In the interstitial space between digital entanglement and corporeal presence, we find ourselves enmeshed within what can only be described as a haustorial web. No longer the rhizomatic utopia once envisioned—that horizontal, non-hierarchical network where connections flourish democratically—but rather a parasitic structure that penetrates and extracts while maintaining the illusory spectacle of connectivity. The promise of information technology has revealed itself as perhaps the most sophisticated confidence trick of late capitalism, a sleight of hand where connection is repackaged as commodity and sold back to us in endless iterations, each promising deeper resonance while delivering only more profound alienation.
This thesis interrogates the dialectical relationship between digital haustorium and embodied experience, positioning the contemporary crisis of meaning within Fisher's framework of capitalist realism—that pervasive sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that it has become impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative. The digital architecture of attention, with its predatory vision systems and extractive mechanisms, has become the primary terrain upon which the culture and meaning crisis of the West unfolds. Under these conditions, culture itself becomes recursive, trapped in a melancholic loop where even resistance is anticipated, commodified, and neutralized through a process of preemptive incorporation.
Yet within this seemingly totalizing system, liminality persists. The categorical imperative that drives the machinery of capital—continuous growth and accumulation—speaks through hypothetical imperatives delivered by representatives who have permeated every aspect of our lives. However, the very ubiquity of this system creates interstices, moments of rupture where alternative modes of being briefly crystallize. The ritualistic dimensions of collective experience—with their intensities of presence and temporal suspensions—represent such liminal spaces, neither purely commercial nor purely resistant, neither fully captured by the logic of capital nor entirely outside it.
What makes this inquiry particularly urgent is the accelerating transformation of cognitive processes under algorithmic governance. We witness the fragmentation of memory and attention, where once internalized knowledge becomes outsourced to the cloud, paralleling the larger cultural outsourcing of meaning-making to digital platforms. The haustorial system doesn't merely connect us; it fundamentally reconfigures the architecture of consciousness itself, redirecting neural pathways toward its extractive ends. This colonization of interiority represents perhaps the most sophisticated manifestation of what critical theorists presciently termed the culture industry, but with a crucial distinction: the contemporary subject is simultaneously producer and consumer, voluntarily surrendering cognitive and affective labor in exchange for the simulacra of social connection.
The critical challenge emerges: how might we conceptualize resistance or renewal in an epoch characterized by such systemic closure? When innovative critique has itself become a commodity form, when the horizon of expectation collapses into an eternal present mediated by algorithmic curation, what remains of transformative potential? Our analytical frameworks must themselves be radically reimagined, moving beyond naïve technophobia or utopianism towards more complex, nuanced understandings of how intentional collectivity might carve out spaces of temporary autonomy within the haustorial structure.
This thesis thus positions itself at the nexus of critical theory, ritual studies, and phenomenological inquiry to explore the possibility of tactical response to the haustorial condition. By examining the ritualistic dimensions of collective experience—from nightclub gatherings to broader embodied social practices—we uncover transient but vital counterforces to the extractive logics of digital capitalism. These practices do not offer escape from entanglement but rather momentary recalibrations of the sensorium, reintegrating fragmented subjectivities through synchronized participation in non-algorithmic time and space.
The theoretical framework developed herein does not naively propose liberation from digital embeddedness; rather, it seeks to identify possibilities for intentional navigation of the haustorial web—ways of being together that acknowledge our implication in these systems while cultivating critical distance from their imperatives. If the first step in overcoming capitalist realism is to demonstrate that alternatives are possible, then perhaps these embodied collective experiences, with their temporary suspensions of algorithmic temporality, offer glimpses of what such alternatives might feel like—not as utopian endpoints but as processes of becoming, as immanent practices of reclamation within the very networks that seek to capture them.