Internet’s Silent Coup

When machines quietly begin to outnumber humans online, a deeper question emerges. Who or what controls the Internet's direction, purpose and influence?

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Machines are no longer peripheral users of the web. They are its dominant occupants

Atsome point, without ceremony or countdown clocks, the Internet tipped. Not in who uses it, but in who occupies it. As many unsettling ideas do, this truth too dawned on most people with a statistic quietly circulating online, one that industrialist ‘Anand Mahindra recently flagged: Humans account for just 38.5 per cent of global Internet traffic. The remainder comes from bots, automatons, crawlers, scrapers, crypto-miners and software designed to impersonate people. Mahindra was not alone in drawing attention to this number. Cyber-security firms, infrastructure companies, Al researchers and platform guardians have been circling just such a conclusion fora while now. The Internet has crossed a threshold. Machines are no longer peripheral users of the web. They are its dominant occupants.

To be truthful, this inversion feels counterintuitive. Nearly 5 billion people, about 63 percent of global population, are online today. Digital connectivity has never been broader. Yet, when measured by traffic (the webs basic currency), human activity is a minority signal in a machine-heavy system. ‘This gap between perception and reality matters. Because traffic shapes everything. It determines what content is promoted, what businesses are valued, what voices are amplified and what behaviours are rewarded. And which ones are not. When machines begin to dominate this flow, the Internet begins to tilt, subtly but decisively so, away from human priorities. This has happened. The circle is complete.

Machines Do the Talking