The dead internet theory is a lie.

The other night I watched the ‘Always Sunny’ episode where Dennis takes a ‘mental health day’ because he’s so stressed by work he’s developed high blood pressure. He makes simple plans to take a trip to the beach and relax but instead ends up absolutely enraged by every single company he’s forced to deal with along the way. And from the most minute interactions. I laughed hard. Because it was such a beautiful microcosm of whatever late-stage capitalist dystopia this one is becoming.

Having recently (finally) bought a house and moved from self-employment back into company directorship, I’ve also had to deal with a cavalcade of companies all at once lately, and it was both hilarious and terrifying to resonate so strongly with… Dennis…. of all characters… because of… the implications… but here we are.

I wanted to install high-speed internet and was bounced around by multiple telcos who couldn’t figure out what service was available, before finally having to deal directly with the nbn, which was quite possibly the most infuriating experience in existence, a process that I believe would’ve uncovered the location of Osama Bin Laden in minutes had an Al Qaeda commander been put through it, in where I was told my house was a new build, and then not, and then it was, and then it wasn’t again, and then I’d have to have it installed, and no I wouldn’t, and it would cost thousands of dollars, actually 300 dollars, no it’s free, actually no it’s thousands of dollars again - in the end, after 3 or 4 months, MONTHS, I gave up and just got a 5g modem.

I tried dealing with my current bank and ended up caught up in an insane ‘re-identification’ labyrinth on my accounts, with a bank I’ve been with for decades, and have had personal and business accounts with, that I recently did all of this for anyway, that ended up locking me out of my own bank accounts whilst in the middle of a shoot. With my very own ‘Always Sunny’-esque moment of being left on hold for an eternity whilst ‘She Drives Me Crazy’ and ‘So Far Away From Me’ played on loop. (My home loan is subsequently not with this bank I have 20 years of history with.)

And then, needing a holiday after a long 2025 (I know we’re only in August but it feels like June 2027 at this stage), I tried booking two separate sets of flights, that were admittedly bungled by the airline’s own system, resulting in me being passed to the ‘Existing Bookings’ department, and then the ‘New Bookings’ department, and then the ‘Bookings made with Points and Cash’ department, which I will admit is an impressively specific department, before I just ended up agreeing to pay the difference they’d manufactured to just end the fucking 48-minute phone call and get on with my life. (But maybe that’s the strategy…)

In every instance I was a long-standing engaged willing customer trying really hard to hand over money to an organisation who, as far as I can tell, had decided to have their ‘customer experience’ designed by the guy from the SAW movies. (And that’s just the three I can be bothered writing about.)

The point to all of this? The disconnect between corporations and people has never been wider. The disdain that I regularly feel as a human trying to use a product or service I’ve paid for has definitely reached a new peak. And recently, I feel like I saw the marketing world’s announcement of taking this one step further.

AI-powered market research with ‘synthetic focus groups’.

Now, maybe this is my millennial boomer moment. Maybe I’m the Abe Simpson meme where I used to be ‘with it’ but now they changed what ‘it’ was and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me. But this might be one of the most inane things I’ve ever heard.

We might as an industry use the words ‘customer-centric’ and ‘personalisation’ and ‘human-first’, but words have no meaning without substance, and given we’re one of the only businesses in the world where people pay money to NOT interact with our product, I think it’s fairly safe to say that we currently DON’T have a great grip on how people want to interact with us as brands. I conversely think that people that work in marketing and advertising have a whole lot more to learn than we think from the real world people that we serve our product to.

Given the fact that we’ve also had more ‘data’ at our disposal than ever before, and have cleverly used it to create ‘adblockers’, ‘skip buttons’, and ‘ad-free premium subscriptions’, I reckon now is not the time to ‘synthesise’ our conversations with humans. Feels like a real ‘shark jumping’ moment, to me anyway.

Do we really think we have such a perfect understanding of how people think and behave that we can just ‘synthesise’ them and their response to a brand? Like an all-knowing, all-seeing deity, marketers have ‘clocked humanity’, have we? We finally know everything, just press the button.

The ‘dead internet theory’ was an internet ‘conspiracy’ that started surfacing 10 odd years ago, posing that the internet is actually mostly ‘bot’ activity designed to sway algorithms and control the populace. It probably sounded a bit tinfoil-hat for the mid-2000s, but the thinking has proven to be ahead of its time. Because the dismissive automation and synthesising of human interaction is now well and truly upon us. And it exists everywhere, not just the internet.

We hear of a loneliness epidemic. We hear of a lack of community and social cohesion. We hear of a cultural rejection of social media and algorithms from the younger generations. And as experts in the communication business, our response is to… stop listening? And just make it up? Just turn it into bots talking to bots? (I’ve seen some ‘synthesised customer responses’ and, let me tell you, it would be cheaper than AI to just make it up at this stage.)

We’re at a technological epoch, no doubt, but we really need to stop every now and then and think, ‘wait, what the hell are we doing here?’

Market research and focus groups, whether you like them or not, only exist to provide direct human insights. ‘Synthesising’ this part of the business feels like thumbing our nose at the very people that already pay money to avoid us, thus furthering an already gargantuan divide of understanding.

There’s a planet out there of people wanting to buy stuff from brands they’re comfortable with and our big-brained idea is to cut them out of the process. Creating more distance between ourselves and the people we’re supposed to serve has already been disastrous. This is not going to make it better.

If we want to connect with people, to have ‘conversations with them’, to be ‘customer-centric’, then we have to be curious enough to engage, not ignorant enough to ignore.

Took a break from ads. But gotta pay for this thing somehow. Every click helps keep DTSA free. Much appreciated.

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