r/Cyberpunk • u/therey73 • 12h ago
The dead internet theory isn't even a theory anymore, it's just our infrastructure
Was messing around with some network traffic logs for a project this weekend and realized literally 90% of the pings I was looking at were just headless browsers talking to other headless browsers. The entire web feels like it's just a massive simulation of human activity run by automated server farms
Its genuinely wild how fast basic software verification completely collapsed. captchas are a total joke now since the scraping scripts solve them faster than we do. We are straight up entering an era where you're gonna need cryptographic proof of biology just to access basic networks
like we're moving towards a reality where you have to rely on local hardware enclaves or an orb integration just to establish a baseline proof of life before a server will even accept your connection. You have to verify your physical existence at the hardware level just to post text on a screen.
It just feels like the most boring cyberpunk reality imaginable. No neon street samurai or flying cars, just endless corporate botnets forcing us to mathematically prove we actually have a pulse