Call-In Show #7: Ghost in the Machine

I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. I’m an Internet ethnographer and reporter. This newsletter is filled with interviews, takes on current events, a sporadic advice column, Craigslist-style missed connections, Internet culture explainers, streams, a book club, predictions and forecasts… There’s a lot of stuff. I also spend maybe 20 hours a week talking to people about how they use the Internet. Consider chipping in $2 for my efforts:

Alright — I did NOT edit last night’s call-in show with Taylor McMahon and Alex Dobrenko`. I’m just biting the bullet and posting it for all to see, no paywall, rambling stories and all. I’ll get shows #5 and 6 out… at some point. This is part of why I had to wind down The Computer Room, I am so bad at staying on schedule with these things! As an aside, if anybody wants to help me edit clips for social, please drop me a line.

Last night’s theme was GHOST IN THE MACHINE. I like to pick themes that are open-ended— could veer paranormal but also has some relation to current events. With the recent spate of Internet ideology-inflected violence, Ghost in the Machine felt fitting.

You know what’s weird, too? Each episode, we have technical difficulties that align with our theme. Ghost in the machine indeed…

Something I wanted to talk more about—but didn’t get the opportunity to—is a trio of books: D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless’s Phone Calls from the Dead, Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media, and Laurent Kasprowicz’s Des coups de fil de l’au-delà?. Taken together, they trace a through-line in which each leap in communication technology—telegraph wires humming through Victorian séances, radio’s “etheric ocean” of unseen waves, telephones that supposedly ring after the caller has died, television snow, and early computer networks—is framed as a fresh conduit to “the other side.”

Phone Calls and Des coups de fil gather eerie testimonies of phones ringing post-mortem and Haunted Media zooms out to show how every new medium inherits a moment of spectral possibility before its quotidian uses drains the magic away. Which is why today’s spate of think pieces about a digitally-induced “reenchantment”—or claims that AI uniquely revives the paranormal—feel less like a revolution than the latest verse in an old song: the hardware changes, but the instinct to hear more than static on the line endures. (Full disclosure here: this was a claim I myself was making, until I thought a little more about it.)

iPad Kids? More Like iPhone Moms. Something that keeps unsettling me, again and again, is the sight of parents, grandparents, and nannies glued to their phones while the kids they’re supposed to be watching play. I’ll walk into a library or a park and see caregivers staring at screens; the children stay device-free, yet the adults can’t look away from theirs.

Never mind the obvious safety risks. What really gets under my skin—sorry, I know I sound preachy—is the quiet assumption that a playground isn’t time with your kid at all, but rather the environment itself acts as a babysitter that frees the grown-ups up to text or watch TikTok in public. It also erases the chance to meet other parents. Everyone keeps telling me, “Go out and you’ll make mom friends!” But the only places I’ve truly connected are explicitly phone-free “mommy-and-me” groups, some of which ban devices for spiritual reasons.

It’s not that I never dick around on my phone while I’m with my kid. I certainly do. I’m not always engaged. I’ll take long walks with my son while listening to Coast to Coast AM or an audiobook, sometimes I’ll even go on these walks for the sole purpose of listening to C2C. Still, it can be heartbreaking. Yesterday a boy who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten months old was crawling around the library and I had no idea whose child he was. I sat down with a board book and read to him and my son near the entrance until his mom finally wandered over.

On a shallower note, it’s just an eyesore. A line of adults hunched over their phones looks grotesque. And I do mean grotesque. It f***s up your breathing, it gives you a double chin, a lot of people’s mouths are agape while they’re distracted and they probably don’t even know it. These days, I rarely see toddlers or young children tethered to devices—we know better, right?—but I do see whole oceans of checked-out moms and dads ignoring the world right in front of them.The Body as Counterculture. I read this excellent piece by Emma Collins yesterday about embodiment returning as a sort of counterculture. I agree with her and there have been hints everywhere: in wellness culture, in the mainstreaming of bodybuilding, in certain TikTok trends, more tenuously, in certain expressions of disordered eating or self harm, and of course, everyone’s favorite, right-wing vitalists.

Some other stuff:

* Welcome new subscribers! I really appreciate you being here. This is an oddball blog and I do things a little differently than some of my peers in the space. It’s less a straight Internet culture newsletter, and more supposed to simulate the feeling of being in your computer room, late at night, jumping down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. It’s part scrapbook, part diary, part reporting. It’s a little of everything. I hope you stick around.

* Max Read mentioned my writing about efilism in his newsletter here! We make the same argument — there’s something strange brewing in the world of utilitarianism.

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