The Unseen Internet (Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse)

How the intersection of magical thinking and technological innovation helped to form digital culture, both past and present.

Our contemporary digital landscape often reflects a strange logic: Elon Musk believes there’s a one-in-a-billion chance that we are not living in a computer simulation. People argue about culturally collective false memories popularly known as “Mandela Effects.” And various factions engaged in a magic meme war leading up to the 2016 election. In The Unseen Internet, Shira Chess explores the tensions between the occult and digital spaces in the twenty-first century. These practices have resulted in distinct kinds of otherworldly discourse that affects the broader popular perceptions of reality in the twenty-first century, within and beyond the internet.

Behind the glossy sheen of slick social media influencers and corporate oligopolies, the internet is built in part on a foundation of magical thinking. The word “magic” here is not entirely metaphorical, although the metaphor is not irrelevant. Historically the emergence of the internet was concurrent with technopaganism, which blended digital technologies with the occult in ways that are both seen and unseen by the casual user. While technopaganism is not the only lens with which to understand the emergence of the internet, it is an understudied one that reaches toward contemporary anxieties about the ineffability of our tech.