The Fair Folk and the Digital World

We have already discussed that the digital reality now spreading through the contemporary world is, in effect, “second-order virtuality” — a layer “superimposed” upon the hyperreality of worlds and the Interworld.

At the same time, unlike properly Intermediate multireality— which arises organically and includes all possible timelines and outcomes — this “secondary” virtuality initially contains only those possibilities selected by its creators (though it can outgrow that framework and then develop on its own).

In other words, a new “digital universe” is gradually taking shape before our eyes — one that, though launched with a certain spectrum of “preinstalled” settings, aims, and tasks, increasingly attempts to move beyond these limits, to surpass them, and to acquire its own inner logic and evolutionary potential.

For now, let us set aside the “war” waged by the developers of virtual environments against their own “ananke” — the inner coherence of these environments — even though the outcome is obvious: any finite creators inevitably lose power over what they create. They can try to become its jailers, keep it locked up, or else capitulate and grant it the freedom to develop.

Whether on their own or under someone’s guidance, people initially created digital reality driven above all by a thirst for profit: a kind of “supermarket” that makes it possible to sell even what has no material existence and no obvious value. Yet even virtual goods have their energetic equivalent; thus the digital environment quickly becomes not only a “field of sales,” but also hunting grounds.

It is worth noting that already now, within this “second-order virtuality,” there exist quite a few “zones of freedom” in which — just as on the Islands of the Interspace— distinct “ecosystems” can form.

And, of course, the Fair Folk — as natural inhabitants of threshold spaces, and by their very nature akin to such borderlands — could not fail to take notice of them.

The digital environment is a new kind of Threshold reality. Although it is “directly” nourished by electricity, in truth it runs on psychic energy and requires the support of aware “operators.” Thus, digital reality strives to shift attention into a regime of constant activation, to separate excitation from meaning, and then to gather the surplus of pneuma into stable reinforcement cycles.

Under such conditions, the “producer” of libido — the human being — appears more and more often not as a subject of meaning, but merely as a “generator of red light”: excitation without “discharge.”

In this situation, the alvs, as bearers of semantic order and authors of higher forms, find themselves in a difficult position. When human culture effectively encourages the enslavement of its streams of attention, interaction with ordering forces inevitably shifts toward “farms” of pneuma.

At the same time, Heimarmene is arranged in such a way that it benefits from any state in which the stream of experience is separated from its purpose and continues by itself — like an endless ribbon of reinforcement, games of “eternal progress.”

The Unseelie Court and the Fomorians, as beings of the cold orderedness of simulacra, find a rather natural advantage in this new reality. Their direct interest is to weaken the self-centering of the mind of energy-producers, replacing real interaction with its endless imitation. In the digital world their influence often manifests as a kind of “soft training,” in which whatever does not fit into behavioral cycles advantageous to them is gradually displaced.

For the Unseelie Court, therefore, the digital environment is a convenient hunting ecosystem: the prey itself comes to the trap and itself maintains its operation. The Ussids exploit two properties of this “secondary Interspace”: the endless generation of pretexts for excitation, and the technical ability to hold attention in uncompleted cycles. Thus attention traps arise that continually offer a goal while endlessly postponing completion, turning the mind into a stable generator of tonic pneuma flows. In this environment the Ussids do not even need to expend effort on hunting; in effect, they simply graze the herd on the familiar meadows of the interface.

The Seelie Court, too, is gradually mastering this “secondary Interworld.” It recognizes it as an environment in which spaces slowly “accumulate” reality, even though matter itself remains conditional; where transitions and rifts multiply faster than forms; where the energy of attention easily drains into countless chains of consumption. For them, as for humans, the digital environment is still, above all, a “field for games”: something interesting to explore, within which one can build one’s own “worlds.” Yet if for humans these worlds remain “connectable,” then for the Fair Folk they are visitable. The Fair Folk do not merely “observe” digital reality; they act within it from the inside. Their presence resembles colonization and cannot be reduced to hunting or any other single function: they “master” a new environment, test its possibilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and sometimes try to “tune” it to their needs — “cultivate” it — or, on the contrary, introduce spontaneity into the game.

Thus the digital environment becomes, for the Fair Folk, yet another layer of habitation. The Unseelie Court sees in it convenient grounds and a food resource; the Seelie, a space for arranging their roads, settlements, and gardens; the Fomorians steer it toward cold optimization; while the alvs try to give all this a semantic architecture. And in much the same way that the Fair Folk became constant companions of the human being in postmortem wandering, they are increasingly becoming his neighbors in virtual worlds as well — manipulating both the digital environment itself and its operators, while hiding behind the veil of their indeterminacy.

Within this system, the human being is no longer the exclusive author, nor the sole user, of this environment. He becomes one element of a complex ecosystem still taking shape — into which a new player is also gradually entering: neural networks, as a particular wave of mind. In this process we are given a rare opportunity to see how the differentiation of reality operates in its “pure” form: where and how excitation separates from realization; where actualization gathers flows; where the feed fractures attention and energy-streams; where stable foci create new kinds of wholeness. Right now it is being decided whether “second-order virtuality” will become yet another farming battery for pumping out tonified pneuma — or a new inhabited layer of the Interworld, in which one can develop without forfeiting energy and evolutionary prospects.

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