"Oh, the internet isn't a real place, you shouldn't treat it like that," but the thing is, it is very real because the consequences of the internet are very real. You can leave the real world and spend your time in this place that's just like the real world but slightly off.
And to be clear, it's slightly off in all the ways that matter. Just like the internet, all the people here can be just facades if you don't look close enough, just like the internet, you can wander from room to room (webpage to webpage) forever. Each room underneath is degrading. Beyond that, there's the pretty blatant AI metaphor, with these "people" being forged together from dozens of other people, faces sliding around their heads with another Mary even having the trademark absurd amount of fingers. Despite its uncanniness, it's still easier for Clark to pick a place that's familiar and fake, than one that's real and could never want him.
I think the way we are wired is extremely telling, especially because all of this starts from the wiring, with extra switches appearing haphazardly slammed into the breaker box of Clarks' department store. The wiring is changing, flickering and leading Clark into the basement and through the door of the backroom. Almost calling him in.
I think this is how the backroom "knows" Clarks Department Store. Obviously, things fall in, but I think the place is stretching, like an infection, each box building a new room and connecting more with our reality, pulling things in to learn about them. You could think of the backrooms as some baby electric being, with the "people" being red blood cells, and the rooms being various organs, and the wiring being the nerves.
I think that Captain Clark and Clark becoming a "we" as he addresses them, as "Oh it's just me down the hallway," shows the division in his own personality. It's his whining (as Mary says) that everyone leaves him for, not the diluted person behind that who won't admit his own fault to anything.
Captain Clark is him, but it's the version of him everyone sees. Hence the pirate get-up, because he had nobody outside Mary in his life, there was nobody to put missing posters up for him. So the people in the valley only know him from his advertisement, his store, and his wife. So that's all the backroom has to go on, making the only woman around him scared and incorporate with his role play, making its version of him the pirate, the robber, the liar his community sees him as.