The internet may be dying.
Not dying like a palliating grandparent whose time on Earth is almost up, or a consumptive child who never got a strong start to life in the first place. It is dying like a middle-aged smoker slowly giving themselves lung cancer. As poison creeps into the body, living cells are attacked and replaced by cancerous ones. Although the body is still living, it has been crippled and decayed by poison. The body is weakened and cannot make sense of the world anymore. Surgical, chemical, or radiological removal of the invaders is the only course of treatment. If the body denies treatment and continues to let the poison in, it will eventually cease to perform its necessary functions and be rendered inert.
The Dead Internet Theory is reasonably well-trod ground at this point. It is sometimes called a conspiracy theory, but is there not some truth to the idea that the body of the internet is keeling over as it becomes ever more saturated with artificially generated articles, websites, accounts and web traffic? It is difficult to find correct information and useful resources on the internet as it is. How about if most of the content you see isn’t even created by a human being? If it has been replaced by A.I. body snatchers? The internet cannot perform its necessary functions of data sharing and storage between human beings during an invasion such as this. Or can it? Enter, Creative Commons.
The Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that stores information which can be licensed by individuals or groups and made public to be freely used across the internet. It is a website dedicated to increasing open access to useful resources and information like images, music, articles, and education resources. Many open access websites are registered under the Creative Commons license, including Wikipedia and StackExchange. Creative Commons licensing provides a source of freely usable content for anyone with access to the internet, with the number of licensed works totalling in the billions.
The fact that it is all completely free to use and access means that artificially generated internet users have no interest in the site. There is no reason to scrape the Creative Commons with bot views because there is no ad revenue to generate, nor do dummy bot websites have a reason to spoof the Commons or its licensed sites because they, too, do not generate any ad revenue. In the words of the Commons, it works to “reshape the open ecosystem to support equitable and prosocial sharing in the public interest.”
Thousands of websites utilize Creative Commons-licensed content, like the Internet Archive, YouTube, and Bandcamp (more on those in my Inquiry Project posts). Although parts of the internet are surely groaning under the weight of artificial bloat, there are still organs within the body that have retained their function and their humanity. Decaying organs and limbs may at some point need amputating, but for the time being we still have access to thriving spaces that assist actual human beings.
