It all started with the “Dead Internet Theory” and a feeling that the internet was drowning in regurgitated low-effort content.
There had always been bots on the internet – back in the early 2000s we were constantly struggling to keep our forums fenced off from automated bots signing up and spamming the boards with ads and malware.
However, after the LLMs got real traction, there was a significant change. Search results were increasingly saturated by unknown sites repeating the same articles, and finding reliable sources became an increasingly demanding task.
Said bluntly, the internet was “drowning in slop”. It felt like the internet as we knew it was ending, and this turned out to be the beginning of something else.
As I started mentally exploring how this might affect the internet and society in the long term, the thought experiment kept expanding until it became a plausible setting. I started writing short stories, trying to “embody” that potential future. A future where prediction and optimization is taken to the extreme, where the internet becomes so unreliable that it is abandoned entirely (and replaced by something new). A future where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is wider than ever.
This thought experiment turned into my first published book.
While it’s predominantly a sci-fi/cyberpunk work, to me it’s also philosophical. An examination of society, technology, and what it might end up looking like if things continue as they do now.
This is cyberpunk filtered through the eyes of an engineer/historian. This is Ciphersoul Aria.
