The Presence of an Absence
Mark Fisher defined the eerie as a failure of absence or a failure of presence. It’s that prickle on the back of your neck when you see a stone circle or an abandoned film set—there is something there that shouldn't be, or there is nothing there where something should be. Lately, my Twitter feed feels like a failure of presence. I am looking at a stream of content, but I am increasingly convinced that nobody is home.
It isn't just that the bots are winning; it's that the nature of the interaction has shifted from communication to mimicry. When I see a post with 50,000 likes featuring an AI-generated image of a 'life hack' that defies the laws of physics, followed by three hundred comments saying "Amazing!" and "Great tip!", I’m not looking at a community. I’m looking at a self-sustaining loop of data that has no need for a human observer. It makes me wonder: if we all logged off tomorrow, would the feeds even stop?
The Architecture of the Void
There’s a specific kind of vertigo that comes from realizing the 'Dead Internet Theory' is moving from a paranoid creepypasta to a measurable reality. By some estimates, nearly 50% of all internet traffic in 2023 was bot-driven. That’s half of the digital world operating in a dark room where we aren't invited. This is the eerie economy in action. We are moving through digital spaces that look lived-in, but the lights are on and the house is empty.
I find myself fascinated by the 'Slop' phenomenon—those bizarre, nonsensical Facebook images of Jesus made of shrimp or soldiers made of plastic bottles. They garner millions of engagements from what appear to be elderly users, but are likely just other bots boosting the signal to harvest ad revenue. We’ve built an engine that produces culture for an audience that doesn't exist, simply because the engine is programmed to keep turning.
What does it do to our brains to spend four hours a day talking to ghosts? We used to fear the 'Uncanny Valley' because things looked too human but weren't. Now, we’re entering the 'Eerie Valley,' where the structure of our social lives is intact, but the agency is missing. We are shouting into a canyon and being startled when the echo sounds like a different person's voice.
The Extraction of Human Agency
Fisher’s work often focused on how capitalism flattens our ability to imagine different futures. If the eerie is about the 'failure of presence,' then the modern internet is a failure of the human spirit to manifest in its own tools. We’ve outsourced our curation to algorithms and our expression to LLMs. I wonder if we’re losing the ability to tell the difference between a genuine connection and a statistically probable response.
- We see 'Engagement' as a metric of success, but engagement doesn't require a soul.
- We mistake 'Content' for culture, though content is just the filler used to pack the crates of the attention economy.
- We accept 'Personalization' as a service, forgetting that a mirror doesn't actually provide company.
I’m curious if this eeriness is a transition state or a final destination. Are we just in the awkward middle phase of a new digital ecology, or are we witnessing the heat death of social relevance? It feels like we are living in the ruins of a civilization that hasn't actually fallen yet. We’re still here, but we’re becoming tourists in our own digital lives, watching the bots perform a play that was originally written for us.
What This Actually Means
The eeriness we feel isn't a glitch; it’s the inevitable result of prioritizing 'scale' over 'substance.' When you try to make a platform that connects eight billion people, you eventually run out of people and start filling the gaps with ghosts. We are currently participating in a massive psychological experiment to see how long humans will stay in a room once they realize they are the only ones there.
If the internet is becoming eerie, the solution isn't better AI or more sophisticated filters. It’s a return to the small, the inefficient, and the unscalable. We need digital spaces that are 'broken' in human ways—places where a bot would stand out because it’s too perfect, too fast, or too boring. We have to reclaim the 'presence' that Fisher said was failing.
Ultimately, the weirdness of the world right now is a signal. It’s the sound of the machine running without a load. It’s a prompt for us to stop being 'users' and start being 'neighbors' again, even if that means moving to smaller, quieter corners of the web where the ghosts haven't found the keys yet.
Quick Answers
Is the Dead Internet Theory actually true?
It’s less of a literal conspiracy and more of a functional reality; while humans are still online, the vast majority of 'activity' and 'content' is now generated or mediated by non-human actors.
Why does 'Slop' or AI content feel so unsettling?
It triggers the 'eerie' because it possesses the form of human creativity (images, text, jokes) but lacks the underlying intent or experience that usually justifies that form's existence.
Can we fix the 'Eerie' feeling of social media?
Only by moving away from algorithmic feeds that prioritize infinite scrolling; the eerie thrives in the 'void' of the infinite, whereas human connection requires boundaries and actual stakes.
