ArticleEtsy witches hexed American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk before he was killed. It was also Halloween on Friday, which means parents have spent the weekend dealing with the kids’ sugar crash after they went out to trick-or-treat their way around the neighbourhood.
The fact that both these events seem worlds apart to us? That seems the real sorcery.
I don’t mean that the hexes “worked” and caused Kirk’s death. That would be crazy. But it seems equally mad to me that all the supernatural stuff about Halloween gets ignored. Especially since life online just gets weirder, and we just go along with it.
To many, Halloween is just an annual rite of angst over sugar, crass commercialisation and this year, the reason for a parent-led petition to get retailers to not freak kids out through ghoulish store displays. We’ve sidelined any of the other business about Halloween being a “thin” time of year when the borders between the living and the dead get blurred, and evil spirits might mess with us.
This seems a serious case of denial, since we spend the other 51 weeks of the year in an increasingly and uncomfortably “thin” place: the internet. Forget the hexes. Focus instead on the way we internet.
Our body in the physical world, our attention in another realm. Everything there is shiny, compelling, irresistible – including the curated images of ourselves on social media. Just one more reel, meme, story, shopping cart. Time slips by unnoticed. We call this “phone addiction” but we’re behaving as though we’re bewitched.
Or consider the sheer pace of technological wizardry that in a few years has seen chatbots graduate from stilted conversation to becoming your best friend/therapist/life partner. Even god, for some poor souls experiencing what some today dub “AI psychosis”. An earlier age would have called it “demonic possession”.
Then there’s the online pile-on, where millions turn on the internet’s sacrificial victim for the day. It’s bad enough, for those who fall afoul of the digital discourse, to get doxxed and have their address posted online, threatening their safety, and that of their friends and family. But all those malicious intentions seem to take on a life of their own. That casual cruelty may never cross the border into the real world. But read that virtual room. Bad vibes doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Also sinister are the creation of deepfakes that, through AI, slap someone’s face on a porn performer’s body, and circulate the images far and wide to ritually humiliate the person. Deepfakes are “almost demonic”, said one recent victim, NRL presenter Tiffany Salmond. She probably didn’t mean that literally, but then no one does, these days. Even if it perfectly nails what it’s like to have your own face turned against yourself and your humanity turned inside out.
Reports last week of the depraved acts of “crimefluencers” show us how some of that dark energy can leak offline, causing untold harm to victims. Members of nihilistic online groups, under investigation by the Australian Federal Police, are allegedly coercing isolated, vulnerable teens into self-mutilation, filming the results, and then trading the sick images with other members. The internet was supposed to allow us to find our tribe. Not for sadists to one-up each other for dopamine hits. (Or, in a related but different context, for self-sadism to become a way of life, as Harper’s Magazine reports in a chilling piece on porn’s next frontier: endless masturbation).
Maybe this is just regular old human nastiness, the mess of the real world now replicated online – but now the freaks can more easily find each other. But Neil Postman, the late cultural critic, insisted that technological change is “ecological” because “one significant change generates total change”. He meant that every new medium introduces new ways of thinking, speaking, and being into the world. Basically, new tools make new things possible. The question is not if the internet is changing us, but how.
Which isn’t, I know, the same as asking whether evil spiritual forces are descending on us through Wi-Fi. But I’ve never been able to forget the way that Paul Kingsnorth, environmental activist and author turned chronicler of life in the machine age, once described the internet as “giant Ouija board” putting us in touch with malevolent, disembodied intelligences. If he’s right, then the nasties on the other side of the screen must get a kick out of messing with us, glorying in the darkness we bring on each other.
These are the vexing questions: are we using our devices or being used by them? Why is the internet called a “gateway” or “portal”, and what is meant to come through?
Best not to ask for the next twelve months until we circle back to regular old Halloween angsting. Keep sweating the small stuff.
Dr Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity.