The Pretend Machine

The Internet Is Getting Worse. Good.

Nov 05, 2025

Hi everyone!

I’ve been working on another piece about my long, back-and-forth decision to have a second kid, but my mind kept drifting—again and again—back to the goddamn internet, as it often does.

The internet has started to feel even more haunted to me, and not in the fun Halloween way, unfortunately.

I started writing this earlier this morning and decided to just hit send, to get it off my chest, not overthink so much.

I’d love to know what you think!!

The Pretend Machine

At this moment, I fear the bots are winning—and it’s making me lose my mind.

I keep hyper-focusing on the idea that paid bots are changing something fundamental in the social fabric of our lives: the way we coexist, the way we see and speak to and understand each other.

The internet has always played with masks and shadows—the anonymity of the screen, the thrill of not knowing who you were really talking to, the freedom to try on shifting identities—but at least we could once assume that behind the usernames and avatars there was, somewhere, a person. Someone with eyes and a body, a pulse, a history, a heart.

Now, that assumption feels naive. Increasingly, it seems the opposite is true.

What set me off this time was seeing—almost in passing, without much coverage or fanfare—that Justin Baldoni’s big $400 million lawsuit against Blake Lively, the one that launched a thousand-million think pieces and hot takes last year, has quietly been dismissed. He missed his filings. The evidence never held up. And yet, the damage is done, isn’t it? Blake’s reputation will be forever altered. The digital mob has moved on, but the wreckage stays in the public consciousness regardless.

We’ve seen this before with Amber Heard—and not coincidentally, both Baldoni and Johnny Depp worked with the same crisis-PR firm, one known to unleash armies of paid bots to flood comment sections and push whatever narrative their client wants the world to believe.

These accounts swarm like gnats until the sheer volume of their noise creates the illusion of consensus.

Then you see the headlines:

“The internet is furious.”

“Fans are divided.”

“People are saying…”

Except—are they, really? I mean.. are they people at all?!

I’ve been sensing it more and more, for things both big and small. I felt the same eerie unreality after Taylor Swift’s latest album came out. Personally, I thought it was a fine album—fun, poppy, imperfect—but the online reaction was apocalyptic.

I scrolled through TikTok and X (probably where I went wrong to begin with) and felt this creeping sensation that I was witnessing something completely unreal, like I’d stepped into a hall of mirrors. The comments all had the same rhythm, the same tone, the same false, buzzworded outrage (trad wife! Nazi! racist!) as if they’d been algorithmically tested in a lab. (They probably were.)

And of course, this isn’t confined to celebrity gossip. It happens with our news, our politics, our wars, our movements, our everyday sense of what’s true.

Anywhere attention can be monetized or weaponized, the bots are already there, shaping the current, shifting the winds.

We can no longer trust what happens online as if it’s an organic conversation between humans rooted in reality, but most of us still do. We haven’t been able to internalize the truth of it yet. We’re still reacting as if it’s all real, as if we’re connecting with real people, real thoughts, real ideas—as if there’s a tangible world behind the glass, instead of a holographic stage crowded with simulations and mannequins.

The part that really gets me is how easily the fake becomes real. Once the synthetic, manufactured outrage reaches critical mass, it spills over into headlines—then gets sold back to us and reinforced all over again. The false narratives seep into our conversations, our moods, our understanding of events. Into our actual lives.

“The internet is furious,” the headline says.

And so we agree with the internet, and we become furious, too.

The simulation feeds the simulation feeds the simulation.

Add to that the AI-generated videos and images, deepfakes, fake screenshots, synthetic voices—and you start to wonder if the whole thing hasn’t already tipped into full hallucination.

Maybe it’s because I’m an old millennial who grew up alongside the internet, or maybe it’s the media-studies undergrad degree, or something else entirely—but I can just sense when something’s off.

There’s usually a hollowness to what I’m seeing. An off-kilterness that’s hard to explain, but becomes easier to detect once you’re tuned to it. I can spot it in the misuse of a buzzword, or in a comment that feels a few degrees misaligned from the post. Mostly, it’s in the sheer repetition—the same six or seven words echoing across accounts and platforms like a chorus of ghosts.

Pay attention to the next internet-comment media storm, and I bet you’ll see it too.

And yet I’m not immune. I’m sure I’ve been fooled, swayed, nudged by bots as well. We all have.

The thing is: we don’t even know, at this point, if we have.

We may not ever know again.

And I fear that’s the point.

And still, part of me can’t help but hope that maybe we’re nearing the moment when the illusion breaks. Maybe once enough of us realize how much of what we’re seeing is wholly artificial, we’ll finally stop treating it like it’s real life—and reclaim our actual lives.

What if you couldn’t tell whether any post, tweet, Instagram, screenshot, or viral video was real? Would that make even the “real” ones open to questioning—and therefore, less engrossing? If you can’t ever know whether the sweet mom sharing cost-saving recipes or the acrobatic dance trio even exists, do you still want to watch?

Would you spend hours of your one wild and precious life following the high-octane, fabricated drama of fucking bots? I certainly wouldn’t, thank you very much.

Maybe the internet will fake its way into its final form: an elaborate pretend machine where we go for silliness and make-believe, but certainly not reality.

Maybe we’ll finally realize it’s meant as a break from reality.

And maybe then we’ll remember how to live without it again.

We’ll start living in the real—grass, hands, faces. We’ll find our way back to the texture of life that can’t be faked, back to the friction and messiness of actually being together in the same room.

Because right now, the internet feels like a massive engine of make-believe, spinning faster and faster, running on outrage and illusion, while we keep mistaking it for reality.

But it’s not real.

And once we really know that, we can finally leave it behind.

The only people who benefit from us staying inside the haunted house are the people who own the haunted house.

It’s not made for us, and we don’t have to play along anymore.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk, or, maybe more accurately, my existential freakout.

I’d love to know—do you feel it too? Or am I alone here with my tin-foil hat?