Dead Internet 2026: DARPA, Peter Thiel, Alien AI & Memetic Magick | Kwarter Kwell Ep 3

Free The Rabbits

The hosts explore the 'Dead Internet Theory,' investigating the claim that much of online activity is now driven by bots and AI-generated content

Key takeaways

• The 'Dead Internet Theory' term originated from an 'Illuminati Pirate' thread on the now-defunct Wizard Chan board.
• DARPA's LifeLog project, which aimed to track all human activity, is viewed by the hosts as a precursor to the data-mining capabilities of Facebook.

Main topics

• Dead Internet Theory
• DARPA and Surveillance History

Notable quotes

We are the transhumanistic cyborgs at this point because we do not function without being tethered to the internet.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a warning about the erosion of human authenticit

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) What's up guys, before we get into episode 3 of the Quarter Quell, the quarterly podcast I do with Isaac Weishaupt from Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture, two merchandise items I want to let you know about that are in the shop now. We now have Quarter Quell hoodies in multiple colors and sizes, so if you want to represent the podcast, head over there now. Also, brand new addition to the comic cover line, we have the new Bill Cooper Kill Bill t-shirts and hoodies with conspiracy theorist Bill Cooper in full kill- build gear with katana trying to hold off the cia reptilians coming for him for quote-unquote evading his taxes multiple colors and sizes available as well all right now let's get into the show in Speaker 1 (0:44) a world veiled in symbols where truth is buried beneath ritual power and illusion two voices emerge from the noise From the hidden layers of pop culture to the ancient echoes of the occult, they follow the threads others refuse to see. Not as masters, but as seekers. Two men, one mission. To uncover what lies beneath the surface of reality. This is not just a podcast. This is The Quarter Quell. Isaac Weishaupt and Joel Thomas. The games begin. Speaker 3 (1:45) What's up, guys? We are back with episode three of the Quarter Quell. This is a quarterly podcast I do with my good friend, Isaac Weishaupt. And we're pretty excited about this episode. And actually, Isaac, this topic has become super relevant this year again. It's actually interesting. And I'll talk about it today. There were several articles that have come out just this year about it in the mainstream consciousness. Speaker 3 (2:12) Interesting because I knew about this years ago, at least the concept of it. And now that it's come back into the zeitgeist, people are starting to notice it more. And obviously it has a lot to do with where AI is heading and all that. But how are you feeling about going into this, specifically this year when it comes to this topic? Speaker 4 (2:32) Yeah, I think this is pretty relevant given the nature of everything going on. And I've been... Speaker 4 (2:38) As you know, diving into the dark enlightenment and how the Silicon Valley nerds are trying to hijack reality and they're doing it through social media and the internet. So when we were planning this show, trying to figure out, we were brainstorming topics like what sounds interesting. And this one sounded real interesting to me. And when I was digging into it, because when I started researching for it, I was shocked that there actually isn't... A whole lot out there. There isn't a whole lot of. meat on the bone of what the dead internet theory is besides the basic, you know, 10 second talking point soundbite of like, yeah, most of the, most of the activity on the internet is just bots. It's not really human. And I was hoping I could get, because usually when we talk about these subjects, I can like dig around and I find something that's like, you know, tied into something occulted and things like that. And that's not really what I experienced on this one. So. This is going to be interesting because for me and my research, my side of it, because I don't know if people know this, right? When we do our show, we kind of talk about, we brainstorm some ideas. We're like, okay, let's pick this topic. And then we'll kind of each pick a couple of talking points and compare notes to make sure we're not doing the same subject matter so that people aren't listening to the same research. And I find that intriguing because I know... some of the ideas you're going to talk about. And I'm hoping that the stuff that I came up with will supplement it nicely. I think that the philosophies in the background of the dead internet theory... and the dark and light kind of flow together. So I'm going to be talking about a lot of things today that are related to AI, Silicon Valley, the Illuminati utopia fantasies that they have for us and so on. So yeah, this is a great topic and I think it's relevant given all the stuff in the news about AI and things, right? Speaker 3 (4:40) Yeah, for sure. And I do think that interwoven in it, at least... in a weird way, there are some occulted things, even though on the surface and even as you go deeper, there's not so much. So I agree with you on that front. I think I've got a pretty good piece today that will tie into magic with a CK and kind of show how there's an underlying technocratic movement to manipulate our minds with magic in a way. But to start out, we're going to start where this even came from. Where did the dead internet come from? This theory, where did the terminology come from? And it's really a concept. And it means that most of the internet is primarily bot activity and automated content. And it's manipulated with algorithmic curation. So basically what you were saying that we have a huge influx of all of this bot activity. And today I'm going to talk about the percentages. We'll talk about some different articles that have come out even this year that talk about super high percentages of what we're dealing with online is bot activity. And a lot of it are social bots, right? You're going to see this a lot in social media. YouTube is a big one. That was one of the earliest ones that was really getting hammered and obviously still to this day. And obviously all these other social media platforms. Facebook was a very early one. I'm going to talk about some interesting stuff with Facebook today. But Instagram X is another one. And I got a really interesting piece on X and what's going on over there and how they kind of divide people into these hidden rooms using AI algorithms as well. And I think that it is it's it's become kind of in the forefront of people's minds because of the AI influx really from 2000 or. 2000 all the way to now. And AI has been around for a long time. But just what AI has become and what people see it as, even the idea of what people call AI slop, where you see a lot of these really low quality pictures that just keep generating the same thing. Shrimp Jesus was one of them that was just constantly popping up. You'll see a lot of this. weird stuff that just, it's not even like a human being is creating this stuff, right? With the AI, it's like the AI itself is generating this stuff and putting it out there and people are interacting with it. But even more importantly, other bots are interacting with it as well. And it really comes from... this guy called Illuminati Pirate. And he was the first one to coin the term. And he wrote an entire... I'd say article, but more like a thread on the dead internet theory. And he called it that. He wrote it on an image board called Wizard Chan. Now, Wizard Chan is no longer in existence. It's defunct now. It was actually a part of something you talked about before when we did our first Quarter Club episode. It was a big part of Gamergate with the whole Zoe Quinn harassment scandal. And it was in that pantheon of 4chan and 8chan and all that. And he wrote this on there first, but now you can find it in a place called Agora Road, Macintosh's Cafe. And he talks about what it means to have pretty much a defunct internet that we're working with. Now, he kind of starts out with how long. that he's been a part of these communities. He talks about in 2006, he was with 4chan. This guy's been around for a long time. And he's been a part of all these message boards. And he's seen the changes. He talks some very interesting stuff about Christopher Poole, who's called Moot on 4chan. And he's seen the rise and fall of Poll, which from Poll is where we get all of the QAnon stuff that came out of that. which you and I've talked about too. And he kind of gives you that to set you up. He's like, these are my credentials. He's like, you don't have to believe me or not. He's like, but I'm telling you, I've seen the change of the internet itself through social media, through message boards. I've seen the bot influx. And I'm trying to tell you that from what I've seen, that basically it's creating a Potemkin village, these empty husks that... look really good from the outside, but there's no depth to them. That what you think you're interacting with is not a human and it's something else. And he kind of gets a little bit deeper into. Speaker 3 (9:40) The same pics and replies being reposted over and over again. He talks about that specific instance in 2015 where he sees a specific post. And then a month later, it's the same post, but by a different Anon. And this is on the 4chan threads. And he talks specifically about poll, how he knew that that was just an absolute cesspool of bot activity and all of this. AI convergence that was using to manipulate people as well. And he goes on a little bit further. Speaker 3 (10:18) with some of the other ideas that come out of the 4chan specifically. And he talks about that the terrorist accusations that came out of it and the reason why 8chan was taken over. And he talks about moot again, Christopher Poole. And he thinks that, well, one, he said they knew there were two moots that were talking. And he said when... Christopher Poole left and started working for Google. He said it was super weird. And he never said what he actually did for Google for five years. But then there was another moot that was talking about being in Mexico. He almost wondered who's the real moot. It was super weird conspiracy stuff. But he said that he was tracking everything that was going on just in this world, but everywhere else too. And he also talks about... kind of the sexual perversion that was really coming out of these areas too. And it being connected to bot activity, because one of the things he talked about was in the early days of 4chan, a lot of these guys were into a lot of weird stuff. He said, you know, before it was popularized, and this is the point. foot fetishes, and then you had all of the weird stuff with all the cartoons and hentai and all these things, right? And he said what was weird was he said that out of it became this push for all of these things to be normalized in society where he was seeing that, oh, now they've got... a whole site for foot fetishes. They've got a whole thing for this and now it's been normalized. And he said that the bot activity around it was pretty crazy. It was like the AI was taking all the info that they were putting into 4chan and was saying, okay, how do we create subcultures that we can manipulate out of this? And he said a big one was the pedophile stuff that was coming out of this too. And he said, that's where that it really got unmanageable because it was taking what those people were saying in these threads and then pushing it and trying to normalize it, make people feel okay with doing it, which, you know, is obviously disgusting. But at the same time, it's showing you how that the Speaker 3 (12:51) AI and these bots are honing in on information that they can bring back to, obviously, there are people behind this, and we can talk about different government entities that are watching this and using it to manipulate people, but also just the AI itself is growing and evolving, and it is finding ways to box us in as well. And I just want to know your take on that before I continue, because I think that's... super wild how it was taking in even people's fetishes to then weaponize it. Speaker 4 (13:24) Well, when I, like when we talk about AI and stuff, it makes me think that because there's people out there that say AI is this new life form that's going to be super intelligent, smarter than man. But then on the same, in the same breath, they'll also say that AI is just a reflection of us. All it does is. look around the internet at the stuff that we've produced and then sort of regurgitates it back, which in a way is like in terms of data fidelity. Speaker 4 (13:56) as far as replicating the human spirit, like it's never going to be as fully, how Speaker 1 (14:03) do Speaker 4 (14:03) I Speaker 1 (14:03) say that? Speaker 4 (14:05) It's not ever going to be truly as creative as a human could ever be. I would think if that's the case. So I lean more towards that, that AI is, is just. Speaker 4 (14:17) reflecting back what it learns about us on the internet. So if it learned about foot fetishes in these 4chan forums, I mean, plus, let's talk about how nasty 4chan and specifically the Politically Incorrect Forum is, right? Speaker 1 (14:33) So the Speaker 4 (14:34) fact that it's on there, which actually was a big problem they had a couple of years ago when one of the, I don't remember if it was Grok or one of these AI bots was... Speaker 4 (14:47) started ranting on about white supremacy stuff. I think it was Grok. And it's like, well, yeah, no kidding. Because this thing's crawling around Twitter and it thinks this is how people should operate. Right. I mean, I'm super anti-AI. I become more and more anti-AI as time goes on. And I think there's a huge manipulation of what they're trying to do and claim AI is going to do to us. But we'll... We'll talk about that later. I've got a section on AI as the alien, and we can kind of get into that. Speaker 3 (15:22) Yeah, and he goes on to say that he believes that this is a setup by the U.S. government to use AI to gaslight the world population with a lot of these apps and by utilizing these bots through these apps. And he talks about that. Speaker 3 (15:46) One of the interesting pieces was how to nudge people into doing certain things by the bot activity. So he talks about Facebook and, well, he uses the word Twitter, but it's now X. And he says that, obviously, it's a fast place to get information, right? So everybody goes these places. So when they introduced the like system and it. treats each post as a likable thing. Obviously, YouTube took away the ability to dislike. Well, you can still dislike, but it doesn't show up now what the dislikes are. Only the owner of the channel can see what kind of dislikes are on a video. So people are encouraged to like as opposed to dislike. And he's talking about how the positive opinions are propagated to make the negative ones obsolete. So it encourages people to say they like certain things, to go along with certain things, to operate in a way that they wouldn't normally operate and essentially become NPCs themselves, which a lot of us are seeing now with people not having any kind of creativity or... really any kind of thoughts for themselves. And the people that do have thoughts for themselves, it seems like, and I don't know how you feel about this, seems like they're being squelched in a way because they're not allowed to create. And Isaac, I'm not even talking about something that's anti-government. I'm just talking about creating art, creating music, creating anything that is original. And when you see that type of stuff getting squelched, but yet the machine pushes the same sounds, the same talking points, the same things, you have to admit that there's something else to it more than just the government's trying to hold me down. No, there's like an actual... Speaker 3 (17:52) system behind all this that is with algorithms pushing it down. And this is what he's suggesting. He's suggesting that this is where we're going. Now, he does give some suggestions on how we could fight it. Obviously, encrypted peer-to-peer communication software. He goes into a few other things because he talks about how the image boards are... originally were the Wild West and how they're kind of the last stand on normal internet for people to have kind of nuanced conversations. But he said even those are getting bodied to death. And he said he doesn't know how much that they'll actually be able to fight this in the long run. Now, what's also interesting, a part of this thread that he wrote, and this is something I've talked about in the past, is the idea of of algorithmic filter bubbles. I don't know if you've heard of this or not. This is very interesting. And X is a big proponent of this system. Now, obviously, bot spamming can be used to derail conversations, can be used to divide and conquer. We see that all the time online where you may put something out there or a comment out there, and then you're immediately responded on by the opposite. And it creates a chain of discourse. which they want because the more discourse there is, the more this post gets in the algorithm and the more that it gets out to more people. And that is one way. But the other way is algorithmic shadow banning conversations. But it's not to the point to where you're shadow banned to like your content isn't getting out there. It's more of trapping you inside of a bubble with no access to the outside world. So what's said in the thread is that They attribute it to video games. Say you're playing COD or something like that, and you're getting too reckless, right, on the microphone. You're causing trouble. You're using real toxic behavior, and you're cheating in the game, whatever. So what they'll do, some of these games that are out there, instead of banning you, they'll just put you in what they call low trust factor queue. So you can't check the queue. You don't know that you've been moved to the queue, but then you realize that the game's not playing the same. The guys that you're playing against aren't as good. They're also cheaters. And before you know it, you've been put in a box with other people that are doing things just like you without you even knowing it. Well, that's what they're also doing on X specifically and Instagram, all these. What happens is when... You are exerting behavior that they deem is not acceptable for society or what they deem acceptable. Maybe you're asking too many questions about something, whatever. They will put you in a room. You're still in X, but now you are not connected to everyone on X. You're boxed in with other people like you. And what they do is they will feed you information that will also piss you off. So then it gets you more mad and they're banking on the fact that your emotions will keep you in this X matrix as long as it can, because it's going to generate more ad revenue and more interactions and the algorithm will box you into this arena. So that's another way that this dead internet's working specifically. on these social media apps, you don't even know you're trapped in there. Now, there are ways you can kind of circumvent it. I know that the GDPR of the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation, that, well, they say, right, that you can ask to see what data companies hold or what... companies hold your data. And by finding out that, you can ask the companies to delete your data, and then you can kind of pull yourself out of some of these rooms. Or again, I think that's just a smokescreen. I don't think you can really do any of that. I think, oh, Speaker 2 (22:07) yeah, yeah, we'll do that for you. Speaker 3 (22:09) But in theory, right, I wouldn't say in theory that... They put you in these rooms and you're trapped without you even knowing it, which I think is far scarier than actually being banned. At least you have something to point to. But when you're squelched and your voice is silenced without you even knowing it, I think it's pretty scary. Speaker 4 (22:29) Wow. Do you think YouTube does that too? Those algorithmic bubbles or whatever? Speaker 3 (22:34) I think so. Absolutely. I think they all do. I think they all have algorithms that put you in a place where. certain people will get to your content or not. And I think too, I feel like that's what rumble is. Speaker 4 (22:51) I feel like that's what rumble is supposed to do is to get all those people in one platform. Cause I was on there for a while. I agree. Speaker 3 (22:58) Absolutely. Yeah, I do. I just think from a scale of, and I don't think that YouTube's necessarily awful because I know they've, well, barring your incident that happened like a month ago, they've definitely reeled some things back. I just think they've got it in for you, man. I'll be honest with you. It's your name. They've got your name Speaker 2 (23:21) in Speaker 3 (23:21) the system. Speaker 4 (23:22) I've come around. I actually love YouTube now. Maybe it's like, what's that called when you love your person that kidnaps you? Speaker 2 (23:32) Stockholm Syndrome. Yeah, Speaker 4 (23:34) I got Stockholm Syndrome. I got YouTube Premium, which gets rid of all the ads. And YouTube is like a whole new world to me. And I'm finding all these creators that I really like now and I really enjoy it. And I actually don't blame YouTube. I blame the talent management companies. And YouTube is maybe complicit in it because they're the ones filing the strikes against me. I think. I mean, from what I can tell, that's who's actually got the problem with me. It's not YouTube necessarily being like, hey, you can't talk about these things. It's more of the people that manage the talent have the problem. And YouTube allows them a place to do this to me. So they're part of it. But I actually think it goes beyond that. Speaker 3 (24:22) No, for sure. And I'm going to go ahead Speaker 2 (24:24) and Speaker 3 (24:24) swing it to you now, because that gives us the setup of what Illuminati Pirate was talking about and his take on what it was. And this is where it all spawned from. Oddly enough, this odd thread. Speaker 3 (24:40) generated the name Dead Internet. Speaker 4 (24:42) That's fascinating because I think that one of the elements in my... This is... So my first part of this show, my first segment here is going to be about the internet and the origins and what the vision was of it because that's being taken away from us. And then the second part, we're going to talk about AI as an alien life form. And that, before I forget, you mentioned something about... Speaker 4 (25:09) this idea... I forgot what you were saying. Sorry, it's getting late in the day. My brain is mush. I've Speaker 3 (25:14) been Speaker 4 (25:14) editing my stupid Twin Peaks book all freaking day. My brain is fried. But anyway, the... I started thinking because my whole steeze is that I think AI is anti-humanism and it's therefore like satanic on some levels. And I think that AI can't be as creative as humans. All it can do is mirror us and emulate us. And that... takes me to what David Icke used to talk about, about the archons being these alien life forms that they don't have the ability to be creative. And that's what