Cabinet of Curiosity
An occasionally updated assemblage of cultural artifacts & research notes curated haphazardly by @unluckydip
[Writing and under-used blog can be found at: dotdashscribble.tumblr.com]
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From the advertising that descends from the clouds of corporate technology giants, to the missives emitted from the dark alcoves of the hacking community, metaphors of mysticism and magic once seemingly discarded by our modern rational world appear to be bubbling up once-more. This contemporary return can be particularly felt in conjunction with our relationship to the internet and its associated networked communication technologies; these were first connected to the cybernetic ether by ether-net cabling, but today more commonly cross-over by sending signals through the air that are guided by wi-fi daemons.
Future corporate projections of consumer technology show no let-up in what can be viewed as the cybernetic re-enchantment (and subsequent mystification) of the world. From talking obelisks in the form of the Amazon Echo, to the internet of things powered smart homes which promise, when they work correctly, to turn our homes into a utopian realization of the imagery witnessed in Disney’s Fantasia. However, on the flip side of this positive view is the hidden possibility that our homes and other previously inert material possessions could be hacked, leaving open the dark potential of plummeting from the perfect visage of a smart technological utopia into a world that can be haunted and ruled over by malevolent outside forces.
The key problem with the conflation of magic and technology is crucially one of everyday fundamental phenomenological miscomprehension. The founder of cybernetics Norbert Weiner was all to aware of this danger and in his 1964 book God and Golem Inc he specifically looks in detail at the implications of a devoted utopian belief in a world based entirely upon his ideas of feedback. He does this by reinforcing the link between his science of cybernetics and magic.
This paper will outline this background and then look at two specific sites of dark magic incantation being enacted in today’s cybernetic ether. Both are conducted by radically different groups for entirely different ends, doing so mostly under the everyday apprehension of the average online muggle. What unites these conflicting techno-magical covens however is that they both utilize their unique knowledge of cyberspace, both technical and sociological, in an attempt to enact their will in the manner that resembles the affective contortions of a magician’s spellcasting.
I want to ultimately argue that online we find ourselves embroiled in a language war over our perception, one in which affect is being both exploited for monetary gain and weaponized for political leverage. Warnings of such phenomena can be seen to echo through magical tomes of days gone by, where we are warned that bards are to be most feared because through their trickster mastery of language they can change how people view their reality. Why is this important? Because language is information and if we are living in an information age we need to learn what that entails. In essence we all need to grasp that online we are as wizards and as such we might as well get good at it.
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"War touches not only the material life but also the thinking of nations…and here we meet again the basic notion that it is not the rational which manages the world but forces of affective, mystical or collective origin which guide men. The seductive promptings of these mystical formulas are all the more powerful in that they remain rather ill defined…immaterial forces are the true steerers of combat"— Dr Gustave Le Bon (1916) in War And Cinema: The Logistics of Perception by Paul Virilio 1989 (p.39) -
"With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetery structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will be either fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organisations"— Lewis Mumford in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (p29) -
"Even those who stand out as revolutionaries are almost wholly the conventional products of the systems they overthrow. They speak the language, use the principles, and employ the practical skills and knowledge which society has given them. A small part of their behavior may be exceptional, possibly dramatically so, and we shall have to look for exceptional reasons in their idiosyncratic histories. (To attribute their original contributions to their miracle-working character as autonomous men is, of course no explanation at all"— Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner. (p118/9) -
"Those who had knowledge of the stars were more influential than the king’s ministers, and foreign rulers consulted them frequently . Diodorus of Sicily (first century of the Christian Era) gives witness of their prestige: ‘Having observed the stars during an enormous number of years’ he says 'they know more precisely than anyone else the movements and the influences of the stars, and they predict with accuracy many things to come’"— The History of Magic by Kurt Seligmann (p. 30) -
Bose Wireless Speakers - part innovation, part magic
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"If Facebook were deleted, I’d be deleted… All my memories would probably go along with it. And other people have posted pictures of me. All of the would be lost. If Facebook were undone, I might actually freak out… That is where I am. It’s part of your life. It’s a second you.” It is at this point that Audrey says of a Facebook avatar: “It’s your little twin on the Internet."— [ebook] - Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle - Chapter 10 - Page 11 of 47 -
"…secret knowledge has put an end to effective criticism and democratic control; the emancipation from manual labour has brought about a new kind of enslavement: abject dependence upon the machine. The monstrous gods of the ancient world have all reappeared, hugely magnified, demanding total human sacrifice…[and] whole nations stand ready, supinely, to throw their children into [their] fiery furnace"— Lewis Mumford 1975 [1961] in Key Thinkers for The Information Age edited by Christopher May (p125) -
Filed under: Technology as Magic
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(Source: towerofglass, via c-o-n-f-l-u-x)