MA Thesis_Bob CLuness_Weird and Eerie  ## Metadata - Author: [[bob cluness]] - Full Title: MA Thesis_Bob CLuness_Weird and Eerie - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #weird - #eerie - #gothic Author: Bob Cluness Source: MA thesis (University of Iceland) Reference: https://skemman.is/bitstream/1946/32696/1/MA%20thesis_Bob%20CLuness_Weird%20and%20Eerie.pdf date created: 2025-08-23 00:00 --- # Title: On the Weird and Eerie in Contemporary and Digital Cultures (MA Thesis) ## Table of Contents: - 🧭 Introduction (#introduction) - 🏛️ Definitions: Weird, Eerie, and the Gothic (#definitions) - 🪞 The Uncanny vs. Weird/Eerie (#uncanny) - 🕸️ Slender Man and Hyperstition (#slenderman) - 🛣️ Ballard’s Crash and Concrete Island: Non-Places and the Eerie (#ballard) - 🗒️ Notes (#notes) - 📚 References (#references) - 🗣️ Paraphrase (#paraphrase) - 📰 Newsletter (#newsletter) - ✅ Action Items (Advocacy/OSPO alignment) (#action-items) - 🧪 Hypotheses (#hypotheses) - 📊 Methodology (#methodology) - ❓ Questions (#questions) - 🔮 Future Research (#future-research) - 💡 Implications (#implications) - 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment (#learning-styles) - ♿ Accessibility Assessment (#accessibility) - 🌍 DEIB Assessment (#deib) - ✅ Logical Validity (#logical-validity) - 🔍 DARVO Analysis (#darvo) - 🔎 SEO Evaluation (#seo) - 🎯 Conclusion (#conclusion) Note on reading position: You’re at 100% of your current scroll and have read 100% of the same section you’re viewing (no difference between current view and furthest point reached). ### References: - Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie - Freud, The Uncanny - Ballard, Crash; Concrete Island - China Miéville, “Weird Fiction” - CCRU, hyperstition sources - Chess & Newsom on Slender Man - Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny - Augé, Non-places (implied through “supermodernism” discussion) ## 📝 Summary: The thesis argues that the weird and the eerie are distinct aesthetic modes—different from the uncanny—that illuminate how individuals relate to an impersonal, technologically saturated modernity. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s definitions, the author traces these modes through gothic foundations, contrasts them with the Freudian uncanny, analyzes the Slender Man phenomenon as an instance of networked folklore and “hyperstition,” and reads J.G. Ballard’s Crash and Concrete Island to reveal the eerie agency and alienations of “non-places” in late modernity. The weird erupts from the outside as a non-assimilable intrusion; the eerie arises from unsettling absences/presences and ambiguous agency. Together they offer conceptual tools to interpret contemporary cultural anxiety and to reanimate collective imagination beyond capitalist realism. ## 📖 Main Content: - Fisher’s framework - Weird: an intrusion from the outside that “does not belong,” generating fascination as well as dread. It resists domestication and anthropomorphization (“unnamable” entities). - Eerie: a charged sense of absence/presence and questions of agency—“who or what is acting?”—often without embodiment. - Gothic as conceptual groundwork - Beyond haunted castles: gothic materialism examines an “anorganic continuum” merging living/non-living, human/non-human, dissolving binaries and creating liminal spaces conducive to weird/eerie affects. - Against subsumption into the uncanny - The uncanny processes the outside through the inside (self, home). Fisher urges seeing the inside from the outside’s perspective; weird/eerie resist rational closure and subjective domestication. - Slender Man as hyperstition in digital culture - Originating in a forum thread, Slender Man proliferated through YouTube ARGs (Marble Hornets, TribeTwelve, EverymanHYBRID). As “hyperstition,” a fiction that makes itself real by feedback with culture, it shows how distributed authorship and memetic infrastructures instantiate agency-like effects. - Ballard, non-places, and the eerie thanatos - Modernism’s shock (weird) yields to supermodernism’s non-places (motorways, interchanges) whose abstract standardization induces eerie ambiguities of control and compulsion. Characters in Crash/Concrete Island encounter machinic landscapes that elicit pathological, death-driven (thanatic) liberation, revealing an inhuman pulse within the human. Personal reflections: - The thesis persuasively reframes popular online phenomena (Slender Man) and infrastructural spaces (motorways) as experiential laboratories for Fisher’s categories. - Its insistence on refusing easy “uncanny” labeling clarifies contemporary disorientation: not merely the return of the repressed, but confrontations with alterity and impersonal systems. ### 🗒️ Notes - Definitions and scope - Weird: outside intrusion; fascination plus dread; resists naming and ontology. See Fisher’s emphasis on jouissance and Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable.” - Eerie: absence/presence tension; agency attribution problems; can be disembodied (sounds without a source). - Distinction from uncanny: uncanny privileges the self/home; weird/eerie reorient perspective from outside to inside. - Gothic materialism - Dissolves binaries (animate/inanimate). - Liminal zones enable conceptual experiments with agency and matter. - Uncanny discourse - Freud’s unheimlich; later expansion across disciplines (art, architecture, computing, AI). - Risk: over-normalization of outside phenomena by folding them into subjectivity. - Slender Man case - Birth in forum culture; early commenters anticipate migration into “paranormal” spaces. - ARGs professionalize myth; participatory authorship creates a mythos with apparent agency. - Hyperstition stages: effective culture, time-traveling fiction, coincidence intensifier, “call to the Old Ones.” - Ballard’s urban eeriness - From modernism’s “newness” shock (weird) to supermodern non-places’ abstraction (eerie). - Ambiguity of control: infrastructures guide behavior while denying presence. - Thanatic drive as inhuman agency coursing through social-technological systems. - Implications - Weird/eerie as diagnostic tools for ecological crisis, media chaos, algorithmic mediation. - Reinvigorate imagination beyond capitalist realism; “make things weird” to unlock futures. Direct anchors to cited thesis sections: - Abstract (0%): “uneasy feeling… signs of disintegration,” Fisher’s definitions applied to Slender Man and Ballard. - Gothic definitions (≈14%): gothic as “anorganic continuum” and outside intrusions. - Weird vs. uncanny (≈29%): “allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside.” - Slender Man spread (≈49–56%): forum prescience; YouTube series as “traveling bards.” - Conclusion (≈90–94%): pervasiveness across scales; call to “bring out the eerie in the everyday.” ## 📖 References: - Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie; Flatline Constructs; Ghosts of My Life - Freud: The Uncanny - China Miéville: “Weird Fiction” - CCRU; Simon O’Sullivan; Delphi Carstens on hyperstition - Chess & Newsom: Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man - Vidler: The Architectural Uncanny; non-places discourse - Ballard: Crash; Concrete Island ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1) Original idea (≈11–12%): Fisher’s weird is an outside eruption: not only dread but also jouissance. Paraphrase: The “weird” marks an intrusion from beyond familiar frames—something we can’t readily describe. Encountering it produces not just fear but an intense, almost ecstatic captivation. 2) Original idea (≈29–30%): Weird/eerie vs. uncanny—outside-in perspective; resistance to anthropomorphism. Paraphrase: Where the uncanny translates unfamiliarity back into the terms of the self, the weird and the eerie look inward from an alien vantage point. They elude efforts to humanize or pin down their being, maintaining their strangeness. ## 📰 Newsletter: Learning web dev meets the Weird and the Eerie this week. We’re exploring how modern infrastructures—from CI pipelines to content networks—can feel “eerie” when agency blurs between humans and systems. Recent updates: WordPress 6.x performance wins continue, and new block editor tooling sharpens theme workflows. Community spotlight: indie creators remix folklore into ARGs, reminding us that open web storytelling thrives on participation. New plugins: check out performance-friendly image lazy-loading and accessibility auditing tools to keep UX fast and inclus - Summary: This MA thesis explores the concepts of the weird and eerie as aesthetic registers and critical tools in analyzing the relationship between individuals and modern society, delving into these themes through historical contexts and contemporary cultural phenomena like the Slender Man and J.G. By examining how the weird and eerie manifest in various cultural texts and online communities, the author highlights their prevalence in societal levels. The thesis also discusses how these concepts can help understand anxieties in digital cultures and inspire new ideas and fictions. Additionally, it delves into the destabilization of social norms and boundaries in gothic and postmodern aesthetics, as well as the role of technology in shaping narratives that challenge traditional concepts of reality and self. - URL: https://skemman.is/bitstream/1946/32696/1/MA%20thesis_Bob%20CLuness_Weird%20and%20Eerie.pdf Full text of this document omitted because this document is a PDF [Download original file →](https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/146676403), MA Thesis_Bob CLuness_Weird and Eerie, bob cluness, 01hqrr6e1g7w1hfnh4h140xgh9.