The dead economy theory

Bitter Buffaloes The Dead Economy Theory We can laugh at them but we have to take this seriously Owen McGrann May 01, 2026 928 159 333 Share You’re probably familiar with the dead internet theory: most of what you encounter online is now generated by bots, for bots, with humans reduced to a shrinking audience for machine-generated noise. Last year, over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated. The humans are still there, scrolling, but the thing they’re scrolling through has become a performance staged by machines for an audience that hasn’t yet realized the show isn’t for them. It’s utterly desiccating to log onto spaces seeking a live mind to joust and think with, and find a relentless stream of slop. Promised an age of superconnectivity, we’ve let our shared physical spaces wither, only to find our promised digital commons to be one large billboard increasingly read and created by bots. That’s bad enough. I want to talk about something worse. Call it the dead economy theory. Subscribe A word of welcome to the folks who have arrived here from Hacker News and various other places. Two quick comments, given that I’ve received many messages and have seen many comments on HN on this. First, the text of this piece is entirely human-generated, including the infelicitous phrasings and penchant for two-dollar words. The AI-generated images, which many of you hate, are an inside joke with a friend. Had I known this piece was going to get the traction it has, I promise you I would have gone with normal headers. But, to paraphrase Dostoevsky from the prologue to The Brothers K , yes, I agree that it is superfluous, but it’s done, so let it stand. Thanks for reading. The AI industry has a numbers problem. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft: the combined investment in large-scale AI infrastructure now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with projections into the trillions over the next decade. OpenAI alone has been valued at north of