In 2019, a mysterious post took off on 4chan, that ever-churning morass of anonymous commentary and internet peculiarities. In response to a yellowed picture of an empty, carpeted room (actually in a vacant HobbyTown store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin), a user wrote, “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms.” To “noclip” is to walk through solid surfaces in a video game, and the idea of blipping out of reality and into some odd, mundane parallel universe sparked instant intrigue—including for one 13-year-old named Kane Parsons. Parsons was already deeply enmeshed in imagining, and visualizing, strange new worlds online. “It’s nothing,” Parsons told me recently, speaking of what drew him to the empty place shown in that particular viral photo. “But it’s also kind of giving us everything.” Within seven years, he would expand the simple notion of “the Backrooms” into a complex saga. He developed the concept into a string of YouTube videos, which have attracted hundreds of millions of views since he …