Ghosts of the Digital Dimension

The emergent horror of online reality.

“You are worse than a fool,” Michèle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?”
- Neuromancer

EvanGooch

Before my Facebook account got hacked by the Chinese a second time, I remember getting some strange notifications. My great aunt had contacted me and requested that we be Facebook friends. I also had a message from her that was pending. This struck me as odd because we were already Facebook friends. It also struck me as odd because she had passed away the year before. A couple of months later, the same thing happened again when my late grandfather sent me a Facebook friend request.

These were not my passed-away relatives reaching out to me. They were bots, third-world scammers, or some combination of the two seeking to make a quick buck by pretending to be someone they are not and asking for a donation or funding. This happens a lot on Facebook. If someone is inactive for long enough, some party will try to re-animate the digital corpse. This is why the Chinese hacked my Facebook. I had been inactive for so long that they figured it was easy pickings. Sometimes, they break into an account and sometimes create an entirely new account but duplicate all the information.

Even though I knew what was happening here, it was still extremely haunting. The internet is an ethereal plane of existence outside our dimension. It is a new dimension that we interface with through all our different devices. It’s a network of superheated sand and plastic plates coated in metal and lights connected through invisible waves and fiber optic cables. It is a new and hyper-integrated dimension. Oswald Spengler argued that modern science is simply our cultural expression of perennial mysticism. C.S. Lewis made a similar point, collapsing the distinction between technology and magic. In both cases, man seeks to subject the world to his will. Man does so through esoteric means. Similarly, G.K. Chesterton stated, “The man of science has always been much more of a magician than the priest since he would "control the elements" rather than submit to the Spirit who is more elementary than the elements.”

Every social order has two primary ruling classes: the military class and the priestly class. Spengler points out that the beginning of every high Culture spawns two consequential and primary orders: the order of nobility and the order of priesthood. From these orders, high society emerges, detached from the peasantry. In the current regime, the priestly order is the tech world. It is not a perfect fit, but it is pretty close. They are the wizards that have opened up and facilitated access to our new dimension, and we evaluate them based on their management of this quasi-spiritual plane.

Emptiness

For the last few years, liminal spaces have gained popularity online. Liminal spaces are photos of spaces that feel familiar but lost to time. They appeal especially to Zoomers and Millennials. The aesthetic is that of our childhood. It may remind one of lost innocence or easier times before the smartphone and the internet age. Millennials and Zoomers long for the pre-internet age, which, for some like myself, was so fleeting that I could not fathom what the world used to be like.

These images are completely devoid of humans, although the spaces seem as though they should have people in them: an elementary school library with half of the lights off, missing most of the books, a shopping mall with nobody in it and no shop fronts, a hotel that shows no signs of habitation. These images are haunting for many reasons.

All we have left of these spaces are those memories and images of the spaces we once knew. But without those people, or anyone else. They produce an unsettling feeling because of the time that has passed, most of which has been spent in a new dimension. What is more haunting about these images, however, is the emptiness. Emptiness is an emblematic feeling brought about by the digital plane.

The liminal space known as ‘The Backrooms’ has developed an online cult following. Backrooms began with a 4chan image post of an abandoned office building with branching rooms, no windows, tattered yellow wallpaper, fluorescent lighting on a tiled ceiling, and light brown carpet.

The liminal space-turned-creepy story quickly gained an online following, with many creating stories about the backrooms. What makes the backrooms terrifying is the sprawling emptiness of what looks to be a regular, if dingy, workspace. The concept of loneliness in such a vast space with no escape, along with the potential for threat, is a poignant horror concept. It is emptiness that makes the backrooms terrifying, just as in the case of other liminal spaces.

As the backrooms were entering into digital consciousness, an older theory about the workings of the internet slowly began to creep around digital spaces. Dead Internet Theory posits that the internet is dead, or mostly dead. The TLDR states: “Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.”

The author is a self-described veteran internet user who has been deep in the catacombs of the internet since 2006. They contrast the 2007 Internet to the current Internet, which is described as “sterile” with “nowhere to go and nothing to do.” They compare the internet to a hot air balloon with nothing inside.

I used to be in perpetual contact with a solid number of people across multiple sites. Across the years each and every one of them vanished without a trace. None of them were into /pol/ stuff or anything even remotely questionable or controversial. Yet, they all simply vanished in a puff of smoke, no matter the site, no matter the communication platform. There was no "goodbye" or explanation.

I've seen the same threads, the same pics and the same replies reposted over and over across the years to the point of me seeing it as unremarkable. Simply put thread A would be posted in say 2015 and would get its share of replies or pics, on say /co/ or /a/. Then that very same thread, with the same text, pics, and replies would appear in 2016 and beyond. This often happens in the same year multiple times as well. Of course /pol/ is getting shilled and botposted to death, but why recycle a completely innocent /a/ thread?

Who is doing this and why?

The author muses about the possibility of fake people, completely fabricated internet personalities. YouTubers and content creators that are entirely deepfaked.

The Internet on your smartphone is not the same internet as on your PC. Try it out for yourself. Go to a "popular" website with a lot of traffic. 4chan, faceshit, plebbit... any site with a massive userbase and fast content will do. Spend a few days randomly checking it out on your PC and your phone. You will soon notice that from time to time, at irregular intervals (as far as I've witnessed) the same site as seen on your phone will be wholly different than the version on your PC. Entire threads, numerous and well-replied, will be on one but not the other. The whole board will be different.

The author then posits a potential explanation for why this is happening: the United States government is using extremely advanced artificial intelligence designed by DARPA and Facebook to manipulate the population for their ends.

Bots dominate the internet, and most traffic is filtered towards corporate sites. Even in 2017, over half of the traffic on the internet was bot traffic. Much of the internet certainly is fake, whether that means the traffic or the content generated. The author of the post also discusses automated news articles. Machine learning artificial intelligence is capable of producing news articles, and large news corporations use them to churn out digital content.

Between 2020 and 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an interesting phenomenon in which you could search any three-digit number followed by “new cases,” and there would be a news article for each one of them. What was interesting about this is that there was always at least one from the last two weeks. What is even more interesting is that this had been the case over multiple months. I last tried this in early 2023, and it still worked. Most of them are often from local news sites that people rarely pay attention to. Was this bot-generated content? It seems possible, but it is difficult to prove. Either way, these news articles, as well as similar news articles that seem bot generation, point to the vast emptiness of the internet.

The Backrooms are emblematic of the digital dimension. It is horrifying, and it is poignant because it is where we reside whenever we log on. The internet is a vast and empty space that seems increasingly filled with phantoms.

The backrooms are compelling because they evoke the uncanniness that Heidegger describes. It looks familiar, but it is not quite so. It is a space that is supposed to be busy, but it is not. It is empty. So is the internet. This uncanny feeling is amplified when something like a dead relative messages you on Facebook. When I received that friend request, my stomach dropped for a split second before I realized what was going on. It was a natural reaction. I bet I looked like I had seen a ghost, probably because I had.

Summoning

McLuhan describes media as extensions of the human. The internet as a medium is an extension of ourselves, and its emptiness is an extension of our emptiness. When a child has no friends around, he will come up with an imaginary friend. Similarly, when an individual is experiencing a dopamine deficit in the prefrontal cortex, she will stir up conflict so her brain is stimulated. It is human nature to fill up emptiness.

Many exorcists have explained that the possessed do not become so because they are happy and fulfilled. They are possessed because they lack something in their lives. Lacan says that the lack between the symbolic and the real is the root cause of our mental maladies.

When faced with emptiness, we fill it up, and we tend to do so with the scary, creepy, and horrific.

Analog horror has gained a lot of traction in recent years. The genre consists of fictional videos, news reports, informational videos, and other forms of media to construct a horror story that can be pieced together from the content. The nature of the content and its parallels to real-world media blur the lines between fiction and reality, creating a foreboding sense of horror.

Alternative Reality Games (ARGs) similarly blur the line between reality and fiction. In these games, some cryptic piece of digital content will appear, and many will become interested in figuring out the mystery. Internet sleuths attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery and are led through a series of puzzles to find some sort of answer. The tease is often that the original content may point to some real-world event, such as an unsolved murder or a large amount of money.

Analog horror and ARGs are an attempt to re-inject being into the digital dimension.

They use terror, horror, mystery, and blurring the lines between fiction and reality through digital means. Horror is an alluring filler because it threatens. It creates a fight-or-flight response. But when you are threatened, you know that you exist.

Horror strikes at Dasein. Just as recognition by the other is phenomenologically constitutive of subjectivity, simulated danger constitutes subjectivity through self-recognition. Blurring the lines between the digital world and the real world makes it all the more effective.

In ‘Evil Demon of Images,’ Baudrillard describes how the diabolical nature of mediated reality stems from its perfect representation of reality. He states:

The image is interesting not only in its role as reflection, mirror, representation of, or counterpart to, the real, but also when it begins to contaminate reality and to model it, when it only conforms to reality the better to distort it, or better still: when it appropriates reality for its own ends, when it anticipates it to the point that the real no longer has time to be produced as such.

The image, which today finds its many manifestations in the digital dimension, cuts ahead of reality. The lines between the digital and the real no longer exist. The two dimensions have been completely entangled. As long as one uses the internet, the digital space and reality become one. The emptiness of the internet is emptiness in the real world, so our digital ghosts haunt us in both.

Baudrillard later states:

For some time now, in the dialectical relation between reality and images… the image has taken over and imposed its own immanent ephemeral logic; an immoral logic without depth, beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity; a logic of the extermination of its own referent, a logic of the implosion of meaning in which the message disappears on the horizon of the medium. In this regard, we all remain incredibly naive: we always look for a good usage of the image, that is to say a moral, meaningful, pedagogic or informational usage, without seeing that the image in a sense revolts against this good usage, that it is the conductor neither of meaning nor good intentions, but on the contrary of an implosion, a denegation of meaning.

The image/internet is amplified nihilism. Nihilism allows for all kinds of evils to creep in. It eviscerates all meaning, which is why we summon ghosts to haunt us.

Something really weird happened in 2022 when people were first messing around with AI image generation. AI images are already at the peak of nihilistic image generation. They have negative meaning; they have to suck it out of the real world. The AI takes your text prompt and reaches into its vast data stores to spit out some crude approximation of your desire.

It is normal to wonder what it is thinking about when crafting our images. Of course, it does not think like a person, but its lines and lines of code approximate something like it. What if you ask it to make the opposite of your prompt? One AI image creator tried this using negative prompts, and a cryptid spawned out of the dark corners of the digital unconscious.

Loab is the result of a few negatively weighted prompts fed into an AI image generator. (Disclaimer: the Loab images are pretty freaky, so do not click if you are easily disturbed.) What is weird about Loab is that she kept showing up, her face mostly distinct and often surrounded by gore and horror. Humans did not summon Loab. The AI did.

Some give a very literal account of the demonic nature of the digital dimension. There is probably something to that. Here’s a great thread from 2022 touching on the subject. Loab could be a demonic entity that accidentally emerged through AI image generation, or it could just be a fluke in the early image generation codes.

Either way, we are desperate for something to haunt us in the digital spaces. We create and summon our monsters to affirm that we exist in the digital dimension. As digital colonization of real space grows, so will the ghosts that haunt us.