CRACKPOTS #44: INTERNET GOTHIC

Greeting,

This week’s newsletter comes from MAX READ, frequent guest of TrueAnon and creator of the allegedly extremely popular READMAX substack (just playing, I’m a longtime subscriber). You can listen to our episodes with Max here, here, here and here (WOW FOUR TIMES a lady).

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The days are getting shorter and the shadows longer, and I've been thinking about horror stories. 

For most of its existence the dominant source of metaphor and sensibility when talking about Silicon Valley has been science fiction, for obvious reasons. The stories tech tells about itself are usually sci-fi stories, and the stories we (journalists, consumers, day-traders) tell ourselves and each other about tech are usually sci-fi stories. The ideas, structures, and images we use to think about Silicon Valley are almost all borrowed directly from the 200-year tradition of sci-fi; even when criticizing the tech industry we tend to resort to science-fictional formulations like "dystopian," or, if it's really depressing but also kind of cool, "cyberpunk."

But over the last half-decade or so, it's hard not to notice the extent to which horror fiction has begun to creep in as a paradigm for thinking and talking about tech. To some extent this is a sort of self-explanatory shift: As the truly transformational possibilities afforded by Silicon Valley seem increasingly out of reach, we stop looking for futuristic imagery to describe its effects and rely instead on metaphors and ideas that reflect psychic and physical distress.

But what seems particularly noteworthy is that the increasing use of horror-fiction imagery is also happening within the tech industry itself. Take, e.g., the metaphor for large language models most preferred by A.I. enthusiasts: Not the genial, altruistic Minds of Iain M. Banks' utopian-socialist Culture series, nor even the evil supercomputer Hal-9000 from 2001, but the pus-filled, gelatinous shoggoths from H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. (Please do not tell me that Mountains of Madness is "actually" "technically" science fiction. Not interested.)

There are good reasons to use the Lovecraftian cosmic-horror mode rather than the utopian hard sci-fi mode of Asimov or Banks when talking about LLMs specifically; they really are eldritch, ghastly, uncanny. And as much as the cutesy tentacled illustrations that recently blanketed Twitter annoy me—[Comic Book Guy voice] Lovecraft describes the shoggoth as "a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming" with "pustules of greenish light all over," and never once mentions tentacles—the book-accurate shoggoth is a decent way to conceive of LLMs: Powerful, unsettling, but not truly conscious. (It also makes for a good cautionary tale: The Old Ones created the shoggoths to serve them as beasts of burden, but became too reliant on them.) 

But accurate or not, "cosmic horror" is a revealing library from which to borrow metaphors to describe your products, given that it jettisons even the awe-inspiring technological development that often characterizes dystopian sci-fi. (At least if you live in the Sprawl it looks kinda cool and there's still internet. Imagine trying to get Fios in the Mountains of Madness!!) The most you can say for it is that it's reflective of the tech industry's current mood: Cutely self-aggrandizing and proudly unsettling.

If "cosmic horror" is the model for how an industry looking forward to A.I. imagines itself, how do we imagine Silicon Valley ourselves? A few years ago, writing about Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, the novelist Brandon Taylor argued that "internet novels" should be understood as Gothic novels. "In the view of the Internet Novel, the internet is a corrupting force, persuasive and totalizing in its effects," Taylor writes. "The Internet Novel captures some of the weird Gothic horror that white people have come, by way of their new digital Calvinism, to accept as being inherent to digital life."

I'm not sure I follow the exact contours of Taylor's argument in his essay, and he doesn't precisely endorse the "Gothic" idea of the internet. But I think he's exactly right to identify a particular tone of internet writing as effectively "Gothic," understood not so much a specific historical genre with recognizable tropes (crypts, veils, Italian aristocrats, evil friars, etc.) and more as a set of concerns, or an aesthetic, or even, really, a vibe of "hauntedness"—dread, decay, rot, claustrophobia, suspicion, paranoia. 

I see this not just in realist novels, either: Tech journalism increasingly treats "the internet" the same way, as a kind of corrupting miasma, an ongoing "Masque of Red Death" party. One of the most influential and widely read pieces of writing about tech over the last decade is the artist James Bridle's "Something is wrong on the internet," a supremely chilling piece of Gothic nonfiction about the then-inescapable "Elsagate" videos on YouTube, which unavoidably mimics the tone and approach of a good horror story:

Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I’ve seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.

To begin: Kid’s YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I’ve been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That’s it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them.

I know too well myself how appealing to readers the Internet Gothic sensibility can be; one of the most popular pieces I've ever written was a New York magazine column called "How Much of the Internet is Fake?," which formed one building block of the truly Gothic folk belief "Dead Internet Theory." How many threads, Substacks, articles about the internet have you read over the last few years that attempt to generate the same (Gothic) feeling of dread?

In general this is understandable. For most of us the Gothic sensibility better reflects our relationship to the internet than the science-fictional sensibility; when I spend time online I feel more like I'm in the Castle of Otranto or Udolpho than jacked in to Gibsonian cyberspace, let alone on a General Systems Vehicle. But I still feel somewhat ambivalent about the rise of Internet Gothic. It's not just that, as Taylor suggests, the Gothic idea of the internet is at least somewhat racialized and age-bound, the domain of white creative-professional millennials mourning an earlier internet. ("The Gothic" is kind of always a racialized sensibility anyway, especially if you think of "Catholic" or "Latin" as a race.) It's that Internet Gothic is a mode that feels designed to titillate and provoke rather than to explain or enlighten. 

In this it takes after its predecessors: The immediate appeal of the original 18th-century Gothic novel, as Jane Austen puts it in her loving Gothic-novel parody Northanger Abbey, was "the luxury of a raised, restless, and frightened imagination": For the hour Catherine Morland reads The Mysteries of Udolpho she is "lost from all worldly concerns of dressing and dinner." So too can you read a long thread about "dead internet theory" or "Elsagate" and allow yourself the small pleasure of goosebumps, the sense of having your own assumptions about the internet confirmed, and a brief escape from the immediate problems of your life.

But even as it more accurately articulates the affective experience of online, Internet Gothic mystifies the internet, transforms it into a crumbling, corrupting crypt instead of an technology and institution and network like any other, the product of observable social, economic, and cultural forces. This, I think, is where the miasmic horror of Internet Gothic meets the eldritch horror of LLM shoggoths. Whatever you can say about science fiction, as a genre is it premised on the idea of the possible, the plausible, the knowable, the scientific. Horror, on the other hand, draws on the unknowable, the uncontrollable, the impossible to understand. If the tech industry is leaning on the latter paradigm for its metaphors and self-conceptions—and if we too find ourselves regarding it as hidden, veiled, unmanageable, inexplicable—we're in trouble.

Four horrid books

In one of the most famous bits of Northanger Abbey, the social climber Isabella Thorpe offers her more innocent friend Catherine a list of seven novels to read after she's finished with Ann Radcliffe's Gothic blockbuster The Mysteries of Udolpho. "I will read you their names directly," Isabella says, "here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time." Catherine has only one question: "but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?"

I relate to Catherine: I, too, love a horrid book. I haven't read any of the 18th-century gothic novels on Isabella's list (really, it's her friend Miss Archer's list), but I know from their titles that they're good: I like my warnings mysterious and my mysteries horrid. When Liz asked if I would write a Crackpots newsletter, I had this half-formed idea of making my own list of "horrid books" for the Catherine Morlands of the TrueAnon patreon. These are not really "about the internet" (or are they?), but they're properly horrid, bleak, unsettling, and spooky. (To avoid accusations of self-plagiarism, let me admit up front I'm taking the capsule descriptions from previous editions of my newsletter.) The days are getting shorter and the shadows are getting longer; the wind has developed cooler edge. What better time to pick up a horrid little book than now?

Painted Devils and Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman

In this house [1.5-bedroom apartment], October is Robert Aickman season. Aickman was an English writer of what were published “strange stories,” which is basically to say ghost stories, but subtly pervy, and sometimes with like “constantly ringing bells” or “a weird dog” instead of an actual ghost. That’s probably a bad description; all that’s important to know is that if you like to feel uneasy and unsettled for a few hours Aickman’s collections are a great way to accomplish that. His 48 total short stories were initially published in eight collections during his lifetime (he died in 1981), most of which have been republished as his profile has risen in the decades since his death. (Aickman is an obvious influence on great modern strange-story writers like Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi.) You kind of can’t go wrong; all the collections are very good, but I suggest the American collection Painted Devils since it functions a bit like a “greatest hits” -- it includes his most famous story, the sublimely creepy “Ringing the Changes” -- and because the original hardcover had a great Edward Gorey dust jacket that would look great on your shelf. It’s relatively easy to find on Biblio and elsewhere, as is Cold Hand in Mine, which also had a Gorey cover.

Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon

If you are a fan of The Wicker Man (or Ritual, the novel it’s based on) but have always wanted an American version--one set, say, in the rural Northeast, in a hamlet to which irritating urbanites have retreated--boy, have I got the book for you. Harvest Home, written by the movie-star-turned-horror-novelist Thomas Tryon, tells the story of a family of New Yorkers who move to the Connecticut town of Cornwall Coombe, where local farmers still adhere to mysterious old traditions and superstitions around growing. You can see where this is likely to go, but it’s an extremely enjoyably creepy ride to get there. Tryon’s most famous novel, The Other, was recently republished by NYRB; it’s good but I prefer Harvest Home, which is out of print and should be read, as God intended, in a beat-up mass-market paperback edition.

Negative Space by B.R. Yeager

It’s a bit hard to recommend horror novels to people who aren’t naturally predisposed to them, because you say things like “well, it was really creepy, and pretty unremittingly dark, and ultimately quite bleak, and I fucking loved it,” but that’s about where I am on Negative Space. The story of a New Hampshire mill town undergoing a bizarre suicide epidemic--complete with occult overtones; a new, legal psychedelic drug; and an obsessive message board tracking the suicides--that authorities seem to ignore, Negative Space is maybe most easily descried as “If Dennis Cooper was a Zoomer and wrote It”? (If that even vaguely appeals to you, pick this one up now.) But beyond its gloomy portrayal of a town caught in a limbo of long-ago deindustrialization and a generation of kids positive that they’re more fucked up than any generation that came before them, Negative Space is a remarkable internet-era novel--not just in its pitch-perfect portrayal of message boards and digital relationships, but in the subtle metaphor for the internet provided by the suicide epidemic and seemingly related drug “whorl.” Really good stuff.

A Trick of the Shadow by R. Ostermeier

Not an enormous amount of information is available about Broodcomb Press, which describes itself as the “house publisher for the peninsula.” “The peninsula” is the otherwise unnamed or geolocated setting (possibly in Southwest England) for all of Broodcomb’s weird, supernatural, folkloric, and generally extremely and pleasingly creepy fiction. It’s one of the coolest projects I’m aware of in the world of weird and speculative fiction--a dozen books in different registers, by ostensibly different authors (none of whom have much of an online presence besides Jamie Walsh, who designs the covers and runs the publisher, and is maybe the actual author behind most or all of the books), covering the dark history and mysterious present of a benighted and haunted region. My favorite of the Broodcomb authors is R. Ostermeier, who writes stories in the unsettling mode of Arthur Machen or Robert Aickman; A Trick of the Shadow opens with an explicit Machen homage and then moves into wonderfully disquieting stories about night terrors, strange plays, and a hidden room in the middle of the house. If you like to feel a little bad and a little weird, I can’t recommend A Trick of the Shadow (and the rest of Broodcomb) enough. The only U.S. shop that carries Broodcomb (as far as I can find) is 50 Watts in Philadelphia, but Americans can order the books directly from the publisher.