The Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory that, when we take the conspiracy theory out of it, ceases to be an unrealistic or far-fetched idea, and starts to be very obvious. Like many theories (such as the Anthropic principle), it has strong and weak forms. The strong form is a variant on the great conundrum of stoner epistemology: what if everyone else in the world is a robot, dude? The weak version is that the internet sure has changed, hasn't it?

I don't believe that I am the single remaining internet user of flesh and blood in the world. This is an application of the Copernican Principle: I am probably, in general, average. Since I am not a robot, most people aren't robots, either. This is not ironclad, but it makes sense. But lets go on to a weaker idea: the internet has changed. Of course it has, but lets talk about how it has changed, and in what sense that makes it "dead".

Let me start with an example: Instagram. Ten or a dozen years ago, there was a joke/

Today is my 25th anniversary of being a noder here. That means it's my (counts on fingers, learns Latin) Viginti-quinque-versary. (If that's wrong, don't tell me. I will not care.)

I've been an Everythingian for longer than Wikipedia has been in existence, or Facebook or Twitter or Netflix or MySpace or YouTube. I've been a noder for longer than there's been an iPhone or a Crunchwrap Supreme or "American Idol" or the entire "Fast and the Furious" franchise.

I'm honestly not sure whether

I haven't done this for a while! In the six months I was in Costa Rica, English language books were hard to come by, and I ended up paying several dollars for a tattered paperback. So when I came back to the United States, one of the first things I did was go to the Dollar Tree to once again indulge in the process of buying books, just because I could! And thus, Creepers: The Scarecrow, written by the presumably pseudonymous "Edgar J. Hyde" and illustrated by the (less presumably