FAIRYTALES -DIGITAL AGE- FANTASIES * : MASTER GLOBAL ESSAY

TO SURVIVE an enchanted world, an otherworld like the Internet, we need the right kind of stories to help us move through uncertainty and cross thresholds without losing ourselves.

FOLKLORE - the world's vast tradition of myths, legends and fairytales has long offered this kind of guidance in forms that are easy to remember under pressure.

Some of humanity's oldest stories are about crossings into other worlds, places where ordinary rules dissolve, where time slips, where travelers risk forgetting of who and what they are.

THE INTERNET IS A DANGEROUS PLACE. Folklore can teach us how to move through it. Welcome all to The World Students Society - for every subject in the world.

FOR more than a decade, the language of addiction has shaped how we understand our relationship with the internet. We talk about dopamine hits and rewired brains.

We count the hours lost online as if they're milligrams of oxycodone. We prescribe digital detoxes and '' tech sobriety,'' and confess to falling off the wagon when we re-download Instagram.

In an odd way, the addiction metaphor is comforting. It promises that what we're experiencing can be neatly diagnosed, treated, even cured.

And the addiction story does capture something real about our experience of tech - the compulsion, the phantom buzz in your pocket, the reflex to check your phone when you know nothing is there.

But while it tells us we've gone too far, the story fails to help us move through the world the internet has remade.

At some point, we have to accept that we will neither quit the internet nor live in a world untouched by it.

BAN phones from every school, movie theater, library and third space you like  -we will never be able to live back in time, or to an alternate reality, where this technology was never created, where it was never put in the hands of every person on Earth.

Before long, we'll have to accept that the same thing is true of artificial intelligence.

Refusal isn't an option. Adaptation, however, is.

Belgian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh suggests that we now face a new absolutism.  

The terror we once felt from nature - floods and droughts, sickness and death - now comes from the technology we've built and no longer fully understand.

This Master Post Essay continues. The World Students Society thanks Katya Ungerman, a tech correspondent for The Spectator and a columnist for Tablet.