“Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”

Dante’s depiction of hell, completed in the 14th century, still warrants the attention of scholars because it serves as a bridge between medieval thinking and the beginning of the Renaissance. It integrated the theology of the medieval era with a rational account of the severity of sins and their consequences. The poet Virgil guides Dante through the nine layers of Hades. Dante’s images of hell are reflections of the problems of his society.

We live in a time of rapid social change, and our futures seem simultaneously bright and dark, a new age of AI and leisure time, or a kind of hell in which people are subjugated to computers.

Here’s what a digital hell might consist of, compared to Dante’s:

Dante’s tour begins with a vestibule where souls of the indifferent and opportunistic receive an appropriate punishment of chasing after blank banners while being stung by wasps. In digital hell, the waiting room consists of Luddites and those who simply don’t care, whose punishment consists of trying to install upgrades to computers with insufficient memory for eternity.

The first layer of Dante’s hell is limbo whose residents are virtuous souls who lived before Christianity, including thinkers like Homer and Ovid. They are subject to eternal separation from God. In digital hell, souls that died before PCs and iPhones live. They are simply out of the game, suspended in time.

In the second circle, Dante found lust where souls are blown forever in a violent storm, symbolizing uncontrolled passion. In digital hell, lust is built into a never-satisfied quest for faster and more powerful computers. Punishment is perpetual dissatisfaction, feelings of loss and frustration.

In Dante’s fourth circle there is greed, where misers and spendthrifts push heavy weights against each other, symbolizing pointless material accumulation. Since the cyber world transforms reality into virtuality, damned souls struggle with piles of obsolete PlayStations, virtual reality goggles, and laptops that start to boot, but work randomly. Sinners are locked into futile efforts to become virtual.

Going down one more layer, Dante found wrath in a swamp, where angry souls fight on the surface and beneath the water sullen people gurgle while drowning. In digital hell, angry programmers compete with each other to write the most complicated code inside a glass building with no doors while watched by surveillance cameras.

Dante’s interpretation of heresy exists in the next circle where hectics are punished in fiery tombs. Heresy in the digital hell questions the wisdom of cellphones and being “always on,” connected within ever-expanding networks. The heretics are punished by being compelled to respond to all the messages and emails they receive, an experience reminiscent of a scene from the movie “Bruce Almighty,” where Bruce becomes God and is overwhelmed with prayer requests and pleas.

Violence exists at the eighth circle for Dante, where it is divided into into three rings: violence against others where perpetrators are submerged in boiling blood; violence against self (suicides) where sinners are transformed into twisted trees, and violence against God and nature, punishable by wandering in a burning desert with raining fire. Violence in the virtual world springs from video games, AI-enhanced violence in movies, and pernicious bullying and assaults on social media. Appropriate punishment: eternal combat gaming with faulty programs while being subject to salvos of taunts and harassment.

The ninth and 10th circles are reserved for the worst punishments. To Dante, these are fraud and treachery. Deep trenches with no escape punish various deceivers (seducers, corrupt politicians, hypocrites, thieves, and false counselors). Treachery is punished by entrapment in a frozen lake. At the very center of the ice stands Satan, a giant three-faced monster chewing history’s greatest traitors: Judas Iscariot (betrayed Jesus), Marcus Junius Brutus (assassinated Caesar) and Gaius Cassius Longinus (conspired to assassinate Caesar).

At the bottom of digital hell dwell the founders of our cyber world: Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, to name a few (Wozniak gets rest and recuperation since he bailed before “digital” superseded everything, and maybe so does Gates for his philanthropy). These foundational figures sit in front of screens and keyboards tasked to fill out forms online that never complete. They stop “populating” cells randomly, only to loop back to the beginning when they reach the “submit” button. The result is eternal meltdown. Digital hell uses control, repetition, exposure, and the loss of self inside inescapable systems, a hell built out of code.

For Dante, sin and punishment follow a moral logic: lack of self-control (upper circles), violence (middle), and fraud and treachery (lowest and worst). The deeper the circle, the more deliberate and malicious the sin.

In digital hell, sin and punishment reflect binary logic itself, endless streams of ones and zeroes and commands designed to seem intuitive and productive but actually control the denizens of this hell. At the upper circles, naiveté and irritation result in isolation. At the middle level, desire without fulfillment comes from endless loops, total surveillance, and inauthentic and fragmented senses of self.

The deepest regions of digital hell are populated by those completely absorbed in cyberspace. Information is mistaken for wisdom, and judgments follow algorithmic metrics.

Dante depicted eternal punishment in order to understand the consequences of choices made on Earth. Might my version of digital hell do the same?

Jeff Nash is a retired sociologist living in Fayetteville.

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