Ouroboros (2/22)

I didn't know where this was going until the end and once I got there wish I had just started from that. I don't believe in the Dead Internet Theory, but I think it's a very cool thing!

Wish I had leaned more into the horror stuff about these shambling ghouls desperately looking for human created content to rip apart and regurgitate, but forced to cannibalize other bot created content.

        The first learning algorithms were trained on content sourced from all over the net, picking and choosing from the greatest and cleverest minds that they had access to. Thieves ripped paintings from their frames, plucked notes from staves as though they were picking blackberries, turns of phrase from a panoply of online communities were macerated by the grinding silicon teeth of capital. The slurry the corps vomited back like a weary mother bird was passionless and artless, but so low cost.

Entire communities and personalities were formed overnight, blank eyed corporate algorithm regurgitating the synthesis of millions of data points. Data points accrued from artists and writers and philosophers, people whose horizons stretched further than the bottom line and thus were totally incongruous with corporate philosophy. And these artificial things, beings of no thought or care, algorithms in a trench coat made from the stitched together faces of someone’s bride, son, friend. They moved with the rigid gait of a puppeteered corpse that had never lived, influencers who existed only in cyberspace hawking products they had never received.

The corps, of course, denied that they used this tech. They played their cards close to their chest, as their marketing teams sent forth droves of bots to advertise their products, and similarly large amounts to drive up perceived engagement. The engagement drove clickthrough rates, the only metric that any boardroom cared about. CPM was sacrosanct. As long as the numbers were high it didn’t matter where the numbers came from, or if any human beings had actually seen the posts. Artificially inflated ad-revenue was still revenue. The corps were making money selling products nobody bought, from ads no one had ever seen.

The OldWeb is a dusty old fun house, winding down from lack of maintenance yet no one has the guts to tear it down. No one walks those dusty information highways, but that doesn’t mean they’re not occupied.

Shambling AI constructs, bots designed for the sole purpose of market manipulation and search engine optimization, lurk in the comment sections and replies of the waning light of once popular sites. Binary tumbleweeds blow through abandoned online spaces, boomtowns formed to pan streams of data for glittering ad revenue. Perhaps the odd real human will stumble through, engage with the content or engage in lively debate in the comments. But they’re still in the fun house, and the animatronics are starting to collect rust.

When most humanity left the OldWeb for greener pastures, the bots continued in their pursuit of infinite growth. The human created data had all been parsed, but there was an endless supply of algorithmic slop in the trough. New iterations, new posts and comments and glassy-eyed AI facsimiles of humans, were churned out by the million every hour. The binary genome of the algorithms unspooled, every new iteration mutating and growing as though the computer banks were situated on top of the Elephant’s Foot.

Perfect mimics of humans grinned with too many teeth as their skin sloughed off in handfuls, the flesh beneath shimmering and whirling with eyes and teeth and eyes and eyes and eyes. They opened their mouths and screamed, thousands of words layered on the other, each algorithm desperate to optimize some search term or the other. Stuttering and shrieking like the construction workers at the base of Babel, too wide smiles stretching past where the skin should break.

Billions of interactions, content churned out to be devoured by content waiting to be devoured by content by content to be devoured by churned by content by the interactions to rise CPM and get high levels of interactions to get content to be devoured and produced by content creators who were devouring themselves before your eyes. Hunks of writhing flesh made of stolen assets dropped down forgotten gullets that did not exist. Maggots devouring each other after the carcass had been entirely disassembled.

History was corrupted and unusable, online encyclopedias and scholarly articles edited every fraction of a second, the new data based on old iterations that were already warped and mutated. The article on the Franco-Prussian War is 600 pages long and includes the entire text of Pride and Prejudice in Urdu. Nowhere in it is the word “France” used.

YankeeFive hated diving through the OldWeb. When cutting through corporate firewalls occasionally you’d pick up a tail. It wasn’t always the case, Yankee prided herself on her procedure, but sometimes siphoning a few thousand out of corporate slush funds drew attention. Today, corporate pigs snuffled along the information superhighway as though searching for truffles. It became prudent to bounce through the disparate pages of the OldWeb to try and cast off your scent.

She hopped through several pages, scrolling through them in a blur of color. On each she left a comment, something small to be devoured by the digital revenants that hungered for anything real, anything to rip to shreds and rebuild.

Power

Asparagus

Dance

Freight

Hundreds of comments, each one totally separate from the last, each one carrying the digital scent of humanity. No connecting link between the words, each one drawn from her own head. She’d tried using random word generators, but the scent of sapience wasn’t as strong. The algorithms needed the blood, were hungry for the pulse beating beneath fingertips.

The digital revenants tore each comment to threads, every letter, every keystroke, grabbed onto by a thousand algorithms unconsciously desperate for human influence. They repeated and altered them over and over, the words exploding in an exponential fractal across the net. The blood diffused through the web like a slime mold. Each word carrying an impossibly small fragment of the digital fingerprint, just enough of a lead to draw the corpo cyberhounds off her tail.

Tabs opened and closed by the dozens, a zoetrope of webpages flickering over her eyes as Yankee dropped chum in her wake. All she needed to do was keep her trail concealed enough to pass through one of the derelict entrances back into the subsurface world of the net. She surfaced in the OldWeb only long enough to throw pursuers off her scent. Every moment spent there, banner ads of Adamic languages and news articles referencing events that had not happened, made her teeth itch.

Despite the activity in the tomb, the movements were those of ghosts and corpses.