A B R FESTIVAL

By Steven Rice MacKay of Arroz Estúdios, a TY-CO partner. March 2026

As we move deeper and deeper down the wormhole of irrational geopolitics and all-consuming social media, how can we as cultural leaders turn the tides and forge paths to a more inclusive society?

Written for TY-CO (Typologies of Community), our European project on how cultural organisations survive, grow and stay useful to their communities.

It's obvious that social media & big tech has a stranglehold on our attention span, Gen Z are fully locked into instagram & tik-tok and we're constantly being told how these biased voices are affecting the mind-set of our younger peers.

However, looking at it more optimistically, we're starting to see evidence of advancing stages of the dead internet theory with social media fatigue developing from extreme levels of bots populating the apps. Ever see a popular video or meme on social media with some generic text underneath? Do you think a human wrote that?

The Dead Internet theory suggests that as AI starts to dominate the internet, we - as humans - begin to reject the flow of recycled content and misinformation and, in theory, we begin to return to real life interactions and experiences. What was originally branded as a conspiracy theory, is now gaining more credibility amongst digital leaders with co-founders of both Reddit and OpenAI warning against it and at the end of 2025, Imperva said over 50% of all internet traffic is now through bots - with 35% being defined as 'bad bots'.

THE MOST RADICAL ACT IS TO BE STUBBORNLY, DEFIANTLY HUMAN

So where does that leave social media? Is it mostly brain rot and rage bait now? Shouldn't we be preparing to get people off there? How can we lure people on to higher value content? Encouragement? Incentivisation? Enragement?

When these things change, they tend to stem from a community level first, decentralised tech, community-owned spaces, and open-source platforms are part of the answer — but the real weapon is culture itself. Mailing lists, fly-posted flyers, word of mouth, all-night events that don't exist on any algorithm. The roots of electronic music culture, punk, and grassroots activism were never built on engagement metrics — they were built on showing up. If the internet is increasingly synthetic, then the most radical act is to be stubbornly, defiantly human. Get people into rooms. Make them feel something & develop human connection.

Photos: Robin Worrall, Lobar Qudratovna, Evgeniy Smersh and Christian Agbede via Unsplash

TY-CO (communities in conversation) · ABR – Alternative Brains Rule · Co-funded by the European Union

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.