When I was starting out with the Ciphersoul project, I struggled to visualize what a Dead Internet might actually look like. The initial mental model was an unthinkably vast “ocean” of garbage – self-replicating articles with ever-increasing signal loss and language corruption, with the replication happening at speeds that even made navigation itself a challenge.
It didn’t feel fully anchored tech-wise, but it was a starting point.
As I kept writing, I got the idea to see it from different lenses. In one instance, someone might come across an old forum / message board. The URLs are still static even if new content is constantly churned out elsewhere. Reading this forum should be possible without having to fight the “tides of chaos”. Most links and attachments might be long gone, but the messages and discussions would still be there – an echo of the past.
Another lens would be a more theatrical approach; Tapping into the Dead Web with makeshift analog tools (such as a synthesizer and radio transmitters – because sometimes “cool” trumps realism) would show us a vastly different imagery. This lens would focus on trying to hold a stable signal while fighting off a torrent of garbage data. Like trying to keep a target location pinpointed while in a storm.
This was how the Dead Web took shape for the first volume of Ciphersoul Aria.
Meanwhile, the world around us kept advancing. In technical circles (such as Hacker News), AI coding was constantly being discussed, and I learned more and more about its failure modes. I felt as if a lot of what I’d written “came true”. But I also had to revise my internal model.
The AI “Ouroboros” might look different from my initial mental model. One short exchange in particular changed my mental model entirely:
An AI agent infers a lot. Not necessarily correctly.
It might add comments to your code, describing the intended purpose of a function (or rather its inferred purpose). These comments will then be read as canon on its next iteration. The errors propagate and evolve.
This, to me, unlocked something.
The Ouroboros doesn’t simply regurgitate and lose meaning across the iterations. It actively mutates truth.
Nuance would slowly be eroded, then new details would emerge in its place. The meaning would slowly change, and the agents might infer/assume facts to fill out the narrative.
This would mean that the Dead Web would consist of conflicting records and falsehoods, ever-growing branches of increasingly misunderstood facts. And with a massive corpus of generated “mutations”, finding the truth would be like finding a needle in an ever-expanding landfill.
And this – ironically – brings me back to another anchor piece of the setting, which is vastly strengthened by this new realization:
Institutional Memory is damaged. Our records, our history, is unreliable. It’s been buried in conflicting records, and we can no longer reliably know the truth.
Once, history was written by the victors. Now, history is written and continuously rewritten by Agents.