How the intersection of magical thinking and technological innovation helped to form digital culture, both past and present.
Our contemporary digital landscape often reflects a strange logic: Elon Musk believes there’s a one-in-a-billion chance that we are not living in a computer simulation. People argue about culturally collective false memories popularly known as “Mandela Effects.” And various factions engaged in a magic meme war leading up to the 2016 election. In The Unseen Internet, Shira Chess explores the tensions between the occult and digital spaces in the twenty-first century. These practices have resulted in distinct kinds of otherworldly discourse that affects the broader popular perceptions of reality in the twenty-first century, within and beyond the internet.
Behind the glossy sheen of slick social media influencers and corporate oligopolies, the internet is built in part on a foundation of magical thinking. The word “magic” here is not entirely metaphorical, although the metaphor is not irrelevant. Historically the emergence of the internet was concurrent with technopaganism, which blended digital technologies with the occult in ways that are both seen and unseen by the casual user. While technopaganism is not the only lens with which to understand the emergence of the internet, it is an understudied one that reaches toward contemporary anxieties about the ineffability of our tech.
ENDORSEMENTS
“In her authoritative account of the occult development of digital spaces, Shira Chess sympathetically chronicles the emergence of these newfound, unseen, interstitial realities, as well as their co-option by some of the darker forces promoting technology today." —Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest and Team Human
“Blending scholarship and deep research, Chess illuminates the occult dimensions of the internet then and now. The upshot: whether you believe in it or not, magical thinking lit the fire behind today’s digital meltdown of consensus reality.” —Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness and Blotter
“By exploring the occultic encoding and decoding of the digital, Shira Chess provides an innovative (and spooky!) account of internet culture—and the esoteric beliefs that helped conjure it.” —Whitney Phillips, coauthor of The Shadow Gospel
Shira Chess is Associate Professor of Entertainment and Media Studies at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Play Like a Feminist (MIT Press) and Ready Player Two, and the coauthor of Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man.
How the intersection of magical thinking and technological innovation helped to form digital culture, both past and present.
Our contemporary digital landscape often reflects a strange logic: Elon Musk believes there’s a one-in-a-billion chance that we are not living in a computer simulation. People argue about culturally collective false memories popularly known as “Mandela Effects.” And various factions engaged in a magic meme war leading up to the 2016 election. In The Unseen Internet, Shira Chess explores the tensions between the occult and digital spaces in the twenty-first century. These practices have resulted in distinct kinds of otherworldly discourse that affects the broader popular perceptions of reality in the twenty-first century, within and beyond the internet.
Behind the glossy sheen of slick social media influencers and corporate oligopolies, the internet is built in part on a foundation of magical thinking. The word “magic” here is not entirely metaphorical, although the metaphor is not irrelevant. Historically the emergence of the internet was concurrent with technopaganism, which blended digital technologies with the occult in ways that are both seen and unseen by the casual user. While technopaganism is not the only lens with which to understand the emergence of the internet, it is an understudied one that reaches toward contemporary anxieties about the ineffability of our tech.
Reviews
ENDORSEMENTS
“In her authoritative account of the occult development of digital spaces, Shira Chess sympathetically chronicles the emergence of these newfound, unseen, interstitial realities, as well as their co-option by some of the darker forces promoting technology today." —Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest and Team Human
“Blending scholarship and deep research, Chess illuminates the occult dimensions of the internet then and now. The upshot: whether you believe in it or not, magical thinking lit the fire behind today’s digital meltdown of consensus reality.” —Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness and Blotter
“By exploring the occultic encoding and decoding of the digital, Shira Chess provides an innovative (and spooky!) account of internet culture—and the esoteric beliefs that helped conjure it.” —Whitney Phillips, coauthor of The Shadow Gospel
Author
Shira Chess is Associate Professor of Entertainment and Media Studies at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Play Like a Feminist (MIT Press) and Ready Player Two, and the coauthor of Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man.
