Transhumanism is typically viewed with either blithe optimism by technology enthusiasts, or with fear and trembling by luddites, both groups envisioning some physical update to the flesh which makes human experience different in a novel, powerful way. I don't think either group accounted for transhumanism as simply the jacking in to a narrative "matrix" which actually offers different realities, ego states/identities as the main feature. Reality in sci fi was typically seen as shared and distributed among the many, rather than narratives fighting for dominance. I'm reminded of the book/show "American Gods," where differing gods fight for control of how humans view the world.
This essay hit me like a gut punch, because I’ve been trying to articulate something adjacent for years. You’re completely right—what’s happening isn’t just radicalisation, it’s a full neurological shift in how cognition itself develops. The “terminally online” state isn’t just about consumption, it’s about rewiring—and the problem is that it mimics the effects of CPTSD without actually being trauma.
It’s not nihilism, it’s something much stranger: a generation whose baseline cognitive architecture has been shaped by algorithmic fragmentation before they even had a chance to form a stable sense of self.
I wrote about this in depth here, I would, I would just be so honoured if you could read it as an appreciator of what you do, but also I think it will uniquely flesh parts of where you are going with this really important exploration. It's about how the internet and trauma operate on the same neural logic, why the “stream” feels like a safer place to exist than reality, and why Gen Alpha isn’t rejecting meaning so much as experiencing it in a state of constant dissolution:
I’d love to hear your thoughts. There’s something terrifying in realizing that this isn’t just a cultural problem—it’s an ontological shift. The feed isn’t a layer over reality anymore. It is reality.
Thank you for prompting me to write this through this post, it was therapeutic and also made me realise how innate my understanding of this concept and its contexts are.
Hi Ella, I'm a psychotherapist specializing in EMDR therapy and treatment of PTSD, and I actually wrote about "digital dissociation" which fragments identity into online-mediated ego states. I'll be glad to read your article, and I would also like to share mine with you:https://psychfox.substack.com/p/the-age-of-the-divided-self
—if ontological flatness is a thing, I don’t think it started with the internet. My understanding is that Baudrillard said something similar about the Gulf War: that to the west at home “The Gulf War” was a fiction constructed by the media we consumed, so the people living through the actual thing found they were seen in reference to that fiction. That ability to assert yourself as part of the Real has always been a privilege, I think— perhaps a privilege none of us have anymore, but never one that all of us enjoyed
—I think there’s a need to consider what the real world actually is when talking about negating this kind of flattening. The distinction between the Real and the real becomes crucial. Part of the issue to me is that “the real world” seems like an increasingly desperate performance of pretending society is where it was at various points in the past. To an extent the internet not being a part of “the real world” is a function of this.
The Real is the world as it’s sensed and experienced by us, not the story we tell about which parts of reality are acceptable. For any young person to be won over to it, we need to make contact with it ourselves. And that often means letting the mask drop where “the real world” is concerned, which is a moment of intense vulnerability— but without it I expect awful things will continue to happen in the Real, whatever happens to the world as we describe it
Absolutely. I enjoyed this essay but I kept waiting for the word "weed" to appear somewhere and then a conversation about changes in potencies, availabilities, and psychoactive effects of weed. These forums don't exist without a lot of real, physical weed being smoked by those involved, and weed is a potent ontological flattener all by itself. No one fixed the flattening nihilism that killed David Foster Wallace and the Internet helps it grow and intensify.
There’s an interesting parallel here between the concept of ontological flatness and what Nicholas Carr has termed ‘the Shallows’—the manner in which the internet seems to cause us to have an understanding of the world that is an ocean wide and a teacup deep — a sort of epistemic flatness as well.
It sort of seems like an absence of real experience is leading people to lead a phenomenological half-life where they don’t really understand the meaning of anything and are de-realised, living in a world of broad factual knowledge but limited depth or conviction. As an older zoomer who has mostly ditched social media I frequently find the lack of substance in my peers view of the world and even their own lives frankly astonishing. They can talk at length about the most banal things but are total unaware of themselves, disinterested in human relationships, lazy and unreliable, utterly fried. These aren’t fringe networks, they are all depressingly ‘normie’.
The worst is that most of them are almost inert to the idea that they could have agency over their own lives.
The implication is that these fringe communities are just the most radical expression of a much more epidemic ‘internet brain’.
This highlight what, I too, worry about, "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."
The internet, literally, turns us into 1s and 0s. Yes, there are vibrant online cultures that create something. But the physical world forces us into situations where we have to "read the room" as it were and improvise.
It seems like the digital world forces use to create an identity without "reading the room", nuance, improvisation, etc.
Anyway, this was a great read. Looking forward to more.
Are you familiar with "sissy porn? I recently reviewed Andrea Long Chu's FEMALES .(see review on Amazon.com)..and discovered the exisistence of sissy porn therein...freaked me out...algorithmic programming...God help us
Seriously? Are we talking about the same thing? As descrubed in Chu's book? You might check out my review rather than read her book, which isn't terrible, but not worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, in my humble opinion
The Slender Man made his debut on Coast to Coast AM *the night before* the stabbing. Darkness Dave was talking to a guest about how people were having real sightings of this fictional character - meaning that probably hundreds of thousands of people were hearing about this story for the first time.
May we also consider the medium that resulted in the very first boomer-shooters and compare them to our Lost Children: the postal worker. In many ways they WERE the physical embodiment of what we know as now the Internet, connecting people from anywhere and across time. Every day, waking up and ‘logging on’ to a network to deliver information and media all day 6 days a week in route patterns. Comparable to routine Internet users habits today, certainly. Both mediums encompassing everyone and yet only ‘realized’ by those already overtaken by the organizations/hierarchies within. It’s enough to drive the vulnerable to deliver the Ultimate Post.
I've been waiting for the creepypasta episode on this blog for a long time, glad to see it.
The description of the online as "semi-fictional" is excellent, but Kirby's description of a user's relationship to the online text seems incomplete. I've never interacted with his worked before, this line makes me feel like I should, but can Joe clarify if Kirby is being a determinist about this relationship?
There is another path open to an online user that is analogous to how Kierkegaard used his pseudonyms the in print. That the user recognizes his posts as the contents of a character he is creating in the semi-fictional space of the online. This path is one that many internet users seem to adopt intuitively, particularly anon's.
I also agree that the digital presents a particular challenge to understanding how real a given piece is, of understanding what genre we engage with at any time. However, this challenge existed in all previous technologies as well. It's fascinating to me that the internet exhibits this danger of confused hermeneutics most strongly, but at the same time it might be the most obvious case of this danger. During the age of radio there was the "War of the World's" broadcast, in literature Borges played with this trope his whole career. Don Quixote is an extremely early example of a character who misunderstood the "reality" of his books.
Kirby is, if I'm honest, a deeply frustrating writer. Digimodernism is a remarkably useful text with a lot of surprising foresight, especially for having been written in 2010, but the examples he uses aren't the best to illustrate his theories. There is a whole section on social media about the "apparently real" nature of online space that is remarkably useful, especially in terms of the sincerity needed for these platforms to function.
I certainly agree that this challenge has existed in previous technologies too - it's what informed my PhD research and I find the relationship between communication media evolution and leveraging it to create a story that appears "real" utterly fascinating. You can argue that through the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, such an attitude is a core feature of horror and the Gothic.
Where the digital realm differs from previous versions is in what I call ontological flatness. With books, radio, even film (thinking Blair Witch or Ghostwatch), there is always a physical real 'you' experiencing the mediated text. There is an ontological heirarchy between the reality in the medium you are engaging with and the embodied self. Online, as Kat's intro puts forward, we are always partially 'in' that space, as people. This is new. We cannot close the book or find delineations between a storyworld and a mediation of a real person, and when this is a new layer of reality, we're in uncharted territory entirely.
I'll close with an eerily prescient passage from Kirby. He was writing from a place of speculation, but it's certainly something that has come to pass now.
"people will feel that the gulf separating their ‘real’ and their ‘textual’ lives has disappeared; the thoughts, moods, and impulses of our everyday existence will translate so immediately into the electronic, textual digimodernist realm that we will no longer be conscious of transference. It won’t be a question then of oscillating between offline and online, but of hovering permanently between those two extremes."
You're both right, the internet's use case is uniquely active, almost gravitational (in the sense it pulls you into itself) compared to previous mediums.
Creepypasta is such a solid case to illustrate it.
As it's part of the horror genre, its effectiveness hinges on suspension of disbelief, which must be collapsed with a method fitting the medium.
Lovecraft used case files and eye witness reports in his work, blair witch used "found footage", creepypasta uses the ambiguity of the online space itself. I've been fascinated by it as a synecdote for the internet's peculiarities since I found Ted the Caver more than a decade ago.
Do you have any more of your work online? If so can you post a link? This was a very fun and interesting piece which hits my own interests square on the head.
I do indeed. My thesis (which I'm currently in the process of adapting to a book) is available here: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/32027/
A previous article that digs further into creepypasta as emblematic of a shift in our culture is available here: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/23603/
I have a forthcoming piece out with Routledge, but it's in review at the moment. The aim is to expand and set out an analytical framework from creepypasta to the forms of digital horror we see today.
Transhumanism is typically viewed with either blithe optimism by technology enthusiasts, or with fear and trembling by luddites, both groups envisioning some physical update to the flesh which makes human experience different in a novel, powerful way. I don't think either group accounted for transhumanism as simply the jacking in to a narrative "matrix" which actually offers different realities, ego states/identities as the main feature. Reality in sci fi was typically seen as shared and distributed among the many, rather than narratives fighting for dominance. I'm reminded of the book/show "American Gods," where differing gods fight for control of how humans view the world.
Good insight 😌 Can i translate part of this article into Spanish with links to you and a description of your newsletter?
Sure! Please be sure to include Joe Ondrak’s name as well.
This essay hit me like a gut punch, because I’ve been trying to articulate something adjacent for years. You’re completely right—what’s happening isn’t just radicalisation, it’s a full neurological shift in how cognition itself develops. The “terminally online” state isn’t just about consumption, it’s about rewiring—and the problem is that it mimics the effects of CPTSD without actually being trauma.
It’s not nihilism, it’s something much stranger: a generation whose baseline cognitive architecture has been shaped by algorithmic fragmentation before they even had a chance to form a stable sense of self.
I wrote about this in depth here, I would, I would just be so honoured if you could read it as an appreciator of what you do, but also I think it will uniquely flesh parts of where you are going with this really important exploration. It's about how the internet and trauma operate on the same neural logic, why the “stream” feels like a safer place to exist than reality, and why Gen Alpha isn’t rejecting meaning so much as experiencing it in a state of constant dissolution:
https://ellastening.substack.com/p/no-youre-not-traumatisedyoure-wired
I’d love to hear your thoughts. There’s something terrifying in realizing that this isn’t just a cultural problem—it’s an ontological shift. The feed isn’t a layer over reality anymore. It is reality.
Thank you for prompting me to write this through this post, it was therapeutic and also made me realise how innate my understanding of this concept and its contexts are.
xx
Hi Ella, I'm a psychotherapist specializing in EMDR therapy and treatment of PTSD, and I actually wrote about "digital dissociation" which fragments identity into online-mediated ego states. I'll be glad to read your article, and I would also like to share mine with you:https://psychfox.substack.com/p/the-age-of-the-divided-self
I loved joker 2 also.... Arthur fleck repented in the end and turned toward the light
https://fatherofzoomers.substack.com/p/luigi-and-the-joker?r=jejuu
Yikes!
I would push back against two things here:
—if ontological flatness is a thing, I don’t think it started with the internet. My understanding is that Baudrillard said something similar about the Gulf War: that to the west at home “The Gulf War” was a fiction constructed by the media we consumed, so the people living through the actual thing found they were seen in reference to that fiction. That ability to assert yourself as part of the Real has always been a privilege, I think— perhaps a privilege none of us have anymore, but never one that all of us enjoyed
—I think there’s a need to consider what the real world actually is when talking about negating this kind of flattening. The distinction between the Real and the real becomes crucial. Part of the issue to me is that “the real world” seems like an increasingly desperate performance of pretending society is where it was at various points in the past. To an extent the internet not being a part of “the real world” is a function of this.
The Real is the world as it’s sensed and experienced by us, not the story we tell about which parts of reality are acceptable. For any young person to be won over to it, we need to make contact with it ourselves. And that often means letting the mask drop where “the real world” is concerned, which is a moment of intense vulnerability— but without it I expect awful things will continue to happen in the Real, whatever happens to the world as we describe it
Absolutely. I enjoyed this essay but I kept waiting for the word "weed" to appear somewhere and then a conversation about changes in potencies, availabilities, and psychoactive effects of weed. These forums don't exist without a lot of real, physical weed being smoked by those involved, and weed is a potent ontological flattener all by itself. No one fixed the flattening nihilism that killed David Foster Wallace and the Internet helps it grow and intensify.
There’s an interesting parallel here between the concept of ontological flatness and what Nicholas Carr has termed ‘the Shallows’—the manner in which the internet seems to cause us to have an understanding of the world that is an ocean wide and a teacup deep — a sort of epistemic flatness as well.
It sort of seems like an absence of real experience is leading people to lead a phenomenological half-life where they don’t really understand the meaning of anything and are de-realised, living in a world of broad factual knowledge but limited depth or conviction. As an older zoomer who has mostly ditched social media I frequently find the lack of substance in my peers view of the world and even their own lives frankly astonishing. They can talk at length about the most banal things but are total unaware of themselves, disinterested in human relationships, lazy and unreliable, utterly fried. These aren’t fringe networks, they are all depressingly ‘normie’.
The worst is that most of them are almost inert to the idea that they could have agency over their own lives.
The implication is that these fringe communities are just the most radical expression of a much more epidemic ‘internet brain’.
Excellent comment.
This highlight what, I too, worry about, "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."
The internet, literally, turns us into 1s and 0s. Yes, there are vibrant online cultures that create something. But the physical world forces us into situations where we have to "read the room" as it were and improvise.
It seems like the digital world forces use to create an identity without "reading the room", nuance, improvisation, etc.
Anyway, this was a great read. Looking forward to more.
I fear the social ramifications of AI progress and proliferation are going to make the 2015-2024 experience look quaint
Yes
Fuuuuuuck love this!!!
Happy to hear it!
Are you familiar with "sissy porn? I recently reviewed Andrea Long Chu's FEMALES .(see review on Amazon.com)..and discovered the exisistence of sissy porn therein...freaked me out...algorithmic programming...God help us
I had a sissy porn series up but two of the interviewees asked me to take it down. One remains. May revisit
Seriously? Are we talking about the same thing? As descrubed in Chu's book? You might check out my review rather than read her book, which isn't terrible, but not worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, in my humble opinion
Thank you for this, most informative. You bet the backlash is growing! 👊
The Slender Man made his debut on Coast to Coast AM *the night before* the stabbing. Darkness Dave was talking to a guest about how people were having real sightings of this fictional character - meaning that probably hundreds of thousands of people were hearing about this story for the first time.
The egregore reared its head.
Egregors is the correct term and I'm glad to see it used here. People don't give the topic enough attention.
A brilliant post by both of y’all. Respect.
May we also consider the medium that resulted in the very first boomer-shooters and compare them to our Lost Children: the postal worker. In many ways they WERE the physical embodiment of what we know as now the Internet, connecting people from anywhere and across time. Every day, waking up and ‘logging on’ to a network to deliver information and media all day 6 days a week in route patterns. Comparable to routine Internet users habits today, certainly. Both mediums encompassing everyone and yet only ‘realized’ by those already overtaken by the organizations/hierarchies within. It’s enough to drive the vulnerable to deliver the Ultimate Post.
Nice play on McLuhan's work there.
I've been waiting for the creepypasta episode on this blog for a long time, glad to see it.
The description of the online as "semi-fictional" is excellent, but Kirby's description of a user's relationship to the online text seems incomplete. I've never interacted with his worked before, this line makes me feel like I should, but can Joe clarify if Kirby is being a determinist about this relationship?
There is another path open to an online user that is analogous to how Kierkegaard used his pseudonyms the in print. That the user recognizes his posts as the contents of a character he is creating in the semi-fictional space of the online. This path is one that many internet users seem to adopt intuitively, particularly anon's.
I also agree that the digital presents a particular challenge to understanding how real a given piece is, of understanding what genre we engage with at any time. However, this challenge existed in all previous technologies as well. It's fascinating to me that the internet exhibits this danger of confused hermeneutics most strongly, but at the same time it might be the most obvious case of this danger. During the age of radio there was the "War of the World's" broadcast, in literature Borges played with this trope his whole career. Don Quixote is an extremely early example of a character who misunderstood the "reality" of his books.
Kirby is, if I'm honest, a deeply frustrating writer. Digimodernism is a remarkably useful text with a lot of surprising foresight, especially for having been written in 2010, but the examples he uses aren't the best to illustrate his theories. There is a whole section on social media about the "apparently real" nature of online space that is remarkably useful, especially in terms of the sincerity needed for these platforms to function.
I certainly agree that this challenge has existed in previous technologies too - it's what informed my PhD research and I find the relationship between communication media evolution and leveraging it to create a story that appears "real" utterly fascinating. You can argue that through the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, such an attitude is a core feature of horror and the Gothic.
Where the digital realm differs from previous versions is in what I call ontological flatness. With books, radio, even film (thinking Blair Witch or Ghostwatch), there is always a physical real 'you' experiencing the mediated text. There is an ontological heirarchy between the reality in the medium you are engaging with and the embodied self. Online, as Kat's intro puts forward, we are always partially 'in' that space, as people. This is new. We cannot close the book or find delineations between a storyworld and a mediation of a real person, and when this is a new layer of reality, we're in uncharted territory entirely.
I'll close with an eerily prescient passage from Kirby. He was writing from a place of speculation, but it's certainly something that has come to pass now.
"people will feel that the gulf separating their ‘real’ and their ‘textual’ lives has disappeared; the thoughts, moods, and impulses of our everyday existence will translate so immediately into the electronic, textual digimodernist realm that we will no longer be conscious of transference. It won’t be a question then of oscillating between offline and online, but of hovering permanently between those two extremes."
(Kirby, 2010, p. 123)
You're both right, the internet's use case is uniquely active, almost gravitational (in the sense it pulls you into itself) compared to previous mediums.
Creepypasta is such a solid case to illustrate it.
As it's part of the horror genre, its effectiveness hinges on suspension of disbelief, which must be collapsed with a method fitting the medium.
Lovecraft used case files and eye witness reports in his work, blair witch used "found footage", creepypasta uses the ambiguity of the online space itself. I've been fascinated by it as a synecdote for the internet's peculiarities since I found Ted the Caver more than a decade ago.
Do you have any more of your work online? If so can you post a link? This was a very fun and interesting piece which hits my own interests square on the head.
I do indeed. My thesis (which I'm currently in the process of adapting to a book) is available here: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/32027/
A previous article that digs further into creepypasta as emblematic of a shift in our culture is available here: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/23603/
I have a forthcoming piece out with Routledge, but it's in review at the moment. The aim is to expand and set out an analytical framework from creepypasta to the forms of digital horror we see today.