The Cybernetic Unconscious (3)

Part three of five.

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Feb 15, 2026

Link to Part One

Link to Part Two

2A. Sigils

“Everything stands on communication

If you can’t talk, then there’s no escaping

Even if you could talk, there’s no escaping this

If it’s a breakdown, then why won’t it break?

Why won’t it break?”1

In Serial Experiments Lain, communication is power. In the real world, it belongs to the social cliques and clubs at Lain’s school, all of which she observes from the periphery, exiled by her inability to read or respond to physiological social cues. In The Wired, it belongs to people like her and The Knights. Like many real autistics2, she sees communication purely as a receptacle for information, and thus reality, interrogating Professor Hodgeson and the Cheshire Cat in her search for truth3. The truth is that communication is not just a tool for perceiving reality, but a weapon for controlling its users: she forces the nightclub shooter Ash to shoot himself just by talking to him4, a video game leads to the deaths of multiple users5, and Lain’s sister Mika is destroyed by commands to “Fulfill the prophecy.”6 These images, words, and videos do not represent reality, but automatic reactions that precede conscious awareness. They are sigils, empty of reference, full of significance.

Both in the anime and in real life, sigils emerge when people communicate in symbols that occlude rather than specify what they reference. A Chaos Magick sigil of abundance does not “mean” abundance any more than the Christian cross “means” Christianity, or Jesus. Rather, the Chaos Magick sigil manifests abundance and the cross wards off evil, without the user knowing how or why7. As with the pre-conscious forms of language postulated by Julian Jaynes or the metavirus in Snow Crash8, “information is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmission, and observation of orders as commands,”9 with no interpretation or reflection necessary on the part of the receiver. Between the past of language as pure social instinct and its future as the basis of pure automation10, sigils represent a present achievable maximum of potential significance.

Sigils are social phobias, programming instant, violent reactions to immaterial symbols. In organized religion, they operate more like manias, marking arbitrary “holy” spaces and objects that attract worshippers and program behavior. Shrines automate offerings and kneeling, holy relics automate pacification of those in need, and the hymns and blessings of church services automate sociality. Euphemisms, slang, and slurs all function analogously: the narrator of “Sexting” can simulate a sexual relationship with “emojis only” and “one hand on [his] dick and one hand on [his] phone,”11 yet he neither understands nor fully believes the texts on which this digital perpetuation of normative sexuality depends. Slurs and euphemisms automate entire political networks while objectifying their referents; both “differently-abled person” and “cripple” allow neoliberal achievement networks and conservative disciplinary networks, respectively, to enact policies affecting disabled people without realistically conceptualizing, or including, such people in policy-making. Swear words represent the limit of significance, a point at which “fuck,” “cunt,” or “bloody” no longer refer to sexual intercourse, vaginas, or Christ’s blood, respectively, but to a general intensity. They reveal nothing about what they signify in any given context, except that you must "listen closely—everything is very important."12

2B. Servitors

“I want to be the machine in your hand and go wherever you go

Your every touch would be my command, and I wouldn’t be so slow”13

Being the smallest unit of religious significance, sigils can only automate simple situational effects, such as producing feelings of comfort in a congregation or fear in the targets of hate speech. Servitors link sigils into machines that not only share the effects of each sigil, but produce a composite effect absent from the component sigils. The sigil programs a reaction; the servitor programs an action and reaction.

Sigils are objects divided from consciousness, egregores simulate consciousness, and servitors seem semiconscious14. A collective consciousness assigns them significance via communication, but this significance only generates effects on an individual basis. Angels and demons are superhuman because collectives construct them, yet are subhuman because they exist only to serve a single goal, and generally a single individual. Egyptians and Romans, as societies, believed that Shabtis would serve Egyptians in the afterlife15 and Lares protect ancient Roman households16, but individual Egyptians and Romans could not expect to call on each other’s personal spirits any more than a pregnant Christian today would expect Gabriel to offer a personal annunciation.

Servitors metaphysically reflect the paralogisms of slavery or labor exploitation. Like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos with their fully automated factories17, “army of part-time workers” under constant surveillance18, or crowdsourcing of AI training to what is effectively slave labor19, religion advertises servitors as the foundation of a fantasy in which an authority may relegate all work and responsibility to inhuman parties. The religious fantasy at least allows immaterial manifestations to substitute for actual enslavement, whether through an imagined afterlife where clay figures serve their masters or through the invisibility of protective spirits. Yet, while dehumanizing creatures that do not exist may be amoral, the normalization of dehumanization is not. Enslaving a demon harms no one, but wanting to enslave one, believing that achieving total personal freedom by stealing it from others is not only possible, but good, is the “blood along the ridges” of capital20.

2C. Egregores

“I spent the winter with my nose buried in a book

Trying to restructure my character

‘Cause it had become vile to its creator

And through many dreadful nights

I lay praying to a saint that nobody has heard of

And waiting for some high times to come again”21

The weird needs gods. In the seminal stories of H. P. Lovecraft, the aliens, cultists, and entities propagating chaos all serve a pantheon of “utterly transcendent and uncaring entities that somehow underlie the universe.”22 In those of his predecessors, like Arthur Machen or Robert W. Chambers, a “strange, ominous, and foreign-looking child” is “a daughter of hideous Pan himself”23 and a man giving “the impression of a plump white grave-worm” is an avatar of The King in Yellow24. They owe their physical abnormality, equated with monstrosity, to a metaphysical source. Each example and subcategory of the genre creates a new pantheon, an array of models for the inhuman, unknown, and inescapable. These entities both produce and are produced by their signifiers, as they represent phenomena inexplicable under human rationality or logic, and thus inherently tautological. In The Magnus Archives, the greatest fears of humanity produce entities that produce and feed on fear, while in The Silt Verses, corporations use sacrifices to create gods that demand more sacrifice. Tiny Terrors, a metafictional deconstruction of horror podcasts and creepypastas25, refers to its own gods as “egregores,” a term borrowed from Theosophy, esotericism, and magic traditions26.

Egregores are simulacra of conscious individuals. Like humans, egregores have distinct personalities that can be broken down into consistent traits, like those servitors represent. In The Magnus Archives or The Silt Verses, each god represents a collective fear or system—The Eye represents scopophobia27, The Spiral represents the fear of losing one’s mind28, and The Trawler Man represents creeks and inland waterways29. The Trawler Man defends his cult by flooding their enemies and turning them into giant crayfish, but he is not only capable of those two things, nor will he always do them when asked. Like his followers, he can choose any actions within a set of constraints, which happen to be metaphysical rather than physical. As social machines, egregores execute not just single programs, but entire categories of programs.

Egregores lack the embodiment, materiality, and intersubjectivity of actual humans, meaning they always favor their own survival over their constituents despite being of the same order as consciousness. They survive through the reproduction and veneration of symbols and “the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”30 Jonathan Sims describes this form of reasoning as “dream-logic,”31 a theory based entirely on aesthetic axioms. This allows egregores to replicate on a mass scale the cognitive dissonance and inner conflict resultant from neurosis. What psychiatrists condemn as self-harm, anorexia, or depression, egregores exalt as mortification, fasting, or penance. They not only demand sacrifice, but “the production of ritual values,”32 specific acts that symbolize the egregore, such as drowning sacrifices to a water god33 or instructing followers of an AI god to optimize their “altruism” and “efficiency,” just like a machine34. Nothing ever satisfies, because egregores want universal control over all phenomena. They want to become true gods.

2D. Gods

“I’ve called to you a thousand times to take away this cup

But there will be no miracles ‘til the ransom’s added up

Just tell me what you want from me

Tell me what would make it be enough”35

Egregores express unknown concepts by inscribing their symbols across territories of the material world. True gods contain all symbols and all territories. The institutions that attempt to simulate gods seek to automate all other deities with their own, hence the consolidation of winter festivals like Yule or Saturnalia into Christmas36, the incorporation and subsequent redaction of pagan Meccan goddesses in the Quoran37, or the capacity of weird and postmodern fiction to absorb other genres through intertextuality and metafictional references. Egregores operate within collectives; gods desire to add all collectives to their own.

Psychosis and god are both unachievable limits to the production of significance. Both multiply significance across networks without being able to fully erase reference. In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson describes this process of approaching god by narrating the history of monotheism in typical conservative Protestant fashion. In his telling, Judaism replaced polytheism but reverted to legalism, Christianity replaced Judaism but reverted to ceremonialism, and finally Protestantism fixed Catholic ceremonialism38. It would be more accurate to say that the relegation of information to a collective unconscious requires that it remain unknown, but the collective sharing of that unconscious requires that its representations be made conscious, whether through laws, ceremony, or evangelism. The shared practice of theology, and by extension religion, ends with either the refutation of god or the division of god into egregores. Either a perfect, immaterial god has created an imperfect, material world—refutation—or another god is responsible for imperfection—egregores.

At the end of Serial Experiments Lain, Lain becomes a true god. To do so, she not only loses her body but erases herself from the collective memory. Arguing with herself over whether it was the right choice, she says, “You won’t need to do anything. You should only be and observe. Nobody looks down on Lain. Nobody hates Lain.”39

To truly know god, you have to die.

Link to Part Four

ILL.SAN

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