PU 39: The Dead Internet Theory Was Right

Are humans on the internet being pushed out by bots? Is this a lunatic fringe conspiracy theory or does Cory Doctorow’s thesis of enshittification accurately describe what is happening?Punching Upwards, Episode 39 for 7 June 2026Topics: Technology / Artificial Intelligence🦉 No AI Content 📢 Podcast RSS FeedCreditsThanks to Michael Mullan-Jensen, Evgeny Kuznetsov, Vlad A Gouf, Fadi Mansour, Bennet Piater, Eric and Sir Galteran for supporting this podcast financially and therefore making it possible for me to produce it!See Also* Punching Upwards 22: Moltbook MadnessSources* Tweet by Matthew Prince, 3 June 2026* Bots Now Outnumber Humans Online And The Internet Was Never Built For This, Forbes, 4 June 2026* Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows, NBC News, 5 June 2026* AI Agents Now Generate More Web Traffic Than Humans, CNET, 4 June 2026* Cloudflare CEO says bot internet traffic has overtaken humans, Mashable, 5 June 2026* AI and bots have officially taken over the internet, report finds, CNBC, 26 March 2026* The 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report, Human Security, undated* “Bots have now passed human traffic online,” Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year, Tom’s Hardware, 4 June 2026* Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame, The Register, 4 February 2026* More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans / AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans, Five Percent, 15 May 2026* How dead is the internet?, BBC World Service, 17 May 2025* Social Quitting, Corey Doctorow, 15 November 2022* Enshittification:Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, Corey Doctorow, 2025* The Age of Enshittification, The New Yorker, 1 October 2025The theme music for the podcast is a track called Fight or Fall by Def Lev. Find out more about the show at fab.industries/podcast — new media, new rules! Get full access to Punching Upwards at punchingupwards.substack.com/subscribe