Undead Internet Theory

We’re producing an internet of mindless zombies. These zombies speak like humans, but they also present with a horrific artifice of empathy. They don’t feast on brains as the zombies of yore; they feast on attention, and their malformed version of empathy is their attempt to lower your defenses so that they might sup. 

There is no place where the undead rot of the industry shows up more deeply than podcasting. Each time we publish a new episode of Grief & Pizza, we get dozens of new inquiries that use LLMs to create a zombified shape of connection. It’s so scaled out that I’m convinced there are services that are generating fake domains, fake websites, fake employees, and polling podcast publishers for victims. The zombies know nothing of us—our work, our lives, what we value—but they use the Machine all the same in an attempt to draw us into the feeding trough.

I am continuously perplexed by how people think this will be effective long-term. You think we can’t see you? You’re slow and rotting and we can smell you and hear your laboured shuffling from miles away.

If you use machined language to attempt to connect, I will consider you an undead hostile. Using LLMs in an attempt to create an emotional connection is manipulative. You didn’t earn my flesh, and I do not see you as a fellow human. You are such a creature, birthed of and expired in a deeply unwell culture of obligate sociopathy. 

Have you seen anything I’ve ever written, spoken about, or created? What about me says these phrases will motivate me? Be specific. Was it my fine arts degree? Or the fact that I think AI is one of the truest horrors of capitalism writ large; encircling, enclosing...ever extracting?

I’m not interested in your funding rounds or your attempts to “create ethically” under digital feudalism. And especially not your attempts to connect with your generated version of me.

That person doesn’t exist, and neither do you. No version of me exists that will open its world to your inhuman desire.

Dead internet theory? It’s fully undead. Get thee off the peoples’ internet with your digital pollutants and machined faux empathy!

Now then! Still want to come on the podcast? 😂 I’ve removed the contact email from our RSS feed, so you’ll have to find a different way to connect. Perhaps with the human rather than the content? Perhaps we can sit together in the spaces between before we make an ask of each other.