This week on the show, we’re re-airing "The Sum of Our Data." It’s about the data we generate on a daily basis and the stories it tells — from the origins of data mining, to our diminishing right to privacy, and the afterlife of our personal information. We’ve all heard that since its inception, the “internet is forever.” But I recently learned that roughly 38% of the websites that existed from 2013 to 2023 are no longer accessible. Pair that with the fact that 57% of online content is now generated or translated through artificial intelligence, we are losing more and more of our humanity on the internet.
This is what’s known as the Dead Internet Theory — The idea that the web we knew is quickly disappearing and replaced by content farms, bots, and AI-generated text. Scroll on Facebook or any social media and you’ll see it everywhere. It’s the generic listicles and ad-ridden articles and AI-narrated YouTube videos. Comment sections are filled with bots that are getting harder to distinguish from true engagement. Eventually all the noise and slop starts to bury the genuine human work underneath.
That’s concerning for storytellers like me. I worry that over time, the interviews and conversations we share on TTBOOK will be harder to find or disappear completely. And with the recent news that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down, that worry only deepens. CPB has long been one of the few institutions built to preserve human stories outside of commercial and algorithmic pressures. Its loss wouldn’t just be about funding. It would mean disrupting a system designed to safeguard cultural memory and local voices — the very things that get erased when the internet forgets us and algorithms replace us. If the internet forgets us, and the algorithms mimic us, what record of our humanity is left behind?
– Angelo