I can eat glass, it does not hurt me
On absurdity, legibility, and online rituals
There’s a ghost in the machine. By machine, I mean the computer I’m writing this on. By ghost, I mean the holy kind.
A few weeks ago: I’m down a Wikipedia rabbit hole as I often am. I’m sifting through pages on internet culture, as I often do. I come across this project—the I Can Eat Glass Project1—from the mid-1990s that gives me pause. It’s based on the idea that foreigners have an “irresistible urge to say something in the indigenous tongue.” Usually, the best one can do is some phrase like ‘where is the bathroom?’ marking them as ‘TOURIST’ in big red letters. A student at Harvard, Ethan Mollick, sought to conjure up a phrase so absurd, any local would surely think you were one of them: I can eat glass, it does not hurt me. Web surfers from around the internet contributed more than 150 translations of this phrase, and enshrined them in a website that actually became one of the first internet memes.
In another window, I’m writing in my notes app about how I think my computer is a haunted house. The internet is funny that way. There are infinite rooms with infinite languages, infinite people—and yet, I’m alone in my apartment bathed in the warm glow of my screen. There are flickers of a weightless presence with every scroll—so real yet intangible at the same time. It’s like slow dancing with a memory.
So I perform my rituals. I open tabs and I scroll. I feed the machine with strange messages. The machine doesn’t understand; it translates. Into code—or if not code explicitly, at least content? Something sortable, something deconstructable. Whatever will cast my message down the binary river. And then I wait for a response, and do it all over again. It’s a sort of prayer.
I think back to when speaking with the ghost in the machine was not so ambient. Early in the 20th century, IBM popularized the punched card as a method of recording information in a language that a computer could understand.2 You spoke through holes punched into a piece of cardstock in a particular arrangement. There were no illusions of immediacy through blue bubbles or blinking cursors. Just a slow, deliberate translation of thought into pattern. And there’s something comforting in the materiality of it. The way communication required effort, friction, form. The message became an object. Something you could hold. Every punched card served as proof of your once outstretched hands.
I can eat glass, it does not hurt me. An absurd phrase so devoid of context, it demands no response. It just insists on being spoken. On asserting, through all the static: I am here, even if nobody else is.
My contribution to the I Can Eat Glass Project is a translation for the machine, or an incantation for the ghosts within it.
A word on absurdity:
I doubt Ethan Mollick intended for the I Can Eat Glass Project to be overthought this way. That’s part of what draws me to new media studies. How meaning isn’t fixed, but accumulates, warps, and refracts over time. In the nineties, I can eat glass was just a weird internet in-joke. It was a playful experiment in translation before the internet became self-conscious. Now, the phrase feels loaded with irony, alienation, and a kind of haunting absurdity.
Meaning doesn’t just emerge from the content itself, but from the context that surrounds it—who’s reading it, when, and through what interface. What was once nonsense can eventually feel profound. Or poetic. Or even prophetic.
Cache
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar: I just finished this incredible book, and it feels timely with this post. A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants searches for meaning in his life.
We All We Got: A Digital Green Book for the Culture: This guide by Onyx Impact aims to equip Black communities with knowledge and tools to “identify misinformation, protect our families, and make informed decisions in increasingly deceptive online spaces."
The internet used to be fun: This is a great collection of articles and essays about internet discourse. I also really appreciate the disclaimer that “it still is [fun], but it used to be, too.”
Uncommon Fruits: This initiative explores the relationships between humans and landscapes through the lens of fruit trees. Beautifully designed by Companion-Platform.
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Thanks for reading :~) Keep in touch on Instagram and Are.na.
Matt
I Can Eat Glass. Wikipedia.
The punched card. IBM.
Every time I think you can't out-niche yourself, there you go
I like reading this blog