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🏷️ Categories: Writing, Creativity.
There is a theory that has been circulating for years in dark corners of the internet...
It says that almost nothing you see out there on the web is made by humans.
That behind most posts, comments, and “likes” there is no person thinking... there is a machine. For a long time, that theory sounded like a delirium written at 4AM on an internet forum. Something from people with too much time in front of a screen who have become paranoid.
Then the man who built the machine spoke.
Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, wrote in 2025 something that should have kept you up at night: “I never took Dead Internet Theory that seriously, but it does seem like there are a lot of AI-run twitter accounts now”
It wasn’t said by an anonymous forum user. It was said by the person with the most information on the planet about where this technology is headed...
When the architect starts to doubt the building, you should too...
And if you write, create, or just landed on Substack looking for something that still feels real, read this... we’re going to dig into what will differentiate you (or erase you) from the internet in the coming years. Writers and creators with their own voice never had an advantage as big as the one they have today.
An advantage that has an expiration date if you don’t start using it today.
The non-humans
Dead Internet Theory was born in 2021, on a forum called Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe [one of those corners of the internet that only someone who spent too much time in the digital universe would know]. An anonymous user wrote that most of what they saw on the web was no longer produced by people... Search engines and forums were all flooded with content designed to look human without being human, all made by machines (IlluminatiPirate, 2021).
Yes, the user “IlluminatiPirate” put together a crazy theory, but with data in its favor...
In 2016, the security firm Imperva analyzed 16.7 billion visits to more than 100,000 web pages and found something unsettling... 52% of visits were from automated programs, not people (Imperva, 2017). In 2023, they saw it at 49.6%. And in 2026, according to Fortune, it’s already a clear majority. More than half of the visits to any website you open today... are not generated by a human being.
Google admitted it too.
In 2024 it acknowledged that its search engine was being invaded by pages “made for search engines, not for people” (Google, 2024). And if you’ve ever searched for something and had the strange feeling of reading something written by no one... that cold, perfect content you’re seeing more and more of... you can see it wasn’t your paranoia.
The non-humans are already as many [or more] than the humans.
And what can you do, as a creator or as a consumer...?
The humans
Bots automating accounts? Search engines flooded with soulless pages? Half the world’s traffic with no one behind it? And you, right in the middle of it, not quite knowing what’s real and what isn’t? I understand you, when I go online I increasingly feel like I’m meeting with automatons that all talk the same way...
The mistake is believing this is an external threat, something that comes from outside the internet. As if the internet were a country invaded by automatons and you, a defenseless citizen watching thousands of non-humans get closer and closer.
It’s not like that.
The internet didn’t die because of AI. The internet became one more example of something that has been happening forever. A long time ago I talked about Gresham’s Law, the law that explains why mediocre content dominates social media. In 19th century England, when gold coins and cheap-metal coins circulated with the same face value, say £5, for example, people kept the £5 gold coin at home and paid with the copper one that was also worth £5.
See it? Nobody gave up the good stuff when they could pay with the bad stuff.
In the end, the market filled up with worthless coins.
Sam Altman just put numbers to this phenomenon for the case of the internet. Now instead of debasing the coins, it debases the community and its ideas. When the algorithm gives the same weight to an honest reflection as to an empty phrase [if both hold your attention for the same 3 seconds], the incentive is to publish faster and worse. The system doesn’t reward depth, it only wants clicks (Vosoughi, 2018). What is cheap to produce ends up killing what is expensive to produce well.
Artificial intelligence took this logic to the extreme: Now it doesn’t even take a person to manufacture the copper, the automatons do it on their own.
The internet is dying from the systems we gave the internet.
The addictive interfaces for users.
The algorithms we’ve designed.
The infinite scroll.
AI.
And who knows what’s coming.
The inversion of the model
Before, the economic model of communication was different. Whoever produced the most, won. More posts, more videos, more content, more of everything. The scarce thing was information, and whoever accessed more information before the rest, won.
That rule has already expired.
Economist Herbert Simon warned of it decades ago. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” (1971). The more information circulates [and increasingly of worse quality] the less attention remains available to process it.
Pure mathematics.
And this is where you come in.
Imagine a factory that produces identical copies, free, in quasi-infinite quantity. Next to it, someone makes a piece by hand, the way things were always made. That piece can’t compete on price. It never will. The factory will always be cheaper and faster.
So why do people buy handicrafts?
Because the handmade piece isn’t playing that game.
It wins because it’s the only one that can’t be replicated without losing what makes it valuable. You can copy the shape of a handmade vase, the proportion, the color, the finish, whatever you want. But what you can’t copy is the hand that trembled a little while shaping it. As soon as you try to mass-produce it, it stops being human and unrepeatable and becomes mass and serial production.
Like AI-generated content, where everything feels the same.
A signed essay, with a recognizable voice, that defends an idea for half an hour of reading, is that handmade piece. You can imitate the format, copy the structure, the tone, the expressions, but what you can’t mass-produce is the specific person behind it without it ceasing to be what it was.
An infinite scroll feed is designed for instant consumption, with no visible author, no memory. They only try to trap you for 60 seconds, like TikTok.
A newsletter with a visible face and human treatment requires someone to defend the ideas with their own clumsiness, to show up in the comments to keep the debate open with their readers. A bot can generate a post in seconds, but that face is missing, that voice, that touch when speaking.
Substack is gaining ground in a market flooded with copper because it remains one of the few places where the reader chooses to follow a person, and that’s what makes so many artisans of ideas want to come here to showcase their work.
Being human makes you unique in a world of non-humans.
And you, as a creator, can take advantage of it to differentiate yourself.
The worse the rest of the internet gets [more generic, more automatic, more indistinguishable from each other] the more visible any trace of humanity becomes by contrast. You don’t need to be better than the machine at speed, you can just be yourself, very yourself, so much so that it shows just by reading a sentence of yours.
It’s a cold reading of economics: scarcity determines price.
Today the scarce thing is you, if you dare to show yourself exactly as you are.
Go back for a moment to Sam Altman, to Google, and to the 50% of non-humans.
For years it seemed like a crazy theory. Now it’s known to be happening... It can happen to anyone who spends too much time looking at their feed and wondering why everyone talks and writes the same way...
Ask yourself this question now.
Could the same be said about the last thing you posted?
And could you choose to follow other accounts? Artisans who still create by hand?
If this makes you think... there’s your next job as a consumer and as a creator. It’s not a matter of writing more, it’s about writing something that only you, with your specific story and your specific way of thinking, could have written. And when you see high-value content, with that artisanal mark of identity, leave a comment, share it, and connect with its creator [who, for once, is human].
They can’t copy and paste the aura you radiate.
— Álvaro
Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to explore:
P. S. I also offer 1:1 consultations to grow on Substack.
If you’ve just started and don’t know how it works, or you’ve been at it for a while but feel stuck, this will help you. I help you find your direction, position yourself as a leader in your topic, and build a system adapted to your case to grow steadily.
Credentials? +100,000 global readers in 2 years, 100% organic growth, with ~500,000 monthly visits. All from scratch, writing only in spare time.
If you’re interested, email me at: jardinmental@proton.me
References
Fortune. (2026). Turns out Dead Internet Theory was right: AI agents are eating the Web, growing by nearly 8,000% and rewiring the Internet’s business model. URL
Google (2024) New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search. URL
Herbert, F. (1971) Designing organizations for an information-rich world URL
Imperva. (2017). Bot Traffic Report 2016. URL
IlluminatiPirate (2021). Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake. Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe. URL
Rolnick, A. J., & Weber, W. E. (1986). Gresham’s Law or Gresham’s Fallacy? Journal of Political Economy, 94(1), 185–199. URL
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151. URL