Ideas - What will happen to us when the internet dies?

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

And it is dying. At least for us, humans. Our chatter and connection online is being overrun by bots — more than half of online activity is non-human. The internet is on it's way to feeling haunted, like a deserted mall where the fountain is still gurgling, the canned music is still playing, but the people are nowhere to be found. IDEAS explores the dying internet and what we will do when it's dead?If you like this episode, you may want to listen to: We're not machines. Why should our online world define life?Guests in this episode:Cory Doctorow is an activist with a non-profit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He's a writer and journalist. His most recent book is called Enshitification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse And What To Do About ItMatt Hussey is a UK-based therapist and tech journalist.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexavers.cavers.cai exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.com to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. The freewheeling internet of old has given way to an internet where nothing seems to work. When was the last time you could easily find what you were looking for? We tweak our search terms over and over and still useless. Just a list of tangential links topped off with an AI summary that may not even be accurate. I think that the decay of platforms and the decay of the experience we have using them can be tracked to a set of policy choices. Not only is it hard to find things or to communicate or to decipher bought from human. We also can't modify our devices. We can't customize anything. We can't

move our music around. And we're spied on, lied to. And now with AI everywhere, we don't even know if we can trust what we read here or see online. Policy choices that were made in living memory by named individuals who were warned at the time of their likely consequences, who did them anyway, and in so doing created what you might call an insidogenic environment in which companies that do bad things to us in order to become more profitable, do not face consequences or discipline. And so this process of decline and degeneration, you've labeled it in shittification. Can you tell me about that term? Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa wants to know how the internet, and it seems all things digital, got so bad. So she's turned to journalists and

activist Corey Doctoro for some answers. We're calling this episode, The Internet is dying, the internet is dead. Well, the story of how it came up with it is probably the least interesting part of it, I'm afraid. I wish it was a great story, but it's not. I was on a vacation with my family in Puerto Rico. We rented a little rustic cabin in a cloud forest, and we had internet through microwave relay.

And if you know anything about microwave relay, the thing you probably know is that it doesn't go through clouds, and we were in a cloud forest. And so it sucked. And all of the towns were very far away, And if we thought about taking a trip into town to, you know, maybe go out for dinner, we'd have to look up the restaurants on TripAdvisor. And TripAdvisor wanted to load like 75 trackers on your browser before it would show you

any of the content about the restaurant you're trying to looking up. And, you know, 40 of them would load and then the connection would drop and you just get a blank browser window. And so in a fit of peak I tweeted, has anyone a trip advisor ever been on a trip? this is the most inshittified website I've ever used. And people laughed. They did what you did. They chuckled politely. But it's a lot more than a joke for Cory Doctro and has been for the last 25 years. I've been trying to get people to understand the salience and urgency of these digital policy questions. And that has largely been a process of trying to make them comprehensible through metaphors and similes, funny words, parables, and so on.

And so sometime later, when I was developing this detailed technical critique, I hung that word on it just because I knew that people found it a little funny. And something about the combination of a very detailed, nuanced, technical, political, and economic critique. And this minor license to vulgarity was a very winning combination. And it has paid great dividends. Do you think that explaining to people why it's happening is something that people are actually, interested in knowing or is it really just, you know, we're just here and we just think there's no alternatives. And so we'll just kind of grin and bear it. Well, I think that you hit it on the head there. It's the existence of an alternative or the

possibility of an alternative that excites people. You know, if you think that you're a prisoner of the great forces of history or the iron laws of economics and that things got worse because they were destined to get worse, like entropy was applied to these platforms, or if you you think that the reason the platform's got worse is because you were not careful enough in how you shopped. You neglected what I think is the very false axiom that if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. And so you, the consumer, the secret regulator of all that goes on, were insufficiently careful in your shopping behaviors. And so we got monopolies. And that can be quite distressing too. It's kind of like the belief that you didn't recycle hard enough. And that's

why there's wildfires and no amount of recycling seems to fix it. Or then there's this idea that maybe the reason is that we have these bad people running these platforms. But I think that while there are bad people running the platforms, they did better things at one point. And so it's only when you recognize that there are these systemic issues that we created the policy environment that ensured that the most mediocre Zucker muskian ketamine-addled failures would always be in charge of our lives, that you recognize how we can get shut of this trap, how we don't have to be prisoners of the bad policy choices of people in the previous decades. And we can have new policies that could give us a new good internet, one that has the salutary capabilities and

characteristics of the old good internet, where it had a high degree of technological self-determination and diversity and pluralism, but also has the ease of use that allowed all of our friends to come and join us. And I think that there's nothing about digital technology that says that it can't be elegant and easy to use, but also not spy on you, give you technological choices and freedom, and not pick your pocket. One of the things that, you know, does come up for people when they see this decline in the digital space and how they use their platforms or at least, or maybe how their platforms are using them, we're kind of used to this decline in the material world.

You buy something and it's done in like five years, household appliances. And so in some ways it feels, well, you know, maybe there was a sort of inevitability to the decline of the Internet, just like everything else is in decline. Is there some real difference between this kind of material decline that we see and this decline that we see in the decline that we see in the decline? the digital space? I really think there is. I think that when you look at the so-called real economy or the hard goods economy, that it is subject to some of the same sources of discipline

that tech is subject to, and it suffers in the absence of them. So obviously competition is something that has historically really mattered to hard goods businesses, as has regulation. And it's certainly the case that the drive towards monopolization, which is a policy choice, as I've said before, The reason we have monopolies is because we changed our rules about monopolies. We started tolerating and even encouraging monopolies as efficient. And we started treating the punishment of monopolies as perverse. We assume that if you see a company like Google with a 90% market share, that that means that it's extraordinarily good at finding things.

And it would be really wasteful and terrible for the government to use public money to punish Google for making so many. of us happy that we've all chosen to sign up for their service. And so when we stopped enforcing competition law, we got monopolies. And that failure to enforce competition law, it's really, it's across the board. And so we have monopolies across the board and everything from milk to, you know, chicken processing to intermodal and sea freight, professional wrestling and cheerleading, saline solution in sterile bags and glass bottles, vitamin C and eyeglasses, you name it, right?

from mattresses to athletic shoes, it's five or fewer companies dominating globally. And so obviously all these sectors have had the lack of competition give rise to a certain degree of decay and their product offerings. All of these companies also have to worry about regulators. And what happens when you allow a sector to boil itself down to a handful of companies is they find it very easy to capture their regulators. They don't have to argue with 100 companies about what they want the regulations.

to do. There's just three or four or five of them. And also, they have so much money because they don't compete head to head anymore. You know, one of the things Google was convicted of doing last year in an American federal court was bribing Apple to the tune of $20 plus billion every year not to enter the search market so that they wouldn't have to compete head to head in these lines of business that are so profitable. And so they have all this money they can spend to capture their regulators. Before that capture, according to Corey, there had been two ways that things could go wrong for tech companies. So one is the uniquely constituted tech workforce, which was so powerful, even though they weren't unionized, because they were scarce and they were valuable. According to the American National Bureau of Economic Research, the average tech worker was adding a million dollars a year to their boss's bottom line.

And they were in such short supply that bosses were really worried about them leaving and going somewhere else. And so they went to great lengths to make them comfortable and to make them feel heard. You know, they got free compocha and massages and dry cleaning and a surgeon would freeze your eggs so you could work through your fertile years. And that wasn't because they liked those workers. It was because they were afraid of the million dollars they represented each walking out the door. And so what that meant was that when a boss tried to order a worker to insidify some product they cared about, that maybe they missed their mother's funeral to deliver. deliver on time. They would say I refused to do it and they would know that if their boss pushed it,

they could walk out the door and have a better job by lunchtime from the guy across the street and that their boss couldn't readily hire someone to do that. But the power that workers get through scarcity is always short-lived because eventually supply will catch up with demand. And that's how we saw half a million tech layoffs in America in the last three years and the collapse of the discipline that workers represented. But there was one more source of discipline that acted on technology. And that was technology itself, specifically something called interoperability, which is the ability of one thing to work with another. We're surrounded by this. Anyone's light bulbs work in your light sockets. You don't have to buy Nike shoe laces for your Nike shoes. You can put anyone's

gas in your tank. But with digital technology, you get something called touring completeness, the universal von Neumann machine. This is all computer scientists talk to describe the fact that our digital computers are capable of computing every valid program. And so if a tech boss wants to install a 10-foot pile of shit in a program that you rely on, a programmer can give you an 11-foot ladder that goes straight over it. If there's a program that blocks generic ink in your printer, a programmer can give you a new program that allows generic ink in your printer. If there's a program that locks you into using the iPhone store or the store for your video game console or Google store for Android. And that's sending 30 cents out of every dollar that you spend to California so that the performers, the news outlets, the software developers, the cultural workers that you want to support through payments in an app are losing 30 cents to these American firms that do nothing except sell you a device.

you can always run a program that installs a third-party app that lets you get around this restriction. But what we've done over the last 20 years is monotonically expand IP law to prevent the kind of reverse engineering and modification that allows people to, for example, change their tractors so they can fix themselves, or change their cars so any mechanic can fix them, or change their printer so they can take anyone's ink. And in Canada, we passed a law in 2012 called the Copyright Modernization Act, Bill C-11, and it was passed after Canadians made it really clear they didn't want this law. There had been three previous attempts to pass it. All of them had failed.

One MP who tried to pass it, Sam Bulte, lost her seat in Parkdale over this, and it flipped to the NDP and stayed NDP for a generation because it was so unpopular. But finally, Stephen Harper asked two of his ministers. James Moore and Tony Clement to get this bill over the line. And so they consulted on it in 2010. 6,132 of us responded in the negative, saying that we did not want this law. And only 53 of us wrote in to the consultation in support of this law. So James Moore solved this problem by going to the International Chamber of Commerce

meeting in Toronto and denouncing all the people who would have rejected his bill as, quote, babyish radical extremists, and he disregarded their input, and Stephen Harper whipped the caucus, and in 2012, we got this law. Now, the reason we got the law is because the U.S. trade representative had threatened us with tariffs if we didn't enact a law like this. And so it's true that tariffs were something we wanted to avoid, and there was some important to doing that, but if someone threatens you with burning your house down, unless you do as they tell you, and you do it, and then they burn your house down anyway, you are the greatest sucker on earth if you keep doing what they tell you to do. And right now we could get rid of that law. We could unshackle our tech industry.

We could export the tools to allow people to save money. We could make billions on those tools. And we could really strike back against the American tariffs. And so what does that law do? Well, that law makes it a crime to reverse engineer or modify tools or programs if there is any kind of measure in the program that says, please don't modify this. So in other words, if the programmer is writing the software for your printer, and they write a little subprogram that says, make sure that this ink comes from HP and not from a generic cartridge refiller. and then they draw the software equivalent of like a chalk outline around that part of the program and right next to it, do not examine or modify this code. Under Bill C-11, under the Copyright Modernization Act, it becomes a crime to look at that code or modify it, even if what you want to do is something that is otherwise legal, like deciding for yourself,

who's ink you're going to put in your printer? You know, the fact that we can't modify our printers to take generic ink without risking this government intervention that punishes us using the state's legal apparatus to defend the profits of this American company has allowed the four or so companies that control all of our inkjet printers to raise and raise and raise the price of ink to the point where today, ink is the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without getting a special permit. it would be cheaper to print your grocery lists with the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion, right? And this is a law that we passed because the Americans said if we didn't have it, they would hit us with tariffs. And here we are. We've got the tariffs and we're still blowing billions on ink. What are we doing? Online platforms have chosen to make the user experience worse over time.

And they spy on us while they're doing it. Governments have made policy choices that reward bad behavior, encouraging us. monopolies and weaken regulators. We can't even decide whose printer ink we're going to put in our printers. Change can feel impossible. So where does one start? Where does one even say that I have some, I have some measure of freedom? I mean, frankly speaking, talking about the free internet of the old days kind of kind of makes me feel like a bit of an internet hippie. It's kind of like you've given into the system and you can use it or you cannot use it. But the idea of change seems so far away and so impossible that there's a, it's kind of like being stuck on Facebook, even though it's a waste of time.

I don't get anything out of it. But if I leave, you know, I've got these eight cousins that I really love and this is the only place where I find them. And so you give in. Yeah. So I think that that's a really good point. And I would say that I agree with John Hodgman when he says nostalgia is a toxic impulse. And I don't want to look back on what I call the old good internet with rose-tinted lenses. It had real defects. And principle among them was the technical complexity of using them. But I would caution against what I sometimes call vulgar Thatcherism.

You may know that Margaret Thatcher's motto that she repeated so often, it actually became her nickname, was there is no alternative. They used to call her Tina Thatcher for There is no alternative. And what she meant was really not that there is no imaginable alternative, but that she wished you would stop trying to imagine one. It was a demand dressed up as an observation about reality. It's a very cheap trick. And you know, I'm a science fiction writer. It's one of my jobs. and I think of six alternatives every day before breakfast.

I think that Mark Zuckerberg would like you to believe that there is no alternative to having friends, but that he gets to listen in when you talk to them. And I think that Sundar Pinchai, who runs Google, would like you to think that there is no alternative to using Google, but that he gets to know what's in your underwear drawer to help you find the things you want on the internet. And I think Tim Cook would like you to believe

that there is no alternative, but that if you have a phone that works reliably, he gets to decide which software you can run on it and trouser 30 cents at every dollar you spend when you use it. And I think that when you decompose these technical questions to that kind of stark phrasing, it becomes very easy to imagine how you would have an alternative. I mean, for one thing, when Facebook started, it's pitched to people who were on MySpace is that Facebook is like MySpace except we'll never spy on you. And those golden years of Facebook were the years when Facebook didn't spy on you. You know, there is nothing about a pre-feast menu that says that it can't be a la carte,

except that the chef would like you to eat the 30 disgusting dishes that he's made with the food that's going off before he serves you the three things you really want on the menu. And with the ability to reverse engineer and modify technology, if we move past this decade-old policy mistake that we made at the behest of the U.S. Trade Representative and allow Canadian technologists to turn the pre-feast menu that American tech companies have crammed down our throats into the a la carte where we just cherry-picked the parts that we like, we could have a better internet. You know, these companies that say there is no alternative, they spend an awful lot of money

trying to make sure that no one ever experiences an alternative. They don't act like they have the confidence that only they can make a good internet. They act more like the jealous boyfriend who doesn't want you talking to anyone else because he knows that he's a creep. And if you ever encountered someone else, you'd leave him in a heartbeat. So let's just spend like two minutes imagining. Where would you start if you were to imagine a better future online? line. Is there a particular policy? Is there a measure? Is there a trend? Is there a sort of a philosophy

where you would start that would start to break down and lead us back to a place that's better for us? So right now we have a law that says you can't modify technology if the manufacturer has told you not to. And that law does a lot of mischief. It's why our farmers can't fix their tractors. It's why you can't take your car to an independent mechanic anymore. It's why you can't put third-party ink in your in your printer. And it's why in America, if you want to run an app called Ice Block, which tells you when there's ICE goonsweds in your neighborhood who might kidnap you and send you to an offshore gulag,

you can't run that anymore because Apple has declared that ICE agents are a protected category and you're not allowed to make an app that prejudices their interests. And if we got rid of that law, we could be the masters of our own destiny again. Now, it wouldn't have to be a free-for-all, right? We could say, look, you are allowed to modify any technology you want, provided that you don't violate anyone's privacy rights or their labor rights or their consumer rights. So, for example, Uber drivers could get together to have an app that when Uber tries to lowball them with a wage, and this is something the Uber app does to its drivers, it's called algorithmic wage discrimination, where it tries to find the lowest wage that drivers will accept. by lowering the offer by random intervals and at random in random amounts so that the per mile per minute rate just titers down and down and down. Drivers could say, well, we're all going to agree to reject any offer below a certain wage and just force the algorithm to bring it up.

A Canadian printer ink company could manufacture printer ink that was closer to the price of one cent a gallon that the bill of materials cost than the $10,000 per gallon that the big ink companies currently charge. But far more exciting is that because this is going to require software that works in every printer with every version of their software, someone could go into business making that tool and export that tool to everyone around the world who wants to go into business refilling or manufacturing ink cartridges in the same way that we could make the tool that allows any mechanic to turn any check engine light into a diagnosis that they can fix instead of the current arrangement whereby they spend $10,000 per manufacturer per year for the

diagnostic tool. We could make that universal diagnostic tool and every mechanic in the world would pay some Canadian company 25 bucks a month for that. This is a way for Canada to consume the accumulated monopoly rents of American tech companies as fuel in a single use rocket that boosts a new Canadian tech sector into a stable orbit that will then allow it to spin off all kinds of new businesses, all kinds of new skilled technologists who are able to make everyone's technology better. But of course, Canada is not the only place where you find skilled technologists and capital looking for a good opportunity. That's true everywhere in the world. And if it's not Canada, it might be Mexico or the United Kingdom or the European Union or Nigeria or

Ghana or India. There are so many opportunities out there and one country might get the chance to seize the lion's share of them. So it's a matter of some urgency. And that urgency is only being heightened by Donald Trump. So Donald Trump has made it really clear that he views the other countries of the world, not as trading partners, but as rivals and adversaries, and that he will use American big tech to cut those countries off at the knees, that he'll do what we were told Huawei would do to us if we allowed their technology in our infrastructure. So just recently, we saw the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor issue an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for his contributions to genocide. And when Donald Trump denounced the International

Criminal Court and its chief prosecutor, Microsoft followed up by disconnecting the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court from his online accounts so that he lost all of his correspondence and his email archives. He lost all of the working files of the International Criminal Court, as well as his professional diary and address book. Right. So this is really making an urgent case for this. And if we do it, it's almost all upside. Right. Sure, the Americans are going to be angry at us, but they're angry at us now. They'll hit us with tariffs, but they hit us with tariffs now. It doesn't matter what we do. Donald Trump has proved over and over again that you can yield to what he's demanded. And he will take that not as the sign that you have a

bargain, but rather as a sign of weakness that invites him to push for more and more and more. In the European Union, they had been vapor-locked on a solar transition for more than a decade. And then Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, a horrible and disgusting act of aggression. But one tiny little light in that is that it lit a fire, or rather extinguished the fire, that fossil fuels had been burning on in Europe and accepted. accelerated Europe's transition by certainly more than a decade. Now all of the things that seem to stand in the way of solarization turned out not to matter. When you're shivering in the dark, it turns out that you can change your zoning laws and your electrical code to make it easier

to get a lot more solar in very quickly. And I think we're about to have a transition like that with our technology. I think we're long past overdue for a post-American internet. And there were always reasons to stick with the status quo, always costs we didn't want to bear, but those costs have gotten so much higher that we really must take this in hand, and there's so much upside if we do it. What would you say are some small things that we could do that are doable on our own that would at least, if not loosen, at least allow us to imagine the loosening of the grip? What can we do that we're not doing online, whether it's using certain things or not using certain things? What would your advice be?

So look, I wish I had more hopeful stuff to tell you on this question. Some of the early reviews of my book were like, well, I got to the end and there were all these policy changes that the author wants us to become part of a movement in order to enact and demand of our politicians, but nothing I felt I could do when I close the cover. And I think that's unfortunately pretty much right. It doesn't really matter how. diligently you recycle, you're not going to stop the wildfires. And while there are consumption choices you can make that will maybe improve your life and maybe improve your mental health and maybe keep you from getting ripped off quite so badly, it's not going to change the system. To make systemic change,

you have to get involved in a movement. And so there are organizations in Canada. New ones like Shield and the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, can There are existing organizations like OpenMedia.C.A. and CIPIC at the University of Ottawa, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the BC Civil Liberties Association that have been fighting these issues for decades. There's the group I work for, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And if you want to stay abreast to these issues, I would recommend reading a new substack by Peter Noak, late of the Globe and Mail, called Do Not Pascoe, that looks at Canadian competition issues through a Canadian lens, And something very exciting is happening on that score because historically we had the world's weakest competition regulator.

Our Competition Bureau, in its entire history, had only challenged three mergers and had never succeeded in challenging a merger. But in 2024, we got new legislation that vastly expanded the powers of the Competition Bureau. And in that budget, we got the money for the Competition Bureau to do the competition that we need, the regulation that we need. And Canada has really become three monopolies in a trench coat. So this couldn't have come at a better time. That was journalist Corey Docterow. His most recent book is called Enshittification. Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. This program is brought to you in part by Speck Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, Even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan,

technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.caps.com. I exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.caver to learn more. On 1440 Explorers, we talk to the world's experts to unpack the fascinating knowledge behind everyday topics that shape our world.

It's really easy to influence dream content. We can turn you into a drunk. The credit card has massive negative social consequences and also it's magic. The ancient Greek's idea of what a ghost was is very different to the modern Western idea of what a ghost is. Listen to 1440 Explorers wherever you get your podcasts. are crumbling. Online platforms, including the ones we use to talk to each other or learn about things or search for answers, are now less effective, harder to navigate, and always watching every move we make. It feels like the internet is dying, or maybe it's already dead. A decade ago, the dead internet theory, part conspiracy, part prophecy, argued that the internet itself is fake,

Our governments, it said, were manipulating us. How? By making it possible for bots and algorithms to displace human activity and limit us to artificial content including misinformation. That second part proved clairvoyant. In 2025, there was slightly more bot-generated traffic than human online. And bots are responsible for spreading a lot of misinformation. The dead internet theory went viral because it gave shape to a feeling.

The dead internet theory didn't go viral because it was true. I think it went viral because it was recognisable, like someone had finally said out loud what we'd been sensing, that the internet feels less like a crowded bizarre, and more like an empty mall with the speakers still playing. If the dead internet theory started out as just a, vibe, then this is the year the vibe became something more tangible. There are now more bots than humans online. There is now more synthetic content than there is organic. There's now more machine-to-machine

traffic than human-to-human conversation. The internet isn't dead exactly, but I think it's becoming less alive. And humans, us, can feel that difference long before we found the words to articulate it. Algorithms don't laugh. Bots don't surprise you with a weird joke, one unexpectedly kind comment. AI language models can mimic the shape of human speech, but they don't carry the offbeat fingerprints of lived experience. So what happens to us when we find those spaces? once filled with human chatter and connection being quietly filled with non-human voices. Ideas producer Nahed Mustafa continues her diagnosis of the dying internet and picks it up with journalist and therapist Matt Hussie. I came across your work for the first time listening to a

podcast that you did about the internet and the dying internet and the impact of that on our relationship and on our sense of self. There was also something about the feeling of it, which is kind of sad, and it feels like a sense of loss, and there's a melancholy there. Can you talk about what motivated you to write that podcast

and to present it the way that you did? For sure, yeah. So I write on the internet, I make things on the internet, and I noticed that people's comments started to sort of take a particular shape and texture. it would be if I wrote a kind of like an essay or I wrote a kind of long piece, you would see the comments tend to take this sort of form,

which was really enjoyed writing. You really enjoyed what you wrote. I really enjoyed this bit. I disagreed with you on this bit. And here's my contribution to this conversation. And in the beginning, I was like, okay, yeah, fair enough. People use AI to help formulate answers and things like that. But then I started seeing it online more and more in threads on Reddit and on social media

where the type of conversation that would happen would never really focus on the thing that was being discussed by the original post. It would drift very quickly. And the almost sort of the texture of how I describe it was a, it tended to be about conflict and opposition. Like there's almost like a standard one person starts on one side of an argument, then another entity takes the other and then people sort of like file behind the two. And what really struck me was this idea that what happens if most of our interactions are now taking place with machines.

And it just really struck me as a bit of an aha moment that I had been feeling this sort of personal shift in how I was being interactive with online. And then there was this data that said, you're not imagining it. It is actually real. So when you're in these spaces and you're used to a more, let's say, dynamic kind of interaction with people that are responding to your work or maybe it's even moving into receiving an email or it's, you know, a direct message or something like that. What do you think you started to experience for yourself when you saw this kind of dynamic engagement give way to this kind of almost formulaic response? Yeah, it was. It felt quite rejecting, I think, at first, because it was, you've outsourced your thinking to something else.

And what was more important for this person or indeed the machine that had been employed by this person was the performance of interaction rather than the interaction itself. It's a weird kind of abstract thing that I felt, which is you could have said, to this person, oh, I really like this piece. And that would have been great. But what became more important for you, I think, and what I really felt in this sense of rejection was this idea of, oh, it's got nothing really to do with me. This is just a kind of a canvas for you

to put some version of yourself that you want to show the world on. And so there was sort of this misattunement, a misalignment where, you know, I took all this time to write this thing and to do all this thinking. and for you, it wasn't anything to do with what I'd said. It was really about the opportunity for you to perform a version of yourself that you want the world to see. And so there is a, there's sort of an isolation in it.

It's sort of a feeling of, I don't really care. Do you have a kind of timeline on your experience where you felt like, yeah, something's off here, and I don't really know how to name it yet? Yeah. So I think it probably started about 15 years ago, which might surprise you. And it was when I was working as a journalist, before I was a therapist. And I was interviewing a psychologist about like, you know, the rise of the internet and how we're all living online more.

And something he said to me that really stuck with me was we are now seeing people create identities that are separate to them as physical beings. And what he was arguing on what I interpreted from what he said was that we are now, we now have this environment where we can manufacture not just one identity, but multiple identities. And they can serve unique and separate needs to us as sort of embodied individuals. And I think what we're in now is a kind of like the end game of that idea, this sort of like atomized individualism. I think what I've started to see, and I see it in my client work when I work with clients, in my therapy practice, and just being a kind of citizen of the internet, is you feel the internet becomes way more performative.

And it always has been performative. But I think there was a kind of richer commons, if that's the right way of describing it, where people would turn up and perform or be a version of themselves. without really being worried about how it is perceived. And I wrote an accompanying piece about a year ago about the Zero View YouTube videos that live in YouTube's archive. And this was a really interesting kind of experiment because YouTube has this vast non-algorithmically sorted archive of videos

with no views on it or less than 50. And you can go and look at them. There is sites that specialise in just crawling the sort of the dustiest corners of YouTube. And what I found when I looked at that over a year ago was this really wonderfully innocent version of humanity. It was like videos of kids blowing out birthday cakes. It was people walking in woodland and just talking to themselves. It was videos of people kicking a football. in their back garden, it was people knitting, it was people just doing nothing.

And for me, there was such a kind of heartening humanity in it. And I know it sounds quite odd to watch videos that people have known and have watched. But some of those videos were nearly 20 years old and no one had looked at them. And I think for me, what that helped me like synthesize, I guess, in this piece that you discovered, was that so much of our lives on the internet now are, there is a knowingness that we are always being observed. And I think what's new is a knowingness that would be observed by machines. And so therefore, the type of performance that we're being asked to perform to receive connection from another human has to pass through this sort of robotic

arbiter, if that makes sense. There's a metaphor that you use in your piece. piece where you describe humans on the internet as, quote, lingering inside it like guests who stayed late at the party. And I found it such an evocative metaphor. Can you expand on that? I mean, you know, you use the term just now collecting dust and then this idea of lingering late at a party. You know, these are analog examples of a kind of digital experience. But can you sort of talk about how you understand those parallels between how. we may understand that in the quote-unquote real world versus how it's showing up in this digital space.

For sure. So I think my reliance on analog metaphor and analogy is, I think it's really based upon the idea of this is how our brains are learned to respond to the world. So you think about the analogy that I used in the piece about being the last ones at a party, the social cues that you feel, without anyone saying anything, are so vivid, right? Because it's a felt experience where you go, I can't see anyone, or maybe I can only see the hosts, and maybe they're the ones,

they're washing the dishes or they're kind of like closing the curtains. And it's that sort of embodied awareness of the mood has shifted. Or I think another version I use in the piece is, it's like walking through a shopping mall with just the music playing. It's this felt sense of like, I know life has been here and is here,

but the social cues that I would typically have or typically pick up on in a kind of physical environment I'm not so sure anymore. They're harder to interpret. And I think when you face a human in a kind of real and digital sense, you get a sense of them, right? And there's whole parts of our brain's anatomy

that's literally dedicated to interpreting a person in space, right? That's not verbal. That is just a felt sense of them. And I think when we go into environments when that isn't there anymore, when it's a kind of non-human version, I think there is an innate sense of, what do I do here?

like what is the social cue if I'm in a space where people are no longer there but there is something talking back to me and I think this is this is quite a new phenomenon that I don't think we've experienced before which is we have created deeply human spaces where humans no longer linger in the way that we have understood them for our species entire existence you have a set of observations theories that you're working through about what a dead internet might do to the humans who spend time there. And you've broken them down into six areas. I'd like to just put some of those to you and hear your reflections on them. The first one that you point out is the dissolution of being seen, which you describe it as attention without presence. Can you talk about that?

Yeah, for sure. So as a therapist, our entire lives are based upon a term called co-regulation, right, which is we exist in relationships, right? And we know with great authority that we don't do well on our own as individuals and, in fact, put us alone long enough, we tend to just die. So co-regulation is the idea that you know yourself through other people, right? So you know that you're a caring person through the experience of other people showing that back to you or you know that you're a smart person because other people have shown that back to you. In the kind of automated internet, that being seen, that co-regulation isn't so reliable anymore. And I think what happens, and this is a theory, as you've said, and a guess, but I think what happens when we start living in spaces where being seen isn't that great reinforcer or great shaper of our sense of self, I think that unmoors us a bit.

I think that tells us that that co-regulation, that what holds our identities in place, is no longer so held. and it's looser. And I think the risk is, my perception of it is, we no longer value that co-regulation as much. We no longer see our value and our worth, our happiness through togetherness,

through that messy, sticky negotiation with another person. And instead, we live in a world where this robotic other perfectly attunes to us. But we lose that messiness, and stickness, I think, is so vital for us as people. And so when you go through these theories that you've been working on, one of the ones that really kind of caught my attention was the idea of this need to recalibrate trust.

And that's certainly something that I feel, even in my own work, you know, I spend an awful lot of time researching. And half the time now, the question, the first question is, is this real? Can I trust this image? Can I trust this information? double and triple checking things that I would have maybe even five years ago have said, oh yeah, this is cited in this particular way and it's from a journal and it, you know, and I can trust this. Knowing now what I know about how much fraudulent content actually makes its way into quote unquote legitimate publications, I just can't really trust anything. So what do you see happening with this idea that this sort of erosion of a kind of default trust?

what happens to us when that becomes the norm? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think for me, the headline is that we become more isolated as a result. Because to your point, if every interaction that you now have online has to go through this sort of cognitive process of verifying, re-verifying, cross-referencing, that's the emotional cost, or that, the emotional cost, or purely the psychic energy cost, you know, goes up, like immeasurably. And that creates a sort of overload and overwhelm, right? That where it's like, you know, the amount of material, sorry, you might be able to consume or move through as a person

now gets drastically drawn down because the price you pay for experience online is, I have to ask if this is authentic. I have to ask is, is this real? Or am I being led down a garden path to believe in something that some other person, higher power, whatever it is, wants me to think? And so when navigating online spaces becomes riskier,

I think the default response is to just withdraw, to trust less, to do less. I think to withdraw is a form of protection. If I can't trust anything on the internet, internet, should I be using the internet as much anymore? Should I be in those spaces as online communities that, you know, that you mentioned that you may have got to know someone over years, suddenly don't become or suddenly stop becoming these trustworthy, safe, enclosed spaces and start becoming spaces where I now have to worry or be concerned that my views, my values,

my feelings are being manipulated in some way. And so I think the chain reaction to all of this is a less trustworthy internet is an internet that is more isolating for people. So much of what you've been talking about, you know, in this online experience, there are material world analogies to all of these experiences. Are there any lessons that we can apply from our sort of analog existence that can help us mitigate or even solve the problems that we're experiencing online in sort of these, you know, whether you want to call the mental health terms or emotional terms? Yeah, I think the best analogy I can think about is conservation. So the idea of preserving an environment because it has an inherent benefit beyond it.

its constituent parts. And I think we're going to have to start thinking about this with digital spaces, which I know today sounds like a really strange and weird concept of preserving a digital space. But I think unless we are prepared to, we have to slow down the pace of change in digital spaces, then we're going to lose what makes them human, right? which is, you know, if you think about online communities and probably the longest and most consistent one that we have online is probably Reddit.

And some of those communities are, yeah, over 10 years old. But if you went and asked and explored who was active in them in the beginning and who was still there, raises a really interesting question, which is the valley that was there before and why it came into being has now become something else. I know, for example, because I spent a long time working as a tech journalist, that chatGBT or OpenAI, the company that makes chat TBT,

a lot of its training data is spent like scraping Reddit. And so Reddit, what was once a community, is now just a trove of training data. And so that as a sort of like a kind of, so if you think of that through sort of conservation terms, that's like taking a forest, a naturally occurring forest, and replacing it with a lumber forest. And we know this is what happens when you cut down near indigenous trees and you place it with monocultures where you plant one tree,

its life leaves it. It looks like it's alive. It looks like it's, you know, oh, this is a lovely forest walking through. But actually from a kind of diversity perspective, it's dead. And I think this is the, for me, the analogy we're going to have to start thinking about with these spaces. Do we keep bots out of them? Do we put things into public ownership?

And again, this sounds so strange and radical to think about our digital spaces. But our digital spaces have, in such a short space of time, become so important for us. They shape everything around us. They shape our politics. they shape policy, they shape provision of care. And if we're not prepared to protect them from market forces, commercial forces, or ideological forces, then we're at risk of losing them altogether. We are not powerless here. The human web has not disappeared.

It's just shrinking into the corners where people still talk to each other with intention, texture, vulnerability and care. So maybe the real question isn't, is the internet dying? Maybe it's, can we keep the human part alive? And the answer, I think, is quieter than you might expect. Because quite simply, we already know how. We've been doing it all along. Every time we choose presence over performance, connection, over content, and each other over the endless automated noise.

The internet may be hollowing out, But the people inside it don't have to. Wise words that bear repeating. The internet may be hollowing out, but the people inside don't have to. That was, the internet is dying. The internet is dead. Thank you to our guests. My name is Corey Doctoro.

I'm an activist with a non-profit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I write science fiction novels. I'm a journalist, a blogger, and I'm the author most recently of a book called Inshittification. My name is Matt Hussie. I'm a therapist and a journalist, and I spend my time trying to make sense of how the world is changing not only as individuals, but as a community. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada,

on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.com. slash ideas. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Nahed Mustafa. Technical production Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Lukshic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.