds of fake accounts on the internet, but now the general public also has to deal with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). To me, this isn’t necessarily a big change. I’ve always suspected that a lot of the internet was fake, especially if an unfamiliar hot chick was contacting me directly. I learned early on that any hot chick who initiated online contact with me was in reality (if you believe in the ‘reality’ construct anymore) a hairy overweight guy living in his basement. Now it could be A.I. as well.

Even though the internet has always been partially fake, the internet itself isn’t entirely dead. Only part of the internet is dead. A lot of the internet is alive and well if you can ignore the dead stuff. I guess that’s the difference between the living dead (zombies) and the living dead internet; you can’t ignore zombies when they’re trying to eat your brains, but you can work around the worthless stuff online. Maybe you can’t avoid it, but you can work around it.

Youngsters staring at their phones can look like (maybe) well-groomed slouching zombies, but I can’t really blame them because I’m seeing more and more people my age staring like zombies too. I can understand the zombie-like youngster behavior because they were raised on phones and don’t know any better, but oldsters my age or older should (know better). Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they only look like they’re being hypnotized. Maybe those seemingly living dead scrollers are on the verge of discovering the cure for cancer, and I’m the only one who can’t see it.

Act your age, Granny, and knit me a sweater!! I’m going outside to yell at the imaginary kids on my lawn! (image from The Atlantic-good article too. I hope it was written by a human.)

Most of the websites I frequented in the late 1990s are gone now, wiped away as if they had never existed in the first place. Many of the bloggers that I used to read no longer post anything. Most of them probably gotten tired of blogging and have moved on to other endeavors. I hope none of them are actually dead, though as a statistical matter, the probability is that at least one of them is, probably way more than that. Back in my early blogging days, I was confident that the website content was being created by a human being who at least put minimal effort into it. Now the same content can be created by A.I. with no effort at all.

Maybe I’d be better off being a zombie too. From what I understand, you don’t have to think much as a zombie. You just follow your impulses and eat brains. Or you just follow your impulses and scroll. Either way, following impulses and eating and scrolling all day just sounds like a typical holiday. Maybe I should give up on books and just scroll. Maybe I should let A.I. write everything for me. Maybe I’d like being the living dead. Then again, I used to get bored on holidays. I don’t think I’d like being a zombie.

Even though a lot of online users lie or rely on A.I., I find today’s internet very useful, maybe even more useful than I’ve ever found it (BOLD CLAIM). For example, even with today’s level of potential fakery, I can buy and sell stuff much easier than a decade ago. In the old pre-internet days, once I bought a comic or a book that I liked, I kept it for years, not wanting to sell it because it would be difficult to buy back again. For 20-30 years, my book collection stayed the same, constantly growing around a core that remained constant. Now my collection is a lot smaller and constantly changing because I don’t feel the need to keep anything anymore because everything is easy to buy and sell.

I probably wouldn’t find much stuff like this at my local used book stores, but I found it online. Thank you, living dead internet!

Some online sales sites allow you to use A.I. to write the listings, but the A.I .writing always sucks. I take pride in writing my own listings and putting my own personality into each one, but maybe doing that is a waste of time and energy. People who buy my stuff do so because I sell cool stuff. They don’t care about my word usage and insights about the product. Despite my disdain for A.I. written listings, I’ll buy the item if the pictures are good and I actually like the item, so I don’t know why I’m wasting my time with unnecessary effort of writing my own descriptions. Aaargh, I’m just one of those rare fools who enjoys writing for the sake of writing.

The living dead internet’s usefullness is not limited to consumerism. The living dead internet has helped me to learn to type properly. Ever since I started keyboarding with a word processor back in 1985, I’ve been a two-finger typist. For the 15 years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve been two-finger hunting-and-pecking whenever I write something, but two weeks ago I watched a short online video about typing/keyboarding, and since then I’ve been typing almost properly. I mean, I’m not good at it yet. I’m slow, but at least my fingers are in the right position, and I’m not looking at the keyboard much either. Without the internet (whether it was dead internet or alive internet that taught me, I don’t know), I wouldn’t have been able to do this in such a convenient way.

Last week, I had a tune stuck in my head, a song that I had heard only a few times in my life, I think. With the help of the living dead internet, I was able to track the song to the 1932 movie Horsefeathers starring the Marx Brothers and then found the scenes with the song in the movie. The song is still stuck in my head, but at least I’m getting the words right now.

Here’s the song, all four versions in one short video! Thank you, living dead internet!

It might be weird that I’m watching dead people on the living dead internet, but at least these people used to be alive. At least, I think they used to be alive. It would really freak me out if I found out that these dead people I’ve been watching never existed. I wouldn’t be able to emotionally handle it. I don’t know how much of the internet is dead or has never been alive in the first place, but I know that I am alive and writing my own stuff. If I’m still writing stuff after I die, which hopefully won’t be for a while, then I’ll know that the living dead internet has gone too far. And I’ll be sure to let you know on this blog when it happens.

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Without the living dead internet, it would have been extremely difficult to self-publish my one-and-only novel and then find a place to sell it (other than from the trunk of my car).

Thank you, Amazon! And thank you, living dead internet!

An average man with a quiet life falls for a hot chick who brings chaos. Yeah, this was the 1990s for a lot of average men (and I think it’s like that today too)!