For decades, the message out of Silicon Valley was a relentless optimism to the point of being unsettling. But there’s a new generation of startups arriving in the AI era, and they’ve got a new strategy: Get paid, even if it means destroying something in the process. If Silicon Valley’s new nihilism has a mascot, it may be the founder of Doublespeed, a VC-backed bot farm built around the explicit goal of turning dead internet theory into a business strategy.
You might have a vague memory of Doublespeed—if not the name, at least the concept—after it got some buzz by securing $1 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, aka a16z. In a launch video, the company’s CEO, Zuhair Lakhani, bragged that they were going to kill the internet as we know it by flooding social media with AI agents that seem like standard accounts but can quickly be flipped into influencers for a brand for a price.
Half a year later, Lakhani is no less cynical about his path to wealth. In a profile from New York Magazine, the 21-year-old leaned into the old mantra that any press is good press. “I have no problem leaning into the dystopian feeling of our company. That’s what brought us all this attention so far,” he told the publication. For now, attention appears to be the only thing Doublespeed has successfully produced. Per NYMag, the company claims to have a waitlist of about 6,000 companies hoping to tap into its network of faux influencers, but it currently isn’t operating completely agentic AI social profiles—they still require human input.
announcing our vc-backed bot farm to accelerate the dead internet. https://t.co/uQbg9gb3Iz pic.twitter.com/puRfdXLR0h
— Zuhair Lakhani (@rareZuhair) October 28, 2025
The goal of Doublespeed is basically to ape authenticity well enough to capitalize on it, with no real regard for what that concept means. In Lakhani’s mind, the internet was already broken before he arrived; he’s just putting a nail in its coffin. And he’s not alone in that mission, either.
Much hay was made earlier this year of the so-called “psyop” around the band Geese and its rapid rise to fame, which was reportedly created by a marketing company called Chaotic Good Projects. (Coincidentally, Wired reported on Wednesday that a similar “psyop” is happening to promote a new gay dating app called Goose.) Likewise, the rise of “clip farms”—accounts that put together short, attention-grabbing videos meant to garner attention—has helped boost the profile of viral stars like the looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular. Other companies, like Floodify, have made an entire business model out of artificially boosting trends to get them juiced in the algorithm and appear across millions of users’ feeds. Most of it skirts around the Federal Trade Commission’s disclosure rules for sponsored content and paid advertising.
Most of these companies, Doublespeed included, seem to look at themselves as just extensions of the type of marketing and influence campaigns that came before them. And maybe there’s some truth to that. Floodify’s founder told Vulture earlier this year that 90% of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise. If that’s the case, maybe burning it down isn’t such a bad idea. It just seems like Lakhani and others like him have figured out a way to get paid for committing arson.
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