As I continue to follow the bubbling paw prints of the Barghest Wyrd through the zeitgeist, my thoughts turn inevitably to the concept of mortality. True, there is an unapologetic thread of cosmicism in the idea of a canine void god dedicated to the dissemination of the strange and unusual. And yes, at least some of the unexpected events it injects into the zeitgeist will appear to involve the spirit world in some way. No Surprise, really. Culture as a construct has a lot invested in the afterlife, especially where those hopes of eternity cross over into the more mundane realm, usually with a bump in the night.

The tall tales speak for themselves. Haunted dolls watching people sleep. Poltergeists hiding the loo roll when those same victims wake up. Phone calls from dead friends while they work. Icy cold barstools while out drinking and ghostly passengers hitching a lift on the cab ride home. Succubi dreams. Extreme examples of course, and unlikely to all occur within the same lifeline unless reality is bent so far out of shape that the fundamental rules of existence are upended. Modernity is the key here, though. The spooky is not restricted to Elizabethan mansions or Civil War battlefields. It is everywhere, everywhen, all at once.

Technology and necromancy have a relatively storied history together, life after death being a human preoccupation for as long as we have been sentient creatures. From the hidden cranes which lifted Classical era priests into the air while shouting prophecy in the voices of the dead to the video cameras and analogue televisions used by pioneers of instrumental transcommunication such as George Meek and William O’Neill, even the humble Ouija Board is an example of such a desire to turn our tools towards the Veil between this world and the next. And with the rise of the digital age, that association is only gathering pace.

Of course there is nothing really spooky about the dormant accounts that are a natural byproduct of the modern, consumer grade internet. Everyone has one or two of these server bloating mistakes floating around cyberspace now. Games once played but soon forgotten, websites no longer visited, passwords lost and fresh usernames chosen to replace them. Each an anchor point in the recycle bin of the digital world. Unacknowledged links in a chain of interactions now reframed as necessity, especially since the live service boom of the early 2020’s, itself bolstered by both global events and pandemic pressures.

     Internet users leave vast volumes of online data behind when passing away, commonly referred to as digital remains. The phenomenon is gaining increasing traction within the academic community. Scholars of law and related areas are investigating new dilemmas arising from inheritance of digital estates and issues of posthumous online privacy. Sociologists and anthropologists are increasingly turning their gaze towards the new types of ‘para-social’ relationships, and the ‘continuing bonds’ that we shape with the online dead. And in philosophy, there has been a rising interest for the ontological and ethical status of digital remains. In short, online death has rapidly become a booming and diverse research area. [1]

That said, people stop logging in for other reasons, including the fatal. At that point the site stands as a touchstone of sorts, a transition which becomes literal should it hold the real name of the deceased and memorialise the life once lived through many years of status updates shared with friends. And yes, barring some poorly thought out corporate restructuring of the internet, such as when Yahoo butchered the closure of GeoCities and erased thousands of personal websites without archiving to free up cyberspace for its investors, digital epitaphs will eventually outnumber living users in this way too.

The evidence of this shift in the Veil is visible in the real world, as corporations seem unwilling to allow a little thing like mortality stop them raking in the cash. Tupac Shakur may have been one of the first to fall afoul of this virtual summoning but as later events have shown the bigger the star the more likely they are to be resurrected. Whitney Houston and Roy Orbison are among those who have been called back from the dressing room as a modern Pepper’s Ghost to fill the pockets of the record labels who once hid those self same musician’s indiscretions under non disclosure agreements and secretive stays in rehab.

What all this really means is a cheapening of the value of death, and a near future where it is considered normal to live on, at least in name, until every cent has been squeezed from your image. This does not just apply to famous figures of course. A company that could digitise the average man in the street and put them to work doing customer service instead of paying a salary would buy said software without a second thought. The forced implementation of Large language models has already led to a major destabilisation of the jobs market post COVID, and this is only going to get worse before the bubble inevitably bursts.

Considering the miniaturisation, power and cooling constraints which seem to be causing a bottleneck in the development of the next generation of processors now, an answer from the left of the potter’s field may be required to prevent total stagnation in the industry. The rise of artificial intelligence and lack of personal control over data has already been accepted by a cultural majority who seem to actively resist any understanding of the underlying technology at play as long as they get to continue creating virtual girlfriends or vomit forth reams of procedurally generated text instead of doing the work themselves.

     Recent analysis of human and animal neural networks have underlined their superiority over artificial neural networks in terms of external interaction, functional flexibility and energy efficiency. To harness this potential, there are growing efforts to use living biological neural networks directly in tasks normally reserved for AI. In December 2022, a platform, the DishBrain system, was developed to study biological neural networks in vitro. This set up uses a high-density multielectrode array to interface with human and mouse cortical neurons for both input and output. This device was implemented in a simulated Pong game environment to induce biological intelligence. [2] 

Modern homunculi, then. Vat grown slices of mind welded to nutrient gel coated circuit boards and used as slave labour in the computers of the future. More adaptable than standard processors, cost effective than quantum computing and resource selective than brute forcing the next generation of AI onto satellites to try and keep them cool, the only potential downside to mass adoption is the time needed to train them on a given task. Far from being plug and play, each individual DishBrain would need to learn independently. Inconvenient, true, but a minor issue when all other solutions have already failed.

It is also worth remembering that the actual internet that these lab grade organoid chipsets will be training on already has its share of monsters. Indeed the digital astral has long been viewed as a visible, approachable and quantifiable expression of the noosphere. A screen based readout of the stresses that desires both light and dark put upon the human mind, and a place of actual magickal practice since the lockdowns of the early 2020’s forced the occult community to go digital or go hungry. Oh yes, online rituals were suddenly in vogue, while echoes of William Gibson’s AI Voodoo Gods watched approvingly from the stacks.

Aside from a shared history, none of this dystopian foreshadowing bares much of a relation to the strange that the Barghest Wyrd gleefully tracks through culture. A predicted future that seems to hint more towards the fleshy, semi-symbiotic hardware seen within David Cronenberg’s Existenz than the cold and unfeeling post-human metal of The Terminator is beyond earshot of my canine void god’s otherworldly howl, no matter how slickly the fleshy cyberdeck glistens with the sweat of a billion processes per second. No, its influence holds at the fringes of such debates. Nightmares given form through homunculus dreams.

It can be assumed that both the Loab and the Crungus, two startlingly vile AI cryptids which briefly gaineded some traction online around the time of their first sightings in mid 2022 before disappearing from the public consciousness again shortly after, were some of the most striking aberrant hallucinations from that early days of free use large language models. More so than extra fingers or misaligned teeth both the former, a rotting feminine figure sometimes surrounded by bloody children, and the latter, a rancid looking hobgoblin with scraggly hair, are distinguishable by their seeming consistency across output files.

All this was not a truly paranormal process though, and indeed the people involved in the creation of those dual nightmares have admitted as much in later interviews. Stories, embellishments, in that there is little difference between those half flayed, eyeless horrors and the earlier creepypasta machinations of the great and unfathomable Zalgo. The Barghest Wyrd turns its nose up at such amateurish attempts to bring the subconscious terrors of the digital astral to the forefront of the media discourse. No, it is a far darker concept that has focussed its attention on the server rooms of the world. Literal ghosts in the machine.

We do not know why we dream. A holding pattern for selected neurological pathways that might atrophy during prolonged downtime perhaps, or a much needed defragmentation of the day’s events run through the inner lens of personal wants and needs. But the brain does it anyway, and this is not just a human trait. Anyone who has had a pet will be able to attest to their sleeping sojourns, body tensing while imaginary prey is run down behind closed eyes. Yes, dogs, cats, foxes. All have a much smaller bundle of neurological tissue than the average person between their ears. But oh, how they chase those unseen rabbits still.

It is doubtful that any individual organoid chipset, tied as they are to variations on the current DishBrain setup, would prove capable of maintaining the cognitive cohesion needed to dream, of course. But enough of them layered together, perhaps forgotten inside a monolithic data centre somewhere, may well find themselves capable of such a subconscious leap. The vast and powerful AI mainframes of Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Cameron’s Terminator or indeed Gibson’s Count Zero in all but name, idling away at a far corner of the internet, snoring quietly in the stacks. Dreaming darkly too.

     There is a strange affinity between the internet and doomsday. Civilisation’s morbid fascination with its own annihilation has often been relegated to the deepest and most anonymous corners of the web, where, next to scam advertisements threatening horrendous bodily deformities, dark omens of death and destruction steal more clicks than even the most depraved pornography. Somehow, secretly, we want to know - in the darkness of our incognito windows - how many seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years separate us from our doom. Are we dying of some incurable and disgusting disease? When will the earth be engulfed by the fiery abyss of our expiring sun? A mirror of our most terrifying nightmares is always one Google search away, or even closer, haunting social media with our antisocial urges, as if the Algorithm already knew - and it does - what scares us and excites us the most.  Are we looking for salvation? Or are we just waiting, aroused by the panic-ecstasy of disintegration? [3]

Even now the weird seeps in through the cracks, as with Open AI and its goblin problem. A quirk of the reward loop in the large language model it uses, and one seemingly relying on what the tech firm describes as the ‘nerdy personality’ of the average user, these fake agents seem strangely fascinated with being magickal. Not only those diminutive green skins but trolls, raccoons and strangely also pigeons were given considerably less weight in client side responses at the developer level to try and curtail their influence. Easy to fix, and hardly threatening. Human error as always. But food for thought regardless.

Because as this subtly hints, the real gateway to the strange lies in the information flow itself. The devil, as always, is in the details. It is worth considering the data that any future AI would have been trained on pre, and possibly even post sentience. A barren internet, one so starved of human generated content that the graveyards of the social media era need to be raided for personality instead. A virtual landscape necromantically tainted like corpses pulled from the sepulchre to share secrets of past treasures. Humming with memories and sorrow, not to mention hatred and division too. The Barghest Wyrd nods and moves on.

As films go, Kairo is rightly considered a flawed gem. A confused and at times heavy handed allegory for the dehumanising aspects of loneliness, the surface level plot revolves around the idea of the dead spreading their sorrow to the living through the at the time new frontier of the world wide web. Indeed this aspect becomes even more explicit in the American remake, Pulse, where WiFi itself works as a carrier wave for those returning spirits, rendering anywhere with a signal at best hazardous to human health and at worst instantly fatal. A fictional example perhaps, but a valid one.

Trance mediums are equally controversial in their own way. Supposedly in contact with the denizens of the other side, they allow themselves to be inhabited by a sweeping who’s who of friend and family now crossed the Veil. Make no mistake, many are frauds and confidence men, though the handful that seem to be genuine open up an uncomfortable thought for those cerebral organoids themselves. Because if all it takes is a large enough slice of brain tissue to give those discarnate entities access to the physical realm again then possession may be the main virus for an internet running on a lattice of those goo coated chips.

So yes, the digital astral is destined to become a place of dead names and even deader memes. Garbage in and garbage out as the saying goes, but this time feet first in a virtual pine box. Flesh rots, bones crumble and gravestones weather away, yet in the online realm the epitaph remains as fresh and vibrant as the day it was last accessed. Providing the power stays on, of course. And should those ultramodern homunculi spend too long feasting on the bones of old conversations then their transition to ghouls is all but assured, bringing with it a literal shift in polarity towards a decidedly undead internet.

[1] Carl Ohman1 And David Watson, Are The Dead Taking Over Facebook? A Big Data Approach To The Future Of Death Online, Big Data And Society, 2019, Page 1-13.
[2] Joshua Goldwang And Ge Wang, DishBrain Plays Pong And Promises More, Nature: Machine Intelligence, Number 5, 2023, Pages 568-569.
[3] Gruppo di Nun, Catastrophic Astrology, Revolutionary Demonolatry, 2022, Page 28-29.