The ‘Angelicism01’ Girls and Their Faceless Internet Prophet

Sierra Armor was bored. It was December 2020, the middle of a Vermont winter, and she was marooned in her dorm room at Bennington College in a white shingled house overlooking a sloping meadow. She wanted to learn how to write stylistically innovative novels like Tao Lin and Marguerite Duras. But many classmates had stayed home that semester, and much of her academic life — including her creative-writing classes — had vanished into Zoom squares.

That month, her boyfriend sent her a link to a strange Substack with a tiny following, written by an online presence called Angelicism01, or simply “01.” 01 published manic, labyrinthine, thousands-of-words-long ruminations on nearly every concern of the high-COVID era. They drew parallels between cancel culture and the automated, self-replicating