(ESSAY) 'Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie in the Context of the Internet' by Magdalen Simões-Brown

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Dec 15, 2025
11 min read

In one of our final pieces for Digital Dreamland, Magdalen Simões-Brown considers the Lovecraftian sprawl of the internet via Mark Fisher’s The Weird and Eerie (2016). From dead internet theory to AI influencers, this essay offers an experiential mapping of our digital terrain.

The terms weird and eerie are defined by Mark Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie (2016) as follows: ‘...the weird is constituted by a presence … of that which does not belong … [and] a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence’. Both definitions belong under the same umbrella of disconcerting, uncomfortable and othering, but occupy different spaces. The weird is usually obvious: it is something you can point at, something you know not to be like other things through a twisting of a known quantity, even if you can’t explain why. Importantly, the weird is not unrecognisable; there has to be enough familiar in the familiar gone wrong to register as wrong. Weird is a word with life in it – you can feel weird, be weird, observe a weird vibe – whereas eerie is devoid of most of that. Where the weird is an active perversion and generally implies movement, the eerie exists in a colder, more binary state: it is defined by what it is not, and is usually used in reference to static places or landscapes. It is defined by absence – a common example being the absence of people in a place that should be populated. It may not always be definable, as the ‘failure’ (as Fisher puts it) may not always be a known quantity: you may not know how or why all the people disappeared, just that they did. Eeriness occurs when nothing fails into something (an abandoned manmade structure under the sea) or something fails into nothing (people no longer existing in a previously populated context), and all that is left is the opposite of what was there before; as such, it is more of an inversion than a perversion as this lack no longer holds within itself its previous form as the weird does.

Reading through Fisher’s essay, I was struck (intentionally) by how much both definitions relied on liminality and dream-like states. As eldritch horrors are symbols of unknowable truths about life and the universe, so instances of weirdness and eerieness offer this tantalising peek into a different reality previously inaccessible to us. As dreams work from what you know to create unsettling or improbable scenes within the context of that information, so the weird and eerie are rewritten simulations of what we previously believed to be true: people live here, objects don’t move by themselves, etc. Both states appear as simultaneous rejections and reflections of reality; to accept the altered reality, the weird or eerie version of something you previously took to be ‘normal’, is to accept that an original state both exists (because without it there would be no weird/eerie version) and no longer exists (it has been changed through ‘failure’ and so no longer exists faithfully as itself). Therefore it could be said that everything that falls into the categories of weird and eerie exists in a state of liminality, if not full-blown dreamification – what is more emblematic of being between two states than dreaming? The ultimate augmented reality is, of course, that which you’ll find online. It enables enhancement of or removal from life, whichever you like, thus forming a waking dreamscape for all that participate and becomes a space where emotions can be processed (we relive the emotions of the day during dreams because, as Matthew Walker notes in his book Why We Sleep (2017), ‘the first function [of dreaming] involves nursing our emotional and mental health…’ so to experience them again in the shelter of a dream can recontextualise them, sometimes rendering them bearable, just as being online can serve the same purpose) and reality can be distorted. This means that the internet holds the capacity to exist both as a weird and an eerie space, the outcome of which, interestingly enough, can depend on the user’s intentions.

The nebulous dream-like state of the internet means that it could fit into either category, depending on the angle from which it is observed. However, one angle precedes another, and no one angle is absolute truth, so being both and neither it seems that the internet is Schrödinger’s Cat where alive or dead can be replaced with weird or eerie. In the context of being and not-being, the internet is not something we can directly, physically interact with beyond its simulations, e.g. a phone screen, just as we can have dreams but cannot physically possess, partake or interact with them (foregoing lucid dreaming for the time being). This lack of a formal body that we interact with, beyond screens and physical infrastructure, means that its tentacles can extend everywhere with limited pushback from people. It thrives on perpetual motion: it is used because it is used, and not using it puts the individual at a remarkable disadvantage. There is a movement pushing for internet access to become a world-wide human right due to its pervasiveness; you need it for banking, for booking health appointments, for taxes, for content storage, and it is all made worse by subscriptions ensuring we do not own that which we consume, keeping us tied to rental payment models and a wifi signal. In order to gain back control, we must decide what the internet is; alien or golem, external invader or internal mirror. In this context of how we interact with it on a daily basis, the internet is a more of a weird place: overall there is no failure of absence or presence at its core (although an internet-less world would now be eerie), especially as it’s been a years-long creep, but there definitely is a parasitic ‘that which does not belong’ feeling, even when it is us that are made to feel like we don’t belong if we opt out.

Even if it does not belong, I would argue that the internet is, to some extent, natural. We are of the earth and the internet is of us; it came from our minds, is like our minds, is made from what the universe provided. It may be a perversion of the ‘natural’, but to pervert nature is still to hold the natural; which harks back to my earlier interpretation of the weird. However, to be natural is to be real, to be unnatural is to be weird (in this space where weird implies a twisting of reality), and there is something very eldritchin the way that the internet has no one true shape but has endless presence; beyond the handy screens and vast physical infrastructure that very few people know the locations of, wirelessness gives an air of omnipresence, of invisibility, of a god-like ability to be anywhere and everywhere and to know everything. It hovers over us, the ultimate separation of mind and body. But if it is the ultimate mind, then surely the most natural thing for it to do is dream; all roads seem to lead back to natural, despite the bigger picture being that it is simply not a naturally-occurring system. Just as the weird and the normal need each other contextually, so apparently does the natural and the internet.

Despite overall the internet being more weird than eerie (even purely from a colloquial standpoint where you’d say ‘that’s weird’ more times than ‘that’s eerie’ about something you’d see online), there are certainly pockets of eerie for those with eyes to see. If the eerie is the failure of absence or presence, then look no further than social media and creator-based content. In order to keep us online and spending money, algorithms decide what to show us in increasingly sophisticated ways; when videos do well they are boosted in the algorithm, so content creators see and replicate that success. Even though your favourite youtuber, influencer, streamer etc is creating content via a non-AI route (hopefully), they are still being influenced by algorithms. So if a content creator is driven by the want or need to make money (not necessarily in a shallow sense; it’s a modern job) and the only way to make money is to get lucky with or game the algorithm, then how truly human is that creation? Of course, it is to human benefit that this system exists as it enables real people to receive unreal amounts of money. However, as we often see with people who amass vast wealth, it is a dehumanising process that pits everyone involved against each other, all becoming categorised as ‘other’; famously, there are no ethical billionaires. So despite there being very real people behind these decisions, there is very little humanity. If these algorithms are being influenced by a constantly evolving AI programme, one that encourages certain traits, behaviours and even increasingly speech patterns (self-censoring for monetisation is common to the point where it disrupts conversation, and encourages desensitisation through the algorithmically-enforced sanding down of language. The vernacular then creeps into the physical realm too, bringing the desensitisation with it; terms such as ‘SA’ (sexual assault) and ‘unalive’ (suicide) often make it into offline conversations) in order to make money, does that not mean that on some level, it is not man-made? As a piece of content, it becomes eerie through the failure of the presence of human touch. There should be plenty; a person undergoing some sort of artistic endeavour with the hopes of connecting to another person is a classic human experience, so to have it co-opted for something as distinctly anti-human as profit for profit’s sake removes some of the soul from it. An original and engaging idea can become banal when made for a specific platform; because the question persists; how much of it was actually the creator’s idea if their bounds of creation were dictated by a restrictive and inherently sisyphean capitalist machine whose purpose is to create profit at literally any cost?

Another aspect of the internet that is inherently eerie is the anonymity, and how much this can hide. Humanity leaves traces of itself (a comment left in a reddit thread 15 years ago, defunct websites with still-spinning gifs, Facebook pages of the deceased) without having to stick around to confirm its humanity. This is similar in many types of media; it is all an echo of a person or people that were its creators, but on the internet it is extreme. You can be reading someone’s words and they can simply not exist as a person; the internet is full of people falling in love with people that don’t exist, investing their money in schemes that don’t exist, becoming fans of people or artists that don’t exist, influencers photoshopping images until they’re unrecognisable, AI musicians being pushed by streaming services; it is the dead internet theory in full effect, and feels like the perfect example of what Fisher in The Weird and the Eerie calls ‘acousmatic sound - sound that is detached from a visible source’. We are hearing the echoes of life all around us but seeing none of it, and none of it is truly verifiable, or huntable to source. After all, is it natural to have full written conversations so immediately and so without noise? Vitriolic social media arguments are had in the silence of a bedroom, the only noise heavy breathing and the violent tapping of thumbs on screens. On the other hand, the disembodied noise that comes from within an array of open tabs or the autoplaying of songs or videos on websites is another example of this; no one agrees to it, but bodiless sound will come to you, unbidden, whether at home or on public transport. The silent human interaction and loud non-human interaction signals a mass haunting through this subverting of absence and presence, where the ghosts are AI girlfriends and dead bebo pages with nothing else to do.

Perhaps, though, we are the weird in the world of the internet. We are the odd, unpredictable, biological compound in an otherwise binary-coded, logical world - so what would that make us? An alien of fleshy Lovecraftian magnitudes? And what would that make the internet, as in order for us to be weird it would have to be capable of reaction to us and know the normal for contrast? As Fisher writes, ‘What is called organic life is actually a kind of folding of the inorganic [which]... possesses its own agency…’ so, in this way, the question of who is intruding upon whom is always an inversion. In this way we intrude on it, manipulate it to our needs and wants, influence the inorganic to act organically, create more and more and more of it to match the insatiable colonial mindset. Perhaps it is from us but not of us, as the internet as a data processing system is inherently a truthful thing: it does not lie to us, it does not purposefully manipulate our input (i.e. people manipulate people via the internet, but as a thing itself it does not manipulate the information we give it for its own devices). It passes on the information that it receives, without using its own initiative to alter it (even AI is trained on human interaction which still negates any agency), whether that information is true or not. What is true to it is that the information exists, and it does not matter that the information being passed on is enabling a catfishing scam. It deals in true lies, faithfully passing on objectively false data as though the internet system is itself a brain, and the World Wide Web (the interface by which we interact with the network that is the internet) is its visual fever dream, interpreting what is going on as best it can.

While there are many arguments against the internet being neatly divisible into the two categories of ‘weird’ and ‘eerie’ as defined by Mark Fisher, there are also patterns that emerge once you begin the comparisons. It seems as though, widely speaking, the internet’s form is weird and the content is eerie. Its form, its frame of existence, is a strange ‘teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it’ through its many forms (screens) and not-forms (general wirelessness), and therefore reflects our inability to restrain it. It has become a behemoth of previously unimaginable proportions, and all we can do is stare slack-jawed at it hovering above us, wondering where it begins, where it ends and how many resources it will consume along the way. Its content, which is whatever the form enables it to be, is an eerie simulation wasteland full of cast-offs of human interaction, such as locked accounts with lost passwords whose content is still visible decades later, conversations had between AI bots previously trained on real people’s conversations, images photoshopped until the people in them are unrecognisable; the distinct lack of the human within these human-approximated situations highlights all the more that the humanity of it all has ‘failed’ from something to nothing, therefore placing it in the realm of the eerie. Ultimately, wherever you find the human you’ll find the non-human, and wherever you find reality you’ll be able to find a way to manipulate it. The internet is just one example of this; there are many, many more.

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