The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland

from the Philosophical Research Society panel with Tara Isabella Burton, MemeAnalysis, and Gary Lachman

For years—truly years and years and years and years and years and years—I’ve been working on a single insight: “the Internet” behaves less like a tool and more like a portal, a separate plane of existence layered atop everyday life. In other words, it’s the astral plane, or Fairyland. The same charms, rituals, and yes, old superstitions that guide travelers through those worlds prove surprisingly helpful for navigating the Internet, too.

A fuller, better edited version of the below is slated to appear in Tablet later this year. It’s also the introduction of a book. My grand theory below the cut.

And for all those who don’t feel like paying the $5, keep your eyes on Tablet!

Some other housekeeping:

• The paywall on my Comment piece, “Internet Overexposure Syndrome,” about the ways Internet overuse mimics personality disorders but really are necessary adaptations to a different environment has now dropped. Read it here.

• In about an hour, the CURSED HOTEL LINE is open. Remember to tune in!

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There was a time—long ago, though it doesn’t feel so long ago—when I used to stay up on the Internet all night. I think that’s what I said, “on the Internet.”

I’d watch the sunrise over a clunky Gateway monitor, both legs asleep from sitting for 9, 10, 11 hours in an AOL chat room. Back then, being on the computer for too long had a distinct smell to it. Overheating circuit boards, hot plastic, B.O. Your hands would get sweaty and, over time, leave a greasy sheen on the mouse, on the keyboard. Every well-used keyboard had a thin, gray film on it. You’d hear the computer’s fan panting.

It wasn’t lonely. And it wasn’t addictive, either. It didn’t feel like a hit of cocaine or going on a bender. It was more like being sixteen, drinking with kids you think are impossibly cool—kids you like, older kids, the kind you hope to grow into. A little reckless, electric, the kind of night that makes you excited for the next one.

It was a place of infinite promise. A place that has shut its doors for good.

*

In the late 90s and early 2000s, there were already hints that this place—call it cyberspace, the Information superhighway, the digital frontier—was never quite what it seemed. Its earliest users believed they were stepping into a fresh version of ordinary life; stripped of its limits, the physical world’s head cracked open. One of the most prescient critics of digital life, Carmen Hermosillo, better known by her username humdog, joined an influential early online community called the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (the WELL) in the early 1990s. What she discovered there left her deeply disoriented. As she wrote in her 1994 essay “pandora’s vox: on community in cyberspace”: “when i went into cyberspace, i went into it thinking that it was a place like any other place and that it would be a human interaction like any other human interaction. i was wrong when i thought that. it was a terrible mistake.”

That mistake, the belief that the Internet would feel like the world we already knew, haunts so many of our retrospectives. We look back and see not a broken technology, but a utopia that never arrived. Whatever it once promised—connection, community, creativity—it no longer offers, not even in distortion.

*

By that time, the mid-90s, the computer had replaced TV as the technology that freaked critics out the most And more than the computer, really, it was the Internet. The Internet, early adopters realized, was fragmenting identity. For thirty-odd years, this point has been made again and again, guides about what the Internet is doing to us and, crucially, what it’s doing to our children. To name just a few: Growing Up Digital, iGen, The Dumbest Generation, The App Generation, Screenwise. By the 2010s, the rest of the world caught up: the Internet wasn’t just fragmenting identity, now.

It was fragmenting the world.

The torrent of books about our new digital present continued, unabated. In You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Jaron Lanier warned that Internet culture was eroding our individuality. Fourteen years later, Kyle Chayka echoed Lanier in his book Filterworld (2024). Algorithms had destroyed our taste. In The Shallows (2010), Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet robbed us of our ability to focus. Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011) described a world where the more digitally connected we were, the more emotionally isolated we became. The list goes on and on and on and on for the next decade. People are still writing these books!

Writing about what the Internet is doing to us is like writing about climate change. It’s not that it’s not important—in fact, it obviously is very important—but we’ve been circling the drain for thirty years. Now my toddler knows how to unplug my iPhone from its charger and swipe around not only enough times, but in the right combination, to FaceTime a little girl in Miami, Florida. And he knows to smile into the camera, too.

Part of the problem—all of the problem—is that we still don’t know how to talk about the Internet. It’s not a failed utopia—you weren’t opting in on some world-changing project when you, in 1997, waited for a topless JPEG to load line by line in your college dorm room. (Sorry, Stewart Brand!)

It’s not technology mismanaged or capitalism run awry. I mean, it sort of is, but no more than anything else is. We haven’t destroyed the commune’s garden with our selfishness.

What we’ve lost is the promise of an otherworld. Something mystical–-something we used to have the language for, and now no longer do.

*

Over the years, many of our most insightful philosophers of technology, L.M. Sacasas chief among them, have approached the Internet as a uniquely invasive medium. According to Sacasas, the Internet reaches far beyond our screens, shaping our offline behaviors. You don’t have to be looking at the screen for it to affect you. He asks whether we’re using our devices—or being used by them.

I think in tweets and short-form video; the Internet is quiet and constant, the invisible narrator of my day. My sister sees the world through ByteDance-colored glasses. She speaks in today’s version of the transatlantic accent: a strange, made-for-TikTok creole with its own cadence and lexicon, like “unalive,” designed to be intelligible to TikTok’s diverse user base. Much has been written about the “digital panopticon,” the idea that even when we’re not online, we’re always performing for an implied, digital audience. And with good reason, too: we live in a world where anything you do, public or private, is liable to be posted on social media and go viral.

The Internet has shaped who we are, inside and out. This is true of every communication medium.

The telegraph inspired the Spiritualists’ seances—if we could tap across oceans, why not beyond the veil? Radio transmissions conjured what media theorist Jeffrey Sconce first called an “electronic elsewhere,” and later, more poetically, the “etheric ocean.”

He writes: “As wireless put more people into contact around the world, then, it did so with a sense of melancholy. Boundaries of time, space, and body no longer seemed to apply, and though this provided a giddy sense of liberation for some, it also threatened the security and stability of an older social order in which body and mind had been for the most part coterminous.”

McLuhan was right: Each new medium creates its own reality, its own grammar. And always, the last medium bleeds into the next. I grew up on television—as well as the Internet, but television came first—and my inner life follows the rhythms of televisual, serialized storytelling, each moment an “episode” building toward a dramatically satisfying ending. Social media carries the imprint of TV, too: we talk about people having “main character syndrome.” We design soundtracks for our lives on Spotify. Our photo captions hint at a long arc that goes back to the rotogravure.

Each new medium has disoriented us by warping time, collapsing distance, and ultimately, untethering the self from the body.

Still, observers like Sacasas are right: the Internet is different. Previous technologies created liminal spaces we only vaguely intuited. They were a bridge to the electronic elsewhere. The Internet was the electronic elsewhere. It was a parallel world, complete with its own geography, culture, and rules. We’ve never just “used” the Internet. We went online; we surfed the web; we traversed cyberspace.

*

The idea of cyberspace as a parallel world emerged vividly in early 1980s science fiction, first appearing in Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella “True Names,” and soon after in William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome” and his novel Neuromancer. Gibson famously defined “cyberspace” as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators… Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind.”

By the early 1990s, this vision of virtual connectedness was beginning to be realized through Multi-User Dungeons and communities like the WELL. Sherry Turkle observed how people in these “social laboratories” often felt their online identities were “more real than real,” sometimes revealing parts of themselves impossible to express offline. For instance, those experimenting with gender online frequently experienced enduring changes in their self-perception.

The Internet provided an opportunity not only for imaginative play but for personal transformation, a liminal space between fantasy and reality, something betwixt and between. Just as the printing press brought individuality through literacy and the novel helped create the modern sense of self, the Internet fractured this self by enabling multiple simultaneous identities. One of Turkle’s interviewees once asked her, “Why privilege the self that has the body when the selves that don’t have bodies can have other kinds of experiences?”

One wonders, are usernames declarations or the creation of entirely new selves?

Everywhere, you encountered the belief that the Internet could separate the soul from the body. While many embraced this metaphorically, others took it literally. John Perry Barlow captured this spirit–somewhat ambivalently–in his 1990 essay “Crime and Puzzlement,” describing cyberspace as a “silent world” in which he became “a pure point of view.”

By the time he penned his famous manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, his stance had become decidedly more celebratory: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.”

To these early frontiersmen, online interactions liberated us from bodily constraints, and for Barlow, this was true freedom. For some, this was a spiritual liberation. But critics like Hermosillo warned of a hidden cost. Running through much of her writing was the sense of a profound spiritual impoverishment. She writes: “many times in cyberspace, i felt it necessary to say that i was human. once, i was told that i existed primarily as a voice in somebody’s head.”

*

How did the Internet enchant us so thoroughly?

In her essay “Of Memes and Magick,” Tara Isabella Burton argues this enchantment wasn’t incidental but deeply embedded in the Internet’s origins. According to her, the pioneers of the Internet deliberately crafted technology as an instrument of self-transformation. They did it with chaos magic in mind.

By contrast, Turkle, and later, the McLuhan scholar Clinton Ignatov, saw this “magic” as a product of our limited understanding of computers. In Life on the Screen, Turkle observes that Apple’s early Graphical User Interface (GUI), with its friendly, recognizable icons—a spinning beach ball, the hourglass, and most crucially, faces—made technology feel more accessible, yet also more mysterious as we moved away from text-based command line interfaces. The result was as Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The simplicity of the GUI obscured to the user what, exactly, was happening on their machine, and critically, that it was a machine. People began to imbue machines with personality, agency, moods; often without fully realizing it.

*

Today, overt references to mysticism have faded, yet a residual spirituality persists.

Frequently shared images of “liminal spaces”—surreal, unsettling places like abandoned malls, long, winding hallways in office buildings, or empty fast-food restaurant play areas—capture this lingering sentiment. They induce nostalgia and unease, not just reaching for a memory but rather, recalling something closer to a dream. It’s that dreamlike blur and shift of reality, that mirrors the fluid, otherworldly quality of being online, where we hover between the physical and digital. Almost all Internet native art feels fantastical and surreal in this way: it doesn’t speak to the so-called Internet “addict”—to a person who compulsively checks their notifications to feel a high–but, rather, to those of us drowning in the etheric ocean.

Yet ironically, this dreamlike quality is precisely what we’ve lost in our daily engagement with the web. We yearn for a time when cyberspace felt more magical, more liminal, imbued with mystique and promise. Our dream—or nightmare—is of something lost; an otherworld that was once a refuge, though never should have been.

*

What’s at stake in our relationship with the Internet becomes clearer when we examine how the otherworld operates—and what it demands of its mortal visitors.

In Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, a collection of essays exploring the intersection of technology and the body, the authors imagine the computer nerd’s soul drifting through cyberspace while their decaying body is left behind. It is the closest thing we have to a myth of the Internet, and in its essentials, it is very old. We find it in stories as disparate as Oisín’s journey to Tír na nÓg in Celtic mythology, or the Japanese tale of Urashima Taro, a fisherman who visits a magical undersea kingdom, only to return and find centuries have passed.

As history and time itself seemed to gain speed in the Industrial Revolution, the myth became central to the Romantic imagination.

It appears again and again and again: in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” John Keats’s pseudo-ballad “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and a thousand more children’s tales. In each case, the plotline is the same: someone leaves the world as they knew it—wanders into the woods, the dream, the island, the glade—and becomes enchanted. And then the spell breaks. Time has passed. Everything has changed.

The Theosophists described the astral plane as a blend of Eastern spiritual traditions and Western esotericism. Helena Blavatsky called it an "absolute reality" that was also an "area of illusion," complete with the Akashic records—a cosmic archive of every event in history. An all-encompassing library in a place both real and unreal.

According to these mystical traditions, skilled astral travelers could briefly experience their wildest dreams, but this journey wasn't without risk. C.W. Leadbeater warned that visions in the astral space could be "notoriously unreliable," sometimes even "grotesque caricatures of life." Interpreting the Akashic records demanded its own sort of "media literacy," and the presence of astral doppelgängers introduced new complications, since these doubles didn't necessarily behave like their real-world counterparts.

Most significantly, astral travelers needed to maintain a "silver cord" connecting their consciousness to their physical bodies. A severed cord meant permanent separation—a soul death more profound than physical harm.

The Otherworld is beguiling. Glamorous, in the old sense of the word: an illusion so complete you cannot see through it. Time moves strangely there. Food doesn’t nourish. Names have power. Most who visit Fairyland never come back. Those who do come back are irrevocably changed.

*

The Internet, too, offered enchantment. Presence without proximity. Transformation without consequence. Pleasure without limit. But enchantment, eventually, turns to disenchantment. Not all at once. You start to realize the world around you is not quite human. It is more than not quite human. It is monstrous.

You were never meant to stay there. And yet, you do.

In the early days of the Internet, the screech of our dial-up modems and boundaries of the computer room (or lab) served as imperfect ritual thresholds, marking our passage from one world to another. But these offered no breadcrumb trail home, no rowan branch at the gate, no thread to pull us back from the dark. Modern continuous connectivity has further eroded this boundary, blurring the lines until we exist in a perpetual trance state: neither fully present in physical reality nor completely immersed online.

Just as folklore warns mortals not to join in fairy dances, for fear of never returning, the Internet changes us in ways we only half understand. And like the Good Neighbors, it always asks for something in return.

*

So often, we speak of our relationship to the Internet in terms of addiction. Jonathan Haidt calls it a “firehose of addictive content.” The dopamine loop: click, scroll, repeat. The endless pursuit of novelty. The thirst to be seen, to be affirmed, to be thrilled. It’s true; there’s a slot-machine logic baked into the design, always tugging at our lizard brains.

But it doesn’t quite explain what’s really happening to us, or what we’ve lost.

In Irish folklore, the Fair Folk take what is precious. They steal babies and leave behind changelings. The changeling looks almost right, but he is not your child. His skin runs cold or burns with a fever no medicine can ease. He’s stiff in your arms.. He stares past you, watching something just beyond the wall of the world. Your real child, the one born of your body, is taken to Fairyland. Perhaps he dances to music that never ends. Perhaps he sleeps beneath the hill, yearning for his mother. As time slips away, the road back home fades.

The changeling does not laugh. He turns from food. The light is too harsh, the hours too slow. He grows restless. He feels the wrongness of this place as much as you feel the wrongness of his touch, though he cannot explain it and neither can you. He knows he isn’t where he belongs. He forgets how to accept his mother’s love and you forget how to love him.

Or maybe you are the changeling.

You fall in love. You make friends. You feel chosen. You build a career. Your life changes. Or so you think. It flickers on the screen, just out of reach—you try to pull it into the real world, but it won’t hold, like fairy gold crumbling into dead leaves in your pocket, it all dissolves. Still, you make the same mistake, again and again, until the serendipity of the Internet no longer feels like serendipity at all—it feels like a sickness.

This isn’t a high followed by a crash.

You are not addicted. You are cursed.

*

What people describe as “the end of the Internet” isn’t a real end. We are waking up—the Otherworld’s glamor has faded and we are coming to in the mortal world.

I close the laptop, I put down my phone, and I realize I've forgotten how to speak. I’ve forgotten how to be. I’m home, I’m at the grocery store, I’m in my car—but not quite. My body is here, but a piece of me is in the electronic elsewhere. I’ve been possessed, then abandoned. Like Keats’s wretched hero, I woke up alone and in the cold.

It’s not that I’m bored; it’s that I’ve been exiled from a dream—a nightmare that I’ve become inured to.

The soul, like the body, adapts to its environment and after too long online, the rhythms of the physical world feel foreign. I’ve come back from somewhere but not fully. But my soul does know how to live here; how to live in my body.

Like Oisín returning from Tir Na nÓg, I’ve been away too long. And like Oisín dragged from his horse, the minute my feet hit the ground, time caught up. The world flooded back—brutal, unrecognizable. I aged in an instant. The part of me that has lived has lived online. I don’t remember anything from here—not Christmases, not Thanksgivings—but I remember everything from there. I remember chatrooms and forums and people who may not have even been people, just text. Grandparents have died; friends have gotten older; children have been born and grown up. I’ve grown up, too, and I don’t recognize myself. The self I recognize lives behind a username, an avatar. I exist in my own mind not as a body, but as pixels.

There was a moment, several weeks ago, when I realized something strange. That it’ll never be 2003 again, that there’s no moment when we can go back in time. That time keeps moving forward and soon it’ll be 2026, 2027, 2028. That, somehow, I felt like one day, I’d wake up, and I’d be back, in another time, another place.

Oisín didn’t die in Tir Na nÓg; he died in Ireland. But the Ireland he knew was gone. The people were gone. His stories sounded like nonsense. And then the path to the Otherworld closed.