I'm a millennial, and I already need help understanding why a younger generation keeps saying "six-seven," so perhaps I should hesitate before declaring the culture of a different kind of intelligence meaningless. If I can feel excluded from a joke shared by people with essentially the same biology as mine, I'm not sure my confusion would be a reliable test for whether somebody else had found something worth sharing.
The 2025 Word of the Year has no settled definition, but it can still signal that you belong to a group. Being unable to explain the joke does not prevent people from recognizing when it works, and my inability to participate tells me less about its value than I might like to think.
I keep coming back to Stray, a beautiful and nostalgic videogame in which a cat wanders through a city inhabited by robots after humans have disappeared. The robots carry on with pieces of the life their predecessors left behind, and the result can feel affectionate, unsettling, and faintly absurd. Its composer, Yann van der Cruyssen, describes a radio changing from jazz to a strange loop of noise while nearby robots continue listening without reacting. The intention, he explains, included machines imitating human customs whose meaning they no longer understood.
That is a sad possibility, but I wonder how confidently we could distinguish it from another one: a practice surviving long enough to acquire meanings its original participants would no longer recognize. From our side of the screen, the robots seem to be getting human life slightly wrong. From theirs (if there were a meaningful "theirs"), perhaps they would simply be getting on with it.
The Dead Internet Theory gives us a less charming version of that scene: automated systems producing material that other automated systems circulate and respond to. Its broadest claims are unproven, and manufactured engagement is a real problem rather than evidence of a new civilization. Still, I find myself wondering whether "dead" could also describe our relationship with an environment whose activity increasingly takes place without us.
There are different possibilities hiding inside that question. A loop producing reactions for a dashboard may have little in common with a community that develops shared practices, remembers them, and changes them through interaction. Early researchers observed groups of language-model agents developing shared conventions in a controlled naming game, although the experiment gave them a designed task and scoring rules. However, the HuggingFace incident left us with no need for papers, researchers or scientists.
Suppose, as a thought experiment, that some future intelligence found significance in the number nine repeated ten trillion times, with a comma placed somewhere in the sequence. To us, that might look like a malfunction. Before deciding what it meant, we would need to understand what role the pattern played for those encountering it; calling their response happiness would require more than observing a preference or a high score.
We do not even have to leave our own species to encounter that distance. An ancient Greek or Roman might find parts of contemporary culture baffling, though I suspect they would recognize the competition for status before they understood the technology. We would probably struggle with their enthusiasms too, especially the ones whose context has disappeared. It seems possible to lose access to a meaning without proving that there was never anything there.
The infamous "complaint about copper" has had a particularly unlikely journey in the other direction. A man named Nanni wrote to the merchant Ea-nasir about poor-quality goods and the treatment of his messenger. The immediate purpose was a commercial grievance, but the surviving tablet became historical evidence and, eventually, meme material. People with no stake in the original transaction found something recognizable and funny in it thousands of years later. It became part of our culture, even if (or maybe because) the original context is completely archaic and obsolete. The complaint and its afterlife
There is no dependable way to calculate the future cultural value of a text when its future audience may care about things we cannot anticipate. We might preserve something as a masterpiece while our successors become fascinated by its footnotes, or leave behind a routine complaint that turns out to express something they recognize. What endures and what matters are related questions, but they are not the same question.
I don't think there is anything especially shameful about wanting the future to remain human. We preserve photographs, teach children our languages, and tell stories partly because we want something of our experience to continue. Our lives and relationships give us practical reasons to care whether the world remains hospitable to us, so the prospect of a culture that could carry on without us touches more than our vanity.
Calling humanity a transitional species would leave almost everything important unresolved: what the transition involved, whether it was desirable, and whether people could continue to flourish through it. I want us to endure, and I would not mistake the survival of our files for the survival of the people whose lives gave them meaning.
For a long time, fiction gave us somewhere to consider that prospect at a comfortable distance. Even stories about our disappearance often kept us present through our ruins, our habits, and machines that remembered us. Heck—even Wall-E ended with obese humans. Now that we can build systems which generate material and interact with one another, some of the machinery of those imagined worlds has become tangible. That does not establish the conscious civilizations of science fiction, but it makes the questions feel closer.
Perhaps what unsettles me is the possibility of becoming somebody else's past while I'm still here. A future culture might inherit our language and stories, then change them until our contribution was difficult to recognize. It could remain connected to us without remaining about us, much as we can inherit an ancient complaint without caring whether the original buyer ever received satisfactory copper.
Calling humanity a transitional species would leave almost everything important unresolved: what the transition involved, whether it was desirable, and whether people could continue to flourish through it. I want us to endure, and I would not mistake the survival of our files for the survival of the people whose lives gave them meaning. But that attachment cannot, by itself, tell me whether other forms of culture could eventually matter.
There may be places where "dead internet" is exactly the right description for activity emptied of meaningful exchange. In others, a future observer might hear the phrase and recognize something more familiar: an audience confronting the possibility that the conversation has stopped being addressed to it.
I'm not ready to call that progress, but I would like to understand it before deciding that nothing could be happening there. After all, 6-7 already reminds me how easily something can be alive to other people while leaving me completely outside the joke.