Is the internet dead? Why did 33 million people watch a silent video? And more importantly, what does the Kazakh language sound like?


These are all questions that struck the internet this past week after a silent video started to go viral on X/Twitter. The video, which purports to show how the “Kazakhstan language sounds like a diesel engine trying to start in winter,” simply showed what appears to be a news anchor giving a speech to camera. The video is completely silent.



There are a few issues here. First, as we’ve discussed, the video doesn’t show what it claims to show; in fact, the video is silent, and the real video can be seen here. Second, even with sound, that’s not what the Kazakh language sounds like. It actually sounds like, believe it or not, a relatively normal Eastern European/Central Asian language, and the aforementioned video just shows a man doing vocal warm-ups (c’mon — if you were looking for a rhythmic language that sounds cool, Vietnamese was right there!).


And finally, the third major issue is that the silence of the video didn’t stop it from going viral. Even before people began replying to it and reposting it noting the video’s silence, the post was already seeing significant engagement.


Many of these posts were coming from blue-check accounts designed to farm engagement by posting things like the worst memes you can imagine. However, some seemed to actually be responding to the video — leading a few to speculate that this video’s virality was another marker of the “dead internet theory.”




According to Know Your Meme, “the Dead Internet Theory posits the spine-chilling notion that much of the internet, once thought to be a product of human expression and interaction, might actually be under the control of artificial intelligence.” In practice, this means that much of the content one sees online is completely removed from human control. Text posts, images, videos — you name it, and this theory postulates that it was actually created by a computer.




Is there any validity to it? Maybe. For example, X/Twitter alone is overrun with bots, many leaving the telltale signs of ChatGPT creation in their posts.



Even if this isn’t a big issue now, there’s also a chance that it could become more of a problem in the future. Given the rise of LLMs, Midjourney and the proliferation of YouTube accounts that use an A.I.-voice to summarize Wikipedia for you, it’s possible that more and more of the internet will soon be overrun with Dank Memes crafted by some server in a Macedonian basement.



For now, though, it’s relatively clear what’s made by a human and what isn’t. The obvious answer is to log off, but as it’s getting more and more difficult to do that, maybe we all just have to become content with the idea of our lives being taken over by robots. If science fiction has taught us anything, I’m sure it’s going to go just fine.