[Published 17/12/2025]

ON THE INTERNET

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Do we feel at home on the Internet?

We use strange phrasing when it comes to locating ourselves. Supposedly, we exist in the World, but can also be found on the Internet. From where I’m standing, most people experience the inverse: the World is the place people situate themselves on, and the Internet is the place people sink into. The fact that this original inversion is so entrenched in our common understanding speaks to the central problem.

You can’t be at home on a place. You have to dwell in that place to call it home. Locating yourself somewhere is all about presence, and presence is felt, beyond logical doubt or suffocating reason. Presence can’t be argued away or ignored out of existence. Whatever attacks presence only deepens it, and it’s a jolly good thing that is the case, because we need presence like we need oxygen. We have to belong somewhere.

***

Last night, as I lay in bed, I thought of a time a few years ago when the very notion of a personal website seemed about as plausible for me as living without oxygen.

It turns out I was wrong. Apparently, I was already living without oxygen back then… perhaps that clarifies my years of medically unexplainable breathlessness. And the memory returned last night because I was lying there, contented with the website I have now produced—organically, over many months of steady emergence—and it occurred to me: How did I ever live without this before?

It wasn’t that I needed the World to affirm my existence. Rather, I needed a place that could house my experiential truth. And experiential truth, once housed, cannot be distorted—it is not open to interpretation, and it cannot be dismissed as mere feeling. Once properly housed, Feeling and Fact come together as Being, and the subjective finally obtains its objective status. 

Now, we might wonder why the Internet is relevant to this at all. Why not simply house my experiential truth in myself?! Well, I have. But it just so happens that my presence on the Internet, which mirrors exactly my ever-evolving presence in the World, has been vital to the overall consolidation of my being. I learned the hard way that I have lived more interior life than the World generally permits—or is capable of acknowledging—and so I needed a way of entering the World fully that didn’t reduce or distort the full scope of my lived truth. The Internet was my way in, and my personal website now rests like an airy monument, and a humble one at that! My website exists in its fullness and continuity, and so do I.

***

Yes, we all have to belong somewhere. And would we rather belong in the World or on the Internet? It’s a simple one. We want to belong in the World.

But for most, the World is not exactly hospitable. As my earlier inversion alluded to, the World favours those people who can exist comfortably (at least in the surface-level sense) on it. The World, historically, has not been somewhere people can truly dwell—its blunt immanence forbids it. Instead, it acts as a cushy landing pad to people whose interior life glows like a modest lantern in a black inner cosmos. Those people can exist happily on the World and think they’re in it, naively unaware of the burning fixed stars that light up the felt experience of many others. The sad truth is that even those modest few, once presumed to be the majority, long for their lights, however dim, to be recognised in full.

So where does that leave us? With a continued discussion on the Internet as a place.

***

And what kind of place is the Internet? The word itself comes from “inter-network”—a place of connected computers or communication nodes. That might well be important to call back to later, but it doesn’t help us identify what kind of place it is. So what is it? 

It’s not a place we can literally visit, at least in the physical sense. If we were to actually visit the Internet at its physical point of origin, we would be met with nothing more than a collection of cables, routers and satellites. Is that what we consider visiting the Internet as a place? No! So we cannot physically visit the Internet as it actually exists in the material sense. 

Yet we do visit people’s websites and social media profiles. We visit all nature of websites, both personal and corporate. The word “website” actively implies a site within a web, and a site is a place… even if it’s not a physical place. So we do literally visit the Internet, but we do so by visiting the World Wide Web, and that is only a physical act in so much as we type with our fingers and look with our eyes. 

And so the investigation deepens. It appears that the Internet has revealed something crucial about what it is to actually visit a place, and thereby to dwell in it. People do not have presence on the Internet because that is not possible—unless you are content to stand clumsily on a bundle of cables—but they do have presence in the World Wide Web. And if we accept that the World Wide Web could not exist without the Internet, and that the Internet would not be what it is without the World Wide Web, then we can say with calm confidence that people do have a presence in the Internet. It is, quite literally, the only way to engage with the place sincerely. 

There we go. It would be silly to force such a materialist reduction on the place we call the Internet… but what about that other place? What about the World? 

Well, of course, you can exist on the World without having to really dwell in it. The World already physically houses us, after all. If you want to travel to a certain place in the World, physicality will do the entire job for you. If it is pleasantly nearby, you need only put one foot in front of the other and commit to the movement. If it is a faraway place, get on a train or hop in a car, and those wheels will roll on happily. Gravity does half the job, and the ground does the other. It is very easy to visit places in the World… or so we think! Because to visit is to dwell, remember, and so to truly visit a place, we must be capable of residing inside it, not just plonking our feet on the ground at a certain point of longitude and latitude.

With that in mind, here’s another question: If you travel to Rome and stand in the Sistine Chapel, have you been there… or have you merely stood upon its cables?

***

Yes, people can truly dwell in the Internet. The Internet shows that matter is necessary, but it does not reign supreme. Presence does. Experience does. Dare I say… interiority? Hmm. 

Because it is possible to merely exist on the Internet in the crude sense, but that kind of online existence does not garner the respect it would in the physical World. And it’s a common occurrence, isn’t it? A respectable man of societal conformity—not in the degrading sense, simply factual—seems exceptionally real in the World (or on it), while being strangely lacking in depth online, at least in his social media presence.

And yet… this doesn’t mean that same man, with his quieter inner lantern, does not press his presence into the net, as it were, albeit in other ways. It is not uncommon to find people who, while quite content in their supposed everyday lives, still reach for some form of online engagement which allows them to explore the parts of themselves the World does not readily offer residence to.

With this acknowledged, we see that the Internet flips the presumed hierarchy of existence. Suddenly, we have a place where those with burning interior lives, those who want to dwell by nature but have no home in the material, are finally the experiential guides. The natives of the Internet are those who were implicitly deemed too much for the World.

***

This fact: that those with complex, fierce interior lives have finally found a dwelling in the Internet, is at once beautiful, necessary, and dangerous. 

Simply, do we want a split existence? No. Those people who have finally found a home online are not content to accept their banishment, and nor should they be. In the last thirty years, people who were once condemned to exist largely in isolation, and eventually in madness, have found a haven… only for that very haven to be consistently deemed unreal in the physical sense—i.e. in the only sense that matters. Matter matters, after all! Lest we forget… as if we could ever forget the fact!

We have seen, then, a proliferation of understandable attempts by those once isolated people to impose their existence upon the material world. The Internet became a place for people to explore and validate their own experiential truth, but that alone did not help them gain legitimacy offline. How could it? The World is not yet inhabitable, and if depth is to land truly in the material, the ground must be prepared for its arrival. That preparation, unfortunately, simply cannot be undertaken by a world that is incapable of housing extreme depth.

It’s an obvious, tragic problem. Interior life has always needed a way of landing in the material without distortion, but that kind of validation is beyond the capabilities of physical life. Such validation has to come from within. Matter does not reign supreme, after all, so why would we expect it to have anointing powers? 

***

Luckily, I am doing the anointing right now for myself, in this essay, and I have been doing it in my life for some time. 

In fact, I am only able to write this essay with certainty and childlike enjoyment because I am personally standing on the ground I have prepared for myself. You can’t write an objective-subjective essay before living through the ruptures and repairs that make the thing possible. 

So that’s good news, isn’t it? And it’s why I am in no rush for reality to change in some crude revolutionary way… it is already changing for me, and it is changing because I just… keep… going. I am welcoming myself to life at the seam.

***

With the seam now introduced, we can return to what it is to feel at home on the Internet, and to truly dwell in it. Inevitably, this will lead us back to the World, too. This is a masterful stitch: neither place can be left behind. Not anymore. And for the purposes of the present, unified space now occupied, I will speak of other modes of being in the past tense. It doesn’t mean those modes aren’t still a part of reality for most, but it suits the immediacy of the reconciled existence being expounded upon currently and continuously. 

Traditionally, life has been a split experience, and for everyone, too, not just those who lived in isolation. Some people lived comfortably enough on the World, but life always felt incomplete. It was like they were home and grounded, but home was lacking the magic that made home truly homely. Other people lived in total discomfort on the World, and only found home in their own consciousness… and consciousness is an undeniably magical place.

As we have discussed, the second group of people found a dwelling place in the Internet, but the dissonance with the World’s physicality made for a life of tragic escapism. They could not truly dwell in their online home without their own material form tugging at them. To pull themselves away from the screen and stand before a grubby bathroom mirror was to be reminded of a life that didn’t really want them, at least implicitly. 

By contrast, to genuinely feel at home on the Internet is to know that your own consciousness is housing you in the physical world, and that the two complement each other. 

In this way, the Internet and the World begin to mirror each other, and in the healthiest possible way. The Internet is no longer a place where repressed voices make disproportionate noise to make up for an eternity of invisibility, and the World is no longer a confused elder place, threatened by the encroaching voices and torn between oppression and submission.r

If you are at home in a validated consciousness, and that consciousness is housed by a visible, irrepressible body, then you begin to see your physical form as a beautiful, glowing structure. And when you then look in that grubby bathroom mirror, you see the light in your eyes, a fixed star of incandescent power finally thanking its body, not fighting it. 

Notice the light in your eyes, and see if you don’t see your own beauty.

And with that challenge accepted and completed, you may then return to the World Wide Web and take another look at the images of your dwelling self. In this mode of being, remember, you are not performing a self online as you might offline, and neither are you using anonymity to explore the once uncontainable truth of your felt experience detached from the physical body. In this mode of being, you are locatable online in the same way you would be in a local cafe. And so you might search your name, curious to take a gander at your dwelling self, and you are met with an online presence, quietly certain, that shines as you do in the bathroom mirror.

That is being at home on the Internet.

*** 

And I do understand the original formulations of existing on the Internet. It’s not that it was entirely wrong, only incomplete, as usual. 

The dichotomy of in the World and on the Internet was harmful and incorrect, as we now know. But we needn’t throw away the concept of existing “on” altogether! What’s important is that we understand dwelling correctly.

We have to be situated on a place to dwell in it. That is fair and true, and it prevents the solipsistic slip into anti-objective denialism. The issue, instead, was the assumed dwelling in the World and the dismissive notion of existence on the Internet. It would be more correct and more appropriately balanced to say that we are, by necessity, located both on the World and on the Internet. But because we can, and should, be at home on both of them, we are then capable of dwelling within each of them.

Strangely, I might locate myself on the cables surrounding my Wi-Fi router and be no less present in my Internet home. Why? Because I am still present in myself, and the two modes of presence have been reconciled. In the same way, you might visit my personal website and be physically halfway around the world, and yet you are no less ‘in’ my presence, and therefore dwelling with me regardless.

***

And now lastly, as a final adendum, where does the term “Wi-Fi” originate? Well, it’s not exactly true, but the surviving myth is that the name refers to “wireless fidelity”, a play on Hi-Fi (high fidelity) audio. But myth, as we know, often carries the deeper resonance, and so what is that here? “Fidelity” in the tech sense is how true something is to the original. And there we have the essence of dwelling and presence: commitment to the truth of the original experience, undistorted and unreduced. Thereby, it is also transmittable across space and time, and not in a mystical way, either. Dwelling is presence, and presence is accessible anywhere.

***

So I do feel at home on the Internet, just as I feel at home in the World. It’s all one glorious, unified existence. There is no escaping to the interior, where I must be invisible to the physical world, and there is no shrinking my true self into visibility. Dwelling here, presence and being converge, and the two places—digital and material—mirror each other in quiet harmony.