Scrolling through Facebook the other day (yes, I still do that so don’t @ me), I came across a random comment that stopped me mid-scroll:
“Soon the internet will just be AI bots responding to each other, and then we can all go do something else.”

Reader, I giggled. I nodded. And for one shining second, I thought: Yes, please.

Because let’s be real. So much of what we see on Twitter (or X, or whatever we’re calling that blue-bird-who-flew-the-coop app now) already feels bot-generated. The same outrage, the same memes, the same “you won’t believe this” posts. Entire swarms of digital piranhas nibbling at your attention.

Some people are obsessed with trying to figure out who’s real and who’s not. Is that hot take from an actual person or from a bot army running on stale data? But maybe the bigger question is: Does it even matter anymore?

What if, instead of wringing our hands, we just embraced it? Got ourselves our own bots. Trained them on our quirks, our humor, our grudges, and our snack preferences. Let them go forth and argue with the other bots while we reclaim our time.

Imagine this. Your bot rolling its digital eyes at someone else’s bot. Their bots subtweeting your bots. All the algorithms duking it out in a kind of cyber Thunderdome while you’re out actually living, walking the dog, baking bread, or reading a real book (remember those?).

We could finally decouple ourselves from the endless scroll. Our bots could be the ones saying “lol” and “this!” while we’re at the farmer’s market, smelling peaches like our grandmothers used to do.

It’s a weirdly liberating thought. Maybe the endgame of the internet isn’t us doomscrolling ourselves into oblivion. Maybe it’s bots talking to bots, freeing us to be human again.

So yes, dear random Facebook commenter, I see your vision of a bot-to-bot internet. And I raise you a future where, as our bots chat amongst themselves, we’re off somewhere else, sipping coffee, telling real stories face-to-face, and laughing like the analog creatures we were meant to be.