At its core, Ghost Month is about infrastructures of connection. The gates of the underworld are said to swing open, allowing for traffic (spiritual, emotional, social) between realms. It is about networks: between the living and the dead and also between generations, between households and temples, between earthly desires and cosmic orders.

And here is where I want to ask: what if we read the internet itself as a kind of ghost gate? What if the lag, glitches, hidden circuits of our digital infrastructures are not simply “errors” but hauntings, reminders that our networks, too, are spectral spaces where living and nonliving, human and machinic, constantly mingle?

The Opening of Digital Gates

When we log in (whether to social media, an email server or a cloud archive) we are effectively walking through a digital gate, entering into a mediated zone that is neither here nor there. The “cloud” has always been an ethereal metaphor: data floating in unseen servers, humming in the dark across undersea cables and in this sense, our devices are less like neutral tools and more like shrines or altars, interfaces through which we contact absent others.

Media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun once described new media as “enduring ephemeral”: always fleeting yet strangely persistent, full of disappearing messages and eternal backups. This tension is ghostly. Likewise, Jacques Derrida’s hauntology teaches us that the present is always haunted by what is absent, unfinished or yet to come. Our emails, cached files and ghost accounts (think of the Facebook profiles of the deceased) echo this haunting.

So when Ghost Month tells us the gates are open, we might also look at our own network portals….our routers, our servers, our login screens as equally open thresholds.

Glitches as Hauntings

One of the most uncanny feelings online is the sudden glitch: the frozen Zoom face, the error message in red, the buffering wheel that spins and spins as if possessed. We usually treat glitches as technical failures but what if they are hauntings of the infrastructure itself?

Media scholar Jeffrey Sconce has written about “haunted media”, tracing how old devices often carry with them ghosts of past use. Think of a secondhand phone still holding traces of its previous owner’s texts or abandoned MySpace pages that linger in the digital graveyard. Similarly, glitches reveal the hidden material underworld of the network: servers overheating, packets lost in transmission, undersea cables fraying in salt water.

In Taiwan’s Ghost Month, one taboo is to avoid calling the ghosts too directly….don’t shout their names, don’t invite them too eagerly. Yet online we constantly summon absent presences: we “ping” a server, we “call” data from a database and when the call doesn’t return (when latency stretches into silence) it feels uncannily like calling a ghost that refuses to answer.

The Hungry Ghosts of Data

Ghost Month isn’t just about one’s own ancestors. It also acknowledges the 孤魂野鬼 (hungry, wandering ghosts) who have no families to tend to them, no descendants to make offerings. Communities set out food for these spirits, making sure they are not left behind.

Isn’t this what we do, in a way, with abandoned data? The orphaned email account, the forgotten blog, the unclaimed digital remains of people who have died without password legacies….these are the hungry ghosts of the Internet. They persist in our networks, consuming storage space, pinging reminders (“It’s their birthday today!”) long after the person is gone.

David Brooks has warned of a “dataism” that consumes every aspect of life. But perhaps we might read this differently: our digital economy is not just capitalist exploitation but also a vast ghost economy, feeding on the offerings we make every time we click, scroll, upload.

Networks as Ritual

What fascinates me also is that Ghost Month is ritualistic and our network use is not so different. We refresh a page like lighting incense. We backup our files as if praying for longevity. We burn through data packages the way households burn ghost money.

These are everyday rituals of digital life and like Ghost Month rituals, they acknowledge unseen infrastructures. Just as a temple priest may chant to soothe unseen ghosts, our systems engineers patch code to soothe hidden bugs and both are acts of care for invisible forces.

Sociologist Susan Leigh Star reminds us that infrastructure only becomes visible when it breaks down. A downed server, like a restless ghost, forces itself into our attention. Suddenly what was hidden hums into view. Ghost Month ritualises this visibility: it says openly, the gates are open, the spirits are here. The Internet too could use such ritual acknowledgment, lest its ghosts fester silently.

The Internet as Ghost Gate

If Ghost Month is about the gates opening, then the internet is our contemporary gate of spirits, always half-open, buzzing with presences. Every notification is a knock at the door. Every dead link is a gravestone. Every glitch a haunting.

To see the internet this way is not just poetic; it is also ethical. It reminds us that infrastructures carry with them relations of responsibility. Just as communities in Taiwan care for the lonely ghosts, perhaps we need to care for our digital dead, to build protocols for respectful deletion, memorialisation and release. Otherwise, the Internet becomes clogged with hungry ghosts….data without kin, endlessly consuming space and attention.

Ghost Month ends with 普渡 (the universal salvation ritual) when the gates close again and the spirits are sent back, full and appeased. It makes me wonder: do we have equivalent rituals for the internet? Or is ours a network where the gates never close, where the dead and the living endlessly circulate without resolution?

Echoes and Afterthoughts

For me growing up between cultures, ghost month has always been both terrifying and comforting. Terrifying because the world feels suddenly crowded with presences I cannot see. Comforting because it affirms that the living and the dead remain in relation, that memory and care stretch across realms.

To extend this into the language of technology may feel strange, even irreverent. But perhaps it is also faithful to the spirit of Ghost Month: to recognise that unseen infrastructures shape our lives, to admit that glitches and ghosts are part of the same fabric.

The Internet is our modern ghost gate. And each time the signal drops, each time a message lingers unsent, each time we stumble upon an abandoned profile, we feel (just for a moment) that the ghosts are among us.