The Medium Is the Monster

thought digest, 01.24.2025 + a guest post by Joe Ondrak

I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. 😓

I’m an Internet ethnographer, sometimes podcaster, and reporter. I spend maybe 20 hours a week talking to people about how they use the Internet and frying my own brain in the process. It’s hard work! Consider sending me $5 for my efforts…:

I see tweets like this and worry we’re about to plunge into a new, more convoluted conversation about “online radicalization.” It’s the niche subcultures!

Listen: All culture is downstream of internet culture now—and has been for a while—so of course we see the internet reflected in the physical world. Is it surreal that you hear about, and maybe even know, Rationalists in real life? Or do you know Rationalists online because they also exist in real life?

Do you see what I mean?

It is no longer extraordinary to be “Terminally Online.”¹ Most people’s screen time falls anywhere between five and fourteen hours a day. The low end is inconceivably high. We are passively online all the time. When I interview people and ask, “How many hours do you spend online a day?” many say they are never not online. You don’t “log on” or “log off” anymore; the internet is a layer over reality.

For Millennials onward, this has been true for most, if not all, of our lives.

How many of us have as many digital memories as physical world memories? How many of us have more digital memories than physical ones? We wake up and check our phones, we fall asleep clutching them. The idea that the smartphone is an extension of our bodies is not a metaphor. The Computer is a private part of the body. The content of these subcultures is far less important than our fundamental disconnect from the physical world, which my friend Joe Ondrak describes in more detail in the essay below.

I always say “physical world” instead of “reality.” I hesitate to call it “reality,” as though there is a bifurcation. We live in a different reality now, and it’s not purely physical.

As I’ve always argued about this sort of violence: before we look into someone’s upbringing, environment, or gun control laws (all of which matter), we need to examine how young people become dislocated and disembodied. I don’t believe this applies to everyone or that it’s inevitable. There are pro-social and anti-social ways to use the internet—to engage with any technology. But right now, some young people’s media consumption has numbed them, turned them into nihilists. They are empty bodies, their souls imprisoned in cyberspace, untethered. This, I believe, fosters an internet-native sadism.

For them, the world is an over-saturation of images—it is not the mortal world as we know it.

DISCONNECTION is the real danger, not an organized threat, or political radicalization. COVID lockdowns intensified this. What happens when iPad babies become adults?

Here’s an embarrassing admission: the reason I loved Joker 2 is because I read it as an apology to Millennials and Zoomers. This is, of course, not canon—it’s a total projection. But the Arthur Fleck we meet in Joker 2 has heart. He has clear motivations and the world is cruel to him. It is unfair. We should be so lucky to have broken Millennials and Zoomers.

What’s coming—Gen Alpha—is worse. We weren’t sociopaths, we were broken. The next generation embodies a nihilism we have never seen before and may not survive.

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We Took the Wrong Lessons From the Waukesha Slender Man Stabbings. Now, They Haunt Every Killing

by Joe Ondrak

In 2014 in Waukesha Wisconsin, twelve year old Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser took their friend and classmate, Payton Leutner, to a nearby woods and stabbed her 19 times. They claimed they did this to become proxies, or acolytes, for the Slender Man. The stabbing signalled the end of the “golden era” of Creepypasta and sparked a familiar moral panic around what media children can access on screens unsupervised.

The investigation and trial following “the Waukesha Slender Man Stabbing” revealed that Geyser suffered with early-onset childhood schizophrenia, and both she and Weier were found not guilty by mental disease or defect. Geyser remains committed to a forensic psychiatric hospital while Weier remains under supervised release, her Internet usage strictly monitored with no use of any form of social media. Following the attack, the Waukesha Police Chief warned parents that the Internet is “full of dark and wicked things” that lurk to drive children to stab their friends at the behest of fiction and narrative.

In the years since, there has been a steady stream of mass-casualty attacks predominantly (though certainly not always) in North America, emerging from the infinite recombination of “dark and wicked” communities and ideologies found online, from militant accelerationists obsessed with total societal transgression to more ambiguously motivated attackers with a bricolage of influences. In the wake of each of these attacks, a familiar routine is followed, examining what media the attackers were consuming online and what social groups or networks they were participating in. Though there is merit and utility in categorising these attackers based on their consumption of different flavours of the digital dark and wicked, this approach, much like the post-Waukesha warnings around Slender Man and creepypasta, misses the forest for the trees in how medium and narrative influence offline behaviour.

The Medium is the Monster

Many online from the mid-aughts to mid-teens will be familiar with the monsters, memes, and creative output that fell under the umbrella of creepypasta. However, to demonstrate the link between Waukesha and contemporary mass shooting attacks, we must first explore what The Slender Man and creepypasta actually is. In a nutshell, creepypasta is an emergent form of horror fiction told through the socially networked internet across messageboards, forums, and social media, and that derives its horror-affect through that medium.

The “golden era” of Creepypasta roughly began with the 2001 Angelfire dread of Ted’s Caving Page going viral on Bodybuilding.com, through to the variety of participatory stories on /X/, and, of course, The Slender Man’s origin on Somethingawful.com up until the distinctly offline spillover in Waukesha. This was a wildly productive time for participatory horror stories.

The monsters of these stories were varied, some genuinely creepy, others (many, if we’re honest) far less successful at being a scary concept. These were spun out into a kaleidoscope of sub-genres and crossovers. However, underneath all the dead Squidwards, tulpas, goatmen, and Rakes, the true horror lurked in its mode of delivery.

Creepypasta is a type of digital fiction since it is, undeniably, fiction that is written online (digitally). The Digital Fiction International Network definition of digital fiction is “fiction written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium”. That is to say, you cannot remediate creepypasta. Think about the film adaptation of The Slender Man or the Channel Zero series. These don’t retain the same experience as reading these stories first hand. This is because networked social spaces online are integral to the stories.

The internet, as a networked social space, is primarily designed to promote and facilitate interaction and participation between users. These users are, to a greater or lesser extent, agreed to be ‘real’ people, represented as text, avatar, username, and profile. This online social contract comes in the form of an informed sincerity. In his book, Digimodernism, cultural philosopher Alan Kirby zeroes on this agreement as the “apparently real” a state that is “the outcome of a silent negotiation between viewer and screen: we know it’s not totally genuine, but if it utterly seems to be, then we will take it as such”.

To become semi-fictional, to become digital text online, is the price of entry to participate collaboratively online; we all know it, but we all move through the medium with little interrogation of this fact as long as everyone behaves above the threshold of authenticity. As Kirby frames it, “being in a chat room is a loss of self and an infinite expansion of selfhood; no longer you, you become the text yourself. Your thoughts and feelings become text, and in turn create who you are; others’ likewise. There’s an ebbing away of human content and a seeping of the human into the text’s ontology.”

Unlike horror in film or literature, where the medium acts as an explicit or implicit separator between storyworld and reality, when first-person accounts of encounters with paranormal entities exist alongside apparently real posts from apparently real people (up to and including peers you know offline), one is presented with a choice of how sincere they should be in receiving those posts… and in turn all posts.

Creepypasta, therefore, derives its horror by complicating this social contract and pointing out that the medium on which it is written is ontologically flat. This - ontological flatness - is a state when real users and their responses, and the fictional story they are reading and responding to exist in the same textual space without borders, implied hierarchy, or explicit indicators of fictionality in the text.

Social media users, then, are not just readers or audience members. They contribute text, image, audio, and video to social media platforms; they navigate through platforms, following hyperlinks and keying in URLs; they interact with existing content, either that of other users or web pages; they spread and share existing content to other users across and between platforms. Users can, through social media, reach out and participate as a projection of themselves online with no difference in whether they are participating in fact or fiction.

The plot and attack by Geyser and Weier, then, is perhaps the inevitable conclusion of narrative participation on a medium built on both and the semi-fictionalisation of the real and real-ising the fictional. Online first-person accounts of real-life encounters spill over and become offline enactments - The Slender Man merely functioned as the skin worn by the medium.

Just Another Post

The phenomena that played out in May 2014 in Waukesha have significant resonance with the dynamics of contemporary shooters. Specifically, a resonance can be found in the kind of attack that emerges from a confluence of transgressive Internet social currents that are downstream of more ideologically coherent known groups such as Order of Nine Angles, Atomwaffen Division, Tempel ov Blood and other organized networks that blend what has become known as ‘militant accelerationism’ with neo-nazism and satanism.

Unlike those forebear groups who have a clear and stated ideological mission, this loose collection of networks (of which the most well-known of which is called 764 and collectively are referred to as ‘The Community’) is composed primarily of minors and teens, collaborating and participating in a collective narrative of transcendental nihilism and ‘evil. This narrative is in part informed by the mythic image of O9A, AWD and peers as “satanic neo-nazis who worship evil”, and the fandom dynamics of true crime/”Columbiner” culture.

While there are absolutely those within these networks that seek to extort, manipulate, and radicalize with a specific agenda in mind, the broad strokes of the network are children performing acts that fit within this shared narrative of evil to one another - resulting in a muddled mix of coercion, social climbing, performance, and fandom.

Much in the same way that creepypasta invites participation with myth and fiction as yourself alongside others doing the same, the digital-only mediation of The Community allows a similar blurring. Pseudonyms and closed access aid in group semi-fictionalisation and “ostension” (the process of personally acting out a legend or myth narrative to ‘live’ it); the ontologically flat digital medium real-izing ‘being evil’ and de-realizing offline action, thus muddying the boundaries between posting and action offline.

There are, however, differences in the participatory affect achieved through the collaborative digital medium. Creepypasta aims to disrupt social media users’ perception of the “apparently real” by appearing as an account of paranormal interaction alongside the posts of real users who then have the choice to engage with it sincerely or not, providing an entertaining frisson of the possibility of monsters and the paranormal.

By comparison, the narratives collectively engaged with by The Community actively encourage some of the most awful abuse imaginable, and are intended largely to be participated in and sustained by the group rather than to spill out to the “normie” web. The Community actively recruits, grooms, and brings the vulnerable into its fold, preying on youths and appealing to their misanthropy with a mythic promise of transcendent nihilism.

This is a promise made easier as today’s teens have never not known an online/offline distinction and identity-finding – difficult enough as it is during puberty – is inherently shot through with always/already auto-fictionalizing both through social media and among peers. Ontological flatness, then, paves over the moral terrain that would discourage ostension and participation in acts such as recorded self-harm, sextortion of peers, and live streamed assault. All is posting, all is social, all is just as real as it isn’t and thus provides an escape from the trials of contemporary teenagerdom.

This action most recently spilled over in Wisconsin again as fifteen year old Natalie Rupnow opened fire at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, killing a student and teacher before killing herself. It was revealed that she had participated in Discord channels and group chats linked to The Community, including a twenty year old man who planned his own attack. Rupnow’s manifesto was suffused with nihilism towards humanity as a whole rather than ideological hate, and praised other shooters for the act of shooting rather than for furthering a goal. The kinetic action is simply one last post from someone who existed between online and offline. For Rupnow and others like her, The Community acts as a source of twisted comfort as The Slender Man did for Geyser and Leutner, their offline action an act of participation in a narrative delivered without ontological boundaries, rendering all another entry into the collective myth.

The minors of The Community aren’t the only ones affected by the ontologically flat nature of digital spaces. The wider online reaction to the news of Rupnow’s attack serves to illustrate how news of the shooting was metabolized as posts first, tragedies second. Within hours, there were memes, riffing, and fictional manifestos aimed at disrupting and remixing the event to suit different audiences. All these were forms of participation and show how the de-realising effect of collective online creates unintended risks for us all. As much as there is an ebbing of the human into the ontology text online, we’re in danger of our humanity ebbing away too.

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Submit missed connections, personals, and advice questions to me directly or by voice, on Telbee. I am also accepting submissions!

1. We are all Terminally Online, though I suspect the techlash is growing.