To stream this on other platforms like YouTube and Spotify, go to hyperfollow.com/moule/dead-internet

Watch the timelapse of how I designed Dead Internet's cover art: youtu.be/4PqJ2_e7dDU

Dead Internet Merch: www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/149849644

Dead Internet is my 96th release and 174th finished track! Created on September 2, 2023 and finished two days later during a surge of creativity, it's a satirical take on our annoying modern web, full of pop-ups, surveillance capitalism run rampant, and demands that you hand over your personal data and get served ads if you simply want to browse the web.

This track was inspired by a lot of the sentiment I've come across lately about what the tech critic Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification", a term he coined in his Wired article "The Enshittification of TikTok" (www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/), though it can be applied to other platforms like Twitter, especially after its rebrand to X.

Much like how vaporwave mocks consumer capitalism, "Dead Internet" mocks our modern Internet. It starts off with sounds from Logic Pro's pitched samples for its hip-hop drum sets, which I thought sounded similar to the sounds of Windows 95 and the intro of the Nintendo Wii's "Internet Channel".

As the track continues, it becomes increasingly creepier and distorted, becoming a surreal version of its earlier self, symbolising how the Internet as we once knew it is now overrun by bot traffic, surveillance, ads, fake news, and a greedy desire to monetise everything. It also plays off the theory that the Internet "died" years ago and almost all content online is AI-generated, which has become especially the case with the rapid rise of generative text, image, and video models.

In terms of the MOULE WORLD lore, its cover art features Cockburn (pronounced "co-burn") who loves this sort of music, at this point numbed to all the pop-ups and paywalls. This track plays very well into my next track's theme out on October 27 about the dark web and how rogue AI agents are taking over the web. The title word art also makes fun of all the captchas we have to robotically solve to prove we're human!

I think it's my new best track in the vaporwave genre like how Prowler was for the synthwave genre. My track "Cockburn Central", where Cockburn first appeared and was thus named after that track, was intended to be my first vaporwave release, but it was actually chillwave, and Dead Internet sounds more characteristic like vaporwave in my opinion.

Let me know what you think on the Fediverse by tagging me @MOULE@moule.world, or get in contact via email!

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