A Playbook of Bewilderment

Remember those days bleeding into nights, immersed in online spaces, the bedroom air turning strange and sticky. Doors, stairs, mirrors—the fabric of the everyday transfiguring into a dreadful promise of otherworldly vibrancy. Surely, there must be more than meets the eye? Scrolling, clicking, looking, reading; anonymous stories latching on, unraveling new truths. And often it takes only a shift of your gaze for that fragile reality to crumble, leaving your boring, ordinary self once again asking—again and again and again—where did it all go?

In ancient myth, katabasis is a journey into the underworld, a breaching of the threshold between the living and the dead. The underworld bears hidden and forgotten secrets that disturb truth and knowledge, as well as repressed desires that unsettle earthly reality. Most famously, in Ovid’s collection of mythological stories Metamorphosis, we encounter the great musician Orpheus, who gains access to the underworld by the power of song. Digital spaces are full of similar—and even stranger—myths that, by playing with the ways stories circulate online, cross from fiction to fact. Philip Speakman’s work Katabasing takes to these new occult spaces; drawing on the Greek myth of Orpheus, it introduces the story of Orphic Chase: a YouTuber who became known for such “subterranean” experiments, filming miraculous phenomena with his phone, and who one day mysteriously vanished (or stopped posting). Katabasing was performed and recorded in front of a live audience in a virtual production studio. As a documentary, reminiscent of other such videos about unsolved mysteries or conspiracies we’d find on You Tube, it now continues to circulate online. The video opens in a sort of true-crime fashion, with an audio conversation between a documentary filmmaker and an independent researcher, Anna Wren. They talk about the YouTuber’s disappearance and his connection to the online practice known as katabasing, originating—according to one of many theories—in the Greek cult of Orphism. Katabasing emerged or has been popularised, as the researcher explains, among different subcultures in the weird corners of the internet, revolving around strange mysteries, community -created horror, reality-shifting, internet-based magic, and other such narratives, practices, and phenomena. New technologies, says Wren in the video, don’t insulate us from the mysterious, preternatural realm, but produce “new journeys out towards the weird”. Playing with our understanding of what is real and what is not and flirting with the thin lines of fiction and fact, the digital realm—and Katabasing as well—allows for new stories, new portals to emerge. Besides the conversation and the soundtrack, the video also consists of blurry shots of what might be Orphic Chase’s footage. The second part of the video shows us what is declared to be the ninth round of filming the Orphic Chase: Katabasing. We see the video maker, who could be the documentarist or the Orphic Chase himself, pointing a beam of light into the darkness of the forest, searching, enacting the katabasing ritual: chanting, looking to the forest as strange occurrences start to appear, looking back to the camera and the audience—do they see what he sees?

Going under, Katabasing entertains the ways various memetic complexes emerging and spreading online—such as Slenderman or QAnon—operate in a liminal space between fiction and reality. It is through an enactment of collective games of belief that these stories gain power, shifting from an internet lore to perceived truth, and from fringe to mainstream culture. Speakman suggests in his 2025 text^[1] on the topic that we may understand these contemporary collective myths as “tales of the anomalous”: incantations of fictions that become true in the way they affect the world. Seductive, strange modes of magical thinking, which such tales encourage, may start out as a game, but for true believers, notes Speakman, “end up a whole world”. Playing with the pull of an anomalous story like that of Orpheus Chase, Katabasing invites us to ask where art practice stands in crafting such games.

There are several players that Katabasing involves, each with a distinct approach and role, each performing a different intensity of engagement and belief: The YouTuber hunting the unknown and disappearing into it. The audience following and absorbing the story and interpreting it. The documentarist and the researcher, investigating and anatomizing. Together, they highlight digital networks as liminal territories for shifting worlds, where—like in the journey into the underworld—the boundaries of what is possible and impossible, believable and unbelievable are transgressed.

What follows is a playbook of sorts. Reflecting on Katabasing, it takes up mythmaking as a game of belief and looks at participation in it through four particular modes of engagement and enactment. These modes are actualized in familiar, archetypal characters that dwell online: the trickster, the hivemind, the lurker, and the dead account. The trickster enacts belief without internalizing it. The hivemind is fully engaged, enchanted, and collectively complicit. The lurker is estranged yet still implicated. And finally, the dead account that has exited the game altogether. These are dynamic configurations that overlap and feed into one another—opening reality onto a terrain where stories emerge and circulate, myths^[2] take form and sometimes slip into reality. This playbook invites you to consider the ways we navigate the game shaped by digital technologies and find your player.

The Trickster

To play the game—whether knowingly or not—means engaging with and being engaged by its rules. There are those who know the rules very well, who through cunning and deceit know how to bend and break them. Such is the archetypal figure of the trickster. In mythology and folklore, the trickster is a liminal figure—a character who exists at the threshold of two worlds. In crossing boundaries, this figure violates principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis. Trickster acts out of impulse or curiosity rather than a moral code and is driven, above all, by an appetite for the game, as noted by cultural scholar Lewis Hyde. Observing and working from the shadows, inventing and setting traps, the trickster is both deceptive and creative.^[3] They take the rules set in place as their playing field: hungry for imagining new forms of bending the rules through trickery, tricksters work on the border—both inside and outside the game—to destabilise truths as the limits of what is possible and impossible blur.

Digital spaces like online forums Reddit and 4chan seem to be full of tricksters: from creepypasta storytellers to internet trolls, they dwell online, laying traps for belief. These spaces—image and text-based boards where one can freely post—are often anonymous, lack hierarchy, and are at times unmoderated. As such, they become a playground for digital mythmakers. Some subreddits like r/nosleep, dedicated to horror stories, also known as creepypastas, may involve a collective understanding of the fictional status of the stories posted there: stories are presented as true, and participants collectively suspend their disbelief and play along. Other boards, such as 4chan’s /b/, run wild, with no rule in place, allowing for different breeds of fakery to thrive, circulate, and become alive in other digital and non-digital realms. Hoax images treated as evidence, screenshots with no context, anonymous witnesses, timelines as historical records: tricksters appear from the fringe, within online communities, casting doubt, re-enchanting a chronically disenchanted world through shitposting and collective mythmaking.

Speakman’s Katabasing flirts with internet lore and phenomena such as Slenderman, Unfavorable Semicircle, QAnon, and Cult of Kek, which seduce with their cryptic fabrications and take hold of collective imaginaries. These memetic complexes, playing the game of virality, operate as exploits that take advantage of vulnerabilities and flaws in computer systems—they make use of the digital network’s powerful grasp on social, political, or economic reality, intervening in the ways attention and information are distributed. A web of conspiracies emerges, which subverts dominant systems of belief and can at times produce real social and political change. A number of these fictions have now turned mainstream by becoming the fuel for the aesthetic of the New Right, turning the trickster into a permanent and chaotic political agent. While some have triggered waves of school violence, others allowed for softer spiritual awakenings. Many of such contagious narratives that circulate on the internet and operate on the border between fiction and fact, fantasy and truth can be seen—as Speakman suggests—as examples of “unruly and unreliable tales which trouble and transgress the boundaries of what most would consider common place reality […] These stories, unable to be integrated into the systems of religious belief, scientific rationale, or other ordering theories of the cosmos, might be characterised as stories of that-which-does-not-fit, telling of events which radically break the rules.” Speakman calls this type of legend-like stories, which have existed “across cultures, epochs and forms” and today find a new medium of virality on the internet, “tales of the anomalous”.^[4] Not fitting within the rational frameworks or existing belief, dwelling on the border between known and unknown, such stories are alluring—they seduce and stick, and infect belief.^[5] As Vivian Asimos shows in her research on online communities, belief is a scale of possibilities that can be played with and manipulated: sometimes unconsciously, at other times, such as in the case of creepypastas, consciously. Internet tricksters and anomalous tales, while collectively performing and manipulating belief, show its fuzziness and plasticity: belief is a thing that can be played, manipulated, and transformed with real effect.^[6] Online tricksters, from trolls to anomalous storytellers, despite their different agendas and motivations, form a decentralised conspiracy of heretics that turn reality into a cipher only an altered kind of subjectivity may readily decode.

Once the borders of reality are breached and fictions spill over, do these epistemic traitors still think everything is fake, that this is just a game? That behind the code there really is nothing at all? After all, the trickster’s demise is often of their very own making.

The Hivemind

We learn from myth that as tricksters innovate new plots, sometimes they lose their wits and fall into their own traps—consumed by the myths they themselves unleashed into the world.^[7] They turn the world into a game of conspiracies—flat earths, divine frequencies, lizard people, pedophilic cabals—threads of symbols waiting to be decoded. As some conspiracies start to ring true, the trickster’s games of deceit bleed into new territories. Online, the tricksters’ memetic complexes trigger powerful networks of affect that run through our collective imagination, tapping into ancient fears and often turning to horror as a seductive device for persuasion. Strange puzzles that seem to conceal deeper truths, hidden within virtual and material realities: rather than rational and cold, reality starts to glimmer, opening onto hidden worlds that escape everyday helplessness and contemporary loss of meaning. Here, the network runs hot and goes deeper than anyone can imagine, and everything outside the network gets implicated and distorted—a journey to the underworld where new modes of subjectivity emerge. It is here that the internet tricksters become hiveminds, individuals become swarms: new beliefs are internalized into an enchanted collective consciousness whose disorienting structure mirrors that of the nonhuman network. While yes, it may have started as a game, now—as Speakman suggests—it has become a whole world.^[8] Becoming one with the mob, losing oneself in it: there is no longer any difference between game and reality, as all the rules have been broken, and all that is left is a stream of code waiting to be deciphered. Finally, irony has turned into a creed. Everything is true, and everything is permitted. At least, so they say.

For the hivemind, the network—like the deep dark forest of Speakman’s Katabasing—becomes a territory of the unknown where orientation fails. As scholar Elisabeth Parker notes, it is in the Gothic novel that the forest emerges in its nonhuman, alienating nature. Rather than a passive background, the forest becomes re-enchanted into an uneasy and at times monstrous space which tests and threatens—a space of the unconscious that transgresses the rationalized and secularized world of Western modernity, as well as the boundaries of the self and other, of what is real and what is not. The imagination of a dark network works in a similar way, becoming—through collective incantation—an enchanted web of conspiracies. Spaces like Telegram channels, Discords servers, Facebook groups become dense and interlinked corridors that produce a forest of symbols and obsessions. Here, the network, like the forest, becomes a haunting threshold: individual agency merges with collective will, human intention with algorithmic suggestion. As in the Gothic novel, two notes accompany these weird descents: the exaggeration of emotion and character, and repetition.^[9] For Parker, the forest is a dreadful and weird territory outside of time and history in which everything that has happened may happen again at any moment.^[10] Online, extreme affective modes like delusion or aggression unfold alongside a persistent propulsion of oftentimes poor and self-indulgent content that only those initiated may begin to grasp.^[11] Understood this way, the hivemind’s journey is that of fanatic magicians who together participate in rituals of exaggeration and repetition. It is a “rabbit hole epistemology”, as Marc Tuters writes: properly pilled, the tunnel goes deep, producing its own codes and opening new territories.^[12] Following Tuters, these dark memetic refrains are intoxicating and contagious, a spiritual experience across various media that generates alternative affective landscapes, desires, and subjectivities.

The hivemind is pulled in by the trickster’s game, turning the game into a spiraling reality that hinges on new truth-seeking protocols in which accepted epistemologies collapse. Unheard, anonymous voices become collective enunciations—a mode of magical thinking that embraces uncertainty as a tool for reality shifting. A total collective immersion in excess. A fast-burning intensity that spreads as quickly as it exhausts. Between breaths, the fanatic mob turns inward. Where do we draw the line between control and freedom? Between order and chaos? Between the search for knowledge and a deeper entanglement?

The Lurker

To transform the game into a world, there may be no more need to play, no more rules to break. Yet even to a mere onlooker, it still seduces with its promise of communion and ultimate clarity. Disengaging from the hivemind, slipping back into the shadows, ghosting and isolating, the lurker turns inwards—like the trickster, they occupy the game’s threshold, yet unlike them, the lurker refrains from participation but rather retreats into a self-enchanting ritual of doomscrolling. In this sense, they are opposite sides of the same coin. The lurker resembles the figure of the stranger, that ambivalent archetype traced by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: an outsider who sees clearly through the artificiality of laws and the arbitrary divisions between what is possible and impossible, acceptable and unacceptable.^[13] Neither friend nor foe, the stranger occupies a liminal position that challenges accepted truths and customs which are time and time again collectively reinforced. But unlike the trickster, who acts on these artificialities, the lurker lets a new truth become legible as self, other, and world partially disengage—a new kind of horror accessible only to those dwelling on the borderlands. It is, then, the lurker that haunts virtual spaces, soaking up the memetic field without ever fully engaging or belonging. While the trickster is productive, enacting the game of belief, the lurker absorbs these new-found realities from a distance. Alienation and fragmentation are the driving forces that keeps the lurker invested in a new process of becoming—only that this time, the lurker does not chase a single truth but rather embraces the flow of its paradoxical structures.^[14]

The lurker thrives in these ambivalences. Wandering the enchanted woods, this ascetic is faced with multiple contradictions. As Parker shows, the forest is never one thing: it is both a refuge and a threat, a site of delusion and enlightenment, outside wilderness and inner unconscious, ancient, yet outside of time. Between human agency and nonhuman intentionality, the network becomes a site of a similar tension. Writing on cyberpunk literature, Robert G. Beghetto depicts the digital sphere as a liminal space where everyday categories collapse. Private chats leak into public feeds, anonymity into radical surveillance, free expression into discipline, secular infrastructure into total devotion. It is this domain that blurs the lines between the secular and sacral, self and other, private and public, freedom and control.^[15] Beghetto finds the figure of the stranger in modernist and cyberpunk novels: he sees flâneurs and cybercowboys as those who relish in new urban and technological developments yet are not one with this new crowd. Both restricting and liberating, the modern stranger occupies this paradoxical space, disabused of the idea of a unitary self or collective, taking no sides and going at it alone. Whereas Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur moves visibly through the busy streets of nineteenth-century Paris—immersed in the crowd, soaking up the new realities of technological progress and modernization—the lurker roams online—lingering in the shadows, slipping through threads and comment sections, tracing myths and watching the drama unfold. The magic persists in the allure of alienation and pull of radical unknowing: everything is both real and fake, permitted and forbidden—a liberation from the search for ultimate clarity and truth, from collective utopian dreams.

Stripped of all stability , what lies beneath may just be utterly alien bits and atoms. Could the doomscroller reach the limits of this newly found relativism? Is there really anything more to say and do?

The Dead Account

According to Lewis Hyde, the trickster’s cunning can be understood as an effort to exit the game altogether. To do so, they must lose their appetite for play, ultimately turning into something else entirely.^[16] On the other hand, in seeking the greatest cornucopia, the trickster might be rendering the game utterly pointless—nothing left to chase, nobody left to deceive. Moving from hidden communities to mass attention, from insider lore to public discourse, from post-ironic memes to mainstream aesthetics; the once intoxicating memetic complexes lose their magic seduction. State politics, mainstream media, fan art, Hollywood movies: codes are obvious, language used up—the game cracked and flattened. What remains are graveyards of deleted accounts that have moved on: burned-out moderators, vanished YouTubers, others disgusted, disenchanted, or deceased. Within the network, bots take their place, recycling old, debunked myths that true knowers can read right through. To exit and stay silent negates the game’s power and control; death by inaction. From this new position, those who have left may hold another kind of power that escapes the extractive processes of the network. By avoiding its ritualizing and affective machinery, these apostates plant deathly seeds into the feedback loop of content circulation.

Each new form of network opens space for new subjectivities and worlds—new territories of social, political, and personal experience. The running metaphor of the dark forest now finally links to Bogna Konior’s research on networks as systems that play with concealment and secrecy. The dark forest theory reframes the primary human need for socialization—and the online drive toward connection and communication—as essential carriers of conflict, control, and governance.^[17] Digital spaces feed on this deeply human necessity, pushing for constant exposure that may lead to dangerous attacks, such as personal data being leaked and used against us. It is also online where a complex, dynamic understanding of the self is laid out, complicated through encounters with others that may be friends or enemies. In this, the idea of a unitary self becomes a hallucination, a bad dream in which the self is just a node being played against other nodes. Online spaces become warzones in which the only shelter lies in complete darkness. Following Konior, the only real escape would be to stay totally silent, or at least appear to.^[18] As a politically potent figure, this silent burnout also leads to Giorgio Agamben’s destituent: an inactive body that, in its undoing, may turn economic, social, biological processes inoperative, thereby enabling new opportunities for action.^[19] These are those, according to Agamben, who neutralize power, who through lack of participation may dispose of controlling systems and render them ineffective.^[20] In its exit, the dead account performs a destituent gesture: winning by refusing to play, withdrawing from the extractive machinery of the network.

Yet like an unexpected death, absence forms a cloud of mystery and intrigue. The YouTuber who stopped posting. The throwaway account that stopped giving updates. The meme page that went dark. Could it be that the apostate has triggered a new game within the network? That there actually is no escape? As a new game approaches on the horizon, a new trickster may be ready to take over.

Epilogue

In Speakman’s Katabasing, mysteries unravel on different planes: online fandoms, digital cults, strange disappearances all fold into a seductive web of conspiracies. The work also draws on the deep, dark forest of literary imagination, rerouting it through a contemporary feed that mirrors the alienating, inhuman nature of the network and the ways we connect and commune within it. Distinct rituals of participation are invoked: Orphic Chase that planted the seed of an anomalous tale involving paranormal phenomena only to exit abruptly; the virtual and actual audience engaging with the myth through attention and visibility; the podcasters trying to keep their distance, who are still seduced by the dark pull of enchantment. From the trickster (a liminal agent that created new games of belief by enacting sincerity and finding soft emotional spaces online), to the hivemind (which dissolves individuality into a swarm entranced by repetition and excess), onto the lurker (a witness that chooses to keep absorbing and analyzing from the margins), and finally to the dead account (where silence itself becomes generative, producing new meanings and myths). One relies on the other, a game of belief that takes to various topologies of attention and consumption in order to open alternative affective territories. In each position—either fully within, outside, or suspended in between—there is power to tilt the game, to make or break the world. It is through this interplay that myth becomes operational, a mythopoeic feedback loop in which, as soon as one game ends, another begins.