"Trying to Wake Up": Ideas About Dreams as a Tool for Understanding Internet Culture

The article explores the possibility of applying the concept of dreams to the study of modern popular culture and the internet. It references the work "Trying to Wake Up" by contemporary Russian artist P. Pepperstein, created in collaboration with the ruGPT-3 neural network, as well as the study "Critical Theory of the Internet" by media theorist G. Lovink, founder of the Amsterdam Institute of Network Cultures. The Internet is often described through metaphors of a totalizing presence, such as a dream, a mirage, or a fog. Today. It is becoming a constitutive element of human existence. Consequently, the observed transformations of human identity appear logical: each of us, immersed in the world of technology, exists within it as if in a strange duplicate of the world, a kind of dream. The author places particular emphasis on the views of G. Lovink, who in his aforementioned work presents the virtual world as a space of total slumber from which it is impossible to emerge. Dream and reality merge strangely within it, forming a single fabric. The article demonstrates the transformation of human identity during the period of extensive development of media and Internet technologies. This transformation is linked to the fact that technology as such is becoming a kind of meta-anthropology, reprogramming the very essence of humans to such an extent that they become unimaginable without immersion in virtual space. The subject of this research is the dream as a potential metaphor for understanding internet culture. The research methodology is based on analyzing the applicability of dream concepts for studying virtual space. The primary aim of the study is to describe internet culture as a place of a totalizing, pervasive mirage from which humans find themselves unable to break free, and to describe the corresponding transformations of human identity.