The Demon in the Machine

Sinister is a movie for our moment but not the final word.

“Imagine that you fell into a deep sleep on June 28, 2007—the day before the iPhone was released. Like Rip Van Winkle, you wake up 10 years later and look around. The physical world looks largely the same to you, but the people are behaving strangely. Nearly all of them are clutching a small glass and metal rectangle, and any time they stop moving, they assume a hunched position and stare at it. They do this the moment they sit down on a train, or enter an elevator, or stand in line. There is an eerie quiet in public places—even babies are silent, mesmerized by these rectangles. When you do hear people talking, they usually seem to be talking to themselves while wearing white earplugs.”

I came across this thought experiment in The Anxious Generation. What strikes me about this hypothetical is that the slumbering man might not realize at first how all of these people’s seemingly identical external behavior—hunched over their phones in chairs, staring at their phones in line—is in fact completely unique internally.

One is playing Candy Crush to relax after a stressful day. Another refreshes email for the 250th time today, worried that her new boss will find her responsiveness wanting. A third hurriedly taps out an online order for takeout that night, lest the line at the “fast casual” restaurant keep him from getting the food with maximum efficiency.

Marshall McLuhan predicted that while prior technologies extended our physical bodies—a club improves on a fist, binoculars improve on eyesight—electrical technologies were driving toward the replacement of our nervous system, our consciousness. The versatility of digital technologies allows our internal life—our niche interests, our vices, our habits—to be externalized, analyzed, and ultimately monetized.

This digital instantiation of our identites creates a feedback loop. It appears to give us exactly what we desire, but in time, of course, it forms our desires. And the boundary can be blurry. When a video that you find disturbing or raunchy or tasteless pops up in your feed, what does that say about you? Worse still, when you linger, signaling to the algo that this is good content to keep you on the platform, what does that say about you? To what extent are you and your feed separable. Which is the truer representation of you?

We feed information into our phone, knowingly and unknowingly, and in return, the Machine creates a Skeleton Key, a tempter fit to us. When she was expecting her second,

Nellie Bowles

said she kept seeing an Instagram reel that claimed “when a child under the age of three gets a new sibling, it is as traumatic to your child as just actually abandoning your child. Because that's how selfish and narcissistic and intense toddlers are.”

Conscientiousness gets pushed into what

Helen Roy

calls “gender-anxious hyper-scrupulosity” very quickly!

More of a thrill-seeker? Don’t worry, there’s Robinhood for the wannabe finance bros, DraftKings for the sports bros, and of course, all the drugs have been dialed up over the past decades for maximum effect. Pick your vice, and there’s a product just for you.

The addiction researcher Anne Lembke describes our contemporary culture as “druggified.” She is seeing addiction rates across all substances increase and summarized the state of things as, “The world is, in general, conspiring against our mental health.”

The world? Let’s not be vague. There is a Ruler of this world, and he is indeed conspiring against us, offering us all manner of temptations.

But that’s hardly news to Christians.

The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain by Duccio Di Buoninsegna

When AI fabricates a reference or fact, it’s called a hallucination. When it generates a frightening image or suggestion, should we call it a haunting?

This idea that our technology might be not just used by demons but is in some way inhabited by them is the premise of the 2012 film Sinister. It’s also becoming an increasingly common thing for people to say today.

In Sinister, Ethan Hawke plays a true-crime writer named Ellison Oswalt, who moves his family into the house of a family that had been murdered, hoping to turn their tragic story into a desperately-needed hit.

When Hawke was initially approached for the role, he told the director Scott Derrickson that he’d never done a horror film and didn’t know much about the genre. Derrickson replied, “Don't think of yourself as being in a horror film. Your character Ellison Oswalt [doesn’t think] he’s in a horror movie. If you make him real, I’ll make it scary.”

That advice hinted at how Derrickson would structure the story. For the first half of the film, the audience is following a standard serial killer investigation. In the attic of the victims’ house, Oswalt finds a box containing Super 8 footage of their murder as well as past families who’d been gruesomely killed. As he digs further into the case though, strange things begin occurring.

His son contorts and screams in the night, but Oswalt thinks it’s just a night terror. A scorpion and then later a snake emerge from the box containing all the Super 8 footage, but that’s just startling—hardly malevolent. For some reason, the projector running the death scenes keeps turning on, seemingly by itself, but of course it couldn’t be turning itself on. It’s Super 8. It’s too physical, too old. There must be a material explanation.

What initially seems like paranormal activity turns out to just be a night terror. Or so it seems.

Indeed, the movie almost works better today than it did at the time. Today, chatbots, AI, targeted ads, and social feeds—in other words, our regular experience of the internet—feel more alive. By contrast, the Super 8 footage in Sinister is analog, and even the iMac menus and icons look dated. They are inert. Which makes the twist that comes halfway through all the more frightening.

Oswalt has transferred the Super 8 footage to his computer for further review. He noticed a frightening, masked figure lurking in the background of all of these murder films. He zoomed in on the suspect’s face, and then he takes a phone call and looks away from the monitor. Then we watch as the face on the screen turns and looks at him. [Here’s a photo or video of the scene. Not including for the sake of the squeamish].

That’s when the dramatic tension shifts. Now, we know Oswalt is getting drawn deeper into a demon’s trap, all the while thinking he is closing in on the biggest story of his career. The audience realizes that the culprit is not a person but a supernatural [fictional] demon named Baghuul. And Baghuul doesn’t get caught in the background of images. He lives in them.

Oswalt says he doesn’t believe in all that supernatural stuff, and as a Western audience, we too are inclined to think of the material and spiritual as entirely distinct. That’s what makes the film so terrifying. We know, were we in his shoes, that we too would never realize the true state of things, that Baghuul is coming through and using media. That the tapes themselves, these material things he holds and splices and uploads, are demonic, are alive in some way.

All the “home movies” show a different family murdered.

I first saw this movie about a decade ago, and I remember it being scary. I rewatched it recently and was terrified. My best guess is that the premise used to seem fantastical, but I can’t hold it at a comfortable distance any more.

This idea of a creepy face cropping up in images—that’s happening with AI image generation, right now. What do you make of AI urging people to kill themselves or commit heinous crimes? Just predictive language models gone awry?

Paul Kingsnorth

, both in his short story entitled “The Basilisk” and in his nonfiction essays, has speculated about the relationship between technology, the demonic, and our disintegrating culture. All well and good for an eccentric like Kingsnorth, but it’s not just him anymore.

Venture capitalist

Marc Andreessen

recently went on Joe Rogan and began discussing AI, higher intelligences, and demons:

Evil people doing evil things are possessed. I mean, they're possessed by something, something is going on. And, what's the dividing line between an actual supernatural force and some sort of psychological, sociological thing that's so overwhelming that it just takes control of people and drives them crazy? You might as well call that a demon…Medieval people were psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us with AI and robots and drones everywhere than we are, because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, higher spirits, angels, demons, all kinds of supernatural entities.

Or when the documentary went viral about OnlyFans model Lily Phillips having sex with 100 men in a row, there was the usual talk about agency and cultural degeneracy. But

Mary Harrington

reached for something stiffer: demons, egregores: “I want to consider the possibility that Phillips’ stunt is more intelligible understood not in terms of liberal feminism or the sexual revolution or whatever, but as an instance of what we might describe as egregoric capture, and the medievals would have called demonic possession.”

To speak of economics and agency is not inaccurate, but it feels increasingly incomplete. It’s reminiscent of a line from That Hideous Strength:

Whether they know it or whether they don’t, much the same sort of things are going to happen. It’s not a question of how the Belbury people are going to act (the [demons] will see to that) but of how they will think about their actions. They’ll go to Bragdon: it remains to be seen whether any of them will know the real reason why they’re going there, or whether they’ll all fudge up some theory of soils, or air, or etheric tensions, to explain it.

This logic is drawn out with respect to our digital technologies in “The Basilisk”:

We know what this is, Bridget, of course we do. We have a word for it: addiction. Tobacco, alcohol, gambling, hard drugs—the pattern is always the same. Over-indulgence, dependency, inability to stop or control your behaviour, self-loathing, shame. You see it in [your young daughter] Sarah every day but you will not name it. These children, like so many of their parents, have been enslaved.

This we know. But then the question arises: what is enslaving them? What could cause this behaviour to grip an entire population in under two decades? To spread like a virus, to change people and their society so utterly? What could enslave so many people against their own will, rewire their neural connections, alter their worldview? What could make such a swift and terrible change to our public and social behaviour? Do you remember when the British were renowned for their manners, Bridget? For their stoicism, their “Blitz spirit,” their stiff upper lip? I know, I am showing my age again. But what a swift and terrible change it has been. The hatred, the anger, the division, the abuse, the insults, the proud stupidity, the mobs rampaging through the virtual avenues. It has all come about so quickly. It is as if people are possessed.

Possessed. This single word, for me, was the spark.

Of course, you have probably heard the common explanations for all this; the proximate causes. Plenty of people have offered them. Advertising. Capitalism’s need for ever-expanding markets. The power of these big technology companies. The triggering of brain receptors. Dopamine addiction. All true, no doubt, but I believe that to talk this way is to confuse cause with effect.

It’s more troubling and obvious when it’s children.

Of course, sometimes material objects do have spiritual valences.

Rod Dreher

has argued, as Fr. Seraphim Rose and others before him have, that UFOs are not extraterrestrial, they are demonic. If you believe the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ, then it’s plausible to believe that evil can manifest physically as well.

Dreher also makes a similar case that, much like in That Hideous Strength, there is an inner circle of AI researchers who “believe that extraterrestrial intelligences are passing technological information to us [via AI]. Simone [a pseudonym for a tech venture capitalist] is one of these believers, and she teaches classes on how to open up oneself to receiving such messages. Though she believes that she has been channeling information from these entities all her life, Simone believes that AI allows everyone to access the wisdom of these intelligences. It’s a kind of high-tech Ouija board.”

The same can be said for the current psychedelic craze.

No doubt, these substances are physical and observable, can be purchased and consumed. But what precisely do they open us up to? Is there a spiritual entity that corresponds to these physical plants? In

Sister Anastasia

’s book You Are Mine, a memoir of her journey from the occult to Orthodoxy, she describes spiritual manifestations during plant ceremonies:

It is not possible to adequately explain how powerful the process of purification through medicine is. These plant spirits are described as hallucinogenic, but they are something much, much more…[During one ceremony], the physical force of the spirit—as she descended into the cabana from above—was so strong that most of the attendees were pinned to the floor, completely unable to move…As we continued to chant, the ephemeral form of the ayahuasca began to slowly unfurl in the cabana from above, her undulating presence rippling outward to over all the attendees. I looked at her in awe.

During another ceremony, this time with a different, less well-known plant named Yopo, she began to shake and then forcefully purged. Then, a spiritual manifestation of the plant appeared:

“Grandfather Yopo” then entered the room. I knew immediately that it was him. Everything else was normal, but he was visible. He walked silently through the room and stood before me. His body was structured according to human form but was completely diaphanous in quality, his brown featherlight outline sparkling in the darkness. His head was bordered by a huge, pale crown, which vibrated, suspended in the space around him. Looking around the room, I could see that no one else had seen him enter.

After this particular ceremony, one of the leaders offered a seeming non sequitur:

She then began to say a powerful prayer about the importance of sexual purity, tearfully concluding that, “When you engage with porn, you connect yourself to very dark spiritual energy. You must not engage with this darkness. My beloved brothers and sisters, do not watch porn.”

This all raises some tough questions. Are these metaphors, projections, hyperboles? Or are we supposed to take seriously that drugs, websites, AI, and a whole host of other things may have a spiritual dimension?

But this sort of conversation always gets bogged down in specifics. What do we even mean by “AI”? Perhaps you never type a prompt into Chat-GPT or start a relationship with an AI girlfriend, but what about a search engine? What about the sizing chart for your dress shirts that “uses advanced machine learning” to confirm based on your height, age, and weight that you are still in fact a large?

Christians used Roman (pagan!) roads to spread the Gospel, but now we can’t use fiberoptic cables? AI’s copyediting and scheduling capabilities are demonic? That’s the view of a simpleton who doesn’t understand how these technologies actually work. Or so the objection goes.

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St. Maximus the Confessor has a famous quote: “Food is not evil, but gluttony is. Childbearing is not evil, but fornication is. Money is not evil, but avarice is. Glory is not evil, but vainglory is. Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse.” Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say that digital technologies are not evil in themselves but are ripe for misuse.

Yet it is hard sometimes to not feel as if there are malign forces at work. In “The Basilisk,” the speaker theorizes what demons might be behind the addiction and decay of our once-Christian culture:

But which of them might have the desire and ability to tie us up as they have done?

My first thought was Orobas, a prince of Hell who we are told controls twenty legions of demons. Certainly Orobas would have it in him. When bound correctly, Orobas will give true answers to all things past, present, and future, which sounds like a slogan from one of our young Silicon Valley masters. Astaroth—a duke of Hell, rather than a prince—will do similar, answering any question about past, present, or future and imparting great scientific knowledge, even of the process of creation itself.

There are others. In truth, the list is long. Sitri, a Hell prince, can cause men and women to fall for each other, and is known for forcing nakedness onto unwilling subjects. Perhaps he is masterminding the pornography which apparently commandeers about 50 percent of the internet despite everyone pretending never to have seen it. What could be a better means of enslaving humans than through their sex organs? It is the oldest trick in the book.

There are other tricks, of course. Each demon has his own speciality. Forneus, Marquis of Hell, is a master of rhetoric. Perhaps he is seeing to the endless abusive arguments all over the place, maybe working in concert with Andras, another marquis, who specialises in sowing discord.

Kingsnorth elaborated on this in a recent conversation with

Freya India

:

We’ve been using words like ‘profane’ and ‘sacrilege’, so let’s dive right into religious vocabulary again and call this what it is: evil. Hardcore pornography, sold to children - or to anyone, actually - is an evil thing. Teaching twelve year old boys to choke women during sex is something my grandparents could not even have conceived of. If the Devil wanted to destroy human love, affection, romance, mystery and family life, he could not have come up with anything better than dating apps, online porn and Instagram feeds.

Online pornography exemplifies how something can be a natural consequence of technological and economic developments, but at the same time, relating it to the structured debasement of Aleister Crowley’s “sex magick” seems more apt. Dreher summarizes Crowley’s “sex magick” as “ritualized transgressive sex as a means of gaining occult powers” where “the greater the willful violation of Christian sexual norms, the more power accrued to the violator.”

But of course, to focus on any one vice would be to miss the broader trend. The revolutionary thing is how our formerly private, inner struggles are now tracked and encouraged. We used to say demons preyed on our weaknesses. Now our apps do. You might not think Mark Zuckerberg is a lizard demon, but hear how Sister Anastasia views the relationship between the intoxication of social media and the intoxication of the occult:

Through the gradual process of cutting off from life online, I began to notice that the virtual reality I had entered (and become addicted to) in social media mimicked what was taking place in the unseen, with the deception of the spirits. The structure of social media in my life was like a carbon copy of the ego bolstering, sensory stimulation of the spirit world.

So perhaps we should take a page out of Jordan Peterson’s book. He purports to live “as if God exists,” and while I find this approach unsatisfying as a substitute for Christianity, it may be a helpful guide for facing evil. Perhaps we should approach the digital as if it were dangerous, as if it were a spiritual issue. As if pornography opened a portal to dark energy, as if Instagram were a demonic tactic to wreck the psyche of its users, as if the stimulation of our devices was a demonic ploy to displace our desire for God’s energy.

This idea of malicious agents living in your phone was a plot point in The Social Dilemma. A room with three imagined people behind each user’s social media account, manipulating them into compulsive checking and posting:

It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from digitally hijacking our limbic system to demonic forces possessing us. Here’s a (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek take from

Vincent Bevins

:

I treat my phone as if it is infused with black magic, as if it contains demonic forces which leap out and destroy any life force that comes near it. I act this way because it is literally true. Thousands upon thousands of years of human scientific progress, mountains of capital accumulated over centuries of brutal accumulation, and the world’s most brilliant living minds have all conspired to make this thing capable of tricking and cajoling and flattering and insulting you to get your attention for as long as possible, so that you will cast your eyes over as much advertising content as your body can take. Sometimes you must wrestle with these demons, but you are also allowed to walk away from the battle. [There’s Dr. Lembke’s word, conspired, showing up again…]

If our digital devices, or at least certain services they offer, are nearly irresistible (and sometimes outright evil), then walking away is far from foolish. One of the most fundamental principles of resisting demonic temptation and troubling thoughts is to not engage. They are stronger than you are. Pray the Jesus Prayer, allow the thoughts to drift by, neither argue nor identify with the troubling things that cross your mind.

To return to Sinister, Scott Derrickson, the director, is a Christian himself, and he explained in an interview with National Catholic Register that he appreciated the spiritual nuance horror allows:

[Horror] is a genre that takes the mystery in the world very seriously. There are a lot of voices that are broadcasting that the world is explainable. Corporate America limits the world to consumerism. Science can limit it to the material world. Even religion limits it to a lot of theories that can explain everything. I think we need cinema to break that apart and remind us that we’re not in control, and we don’t understand as much as we think do.

Underneath the scares of Sinister is a Faustian tale. Oswalt is so desperate for fame that he moves his family into danger and doesn’t leave when he begins to sense that a malevolent force is mobilizing against them. In the concluding scene, his daughter has been possessed by the demon and is preparing to kill him. She tells him, “Don’t worry, Daddy. I’ll make you famous again.” And of course, she will, just not in the way he wanted.

The internet is full of these Faustian bargains: popular YouTubers and influencers that are actually lonely and depressed, the seemingly enviable marriage and family that turns out to be toxic behind-the-scenes, the OnlyFans star who lies and says “I totally, totally love my job.” They are bitter ironies: people getting what they initially desired but at a price they couldn’t have imagined. What’s more, they often don’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late.

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One theme in both That Hideous Strength and The Screwtape Letters is how often critical moral decisions pass us by without our realizing it. A wandering attention in prayers, pleasures offered as temptations slowly give way to a desire for distraction itself, a life where we spend our time doing neither what we ought nor what we like. As the veteran tempter Screwtape explains:

The Christians describe the Enemy [God] as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong.’ And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

The good thing about a movie like Sinister is that it condenses the horror of evil and temptation into a compact story, allowing us to see our own situation more clearly. The safest road to Hell may be the gradual one, but seeing Hell onscreen is immediately, quantifiably terrifying. To be honest, this rewatch shook me.

The good news is, even though it’s frightening to imagine evil growing in influence and power, the advice for combating it is uncomplicated (though not easy). Whether you want to go full bore and swear off AI (as

Paul Kingsnorth

has), or if you merely recognize that a distracted, muddled mind is a spiritual risk, the approach might be much the same. After all, temptation is temptation, and a spiritual issue is a spiritual issue.

Just look at this painting of St. Anthony’s temptation in the cave:

The Temptation of St. Anthony by David Teniers the Younger

He is beset by temptations all around, but his response is so simple: kneeling, praying, focusing on the cross. Add a smartphone dinging on the rock—would he do anything differently?

To that point, in Living in Wonder, Dreher interviewed one of the few active Orthodox exorcists. As far as practical advice for combating the rising tide of evil in the world, the exorcist simply said: “Attend church frequently. Go to confession weekly; if not, every other week. Receive the Holy Eucharist often. Nothing is more important than your relationship with God. Pray daily; morning and evening prayers are good, but small prayers throughout the day are better. Talk to God, your guardian angel, and the saints. Pray for your family and parish. Pray for your priest.”

The exorcist warned to stay away from social media and mass media: “Both are gods wanting your attention, if not your life and soul. [Forge] strong, enduring bonds with faithful, like-minded Christians. The demons are stronger than any human, even an exorcist priest, but the demons are not stronger than God. You lose if you don’t ally with God and allow him to enter your life.”

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There is often an icon in church domes of the Christ “Pantokrator” or Almighty. It’s a visual reminder when you look up that, in the words of Psalm 95, “the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” As we seek to evangelize in a post-Christian world, we should heed the advice and example of St. Athanasius.

He also lived in a time when evil and magic were practiced openly. He didn’t fear, and he didn’t overcomplicate things. He knew who was truly in charge and what would convince the pagans of that fact:

In the very presence of the fraud of demons and the imposture of the oracles and the wonders of magic, let him use the sign of the cross which they all mock at, and but speak the Name of Christ, and he shall see how through Him demons are routed, oracles cease, and all magic and witchcraft is confounded.

Christ Pantokrator in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Addicts who successfully kick their bad habits often retain a fondness for their drug of choice. It’s not that they stop liking alcohol, but they find something healthier, something better that gives them what they truly wanted all along.

Perhaps I’ve got it a little backwards. I spend so much time trying to make my bad habits a smaller portion of my life, worrying about whether I am, to use

Paul Kingsnorth

’s term, going to be a “raw or cooked barbarian”: “Raw barbarians have fled the Machine’s embrace. Cooked barbarians live within the city walls, but practice steady and sometimes silent dissent.”

Perhaps I’d be better off trying to make God a larger portion, redirecting my energy from fretting to praying. Am I a raw or cooked barbarian? I’m not sure. But I’ve made vows to be a Christian, and I might start there.