It turns out that the most salient feature of the modern, Vatican-sanctioned American exorcism is not the projectile vomiting or the 360-degree head-swivels of 1970s Hollywood cinematic lore, but rather the sheer, soul-crushing weight of its bureaucratic intake process. Which makes a certain kind of grim sense when you consider the numbers. As recently as the late 1990s, there were perhaps a dozen canonically approved exorcists operating in the United States, treating the Rite as a kind of ecclesiastical dusty artifact—something kept in the Church’s proverbial basement next to the Latin Mass and the hair shirts.

Today, there are well over a hundred and fifty officially appointed exorcists in the U.S., a domestic surge that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has been forced to accommodate because the diocesan switchboards are practically melting with requests. We are talking about thousands of inquiries—or "Presentations," in the frankly chilling parlance of the Church—every single year. The overwhelming majority of these requests are coming not from devout cradle Catholics but from desperately unhappy, chronically online, spiritually adrift secular Americans who are essentially looking at the jagged, psychic wreckage of their lives and deciding that late-capitalist anomie is insufficient as a diagnosis, and that they must therefore be occupied by an ancient, non-corporeal entity from the Pit.[^1]

As for the actual, empirical merit of the exorcisms that *do* occur—meaning the vanishingly small fraction of cases (maybe half a percent) that survive the gauntlet of psychological evaluation and actually end up with a priest in a surplice wielding a crucifix and a copy of the 1614 *Rituale Romanum*—the results are both deeply profound and totally devoid of any verifiable supernatural phenomena.

What actually happens in these rooms is a kind of extreme, culturally sanctioned, high-stakes somatic therapy. The quote-unquote "merit" of the Rite is not that it successfully evicts a horned monster, but that it offers a highly formalized, intensely theatrical container for human agony. When traditional psychiatric interventions fail—when the SSRIs and the mindfulness apps and the cognitive-behavioral worksheets do absolutely nothing to staunch the existential bleeding—the exorcism provides a deeply comforting epistemological framework. It tells the afflicted person: *The evil is not you. The evil is a parasite. And we have the specific, bureaucratic authority to forcefully evict it.*

And the frankly astonishing thing is that this performative placebo often actually works.[^2] The sheer exhausting, physically punishing spectacle of the ritual—hours of repetitive chanting, holy water, screaming, the totally un-ironic conviction of the priest—forces a psychological catharsis that allows the supposedly possessed person to finally reintegrate into their own life. The exorcism's ultimate merit lies in its radical, almost post-ironic earnestness. In an era where everything is decentralized and shrouded in layers of snark and medicalized jargon, there is apparently a very real, very human relief in finding a guy in a black dress who is willing to look at your most terrifying internal darkness and command it, in loud and unbroken Latin, to just get the hell out.

***

**[^1]** The vetting process is essentially a masterclass in risk-management and liability-dodging. Before a priest is allowed to even consider putting on his purple stole, the "Demoniac" (the afflicted person) must be thoroughly screened by an entire phalanx of clinical psychologists, neurologists, and primary care physicians to rule out schizophrenia, Dissociative Identity Disorder, epilepsy, bipolar mania, and the gnarly, hallucinatory side-effects of severe methamphetamine withdrawal. The Church is terrified of the PR nightmare of performing medieval rites on a mentally ill person who actually just needs 400 milligrams of Seroquel.

**[^2]** "Works" here being a highly subjective term, obviously. We are not talking about the permanent cure of whatever underlying trauma invited the crisis, but rather a kind of hysterical, placebo-induced remission. The subject screams, thrashes, weeps, and then collapses in a state of euphoric exhaustion, convinced that the demonic tenant has vacated the premises. It is basically the spiritual equivalent of popping a dislocated shoulder back into its socket—agonizing, violent, and immediately, profoundly relieving.

In 1985, as personal computers flickered in garages and *Whole Earth Review* still believed in the counterculture’s promise, Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the WELL—Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link—on a borrowed mainframe in Sausalito. It wasn’t meant to be a social network. It was meant to be a *public sphere*, a digital successor to the Whole Earth Catalog’s belief that tools could empower individuals and communities [1]. The vision: a place where informed, civically minded people could talk about ideas, technology, and culture—no ads, no anonymity, just real names and real consequences.

The WELL launched with a few hundred users, mostly Bay Area intellectuals, hackers, and environmentalists. Conversations unfolded in “conferences”—text-based forums on everything from Zen to nuclear policy. Early users like Howard Rheingold would later coin the term “virtual community,” but in 1985, it felt less like cyberspace and more like a very slow, very earnest dinner party where everyone typed.

Its context was crucial: pre-web, pre-Google, when the internet was still ARPANET’s nerdy cousin. The WELL offered something radical—connection without commodification. Users paid a monthly fee; there was no data mining, no viral content. The culture prized clarity, civility, and depth. Irony was suspect; sincerity, almost mandatory.

But as the 1990s dawned and the web exploded, the WELL’s model began to seem quaint. AOL offered flashy chat rooms and instant messaging. The WELL offered 14,400-baud modems and eight-page posts about *Moby-Dick*. Yet it endured. It became a relic, then a legend—a place where flame wars raged with the intensity of theological debates, where divorces were processed in threads, where people confessed addictions and got advice from strangers who knew their real names.

By the 2000s, the WELL was no longer influential, but it was *historically* significant. It proved that online spaces could foster genuine discourse—if you built them with intention, not profit. It anticipated today’s debates about digital identity, echo chambers, and the erosion of public conversation. The WELL didn’t predict Facebook or Twitter, but it asked the same question: *Can we be human together in text?*

Now, as social media collapses under its own weight—algorithms, outrage, performative identity—the WELL stands as a ghost in the machine. Not a utopia, but a cautionary tale and a quiet ideal: that community isn’t about scale, but about accountability. That conversation, even in ASCII, matters.

It was never perfect. It was often insufferable. But for a moment, in the amber glow of early screens, the WELL believed—and made others believe—that the internet could be more than a marketplace. That it could be a town square.

[1] A clear inspiration for littlebiggy given the default user photo taken from the catalog (people under the influence of something pushing the earth uphill).