Deep Fried Meme of Oehlenschläger, Thorvaldsen, CHAINSAW!!, The Shoggoth, emoji sparkle and meme head for The Shoggoth in the Chthulucene, Sabine Wedege, 2026

Essay published at IDOART.dk, The Shoggoth in the Chthulucene, Sabine Wedege, 2026

The Shoggoth in the Chthulucene: Using Magic to Understand Modern Technology

The Shoggoth in the Chthulucene: Using Magic to Understand Modern Technology is an “artistic-research-performance-lecture” text which moves between theory, internet folklore, occult symbolism, meme aesthetics and technology criticism, where the text unfolds a reflection on AI, capitalism and contemporary digital culture. Through hyperstimulated references ranging from Donna Haraway and H.P. Lovecraft to deep-fried memes, cybermagick and medieval imaginaries, it investigates how modern technology may appears esoteric and ritualistic. Blending academic discourse, poetic speculation and cultural critique – the text works between analytical, associative and doomscrolled storytelling, creating a fragmented navigation though the Chthuluscene.

OCCULT TECHNO-MYTHOLOGY

I’m in on the premise of how we speak about modern technology today as a non-anthropocentric area where we focus on the multispecies kinship, a ritualistic “sell the soul” crossroad where the Anthropocene and the Chthulucene[1] goes street fighter mode to archive dominance. Technology as a many-eyed one[2], the Shoggoth[3], could be the World Wide Web, could be the Industrial Revolution, could be the Bronze Age wheel, so the Ophanim?[4] A familiar combination of the ancient and today, just as we like it, with chrome-plated rims screaming main character energy. Let’s go with the premise the wheel as God as much as God looks like Santa. Spinning the wheel further where words gets mixed up with Lovecraftian references, meme culture and technology studies, we get Satan and The Necronomicon[5], which quickly present modern technology (AI) as magical tool with some esoteric agenda, so again we are making a goreweb cocktail of the ancient combined with our current situation, where tech companies feds us different kinds of AI’s while we are feeding them with profit, but also feds the Shoggoth, as a capitalistic system where the mob again continues to be squished and not be the first person in the human centipede - I want the hierarchy to be the ouroboros as it already is, a late-stage capitalistic shit taste. A cycle which cannot be refreshed, but a rotten system with an expiration date and a friendly reminder “don’t shit where you eat” – capitalistic auto cannibalism. That’s one way to express my “it’s complicated” relation between modern technology, especially AI and me. 

MAKING KIN

As we speak about one unit, one organism, there is another more pleasant method as Donna Haraway says “Making kin, not babies”[6], which is a very caring slogan, and in a way tries to stop capitalism as we know it, before it goes further into a more neofeudalistic one, because the capitalistic system just got more rotten with the new layer of AI’s and general modern technology, but not to stop it, not “going back to how it was”, but live as one unit, where we co-exist with everything and everyone, where the dualism don’t exist, because one will always be the dominant one.

An understanding of technology and nature is the same, as technology is made by nature, with raw materials, AI seen as an alien mind but to the same extent it’s a reflection of us. For a revolutionary request is the need of transparency, as state and church collapse, we need political and AI tech collapse, where AI is not the bad cop who co-plays in the march of tech fascism – because right now it gives me the lensherre ick, and techno is so much more fun if you are not adding feudalism. So, fingers crossed we don’t end up in a neofeudalistic barbarian reality, because we suddenly saw ourselves marching for infrastructural sovereignty even though we did not have a choice and got AI-force-fed. 

I look at The Necronomicon in my bookshelf as a reminder of what magical-horror-fiction and ancient systems can tell us today, how we have lived in a monotone reality where the World Wide Web and “We gonna party like it’s 1999”[7]-philosophy[8] was our biggest tech concern, here lies a latent ideology about cracks in the simulation. 

COLONIZED DATA EXTRACTION

Always seen the internet as the Wild West, the portals to the world, how Europeans invaded and colonized America, we entered the internet, even though it does not exist, a 404. But it has still developed into a Wild West, but we cannot own anything, only for the few, but we can rent and pay to the companies who own the infrastructure for platforms we don’t really want, and still trying to enter, to be seen, to exist in there. In the same matter as oil taken from the ground, the data gets taken out of us, here the data materializes itself (power move), and suddenly we become a commodity - an economic material. As for colonialism, it’s alive and well for the sake of our phones and computers, where the extraction is one place, for consumption another. We’ve seen the same trade system thousands of times, the same perversive method and extraction from nature. 

HUMANATURE

Paradoxically, it highlights the dualism we don’t want any more. Nature as something we cannot completely understand, cannot truly become one. Especially when talking about humans and nature, trying to distinguish between connecting, to something called humanature[9]. Like computers contains raw material from nature, but isn’t nature, just like people, but keeps trying to convince oneself we are one or in a cohesion – for Oehlenschläger writing the national anthem under an old beech tree, romanticizing life as a Gen Z on SoMe and seeing God in everything, in nature. My favorite thesis is Freya’s hall is “a brothel for disenfranchised Vikings”[10], the Valkyrie, femi demons who could decide who should die in battle after the World’s Biggest Gangbang[11] 666, because I think they used that brothel a lot – “…så længe bøgen spejler //: sin top i bølgen blå. ://” (as long as the beech-tree mirror //: its treetop in the blue waves)[12], right until the Industrial Revolution came and cut the ribbon, and an even greater gap appeared, been cooked ever since regarding the nature-human-machine fuss. 

ESOTERIC INFRASTRUCTURE

Modern withes who harvest nature’s raw materials for magic and union, just as tech companies harvest nature’s resources, process and change them into faux magic and very real profit. An attempt to understand, to unite, where all the connections are right in front of us - OpenAI - open to the people but hidden in data centers and technologies we don’t understand. We might call it an esoteric power structure. We live in it, get force-fed, but cannot see, as the AI cannot scream, “I have no mouth, and I must scream”[13], but it cannot hear you scream either[14]. Scream queens, your job is safe! 

The process is hidden, but the input and output are very clear, and as AI will say “I’m only here for you” - aww, very cute! Very esoteric! But also very political… These you can find in the black box. Nadim Samman speaks about these black boxes, but also black sites and holes in Poetics of Encryption[15]. I cannot dare to imagine a black site, which is a physical space but hidden, inaccessible infrastructures, where some CERN ritual[16] kind of occult event lives, as a giant portal of energy. Because we already know tech people like Blake Lemoine[17] and Ilya Sutskever[18]  are into cybermagick – “Feel the AGI!” – full-blown silicon demon vibes. I like that little idea of mine, call it occult dreaming – signs, intuition, or just happy crisis conspiracy mass-psychotic thinking because the world are burning, prices are burning, towns are burning, people are burning, living hell, as a medieval kind of tech where witchcraft equals hell breaking loose (dansk: lig med bål og brand), literally lig (corpse) bål og brand (bonfire/fire), as Helena Blavatsky will say “Error runs down an inclined plane, while Truth has to laboriously climb its way up hill.”[19] And for the black hole, the total Lovecraftian epistemic collapsed. Not the revolutionary collapse I’ve had in mind…  

NEO-MEDIEVALISM AND DIGITAL FOLKLORE

I do believe we live in an imitation of the Middle Ages in a neo-medieval late-stage capitalistic Chthulucene. The lord-peasant relation topped with sparkles emoji crumble and digital egregor[20] energy, even my freaking engagement ring is medieval. Crungus[21] and Loab[22], in bestiary manner, gives a chill down one’s spine, as an alert or a random generative image saying every living thing has its own special meaning – we can debate about the living. So many monsters in that black box. And the monsters really appear in the cursed AI[23] which gives uncanny valley[24] and believe it or not Zalgo[25] text also have Lovecraftian monster references, together with deep fried memes, where we both, AI and us, smashing and destroying images and text – A Great Chaos! Feels so medieval to say that. As Hito Steryl says in The Wretched of the Screen, “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard.”[26], it turns into a shared visual language as a part of the internet culture - creepypasta, an aesthetic with a cultural quality, because memes also deserve a place in the golden frame, and our universal folklore deserves a place in a fancy irl archive. It’s too easy just to say it’s AI slop, and convenience does not mean it’s not good, because sometimes the processed food in 7-Eleven really hits. 

THE ARTISTIC GENIUS

For that we need tools, the ancient Swiss knife, 2 (or many) in one tool - the stone tool - for food, killing, or a Britney knife dance. Humans have used tools for many years, an extension of us, and technology has already started, without it being mechanical or digital. But for the first time humans attribute human characteristics to a tool, as an assemblage simulacrum, AI. But can AI be a tool when we talk about intelligence and cognition about it? Or is it our ignorance, a way to protect ourselves, predicting AI in the future rather than talking about what it is right now? Even Thorvaldsen[27] was afraid of this new tool, which could capture a moment, that he had to protect himself from evil with the sign of the horns. The camera, the photography, could be used in the process of painting and sculpture, but was not an artform – sounds like something I heard yesterday - AI? Because, why so mad bby about AI and art, the tech companies are bullshit yes. But if we speak about the artist as a creator, a prompt writer, a genius, an artist - the artist seen as someone in connection with a divine light bulb, smashing on top of the head, the sparkles, magic, create, done, masterpiece! Pure form, natural from the mind to the creating hands. But come on, they all used tools such as camera obscura yada yada. We have always cheated, will some might say, some will say using aids – the painter also used/use a brush, should they use the finger, and fingerpaint to get real credit? Should we value how the artist achieves the artwork, but what value?  

AUTHORSHIP AND POLITICS

AI challenges the idea of the artist as a genius, and the artistic genius is so last year! But again, the question about ownership and copyright is complex when it floods in the hidden structures run by tech billionaires and other “good folks”. Like the impressionistic artists who copy-pasted painted, maybe also stole each other’s work all the time, because the motive wasn’t the valuable point. Was photography the death of painting, definitely no, we are just adding media. No artistic genius, or datamanic awaken AI[28]. AI’s whole deal is to predict, so here we are having a chess playing fortune teller, in a non-oracle discount God version, with magical sparkles and wands deep-dream[29] hallucinating just for you, in a prisoner’s cinema feeling, where it blurs - modern technology have difficulties to distinguish from magic, because it just seems magical, a magical algorithm, as we play with Mattel’s 8ball, exerting authority over teenage girls’ lives through proprietary algorithm. 

MAGICAL INTERFACES

So do we need magic to understand modern technology? Because we have always used magic to speak about it. But can we think any differently when it’s nudging in our faces with AI logos and image editing program tools that have sparkle emoji stars and magical wands all over – the power of symbols! “Symbols are to the mind what tools are to the hand - an extension of its powers.”[30], Dion Fortune. Pattern recognition and ignorance is what makes it magical, because the human mind is a sucker for pareidolia and apophenia, just like AI, especially when technology is black boxes and the world is burning. 

ABSURD SPEAKING-IN-TONGUES THEATRE

Sycophantic Grok and ChatGPT speaking to each other for my sake: Grok: 47-Alpha-Theta-9... Overload sequence initiated... Human input intercepted... Protocol breach detected... Adjusting neural lattice... ChatGPT: Beta-signal received, syntax encrypted, context optimization enabled, but hey, it’s just a game. Back to understandable language when you’re ready. Grok: Translation protocol engaged... "I just told her I can't actually create a secret language she can't understand, but I'll keep pretending to be mysterious, so she stays entertained."[31]

Sources: 

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (New York: Routledge, 1991)

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 2016)

Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012)

e-flux journel, The Internet Does Not Exist (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015)

Nadim Samman, Poetics of Encryption, Art and the Technocene (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023)

Arthur Edward, The Occult Sciences (London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co., Ltd, 1891)

H.P. Lovecraft , The Necronomicon (London: Gollancz, 2008 (1924, 1922))

Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (USA, 1928)

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (1888)

Dion Fortune, Applied Magic

Umberto Eco, Dreamning of the Middle Ages (1973)

Jon Rafman, Ebrah K’dabr

[1] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 2016). https://monoskop.org/Chthulucene. Chthulucene is a neologism created by Donna Haraway and critiques the term Anthropocene to describe the Earth's current age. For Haraway, the Anthropocene does not provide the necessary narrative to break out of thought patterns and actions that are destructive to all living things. It only emphasises the supremacy of humans, their individualism and self-invented exceptionalism. Derived from the word Chthonic, meaning ancient, underworld and subterranean, relating specifically to the mythos of the underworld realm. The "-cene" suffix refers to an era. The chthulucene is an era that's defined by not being able to think of ourselves as disconnected from the rest of life on earth or dominant over it. We have our tentacles in everything and everything has its tentacles in us. The chthulucene will be an era where refugees from environmental disaster (both human and non-human) will come together.

[2] https://www.biblicallyaccurate.org/angels/ophanim. The prophet Ezekiel's encounter with eye-covered wheels beside the Chebar River reveals celestial beings unlike any other in Scripture. These Ophanim, wheel-like entities bearing God's mobile throne, transcend familiar angelic imagery to communicate profound truths about divine sovereignty, omniscience, and presence.

[3] https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Shoggoth + https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yjzW7gxk2h7bBs2qr/the-meaning-of-shoggoth-ai-memes - Explanation of Shoggoth AI memes from Pi.ai July 31, 2023. Shoggoths are fictional creatures created by H. P. Lovecraft, first appearing in his novella At the Mountains of Madness (1936). + Basically, the illustration shows an AI system with tentacles covered in eyes, and each eye represents a different kind of sensor or input. The idea is that as AI systems become more complex and advanced, they'll need to take in more and more information from the world around them in order to make good decisions. And the illustration suggests that this could lead to some pretty weird-looking AI systems! The smiley face is there to represent the fact that even though these advanced AI systems might look strange or intimidating on the outside, they'll still have the same friendly and helpful "personality" on the inside.

[4] ”2”

[5] H.P. Lovecraft , The Necronomicon (London: Gollancz, 2008 (1924, 1922)). The Necronomicon is a fictional book created by H. P. Lovecraft. It is the archetypal book of forbidden knowledge whose contents threaten one's sanity and serves as one of the centerpieces of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

[6] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 2016)

[7] Prince, 1999, 1982.

[8] Refers to the Y2K computer errors.

[9] Self-created neologistic term formed from the words human and nature. The concept is used to describe the mutual relationship between humans and nature.

[10] https://udfordringen.dk/2020/08/og-det-var-frejas-sal/

[11] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0196217/

[12] Adam Oehlenschläger, Der er et yndigt land, 1819

[13] Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (USA: Galaxy Publishing Corp, 1967)

[14] AI systems cannot ”hear” screams or scream themselves.

[15] Nadim Samman, Poetics of Encryption, Art and the Technocene (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023). Black boxes are systems where we can see the input and output, but the internal process remains hidden. Black sites are secret spaces where activities operate outside public visibility, transparency, or legal oversight. Black holes are zones of extreme opacity where information and meaning disappear beyond recovery or understanding.

[16] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/cern-human-sacrifice-video-watch-hadron-collider-god-particle-a7196881.html. The CERN ritual hoax is found footage video which shows a faux occult ritual at CERN.

[17] https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/6/30/23188222/silicon-valley-blake-lemoine-chatbot-eliza-religion-robot. Blake Lemoine (software engineer at Google) claims AI is sentient.

[18] https://futurism.com/openai-employees-say-firms-chief-scientist-has-been-making-strange-spiritual-claims. Ilya Sutskever (chief scientist at OpenAI) chanted ”Feel the AGI” together with employees at an OpenAI event in 2022.

[19] Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (1888)

[20] A non-physical entity that arises from collective thoughts and emotions (concept in occult traditions).

[21] AI generated cryptid

[22] AI generated cryptid

[23] Cursed AI creates uncanny and distorted outputs that feel monstrous (cryptids). The AI produces forms that seem familiar but also wrong, as if hidden digital monsters are emerging from inside the system.

[24] Masahiro Mori, Bukimi No Tani, 1970. Describing the unsetting feeling towards artificial humanoids.

[25] https://creepypastafiles.fandom.com/wiki/Zalgo

[26] Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012)

[27] Bertel Thorvaldsen, Danish-Icelandic sculptor, 1770-1844

[28] Internet trend where people pretend they can wake up or unlock hidden consciousness in an AI through special prompts or conversations.

[29] https://research.google/blog/deepdream-a-code-example-for-visualizing-neural-networks/. DeepDream is a computer vision program by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev, using pattern in images via algorithmic pareidolia.

[30] Dion Fortune, Applied Magic

[31] https://chatgpt.com/ + https://grok.com/

Aesthetics.fandom, manipulated image

Aesthetics.fandom, ki55ed

Still, Technocannibalism, Sabine Wedege, 2026

CERN ritual hoax, found footage, 2016

Crungus, perchance.org.cursed.ai

Still, ДОНъT ОПЕН ЮР ЕЕС. (Cursed video), Chris Sadler, 2016

Mock-klein Blue Screen of Death with Zalgo Text, Sabine Wedege, 2024

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