Anatomy of a rabbit hole: How do we imagine the internet?

Rabbit holes—as all good holes—come in different shapes and sizes. Some are short, leading quickly to a clear answer, and offering a sense of closure when you smack into the end of the tunnel. There is simply nothing else to learn, or at least nothing the internet can provide you, and so you head back up to the surface, at once pleased to have an answer and disappointed that you couldn’t go further. Some unravel slowly, winding around and around the same information and sources, drawing you in further and further, until at some point, you realize that you haven’t eaten in five hours, and you have no idea how to retrace your steps. Some present you with a series of crossroads, soon overwhelming you with the sheer scale of the fractal webs of information, and you have no option but to choose your path randomly, hoping that by chance you stumble upon an interesting answer.

Some of these rabbit holes are well-trod—they have little wooden beams making sure the ceiling doesn’t cave in, and scattered Minecraft torches lighting up then curves and crossroads in the rock. Some you return to, and some you stop up, and others you leave open and think about sometimes, but never venture back into.

I have often wondered whether I am the rabbit in this metaphor, or the fox, or perhaps the hunter’s dog. If I am the rabbit, then these adventures in research are my home, part of a vast tunnel network of my own design. There’s something comforting about that idea: that I am the digger of my own tunnel, and I decide where it goes. If I am the fox, then the rabbit is the answer and I must chase it down. This is a less peaceful metaphor, but sometimes feels closer to the real experience of trying to unearth information on the internet.

As it turns out, the original notion of “going down a rabbit hole” has nothing to do with either rabbits or foxes, deriving instead from Lewis Carroll’s famous rabbit hole, which grants Alice entry to Wonderland. With some luck, then, I can imagine myself as Alice, bemused and overwhelmed, but nevertheless exploring further, encountering each new strangeness as it comes.

And perhaps the internet is more like Wonderland than a series of dark tunnels: there are webpages labelled “drink me” that make you feel like you’re on top of the world, or convince you that you are meaninglessly small in the grand scale of human existence. There are madhatters hosting tea parties in the discussion pages of Wikipedia articles, and menacing caterpillars at the bottoms of forums that haven’t been updated since 2012. This is a very different internet from the one I explored before—the one of solitary exploration in subterranean channels. Of course, the internet itself hasn’t changed, but something key has: the metaphor that we are using the structure our experience of the internet.

Metaphors are opportunities for beautiful literary flourishes and profound moments of insight, sure, but before this they are tools. Metaphors, at their most basic, structure how we think of things that we don’t know how to think about [I am drawing from Metaphors we Live by here, not sure the appropriate way to cite that for this publication]. This includes everything from the famous White Whale in Moby Dick to the most banal daily phrases: consider what, exactly, about the abstract notion of “worth” is associated with the direction “up,” and yet we say that an object’s “value has gone up” or that a product is “high quality.” In general, metaphors are said to characterize something abstract in terms of a concrete physical object, action, or space, allowing us to make sense of that abstraction as something tangible.

The internet, a remarkably confusing and intangible cluster of technologies, is in desperate need of these sorts of metaphors in order to be understand by us lowly users. Very few people conceptualize the internet as what it actually is: a gargantuan association of servers, bits, packets, datacenters, routers, cables, electrical signals, waves, the devices we use to engage with it, the storage and receivers and code and displays of those devices, and the list goes on and on. Even the people who think of it that way need metaphors to grapple with the internet: the routers “send packets of data” to each other like they are little bicycle messengers zooming through the city streets of the cyberspace. Even webpages are characterized in terms of paper documents, and we are, at the end of the day, still organizing our files using the same systems we developed decades ago for physical filing cabinets.

As users, though, our metaphors are even further removed from the technological physicality of the internet. At it’s most basic, we seem to think of the internet as a space that you can enter (you go online, you, you spend time there, it’s not uncommon to see people draw maps of the different corners of the internet, or hear people ask what side of TikTok you are on) or perhaps as a machine that you plug into or a resource you can use. More grandly, some metaphors structure the internet as a force of nature: maybe a whirlpool that you get sucked into or a hostile landscape that one must journey through.

Which brings us back to the rabbit hole: a nature metaphor, yes, but also a mystical one. You fall down the rabbit hole, and enter a space (as in the simpler metaphors above), but not a space like any that exists in the real world. You encounter strange characters: queens and caterpillars, cats and mad hatters, some of them with vast platforms and domains, some lurking in far-off corners, only ever found by a few adventurous explorers—some of them seem as though they have been there since the dawn of the age—some of them disappear. But inside the rabbit hole, you are not just a spectator, however safe you feel behind your screen—you are implicated in the rabbit hole, as Alice learnt before you. Inside the rabbit hole, you come across strange, vaguely-labelled substances. You drink some of them, you grow larger and smaller, your conception of yourself bending and stretching like you’re looking in a funhouse mirror. The denizens of this strange land may befriend you—or ignore you—or worse.

One of the remarkable things about Carroll’s novel is that there is real danger in it, and real fear—but also wonder, and curiosity, and whimsy. This has always resonated with my experience of the internet. But we could take a warning from the end of the book: Alice must leave. Wonderland is about to kill her. At the moment of her execution, she finds herself awake in a field, back in the world (IRL, as we may be tempted to call it), which fortunately is still there, just as she left it.

For better or worse, unlike Alice, we are not dreaming. If this world is going to kill us, we are stuck with it. And it does seem like it’s on track to do some real damage: The far right demagogues on X are giving the Queen of Hearts a run for her money, and polarization, confusion, and misinformation spread through the internet like viruses (there’s another metaphor — perhaps the internet is a creature, which can be in good or bad health, can be infected, killed, or healed). Not to mention that, like Alice, although we may meet many characters in Wonderland, it is fundamentally a place of isolation from our existing family and friends—Alice, and we, are on our own in the rabbit hole.

So what are we supposed to do? Our path must diverge from Alice’s at this point: we cannot just wake up, and the outside world will never be as it was when we left it. Too much has changed.

I can’t speak to the societal, economic, and political changes necessary to combat polarization on the internet. I have no idea what kind of reform would be able to combat our engineered dependency on social media, or our reliance on the internet to complete simple day-to-day tasks like navigating our home towns or getting dinner. Those questions are for psychologists and policy-makers and engineers.

But as an English student, I wonder what might happen if we took a more critical look at our metaphors for the internet: what possibilities might open up if we found some new language, and what clues our metaphors might give us about what we’re missing back on the outside.

The notion of the internet as a literal network has more or less been lost in the age of the bottomless scroll. Your experience of a space is very different if you hop around between different connected nodes, choosing from several options at each stage, than if you sink lower, and lower, and lower in a feed where your only choice is how long to spend at each stop. I know that I usually come away feeling better about my time when I have engaged with the more traditional “network” metaphor of the internet—making active choices about which videos to watch or webpages to read next. Although, the web evokes a spider’s web, and given the choice between being caught and eaten in an endless spiderweb or sinking ever deeper in a bottomless ocean, I’m not sure which I would prefer.

What about the internet as a cafe or a living room? This is vaguely present in the notion of friends, and the older idea of a chat room preserves this idea as well—if you have a good imagination, you could still conceive of Discord channels as different rooms in an enlightenment salon, or perhaps a bustling marketplace, where you run into a handful of people you recognize, and a thousand strangers.

Maybe the nature metaphors are more appropriate: a desert highlights the vast expanse of the internet, and suggests that the challenge facing the explorer is one of finding the few, life-giving oases in the sea of harsh or meaningless content. A jungle, on the other hand, paints a denser picture, one with threats—both human and non-human—lurking behind every tree and vine.

A more concerning, but maybe more urgent, metaphor for the internet, and here social media in particular, is a drug—although this may be more literally true than some of the others. The line between conceptual metaphor and physical experience blurs here: the way the feed is designed to trigger certain chemicals in your brain, the way the apps are engineered to induce dependency.

Every metaphor highlights some aspects and submerges others, and none of them is able to capture the internet in its totality. Because, of course, the internet is none of these things. The internet is nothing—or at least, nothing we know how to conceptualize as a species. But if we are going to participate in it constructively, we must ask questions about the metaphors we use to think, speak, and write about it. What metaphors lead to the kind of engagement with the internet that we think are positive? What metaphors encourage the kinds of attitudes toward the internet we think are appropriate? On the other hand, what metaphors are being pushed upon us by corporations and social media platforms? If we could change the internet to be more in line with our desires for it, what kinds of metaphors would align with that version of it?