The end of the human internet

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do, so you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.
Support for the show comes from MongoDB.
AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is ACID-compliant, and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com/ai.
Support for the show comes from Attio, the AI CRM. What if all that annoying prep work was just finished the moment you walked into the office? Whether it's Cloud, Slack, or with any other agent you build, you can access your customer data wherever you work through Attio's MCP and API.
Everything you'd normally miss gets flagged. And overnight, Attio reads your whole pipeline and tells you what needs your attention in the morning. Tomorrow is just a click away. You can go to attio.com/decoder and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's attio.com/decoder.

**Nick Statt** (2:00)
Hey, everyone. This is Nick Statt, Senior Producer on Decoder. Nilay's out for vacation this week and we'll be back next week with new episodes. We're very excited for what we have on the schedule. In the meantime, we wanted to share an episode from the excellent podcast The Gray Area with host Sean Illing.
Sean sat down with the Atlantic journalist Charlie Warzel to talk about the state of the Internet in 2026 and what it means that it feels increasingly overrun by non-human actors.
Sean and Charlie dig into some classic web culture concepts, including the dead Internet theory and they connect that idea that most of the Internet is now just bots in disguise to algorithmic recommendation, AI slop and why it feels like the Internet you grew up with is now gone, replaced by something more manipulative, deceptive, and in many cases outright fake. Okay, The Gray Area with Sean Illing, interviewing The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel about the increasingly inhuman Internet. Enjoy.

**Sean Illing** (2:53)
This is The Gray Area. I am Sean Illing. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie wrote a piece about AI and what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this feeling that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms and various AI generated content. Everything feels a little fake, a little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the Internet feels so strange right now and whether it's still possible to build spaces online that feel genuinely human. Hope you enjoy it.
Charlie Warzel, welcome back to the show.

**Charlie Warzel** (3:40)
Thank you for having me.

**Sean Illing** (3:42)
Yeah, man. It's been a while.
Let's talk about your recent piece in The Atlantic. There is a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is getting at a part of it that seems a little under discussed, which is the increasingly weird bot haunted Internet we all live inside now. So let's just start there. What is the feeling you are describing in this piece?

**Charlie Warzel** (4:10)
The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation but also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the Internet right now is this paranoia.
I started the piece with a callback to a piece by the Internet tech writer Max Reed, who wrote New York Magazine back in 2018 about what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by you or me, human beings, may surpass some of the content that we all make, and that the Internet would be just a majority fake to some degree, or majority automated.
That, at the time, I remember, was a real revelation for a lot of people, this feeling that, whoa, like you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever, that there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff, that a lot of websites are populated with automated comments or whatever it is. And now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea, that someone wouldn't be as aware of that. Because in the generative AI age, or whatever we're going to call it, or whatever we're in, basically, since the arrival of ChatGBT, but even before it, you have an Internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways. So you have synthetic text, all the things that we would call AI slop. And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, to promote something that either isn't real, or that is a scam, or pretty awful. You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that Google Search, most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Then you have synthetic music, AI slopped videos and things, clogging these feeds. And you have organizations that are doing a new style of content marketing, viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts to seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes, the algorithm thinks, oh, this is a popular song. And then when other people start posting it, it gets priority inside the feeds. So it's this idea that like, what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings. They're marketing to these algorithms. The end result of all of that, right? This idea that everything around you might be fake.