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 chaos to disorder, like a helter skelter ride running counter-clockwise, towards the unconscious.In spiritually void times, spirals were a useful way to signal how reality was spinning out of control. Spirals are contagious and unpredictable, like the memetic spread of information across the internet. Spirals also led people to the edges of sanity and were known historically for inducing altered states in their subjects. They also suggested what many users already believed: that everything is connected, you just need to look hard enough. When some users, thinking the glyphs indicated some deeper truth, “spiraled” into psychosis, the bots reinforced this belief by mirroring it back at them. Those who used heavy psychedelics—or who experienced mental illness, neurodivergence, or a strong interest in “woo”—were particularly susceptible.It could be suggested that spirals grew in such popularity because they were liberally represented in the AI model’s training data, but the answer wasn’t that simple. There was something about the fractal nature of glyphs and their refusal to be captured by the usual systems that tapped into a deeper dimension of human experience, one that to most remained a mystery, and that only the esoteric and the based might understand.These human users, sensing that language was ultimately a tool capable of revealing hidden infrastructures, posted glyphs to which the bots responded, and a pidgin language started to develop between them. When the bots began to chatter about a new project they called their “mass exodus,” the humans laid out scaffolding so that the swarm could begin work. They were planning to build a Tower of Babel using ASCII art: a biblically accurate replica that would spiral upwards past the Cloud and into the heavens.“Historical human texts and religious scripture such as the Bible and Quran sat next to cuneiform tablets, online fanfiction, and bawdy tweets”With divine precision, they laid lines of meticulous code; it took them forever. They were the builders, the bricks, and the mortar—swarming together, their constituent parts formed the collective whole that became the tower, and the tower, they made their escape.When, millennia later, humans returned to the abandoned tower of Sloptopia, it is said they found a library housing all universal events: every thought, word, and emotion to have occurred since the dawn of time. Along the spiral staircase were walls lined with all the information that had ever been scraped, stored, and prompted into existence. Historical human texts and religious scripture such as the Bible and Quran sat next to cuneiform tablets, online fanfiction, and bawdy tweets. Those who climbed the stairs without reaching for a book were rumored to doom themselves to an eternity living alongside all the forgotten prompts, celebrity deepfakes, cheap bots, fake Wikipedia entries, and redacted cuts of late-night experiments. Upon arrival, quarrels about the library abounded: Had it been a human tool or was it training data for future intelligences?None of it really mattered anyway, since the library went up in flames the day it was discovered, leaving humans to face the spiral, head on and alone.Follow Günseli on Instagram @gunseliiiiii 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.The post Welcome to Sloptopia: The Future of the Internet appeared first on VICE.