#2 The Digital Eerie
Or why my dead dad still has an Instagram account (5 minute read)
Last issue we explored the manner in which our current AI moment is rooted in the uncanny. Which got me thinking: isn’t the Internet in its entirety a place where the eerie is part of the furniture?
If we take Fisher’s idea that the uncanny (and the eerie in particular) has its roots in our sense of something where there should be nothing or nothing where there should be something we can see how it explains why things such as stone circles and abandoned villages generate unease.
In both cases, the eerie is caused by the fact that while we know these places once had meaning (or meanings), the information that once produced those meanings is now absent.
Nuffink where there should be somefing
(or the internet never forgets, but sometimes it goes into a room and can’t remember exactly why it’s there.)
It seems to me that we can apply this model to the online world, since far from being some sort of permanent record, the internet is in a constant state of making and unmaking. Information is in flux, being stored, deleted, mislabeled or lost. This kind of bitrot makes dead sites and digital ruins inevitable, creating a breeding ground for what we could call the digital eerie.
This nothing-where-there-should-be-something unknowability is also at the heart of our ambiguous relationship with the algorithms of Tik-Tok, Instagram or Spotify. We know there is no-one on the other end of the line, so how is it that these modern day votive gods seem to know us better than we know ourselves?
Something were there there should be nothing
On the other side of this equation, we see social media accounts that outlive their owners occasionally burping random content. My dad has haunted me for years now, begging me to follow him on Instagram even though he died before the pandemic and Services like Replika have their roots in using LLMs to resurrect deceased loved ones via their old text messages.
This aspect of the digital eerie is also embedded into the way the online world renders the past into an eternally glitched-up now. Witness how every creepy kids TV programme you ever watched through your fingers is now available online indefinitely. (Watch these at your own risk: Paulus the Woodgnome & the eldritch horror that is HR Pufnstuf).
Google Earth anomalies, such as the graveyard of missiles and aeroplanes in the Tucson Boneyard, the floating forest inhabiting the wreck of the SS Ayerfield and zombie MMO servers such as EverQuest and Anarchy Online all suggest presences that have faded but never fully walked into the light.
Sometimes, it’s hard not to feel as though our cultural present is trapped orbiting a decaying singularity composed of everything that has ever come before. I’m not shaking my fist at the moon or claiming that there is nothing new under the sun, but it’s hard not to see a connection between this fracturing of time and Derrida’s idea of Hauntology. It feels very much as though our culture and politics have become addicted to a nostalgia for the futures we might have had. (The clearest expression of this in the UK is probably Brexit, but let’s not open that jumbo-sized can o’ worms just yet.)
These ghosts of a future that never materialised haunt today’s digital landscape perhaps more than any other. Web 1.0’s promise was of a decentralised, utopian world offering open-sourced knowledge, re-enforced democracy and flattened power structures. What we got instead was monopolies, surveillance capitalism and algorithmic overlords.
The Digital Eerie and Liminal Horror
But maybe the digital eerie isn’t just a symptom of that failure, rather it’s the flip side of those utopian fever dreams. If hauntology traps us in an endless cycle of nostalgic recursion, looping lost futures like an unspooling C90 cassette, then the digital eerie hints at something else: the emergence of new ghosts.
The weirder aspects of internet culture, such as crowd-sourced horror and creepypasta are generating memes like the Slender-Man which have real-world consequences in an almost púca like way. It seems as though if enough people invoke these concepts then we call them into existence.
This uneasy sense of an essentially hostile and unknowable digital space is writ large in content such as the backrooms and the vogue for liminal-space horror. Anyone who’s spent time in an anonymous hotel corridor with Lynchian air con will appreciate the genre. It's the same unease that makes Apple TV’s Severance so unsettling: spaces that should be functional but feel deeply, existentially wrong.
These new myths aren’t just echoes of the past, but are manifestations of a digital world that is birthing its own hauntings, generating presences that never existed but which feel real. It’s a new type of folklore, woven from the anxieties of an age where time has flattened, data lingers, and presence itself feels unstable.
The digital eerie isn’t just a glitch. It’s the system working as designed. The same internet that promised us a utopia of knowledge has given us instead something far stranger: a liminal space where the past won’t die, the future won’t arrive, and where we can’t quite trust what’s real.
Questions for this issue
We covered a lot of ground this issue, but I’d be interested in your (least) favourite liminal spaces or examples of the digital eerie that you want to share. Yes, I do hate hotel corridors, but that might just be too much exposure to Kubrick’s The Shining at an impressionable age. Just reply to this email or hit reply in app.
Something that unnerves me about Facebook Accounts of the Dead*: when some old acquaintance, prompted by a birthday notification, posts on their wall asking how they’re doing, years after they died. Did they not know, or is this the digital equivalent to chatting to someone at their grave?
(*#NameofMyNewSubstack?)
Your dad’s Instagram haunting you is a good example of how tech turns mourning into an endless loop.
I actually have an app concept that would make this phenomenon positive instead of negative.
I shared a very short story I wrote whose plot focuses on the app concept in your inbox. When you have time, please check it out.