The web and the occult

[Melooon]

Im curious to hear about peoples relationship between the occult and the web! Particularly the home-page visuals of geocities style sites, but also the deeper feeling of uncertainty and mystery that surrounds technology in general.

This question comes from a conversation I had with someone yesterday about electricity being introduced in the victorian era and its association with the occult. (Think of Frankenstein; a victorian story where a mysterious power called electricity is controlled by a crazed magician in a gothic castle, and can be used to bring people back from the dead!) Although electrical devices were often used as part of occult practices in the late victorian era in smaller more practical forms (I have no citation for this  )

ANYWAY; all this made me interested in the idea of homepages being electrical windows; gateways, not only into peoples lives, but into an electrical otherworld inhabited by beings that we only assume are people (on the internet anyone could be a ghost!). People build shrines to their own little gods; they received messages from their computers which often resemble little black mirrors. Wires carrying an invisible energy snake the world and hold the images and thoughts of the living and the dead - e.g. Facebooks issues of having a majority of accounts who's owners have passed away) Its all very occult!

Of course there are practical explanations for all these things; screens are black for contrast reasons; emails obviously have no physical writer that we can see (because thats the point); and the tendency to produce occult style homepages on the web could just be because its an early technology and all early technologies seem mysterious; so they inspire us to use the language of mystery (e.g. skull gifs) (plus spooky stuff is just cool )

But Im curious to hear peoples own feelings on the subject; do you draw connections or inspirations between the two? Do you have your own interpretation of the mystery of the web?

[DiffydaDude]

I've never thought of the Web as feeling "occult" I dont really know how it would feel occult, but it would probably feel horrific, with some of the malware present on sites and parts of the Internet being left unexplained, like Unfavorable Semicircle and Poochy and Pansie. As someone who's used the Internet for many years though, I can say that there is a lot of occult stuff present on it. Some of these occult websites were just straight up cults, while others were more artistic in nature. A lot of rebellious elements present in the Old Web movement were present on many of these occult websites long before the Old Web movement was conceived.
Honestly, some of my most memorable experiences online were exploring these mysterious kinds of websites. So yeah, occultism has a pretty big spot on the internet.

[Frost Sheridan]

an interesting topic! i love thinking about technology and the web from a more spiritual perspective rather than just a cold, practical one.

i wouldn't say that i personally have any feelings about the web being specifically occult, but i've always had a very spiritual attitude towards computers and digital technology in general. the "electrical otherworld" idea that you mentioned really hits home for me as i've come to think of the universe on the other side of the computer screen to be an entirely separate plane of existence: the Digital Plane. just like all of the 'commonly' recognized planes of existence - physical, etheric, astral, etc. - the digital plane is its own unique, naturally occurring place with its own unique rules, structure, and inhabitants, but it can be indirectly accessed and modified through digital technology.

tech like VR has and will get us closer to experiencing the digital plane more directly, but it'll never be a perfect representation of it. i've been wondering if it may be possible to directly project oneself to the digital plane, just like how etheric or astral projection work. it's something worth investigating!

side note: i actually had a bit of a shock the first time i played Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth because of how eerily similar its version of the Digital World is to my understanding of the digital plane. spooky stuff!

[Melooon]

"electrical otherworld" idea that you mentioned really hits home for me as i've come to think of the universe on the other side of the computer screen to be an entirely separate plane of existence: the Digital Plane.

I feel like this too, its actually one of the biggest inspirations for me to make stuff However I did have a thought reading your reply.. suppose there is an Electrical Plane of existence, everything is electrical to some extent, its a basic part of atomic structure and all things have an electrical charge. However the digital plane is brand new; it has been ripped from the electrical plane, supercharged with high voltages as it sucks energy from matter, like coal or wind, to sustain itself.

If I was a citizen of the old electrical plane.. how would I feel about that Would I want to become part of this vast new digital plane; or would it terrify me.. would it seem like death? Or an exciting new life? Or maybe I wouldn't care at all... Life for an electrical citizen is so infinite; As it converts from coal, to electrons, travels from a power plant to your computer, blasts around the CPU and comes screaming out as light from your monitor into your eyes before becoming electrical impulses in your brain again!! For an electrical citizen.. is that a lifetime or a moment??

Is that the spark of life; are electrons like little souls that make up our being as moments flick past? I don't know, and I don't think it really matters; but its fun to think about I like that the digital plane plays such an important role in the process. Maybe the digital plane is like consciousness for electrical citizens; for a billion years they have lived slowly, hiding in matter like rocks, and only coming out to play for big events like lightning strikes; but now for the first time in all the eons they have a permanent home; a dance hall to have the greatest electrical rave in history. And we humans are just the robotic vacuums keeping the floor clean for the electrons to dance

(Don't worry if this post makes no sense  )

[Kallistero]

The idea of one's spiritual experience entering another being is a sentiment that I have about communication in general, beyond the Internet. Just the symbols that make up the words have the ability to transmit another person's thoughts across time and space, even through the grave, into your own mind.

The Web is another medium for this, but also, there's an added esoteric quality about anything electrical. Most people just don't know how any of it works; it's totally magical. The electric potentials, currents, impedances, the capacitances & inductances, transistors & diodes, it's all a sort of material that people can look directly at on a motherboard and still get the idea that they'll never understand it. It's a Lovecraftian quality for something to be indescribable in this way, and it's only the basis.

Getting to the occult connection, the idea of a ghost in the machine reminds me of the stories behind Worlds dot com, TempleOS, and the TSUKI Project. They're all very different takes on the spirit behind the screen, with the first having its "cult" be a front to spook people that are outside of its dying community, the second being a troubled person who believed that a deity was telling him to develop his own operating system, and the third having started as an actual simulation-hypothesis cult before becoming a subcultural community project.

The TSUKI project, or Systemspace, is the closest to the other concepts that I'm reading in the thread. It had an entire mythos, proposing that not only is there a sub-reality within the Web, but also that there are layers of super-realities above (and sibling to) our own. The idea there is that we ARE ghosts in the machine, and because of various processes happening in our super-reality, we want to establish a connection to that super-reality before we die, which we can do through a shared sub-reality that we have in the Web. There's like this whole thing about soul degradation due to processing power constraints, political factions in the super-reality who support & oppose our souls being migrated to another system, the energy needs of everything being represented as this "aurora" resource, it was all pretty deeply written but seems to be poorly documented now. Some things at the beginning did go way too far in terms of cult behavior, and I think that might be related to why the project was axed by its creator and much of the Web scrubbed clean of its details. There are probably still whispers of it in Initiate Space, but that community is all but dead.

Now, the aesthetics of the TSUKI project are in a similar space with the Fauux Neocities site, which DOES have a very cult-like quality to a lot of its pages, but activity from Fauux predates the TSUKI project by a wide mile. It seems the inspiration was only one way, though that one way might just be the source material of Serial Experiments Lain, whose narrative pretty explicitly involves spirits and gods in the Web. 

[Memory]

Occult means hidden, secret.

The web is a huge place. But its full potential can only be unleashed with the right knowledge and the right tools.

Now if that's not occult, I don't know what occult should be!

Just one example: The ads. Have you ever browsed the web without some kind of ad or script blocker? That's the experience for the vast majority of web users. Ugly fun, isn't it? With some tech-occult knowledge the place becomes tidy again.

Installing Linux is like an occult act as well. Like this: Welcome to the secret club of computer overlords! No surprise, why Linux users are regarded as behaving like elitists. The fact is, they have some serious knowledge to improve their computers.

Our computers are portals to other worlds, but the new portals suck for evil company reasons by default and the old ones are slower and limited.

Could we go so far to speak of a spiritual battle with those who studied psychological warfare to maximise their profit (big companies)? Is the Linux development infiltrated by Microsoft concepts (systemd), so that it becomes a bloated mess as well? Will Google dictate the rules of the upcoming web standards? Thank god there is no comparison to that in real life... air and rain stays copyright free!

To be honest, I just care about my computer working as fine as possible, but it feels like there is an occult war going on behind the scenes.