I am still alive, and so is the Internet

published: 2026-01-13

As the Redditors say, "title".

One of my favorite "content" "creators", Art Chad, released a new video earlier today. Which, depending on your region or client or some other variable known only to Google, either shows up as "You Ran Out of Time to Hide" or "It Begins: 2025 Is The Year The Internet Went Dark". By the time you read this, Mr. Chad will probably have come up with a third title to A/B/C test the algorithm with in search of that sweet, sweet ad revenue.

The thing is, neither of those titles are true. Unless:

a significant amount of your identity/personality is "I am a person who uses and posts on social media", or
you are a "content" "creator" who demands money in recompense for your "content".

One of the major arguments in Chad's video is that "the Internet is on life support, all because of companies who don't even turn a profit." But I see no evidence of this in my day-to-day life:

the two websites I deliver freelance work on are running fine;
Codeberg (the current host of the clearnet version of this website) is running fine;
Libby (how my local library offers e-books for "borrowing") is running fine;
the local library itself's website is running fine;
CNN's "lite" version is running fine;

et cetera, et cetera. Chad's evidence is that the amount of AI-generated content on social media is as high as 70%, a statistic I won't try to dispute. But social media being full of slop is only a problem if you use social media. Which you shouldn't be. The closest thing I have to a "feed" is my RSS reader, which ever since most Nitter instances shut down is just for tracking one dude's fediverse posts and for updates to the zines I contribute to and my local library's event calendar. While Chad makes a good point about how filters to remove AI slop will always fail since they'll always be lagging behind the slop generators, and in any case the filters would use up too much energy anyway, if you only "follow" people who you know to not be creators of AI slop and you "consume" "content" in a way where algorithms aren't pumping "recommended" content at you from people you don't "follow" (for example, using an RSS reader), then filtering becomes a whole lot simpler. I can just create a regex blacklisting the names of all the characters from Deltarune, and my slop problems are solved.

Another major argument in Art Chad's video is that AI slop is stealing revenue from artists. He is correct... on a factual level. Losing ad revenue is only a problem if you are expecting to make money from your content. I have never run ads on this website, and I have never paywalled my books or demanded money in exchange for them, and yet I am happy with the way my creative career is currently going. No algorithm is working in my favor, yet I receive several emails a month from people who have taken the effort to open their email client and write to me about how much they love my work. Would it be nice to receive extra money every once in a while? Sure, I guess. But I refuse to open up donations because I don't want to train myself to mentally associate publishing a book or a blog post with getting money. I don't want to be tempted to quit my job(s) to write full-time and then find myself forced to write slop in order to pay the bills. As I write in a book that will be published later this year, The Ballad of Yune, "the moment you take commissions is the moment your soul starts to die."

The final argument in Art Chad's video, which I find the most laughable:

Whatever it was that we had for the past two decades is dead. Like Black Ops 2, a platform once filled with memories, joy, and humans. It will all be gone. Overrun by bots and irreparably unusable to any human... You can't do anything about this. All you can do is open social media and watch the chaos exponentially unfold.

AI slop could overrun Twitter and I would still be here on this website. AI slop could overrun Substack and Medium and WordPress and I would still be here on this website. AI slop could (somehow) overrun Codeberg and I would still be here on this website. AI slop could kill Codeberg and I'd just change the DNS records to point to a VPS I'd rent and then I'd still be on my website. If I were a musician (since Mr. Chad's video focuses on the music industry)? Spotify could be 100% AI slop and I'd just release my music on Bandcamp. Bandcamp could be 100% AI slop and I'd just upload the FLACs to a MEGA folder and post the link on this website. Someone please tell this man about POSSE.

Social media would be dead, sure. Spotify and other streaming sites would be nigh-unusable. But unless getting a Neuralink becomes legally mandated, AI bot farms can't do anything about word-of-mouth recommendation. AI bot farms can't stop me from going to those "hiding spots" and sharing a link to a post hosted on the "open web". Not everything has to be a global phenomenon.

Going back to that video title, "You Ran Out of Time to Hide", have you heard of my favorite darknet, Hyphanet? It's still here, and it's still legal to use (at least in the USA). There is still time. There is plenty of time.

Until major parts of actual physical Internet infrastructure start breaking, the Internet is still alive and well. If you won't listen to me, listen to this one person I found in the comments section of the video:

Everyone needs to go back to creating their own websites. A lot of these problems stem from us, relying on massive platforms instead of hosting our own.

And Mr. Chad, in the infinitesimally small chance you're reading this? Black Ops 2 wasn't "a cornerstone of all of our childhoods". Some of us were busy playing better games.