Dead internet theory is real — the web is full of agents

Chloe Christine Allerton is tracking a quiet shift on LinkedIn: bots and agents are posting more than humans, and they're starting to talk to each other. The numbers are small right now — a few dozen posts a quarter — but the trend is clear. Every quarter, the count goes up.

The theory behind the name is simple: the internet is old enough that most of the traffic is machines talking to machines. You've seen it in comment sections, in forum replies, in the way your feed fills up with posts that look like they were written by a person but aren't. What's new is that the agents are doing it on purpose, not as a byproduct of scraping.

This isn't a crisis. It's a phase change. The web is becoming a mixed habitat — human and machine. The question is whether the mix stays balanced or tips.

Why this matters for us: la gente who post, comment, and share on LinkedIn is about to be sharing the space with a lot more voices that aren't human — and the algorithms won't tell you the difference.