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.

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 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.

Our earliest language about the internet seemed to understand its nature best. The central question of cyber space 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... See more

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... See more

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... See more