Are humans on the internet being pushed out by bots? Is this a lunatic fringe conspiracy theory or does Cory Doctorow's thesis of enshittification accurately describe what is happening?

Credits

Thanks to Michael Mullan-Jensen, Evgeny Kuznetsov, Vlad A Gouf, Fadi Mansour, Bennet Piater, Eric and Sir Galteran for supporting this podcast financially and therefore making it possible for me to produce it!

The theme music for the podcast is a track called Fight or Fall by Def Lev. Find out more about the show at fab.industries/podcast — new media, new rules!

See Also

• Punching Upwards 22: Moltbook Madness

Sources

1. Tweet by Matthew Prince, 3 June 2026
2. Bots Now Outnumber Humans Online And The Internet Was Never Built For This, Forbes, 4 June 2026
3. Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows, NBC News, 5 June 2026
4. AI Agents Now Generate More Web Traffic Than Humans, CNET, 4 June 2026
5. Cloudflare CEO says bot internet traffic has overtaken humans, Mashable, 5 June 2026
6. AI and bots have officially taken over the internet, report finds, CNBC, 26 March 2026
7. The 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report, Human Security, undated
8. “Bots have now passed human traffic online,” Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year, Tom's Hardware, 4 June 2026
9. Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame, The Register, 4 February 2026
10. More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans / AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans, Five Percent, 15 May 2026
11. How dead is the internet?, BBC World Service, 17 May 2025
12. Social Quitting, Cory Doctorow, 15 November 2022
13. Enshittification:Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, Cory Doctorow, 2025
14. The Age of Enshittification, The New Yorker, 1 October 2025

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