As I write this, my best friend sits across from me in my living room, staring at her phone.
She’s in a trance, her attention on nothing in particular — just the screen. Is she working? Wandering? Speaking to someone, or being spoken to? I don’t know.
My toddler calls out to her, “Tía! Tía!” and without looking up, she coos his name.
For more than a decade, the language of addiction has shaped how we understand our relationship with the internet. We talk about dopamine hits and rewired brains. We count the hours lost online as if they’re milligrams of oxycodone. We prescribe digital detoxes and “tech sobriety,” and we confess to falling off the wagon when we re-download Instagram.
In an odd way, the addiction metaphor is comforting. It promises that what we’re experiencing can be neatly diagnosed, treated, even cured.
And the addiction story does capture something real about our experience of tech — the compulsion, the phantom buzz in your pocket, the reflex to check your phone when you know nothing is there. But while it tells us we’ve gone too far, the story fails to help us move through the world the internet has remade.
At some point, we have to accept that we will neither quit the internet nor live in a world untouched by it. Ban phones from every school, movie theater, library and third space you like — we will never be able to travel back in time, or to an alternate reality, where this technology was never created, where it was never put in the hands of every person on earth. Before long, we’ll have to accept that the same thing is true of artificial intelligence.
Refusal isn’t an option. Adaptation, however, is.
Adapting begins with seeing the internet for what it actually is — not a drug, nor a set of behaviors, but a place we travel to, with its own geography and customs. It’s not a physical place, but it’s no less real. Anyone who came of age online knows the feeling of crossing that threshold: When you log on, time runs differently, the body slips away, and, as one early inhabitant put it, “the selves that don’t have bodies” step forward.
Our earliest language about the internet seemed to understand its nature best. The central question of cyberspace has always been one of navigation. How do we move through this world while remaining human? What do we bring back from our travels? What bargains do we strike unknowingly? And how do we step back into the world of bodies when part of us would rather remain online?
To survive an enchanted world, an otherworld like the internet, we need the right kinds of stories to help us move through uncertainty and cross thresholds without losing ourselves. Folklore — the world’s vast tradition of myths, legends and fairy tales — has long offered this kind of guidance in forms that are easy to remember under pressure. Some of humanity’s oldest stories are about crossings into otherworlds, places where ordinary rules dissolve, where time slips, where travelers risk forgetting who and what they are.
The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued that myth first emerged to help people cope with what he called “the absolutism of reality” — the overwhelming scale of the world and its fundamental indifference to human concerns. Myth made the incomprehensible bearable. Building on Blumenberg’s work, the Belgian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh suggests that we now face a new absolutism. The terror we once felt from nature — floods and droughts, sickness and death — now comes from the technology we’ve built and no longer fully understand.
Once again, we encounter forces that exceed our comprehension. And once again, we turn to stories to keep our footing, maintain our humanity and emerge from the encounter whole.
The medieval Scottish legend of Thomas the Rhymer offers a map for navigating the otherworld. In the borderlands, Thomas of Ercildoune encounters the Fairy Queen beneath the Eildon Tree and is taken to her world for seven years. When he returns, he has gained the gift and curse of “true speech.” Thomas may never lie again, which grants him the power of prophecy. And indeed, it is a power, though one that alienates him from his humanness. Thomas the Rhymer’s story suggests the crossing can be survived, but only at a cost.
The otherworld rewards skilled navigators and destroys the careless: Treasures turn to leaves; fairy wives eventually disappear back home; hubris causes travelers to be lost forever, or worse, to wither and die. But many stories teach us that brief encounters with the otherworld, carefully managed, need not destroy us.
Artificial intelligence now presents its own kind of danger. With the internet, we cross a threshold into an otherworld. A.I. is like a creature from the otherworld who crosses into ours. Across cultures, there are stories of nonhuman entities who fulfill our requests — or grant our wishes — according to their own logic rather than our true intentions, unable to untangle what we meant from what we said, like a large language model following a poorly written prompt. These stories warn us about more than just greed. They reveal the inevitable gap between what we intend and what we instruct, and the unforeseen consequences that follow. Whether it’s a djinn or a leprechaun or a large language model, these beings don’t adhere to human morality, because they are not human.
The old tales didn’t necessarily warn against interacting with the otherworld, nor did they say its inhabitants were evil. But they did warn against failing to understand their nature, against forgetting that some boundaries exist for good reason.
J.R.R. Tolkien, speaking in 1939, named a clarifying power within what he called fairy stories: recovery, the ability to see the world as it actually is rather than through the “drab blur” of familiarity. Seeing the internet as a fairyland — an otherworld with its own logic — isn’t about mystifying technology. It’s about seeing it sharply, as the strange and powerful environment it really is. In this way, enchantment restores what habit has made invisible.
The internet is a place crowded with uncanny entities and enchantments. Sometimes these enchantments reach back into our physical world. If we hope to travel wisely, the old instructions still apply: mark the threshold, remember that time moves differently there and know that every gift from the otherworld carries a price.
Above all, keep part of yourself rooted in the real world — grounded, embodied and tethered to other people. We’ve seen what happens when someone wanders too far. Think of all the lost boys who have disappeared into their rooms, only to return as something unrecognizable, like a modern changeling. Or the many adults who have fallen victim to conspiratorial thinking, caught the way wanderers once followed will-o’-the-wisps into the marsh, seduced by lights that were always illusory.
My friend looks up from her phone. A moment passes before her eyes refocus — before she fully arrives in the room again. Nearly an hour has slipped by. The light settles. The walls come back into view. My child’s face sharpens into recognition.
He studies her for a moment, then reaches out and touches her cheek, as if welcoming her home.
Katya Ungerman writes under the pen name Katherine Dee. She’s the tech correspondent for The Spectator and a columnist for Tablet. She blogs at default.blog.
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