Liminal Loneliness
Oversocialized and Overstimulated
Author’s Note: A shorter piece from the drafts I managed to get out before finishing up on a much larger project of Immigration, Migration, and Warfare.
I’ve talked a lot in conversation and on video with regards to the discussion of analog horror. It’s a unique trend that has exploded into its own niche subculture and fandom, with some channels and videos garnering millions of views and countless essays, breakdowns, and channels just to talk about it. I’ve argued in the past that there is an emphasis on the generational aspect behind the creators and the viewers, especially as the technology we have has moved so far beyond the world of analog and the distinct grain and quality of VHS tapes, home movies, and CRT Monitors. People my age and older have a distinct memory of those things, we used them, we collected them, we played the earlier computer games on floppy disks or had gotten magazines with instructions on how to install or code the program themselves manually.
There is always something eerie about what’s ancient. The power of the Ark of Old Covenant, The Mummy’s Curse, or haunted graves or locations of great massacres. As a child when we lived overseas, most of the hotels were full or too expensive, so we parked the van inside of Lorraine American Cemetery in France. I was probably no older than ten years old, and there was something deeply unsettling about sleeping in the parking lot of a 12-or-so acre cemetery. In hindsight (and perhaps with chauvinism) I was being watched by the best protectors and warriors around, yet as a kid I was thinking this is how you get haunted or cursed.
Whether this constitutes me being called a “Soylennial” because I find this phenomena or media subculture interesting remains to be seen. I do follow up on a few channels that make this sort of stuff, from Midwest Angelica to Vita Carnis. It’s neat, not nearly as formulaic as some of the horror schlock that you can find in your local movie theater or on the endless scrolling of Tubi and other streaming services. The usual filters, jump scares, and premises for what is causing the horror and plot to take place feels somewhat tiresome, and the novelty of analog horror approach speaks to me as someone who can remember a time before widespread internet, social media, and smartphones.
In 2023 most people’s brains are fried. Maybe not fried, but fried in the traditional socialization that existed prior to the advent of 24/7 social media, programming, and interaction. We can now talk with people from the other side of the world over our love for Chet Baker’s music, and I can listen to someone call me the N Word with a thick Slavic accent when I play a first person shooter in a multiplayer arena. It’s fantastic, really. Yet at the same time we are also in an age where the perception of time has been so radically altered, and as I’ve written before the e-drama or the “lore” or a person or brand from six years ago now feels like sixty, or six hundred years ago depending on how online you are. I try not to be as heavily online as some of my compatriots (I even fast from Twitter by uninstalling it on the weekends) but even my brain is fundamentally wired to the online life. Throw in the tactile nature of tablets and phones and your bandwidth changes how you can interact with the world and see it function before your eyes as you can focus on five different things at once and still maintain a conversation.
This meme definitely comes to mind.
The mind is in a new phase of stimulation, how to think and process information, adapting to how we can perceive patterns, see if it makes sense, and still try our best to function. There are now generations of kids raised entirely on this stuff, those who have seen the advent of these new technologies who wish to make it part of some greater religion (Metaverse for the Dead to Meta Religions) and others wondering how do we maintain our faith and humanity in these realms (James Poulos’ Human Forever.) Lest a major collapse of technological capabilities to maintain the internet dies off in the coming decades, the human brain is on track to once more change itself in the new medium that is with us in our pockets ubiquitously, and potentially wired into our minds in the near future.
So why does this trigger fear, nostalgia, unease, and a sense of foreboding loss all at once?
I guess we should get to the definition for this piece’s namesake. For the first time in a while, Wikipedia offers a pretty good definition for what a Liminal Space is.
Liminal spaces are the subject of an Internet aesthetic portraying empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are commonly places of transition or of nostalgic appeal.
I’ve seen a lot of my mutuals on twitter look at images like these to mock those zoomers or those who find themselves unsettled by these images. To clarify I’m not one of those people who finds himself unnerved but rather instead I find it interesting, it’s sociological, it’s an expression of what a generation fears.