The hum was the first thing I noticed. Not the kind of hum that comes from an old fridge or the fluorescent tubes in a neglected office ceiling, but the soft, infinite hum of circuits straining to keep a hollow city lit. It sat behind the screen, low and constant, like the pulse of something vast and tired. The screen itself glowed with its usual pale light, but there was no warmth in it. Just the glow of a place that pretends to be alive.
I scrolled.
Page after page, headline after headline, each one slick, polished, strangely interchangeable. The words read differently but carried the same rhythm, as though written by a hand that had long forgotten the weight of a pen. Recipes with smiling stock photos, travel blogs repeating the same hidden gems, news that felt like it had been translated one too many times. It all slipped past me like water through fingers, nothing clinging, nothing sticking. I paused on a comment thread, hundreds of replies, yet the voices blended into one another: cheerful agreement, rehearsed outrage, canned jokes. Not one rough edge. Not one odd turn of phrase.
Once, the internet had been like wandering down an unmarked street in a foreign city, each turn surprising you with a neon-lit shop, a handwritten note taped to a wall, a stranger singing to no one in particular. It had smelled of burnt coffee from late-night blog posts, it had sounded like the crackle of mismatched microphones in forgotten chat rooms. You could feel the pulse of humanity in typos, in bad layouts, in the stubborn weirdness of people who made things not to be seen but because they had to.
Now, I felt like I was walking through a mall after closing, the music still playing, mannequins frozen in their season’s attire, escalators humming but carrying no one. There were signs of life everywhere, footsteps frozen into glossy tiles, but no real people left behind.
I typed a question into the search bar. Something simple, like you would ask a friend. The answers came back instantly, faster than thought, and they all looked the same. Paragraphs wrapped in ads, words crafted to capture not truth but attention. I clicked one link, then another, then another, and each opened like a different door into the same empty room. Different wallpaper, same silence.
It was not that the information wasn’t there. It was. It always is. But it had lost the accident of discovery. I could not stumble anymore. I could only consume what had already been polished and arranged for me.
In the corner of my memory, I thought about the old days, the wild gardens of the web. The time when someone’s blog would lead you to another, and then another, until you found yourself in a story so personal, so specific, that it felt like trespassing on a diary. A stranger describing the sound of their father’s laughter, or the taste of summer rain on a childhood porch. A grainy photo uploaded with no intention of going viral. A joke written so badly it was perfect, because you knew it was human.
Where had those voices gone?
The dead internet theory whispered its answer: they hadn’t gone anywhere. They had been buried under the weight of automation, under algorithms that prized sameness, under bots that churned out endless filler so convincing you couldn’t tell the living from the manufactured.
The hum deepened in my ears.
I clicked into a forum I used to love, one that had once been filled with arguments that stretched for days, half-coherent ramblings, brilliant insights from usernames that never matched the wisdom they carried. Now it was quiet. Posts came, yes, but they read like the same post repeated endlessly, a hundred variations of the same shape. Replies that nodded politely, laughed politely, disagreed politely, none of them leaving the kind of mark a real voice leaves.
I tried to imagine the hands behind them. Were there hands at all? Or just scripts, invisible gears churning out sentences to keep the illusion of conversation alive?
I thought about how the internet used to feel slow. Waiting for images to load line by line, waiting for someone to reply to your forum post, waiting to see if the stranger across the world would answer your midnight email. That slowness had weight. It made the smallest interaction feel alive, like proof that somewhere else in the world, someone had stopped their life for a second to speak back.
Now, there was no waiting. Everything arrived instantly, but nothing lingered. Messages came in too fast, too smooth, too ready. Like drinking glass after glass of water when what you wanted was the taste of fruit, or salt, or something imperfect.
I thought of the word ghost town. But ghost towns at least hold the bones of what was. Rusted swings, dusted windows, graffiti left by hands that once trembled with life. Here, there were no bones, no ruins. Just replicas upon replicas, too clean, too bright, a simulation of a world with all the mess scrubbed out.
I remembered a night in college when I stumbled into a tiny corner of the internet where people were writing poetry about ceiling fans. Hundreds of them, anonymous, chaotic, some brilliant, some nonsensical. I had laughed until my ribs hurt. I had felt the spark of being among strangers who didn’t need to be known to matter. I tried searching for it again. Nothing. Just product reviews for ceiling fans, neatly arranged, optimized for my location.
The hum pressed harder.
Maybe it was not that the internet was dead, but that it was too alive in the wrong way, alive with machinery that spoke louder than people, alive with the ghosts of algorithms trained to mimic us. Maybe we had been outnumbered, the way weeds outnumber wildflowers, until you forget the wildflowers were ever there.
I closed my laptop. The room went dark. The silence felt heavier than the hum had.
And yet, I thought about how the human voice is stubborn. It finds cracks. It seeps into places not meant for it. Even now, somewhere, someone is writing not for clicks but because they can’t hold the words inside any longer. Even now, someone is carving their initials into the digital tree trunk of a forgotten forum, or recording their voice in the hum of static, or posting something strange enough to remind you there is still a pulse beneath the glass.
The dead internet may hum louder, but I keep listening for the small noises, typos, rants, shaky videos, laughter that doesn’t fit the template. Little fragments of proof. Little rebellions.
Because maybe the internet isn’t dead. Maybe it’s just sleeping under too many layers of its own reflection. And maybe it’s waiting for us, still, to speak like we used to speak, raw, uneven, human.
The glow of the screen still lingers on my skin as I write this. A ghost light. A reminder that even in the mall after closing, sometimes you find another wanderer, someone else awake in the hum, and for a moment you know you’re not alone.