It is unwise to talk about skinwalkers. It is supposedly said by the Navajo — who otherwise say very little — that to bring them up will bring their evil in. Perhaps it is better to discuss the windigo of the Algonquin instead. Or the doppelgängers of Germany. How about the fetches and changelings of Ireland? The jinn of the Muslim world? The kitsune of Japanese Shintoism or the rakshasa of the Hindu?
Almost every human culture carries a warning about non-human beings who impersonate real human beings to break into our homes and steal our lives.
As old as these figures of folklore are, we would be very wise to talk about them now in these troubled modern times. Whether or not you believe in fairies, demons, or evil spirits of any kind, the material threat of nefarious imposters has become our reality. Americans reportedly now receive nearly 20 billion spam texts and nearly 2.5 billion robocalls per month. Recent studies supporting the Dead Internet Theory have found that nearly half of the Internet’s traffic is bots falsifying content, astroturfing ideologies, and phishing for people’s personally identifiable information to be further used for identity theft. Last September, the Secret Service raided and dismantled a hidden cache of cell phone SIM cards capable of imitating over 300 thousand individual devices that could be used to throttle cell phone networks or manage a not-so-small army of bots seemingly real enough to evade spam detection.
The volume is only one part of the story. The sophistication, supercharged by increasingly powerful AI tools to hyper target and social engineer, is another. Within my own sphere of experience these past few months, I’ve seen a pediatrician’s website taken over by malware, fake messages from supposed Airbnb hosts, and notices on community bulletin boards advising elderly people not to give out mortgage information to random phone callers.
Almost weekly, I’ve seen people I know personally or parasocially posting distraught warnings about their name and likeness being deep-faked and otherwise replicated for non-consensual content or for imposter profiles attempting to defraud people online. All this comes amongst a daily barrage of dubious social media friend requests, imposter bank and streaming service emails, and text messages ranging from pretend crypto wallet break-ins to fake USPS packages awaiting pick up to unpaid toll tickets. Perhaps the most insidious has been the occasional message from unknown numbers brilliantly appealing to my ego. “You were right about what you said,” came an unprompted message from a ghostly number. I nearly replied.
The wisdom of folklore is apparent in how its lessons endure through the times’ changing. Thanks to the powerful portal that is AI, the skinwalkers, doppelgängers, and fairies are here and they have overrun our world. So what did those old folk tales have to say about how to deal with them specifically?
In Celtic lore, fairies (or the ‘fae’) were thought to mimic, replace, or bind a human being by stealing their name. Speaking your name too loudly and freely in the open makes you vulnerable to the wandering whims of a malevolent being, who would then use your name to lure you to the otherworld, or capture your name and likeness to replace your human role in society.
Today, our name exists in data. Then, our name existed in lineage. The lesson? Treasure your identity. Guard it as you would a precious heirloom because it anchors your living essence to your place in this world. Whereas the modern spirit of the open Internet inspired us to capture and share every aspect of our lives, many older cultures did not. A common practice across many would be having a public name and a private name; the private name being closely tied to a deeper spiritual identity only immediate family and priests would know of for use in ceremony. Many families would carry signet rings with wax seals to certify the authority of their word and also assign an elder for each generation to be the keeper of the family and community stories; not for telling but for holding.
The modern analogs are obvious. Our usernames and our passwords as well as cryptowallet keys come to mind as layers of protection, but consider this: how much of who you are have you not put online? Even privately in cloud storage. Is there anything about who you are that you’ve kept sacred on only paper or only inside your mind? Perhaps that, even if just a name, is the ground on which your unassailable humanity truly lies.
The power of a name goes both ways. The traditional way to vanquish not just a Celtic fairy, but Judeo-Christian demons, Shinto kitsune, Navajo skinwalkers, and a host of other pretender beings is to identify and call out their true name or the name of the sorcerer behind them. In doing so, you reassert your reality, break the enchantment, and restore your own individual agency against them. Call a fake a fake and its power diminishes layer upon layer by your ability to dismantle the lie and out the truth behind it.
Hence, the story of Rumpelstiltskin and the game of guessing his name.
Here, in a modern context, we encounter the ethically fraught territory of doxxing. The challenge to unmasking anonymous bad actors online is steep and the consequences can be high. It takes a lot of skill to identify who the Rumpelstiltskin trying to scam you over the phone really is. More nuanced, the act of unmasking people online as a form of justice has itself become its own form of modern witch trial. Take a vigilante approach and you might just lose your soul in the process of trying to protect it.
Fortunately, folk wisdom also carries its more automated cures that have their analogs in modern times. Why take the trouble of calling out a nefarious shapeshifter for who they are when showing them their own reflection will do it for you?
Mirrors, used as an anti-evil catch-all, have a fascinating and wildly entertaining online parallel today. Cameron Mattis, a tech executive at the digital payments company Stripe, went viral for his solution to his inbox being overrun with AI-powered recruiter and sales messages on LinkedIn. Knowing that these bots were scanning his personal bio on his LinkedIn profile for important information to include in their automated messages, Mattis injected overwrite code that would force any AI scanning his profile to abort their primary purpose and to instead send him a recipe for home-cooked flan. Once placed, Mattis’ digital mirror hilariously outed any AI pretender that tried to come his way while also providing him with an abundance of dessert recipes.
Following Cameron’s lead, I have taken to setting up my own array of code-based mirrors across my digital footprint where I keep my public name. I suggest you consider doing the same.
We don’t know where any of this is going. The Dead Internet Theory is feeling more and more like the undead Internet every day. Pandora’s box has been opened, the genies are out of the bottle, and legions of trolls and Rumpelstiltskins are out there tearing at our sanity every day. As overwhelming as it is, I take odd solace in seeing how handily this cutting edge of terrible technology fits into humanity’s oldest stories. It tells me that in some way, somehow, we have been here before. We may call it AI and bots and spam now, but those are just the names for dark forces we have vanquished before.
There’s a humbling in that. It’s an anchor that pulls me into remembrance of our humanity, where we keep the deeper natures of the unconscious spirit that holds all of our true names.
There is a legion of forces out there trying to steal your mind. It is your responsibility, now more than ever, not to lose it or give it away. Fortunately, our old stories can show us the way
