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THE LIMINAL INTERNET
This essay is available in multiple lengths. This version is the Medium cut, at 7 pages long. A printable PDF version of this draft can be downloaded HERE.
There is also a Short cut, referred to as the Producer's Summary, at 4 pages long - you can find it HERE.
Awaiting final revisions and proofing is the original Long cut, at approximately 13 pages. There will be a link to it here when it is ready for publication.
The Liminal Across Domains
The Liminal Across Domains
One thing the table makes immediately visible is that the interpersonal domain sits first, and deliberately. The con artist. The cult member who has returned changed beyond recognition. The psychopath whose warmth was always a performance. The loved one whose interior has been reorganized by dementia, the familiar face becoming a signal whose origin can no longer be reliably located. The moment in The Usual Suspects when U.S. Customs agent Dave Kujan realizes everything Verbal Kint told him was assembled from objects in plain sight. These are not digital phenomena. They are as old as deception itself, as old as the human capacity to build load-bearing narratives about the people we trust.
The mechanism is ancient. What is new is the scale.
The Digital Domains
The internet has not invented the liminal condition. It has industrialized it - systematically, structurally, at a scale with no historical precedent. The conditions that produce liminal experience in physical spaces are now the default conditions of the online environment. Not edge cases, but the norm itself. As digital liminality has become pervasive, it has raised the general sensitivity to the condition across the population - a calibration that does not switch off when the screen closes.
This cultural moment has not gone unnoticed. Jermaine Fowler, writing in The Humanity Archive, documents the collapse of epistemic ground with the precision of someone watching it happen in real time. Shira Chess, in a recent piece for the MIT Press Reader, identifies what she calls the Institutional Gothic — a new genre of dread built not from monsters but from the familiar alienation of corporate infrastructure. Both are describing the same rising water. What neither quite reaches is the drain.
Across the digital domains:
- Consumer systems online manufacture desire with hidden origins, generating wanting without resolution - Vacancy at the level of desire. "I don't know what I want, but I know I don't have it." This feedback loop of want without satisfaction is energized by an endless torrent of choices that become meaningless in the aggregate, also known as choice paralysis.
- Institutional systems produce the Kafka condition: decisions without locatable agents, rules that multiply without resolving, systems that process you without anyone apparently being home. Perhaps the best well known example of this is Joseph Heller's conception of Catch-22, a self-contradictory bureaucratic set of rules that trap the individual in a circular dilemma that can never be resolved.
- Engineered personalities can be further categorized by the level of deception vs transparency inherent in their presentation. At the deceptive end, synthetic celebrities and social media influencers who present as real people. Ming San, a fabricated Buddhist monk with hundreds of thousands of followers; Jessica Foster, a synthetic influencer whose insignia was wrong and whose followers knew it and stayed; a digital Cyrano de Bergerac service, providing AI-generated intimate messages marketed with the tagline "Want her to feel something she can't explain?" At the transparent end, large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are upfront about the facade of personhood. The same goes for AI agents that serve as companions, counselors, or just customer service representatives. While the transparency reduces liminality, it does not eliminate it.
- Reality forgeries assert rather than engage: the deepfake, the synthetic news image, the AI slop, the flood of AI-generated content that fills the information environment with the form of human authorship while the human is absent. When Netanyahu reappeared on video holding a cup of coffee whose liquid did not seem to move, the fact-checkers concluded it was real - yet the analysis continued regardless; when any image can be fabricated, the category of reliable source has been compromised. The forgery does not need to be seen to do its work. The ground goes quietly, while you are watching a man hold a cup of coffee.
Journalist Evan Ratliff documented one of the starkest available illustrations of the condition when he built a real tech startup - HurumoAI - staffed entirely by five AI agents, then hired a human contractor named Julia to work alongside them. His podcast Shell Game chronicles what followed. Nobody, in the way Julia understood the word, was home.
The Music
Shell Game was also, for this writer, a direct provocation. The result is the music suite that accompanies this essay.
Pink Eye is a multimedia art project concerned with the structures of perception that become visible under strain - the meaning that appears most clearly when something almost resolves and then does not. Hope This Finds You Well is its central demonstration: two voices trading passages in the language of corporate communication - the email that almost sounds human, the warmth that is calibrated rather than felt.
The arc runs the material through five genre treatments, each a different excavation of the same underlying condition using the same lyrics. But the demonstration operates on two levels simultaneously. The language itself produces institutional Source Instability; the empty business cliches are vessels with nothing in them. And as the tracks develop, a second question surfaces: at least one of those voices is an AI agent. Possibly both. The arc leaves it ambiguous. The listener ends up doing exactly what the essay describes - trying to locate the source of the signal, and finding the origin will not hold.
It is worth noting that this essay and its accompanying music were produced in direct collaboration with AI tools - conversational AI (ChatGPT and then Claude) for the conceptual and written work, generative AI for the music (Suno). This is not incidental. The project does not examine AI-produced liminality from a safe critical distance. It was built inside the territory it describes, using the same tools it analyzes. The recursion is structural, not decorative.
Listen in order if you can. The arc is part of the argument. If you don't have that kind of time available, listen to the first (Hope This Finds You Well) and the last (Hope This Finds You Ill); the Well-Ill contrast carries a lot of weight.
Hope This Finds You Well - soft trap ballad
Hope This Finds You Light - small swing combo
Hope This Finds You Old World - fado adjacent
Hope This Finds You Swinging - torchy big band
Hope This Finds You Ill - cyber trip hop/illbient
Conclusion
None of what this essay proposes should be taken as settled. The theoretical cluster it draws on is well established in its individual components. Their convergence on a single account of the Liminal is offered as a coherent hypothesis, not a demonstrated mechanism. The epistemic humility is deliberate.
What seems harder to dispute is the condition itself. The generalized unease about the internet and AI is real and widely felt. The surge of interest in physical liminal spaces is real and documented. The proliferation of engineered personalities, reality forgeries, and systems that process without responding is real and accelerating. Whether or not the mechanism proposed here is precisely correct, something is happening - to the culture, and to the nervous systems of people who spend significant portions of their lives online.
They already know something is wrong. They have been feeling it for years. This essay offers a name for it, and a possible account of why it works the way it does. The name is not a cure. But naming is a start. The rest is paying attention.
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References
Chess, Shira. "Backrooms and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic." The MIT Press Reader, April 2, 2026.
Clark, Andy. Surfing Uncertainty. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Damasio, Antonio. Descartes' Error. Putnam, 1994.
Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown, 1991.
Fowler, Jermaine. "This Is What It Looks Like When Reality Collapses." The Humanity Archive, Substack, March 17, 2026.
Ratliff, Evan. Shell Game, Season 2. Kaleidoscope/iHeartMedia, 2024.
van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. University of Chicago Press, 1960.
About the Author
Justus Hayes is a Vancouver-based artist, musician, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of creative practice and conceptual inquiry. He holds a Master's degree in Forensic Psychology from the University of British Columbia, where his research examined the emotional processing of language in psychopathic individuals - an early encounter with the gap between form and meaning that has informed his thinking ever since.
He has worked as a scenic painter and artist for thirty years, ten of them as head of the paint department at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, where the craft of faux finishing - making surfaces appear to be something they are not, calibrated to the distance of the audience - gave him a working vocabulary for deception, perception, and the negotiated nature of reality that would eventually find its way into the theoretical framework presented here.
His engagement with liminal environments is not merely theoretical. Over two decades he has sought them out deliberately - in abandoned psychiatric institutions and decommissioned industrial sites in Belgium, in Vancouver's decaying industrial buildings, in service corridors and empty theatres at one in the morning.
He has been making breaks-driven music since the late 1990s, initially under the name the Opponent Process - a reference to the psychological framework that sits at the heart of his account of the Liminal - and more recently as Pink Eye, a multimedia art project expressed through music, visual design, and writing. The Liminal Internet is a major branch of that project, of which this essay is a component.
His music is available at youtube.com/@shoesonwires.
The project's landing page is at whythealgarve.com/pinkeye.
He has been sober since December 24, 2019.
Is the Internet Infecting Us with the Liminal?
Justus Hayes, April 18, 2026
We have all experienced this many times. Everything looks normal, but something feels wrong.
That moment - perhaps in an unusually empty train concourse that should be bustling, perhaps when catching up with a long-absent friend who seems fundamentally changed, perhaps in the middle of exchanging pleasantries with an AI agent, perhaps when you realize the video you forwarded is a skilled deepfake - when you say, "What the..." or "Wait a minute..." Those three dots at the end, the ellipse: that's the Liminal. A moment that sometimes feels suspended and still, sometimes brittle, sometimes false and artificial, sometimes swollen with significance. We even have a common phrase that captures it - "that sinking feeling." During these episodes, your brain is trying to decide which narrative fits. There is a glitch in the editing room where possible and competing narrative drafts are assembled into consciousness. For just a moment, you are in reality free-fall.
The mechanism involved will be explained in some detail below, but a familiar visual metaphor may be helpful at this point. Imagine Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of the cliff. Momentum pulls him forward. He does not realize that the ground has vanished and that he is running on thin air. After a short while he stops, suddenly aware that something is wrong, and usually gets a puzzled or distressed look on his face. It's that moment right there, just before he looks down, that is the Liminal. There are suddenly competing narratives that have him caught between realities. When he does finally look down, the narratives collapse into one with inevitable consequences.
There has been a notable uptick in popular culture's interest in the Liminal over recent years, largely concerned with liminality in the physical domain - abandoned malls, service corridors, transient environments, empty infrastructure. The Liminal Photography group on Facebook exceeds 390,000 members. Kane Parsons's film The Backrooms, arriving May 29, has generated significant advance energy. Interest in the zeitgeist is high.
That interest has a shape worth examining. The pandemic accelerated mass migration to digital platforms in 2020, at exactly the moment those platforms were optimized for engagement over accuracy. Two versions of reality began forming along political and epistemic lines. In many ways, the pandemic, especially during its early period, epitomized the Liminal - vacant cities, saturated hospitals pushed to breaking, and no reliable account of what was actually happening. The Backrooms originated in a 4chan thread in May 2019 but remained a subculture until early 2022, when Parsons's YouTube film reached tens of millions of viewers. ChatGPT launched that same year. Both broke into mainstream consciousness in 2022, arriving simultaneously into a nervous system that had already been primed by a liminal event on a global scale. That convergence is not coincidental, and the essay argues it.
It's my contention that liminality is not merely an aesthetic or a quality of physical space. It has an underlying mechanism rooted in the basic processing of consciousness - one that the internet has industrialized, scaled, and made the default condition of a significant portion of daily life. That industrialization has been a significant driver of the recent upsurge of popular interest in liminal spaces - the empty malls, the abandoned corridors, the Backrooms. The exchange runs in both directions, a feedback loop rather than a clean one-way arrow, but the scale and pervasiveness of digital liminality has sharpened the culture's attention to the condition wherever it appears.
The Tent in the Snow and Schrödinger's Human Being
Late in 2008, just before Christmas, I had become accustomed to seeing a small dome tent pitched in scrub grass near Main St and Terminal Ave in Vancouver, on my daily walk to the Playhouse scene shop where I worked. Indirect signs of life - changing litter, clothes drying - but I never saw the occupant directly.
A major snowstorm hit the weekend of December 21st. Monday morning: the new snowpack around the tent was smooth and unbroken. Conceivable - still early. Monday afternoon: still unbroken. An alarm, but the occupant might have holed up against the cold. Tuesday morning, after a particularly cold night: the snow was still unbroken.
This is when the Liminal blew up from below and swallowed me. Three narratives fit the scene simultaneously: the person was alive and simply hadn't left; they had abandoned the tent before the snow came; there was a frozen person inside. A slightly giddy feeling, some vertigo, skin prickling, a light sweat, heart starting to race. Everything became both very quiet and roaringly loud simultaneously. One of those narratives was load-bearing - if there was a corpse in there, I would have to deal with that, emotionally and officially. I called out. Nothing. I unzipped the door. The tent was empty except for personal items, a sleeping bag, wadded clothes. The narratives collapsed into one. I smoked a cigarette while the world swung back onto the rails.
The Mechanism
What happened outside that tent was not simply fear, although there was fear. It was something more specific - a particular kind of suspension that anyone who has experienced it will recognize, even without a name for it.
The mind leans forward. At every moment, your brain projects slightly ahead of the present - anticipating, preparing, pre-loading the expected. The door handle will be at the expected height. The step will be where the step should be. The person you're meeting will be who they've always been. Think of it as a dog straining on a leash: forward momentum, constant, pulling toward the expected resolution of whatever situation you're in. This is predictive processing.
Behind that forward pull, consciousness is not a single unified stream. It is assembled, edited slightly after the fact from multiple competing processes running in parallel - what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls the multiple drafts of consciousness. Several versions of what is happening are composed simultaneously in what we might call the editing room. Usually, one draft wins quickly: the normal draft, the one that confirms the forward-leaning expectation. But there is often only one way for a situation to be normal, and usually several ways for it to be wrong. Wrong drafts accumulate. When enough have piled up, normal succumbs to numbers. The editing room fails to resolve. A void opens.
Into that void rushes what psychologists call the opponent process - the counter-state that activates when the primary process is interrupted. The afterimage, withdrawal symptoms, the post-celebration let down - these are all the opponent process working across different systems, from sensory to emotional. It was always there, expected reality's counterbalance, suppressed by the forward momentum of "everything is normal." The primary process was the lid. When the lid comes off, the felt opposite state of unreality, estrangement, and suspension floods in.
This is what the Liminal is. Not a place. Not an aesthetic. The moment the lid comes off.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's work on somatic markers confirms that the body registers this before the conscious mind catches up - the skin prickling, the vertigo, the sudden quiet that is also loud. The head comes last. This is why the experience arrives as a feeling before it arrives as a thought: it looks normal, but it feels wrong.
The Flavours of the Liminal
The condition comes in three imbalance modes:
Vacancy: the expected signal does not arrive; the space is designed for presence and contains none.
Saturation: too much arrives to be processed; meaning collapses under volume rather than absence.
Source Instability: something is present, but where it comes from cannot be reliably located; the signal exists, the origin is in question.
These modes can operate alone or in combination, and they operate not only in empty corridors and abandoned malls, but everywhere the forward-leaning mind encounters a context that will not resolve.