It is a popular topic these days. I doubt I have much to add anyone hasn't heard before.
The Dead Internet Theory is alarming. It draws comparisons to the Matrix pretty frequently, though I think this comparison has fallen out of fashion because of redpilled incels and the life cycle of cultural references. It's gone from a powerful symbol to being appropriated by disaffected neets, neckbeards, and would-be mass shooters. It's a shame that this is so, as it is useful for contextualizing what we are collectively experiencing; at least in the imperial core.
At present, I can think of three things separating our predicament from that depicted in the film:
First, we voluntarily (in the absolute loosest sense of the word) participate in it, insofar as the maintenance of the control requires us to take actions. These actions are barely conscious if at all,
but nevertheless we are doing them.
Second, the system of attention capture is imperfect. There is an arms race to rob us of our time and thoughts entirely. Every major tech company has ambitions to make some version of an AR headset that can simultaneously achieve two things: mediating your entire existence through a set of menus and displays so that the world you see is always overlaid with what they want you to see before it reaches you; and making you look like a fucking moron. If ever I see someone wearing one of these Oculus Grifts in public, the urge to spit on them and call them a rube will be tremendous. Until we universally accept or are corralled into wearing the Idiot GogglesTM, we are still nominally able to break away and participate in meatspace for a while.
Third, we still have the ability (somewhat) to distinguish what is real from what is not. In the film, the facsimile is mostly perfect. Enough that very few ever suspect their existence to be a fabrication. We can still usually identify what is AI slop and clickbait, although the misinformation factories have more or less succeeded.
I've heard the current Internet called a walled garden. An excellent phrase, though inadequate to capture the scope of the problem. No shade; it's just two words, so how could it? I think a house of mirrors is a slightly more apt comparison. A walled garden implies a kind of limited splendor, but is essentially static. It also has living things in it. Increasingly, each of us is the only living thing in our personal digital experience.
I don't need to cover how we see one another less and less in real life. That much is obvious. What is worth mentioning is also obvious, but more relevant: online, we are easier to isolate. As the AI-generated bullshit and bot comments overwhelm social media, participation is much like a strange sort of video game. You spend your time interacting with people that do not exist, pretending to take part in things which are equally nonexistent. The truly insidious part is how easy it is not to notice. I think we all know we're addicted to doomscrolling and the never-ending noise of the content stream, but it is not always clear how, specifically. YouTuber and TikTok content creator Flesh Simulator had a video whose central conceit was trolling someone he had beef with, but the tool around which this was centered is illustrative of how the whole enchilada functions. His method was to use AI to mimic the victim's way of speaking and arguing (easy enough in a text-only setting), in order to craft a vitriolic illusion of argument. This is where the house of mirrors comparison comes in.
The amorphous, opaque Leviathan we call the Algorithm is a collection of datasets, each one about one of us; the little dopamine piggies yanking at our shrivelled genitalia and crying for a squirt of the pleasant neurotransmitters from our electronic surrogate mother's tits. The Algorithm evolves and reshapes itself to fit each of us, as the image in a mirror changes or moves as you change or move. Endless reflections of ourselves through content and information keep us trapped; although where a house of mirrors makes sight nearly useless for navigation, the Algorithm weaponizes our senses against us. It intentionally misleads us to always end up back where we started. It provokes, frightens, angers, arouses, entertains, and hypnotizes us at the pivotal moment just before we might otherwise find the exit. Shoshanna Zuboff has a lot of very insightful things to say on the matter. There are other real people on the Internet, but they are rarefied by the day. A look at someone's Facebook feed these days reveals an endless desert of AI slop commented on by bots numbering in the hundreds, thousands, or more.
The big boys have build up the walls around the major sites. Mark Fuckerturd expressed a desire once for Facebook to replace the mode of Internet browsing wherein we use tools to search for what we want and find it quickly.
He and others have succeeded. This is largely because Google has butchered itself for money. Just try to find the answer to a question you have on Google these days. You will be bombarded by an endless barrage of barely-if-at-all relevant (thanks, SEO) listicles and pages whose contents are copied and pasted from another functionally-identical website whose initial article was written by ChatGPT in the first place. Nobody uses that many fucking bullet points, or feels the need to explain what a loaf of bread is, for example.
It may be melodramatic to call it a prison, but I do not know what else to call it as ...we lack the language to articulate our unfreedom.
I had more to say, but I've gotten lost in the weeds and run out of steam for this post.