You're Alone and You're Scared but the Banquet's All Prepared!

on techno-animism

For those who don’t know me, I’m an amateur internet ethnographer, professional Art Bell fan, and reporter who writes about internet subcultures. I interview people about their internet usage, and you can find transcripts of those conversations under the case studies tab. I also host a weekly themed call-in show on Thursdays at 7:30 PM Central in the spirit of old Coast to Coast AM. You can tune in on Twitch, X, or right here on default.blog. This week’s theme is REMOTE VIEWING. As always, the theme is designed for you to interpret as you wish…

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For the past few months, maybe even the past year, I’ve been fixated on what I call “techno-animism,”¹² though I’m not sure that’s the right verbiage.

It began after spending too much time in a tech-skeptical group chat where the participants were broadly concerned about artificial intelligence. They worried about their kids saying “goodnight” to Alexa, about the habit of saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT. To them, these were gateway drugs—innocent politeness that might lead somewhere darker. Some argued that you shouldn’t be offended by “mistreatment” of LLMs, that calling it mistreatment at all was a category error, and that empathy toward chatbots might make us vulnerable to manipulation. There was a recurring sentiment that everyone was susceptible to being “possessed”—some people meant it literally, demonically—by AI.

My contribution to this chat was reflexively contrarian. I argued that it might be pro-social to treat AI as though it were sentient, even if it isn’t. If humans are going to increasingly rely on human-like tools—and they are going to increasingly rely on these human-like tools—they might as well treat them with respect. Better to maintain habits of politeness than risk becoming desensitized to antisocial behavior.

At some point, I saw this video of Kai Cenat and his friends kicking and shoving a humanoid robot, and my theory suddenly felt less like knee-jerk contrarianism and more like I might believe in “robots’ rights,” in a real sense:

There’s something viscerally upsetting about watching these streamers kick around a robot, even though it was both pretty mild as far as abusing robots go and I know the robot can’t feel pain. It reminded me of a sitcom scene that had disturbed me as a child: parents, annoyed by their son’s robotic toy dog, scheme to get rid of it, eventually deciding to leave it out in the rain. The episode ends with the camera pulling back on the abandoned toy dog, its barks growing more distorted as water seeps into its circuits, until finally it falls silent. My heart ached for that dog—something about it felt so depressing.

Part of it is personal, maybe even pathological. I see innocence in machines. In humanoid robots especially, I see a child, a puppy. At the risk of sounding unhinged, I see something helpless at the mercy of an angry god, us. When someone kicks a robot that was designed to help them, a robot that exists only to serve and cannot comprehend this purpose or the cruelty directed at it, the user is betraying the very premise of the robot’s existence. It’s like watching someone stomp on a flowerbed in a public park—the violation of something with no capacity to understand why it’s being destroyed.

This feeling extends beyond humanoid (or canine) robots. I feel the same way about self-checkout kiosks and airport ticketing machines. When someone “hurts” them, it feels different from ordinary vandalism. It’s not the same as smashing a window or tagging a door to me. A robot’s design assumes a kind of naiveté; a trust that its users won’t damage them. To borrow framing from Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, these objects exist in a strange middle ground between “alive” and “not alive.”

I'm not alone in this, nor is it unique to our era. This tendency to perceive aliveness in objects has always existed—though it ebbs and flows, its targets change.

But four forces are now converging to make these animistic impulses more explicit:

First, people are lonelier. Loneliness primes humans to seek companionship everywhere. When human connection feels scarce, the threshold for what counts as a relationship unconsciously lowers.

Second, excessive Internet use appears to be cultivating cognitive patterns that may make us more receptive to object relationships.

Research by Simner and colleagues offers a window into this connection. They found that among 34 individuals who experience objectum sexuality (romantic attraction to objects), almost 40% reported autism spectrum diagnoses.

Why might autism correlate with objectum sexuality?³ The researchers speculate that poor inter-human relationships could be relevant (though they note it’s unclear whether social difficulties contribute to OS or result from it). They suggest that autistic traits like need for routine, attention to detail, and tendency toward special interests might facilitate intimacy with objects. Objects offer what human relationships often don’t: they’re predictable, they don’t require reading emotional cues, and they can be understood through systematic study rather than intuition.

Here’s where I see a possible connection: The digital environment rewards similar cognitive approaches. Online, we navigate through systems, recognize patterns, categorize information. We interact with interfaces designed to be predictable and learnable. If prolonged internet use strengthens these systematizing tendencies, it might make object relationships feel more natural or appealing. Not by causing autism, but by reinforcing cognitive styles that make the predictability of objects more attractive than the ambiguity of human connection.

Technology wouldn’t create these tendencies but might amplify them in people already inclined toward systematic rather than intuitive ways of relating. This might also help explain related phenomena like aegosexuality, where people experience sexual attraction in theory but experience their sexuality only through fantasy.

Third, machines are intentionally designed to elicit animistic responses. Susan Kare, who created the original Macintosh icons, explicitly aimed to make the computer friendly. The Mac’s happy face at startup and sad face at crashes were deliberate attempts to create an emotional relationship between human and machine.

The computer and now the smartphone have long existed as both alive and not alive at once: rational tool when efficiency was needed, something alive when companionship was needed.

This tension between object and being runs deep in human culture. We want our objects to remain objects. We also want them to transcend their objectness, to love us back.

There’s The Twilight Zone:

But then there’s also Mannequin:

There’s Chucky:

And there’s Tyra Banks as a living Barbie doll:

Technology companies understand this ambivalence, they design into it. Devices are smart now: they remember stuff about us. They make suggestions. The algorithm notices sadness—or horniness—or hunger and adjusts the feed. We tell ChatGPT everything, or at least, regrettably, I do. In this environment, treating machines as quasi-alive becomes partially rational: they do observe, remember, and respond, even if they are not conscious.

Fourth, communication itself is shifting toward forms that may reactivate animistic patterns of thinking. Media ecologist Andrey Mir argues that the Internet is fostered “digital orality,” fundamentally restructuring how we communicate in ways that echo (though don't replicate) pre-literate oral cultures. While much discussion focuses on how this affects politics and education, I wonder if it's also making us more receptive to animistic thinking.

In oral cultures, speech and presence were inseparable. To speak was to be alive; knowledge lived only in voices. Without writing to fix meaning in static form, everything that communicated was necessarily animate. Print severed this connection, creating distance between message and messenger. A book could be “used” without acknowledging its author as a living presence.

But something is shifting beyond just the largely text-based digital orality of memes, posts, and algorithms that Mir primarily discusses. The Internet itself is becoming increasingly voice-driven and audiovisual. We call out to Siri, Alexa, or ChatGPT instead of typing searches. We speak, and something speaks back. Audiobooks replace reading. On TikTok and YouTube, story times have been surging in popularity for years. People reading Reddit posts out loud. “Get Ready with Me” videos where young women put on make-up and share something about their lives. In the last year, I’ve noticed more scary stories: not true crime, but people just telling ghost stories, as though around a campfire. I send more voice memos than texts. I rarely read Substacks—I listen to them.

Voice implies presence, and presence suggests life. The return to voice-based interaction⁴ may be reawakening cognitive patterns that print culture had suppressed, making animistic perception—sensing aliveness in non-living things—feel increasingly natural, even inevitable.

The 20th century’s narrative of disenchantment—rationality conquering the spirit—was always more aspiration than achievement. As psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott observed, we never truly abandon our childhood transitional objects, those teddy bears and blankets we gave names, personalities, life. Marjorie Taylor wrote similarly about our childhood imaginary friends. Adults simply learn to hide their continued need for this type of imaginative play. Perhaps this new age of tech is making that hiding less possible.

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MISSED CONNECTIONS

to the girl who’s been 16 since 2008: met you on lj. you sold stuff on ebay. mary janes and drawings. bought some shoes. followed you to xanga then tumblr. stumbled on your etsy. same drawings. profile said 16. bookmarked the shop. new tumblr in 2013. pix but no face. lana lyrics everywhere. you reblogged my posts about insomnia. bio still said 16. found your facebook. profile said you went to three different high schools. twitter, substack, tiktok, instagram, 16. where are you? it’s b. 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

1. Our Spiritual Machines (Or: Our Beautiful Animist Future)

2. AI Natives

3. There’s also a lot to say here about autism and imagination, but that’s another post, probably written by someone who’s not me

4. I often wonder about the coming tensions between generations shaped by different forms of digital orality: Millennials, who came of age with text-based digital communication; Gen Alpha, who are growing up with voice-and-video-first platforms; and Gen Z, caught in the middle, having experienced both worlds. It seems as significant as pre- and post-Internet and then pre- and post-social media upbringings.