Dead Internet Souls | ★❤✰ Vicki Boykis ★❤✰
In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few years by government employees traveling across the empire and doing counts; a manual map-reduce of epic proportions. If a person was dead, it would often be years before the government cleared the cache, so to speak, and landowners continued to pay taxes on these dead souls.
Alexandr Pushkin, the greatest living Russian-language author at the time, heard a story about how landowners took advantage of this by buying up dead souls from landowners, and passed this story onto fellow writer, Nikolai Gogol as an idea for a book or play, which resulted in Gogol’s seminal satirical work, “Dead Souls.” Gogol meant dead souls on two levels: both the serfs, and the banality and falsity of Russian landowning society at the time.
The internet today is filled with dead souls. Or, more accurately, souls who were never alive in any sense of the word: text copypasta from LLMS, slop artwork generated from generative art tools, and bots on aging social networks that are quickly emptying of real content as real people migrate to group chats.
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