Epistemic Heat Death and the Signal-to-Noise Ratio of the Global Web

A theoretical framework for the post-AI information ecology: as AI-generated text, images, audio, and video come to dominate newly published web content, the web can look more abundant than ever while its actual information content - distinct ideas, grounded claims, accountable authorship - quietly collapses. This paper calls that failure mode epistemic heat death and builds a formal apparatus around it: three governing laws of signal value, a coupled-ODE dynamical model, a proposed Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) index, and a technical/economic blueprint (the cryptographic provenance stack) for an alternative equilibrium.