Welcome to the digital ghost town of 2025, where the ghosts are all trying to sell you something. What was once science fiction has become our unsettling reality: the internet is no longer primarily populated by humans.

Have you noticed something off about your online interactions lately? That strange feeling you get when scrolling through comments or product reviews? You're not imagining it. Major platforms have reluctantly begun admitting what many have suspected - approximately half of all active users on social media platforms fail basic humanity verification. LinkedIn reports 68% of connection requests come from automated accounts. E-commerce giants have leaked that up to 60% of product reviews in certain categories are AI-generated. Even YouTube removed 2.2 billion bot comments in just one quarter.

The truly disturbing part isn't just the prevalence of these bots, but the ecosystem they've created. Bots now generate content for other bots to consume, engage with, and respond to - a digital ouroboros of meaningless interaction. One woodworking content creator discovered 40% of his engaged audience consisted of bots. Dating apps are flooded with AI profiles designed not to scam you, but simply to keep you swiping and subscribing. Companies have built entire "community engagement strategies" where bots talk to bots while real humans are drowned out.

The economic and environmental implications are staggering. We're literally warming the planet so bots can tell other bots about products nobody wants. Companies pay for cloud services to run bots that create content to attract other bots to click on ads to generate revenue to pay for more cloud services - "the world's stupidest perpetual motion machine." As we struggle to distinguish real from artificial, one question remains: in this synthetic hallucination we call the internet, are you sure the person you're talking to actually exists? Subscribe now to explore the digital wasteland we've created and what it means for human connection.