“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”
― Lewis Carroll
FIRST, A FAIRYTALE
Once upon a time, a magic portal opened up in the world. At first, the portal, though curious, was small and difficult to enter — there were a good number of people who had no interest in it at all — but over just a few short years, it evolved. In no time, young girls and boys in small towns across America were visiting the portal to be transported to the vast and varied new landscape that lay beyond.
Through the portal were other people, like the boys and girls, but different, because they came from strange lands, across wide impassable seas (and to these strangers, the little American boys and girls were equally as bizarre and intriguing). Time worked differently through the portal — whole cities and domains could rise and fall in just a few short minutes; word traveled just as quickly as the boys and girls could form a thought.
Through the portal was every kind of creature the boys and girls could imagine, and more than they could imagine. There were animals that played piano, babies that did mathematics and sung in deep vibrato, teenagers that stayed young and cool forever, ancient wisened elders who shared all the knowledge, mysteries, and secrets they’d collected over their lives, and did so free of charge. There was an endless array of stories in the portal, some that were familiar to the girls and boys, others that were new and enchanting because they represented previously impossible realities.
There were dark, dark dangerous woods through the portal, too. But even peering into these woods was a thrill to the boys and girls, many of whom had limited experience with suffering or terror. Anyway, there was no real danger for those smart boys and girls who stayed on the path — who agreed just to look and to never try and bring a creature from that world into the real one.
Nothing, through the portal, was “real,” though the longer the boys and girls stayed on the other side, the more often they visited, the blurrier the lines became between what was real and what was not. And if the real world started to become more than a little affected by what was going on through the portal? Maybe that was not such a bad thing. After all, the world through the portal was, it seemed, a reflection of what the world outside the portal could be, if only we humans were more magically inclined; if only we opened up our imaginations, destroyed our borders, and freed ourselves from our physical, linguistic, and spiritual limitations.
But as the boys and girls grew up, the land beyond the portal started to change. A snake had slithered into their Eden. The land that had once enchanted them started to look not like a more enlightened reflection of the real world, but a darker one. Walking through the portal, which the boys and girls — now men and women — had become accustomed to doing regularly, started to feel like a toxic, even frightening, experience. When they weren’t over there, they wanted to be, yet when they were over there, they longed to leave. Everything that they had so disdained about the real world — greed, avarice, violence — was now replicated, even magnified, in the land beyond.
How had it happened, some of them wondered — how had they let the fantastic promise of their magic kingdom turn to shadow and mirage? But it was too late to go back. The portal had become so so all-consuming, it was impossible to tell where its barriers ended and the real world began. Even the sky and the clouds that hung in it had begun to quiver at the edges. There were witch-burnings on either side of the portal daily; it was the only solution they could come up with to deal with the new challenges presented by the high drama of the thaumaturgical clash. And for every grown-up boy and girl who now questioned the necessity of the portal-world, there were 1,000 new boys and girls who could not remember a time without the portal; whose very thoughts and feelings were shaped by its existence. The portal had once taught the boys and girls the very concept of happily every after, but now it seemed that there was no “ever after.” There was only portal, forever, all the way down.
The timeline of my life — like any late 20-something — is in almost perfect alignment with the timeline of the internet. The World Wide Web went public in 1993, I was born two short years later, and not long after the turn of the millennium, I was pretending to be Emma Watson in online forums and dressing up my Stardolls in gaudy pixelated clothing. By the time MySpace came around, I was primed and ready to start uploading top-down, over-exposed selfies with my tongue out and posting inane messages on my Friends’ cyber walls. Not a thought passed through the membrane of my little unformed cerebrum that the remnant 1s and 0s of those missives could potentially stick around for longer than I had eyes to read them. AOL Instant Messenger, likewise, trained my dumb pubescent encephalon to perk up at the sound of a digital door creaking open, the little notification alerting me that someone was reaching out across the digital ether to say ‘asl?’
I was an only child living in rural Pennsylvania; the internet was like a living, breathing nexus of connection and possibility. (Someone should have got me a puppy). Still, there were limitations. I didn’t really have a computer of my own, dial-up was inefficient, and my sweet naive pea-brain wasn’t yet trained to think that being online 18 hours a day was a rational way to live one’s life. Oh, but the internet grew, and so did I. We grew together! The internet was a fence becoming more expansive and more intricate every day, and I was the morning glory trellising along it. Or something.
There was the early Facebook interface, where one could poke and be poked. I remember Kony2012 like a fever dream. I’ve written briefly about the enchantment of Omegle and the era of randomized webcam interactions. But nothing had an effect on me (this should come as a surprise to no one who knew me then) quite like Tumblr. In some ways, blogs — moreso than Facebook or MySpace — were the real precursors to how we now use social media. This is especially true of Tumblr, a constantly updating feed of disparate images and messages, mainly posted by strangers (it was standard operating procedure not to share your Tumblr username with anyone IRL, except maybe your closest, coolest, most aesthetically aligned friends).
I was on Tumblr nearly every week night in my teenagehood, listening to emo-pop, scrolling through images of other teenagers in other bedrooms papered with posters, ensconced by twinkling strands of white Christmas lights. It must be admitted, I — and those aforementioned closest friends — modeled our looks on the way Tumblr’s cool girls were dressing: oversized sweaters, razor-cut bangs, jewelry made of hemp, stacks of bracelets running up our wrists.
In addition to my personal Tumblr, I had a second blog dedicated to collecting amazing photos from around the globe; places I presumed I would go when I one day escaped my teenage bedroom (where I now had my own laptop and reliable broadband internet). I was taking in the world not through experiences or education, per se, but through images — an unrelenting barrage of images, some curated by me, some put together by others, all a delight to my senses in the way no real-life small-town Pennsylvanian experience could possibly compete (someone get Walter Benjamin on the horn!). On Tumblr, I learned to engage not just with the world of people I knew or knew of, but with The World writ large. Though it was not actually the world — it was a curated world, viewed through the filtered lens of the blogosphere, where aesthetic ruled everything and context meant virtually nothing.
I’m old enough and secure enough to admit that parts of the way I live my life today must have been determined by those formative moments in my own little corner of the blogosphere (what I’m doing right now may be case in point) — and I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing. I discovered poetry on Tumblr — not the Robert Frost plums-in-the-icebox variety, but the sappy, experimental, teenage stream of consciousness that would later morph into Button Poetry and foster fans of a whole generation of poets the likes of Hanif Abduraqqib and Mary Oliver. Some of what we were sharing there was really, really bad; some of it was truly, genuinely good. All of it was fresh and new and interesting (to me). The anonymous allure of the internet allowed a girl desperately afraid of having feelings in public, to feel online. I even started writing my own bad poems on Tumblr, some of which got a little attention. It was probably that encouragement that emboldened me, when I got to college, to form a poetry group of my own.
The internet is not just a medium that exists alongside my modern life; it has shaped my life, most poignantly in the years when I was particularly susceptible to influence.
That may be why, on a recent re-watch of the 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, as a group of Swedish women surrounded the bent-over and wailing protagonist, Dani, mimicking her grief and rage in a cacophony of echoey, mournful screams, I was thinking this is a lot like the internet.
Midsommar writer and director Ari Aster has said that he wanted the film to function like a fairytale. In keeping with this mission, the opening sequence features shots of a folksy embroidered tapestry, detailing key plot points in the story to come, which is as follows: A young woman named Dani, whose entire family has recently died, follows her lackluster boyfriend and his grad school friends on a part-pleasure, part-anthropological trip to a Swedish commune run by a people called the Hårga to bear witness to their nine-day ritualistic midsummer festival.
Dani arrives in Sweden a mess of grief. She can barely keep it together through the plane ride, where she has a jarringly relatable panic attack in the bathroom. Her boyfriend lacks the emotional depth — or tools, or desire — to see her through an unimaginably difficult time. She is, in a phrase, susceptible to influence.
The Hårga’s grassy, ethereal commune at first seems like a beautiful place, full of people who share with each other, support each other, never take more than they give, are connected to nature, and dress like de-saturated DÔEN models. Other than the obvious homogeneity, we think this might just be the right way to live. There are warning signs, of course, that it’s not quite perfect, namely that pesky double suicide, but even that can be understood as a kind of beautiful, unselfish way of living in community.
The visiting Americans’ varied reactions to this out-of-the-blue streak of violence mimics the way we seem to react to violence online. Some of the more well-adjusted visitors, like the couple who attempt to stop the elders from throwing themselves off a cliff, are understandably mortified. Some — like the two student anthropologists — are content to watch and study it; are perhaps unnervingly neutralized to the violence, even excited by it. And some people, like Dani, recognize something in it.
So many of us arrived on the internet not necessarily broken by grief, but unformed, in the process of development, in the throes of self-pitying teenagedom. The internet was a fairytale we were happy to step into, because we are humans, and because it feels good to be in community with other humans. It feels especially good in a world that feels like it is — ironically, in some ways thanks to the way the internet reflects reality — careening toward chaos.
It’s not natural to bear heavy emotional loads alone — the Hårga have that right. They have many things “right,” as it were. We would do well to connect more with nature, with each other, with the food we eat and the way our friends and loved ones are feeling. Connection was, after all, the great promise of the internet, and continues to be the promise of web 4.0; that it will connect us in ways we never were connected before. It has done that, and surely will continue to.
But the machine is now past its fairytale prime, and is instead a conveyor belt that never stops revolving. (Remember that Alice had to keep drinking poison to get herself small enough to fit in Wonderland). As soon as we’ve identified with an opinion, an emotion, an aesthetic, the algorithm kicks works to make it our entire experience. Expressing a strong opinion and getting attention can feel a lot like dry-heaving alongside all seventeen female members of your new overly attentive family. The louder you scream, the louder they scream. The bigger you smile, the bigger they smile. The more you feel, the more they feel.
The internet of 2024 looks like a sleeker version of the internet of my youth, but it is not the same place. On this internet, the magic is like poor frail Twinkerbell flailing to flap her threadbare wings under the weight of disbelief. Finding new pocket-communities to crawl into and get lost in takes time and effort — too many corporations and profiteers have mastered Search Engine Optimization, sucking all the wonder and spontaneity out of the experience of surfing the web (what now seems a quaint term). Surfing this internet no longer feels like exploring laterally across a vast and varied landscape but like diving deeper and deeper into a cave, encountering increasingly more warped versions of what you first found at its surface. (There are exceptions, and I thank the Wikipedia mods and the Craigslist admins every day for their contributions to our species).
A feeling you express on this internet, even if you eventually, inevitably grow beyond it, never stops expressing you. Raw, unfiltered thoughts have the potential to echo forever down here. You can’t really change on this internet; you can only accumulate.
It is that thought that has made me feel, lately, lost in the machine. I told a friend the anxiety I’m feeling is not that I want to die, but that I want to de-pixelate. It is a sign of a modern life well-lived to have a Google trail miles-long. For someone who is neither famous nor well-regarded in any particular industry, mine is pretty sufficient — how could it not be, when I have been trekking this digital landscape since I learned to identify my own thumbs? Sometimes I can feel the weight of my old social profiles and scattered bylines pulling on my ankles, an invisible tether to all the versions of myself I’m no longer interested in being.
On this internet, it is easy to get cordoned off into siloed communities where we take in only messages that resonate with us and form ready defenses against any infiltration by messages that don’t. Sheltered against the naysayers, we are free to add onto our pre-approved ideas, build on them and remake the world in their image, until the things we are saying become blown-up parody versions of what we originally meant. There is a lot of collective screaming and dry-heaving on this internet; I struggle to remember the sense of joyful wonder that first sent me tumbling (pun intended) into its recesses.
“When we spend hours each day in a digital environment, we aren’t just exposing ourselves to a shallow way of using our cognitive abilities,” write Ruth Gaskovski and Peco, of the Substack Pilgrims in the Machine. “We are training ourselves in shallow cognition.”
Online communities that inspire the most virulently hateful conspiratorial garbage are participatory and engaging; members feel not like they are watching or learning but like they are actively participating. This is true on “both sides of the aisle,” but it’s easiest to see in conspiratorial communities like QAnon, which began as a game — a kind of true crime investigation encouraging participants to follow the breadcrumbs left by a mysterious figurehead who claimed to be plugged into the dark underworld of American politics. Who didn’t want to figure out who Q was? At some point, the game is not a game. You may find yourself getting drummed up into a state of real action, making real life choices, like okaying your boyfriend’s immolation, or bursting into a pizza parlor with an AR-15.
The longer Dani spends in Hälsingland, the more she is invited to participate —in cooking, in rituals, in drinking the special tea, until she is finally crowned the “May Queen,” which is to say: she stays in the game until she wins. One by one, the Americans die off. It is Dani, swept up by her new family, with nothing to lose, who thrives. By the film’s end, she is no longer a visitor to the strange Nordic village, but its most special, important member — its Main Character, if you will. For a lonely person, misunderstood and mistreated by a partner who is supposed to be her emotional support, this kind of radical integration into a ready-made community would be nearly impossible to decline.
“This is a fairy tale, and [the Hårga] really are exactly what Dani needs,” Ari Aster said in an interview with Vox. “For better or worse, this is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. This is truly a spoiler, but: We begin as Dani loses a family, and we end as Dani gains one. And so, for better or worse, they are there to provide exactly what she is lacking, and exactly what she needs, in true fairy tale fashion.”
Of course, it is the grim (Grimm?) reality of a fairy tale that being given exactly what you wish for never ends quite as happily ever after as you might imagine. A pivotal turning point in Dani’s experience in Sweden comes when her Hårga friend Pelle asks her if she “feels held” by her boyfriend; if he feels like home to her. She does not have to respond, we already know the answer. She is clearly not held; she clearly needs to be held. It is this realization that leads to her violent vengeance at the film’s end.
A person held too tightly — whose most intense emotions are supported too enthusiastically — loses the ability to move beyond their emotions. A person held too tightly must be held forever, lest they topple over on weakened legs. How multifunctional the verb “to hold” is — there’s such a meaningful difference between held, held up, held down, and held together.
If the ending of Midsommar is meant to be happy, as Aster and others have suggested, I struggle to see how it could continue “ever after” (notably, there are still a few days left of the festival at the film’s end). All I see is a tale of caution — what happens when you allow yourself to go tumbling too far into Wonderland. From down there, everything in the real world is just a shadow on the wall.
Maybe it strikes you as strange that I think a community of people who live without technology, in communal harmony with nature, bear any resemblance to the wild wild web. Maybe you still think the Hårga are perfect, and it’s the Americans who are whack (by the way, I think both, in this telling, are pretty whack).
I argue that a “perfect” community, if such a thing could exist, is not a frictionless wonderland. A perfect community is full of contradictions. In such a truly idyllic commune, people do not just agree with each other because they are all the same and share the same traditions, interests, beliefs, and ways of living, rather, they understand disagreement — even discord — to be as natural as the seasons of life. In this society, groupthink is not a pinnacle to which the collective aspires but a threat it guards against. In this society, grief is normal, collective processing is normal, but so is the necessary limit to that processing — the point at which you do not get to blindly retaliate, but you learn to accept, forgive, move on; the point at which someone is allowed to rehabilitate, to grow from their error, to therapize.
There is no “winner” in a truly “perfect” society; there is no retribution in the form of burning boyfriend in a bear suit. There is discovery, curiosity, inspiration. What were we trying to do, when we built the internet, if not build a new society — a society something like this one? And, by the way, is it too late to try again? 🪱
Related Reads
“The internet arrived as a clear savior for the cause of the individual… But it didn’t work.”- Against Branding (and Sarah Fay) by Sam Kahn
“Getting Out of the Fishbowl: The Unmachining Self-Assessment,” by Pilgrims in the Machine