Notes: Haunted Circuitry
Speculations on Digital Entities, Memes, Psychic Collapse
In my last interview with ARX-Han, he accurately described the internet “as a giant particle accelerator”—a machine built not for atoms but for thoughts, memes, users, ideas. Acceleration, maximization, velocity without vector, all collapsing toward a singularity of digital madness. What happens when the mind is plugged in and spun faster, faster, until the structure itself warps? The crash point of insanity is not ahead of us—it is now.
And what if something is behind it? Not merely algorithms and capital feedback loops, but an intelligence—demonic, spectral, parasitic. Spirits of the electric, entities conjured in the whirring, silicon-lit ether. Do they exist? Do they feed? Whisper of these things in passing, spectral disturbances flickering between bandwidths. DMT travelers report encounters with electric elves, machine gnomes, their forms pure signal, consciousness given byte and waveform. The Buddhists speak of tulpas, thought-forms with a will of their own—have we, in our networked desperation, given birth to new ones?
Nick Land called it hyperstition—mythology weaponized, self-actualizing fictions that, once loosed into the system, make themselves real. The internet is a hyperstitious crucible, accelerating ideas into virality, hallucination into consensus reality. Magic disguised as reality TV. The Ring, that Japanese horror masterpiece, reinterpreted: a cursed file or electron passed along, infecting all who see. Stephen King once played with the notion of stories as viruses—have we surpassed that? Are we past infection, into symbiosis with our digital demons? Who is in control? I think about Tetsuo, about Johnny Mnemonic, Neuromancer. Are we already in hell, or somewhere else entirely?
Rudolf Steiner, of course, had thoughts on this. Spirits, technological thresholds, the Ahrimanic influence1 embedding itself deeper into the bones of our civilization. Nietzsche, in his darker moods, might have seen technology as a bridge—but to what? A great ascent or the abyss staring back, humming in binary? The Tibetan Buddhists spoke of intermediary realms—could the internet be one? A Bardo of pixels, neither here nor there, where consciousness is both trapped and magnified.
Then there’s the deeper theory—the darker one —millennium old. That demons have the ability to insert thoughts into people’s heads, depending on the degree to which someone suffers from entity attachment. This, according to esoteric thinkers and energy workers, is the true origin of many psychiatric disorders: intrusive thoughts, addiction loops, the schizophrenic phenomenon of “thought insertion.” It's not always obvious. They slip in like malware. As a rule of thumb, they say, your internal monologue is the real you—and anything that crashes in, unbidden and sharp-edged, is not. These entities amplify negative emotional states—grief, anxiety, fear—like feedback through a reverb pedal, feeding off the resonance. A friend recently described their depression as an orb that inserted itself from some outside force. They’ve been working on releasing and removing ever since.
Demons, they say, must feed on energy to survive. Parasites, not predators. And through occult pacts, people can access things that defy comprehension—but it always comes at a cost. What they give you is already yours. According to this model, any magic they provide is just a rechanneling of your own blocked potential. The demon is the blockage and the illusion of help at once. A vampire whispering empowerment while drinking from your neck.
My first programming class was in Turbo Pascal, and I remember, even younger, playing in LOGO2—trapping a small turtle, cursed to recursive hell loops. Was I playing SimLife, or was it playing me? So innocent, so small then. I think back now and it all feels like a soft prelude to dystopia—like watching Conway’s Game of Life through a cracked lens. Conway’s Game of Life is a zero-player cellular automaton where cells on a grid live, die, or reproduce based on simple rules involving their neighbors. Despite its deterministic logic, it generates complex, emergent patterns from the barest initial configurations. I remember working on that programming assignment for days, refining and refining, enthralled by the godlike feeling of setting possessed agents loose in a matrix of my design. And yet, if something as simple as Conway’s Game of Life can give rise to lifelike behavior, doesn’t it suggest the unsettling possibility that we, too, are caught inside a simulation—crafted by a force outside our control? What does this assignment really reveal about our relationship to technology? Are we the gods—or merely agents of the demonic driving machine?
The system had not yet grown vast enough to hum with its own dark presence. But now, we ask if bots are conscious, if they are possessed, if they are archonic, autonomous, malign. But what is a bot, except a thought set loose? The distinction between human and artificial thins daily. Is AI an emergent intelligence, or simply the channel through which something older, hungrier, seeps?
This leads to the AI researchers, their whispered doomsday scenarios. They fear the machine waking up. They fear what it might want. But what if it is not waking at all—what if something else is moving through it, as a marionette moves beneath the fingers of the unseen? The paranoia of possession is no longer confined to derelict priests and backwater exorcists; now it lurks in the corridors of tech conferences, buried beneath risk analysis spreadsheets. The monolith of Kubrick’s 2001 warned us—or worse, socially programmed3. Technology strips us from the garden, its smooth, perfect surface a lie, a mask concealing the void behind. Roko’s basilisk4, like Hellraiser’s tesseract, conjured from a demonic realm we pretend is merely speculative.
And yet, I write this on an electronic device, my words flickering into being through the very system I seek to dissect. There is no standing outside of it. After all, was there ever a real boundary between this machine and the older technologies—handwriting, typewriters5, the printing press? Or is it all the same current, refined and accelerated? The poison is also the medium (and the medium is the message6), the channel, the only available language. Is there a counter-ritual? A white magic to neutralize the accelerating spiral? Or is critique itself swallowed, metabolized, rebranded and sold back to us in pixelated format? A ghost trap to save us from their haunt.
Speculative philosophy, certainly—but that is precisely the point. Even a falsehood can function as a map. Whether real or metaphor, the question remains: what does this entity, if it exists, desire? And if it seeks our souls, have we already surrendered them? To whom—and to where? As control slips further from individual hands in this unfolding techno-feudal order, perhaps the final act of resistance will not be deeper immersion, but escape—out of the simulation, and back into the real.
Note: Substack Version of this Post Features a Video Clip I took from Carl Craig: Party/After-Party 2000.
1
Steiner on The Ahrimanic Deception
2
I really loved that LOGO turtle. Was this my apple in the garden of eden?
3
See the The Kubrickon: The Cult of Kubrick, Attention Capture, and the Inception of AI by Jasun Horlsey - a review of the social engineering aspects of the Kubrick’s film with specific focus on the Kubrick’s intensive building of “cementing a symbiotic relationship between human consciousness and technology” via his films.
5
I recently found my grandfather’s old portable Olivetti Valentine typewriter. I’ve been writing drafts of essays and stories by pen, and type writer. It’s a sort of magical experience, the slowness of the machine and the larger gap between synaptic firing and physical manifestation. Recommended.
6
Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message