I’m intending to write a longer post on this once I get the chance, but quick version: I think there would be some value to a new metaphor for the internet which frames it as not real. Not in the old-school “haha online friends don’t count” way — but unreal like some shared dream space, or one of those trippy, creepy enchanted/fae realms that appear in a lot of fantasy stories.

The crucial thing here is to go beyond individualistic explanations of why people act weird (or appear to) on the internet, since the real explanations so often involve dynamics across many people, only a fraction of which anyone could possibly grok at any one time (after all, they are constantly changing). The metaphor should thus treat what we say here as “not the simple thing it appears,” like faery food, and related to reality in ways other than the obvious ones, like dream content. The question is not “why are you saying this strange thing?” but “why has the shadow realm shown me an image of you saying this?” (Of course, in literal reality, you did type the exact words you typed; the metaphor is trying to help me view this act in the appropriate way, which is not, for instance, “as though someone had just spoken those words in a room I am in.”)