Unseen Internet (2026)

Shira Chess in this book has irreversible structured my thoughts in the following ways:

Which to be clear, I already believed all of the above, but Shira Chess outlines the historical evidence and argument with impenetrable logic and grace.

Let’s unpack some more of these arguments she makes:
The internet was a place for social convergence and depository of information which, particularly during the Satanic Panic, served to upload a particular amount of magical and occult information.

Technopaganism and psychadelics were an integral part of the early Internet consciousness and Cyberspace was seen more as a place for expanding consciousness rather than merely increasing productivity. Contributors were people like Timothy Leary, Erik Davis, WEC (whole earth counterculture).

It’s not just this background of magical premises in the web, but that at scale, informational entities form their own shapes in latent space, which is “revealed” to us through AI (she invokes the example of LOAB, a woman who appeared in early AI image generation — terrifying, violent, a ghost in the machine.

CYBERSPACE — 19802-90s
METAVERSE — post-Snow Crash

Cyberspace was information made visible, an architecture of data, navigating a world of pure data and symbolism, mystical and visionary.

Metaverse colonized Cyberspace, enclosing it with a corporate controlled virtual society mediated by commerce, avatars, property, and ordinary life simply recreated within this commercialized environment. The argument here is that we abandoned the spiritual imagination for the spiritually vacant metaverse.

I particularly enjoyed her chapter on Ritual and Games. She notes the differences — first of all, that a ritual has a sacred inner circle whereas the rude Gamer culture often exists to desanctify these spaces. But both involve rules of participation, temporary worlds of endogenous meanings, obstacles that exist on the way to transforming something into a goal. She looks at the histories of “creepypasta” rituals, arguing its not mere superstition but something between a game and a metaphysical meditation.

Now the “spirituality,” she argues is grounded in a Christian Gnosticism which is the spiritual grounding for Cyberpunk. Gnosticism often talks about a Gnosis, a kind of hidden knowledge that will free humanity, awaken people to the hidden control over reality and transcend the matrix — basically.

AI as demonology —

given that information forms entities in latent space, when we ask AI for help, we are essentially invoking help traveling through that space. Much like how we used to invoke daemons or spirits or djinn to execute commands or amplify our wishes. She also references Elon or

There’s honestly a lot more in there — this is a quick overview.