Boring Internet Theory

The internet isn’t Dead. It’s just Boring.

Dead Internet Theory, written at the height of COVID insanity, posits that most of what you see online are bots and AI. There’s clearly some truth to this. You can easily find posts from leftists saying “just be a heckin’ decent person and mutilate your kids” which get 150K+ likes despite being an extremely unpopular position in the polls. There’s tons of accounts with 500K+ followers that can barely crack 200 likes per post. You can buy likes and followers. Bots are real. But this theory has a major flaw.

‘Dead Internet Theory’ was written by someone who spent a lot of time in internet forums at the height of internet forums. Brilliant misfits running wild in a pre-slop internet. They experienced a Very Smart Internet, so they assume most people are Very Smart. This is very human of him. It assumes most people are interesting and can think for themselves. If it weren’t for bots, we’d see the depths of creativity from dazzling minds and groundbreaking takes from untapped human geniuses. This is, frankly, astonishingly naive.

Allow me to propose an alternative theory from someone who spends most of his online time in a post-COVID internet. The majority of online engagement isn’t coming from bots, it’s coming from people. Boring People. People who are Very Easily Memed. Most online activity comes from NPCs. Everyone knows Reddit is composed of leftist NPCs. It’s time to admit that X is mostly composed of right wing NPCs.

The right loves to accuse the left of having the ‘woke mind virus’, which is undoubtedly true. But this accusation assumes people on the right are immune to mind viruses. Indeed, the right is much more intellectually diverse than the left. However, people on right are just as susceptible to parroting expected arrangements of words. Because they’re people. ‘Save The West’ Account #5000 posting about the dangers of pre-marital sex and the mutilated Redditor stating Elon is a Nazi are both people. People who want to be liked.

All leftist minds use the same app. When this app is updated, their minds receive the same update. Minds on the right are running on the same operating system as the left, there’s just more than one app. The left gets updates from the Woke app. The right gets updates from the Trad app, the Ray Peat app, and the You’re Jewish app, among other cringe apps used to replace having a personality.

Most people would rather die than think for themselves. This isn’t a novel insight. Nietzsche talks about this.

“Such a man of late cultures and broken lights will, on average, be a rather weak man: his fundamental desire is that the war within him should come to an end; happiness appears to him, in accordance with a soothing medicine and way of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of repose, of undisturbedness, of satiety, of final unity.” —Beyond Good and Evil, Section 199

‘Dead Internet Theory’ was written at the height of COVID insanity. Now that the cultural chips have fallen, I propose Boring Internet Theory:

Post-COVID, an increasing amount of people are socially stunted and therefore desperate to Fit In. They cling to one subculture or another and repeat what’s expected of them. If they don’t cling to a subculture, they cling to a Meme. They try their best to Become The Meme. They will say what The Meme would say. Becoming a Meme is easier than becoming a Person. If you understand a Meme, you can predict what the Meme would say. If you can predict what a person would say, then that person is Boring. Most of the Internet is Boring.

How I Know The Internet is Boring

For some reason, my account on X is extremely controversial. Therefore, I get to see the full spectrum, from beautiful and curious minds to obsessive and delusional retards.

My account is the opposite of botted. I intentionally try to scare away followers on a regular basis. The accounts who follow me know what they’re getting themselves into and have committed to sticking around for the ride. Therefore, my account gets more engagement than average.

Before I send a post, I can roughly predict how big it will be within 5 seconds of posting it and what the reaction will be within 2 minutes. The feedback loop is rapid speed. I can feel the pulse of the internet’s collective unconscious.

The Boring Internet Created New Types of People

From my bird’s eye view of the internet, it’s very clear that Boring Internet created new Types of People. These are people, who exist, primarily on the internet. They don’t have friends, they don’t have girlfriends. They don’t socialize. Who they are as a person solely exists on the internet. Here are a few examples.

• There’s a Type of Guy who spends all of his time online accusing people of being Jewish. These are guys with a warm phones in their hands, dirty thumbs scrolling fingerprint-covered screens, who are convinced the Jews control the temperature of the water in their sink. They talk about this all day. This Type of Guy exists. Guy who thinks everyone but him is Jewish.

• There’s a Type of Girl who goes online to advertise her purity and how She Would Never have sex before marriage but can’t help but post some tit underneath it. This girl is extremely underfucked and is using X to tell people she doesn’t use dating apps. But she’s trying to get fucked all the same. Girl who advertises her purity to get railed out.

• There’s a Type of Guy who obsesses about the lives of anonymous internet posters. Rather than argue against the things these posters say, they come up with theories to claim these posters aren’t who their vibe gives off, and spend their entire lives in group chats trying to deconstruct them then get the word out. This Type of Guy exists. Guy who spends his life gossiping in group chats.

• There’s a Type of Person who Tries to Become a Meme. There are, undoubtedly, ‘subcultures’ online. Rather than become a Person in the World, you can become a Meme on the Internet. You can post in a way The Meme would post. You can see yourself as The Meme itself. You can take The Meme and craft an identity around it. This Type of Guy exists. Guy who thinks he’s a meme.

These New Types of People are all extremely predictable. They don’t have anything new or interesting to say. So they flood people’s comments with the things they’ve heard online as that Type of Person. They’re incredibly Boring.

The Digital Sin of Authenticity

The accounts with the most engagement have something new or interesting to say. It might’ve been said before, but they say it in their own voice. People who are high-openness but highly disagreeable are a threat to NPCs as it reflects their spiritual cowardice, and are therefore the most hated. The greatest sin you can possibly commit online is to be authentic.

Elon Must Stop the Slop

X is drowning in slop and it’s only getting worse. I know a lot of posters who deactivated their accounts because of it. People are starting to notice that the timeline has become a slopfest.

If Elon wants to prevent X from becoming Reddit, he needs to introduce guardrails. If you post “Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend is younger than him. Is this okay?”, you should be suspended. If you steal posts or re-post memes that already went viral, you should be suspended. If you send the same reply for the 100th time (“aren’t you Jewish?”), you should be suspended. And lastly, even though I enjoy making a little side money from posting on X, Elon must stop monetizing posters. This incentivizes people to Become Memes, which is just as gay as the Woke Mind Virus he’s trying to kill.