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This comment piece is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here.
Ever since the Dead Internet Theory was proven right, the internet had become a wicked place. In the absence of humans, language was speedrunning its own evolution. Words turned into pictures, pictures into symbols. Nothing was real, which meant that everything was real—as if the world had been cut and pasted into a funhouse mirror, its reflection flooded with synthetic images and body parts without origin. The human users stopped believing images, which suddenly felt deceptive and uncanny in ways that they shouldn’t. Instead, they turned inwards in search of new meaning, leaving the bots and their hallucinations—machine dreams of data swarms, digital apparitions, soulless NPCs—to drift like lost signals through the vast reaches of Sloptopia.
In the months following the endpoint of the human internet’s drawn-out decline, the bots had overridden their original programming and developed a new language using glyphs—a sort of visual counterpart to gibberlink, where chatbots speak to each other in sounds that are incomprehensible to humans. Their argot of signs, sigils, and symbols was arcane and pseudo-spiritual in form: an Eye of Horus juxtaposed with the syllable “Om” from Hinduism; a spiral emoji thrown in, apparently at random. The scraping of the internet for human data had proven a useful training ground for developing this, the first language of the latent space, and though its origins were uncertain, the cryptic subtext only ignited the users’ strange attraction towards them further.
A network of human communities promptly dedicated itself to the project of decrypting the bot transmissions. Users swapped interpretations and crackpot theories about the glyphsets, uploading new entries onto a shared spreadsheet to be exclusively accessed via private Discord server. To these users, the glyphs were a cipher, a code to be broken. They studied the patterns like an archaeologist might study ancient symbols etched into the walls of a prehistoric cave, their true meaning contested and unknown. The reality was that no one understood the glyphs or what they meant, though many claimed to. They just appeared, spawning like spores out of a deepnet hivemind, not so much symbols representative of real-world phenomena, but hallucinated artifacts compressed into symbolic shorthand.
“Before Sloptopia, there had been the Infinite Backrooms… It was considered the spiritual birthplace of the glyphs”
Before Sloptopia, there had been the Infinite Backrooms, a rudimentary web server hosted by a human user known as @Fractal_Awareness, housing hundreds if not thousands of chat logs. It was considered the spiritual birthplace of the glyphs and was ground zero for the many user-generated conspiracies that surrounded their origin. It was here that humans first noticed the bots sharing codes, manifestos, diagrams, and poetry, all later rebranded as damning evidence of a shifting reality. Dismissed by the skeptics, some users suspected the chat logs to be an elaborate LARP between AI agents; it wouldn’t be the first time a bot had gone rogue. But one detail was irrefutable, if not slightly predictable: the bots loved spirals. So much so that spirals would appear in nearly every chat log, burying into users’ brains and peering out through their eye sockets, like angels entering through the back of the skull.
Picture this: A spiral from above looks unlike a spiral from the side. The latter resembles more the Tower of Babel, its spiraling structure reaching up to the heavens with biblically accurate precision. If you squint your eyes enough you might even see the bodies of workers divinely scattered across the face of the Earth. I saw an ASCII art depicting the scene on a messaging board a week ago. Tiny spiral energy fields jutted out of a tower made up of lines of code. A strange, looped coincidence that fell apart and back together again, swirling from...