# The Hollowcene - Author: Kojin Glick - Published: 2025-05-17 - Canonical: https://www.kojinglick.com/blog/hollowcene --- A peculiar hollowness has settled over our collective experience, a phenomenon that I would like to call "the Hollowcene." The term emerges as a necessary addition to our epochal lexicon, not merely as a clever neologism but as recognition of a profound shift in the texture of human existence, one that rivals the geological and biological transitions that have punctuated Earth's history. The evidence surrounds us, if we care to notice it. Consider the eerie familiarity of scrolling through online spaces that seem populated yet oddly vacant: digital town squares where conversation flows continuously but often without the friction of genuine human exchange. The phenomenon known as "Dead Internet Theory" posits that vast swaths of online content are now generated by algorithms rather than people, creating the simulacrum of human culture rather than culture itself. Similarly, the internet folklore of "the Backrooms" captures our collective unease: endless, identical yellow corridors of corporate carpet and buzzing fluorescent lights, a purgatory of the mundane where one might wander forever without encountering another soul. The scenes feel familiar but lost, a bowling alley from a late 90s early 00s birthday party, yellowish wallpaper on a dentist's walls. What distinguishes the Hollowcene from mere cultural malaise is its ontological dimension. Just as the Anthropocene marks humans becoming a geological force, reshaping the physical and biological world, the Hollowcene represents a fundamental alteration in how culture itself is constituted. The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher identified this condition as "hauntology," a state in which we find ourselves haunted by futures that never arrived, endlessly recycling nostalgic visions of pasts that never existed. We have, in effect, become unstuck in time, unable to imagine genuine futures while constantly revisiting simulations of memory. The significance of naming this condition extends beyond academic exercise. The hollowing out of experience represents a rupture as consequential as the advent of agriculture or the Industrial Revolution: a restructuring of consciousness itself. When algorithmic entities can mimic human creativity, when digital spaces feel simultaneously crowded and abandoned, when the uncanny valley expands to encompass entire realms of interaction, we have entered a new relationship with reality that demands recognition. Our experience has become increasingly mediated, creating a persistent layer of removal from direct engagement. This mediation is not merely technological but ontological, a transformation comparable to how writing once reshaped human cognition. The pervasive sense of unease, the feeling of navigating through empty replicas of meaning, constitutes a shared psychological condition that defines our era. We find ourselves like explorers in the Backrooms, surrounded by the familiar made strange, sensing that something fundamental has been extracted from beneath the surface of experience. In the Backrooms, the comforts of the past linger past their welcome. They're not supposed to be here, and yet their forceful assertion in this non-place makes us question the soothing sensation of familiarity. In the Hollowcene, individuals have been given everything they want, so long as they allow a wall between ourselves and others. As long as you allow Meta, or X, or Snap mediate your relationship, your dopamine system will never go unused. But after a while, we started to mistrust the strange sounds from beyond the wall. Indeed, the parallel to the Greek underworld is uncannily apt. We have become shades wandering the asphodel meadows, each of us insubstantial, each passing through one another without true contact. Like the souls in Hades who drink from Lethe to forget their former vitality, we sip continuously from streams of content that provide momentary salience while eroding memory. The mythic river Styx that separates the living from the dead finds its contemporary analogue in the interfaces that promise connection while ensuring separation, offering simulacra of intimacy that leave us perpetually unfulfilled. Plato's allegory of the cave finds renewed relevance as we mistake shadows on walls for reality, arguing fiercely about projections while remaining chained in place. The Hollowcene has transformed us into Tantalus figures, forever reaching for human connection that remains just beyond grasp, or perhaps into Sisyphean strivers, endlessly pushing the boulder of our curated personas uphill only to watch them roll back down with each refresh. What the ancients understood as divine punishment, we have somehow reimagined as technological progress, building ever more elaborate systems to maintain our isolation while convincing ourselves that we have never been more connected. The phantoms and wraiths of Greek mythology now take digital form, as we increasingly interact with algorithmic approximations of humanity, wondering why the exchanges leave us feeling so bereft of warmth. The Hollowcene, then, represents not just cultural critique but an attempt to understand a critical juncture in human civilization, one that will leave as permanent a mark as any geological shift, even if its traces are not visible in strata of rock but in the architecture of consciousness itself. To define it is to begin the necessary work of understanding how to exist meaningfully within it, or perhaps how to find our way out of those endless, empty corridors.