back to Issue 18
by Marie Anne Arreola
I pretend I’m rational. Someone who walks the world with the cool indifference of a field scientist in a tundra, eyes clear, pulse steady, nothing but the facts allowed. And yet most mornings begin the same way: I tumble headlong into the pixelated catechisms of TikTok astrologers and YouTube tarot readers, into Instagram therapists speaking in soft, syrupy tones as if the soul could be coaxed into compliance. This video found you for a reason, they murmur, and I, absurdly, hungrily, lean toward belief. It’s embarrassing how easily I slip into reverence. But the oldest human impulse is not curiosity or hunger; it’s the desire to make meaning from the shapeless.
There is a name for the thing I keep touching: algorithmic conspirituality. The term sounds clinical enough to be pinned under museum glass, though the experience itself feels more like stepping into a candlelit room where the air thrums with old longings. A machine, humming in its unseen vaults, studies the curvature of my ache and returns with a prophecy tailored to the nearest ounce of my fear.
The algorithm leans in—warm-breathed, intimate as the whisper that precedes a dream. You need this. You were meant to see this. Soon the screen becomes an altar we built without noticing, a small glowing shrine carried in the pocket of our jeans. And the new clergy—content creators, platform mystics, spiritual entrepreneurs—preach a hybrid gospel, half mysticism, half suspicion, threaded together so deftly the metaphors harden into mandates before we realize we’ve said amen.
The scholars Egil Asprem and Asbjørn Dyrendal warned us almost a decade ago: conspirituality is not new, only newly distributed. It draws from what they call the cultic milieu—that bottomless well of esoteric knowledge, oppositionist narratives, and mystical alternatives that have long hovered at the edges of Western culture like a ghost tapping on the window. What’s changed is the choreography: scroll, inhale, believe. The ritual has become frictionless, private, almost unconscious.
Some days I imagine the algorithm knows me better than I know myself. It organizes my spirals into a neat constellation and points me toward the brightest star. Wear this today, it says, offering a mood, a diagnosis, a destiny. And I accept the garment like a child accepts the weather. But no algorithm is neutral. It crooks the world at angles, teaches the mind to think in compressed shorthand, trains the attention to lunge at anything glittering with certainty.
A thousand flickering faces cross my screen—tiny stars, imprecise, refusing to gather into a recognizable shape. I scroll through them the way some people sift for fossils: hoping the bones of meaning will rise from the sand.
It never quite happens.
Instead, I remember the first lesson I learned about images. I was thirteen when my mother placed a camera into my hands during a funeral. I lifted the lens as if it were a small, breakable animal. And I saw at once: the camera does not tell the truth; it tells the version of truth we can stand to look at. A shutter is a mouth that opens only when the light demands it. Back then, the lens did not look back. But now it does. My phone watches me watching it, memorizing the small tremor in my thumb, the flicker of attention that betrays what I wish I could hide.
And maybe (here is the shame), the part of me that aches to be understood wants this intimacy. Wants to be legible. Wants, even in its loneliness, to be seen by something.
Those of us born into the era of the feed carry a peculiar inheritance. Before we learned how to love or argue or forgive, we learned how to curate. By thirteen I already knew how to angle my face toward forgiving light, how to perform sunlight on a day that felt like rain. Girlhood was not a rite of passage so much as an aesthetic project. My sister learned it too. Three hours away now, she texts me memes at ungodly hours like offerings on an altar.
Last week, I sent her a picture of me crying in a Target parking lot, mascara melting like a bad fresco. She answered with two pink hearts and a Tom Petty song. I didn’t understand the grammar of comfort, but I recognized it. Online, we’ve built a whole language of fragments—half confession, half ornament. A girl I once knew buys a mid-century couch; another drinks wine in Italy; Emma Chamberlain stores lemons in a ceramic bowl so lovely I think: I would keep my sorrow in there. Maybe an Advil. A peach pit for symbolism.
This is the cultural logic Asprem and Dyrendal warned about: a fusion of mysticism and suspicion, transcendence and aesthetics. A promise that if we learn to read the signs, astrological, political, algorithmic, we’ll unlock the hidden script beneath our suffering. Pain becomes archivally arranged, lit from the soft side, curated into something almost beautiful.
In my early twenties, I still mistook disappearing for transcendence. Hunger became my private religion. I collected images of girls with collarbones like wings, as if thinness were an answer to a question I had never been brave enough to ask out loud. I’m better now, though not heroically so. I eat. I sleep. I no longer zoom in on photographs of my former life, searching for a ghost. Still, the old impulse returns sometimes, quiet as dusk: to step out of my body as if stepping out of a dress pooled on the floor.
Beauty, I’ve learned, is often pain arranged with better lighting.
If conspirituality is an old pattern draped in new cloth, then we have embroidered the cloth with our longing. We want meaning—but portable, shareable, quietly aestheticized. We want transcendence, but framed as a lifestyle. We want an interpreter of the chaos, and the algorithm arrives like a mechanized oracle whispering, We see you. You are not random.
Marie Anne Arreola is a bilingual poet and editor whose work lives at the intersection of speculative lyric, digital culture, and diaspora memory. She is a 2025 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, author of Sparks of the Liberating Spirit Who Trapped Us (Foreshore Publishing, UK), winner of the Plumas en Ciernes Short Story Prize, and founding editor of VOCES, a bilingual platform for global artists and writers. Her work appears in over 40 literary journals across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.