“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying or beautiful to souls like the Greeks or our own than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?” (Tartt) While Burke and Kant both distinguish the beautiful from the sublime, Tartt suggests what the sublime is: the moment when the ability to “apprehend, know, or express a thought or sensation is defeated.” (Shaw) Since the first century observations by Longinus, the notion of the sublime has centered on the “immutable capacity of human psychology for astonishment.” (Nye) While Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime in The Critique of Judgment—arguably the first great 
synthesis of thought stemming from two disparate philosophies in the Western Tradition (Shaw)—suggests “that objects must conform to cognitions, rather than our cognitions to objects,” (Monk) Nye continues that “the objects that arouse this feeling and their interpretations are socially constructed.” As digital culture hurtles society towards an almost magical abundance of possibility in the creation of objects and social constructs, so begins the burgeoning notion of the digital sublime. This paper surveys the history of the sublime from Longinus to Kant to Nye’s American Technological Sublime. As it does so, the authors touch on the Sublime’s relationship to architecture, landscape and spatiality. As digital culture increasingly becomes simply “culture” how will the concept of sublime exist in the Noosphere, the sphere of human thought? (Teilhard) Five phenomena point to the burgeoning digital sublime: the embodiment of the new dynamic sublime in the Year 2000 Bug (Y2K); the realization of the never-ending story through hypertextualized blogs; the digital Pastoral in synthetic environments; the new tribal primacy of the Burning Man Festival (Mosco); and the digital bricolage of identity built through various social networks. While the digital presents a platform for old and new con.gurations of the sublime, perhaps it will bear a new sort of sublime, a sublime that harnesses the tremendous power of digital communications to create myth. We have already witnessed several myths generated from this arena: the Nigerian banker, the miraculous male fertility drugs, bogus pictures of the September 11 attack; but also myths of our own identities, our own environments and our own futures. It is only a matter of time before we can, as Tartt states, throw off the chains of being and shatter the accident of our mortal selves.