A Splendid and Pounding Hallucination

William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793).

On November 10, 2016, Mark Zuckerberg was asked whether Facebook posts might have helped elect Trump.

That’s “a pretty crazy idea,” he said. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

As it happens, in 2016, I had just published a book about the relationship between the internet and lived experience. I argued that the symbolic order of the internet had become its own civilization, one populated not with humans but with digital artifacts. The artifacts were infinite and infinitely renewing—everything from our avatars to our posts to our search queries to our selfies.