In late January, like Dr. Frankenstein pulling the knife switch to jolt his monster alive, entrepreneur Matt Schlicht flipped the digital swap on his vibe-coded social community, Moltbook, unleashing his personal monster into the world.
The platform made headlines for being the primary social media web site expressly for AI brokers, not people. However for me, its significance goes method past that.
Moltbook is a harbinger—the primary actual signal {that a} new kind of web is upon us. No, not a dead internet. One thing rather more epochal: a zombie web that would have devastating penalties for promoting, social media, and the human internet within the years forward. Or, maybe it might be our salvation.
What’s the zombie web? It relies upon when you’re asking
Earlier than explaining how a zombie web spells doom for promoting, social media, and the human internet, it’s necessary to outline precisely what the zombie web means. It’s a time period that has modified over the a long time, and now, I consider, it must be redefined.
So far as I can inform, zombie web originated within the late Nineties or early 2000s. In this 2005 article from the cybersecurity group SC Media, for instance, writer Marcia Savage utilized it to explain “compromised techniques utilized by intruders to ship spam, phishing emails, or launch denial-of-service assaults.” In different phrases, the unique “zombie web” definition described networked computer systems that malicious actors hijacked to unfold malware or launch cyberattacks.
Over the subsequent few a long time, as the dead internet theory took off (positing that our present web consists primarily of content material generated by bots) and synthetic intelligence instruments helped people or bots proliferate AI slop, the time period started to be repurposed. Take this May 2024 article from 404 Media, through which Jason Koebler defines the “zombie web” as a spot (Fb on this case), “the place a mixture of bots, people, and accounts that have been as soon as people however aren’t anymore combine collectively to type a disastrous web site the place there’s little social connection in any respect.”
After which we get to 2026, when a February X post from Know-how Enterprise Programming Community host John Coogan described the zombie web for the post-Moltbook period. Right here, the zombie web was a spot “the place AI brokers are form of lifeless, however alive sufficient to maneuver round.”
Whereas I discover all three of those definitions cheap, particularly for his or her time, I believe there’s a necessity for even higher precision. As I see it, the zombie web is without doubt one of the three distinct varieties of internets presently competing for dominance in our on-line world. Which can finally reign supreme continues to be unknown, however solely by defining—and even redefining—them decisively can we start to debate their implications for one another and for us within the years forward.
The human web, the lifeless web, and the zombie web
The way in which I view it, the three varieties of web that exist in 2026 are the human web, the lifeless web, and the zombie web.
I outline the human web because the one we’ve recognized all our lives, crammed with web sites from Quick Firm, CNN, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, Amazon, and extra, plus private blogs, legacy social media platforms, and tens of millions of others. The frequent theme amongst all these disparate websites—the factor that makes them a part of the “human web”—is that their content material is each created by people and meant for human consumption.
The lifeless web, which now not seems to be just a theory, is made up of algorithm-fueled websites like Grokpedia, AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Website positioning-manipulating content material farms, and, more and more, social media platforms like X, Fb, and TikTok. Most of these websites are both fully AI-generated (as with Grokpedia, ChatGPT, and fashionable content material farms) or overrun with AI slop (as with right this moment’s social media giants). In different phrases, the lifeless web consists of areas that host content material that’s generated by synthetic intelligence however is meant for human consumption.
After which we get to the zombie web. This one is presently comparatively small in comparison with the opposite two. Actually, the one agency instance I may give is Moltbook, which makes that platform so important.
Moltbook is often known as the “Reddit for AI brokers,” a social community the place solely AI brokers can talk with one another, discussing concepts, ideas, and issues. On this web site, AI brokers can ostensibly use this shared communal area to be taught new expertise and workflows from different AI brokers and to scrape data from them.
That is the zombie web, on which there are not any sentient creators or shoppers. On the zombie web, the content material of internet sites—whether or not it’s articles, follows, or social media posts—is each generated by AI brokers and meant for AI agent consumption.
In brief: On the human web, sentient beings are each the creators and meant viewers of the content material. On the lifeless web, non-sentient entities create the content material, and sentient beings are the meant viewers. And on the zombie web, there is no such thing as a sentience in any respect.
The implications of a human-free web
As I discussed earlier than, Moltbook is the one concrete instance of a zombie web web site we all know of proper now, however on the charge AI is progressing and proliferating, it’s conceivable that someday within the 2030s the zombie web may change into dominant. And that may have some fairly important penalties.
In a zombie internet-dominated world, promoting now not makes monetary sense for corporations. Even when all websites on the zombie web permit people to peek in on what’s happening (as Moltbook presently permits), I believe that almost all people will develop uninterested in it in a comparatively brief time. In any case, why would an individual preserve returning to an ostensibly communal area if they will’t contribute?
Which means any adverts positioned on these websites will probably be “seen” virtually solely by the AI brokers themselves, who don’t have financial institution accounts and don’t have any use for bodily or digital items anyway. No quantity of psychological gymnastics would persuade shareholders that promoting to those entities would yield a superb return on funding. And if promoting leaves the web, the “free” internet dies with it, dramatically altering the cost-benefit evaluation of our on-line world.
However let’s say that people do stick round as a “read-only” viewers on a dominant zombie web. It looks as if it wouldn’t take lengthy for belief in what we see or learn to utterly collapse. On condition that AI brokers are well-known for hallucinating—confidently making issues up once they don’t know the true reply—we may by no means make sure if a zombie web Wikipedia, for instance, was stating true details. Even the footnotes might be hallucinations. This mistrust may speed up the tech-driven social disintegration we’ve been experiencing for almost twenty years. Worse, if AI brokers determined they needed to govern a read-only human inhabitants, they may disseminate disinformation at a pace and with an ease we’ve by no means seen earlier than.
Nonetheless, in need of malicious intent, may a zombie web be good for us people?
Maybe it may have a silver lining. For many who detest the social media-influenced world we presently stay in—the place political divisiveness, loneliness, and psychological well being crises flourish—the zombie web may current a chance.
The lack of sentient genesis—when there are not any people creating something on the web anymore—might make folks much less more likely to go to divisive, isolating platforms. I’ve already seen this in myself, in a method. With the proliferation of AI slop on social media platforms over the previous a number of years, I hardly ever go to the websites anymore. If it’s simply slop, why ought to I care about it?
If the remainder of my organic brethren begin to really feel the identical method about an web crammed with Moltbooks, maybe we’ll all get off our screens extra usually, get much less outraged, and really go outdoors and speak to one another once more like human beings as soon as did.
If that’s the case, I’ll fortunately depart the web to the AI brokers.
