As more and more of your social life takes place online, you’re training yourself to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty towards them whatsoever. These effects don’t vanish once you look away from the screen. The internet is not a separate sphere, closed off from ordinary reality; it structures everything about the way we live. Stories of young children trying to swipe at photographs or windows: they expect everything to work like a phone, which is infinitely responsive to touch, even if it’s impossible to engage with on any deeper level. Similarly, many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don’t like a person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have them disappear forever.
In 2011, a meta-analysis found that among young people the capacity for empathy (defined as Empathic Concern, “other-oriented feelings of sympathy,” and Perspective-Taking, the ability to “imagine other people’s points of view”) had massively declined since the turn of the millennium. The authors directly associate this with the spread of social media. In the decade since, it’s probably vanished even faster, even though everyone on the internet keeps talking about empathy. We are becoming less and less capable of actual intersubjective communication; more unhappy; more alone. Every year, surveys find that people have fewer and fewer friends; among millennials, 22% say they have none at all. For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons swarm.
I don’t think this internet of demons is only a metaphor, or a rhetorical trick. Go back to those sigils, the patterns of weird loopy goetic lines that signify the presence of demons in online memes. Most of those designs come from the grimoires of the sixteenth and seventeenth century—and of these, probably the most significant is the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, or the Lesser Key of Solomon. Unlike most old books of demonology, the Lesser Key is still in print, mostly because it was republished (and extensively tinkered with) by Aleister Crowley. But despite its influence, the Lesser Key is mostly plagiarized: entire sections were simply ripped out of other books circulating at the time. Most prominently, it reproduces much of the Steganographia, a book of magic written by Johannes Trithemius, a Benedictine abbot and polymath, around 1499.
The Steganographia is a blueprint for the internet. Most of the book is taken up with spells and incantations with which you can summon aerial spirits, who are “infinite beyond number” and teem in every corner of the world. Here, the purpose of these spirits is to deliver messages—or, more properly, to deliver something that is more than a message. Say you want to convey some secret information to someone: you compose an innocuous letter, but before writing you face the East and read out a spell, like this one to summon the spirit Pamersyel: “Lamarton anoyr bulon madriel traſchon ebraſothea panthenon nabrulges Camery itrasbier rubanthy nadres Calmoſi ormenulan, ytules demy rabion hamorphyn.” Immediately, a spirit will become visible. Then, once the other person receives the letter, they speak a similar spell, and “having said these things he will soon understand your mind completely.” A kind of magic writing that works like speech, instant and immediate. Not an object composed by another person, but a direct simulation of their thoughts—and one that’s delivered by an invisible, intangible network, covering every inch of the world.
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