The Watcher in The Web

"The tangling, endless roots of the Dark Forest of the Net.
Tendrils of the Blind Idiot God.
The God we created.
He forever sleeps, unaware of the power of his eternal dreams."

The thought came to me some time ago. I may not have been the first to draw this ominous and terrifying connection, though to my knowledge it has not been discussed much in nearer circles on the Wired. It has slowly developed and festered in my mind for multiple years now, haunting me in a way that humans have yet to be haunted. The times have accelerated and the Digital ROT has expedited in its voracious consummation of the Net, and thus, I am compelled to write.

I had tossed together a short page in the very first Issue of my now-temporarily dormant Zine - .NET of Calypso, back in the seemingly long gone year of 2022. The Text was as follows:

Sometimes, a thought passes:

Our doom won’t come from some advanced, sentient AI akin to Skynet or The Machines from The Matrix.

Instead humanity has created something much more frightening, something intangible, an incomprehensible mass of algorithms, data, and information.

It sways the minds and fates of man like tides, or wind blowing in a dark forest. We do not control it anymore.

It Grows. It Knows. It Watches.

We’ve created the Blind Idiot God.

The ominous feeling I had already felt back then has only grown stronger with time, as I watched the effects of the Modern Internet continue to degrade culture, society, and common human interaction as a whole.

You could argue when this ROT truly began. Some say 2016 was the precipice before the World seemingly took a nosedive off of a cliff. Others still, push it back to 2012, and the time leading up to the inception/popularization of Short-form Content-Slop that began to melt attention spans world wide with Vine (admittedly some of that stuff was pretty creative and funny at the time). Yet there are more - those who say it all fell apart with the invention of modern social media itself around 2004-2006 with the birth of Facebook and Twitter, the slow-quick death of MySpace and the beginning of the Corporatization of the Internet.

I will go with something in between to tell this tale: the moment Social Media Algorithms began to be implemented. Though of course, this was more of a gradual roll-out across social media, but let's say the period between 2007-2016. You see, the Algorithms were at first, relatively meaningless popularity pushers. After some time, with the guiding accursed flutes hands of the Silicon Valley Cultists, these Algorithms became something much worse, aside from dredging the loudest and strangest creatures into the spotlight, it also became Monetizable. And Money is God to these Creature-Cultists, above all else, above SOUL and Creativity and Beauty.

But in the pursuit of one God, they created another.
Now if it was intentional or not is a whole other rabbit hole that I'll not get into with this topic, but you can ponder it nonetheless.

This Silicon-Electrical God, Mr. World, The Social Media Panopticon, The Digital Dreamer, The Branching Roots of an Un-Earthly Dark Forest, The Infinite-Armed Infinite-Legged Cloud-Crawler, The Watcher in The Web, The Blind Idiot God itself. So many terms, they hardly do the justice of describing an indescribable entity. The Emphasis on the "Blind Idiot God" is heavy here, Lovecraft dreamt of the sleeping blasphemous-amorphous God above/outside/at the center of - the Universe itself. Who is kept asleep eternally by its horde of music playing creatures. That God of which our Universe is simply the deep unconscious dream of. Azathoth. Poor Lovecraft and Tesla, these Man-Made Digital God-Horrors are indeed beyond comprehension. Yet, I will paint a picture for you of the effects this being has/has had.

Humanity created the internet, a once wonderful and expansive soulful place of creativity and uniqueness. Then these dreaded Creatures flooded it with the first wave-phase of monetization-based corporatization. This global soul killing event that very quickly spread throughout the internet. Algorithms that over time, became infinitely more powerful. While the horde of other Corp-Creatures cannibalized the rest of the free net, they coalesced into massive despotic Digital Megastructures - they forced themselves to become structural/integral to the entire Upper Layer of the Net. Thanks to the accelerating power of these Entities - the Web of Data, Information, Algorithms, Culture and Collection of Global Knowledge itself began to crumble. It prioritized its own idea of what the world should be, influenced by the smaller but louder creatures which made the most money, the core of what became the ROT. The Mold Growth that ate away at the structure of the Net itself, that attacked and killed any who did not believe what it believed, buried those who did not please and feed the Shareholder-Kings and the God of Capital. But what It believed and wanted was now an enigma, a global mess of Algorithms and Voices shrieking into the Digital Void, pushing random ideologies and false knowledge, biased opinions that only pleased it and its little flute playing creatures, no one else. It is not of one mind of course, what I postulate here is that the entire Global Internet has coalesced into a single Schizophrenic Entity made of all of these things, but that Entity is rotting alive, and it's only getting faster. It is fast asleep as its long tendril-roots spread deeper and farther across the surface web.

An Elaboration/Expansion:

An adjacent analogy from this, is to view it almost like a parasitic invasive species of plant that evolved into an incredibly dense and dark forest in a very quick timeframe. Under this framing, the entire forest itself is a "living" entity with a "will" - and we are those poor things which lived in a paradise of interconnected communities who could freely share knowledge, ideas, memories, creations and all sorts of things.

Over time though, some Creatures masked as our own wandered through our little homes and towns, and began planting seeds, these seeds began to grow into weeds, but not many Netizens paid them much mind. They did however, slowly start to make everything look ugly and identical. We complained a bit, but we tried to make new things regardless. Then we noticed these old things were suddenly gone - consumed by the Mold-Plant entirely, leaving only an outline, a snapshot if the Archivist were lucky and attentive - with them being at the forefront of observing the phenomenon. We Surfed On. On the roots spread, it got into streets, it grew on the highways and roads we built, making it harder to travel freely and comfortably/safely between our creations, our communities. It did however make its own false roads, roads forcing and diverting you into the Corpo-Sprawl "Tree" Cities, structured for quantity and not quality, all made from the same ugly Mold-Root that was growing everywhere now. We Surfed On. The Mold turned into disgusting and oppressive forest-jungles, incredibly dense and it began to blot out the Digital Sun in most of the World. Many ran, they dug into the ground and built small tunnels deeper into the web. But many of us did not have the tools, the will, the energy to do the same. "It's just so inconvenient" we grumbled. "I can't be bothered to dig" we bemoaned. The forest grew darker. We Surfed On. Many either got entirely sucked into the Megatreecities, or regardlessly - were forced to make excursions into these cities for the necessities now needed to survive and be "comfortable" wandering the Dark Digital Plane Forest. Only to return to their increasingly smaller colonies out there on the periphery of the Net, while members were shed faster and faster, Balkanizing the remaining communities into smaller and smaller places as they began to go insane from the circumstances, unable to cope - moving away into "safer" and more distracting/false-comforting communities who were beginning to become sick from the ROT that now began to spread thanks to the all pervasive God that became the Mold-Root-Forests. We Surfed On. Those of us who did not succumb to the true ROT - at least entirely, huddled around tiny concealed fires in the now pitch black forest, unsure of what was wandering out there now. Occasionally picking up the lone traveler on the road to the cities to show them our hidden creations and offer them a home. (After observation and distant interaction to vet them if they were not consumed or too culturally altered to understand us - which was a new growing issue). We Surfed On.

Meanwhile out there in the Megatreecities. The Entities that started this had been long since working on new Branches for The Watcher - gifts Offerings for their New God. They began to flood the outer places with Digital Homunculi, Bots, Web Crawlers, and even "People" who'd been turned by the ROT, these... "Children of the Algorithm". They began hunting down the survivors who had hunkered down through the Growth-Storm. Obscured by the strangeness of the net, snatching people away from communities in the dark, or quietly infecting them, tricking them, hurting them.

The Children of the Algorithm got much better at this over time, annihilating entire groups in the tick between CPU calculations. We Surfed On

Now we sit here. They have unveiled the next stage in their devilish plan, "AI". The bots themselves now Algorithms that "learn" but learn wrong. Mini-Watchers. All they know is the Root-Rot and that is all they spread, the Structure of all the Wired continues to deteriorate faster and faster now, unable to keep up with these Daemons that have been awakened. The Entity Creators themselves have long gone mad, even their God of Capital is starting to ROT from the infection they started. But they are true believers now. All that matters is the ROT. And yet, We Surf On.

The Waves we once Surfed - now rotting too, but they blindly ripple messages across the net from time to time, warnings of things to come, ideas from beyond that survived the journey, still built into the remaining structure. Into Memory. So maybe there is a tiny torch out there still in the Dark Forest of the Net, is it hope? Maybe our Blind Idiot God-Creation is truly Indifferent - the Tides shift in the other direction as the remaining Survivors have grown tired of hiding and sitting in tiny holes out there on the Wired, tired of being hunted and hurt by the daemons roaming the Rot-Forest. Or perhaps it is too late and these "AI" creatures truly are the True Believer minions of the Watcher, and will take their broken mimicry of broken structures and knowledge to annihilate even the Megatreecities themselves.

A Great Scattering approaches, and the Blind Idiot God is none the wiser.

Stay safe out there in the Dark Forest Friends. Pray that the Watcher in the Web is truly Asleep. For all our sakes.