On December 15, 1970, Monty Python aired a sketch that would unintentionally shape the future of the internet. In the now-famous “Spam” sketch, a couple tries to order food at a Viking-filled café where nearly every item includes Spam. When the woman insists she doesn’t want Spam, she’s drowned out by chanting Vikings praising the processed meat.
This absurdist comedy turned out to be more prophetic than anyone could have guessed. Decades later, the term “spam” would become shorthand for the overwhelming, repetitive, and often unwanted content flooding our digital lives. The sketch didn’t just foreshadow a nuisance—it captured the essence of how media can evolve into something bloated, numbing, and impossible to escape.
🧠 From Sketch Comedy to Digital Reality
In the early 1980s, internet users began to appropriate the Monty Python sketch in online chatrooms and virtual games by flooding discussions with the word “Spam” to silence others. From this, the term morphed into a broader descriptor of any excessive, irrelevant, or insincere content.
As the internet matured, so did the concept of spam—from annoying email floods to clickbait headlines, fake followers, bot traffic, and content written solely for algorithmic reward. What started as a joke became an early warning about where the internet was heading.
📈 Growth, Connection, and Consequences
By 1989, the World Wide Web was born, and by the mid-1990s, hundreds of thousands of websites emerged. The internet, once an academic experiment, had become a cultural revolution.
Fast forward to 2024: around 5 billion people own smartphones, over one billion websites exist, and the average person spends 6 hours and 35 minutes online daily. Opportunities for creativity, commerce, and connection have exploded—but so have disinformation, algorithmic manipulation, and yes, spam.
💣 The Internet Menu: Spam in Every Dish
Like the Monty Python café, the internet’s current state feels overloaded with spam-like content. It’s not just unwanted email—it’s TikToks that copy each other endlessly, YouTube thumbnails engineered for clicks, AI-written articles with no human voice, and videos optimized to satisfy algorithms instead of audiences.
We’ve adapted our tastes to this—craving quicker, easier, and more processed content that doesn’t challenge us. In the rush for attention, creators chase metrics like watch time instead of creative purpose. Audiences, meanwhile, become passive consumers of repetitive noise.
🤖 The Dead Internet Theory
This growing detachment has given rise to what’s known as the Dead Internet Theory—a fringe concept that suggests most of today’s internet activity is fake, driven by bots and AI. The theory emerged on Agora Road’s Macintosh Café forum in 2021, claiming the internet “died” around 2016.
While conspiracy elements abound, the core idea is unnervingly plausible. As far back as 2016, cybersecurity firm Imperva reported that bots made up more than 50% of internet traffic. Roughly 30% of that was classified as malicious. And that was almost a decade ago.
Even for careful users, there’s no escaping fake clicks, AI-generated interactions, and algorithmic content curation. The internet as a space for unfiltered, human connection feels less like a public square and more like a manipulated simulation.
📉 Creativity vs. the Algorithm
In a 2024 keynote at SXSW, Patreon CEO Jack Conte described what he sees as a dangerous shift: the death of the follower. Social media platforms have moved from follower-based feeds to algorithmically ranked feeds. That means what creators post is no longer guaranteed to reach their audience.
Conte explains: creators are now performing for the algorithm—not for their community. The focus has shifted from artistic intent to content that ranks. As he puts it, “What lights me up?” has become “What will the ranking system favor?”
🧪 Spam by Design: Profit Over Purpose
Why has the shift happened? Because platforms profit from engagement. The longer users stay, the more ads they see. Algorithms maximize this by feeding users content that will keep them watching—whether it’s quality or junk.
Under these conditions, spam thrives. Creators tweak their output to mimic what works, even if it means copying trends, simplifying ideas, or churning out thoughtless content at scale. The algorithm doesn’t care about originality—only performance.
🤯 Enter Generative AI
Now, generative AI is amplifying the spam problem. Models can produce endless videos, articles, images, and even fake users. AI can talk to humans—or to other AI models—flooding the web with content that seems real but lacks intent or meaning.
It’s not all bad. AI has incredible use cases in education, accessibility, and creative tooling. But without regulation or restraint, we risk a digital landscape that’s not just noisy—but hollow.
⚖️ The Path Forward
So what do we do? Regulations and better tech are needed, but they’re often slow to catch up. Until then, the responsibility falls on us—creators, consumers, platforms—to actively seek healthier digital diets.
We should ask: who are we following? What are we consuming? Is this nourishing or just another hit of digital junk? As the saying goes, we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with—online, it may be the five creators we follow most.
The internet isn’t doomed. But it is at a crossroads. The old version may be gone, but what comes next is still unwritten.
🧠 What Matters Most
Forget whether the dead internet theory is fact or fiction. What matters is whether we can preserve what makes the internet meaningful—honesty, creativity, community—in an era defined by algorithms and AI.
We don’t need to banish spam entirely. Like the café from Monty Python, it’ll always be on the menu. But we can choose to build better menus, better platforms, and better norms—where connection beats clicks, and content actually means something.
As Jack Conte put it:
“Don’t let somebody else tell you what you want, because then you’ll end up with what they want instead of what you want.”
