• Welcome to the a2b2 discussion board
  • Check out the main site here
  • Get some merch here
Hello There, Guest! Login Register


Title: THE INTERNET: WEIRD, EERIE, UNCANNY, ETC.
Thread Modes
#1
Friends, 

Let's get strange. 

Let's get strange talking about the strange thing we call the internet. I want to cast a wide net with this topic, and hopefully we can catch some tantalizing things together. The hope is that this thread, best read after dark (in your respective timezone), will allow us to channel vibes that are weird, eerie, uncanny, existential dread-inducing, psychedelic, and haunting about the internet and the digital age. 

Whether the internet is just a big floating mass of human thought or its own unique inhuman consciousness (or both, or neither), I think that there are strange nameless energies we constantly experience because of our relationship to the internet, and that's what I want to tap into here. 

What do I mean? I don't really mean that time you watched a spooptube video about red rooms (though an experience or concepts involving a sense of danger and unease related to the internet may come up organically as we go). Urban legends have always existed; I am interested in us talking about psychical/limbic/bodily/cultural experiences and effects specific to the internet--to Now, or as long as you've had access to a computer. Anecdotes and theories. 

Not so much about content itself alone, but discussion of the very presence or effect of the technology itself. Let's get trippy, nutty, fringy, philosophical, shamanistic, galaxy-brained, personal, anecdotal, relatable. Let's find weird common ground and totally alien new terrain. Reality, identity, perception, presence, absence, space, time, energy, auras, bodies, dreams, delusions. 

It'd be relevant to also discuss/dissect content that often makes us think and feel on a meta-level about (electronic/digital) technology, i.e. stuff like what's being posted in the Youtube Oddities thread, bizarre/strange current or dead websites, true weird events involving the internet in a weird context, post-internet art, OPN, vaporwave, the appeal of The Backrooms meme, the effect of cursed images, dreamcore, internetcore, analog horror, Outrun, glitch art, error messages, anomalies, skeuomorphs, vaporwaRe, Randonautica, numbers stations, broadcast signal intrusions etc). Everything shadowy and off-kilter about the devices and logics that dominate almost every domain of 'modern' life now. 

Not just the what, but the why of the effect of these things on us feels like it would be really immersive and rewarding to discuss. Let's try a create a vibe with this thread and keep it going. 


Starting points/generative concepts: 

  • What are you earliest memories of the internet? 
  • When you have memories of the internet, do you remember your body experiencing the thing in the space you were in, just the content itself--how would you describe it? 
  • Do you notice that changes in layouts/interfaces/web design effects you at all on any notable emotional/psychological level? 
  • Do you ever have internet related dreams? 
  • Is the internet supernatural? 
  • Is the internet "real"? Surreal? Irreal? Unreal? Multireal?
  • Does the space in which you use the internet affect your usage habits? 
  • Do dead websites or dead links or empty comment sections or no one else online make you feel weird? 
  • Why are 'liminal spaces' such a thing online right now? Can the internet be a liminal space?
  • What do you picture when imagining other people on the other side of internet communication?
  • Is the internet related to psychedelics, stimulants, or deliriants?
  • Have you ever found anything genuinely weird/sus/spoopy in places like google search, maps, etc--again, not so much creepypasta type stuff, but stuff that genuinely fucked with you in your experience of it. 
  • Any truly bizarre or haunting/unsettling experiences you've had online? (again, let's take it above the basic internet mystery/horror territory--let's get into real odd shit you've seen)
  • Do you have any weird/strange/insane theories about the internet, the digital age, digital tech? (the more bizarre the better)
  • What does the internet do to our sense of time? Our bodies? 
  • How does the internet change our relation to and perception of offline spaces, bodies, language, communities, etc.
  • Is there archetypal/mythical precedence for the design, effects, and function of the internet as a thing?
  • Predictions on how the internet will continue to evolve and continue to shape societies?
  • Anything extraterrestrial about the internet we should consider?
  • What do algorithms do to and for us psychologically?
  • Is the internet just TV 2.0 or Written Language 10.0 or is it truly unique in the lineage of human tech? What comes after?
  • Does anything in general about the internet ever feel weird, eerie, uncanny, existential dread-inducing, psychedelic, or haunting to you in a way that no one ever talks about? Does the internet scare you in any way?
  • Let's talk about anything else that feels like it fits these vibes
P.S. Considered putting this in the Tech section, but since it's more concerned with the aesthetic/subjective experience of technology, rather than anything technical or that literal, I thought I'd go with General. Pardon if that's the wrong call.
1
 
Reply
#2
I think the earliest memory of me using the internet was going on the site new grounds and playing the game Dad And Me for the first time (and was probably the first flash game I ever played, besides Interactive Buddy), and being absolutely horrified at the violence and blood for my little boy brain, even though the contents were just basic violence and comic mischief, but nonetheless, it had left a pretty decent scar on me until my brain was fully developed. Pretty sick game ngl.

On the topic of weird shit, I'll say two of the most recent things I've discovered, Alfred's Playhouse, and trauma core.

The internet is the modern day language, a new language of love to replace Latin, or any other language. We're swapping letters with 1s and 0s, because who want's to keep using outdated shit when the internet constantly keeps us up to date with everything going on in the planet as I'm typing this and you reading this?

In my personal opinion, the internet is a psychedelic that we take, just like how you get booted up into the Matrix. Healthy? Probably not. Addictive? Fuck yes indeed.

Algorithms fuck me up, and I'd say the rest of the world using an app or search engine. I was digging deep into the premise and ideals of algorithms, and it's kinda scary. It's a well known fact that algorithms are created to keep you interested in the topics you're interested in, whether it's jock straps or bible verses. However, algorithms will NEVER give you the other side of a certain topic or story, such as an argument or a world war. It's like Diet Pepsi propaganda in a way to keep people enticed, but also making sure that they keep looking at the same shit. Dangerous game.

It's a whole new world of shit, and I'm loving every second of it.
 
Reply
#3
(03-30-2021, 07:17 AM)haunted.red Wrote: I think the earliest memory of me using the internet was going on the site new grounds and playing the game Dad And Me for the first time (and was probably the first flash game I ever played, besides Interactive Buddy), and being absolutely horrified at the violence and blood for my little boy brain, even though the contents were just basic violence and comic mischief, but nonetheless, it had left a pretty decent scar on me until my brain was fully developed. Pretty sick game ngl.

On the topic of weird shit, I'll say two of the most recent things I've discovered, Alfred's Playhouse, and trauma core.

The internet is the modern day language, a new language of love to replace Latin, or any other language. We're swapping letters with 1s and 0s, because who want's to keep using outdated shit when the internet constantly keeps us up to date with everything going on in the planet as I'm typing this and you reading this?

In my personal opinion, the internet is a psychedelic that we take, just like how you get booted up into the Matrix. Healthy? Probably not. Addictive? Fuck yes indeed.

Algorithms fuck me up, and I'd say the rest of the world using an app or search engine. I was digging deep into the premise and ideals of algorithms, and it's kinda scary. It's a well known fact that algorithms are created to keep you interested in the topics you're interested in, whether it's jock straps or bible verses. However, algorithms will NEVER give you the other side of a certain topic or story, such as an argument or a world war. It's like Diet Pepsi propaganda in a way to keep people enticed, but also making sure that they keep looking at the same shit. Dangerous game.

It's a whole new world of shit, and I'm loving every second of it.

oh man. I love the Diet Pepsi allusion. In so many ways the increasing sense of ever-increasing choices is really just the over-designing of the inside of a cage that is getting smaller and smaller, or like a VR visor presenting literally the entire universe in front of you, whilst you're on a treadmill. I had a convo the other day with a friend about how the algo is basically paranoia/solipsism/synchronicity artificially realized. like, back in the day, people thought god/the universe was giving them a sign, but had to have faith that's what it was. now, literally everything is a sign (ostensibly) directly meant for you and only you. because it's not just the sign (like one recommendation), but the whole pattern or rhythm of signs themselves. in what ways specifically do you feel it's personally or socially dangerous?

love your other points, but just to focus in--yeah, what's the deal with traumacore? I just discovered it recently too, and am stunned by how fascinating it is from a folk/anthropological perspective: genuinely feels like meme art intensified to such a state that it's actually, and pretty organically, a medium of catharsis and solace for (what I take to often be) kids or young adults. there's absolutely something uncanny about it though, how the spaces chosen for the photos used feel like a kind of mental landscape, or projection of the feeling into a space, which seems to usually be a corrupting presence over the cute/innocent objects/toys in the room. still processing it, really. also makes me feel a lot of the same way that Nicole Dollanganger's music does.
 
Reply
#4
I was thinking about liminal spaces the other day, and why they might be so interesting to a lot of people (me included).
my thoughts -
  • they can be impossible spaces, depending on what kind of liminal space you mean. I'm not really talking about the type of liminal spaces that are basically just abandoned childhood spaces, which tend to rely on their audience being familiar with the space from their childhood to get an emotional reaction: like soft play areas at night or something. I don't feel like these are universal liminal spaces because they have specfic cultural context; someone from another country who didn't grow up going to soft play areas isn't going to feel as unsettled by these images. I mean shit like endless corridors, or backrooms; weird endless spaces that don't actually lead anywhere: now that is all very literally liminal. There's a French art film my dad said he had to watch in art college, I can't remember what it's called, I might add it if I find out, but there's a lot of shots of these corridors with the voiceover saying 'endless corridors' over and over again which sounds... pretty damn liminal to me. [EDIT 28/4/21: the film is Last Year at Marienbad]. That's the kind of impossible and unsettling places I mean
  • You could definately characterise a lot of these liminal spaces as having impossible physics and spaces that don't make realistic sense; I mean the whole premise of the backrooms is that you no-clip out of reality. I think this idea is very similar to digital space: the internet is NOT a physical space, that's its whole thing. You mentioned the idea of how the internet affects our relationship with physical spaces: an idea I have is that whilst the internet is a very non-physical space, liminal spaces are VERY physical and overwhelming. I don't have like a pyscological theory reason for why this is: idk maybe the prevelance the internet has now is making us obsess over ideas of much more physical spaces? I'm not sure about that. I don't think that the internet is a liminal space, it doesn't have that physicalty, but I do think that  digital spaces and liminal spaces share endlessness and hard or impossible to comprehend physics, and I feel like the popularity of liminal spaces makes a lot of sense in the setting of the internet - there is something very... internet in liminal spaces
  • This idea of endless impossible spaces also reminds me of space, which is something people have always been fascinated with: scary and unknown and really really cool. They both are unknowingly vast and invoke exestential and unsettling feelings. It also reminds me of living spaces, spaces that change around you and again don't make physical sense.
  • I like the presence that the setting itself has in being unsettling here, I feel like there's something a little dystopian in it, alot of industrial archetecture and city buildings I feel fit the liminal vibe very well
Local Cryptid
 
Reply
#5
(04-07-2021, 11:39 AM)YoI like the idea that liminal spaces are created by the specific ways in which the personal psyche relates to itself. A theory of the types of spaces which could exist might depend on what we believe psyche is "made of" (or what the essential nature/s of the psychic substance Is).ant1quarian-h Wrote: I was thinking about liminal spaces the other day, and why they might be so interesting to a lot of people (me included).
my thoughts -
  • they can be impossible spaces, depending on what kind of liminal space you mean. I'm not really talking about the type of liminal spaces that are basically just abandoned childhood spaces, which tend to rely on their audience being familiar with the space from their childhood to get an emotional reaction: like soft play areas at night or something. I don't feel like these are universal liminal spaces because they have specfic cultural context; someone from another country who didn't grow up going to soft play areas isn't going to feel as unsettled by these images. I mean shit like endless corridors, or backrooms; weird endless spaces that don't actually lead anywhere: now that is all very literally liminal. There's a French art film my dad said he had to watch in art college, I can't remember what it's called, I might add it if I find out, but there's a lot of shots of these corridors with the voiceover saying 'endless corridors' over and over again which sounds... pretty damn liminal to me. That's the kind of impossible and unsettling places I mean
  • You could definately characterise a lot of these liminal spaces as having impossible physics and spaces that don't make realistic sense; I mean the whole premise of the backrooms is that you no-clip out of reality. I think this idea is very similar to digital space: the internet is NOT a physical space, that's its whole thing. You mentioned the idea of how the internet affects our relationship with physical spaces: an idea I have is that whilst the internet is a very non-physical space, liminal spaces are VERY physical and overwhelming. I don't have like a pyscological theory reason for why this is: idk maybe the prevelance the internet has now is making us obsess over ideas of much more physical spaces? I'm not sure about that. I don't think that the internet is a liminal space, it doesn't have that physicalty, but I do think that  digital spaces and liminal spaces share endlessness and hard or impossible to comprehend physics, and I feel like the popularity of liminal spaces makes a lot of sense in the setting of the internet - there is something very... internet in liminal spaces
  • This idea of endless impossible spaces also reminds me of space, which is something people have always been fascinated with: scary and unknown and really really cool. They both are unknowingly vast and invoke exestential and unsettling feelings. It also reminds me of living spaces, spaces that change around you and again don't make physical sense.
  • I like the presence that the setting itself has in being unsettling here, I feel like there's something a little dystopian in it, alot of industrial archetecture and city buildings I feel fit the liminal vibe very well
 
Reply
#6
(04-07-2021, 11:39 AM)ant1quarian-h Wrote: I was thinking about liminal spaces the other day, and why they might be so interesting to a lot of people (me included).
my thoughts -
  • they can be impossible spaces, depending on what kind of liminal space you mean. I'm not really talking about the type of liminal spaces that are basically just abandoned childhood spaces, which tend to rely on their audience being familiar with the space from their childhood to get an emotional reaction: like soft play areas at night or something. I don't feel like these are universal liminal spaces because they have specfic cultural context; someone from another country who didn't grow up going to soft play areas isn't going to feel as unsettled by these images. I mean shit like endless corridors, or backrooms; weird endless spaces that don't actually lead anywhere: now that is all very literally liminal. There's a French art film my dad said he had to watch in art college, I can't remember what it's called, I might add it if I find out, but there's a lot of shots of these corridors with the voiceover saying 'endless corridors' over and over again which sounds... pretty damn liminal to me. That's the kind of impossible and unsettling places I mean
  • You could definately characterise a lot of these liminal spaces as having impossible physics and spaces that don't make realistic sense; I mean the whole premise of the backrooms is that you no-clip out of reality. I think this idea is very similar to digital space: the internet is NOT a physical space, that's its whole thing. You mentioned the idea of how the internet affects our relationship with physical spaces: an idea I have is that whilst the internet is a very non-physical space, liminal spaces are VERY physical and overwhelming. I don't have like a pyscological theory reason for why this is: idk maybe the prevelance the internet has now is making us obsess over ideas of much more physical spaces? I'm not sure about that. I don't think that the internet is a liminal space, it doesn't have that physicalty, but I do think that  digital spaces and liminal spaces share endlessness and hard or impossible to comprehend physics, and I feel like the popularity of liminal spaces makes a lot of sense in the setting of the internet - there is something very... internet in liminal spaces
  • This idea of endless impossible spaces also reminds me of space, which is something people have always been fascinated with: scary and unknown and really really cool. They both are unknowingly vast and invoke exestential and unsettling feelings. It also reminds me of living spaces, spaces that change around you and again don't make physical sense.
  • I like the presence that the setting itself has in being unsettling here, I feel like there's something a little dystopian in it, alot of industrial archetecture and city buildings I feel fit the liminal vibe very well

Major fuck yes to all of this. Was going to respond sooner but wanted to give it proper due. 

Firstly, this isn't it, but when you mentioned the unknown art film, I immediately thought of Michael Snow's "Wavelength" from 1967, which is an hour of the camera slowly zooming in on an empty room only to eventually end up at a image pasted on the wall--the image of an ocean, which then fills the screen. Synchronously to this convo, it fits too, given its hypnotic effect regarding an empty space only to reveal an endless space within a (conversely quite confined) space. Here it is, just as footnote: https://vimeo.com/226140780

Secondly, I very much agree with and dig this distinction between the more generic form of liminal space that is a little more culturally transposable and not really contingent upon distinct human memories/association (such as backrooms, and the Backrooms meme image: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/news...32/622.jpg. What excites me so much is that these types of spaces are, as you say, far less marked by cultural distinction, other than general contextualization within modern industrial society, and yet they have this universalish quality, as if there is some broader collective unconscious deeply altered once humans began to really fuck with our relationship to the spatiality of the pre-human ecosystem (although even then, it's not all industrial, as there is more ancient shit like old Roman pathways with big arches and pillars or the Parisian catacombs that give off similar vibes). It's as if built space opens up a weird portal to something beyond, if even merely mentally--although if you go wandering around some areas and spaces like we're talking about, it can genuinely feel like you enter another realm, another time, another real...

To the point about the internet: YES. Marshall McLuhan has this idea that each new technology obsolesces the thing that it replaces, and also retrieves some already long-obsolesced technology or form of content. So, for instance, literature became the content of movies, movies became the content of TV, and if we bend McLuhan's mid-century (60s/70s) commentary to our time, pretty much--well, everything has become the content of the internet. But what I'm getting at, in relation to your astute speculation re liminality and the web, is that it's as if the more that we obsolesce three-dimensional space (through the internet, faster travel, urban planning, environmental destruction etc.), we develop a greater deal of nostalgia and investment in it as an almost alien or exotic object. Hence why, if we accept that liminal space is all about the intensity and, like, sheer fucking Thereness of the physical, a preoccupation with physical space has become a specific obsessive tendency in this very much not physical realm of reality (the internet). 

OR, additionally, it is as if the allure of the true liminal space has always been there, and in this unconsciously driven way, that has ended up showing up in the architecture/organization/visual/psychogeographical structure of the internet. And that shit I really like. The ways in which ancient elementalities resurface and remanifest in futuristic contexts. 

And just, to your last point, I've theorized before that the effect of dystopian/'urban hell' landscapes (and also 'night walk' pics) is a cathartic and possibly even emancipatory impulse to render the places in which people typically feel so repressed, oppressed, and helpless as something not just aesthetically pleasing (sort of like traumacore), but also...idk, I think a lot about time and temporality in relation to this shit, how some spaces can fuck with your sense of time, or seem in photos like they could really warp or fuck with time profoundly (like a house in which time runs slower than the outside) and so I feel like there's some sense of solace or catharsis in seeing our world abandoned, not even so much in the cold-take doomer sense of waiting for it to be over and misanthropy, but more like the idea that seeing a world without us is a potential deconditioner to envision our relation to society and each other and the planet differently and thusly act differently, idk. It's not so much extinction we're seeing in abandoned dystopic contexts, or that they're dystopic because they're abandoned, per se, but more so that they're pre-arrival, like waiting for us to arrive and do something differently, experience them less violently, under less control. Like how some spaces have that sense that they were just ~waiting~ for you to find them/see them/etc.

Other relevant media: the great short story "Windeye" by Brian Evenson, involving a house that has a window that can be seen from the outside but not from the inside: https://pen.org/windeye/

And Mark K. Danielewski's House of Leaves, the classic cult novel revolving around a house whose interior measurements no longer match those of its apparent outside scale: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2480..._of_Leaves (haven't finished it ever but do recommend to everyone as one of the most unsettling things you will probably ever read)
 
Reply
#7
The openess the internet creates within people is something I have always found strange ever since I was first exposed to social media platforms. For example, many people I follow use their accounts to post about family deaths or other deeply personal/familial issues. In the real world, most people would not openly mourn to a group of strangers you hardly know, but the comfort and perceived anonymity of the internet gives these people solace. I don't hold any judgement to people who are so open to strangers on the internet- to each their own- but I don't understand how people can be so open online to some people they have never met or gauged in real life. Odd.
 
Reply
#8
(04-13-2021, 06:15 PM)duncellc Wrote: The openess the internet creates within people is something I have always found strange ever since I was first exposed to social media platforms. For example, many people I follow use their accounts to post about family deaths or other deeply personal/familial issues. In the real world, most people would not openly mourn to a group of strangers  you hardly know, but the comfort and perceived anonymity of the internet gives these people solace. I don't hold any judgement to people who are so open to strangers on the internet- to each their own- but I don't understand how people can be so open online to some people they have never met or gauged in real life. Odd.

Isn't this the oddest paradox? That platform which is, on one level, increasingly the most visible and circulatory thing in the developed world is seen as more intimate and private than your own household, bedroom, maybe even your own head. Let's take it even to that extreme: how many people post things to potentially dozens, hundreds, thousands of witnesses that they otherwise wouldn't admit to themselves? 

On some level, it's as if we haven't fully accepted how consequentially 'real' the internet is, how rife with actual resonance it really is. Of course, we often realize this in pieces--that uncanny cause and effect between what we do in this weird feverscape and how it affects all other offline realms of life--and then this feeds back into what we do online. 

But yeah, I wonder if our willingness to divulge our deepest reaches of conscious being to not merely the public, but on a far less popularly-aware level, to data-mining megacorps and predatory third parties, stems from that sense that the Online space is taking place in our heads, within ourselves, and so of course it must be safe. Sort of like if you did DMT and expected the machine elves to politely keep your secrets, maybe even from you, along with those of the cosmos, beyond whatever glimpse you get, because they were confined to only your head anyway. But the web is then like waking up the next day only to realize that everyone else who did DMT that night also saw your shamefullest shortcoming grafitti'd everywhere in city squares across the globe, skywritten, broadcasted on car radios, etc. I don't think people even wholly understand so much of what or why they do online what they do and say and share online. We're just tweaking, tripping so much of the time.
1
1
 
Reply
  


Forum Jump:


Browsing: 1 Guest(s)