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The Internet is Made of Demons

Sam Kriss
April 21, 2022

Review of Justin E.H. Smith, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History,
A Philosophy, A Warning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

According to one theory, the internet is made of demons. Like most theories
about the internet, this one is mostly circulated online. On Instagram, I saw a
screenshot of a Reddit post, containing a screenshot of a 4chan post,
containing a screenshot of Tweet, containing two images. On the left, the
weird, loopy lines of a microprocessor. On the right, the weird, loopy lines of a
set of Solomonic sigils. Caption: ‘Boy I love trapping demons in microscopic
silicon megastructures to do my bidding, I sure hope nothing goes wrong.’ In
other versions, the demons themselves are the ones who invented the
internet; it’s just their latest move in a five-thousand-year battle against
humanity. As one four-panel meme comic explains:

The king’s pact binds them. They cannot show themselves or speak
to us.
1) Create ways to see without seeing
2) Create ways to speak without speaking
Pictures of more Solomonic sigils, progressing into laptops and iPhones. The
fourth panel, the punchline, has no words. Only a giant, mute, glassy-eyed
face.

This theory is—probably—a joke. It is not a serious analysis. But still, there’s
something there; there are ways in which the internet really does seem to
work like a possessing demon. We tend to think that the internet is a
communications network we use to speak to one another—but in a sense,
we’re not doing anything of the sort. Instead, we are the ones being spoken
through. Teens on TikTok all talk in the exact same tone, identical singsong
smugness. Millennials on Twitter use the same shrinking vocabulary. My guy!
Having a normal one! Even when you actually meet them in the sunlit world,
they’ll say valid or based, or say y’all despite being British. Memes on
Instagram have started addressing people as my brother in Christ, so now
people are saying that too. Clearly, that name has lost its power to scatter
demons.

Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every

platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received
your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For
almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the
things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this
stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech—not because someone
might ban your account, but because there’s a vast incentive structure in place
that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt
censorship, it’s not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of
the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that
comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and
mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels.

This incentive system can lead to very vicious results. A few years ago, a friend
realized that if she were murdered—if some obsessed loner shot her dead in
the street—then there were hundreds of people who would celebrate. She’d
seen similar things happen enough times. They would spend a day competing
to make exultant jokes about her death, and then they would all move on to
something else. My friend was not a particularly famous or controversial
person: she had some followers and some bylines, but probably her most
divisive article had been about tax policy. But she was just famous enough for
hundreds of people, who she didn’t know and had never met, to hate her and
want to see her dead. It wasn’t even that they had different political opinions:
plenty of these people were on the same side. They would laugh at her death
in the name of their shared commitment to justice and liberation and a better
future for all.

Maybe these were simply bad people, but I’m not so sure. There’s an incident I
think about a lot: back in 2019, a group of bestselling authors in their 40s and
50s decided to attack a young college student online for the crime of not liking
their books. Apparently wanting to read anything other than YA fiction means
that you’re an agent of the patriarchy. The student was, of course, a woman.
So what? Punish her! For a while they whipped up thousands of people in
sadistic outrage. Even her university joined in. But then, the tide suddenly
shifted, and one by one they were forced to apologize. ‘I absolutely messed up.
I will definitely do better and be more mindful moving forward. I made a
mistake.’ Of course, these apologies weren’t enough. The discourse was
unanimous: we want you to grovel more; we want to see you suffer. Was
absolutely everyone involved making the same personal moral lapse? Or could
it be that they’d all plugged their consciousnesses into a planet-sized sigil that
summons demons?

Back when I spent half my days on social media, I did much the same thing. I
would probably have also celebrated a murder, if the victim had once tweeted
something I didn’t like. Now, looking back on those days is like trying to
remember the previous night through a terrible hangover. Oh god—what have I
done? Why did I keep saying things I didn’t actually believe? Why did I keep
behaving in ways that were clearly cruel and wrong? And how did I manage to
convince myself that all of this was somehow in the service of the good? I was
drunk on something. I wasn’t entirely in control.

Ways to speak without speaking. If the internet makes people tangibly worse—
and it does—it might be because it lives in a strange new middle ground
between writing and speech. Like speech, social media messages seem to
belong to a now: briefly suspended in an instant, measurable down to the
second. But like writing, there’s a permanent archive you can choose to dig up
later. Like speech, social media is dialogic and responsive; you can carry out an
instantaneous back-and-forth, as if the other person is right in front of you.
But like writing, with social media the other person is simply not there. And
instead of a book or a letter or a shopping list—a trace, a thing the other
person has made—you’re looking at a screen, this cold bundle of pixels and
wires. This blank and empty object, which suddenly starts talking to you like a
human being.

The internet is not a communications system. Instead of delivering messages

between people, it simulates the experience of being among people, in a way
that books or shopping lists or even the telephone do not. And there are things
that a simulation will always fail to capture. In the philosophy of Emmanuel
Lévinas, your ethical responsibility to other people emerges out of their face,
the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject. “The
face is what prohibits us from killing.” Elsewhere: “The human face is the
conduit for the word of God.” But Facebook is a world without faces. Only
images of faces; selfies, avatars: dead things. Or the moving image in a
FaceTime chat: a haunted puppet. There is always something in the way. You
are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.

As more and more of your social life takes place online, you’re training yourself
to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty
towards them whatsoever. These effects don’t vanish once you look away from
the screen. The internet is not a separate sphere, closed off from ordinary
reality; it structures everything about the way we live. Stories of young
children trying to swipe at photographs or windows: they expect everything to
work like a phone, which is infinitely responsive to touch, even if it’s
impossible to engage with on any deeper level. Similarly, many of the big
conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the
expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don’t like a
person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have
them disappear forever.

In 2011, a meta-analysis found that among young people the capacity for
empathy (defined as Empathic Concern, “other-oriented feelings of sympathy,”
and Perspective-Taking, the ability to “imagine other people’s points of view”)
had massively declined since the turn of the millennium. The authors directly
associate this with the spread of social media. In the decade since, it’s
probably vanished even faster, even though everyone on the internet keeps
talking about empathy. We are becoming less and less capable of actual
intersubjective communication; more unhappy; more alone. Every year, surveys
find that people have fewer and fewer friends; among millennials, 22% say
they have none at all. For the first time in history, we can simply do without
each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you
need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI
chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to
love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons
swarm.

I don’t think this internet of demons is only a metaphor, or a rhetorical trick.

Go back to those sigils, the patterns of weird loopy goetic lines that signify the
presence of demons in online memes. Most of those designs come from the
grimoires of the sixteenth and seventeenth century—and of these, probably
the most significant is the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, or the Lesser Key
of Solomon. Unlike most old books of demonology, the Lesser Key is still in
print, mostly because it was republished (and extensively tinkered with) by
Aleister Crowley. But despite its influence, the Lesser Key is mostly plagiarized:
entire sections were simply ripped out of other books circulating at the time.
Most prominently, it reproduces much of the Steganographia, a book of magic
written by Johannes Trithemius, a Benedictine abbot and polymath, around
1499.

The Steganographia is a blueprint for the internet. Most of the book is taken
up with spells and incantations with which you can summon aerial spirits, who
are “infinite beyond number” and teem in every corner of the world. Here, the
purpose of these spirits is to deliver messages—or, more properly, to deliver
something that is more than a message. Say you want to convey some secret
information to someone: you compose an innocuous letter, but before writing
you face the East and read out a spell, like this one to summon the spirit
Pamersyel: “Lamarton anoyr bulon madriel traſchon ebraſothea panthenon
nabrulges Camery itrasbier rubanthy nadres Calmoſi ormenulan, ytules demy
rabion hamorphyn.” Immediately, a spirit will become visible. Then, once the
other person receives the letter, they speak a similar spell, and “having said
these things he will soon understand your mind completely.” A kind of magic
writing that works like speech, instant and immediate. Not an object
composed by another person, but a direct simulation of their thoughts—and
one that’s delivered by an invisible, intangible network, covering every inch of
the world.

Trithemius was a pious man; in a long passage at the start of the book, he
insists that these spirits are not demons, and that “everything is done in
accordance with God in good conscience and without injury to the Christian
faith.” But readers had their suspicions; he does repeatedly warn that the
spirits might harm you if given the chance. And while his internet can be used
for godly ends, it can also be used for evil. “For though this knowledge is good
in and of itself and quite useful to the State, nevertheless if it reached the
attention of twisted men (God forbid), over time the whole order of the State
would become disturbed, and not in a small way.” Today, a broad range of
sensible types are worried—and not without cause—that the internet is
incompatible with a civic democracy. Trithemius saw it first.

But the Seganographia held a secret, and its real purpose wasn’t revealed until
a century after its publication: this book of magic is actually a book of
cryptography. Not magic spells and flying demons, but mathematics. Take the
spell above: if you read only the alternating letters in every other word, it
yields nym di ersten bugstaben de omny uerbo, a mishmash of Latin and
German meaning “take the first letter of every word.” This is a fairly simple
approach; Trithemius warns that Pamersyel is “insolent and untrustworthy,”
and that the spirits under his command “speed about and by filling the air
with their shouts they often reveal the sender’s secrets to everyone around.”
Others are subtler. The book’s third volume wasn’t decoded until 1998, by a
researcher at AT&T Labs.

There is a direct line from this fifteenth-century monk to our digital present.
Pamersyel and the other spirits are algorithms, early examples of the
mathematical operations that increasingly govern our lives. They are also the
distant ancestors of machines like the Nazi Enigma device, a cipher so
powerful that to break its code, it was necessary to build the first electronic
computer. Trithemius invented the internet in a flight of mystical fancy to
cover up what he was really doing, which was inventing the internet. Demons
disguise themselves as technology, technology disguises itself as demons; both
end up being one and the same thing.

Exactly how long have we been living with the internet? There’s a boring
answer, which gives a start date some time in the second half of the twentieth
century and involves “packet-switching networks.” But the more interesting
answer is one that considers the meaning of the internet, rather than its
technological substrate: the thought of a world lived at a distance, a dream
and a nightmare that has been with us for a very long time. The internet dates
back five thousand years, or five billion, or it hasn’t been invented yet. In The
Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin E.H. Smith pleads for the
interesting answer. The internet is very old; it is “only the most recent
permutation in a complex of behaviors that is as deeply rooted in who we are
as a species as anything else we do: our storytelling, our fashions, our
friendships; our evolution as beings that inhabit a universe dense with
symbols.”

Smith is a philosopher of science at the University of Paris, an occasional

Damage contributor, and one of the most interesting public intellectuals of our
age. He’s one of the few people writing on the internet who manages to avoid
writing like the internet. Online writing might be about birds or Proust or the
Kuiper Belt, but always in a way that’s optimized for the endless, tedious war
being fought on social media. Occasionally, Smith will even write about cancel
culture or wokeness or Trump, but always in a way that points away from the
squabbles of the day, and towards a more genuine fascination with the things
and the history of the world.

In this book, he shows us prototypes for the internet in some unexpected

places. Like me, Smith finds demons at the origin of the digital age: here, it’s
in the Brazen Head, a magical contraption supposedly built by the thirteenth-
century scholar Roger Bacon. Like a “medieval Siri,” this head could answer any
yes or no question it was given; it was a thing with a mind, but without a soul.
Bacon’s contemporaries were convinced that the head was real, and that he
had created it with the help of the Devil. Seven hundred years ago, we were
already worried about the possibility of an artificial general intelligence.

If it’s possible to build a machine that has a mind, or at least acts in a mind-
like way, what does that say about our own minds? Leibniz, a pioneer of early
AI, insisted that his gear-driven mechanical calculator did not think, because
the purely rational and technical operations of the mind—adding, subtracting—
are not real thought. “It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves
in the labor of calculation;” a calculating machine would allow us to spend
more time fully inhabiting our own minds. Today, of course, it’s gone the other
way: computerized systems form our opinions for us and decide what music
we enjoy; dating-app algorithms choose our sexual partners. Meanwhile, the
pressures of capitalism force us to act as rational agents, always calculating
our individual interests, condemned to live like machines. It has all, Smith
admits, gone very badly wrong. But it could have gone otherwise.

After all, there have already been many different versions of the internet; go
back far enough, and the internet is simply part of nature. An elephant’s
stomping foot, the clicking of a sperm whale, the chemical signals released
into the air by sagebrush, all of which send meaningful messages over a long
distance. “Throughout the living world, telecommunication is more likely the
norm than the exception.” Mystics understood this; they have always assumed
that something like the internet already existed, in their vision of a “system of
hidden filaments or threads that bind all things.” Ancient philosophers, from
the Stoics to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, saw creation as a kind of cosmic
textile. “How intertwined in the fabric is the thread and how closely woven the
web.” Maybe, Smith suggests, it is not a coincidence that the first fully
programmable computer was the Jacquard loom, a machine for entangling
threads. Our digital computer network is just the latest iteration of something
that permeates the entire world. The internet is happening wherever birds sing
in the morning; the internet is furiously coursing through the soil beneath a
small patch of grass.

It’s a fascinating argument, and a tempting one. Like Smith, I’m fascinated by
very early computers, which are ultimately far more interesting than the
machine I’m using to write this review. The Jacquard loom, the Leibniz
machine, the Babbage engine: these devices seem to point the way to an
alternative internet, something very different to the one we actually have. At
one point Smith mentions Ramon Llull, a hero of mine and a major influence
on Leibniz’s first doctoral dissertation, who invented a mechanical computer
made of paper which he imagined could help us understand the nature of God.
What would our internet look like if it had kept to its thirteenth-century
purpose? Well, Smith suggests, maybe it would look like Wikipedia, “this
cosmic window I am perched up against, this microcosmic sliver of all things.”

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is, well, not what you think it is. Some
online reviewers have been surprised by this book: they expected a pointed
screed about how the internet is ruining everything, and instead they get an
erudite, quodlibetical adventure through the philosophy of computation. They
wanted to be told that the internet is a sudden, cataclysmic break from the
world we knew, and they get a “perennialist genealogy,” an account of how
things are “more or less stable across the ages.” It’s not as if Smith has failed
to properly consider the opposite position. The Internet Is Not What You Think
It Is grew out of an essay in The Point magazine, titled “It’s All Over,” which
was also about the internet but struck a very, very different tone. “It has come
to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language
something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles.” The piece was,
he writes, “the closest thing to a viral hit I’ve ever produced.” Strangely, one of
the things the internet likes is essays about how awful and unprecedented the
internet really is. Online essays feed off rupture. Maybe the sustained
intellectual activity that comes with writing a book reveals the connections
instead: the way things all seem to hang together in an invisible net. Theodor
Adorno describes thought as a kind of hypertext, a network, a web:

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric,

transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the
creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become
their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them.
The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes
one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up
one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject,
 penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as
other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its
chosen substance, others begin to glow.

So when I say I can’t entirely agree with the book’s thesis, this might be the
internet itself speaking through me—but still, I can’t entirely agree. I still think
that the internet is a serious break from what we had before. And as nice as
Wikipedia is, as nice as it is to be able to walk around foreign cities on Google
Maps or read early modern grimoires without a library card, I still think the
internet is a poison.

This doesn’t mean that the boring answer was the right one all along. Thinkers
of the past have plenty to teach us about the internet, and the world has
indeed been doing vaguely internetty things for a very long time. But as I
suggested above, our digital internet marks a significant transformation in
those processes: it’s the point at which our communications media cease to
mediate. Instead of talking to each other, we start talking to the machine. If
there are intimations of the internet running throughout history, it might be
because it’s a nightmare that has haunted all societies. People have always
been aware of the internet: once, it was the loneliness lurking around the edge
of the camp, the terrible possibility of a system of signs that doesn’t link
people together, but wrenches them apart instead. In the end, what I can’t get
away from are the demons. Whenever people imagined the internet, demons
were always there.

Lludd and Llefelys, one of the medieval Welsh tales collected in the
Mabinogion, is a vision of the internet. In fact, it describes the internet twice.
Here, a terrible plague has settled on Britain: the arrival of the Coraniaid, an
invincible supernatural enemy. What makes the Coraniaid so dangerous is their
incredibly sharp hearing. They can hear everything that’s said, everywhere on
the island, even a whisper hundreds of miles away. They already know the
details of every plot against them. People have stopped talking; it’s the only
way to stay safe. To defeat them, the brothers Lludd and Llefelys start
speaking to each other through a brass horn, which protects their words.
Today, we’d call it encryption. But this horn contains a demon; whatever you
speak into it, the words that come out are always cruel and hostile. This
medium turns the brothers against each other; it’s a communications device
that makes them more alone. In the story, the brothers get rid of the demon
by washing out the horn with wine. I’m not so sure we can do that today: the
horn and its demon are one and the same thing.

■
Sam Kriss is a writer and dilettante surviving in London.

Categories: Demons, Internet, Isolation, Johannes Trithemius, Justin E.H. Smith

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