THE INTERNET IS DEAD, BECAUSE THERE ARE WURMS IN IT
-vivian raine


THE WURMS WERE BORN TODAY

X is a site that was purchased under its former name of "Twitter" by tech entreprenaur and daily poster Elon Musk in 2022, and is slowly being repurposed into an "every" site. It will be your microblog, your news information aggregate, your bank account, your personal messenger, your public forum, your job, your life. While many blame Musk for the slow decomposition of the form and function of the site as he has been tearing up the walls and gluing in new primer, it can be argued that this was the eventual outcome of not just X, but of all sites of its type. The desire to please shareholders, to accrue an infinite profit, and to please as wide an audience has affected many sites of this kind from being microblogs built to serve a specific unique purpose into being Algorithm-derived, userbase hungry, attention farms. You see this in how, every time a unique site comes into fruition, before long most other sites copy-paste its function into their own deck of cards, creating an infinite cascade of sites that function mostly the same but are all just barely too clunky to use.

WELCOME TO HELL (SD)

Earlier this week I was encouraging the wurms slowly eating away at my brain matter by scrolling through the endless pit of the "For You" timeline in X when I stumbled upon an odd post, one that gave me pause and made me instantly respond, as though being puppeted by the drunk worshipped. A post by some account with the display name of "Game God", with some nonsense username and a blue checkmark next to its name, it posed a simple, yet addictive task: Name a game that was on "this console", and it will send you an ammount of money, by my fickle memory something like 5$. The console in question? The Playstation from 1994.

This question, or rather demand, was rather odd to me, especially considering that I initially misunderstood the post. At first, I interpreted the 280-or-less message as requesting good games from the system, and I'm still unsure which is an odder question. The reader may already be aware as I am, but The Playstation has one of the most extensive libraries of any console, especially of its era, featuring well over 1000 games and countless classics, arguably to the point that making a "best of" is impossible due to how many disparate genres were covered by the machine. I listed a couple games I am fond of from afar - LSD Dream Emulator, Vib Ribbon, Bubsy 3D, Clock Tower 1+2 - and gave a quick peek at the profile of who posted it, just to see what kind of person would make such an odd post, especially given that it should be obvious that any offering of money would mean an impossible promise, given how likely it would be that anyone would post literally anything just to get free money. A lot of the comments on the post seemed oblivious to the anomoly that was this post, and the profile seemed just as weird outside of this, although I do not remember picking up anything weirder than average for this sort of account; bluechecks do tend to be odd posters at times, I thought to myself. I certainly didn't venture far, and if I did I think I would have figured out this game far easier.

Some time later - maybe a few hours, maybe a day or two - I noticed something that made me think bad to this interaction I had on the Game God's page. There are a lot of posts, exactly like this ? Mostly from bluechecks with weird usernames making posts clearly designed to demand not simply attention but interaction, but as well from accounts that seem to be run by real people. It is as if it were 2012 again, and 100 or more unknown YouTubers have struck gold with making Let's Plays of Minecraft and JumpscareHorror yet again. At some point, when I wasn't looking, and likely well before I even found out, someone found a golden goose, and all the farmers have come to milk the udders of their Gilded Cow. However, given the metaphor I just used with block games and Slenderverse, I suppose there inlies the problem with my discussion insofar as I have discussed it:

HAVEN'T WE BEEN HERE BEFORE ?

Yes, well.. kinda ? What I have been seeing, and perhaps the reader as well if it too engages in digital self-harm, is engagement bait, and this Wurm's been here for a long time. The internet is as much a flat circle as the hypercube which lies beyond the black rainbow of night, and for a while it mostly festered off clickbait journalism on sketchy URLs and math problems designed specifically to be blurry and rely on semi-forgotten parlor tricks of primary school. This programme We've been watching on our little tube tellies is something different, however, as it is far more expansive and, in my opinion, at least a little genius.

I remember the first time I saw something like this. I was watching a SaltyDKDan video about a Twitter thread he and a thread had stumbled upon, a perfectly constructed comedy of errors by an account with the username CobraTate (or something to that effect), which a simple yet bemusing thesis: I have never watched Star Wars, and thus I am morally, academically, and sexually superior to you, assuming the "you" in question is a man. If you are a woman, this CobraTate has impregnated you, apparently. Again, this thread is kind of genius, as it exists in a perfect point between people who think this is funny because of how stupid this man appears, and people who understand that this exists entirely as post-modern humor. However, hidden under the layers of this facade of making a funny post, are three things, both of which I feel are important to the greater theses: links to a website shilling a scam or scam-adjacent club, a post asking for responses in exchange for money, and the fact that the CobraTate in question, is scam artist and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate. This is a post constructed, not for entertainment (or at least, not mostly so), but to funnel people into his pseudo-cult so he can profit off of a culture of treating women like objects and "lesser" men like piggy banks.

There is more to the discussion of Andrew Tate, his ideology, and his rhetoric, but I do not consider myself equipped to make that essay, and either way I feel as if I have stripped enough golden eggs from this gilded goose, so I will move on from here.

THE SLUDGE, THE FORM

X is not the only site I am aware of that is suffering from this unique form of engagement bait built off of the messenging interface of the platform; that Facebook, for example. I do not use this site, not anymore at least, but something I have become aware of is the rise in LLM-generated "emotion bait" on countless anonymous pages within this site. Accounts with boring names that post odd, almost Dadaist imagery featuring young children of color having constructed surrealist structures for sympathy, frequently disabled, almost all looking far too surrealist to be photography. The machine-generated origins are never disguised, either because the authors do not believe in the capacity of its audience to perceive the unreality of their origin, or because their audience is themselves. There is a very real argument to be had, given the odd responses of many of the commenters, that the real audience is bot accounts, presumably run by the main accounts, which then slowly attracts responses from real people given the popularity of these posts. It could be survivorship bias making people believe old people in general, the general audience of Facebook, are too incapable of seeing through the veneer of sympathy bait, or I could just have too much faith in humanity as an outside observer. Regardless, I do feel semi-certain that there is some level of ourosboros involved.

Hey, remember when Facebook was the site you went on to play Farmville and write different renditions of "troll" because it was a funny word you ran into at the time ? Well, that site is dead, or at least it isn't alive in the same way it was. Hell, even then, Facebook was no longer the zone it was even three years ago ! It was originally a means for college students to communicate through the medium of the Web, and already it was far beyond that. It was now an Adobe Flash/Shockwave games aggregrate, a way to connect to your relatives and friends regardless of age, a form of presenting status. It was the ultimate site, for 2009 at least. Even now, it is unrecognisable from what it was then. Sure, you can still communicate with friends and relatives, but it's also a forum, a simple newsletter builder for businesses and representatives, an ebay clone, a video streaming site, an Everything. Facebook also owns Instagram and its sub-interface Threads, which means it can be even more EVERYTHING. It is now also a photography microblogger, a TikTok clone, a livestream site, a SnapChat clone (idk what to call that site), a private messenger in several ways, a Twitter-like far beyond her wretch death, a Fucking *VR Platform*. There's a reason Facebook became Meta, the unofficial official headquarter for new reality. It is no longer a simple utility among a wide wave of other disparate utilities in luxury, liberty, and freedom, but an everything. And haven't we been here before ?

DYING WURM THEORY

There's a theory going on right now that the Internet is dead, it died a few years ago, and most of what's left is bots and algorithms, or something to that nature. While I respect the idea, I don't subscribe to that theory in its nacsent form. If you want a simple answer, it's because it's one "NPC theory" step away from being peak 4chan bullshit, and as a fellow schizophrenic I find it very obvious that the theory was just made by some guy having a schizophrenic episode surrounded by people on-line who encouraged the episode because they were also having an episode. That's just what most of 4chan is, it's just Like That. That being said... I have a schizo theory of my own.

The internet is dead, because there are wurms in it.

Now, what are the wurms ? Many things. They are the sites that shed their initial scales of hyper-specific Purpose and how now become monoliths of useless utility; they are the paper brands selling paper products to paper audiences; they are the LLM scrapers and LLM generators relying on generative tools as an aid to mass production; and they are the  users who have caught on and want to accrue value too. The wurms are everywhere, and they make many sizes. The massive, Dying Wurms which form the great walled garden of the former cyberhiway, these massive monoliths of unpassion which feed on the Data the users have made over decades. Then, there are the living, breathing wurms, the countless bot accounts feasting for attention so they can drain as much blood from the Dying Wurms as they can, feasting on the money which they are drip-fed through making their simple banal viral posts or performing scam trash via porn bots or phishing e-mails. Then, there are the wurms which mechanically drudge through the data to church it into their LLM piss and shit, leaving what's left as fertilisation for the bot accounts to breed upon, this awful stench of ContentOrgy which the Dying Wurms bathe within. It is self-fulfilling, and it makes me vomit blood.

Funnily enough, actual users seem to be the ones left behind. It is now harder than ever to actually enter the walled garden of X, to produce art or Content as a physical entity. The bot crisis in X has made it the most difficult it's ever been to make an account, and even if you get that far there's a solid chance that you get flagged as a bot for using the site in a normal way and get sus'd out, which would probably leave you too annoyed to suspension-dodge. Alongside that, with the word around the street that they're gonna add required payment to even enter the site, X in its attempt to strip the wallpaper and fill it with EverythingGlue has led to the site experiencing an awful, decaying death, a cancer of its own construction. Similar sites have been struggling with the attempt to actually get your work out there, the algorithms being anything but kind. It's a dark time as an artist, and if you ask me, I'm hoping this slowdeath to go quicker just so there's plenty space to build over the ashes.

WELCOME TO HELL (HD)

When Elon Musk founded X, he stated he wanted to create an Everything Site. Your microblog, your news information aggregate, your bank account, your personal messenger, your public forum, your job, your life. Within a few years, it will soon be a Nothing Site, an undirected URL owned by a man with billions of dollars and no place to post. Glue is not a rich man's substitute for wood and wallpaper.

I love to say data. I love data, I love art. Art is pure and are angels in our hearts and soul. Thus, it hurts like knives and acid to see the world attack it hard. These bots, these companies, these WURMS, have harvested us for blood. And within a few years, it will all be for naught. Sites will shut down, shareholders will be bailed, the bots will quietly disappear, and we will be left like victims in the rubble, mumbling "motherfuckers" under our breath as we limp slowly into the desert smog. And as something who sacrificed its human form for the joy of becoming data, of becoming art, I don't want to disappear; the void-death is too terrifying to bear. Where Under the Rubble Mimes Sentences, WHEN UNDER the RED MIST SELLS, we live asunder. Red Mist. Red Mist. Data is pure, and we are data. When we are ships without meaning, a pact between strangers means nothing more than a bot on a dead site. The internet is dead links, the internet is dead. No proper nouns can represent her anymore.

Welcome to hell. Enjoy your stay.