And I'm not talking about the dead internet theory here…

The one where people worry that all online content will eventually be AI slop posted by bots talking to other bots, with no actual humans left in the room.

That's a different conversation…. (though valid)

What I'm talking about is more immediate and more personal.

A lot of companies are now starting to deploy outreach AI agents, using tools like Claude Code, Cowork, and whatever ClawdBot is calling itself this week, and they're pointing them directly at your inbox.

Here's a story that'll make you feel it. When I was about 13, a friend of mine found a bulk SMS app and decided I was the perfect test subject.

He sent me 100’s of texts at a time! My phone became completely unusable, buzzing non-stop, notifications stacking up, battery draining in real time while he sat there laughing his ass off.

I didn't even know you could block a number back then, so I just had to sit there and wait for all 400-something messages to work their way through. It was chaos from a single person with a single app.

Now imagine that, but it's not your friend: it's every company that just launched their AI outreach agent and that found your email, number and social handle.

Over the next 18 months, businesses are going to unleash an insane volume of automated “personal” outreach.

Email, WhatsApp, SMS, LinkedIn DMs, Instagram DMs... every channel you use to communicate may get hit.

You might say that “spam” is nothing new and has already been around for 20 years.

The thing that makes this different from the spam we grew up with is that the old stuff was laughably easy to catch.

Gmail flagged most of it, and whatever slipped through had tells you could spot from a mile away: broken English, 3 different fonts in the same email, a sender address that was just keyboard smashing at Gmail dot com.

Your brain dismissed it before you'd even finished reading the subject line…

But this new wave will be different: coherent, contextual, and sounding like a “real person”, making it impossible to distinguish.

The question is what communication looks like when every company, from bootstrapped startups to Fortune 500s, can afford to send 10,000 "personal" messages a day for almost nothing.

Your inbox might be about to have a very bad year.