Such has been the level of concentrated bad-craziness directed at me this week that I’ve even found myself feeling grateful to the blazer-clad old duffers who used to insist on reciting Kipling’s “If” to us every school speech day: the prospect of keeping one’s head while others are “losing theirs and blaming it on you” has become rather dear to me all of a sudden.

A preamble. The inventions of the telegraph and radio coincided with an upsurge in spiritualism, as believers in voices from the other side found a potent set of new metaphors for those voices’ spooky action at a distance (it’s a bit like those jokes about the golden telephone somewhere in the Vatican). New technology gives new life to old folk beliefs. Among the folk beliefs riding on the coat-tails of the internet are those concerning witchcraft: “hacking” is a form of malicious action at a distance, and the hacker’s power over a compromised computer is an analogue of demonic possession.

Like a poltergeist haunting a building (and in this analogy, my computer is very much my home, the place where at least a part of me lives, such that violation of my computer is violation of my domestic space, of my extended selfhood), the hacker who has possessed my computer can move things around and break them: files disappear, things abruptly stop working, odd messages keep popping up. Only the incautious would venture anywhere near the internet without a brace of warding charms and amulets: antivirus software, a personal firewall and so on. But the truly demonic hacker will be able to circumvent all of these, effortlessly obtaining control over his victims - at which point professional help must be sought to clear the psychic/cyber-infestation.

So, anyway, this week my wife received an email accusing me of cyber-stalking and harassment: of hacking email accounts, obtaining control over my accuser’s desktop computer and gradually degrading its capabilities to the point where it was finally unable to access the internet at all (seems a bit counter-productive, if you ask me: surely if you wanted to harass someone over the net, you’d want to keep them online? But only a fool looks for consistency in the chambers of the human heart), posting swastikas on a Jewish woman’s blog (I assume this means qlipoth, which did have a problem a while back with nazi-themed ascii art in its comments boxes; obviously this is just the sort of thing I’d do), and so on.

My motive, apparently, is psychotic obsession with the person in question: it’s understood that all my blog posts are about her, all the youtube videos of me singing and playing are performances for her exclusive benefit, and since I can’t have her it’s obvious that I’ve decided to try to destroy her…by hacking into her computer and dicking about with the volume control.

The level of magical thinking here is impressive: I’m supposed to have the ability to compromise the computers of people who argue with me in the comments sections of my blog by tricking them into downloading malware (the witch’s familiar!), and to have used this ability for the traditional evil-magic purposes of scrying (I’m alleged to have read all of her emails; I frankly can’t imagine any more tedious pastime), haunting, blighting and so on.

I imagine it’s terribly distressing to feel that there’s an evil presence in your house, breaking your plates and moving your furniture around; that a malign spirit has invaded your life and needs to be cast out. The psychological content of all this craziness is I think this feeling of being compromised, haunted, broken into; and the search for a cause, for the person who has worked the spell and needs to be confronted in order to get them to break it again, has a considerable urgency to it. But what, I ask, is the person so identified and confronted to say? Clearly I’m not a cyber-witch; I’ve never done any of the things I’m accused of, and would have to have been crazy as well as evil to have attempted them. But how do you persuade someone whose psychological wellness depends on expelling a malevolent, invading force to give up the notion that you are the person responsible for their feelings of violation, when that identification is so pivotal in the narrative of confrontation and expulsion they’re using to make sense of their experience?

My feeling at the moment is that I can’t: the best I can do is keep my head down and hope it all blows over. It’s tempting to make some sacrificial gesture, to try saying: “yes! you’re right! it was all me! I’m terribly sorry, and now I’m going to stop!”, but there are issues of reputation and liability involved that make this option look imprudent to say the least. So, I don’t know. What have you, dear reader, done about your crazy internet people? And most importantly, how the fuck do you make them go away?