Dead Internet? More like Zombie Internet.
We know the Internet isn't dead. Although it is seriously contaminated with bot traffic, AI, and corporate advertising feeds. It has become a miserable place to be a part of.
Like some sort of Zombie Land, where a handful of survivors try to exist when all around them the sites and feeds and comments attempt to eat brains and create more zombies. Have you never seen the stories of people mindlessly doom-scrolling on their smart phones until they step off the curb into oncoming traffic? There doesn't even have to be that final result; you're just as dead if all you do is expose yourself to The Feed. Social media = anti-society.
The Small Web is a collection of digital enclaves where humans dwell without corporate interference, yet knowing all the while that the Tech Bros are using AI to try and find a way to breach the defences.
You could not write the story of what is going on right now; it is too bizarre even for fiction. An unbelievable dystopian nightmare no hallucinogen could possibly be powerful enough to induce.
And yet ... here we are in the Bear Blog safety zone, taking a brief respite from the never-ending fight against the evil that intends to destroy civilisation.