(ESSAY) 'An [ESC]ape from the Ocean of Reality, by Neill Russell

Remember the anglerfish? Neill Russell dips into the shallows of recent internet history to explore the imagined communities which emerge during moments of virality. From the half-life of memes to digital capital, this latest from our Digital Dreamland series unpacks the politics of internet fever, anthropomorphism and willing delusion. Can we escape?

In February 2025 the internet was awash with anglerfish. A sole humpback angler fish, outwith the depths it normally haunts, was videoed swimming towards the ocean’s surface near Tenerife. This was a fish out of water which died shortly after reaching sunlight. We experienced the tragic but beautiful end of a very ugly fish’s life.

This fish hit every branch of the ugly tree as it fell out of the ocean and yet we saw ourselves in it. An image of the grotesque, evolved uniquely for its environment, the anglerfish resembles an AI hallucination turned nightmare. We have become immune to the spread of AI slop in a very short time, however, this was something real. The fish was no Shrimp Jesus crawling out of the depths but a real life creature on an unusual, unexplainable quest.

The video of a lone female black seadevil rising from the deep quickly went viral on social media. The human response was both emotional and poetic. People cried. Reaction videos appeared on TikTok of people drowning in floods of tears, real or not. And people created. Today, there are copious poems, songs, artworks, cartoons, and even an AI-generated Finding Nemo-inspired video depicting the journey of one fish from the darkness of the midnight zone into the light of our world.

We are continually divided by the politics of events in real life and on the internet. These events both constitute and pollute our timelines. There are, however, occasional moments and memes like this that break through the noise and make us pause. Were these artworks created in response to one creature’s predicament or was something more at play? What caused this outpouring? Was it a grief response? 

So much happened in that first quarter of 2025: the continuing wars in Ukraine, Palestine and Gaza; the Israel/Hamas war; some of the most destructive wildfires California has ever seen; a new US President; the unexpected reveal of the Chinese AI, DeepSeek – not to mention the background cumulative effect of the climate emergency. How did this fish simultaneously break the surface tension of the ocean and the internet while all this was going on?

The collective response to this incarnation of Icarus could be seen as a manifestation of Benedict Anderson’s 'imagined community'. A theory formed to describe the formation of Nationalism, it can also be used to explain the short lived experience of community which blossoms around a newly minted meme. Much in the same way print media enabled readers to experience the same national narrative in newspapers over breakfast, so do those who share memes on the internet. Commenting on a thread about a dead fish’s last swim or creating art commemorating its life binds you momentarily to others who do the same. Traditional nations may be losing this sense of imagined community as our consumption of media becomes more disparate and our culture becomes more fractured.

In today’s attention economy the outpouring of emotion focused on the anglerfish is also a commodification and exploitation of its predicament. It can be argued that those involved did so in a performative way. The fish’s situation was captured into digital capital and shared on social media platforms which rewarded creators in popularity and likes. When we join in with the 'imagined community' of the anglerfish, we are responding not to the fish but to the art and the (humanised) idea of the fish. We’re caught in a trap. 

Deep sea meme fish are nothing new. Japanese folklore speaks of Ryugu no tsukai, a 'messenger from the sea god’s palace'. In myth ryugu no tsukai are large fish with human heads and hair which in the modern day are recognised as oarfish. Sightings of oarfish are said to foretell of impending disaster. News sites love them for headlines such as 'A Rare “Doomsday” Fish Is Spotted Swimming in Mexico'. Reports of at least a dozen beached oarfish were reported before the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. There is always truth to be found in myth.

Memes have a half life – you’re likely to have forgotten or never seen: Hampster Dance (1999), Techno Viking(2000), Disaster Girl (2005), Boxxy (2008/2009), Nyan Cat (2011), or the Harlem Shake (2013) – and like radiation, memes also give off an energy, especially early in their creation. Content creators seek to ride the wave of popularity a new meme generates before it jumps the shark. On Instagram, the poet Luka Erausquin (@atombombicarus) recalls 'how so many poets lost their minds over the 52 Hertz Whale, this anglerfish is my whale. I will be thinking about her until the day I die.' How many of us who were caught in the current of this latest nautical meme would say the same now that its half-life has decayed and its glamour has faded away?

Erausquin wrote a poem about the fish titled 'Icarus Is The Anglerfish', in which he describes how the fish swam 'so purposefully… with some kind of awe. / Defying all instinct'. This anthropomorphising of the fish is common in responses to its plight. We see its rising as a triumph when in fact it is a tragedy. A majority of comments online concentrate on this reading rather than truly empathising with the distress the fish must have suffered while being outside of her environment. Erausquin hints towards this when he ends with 'But oh, / how warm it must have been / when the light hit her face.'

Another poet on Instagram, Elise M Powers (@elisepowerspoet) also recognises the absurdity of humanizing this animal in her poem 'The Anglerfish' – 'Who are we to decide anything at all / about the little daredevil? And anyway, / what does it matter?' Powers summarises the collective’s motivation in eulogising the little fish with the words 'we must let hope / win out over logic'.

And so we enter the world of willing delusion, which may be the only appropriate response to our current predicament. Logic is not always the answer. Capitalism has commodified and structured everything to such an extent that the only human response is irrational hope and a desire to jump into the depths of the unknown. Perhaps this is what we are feeling when we consider the anglerfish journeying where no anglerfish has been before. The fish escapes the depths we seek to enter.

We fear the deep. The deep is the unknown. It’s where monsters lurk. In 1975 Jaws, the Great White shark, swam out from the deep into the shallows and left a generation of cinema goers afraid of the water. Psychoanalysis tells us we are split in two – our rational mind and a deep collective well of the subconscious. The subconscious is associated with water. Liquid, fluid, ever moving and changing, our inner world has, so we are told, inner depths. It was from this deep Piscean dreamworld that our dark angel of an anglerfish appeared. 

The creature lived in darkness and yet analogies were made, by commentators of its journey towards the light, to a human spiritual path – 'she rose to show us that darkness is not something to fear'. If we correctly applied the principle of mirroring this deep sea fish’s ascent into the light, a human’s equivalent would be a descent into darkness, into the dream. Another narrative we could apply is that this was a death wish fish seeking to escape its reality. It wanted to break free from the fluidity of the ocean and enter the bright Apollonian world of the sun. 

It’s hard to know if we seek to escape the fever dream of the internet or the real. Once we sought to escape reality by surfing the internet. Now we crave the real and yet we dive deeper into the internet to find it. We saw ourselves in this fish who swam too close to the sun. Did we dare to dream that we too could escape?

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Text & image: Neill Russell

Published: 7/10/25