I find myself wondering about the internet, and varying degrees of sub-natural contamination.
I like your hypothesis that the internet is itself somehow possessed-- it explains its obsessive draw, the awful interactions, and the unseemly nature of so much 'content' floating about on the web. That said... is the internet special in that regard? I think it may be.
Look at writing, for example: take a typewriter, a fully analog device. Take a wordprocessor. There's no real difference in the writing experience. The editing experience, yes! Very much so! But just writing draft on a typewriter or a draft on a computer... having done both, I can't tell the difference in my work. If the subnatural realm contaminates, it's very subtle. While fashion and the general level of education have lowered the content of popular books to some degree, I think that's more recent than the use of computer word processors. You can't often tell when in the 1980s a particular author picked up a word processor by looking at their oeuvre, or at least, I cannot. (Occasionally the prose improves due to the ease of editing, or their production went up, or you see where they mentioned it in an interview somewhere or the end-notes of the book-- but in terms of "oh, there is now demonic influence in this author's works", I just don't see it.)
In fact, aside from the internet, I cannot think of where the contamination of the sub-natural is particularly obvious. I can list many counterexamples OTH where the introduction of digital technology hasn't changed much at all. And yet! The shift from letter writing to Usenet and BBS immediately led to new heights of piracy, pornography, and the invention of the flame war. I don't see that dramatic shift anywhere else. Maybe I am missing something. Does anyone have other examples?
If you can agree (at least provisionally, hypothetically) agree that the internet is the real problem, not the underlying microchips, that leads to a few (very speculative!) questions:
1) Might it be possible, if the whole thing does not come crashing down, to exorcise the internet, or perhaps later on to exorcise what's left of packet-radio etc networks people might put together?
2) Any guesses if the possession will be able to move to isolated machines as the great network comes crashing down? (My intuition is we'll get more gremlins, but that's about it.)
3) Is there any protection one might put on a computer to keep the subnatural influence of the internet spilling out into it? I'm sure a personal protection ritual will do much to keep the gunk off the practitioner, but not every member of a household will have such practice. Dunking everyone's phones in a bucket of holy water will surely fix the problem, but not in a way they'd be happy with. Is there anything of that nature (via natural magic or religion) that might be accessible without years worth of occult practice?
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branchandroot
Sub-natural contamination
Date: 2023-08-14 03:54 pm (UTC)I like your hypothesis that the internet is itself somehow possessed-- it explains its obsessive draw, the awful interactions, and the unseemly nature of so much 'content' floating about on the web. That said... is the internet special in that regard? I think it may be.
Look at writing, for example: take a typewriter, a fully analog device. Take a wordprocessor. There's no real difference in the writing experience. The editing experience, yes! Very much so! But just writing draft on a typewriter or a draft on a computer... having done both, I can't tell the difference in my work. If the subnatural realm contaminates, it's very subtle. While fashion and the general level of education have lowered the content of popular books to some degree, I think that's more recent than the use of computer word processors. You can't often tell when in the 1980s a particular author picked up a word processor by looking at their oeuvre, or at least, I cannot. (Occasionally the prose improves due to the ease of editing, or their production went up, or you see where they mentioned it in an interview somewhere or the end-notes of the book-- but in terms of "oh, there is now demonic influence in this author's works", I just don't see it.)
In fact, aside from the internet, I cannot think of where the contamination of the sub-natural is particularly obvious. I can list many counterexamples OTH where the introduction of digital technology hasn't changed much at all. And yet! The shift from letter writing to Usenet and BBS immediately led to new heights of piracy, pornography, and the invention of the flame war. I don't see that dramatic shift anywhere else. Maybe I am missing something. Does anyone have other examples?
If you can agree (at least provisionally, hypothetically) agree that the internet is the real problem, not the underlying microchips, that leads to a few (very speculative!) questions:
1) Might it be possible, if the whole thing does not come crashing down, to exorcise the internet, or perhaps later on to exorcise what's left of packet-radio etc networks people might put together?
2) Any guesses if the possession will be able to move to isolated machines as the great network comes crashing down? (My intuition is we'll get more gremlins, but that's about it.)
3) Is there any protection one might put on a computer to keep the subnatural influence of the internet spilling out into it? I'm sure a personal protection ritual will do much to keep the gunk off the practitioner, but not every member of a household will have such practice. Dunking everyone's phones in a bucket of holy water will surely fix the problem, but not in a way they'd be happy with. Is there anything of that nature (via natural magic or religion) that might be accessible without years worth of occult practice?