Earlier this month, three data centers in western Russia suddenly went dark due to a “rapid unplanned disassembly,” to use euphemistic engineering parlance. They exploded, in other words. Operated by Yandex, a Russian technology company often compared to Google that offers many similar services — a search engine, online shopping, cloud computing and the like — the centers were heavily damaged in a series of coordinated drone strikes over four days by Ukraine, which saw them as a valuable target in the country’s military campaign against Russian infrastructure.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine slogs on, both sides are increasingly adopting this strategy. While power plants and oil refineries have been hit, data centers and internet facilities are becoming the latest quarry for drone and missile strikes — and not just in Europe. Data centers operated by Amazon in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have also been targeted in the ongoing Iran war.

Few Americans have probably heard of Yandex, let alone use its services, and most likely didn’t notice when many of its hosted websites became inaccessible. But after Ukraine’s attacks, many people started to claim that social media was seemingly different. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was quick to suggest his country had dealt a massive blow to Russia’s online disinformation machine, saying, “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms. There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.” Several reports seemed to support his claims, citing data from internet monitoring service Cloudflare, that allegedly showed “Russia’s Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight.” 

But the truth is far more complicated, as some experts have noted. Yandex did experience a crash in bot activity, but at least some of that traffic seems to be legitimate. “When Cloudflare data shows a precipitous drop in ‘bot’ traffic, that does not mean ‘automated social media troll accounts’, it means ‘software that makes automated web requests on a large scale,’” Michał ‘Rysiek’ Woźniak, an internet infrastructure expert, told The Guardian. Others noted that they haven’t seen an actual drop in online disinformation. “Our platforms are still monitoring Russian social networks across the world and there is no discernible change in their posting patterns,” said Amil Khan, the chief executive of Valent, a tech startup that tracks disinformation.

None of that has stopped Reddit and other corners of the web from celebrating and memeing the issue. If those celebrations aren’t quite justified, there’s still something to be learned from the ordeal, which digs into the so-called dead internet theory. The basic premise is that almost nothing we see online is human-generated anymore. In his 2025 book “Market-Oriented Disinformation Research,” business academic Carlos Diaz Ruiz, who has studied how disinformation spreads in social media echo chambers, describes what many of us experience online on a daily basis: “an eerie feeling that the Internet is made up of bots talking to bots, following and liking bots, and posting AI-generated content designed for machine consumption, the algorithm, not humans.”

Indeed, bot traffic makes up an increasingly large share of the internet, surpassing human traffic for the first time in history over the summer, according to a June Cloudflare report. No doubt the surge in generative artificial intelligence use is what tipped the scales, but of course, not all bots are created equal. Many have legitimate, beneficial uses, like archiving web data.

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Some people have wedged dead internet theory into a conspiracy theory that Diaz Ruiz divides into “weak” and “strong.” The weak version of the theory is that the internet is now little more than a hall of mirrors used to manipulate the masses into fighting a culture war instead of a class war. “The Internet drama keeps the population occupied and distracted, preventing them from resisting the elites secretly controlling the world,” as Diaz Ruiz says. “The ‘strong’ version of the dead internet conspiracy theory claims that online activity is entirely disconnected from human activity because our society ceased to exist some time ago. In some versions, a catastrophic event occurred in the past, triggering society’s collapse.”

OK, so we’re basically talking the plot of “The Matrix” here. The argument that humanity peaked in 1999 may be compelling, and I won’t argue against it. If reality truly is nothing more than a hallucination, dream or computer screensaver in the brain, why should we waste time disputing it? Proving a negative with such a lack of evidence is fruitless. The point is, some people may be taking dead internet theory a little too far, but that doesn’t change the fact that within the last week people felt like they got a taste of some version of it.

If we lift the hood on some of these conspiracies, we can understand what people are really afraid of. Last December in the journal Computer, Hal Berghel, a computer science professor at the University of Nevada, argued the dead internet is more than a conspiracy and should not be dismissed, writing, “There’s certainly evidence of the distortion of the internet from the original concept as a liberating, self-healing, packetized purveyor of useful and important information: the original commitment to net neutrality is on life support, the goal of a shared public information repository is constantly compromised by paywalls, the content has moved from valuable scholarship to a sub-cerebral landfill, and the users are subjected to a mind-numbing cacophony of digital threats: spam, phish bait, spyware, malware, online bullying, online fraud, extortion, hacking, VoIP 911-swatting, doxing, slander, pretexting, etc.”

In other words, there’s a good reason so many people find dead internet theory attractive. Once a zone of promise and connection, the web has not only rotted and enshittified, it’s turned into a literal warzone. There really are algorithms out there, unleashed by governments actively dropping bombs on one another, that are designed to infect our minds and prejudice our ability to perceive the truth. It’s one of the many ways modern warfare has become invisible, pervasive and endless. No wonder social media is making so many people depressed — it can be a form of assault.

“In tandem with proxy warfare, cyber operations have become a central pillar of modern statecraft. Cyber warfare enables states to conduct aggressive acts; espionage, sabotage, infrastructure disruption without engaging in kinetic violence,” philosophers Oluyemi Opeoluwa Adisa and Kareem Shwan Adham wrote last year in a study published in the International Journal of Scientific Research and Management. “The strategic advantage of cyber warfare lies in its stealth and ambiguity. Because it blurs the line between war and crime, attribution becomes difficult, enabling perpetrators to operate with minimal consequences.”

How do we even tell how much of the dead internet theory is true? Perhaps through that old tech-support adage: Turn it off and back on again. And no, I don’t mean bombing more data centers, though we’re likely to see more of that, for better or worse. If everything feels fake, maybe we’re better off getting outside and experiencing something real for a minute. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all been told to touch grass so much that such advice is routinely mocked, and anyway, not everyone can easily do that.

But here’s your daily reminder that humans are primates whose still-evolving brains are exponentially outpaced by technological advancement. Being in nature is essential because we are nature. There’s a certain reset available in the presence of trees, birds and clouds. Even more important is connecting with real humans: family, friends, neighbors. Socialization is the essence of the primate brain too. You don’t have to uninstall any apps or delete Facebook, though you could try it too. Off, on again. 

And when you are online, which is unavoidable for many of us, try to remember that you are probably interacting with fewer humans than you might think. So don’t take it so seriously. Temper those outrageous emotions, the ones the algorithms have gotten so good at teasing out of us. Maybe instead we can fortify them into weapons to attack the real problems we face, like widening wealth gaps, destruction of the environment and the rise of authoritarianism. 

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In the 1987 Nintendo game “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” there is a village you can visit and a home you can enter and a man in a purple shirt you can speak with. But the only thing he says is “I am Error.” I was unexpectedly delighted by this dialogue when I first encountered it on a Gamecube emulator in 2009 (I’m not that old). It felt both meta and existential, or just an amusing bug. It turned out that Error was actually the character’s name, a sort of in-joke slash translation mistake that has since become a meme akin to “Your princess is in another castle” or “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this” from the original “Legend of Zelda.”

Error is a non-player character (NPC), meaning one that the player can’t control but is usually more than just video game wallpaper. Nearly 40 years later, NPCs have come a long way, with increasingly complex behaviors and conversational dialogue that span far more than just three words. The upcoming game “Grand Theft Auto VI” is rumored to feature unprecedented complex NPCs with rich, fleshed-out personalities and backstories, while video game companies explore using artificial intelligence to let players train NPCs as they interact.

In many ways, NPCs are how many people were first introduced to AI, although in a relatively simplistic form compared to the chatbots and massive data center hogs that we have come to either love or loathe, with little room in between. Years ago, NPCs became an insult spun out of 4Chan, the anonymous online forum, to describe real people who don’t think for themselves and follow a set of cultural programming, usually illustrated by an expressionless gray cartoon avatar. The meme became popularized by chronically online cohorts of Donald Trump supporters during his first presidential term, adjacent to the idea of “Trump derangement syndrome,” both implying that people oppose the MAGA movement out of reflexive mindlessness and not, you know, because they’d looked under the hood and seen it for what it is.

It might just sound like a new way to call someone an idiot, but the NPC label has much deeper, scarier implications. On the surface, it seems like harmless video game humor, and I’m sure we’ve all had encounters with actual humans that resembled interacting with tautological machines programmed with limited responses. “There is weather today. Did you hear about celebrity? Sports.” And certainly social media, now overrun by bots, increasingly feels as if every conversation is between different viruses. These realities don’t map to every experience yet following the NPC slander to its logical conclusion can be dangerous: declaring that a person’s alleged lack of inner thinking is justification for dismissing their humanity. After all, they’re just mindless characters in a video game (and maybe reality is just The Matrix, so whatever), so it’s fine to ignore them, disenfranchise them or abandon them to a grim fate.

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Solipsism, the philosophical position that you can only experience your own consciousness, and therefore other people might not exist or have souls, is not a new idea. René Descartes believed animals were soulless, unthinking automatons, though modern neuroscience has repeatedly disproven that one. (On some level, “I am Error” echoes Descartes’ famous quip about thinking and therefore am-ing.) But now that complex AI has spilled from video games into the mainstream, it’s especially dangerous to see the NPC label has become embedded in mainstream politics, whether explicitly or not.

All this is rooted in Donald Trump’s recent campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” via executive order, posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” The idea has quickly been embraced by tech leaders, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk saying this week that AI is “no more” and promising to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”

Yeah, most of us are going to roll our eyes hard at AI being “super,” but if these attempts at normalization gain ground and get pushed to their absurd conclusion, it might end in providing AI more rights than humans. (It’s worth noting Musk invokes the NPC meme often.) It’s right there in the name: “Super intelligence” is better than the old, human kind, so why shouldn’t we give these computer programs rights and defend them from regulation? That’s why stories about AI bots being put into virtual torture chambers aren’t just silly, but foregrounds the false notion that AI is capable of suffering. (Maybe don’t put bots in rooms like that anyway — at the very least, it’s a waste of energy.)

After all, AI will either become the savior of humanity or make humans obsolete, depending on what day of the week it is. Sure, this technology is nifty, even as it comes with an enormous environmental destruction. But we are still a long way from elevating the technology above regular human intelligence. But as in a two-for-one, if you can be sold on the myth that AI is superhuman, it travels along with the idea that regular humans are disposable. In other words, the tech bros are trying to turn us all into NPCs, into Errors, not least through the mass surveillance programs being used to hunt migrants and spy on protesters.

Yes, thankfully, granting above-human rights to supposedly sentient AI sentience is still a fringe idea, but we can see that changing before our eyes, not to mention we already kind of did that with corporations. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told POLITICO that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” To further consolidate its power — or at least keep the economy from crashing — Silicon Valley wants us to believe their latest technological invention can think, reason and moralize. It’s no surprise that tech bros were recently exposed trying to convince none other than the pope that AI is conscious, but to his credit, Leo XIV has rejected this idea, saying “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity” and elsewhere warning against “losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines.’”

Spending time with large language models like ChatGPT and knowing a little about how they work, it becomes clear that it’s just a really good computer program that can mirror human expression, sometimes terribly and sometimes surprisingly well. There remains zero hard evidence that AI algorithms are sentient.

Yet an increasing number of people are convinced otherwise, as seen in the controversial AI psychosis phenomenon, which makes me wonder how so many people have persuaded themselves a souped-up version of “I am Error” is a conscious being. It can feel like human interaction typing back and forth with these things, but there are always gaps where you can sense the uncanny valley, where you know it’s just a lot of math and nothing more. Perhaps, if you want to be really cynical about it, you could boil down all of human nature and biology and the emergence of consciousness into “a lot of math” as well. But our brains aren’t computers and physics has yet to fully explain consciousness — that’s why they call it a hard problem. Instead of stewing in this mystery, tech bros have gotten the metaphor backward, assigning personhood to bots while denying it to living humans. Talk about soulless.

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