What Do the Dead Internet Theory and Russian Intelligence Operations Have in Common? With Carl Miller
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Hello, I'm Mia Sarrenti, and welcome to Intelligence Squared, the podcast about ideas that matter. In each episode, we speak to some of the world's most interesting thinkers, not simply about what they've written or created, but about the ideas that drive their work and why they matter now. The Dead Internet Theory began as an obscure conspiracy theory online. Its proponents argued that the internet was almost entirely overrun by non-human actors. automated bots and AI generated content. In 2021, it sounded paranoid, and much of it was, but today many elements of this theory seem to be ringing true. In June, Cloudflare CEO Matthew posted on X that machines now generate more web traffic than people. On October 20th, Spotify said that in 2026 it kept more than 50 million slop and spam tracks out of recommendations. Researchers are also finding online material apparently designed less for human readers than for the AI systems that retrieve and cite it. So where is the internet heading?
If synthetic systems increasingly produce, rank, consume, and explain information to one another, What is left for human users to trust? And how can the shift be weaponized by nefarious actors? My guest today is Carl Miller, a demos fellow and co-founder of the Center for the Analysis of Social Media. He has spent more than a decade studying power, influence, and conflict online, and is a co author of the twenty twenty six demos report GEO for geopolitics, which examines attempts to manipulate the sources AI systems retrieve.
Carl welcome to Intelligence Square Mia, everyone, hello. So the dead internet theory was floating around chatrooms and forums in early twenty twenty one. So what would you say has changed online in the past five years? Yeah, so the the dead internet theory Initially
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