Gary Zhexi Zhang

From 2022, "The Internet of Egregores" reframes social media not as networks of individual identities but as ecologies of collective "thoughtforms." Zhang borrows the occult term egregore — a group-mind summoned into agency by shared belief — and applies it to the influencers, brands, conspiracies, fandoms, memes and nations that grow, die and move through the world by means of group identification. An egregore acts under the name by which it was called, speaking at once as the individual user and with the sovereignty of the crowd, and persisting so long as believers sustain it.

The essay grounds this in the political economy of Web 2.0, whose affordances convert engagement into market capitalisation. Reading Deleuze's shift from disciplinary individuals to recombinant "dividuals," Zhang argues that platforms reward the differential play of identification, making identity itself a vector of affective and financial investment. He tracks this across concrete cases: the BTS ARMY's raid on a Trump rally; Carrd profiles whose DNI/BYF lists operate as self-authored personal egregores; TikTok dissociative-identity and mass-sociogenic-illness communities; and the GameStop short squeeze, where "noise traders" briefly became a market-moving signal.

Drawing on the "Gutenberg parenthesis" and the "dark forest" of semi-hidden platform spaces, Zhang asks what infrastructures might let such transient, composite agencies mature into durable political forms — labour unions, research collectives, even upstart nations — rather than bait balls swarming a carcass. Against the enclosure of the "dark forest," he floats the aspiration to a "metachurch": an apparatus of governance able to hold a plural pantheon of cultic forms through transient situated alignments without perverse monetisation or dystopian identity-surveillance.

About the Artist

Gary Zhexi Zhang's work explores systemic connections between cosmology, technology and economy. He operates individually, in collaboration and within organisational frameworks. He recently edited a book of fictions, essays and interviews about finance and time, Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023). Dead Cat Bounce, the opera he co-created with Waste Paper Opera, premiered at Somerset House in 2022 and toured in 2024. His is lately interested in the production and mediation of geopolitical imagination through technology.