VFX IRL: Intersections between Technology and Magic
“At 60 miles per hour, a prayer is too slow” – advertisement for an airbag
The hilariously ingenious messaging on this advert aside, it suggests how deified technology is in our societies. Technology is faster than praying so it must be more powerful than God. Some sense can certainly be found in this statement, for although the computer’s binary logic prevents it from making qualitative judgements (moral, ethical, emotional), its mastery of quantitive data and processing power makes it omnipotent in a capitalist society which worships speed, performance, and growth.[1]
That’s not to say people get down on their knees and pray to their MacBooks, although whatever you do in your privacy is between you and your computer. The point is, a certain magical quality pervades the technology around us. Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Magic is science we don’t yet understand”, making both magic and technology two sides of the same coin which flips according to the development of ideas.
My answer to the question of where the magic has gone is: nowhere. It’s all around us, in the form of technology, raising the baseline for enchantment with each new device hitting the market. Technology is, I propose, the perfect cauldron for magic to be brewed in as it amplifies the magical thinking inherent in humans by packaging it in a form acceptable to an (ir)rational, scientific society. Initially using it as a component to realise magical possibilities, we’ve now developed technology into magic itself and democratised it – for better or worse – among the masses.
Before venturing any further, it’ll be prescient to define technology and magic. In Marcel Mauss’ conception, magic is wish fulfilment, or rather it is the bridge that connects the wish and its fulfilment.[2]Whereas Richard Stivers places technology in the realm of science and rationality, “an objective, logical process that can be consciously communicated and replicated.”[3] However, Stivers wants to define magic too, but unbeknownst to him, his definition overlaps technology. “Magic involves a belief that a set of practices produces a desired outcome.”[4] Look at the technology around you and behold how all of them involve the rational equivalent of saying an incantation or performing a ritual to conjure a desired spell.
Magic has historically been the act of influencing nature, persuading it to act in the best interest of humanity. Meanwhile, technology, created in the macrocephalic image of its god, has become a force greater than nature, “for it is used successfully to exploit the resources of and recreate nature.”[5] Only the most destructive kind of magic could flatten entire valleys and forests into parking lots today. It’s no secret that with the advent of technology, humanity’s relationship with nature went from one of communion and respect to an extractive and inconsiderate one. However, we can’t blame the murder weapon for the crime, after all, the inappropriate use of technology is concomitant with its diffusion into every sphere of life.[6] Humanity and technology are developing concurrently, both learning from each other. But what exactly is technology learning from humanity?
Ironically, the billions of dollars propelling our venture to create a new species of intelligence is just producing AI that replicates human biases. As AI gorges on the boundless corpus of information on the internet – information authored by humans – as its training data, and quite a considerable portion of this information is racist, sexist, homophobic, and conspiratorial, the AI adopts these views. A recent example is Bloomberg’s experiment with Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image generator, where they prompted it to create a representation of workers in jobs ranging from high-paying to low-paying.[7] The results had white and male workers overwhelmingly occupying high-paying jobs while people of colour and women occupied low-paying jobs. Because the computer colonises all human qualities, including our racial, gendered, and sexual stereotypes, it becomes an absolute social power[8], especially since an increasing number of institutions are using AI in sectors such as healthcare, recruitment, and surveillance.
In Napoli, people use charms called Cornicello to invite good luck and ward off evil spirits. Cultures as diverse as the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Asia fear the malevolent gaze of the evil eye and protect themselves against it with an eye-shaped amulet called a Nazar. Spiritualists fill their shelves with a collection of crystals to curate their energies. The fact that we still use words like “spirit” and “soul” in our modern vocabulary is a testament to the persistence of magical thinking.[9]
Unsurprisingly, we extend that mysticism to technology. On the extremes of this thinking are people who believe they’re in a simulation, and the technopagans who perceive the computer as a universal magic machine. Mark Dery notes that the technopagans situate spirituality within the computer,[10] that because it embodies an entire universe of information it is the most absolute form of magic. Attaching spirituality to the computer, however, is no different to the ancient idea of nature possessing divine consciousness.
Technopagans aren’t the only ones who deify technology. Such reverence of the computer can be heard in the paeans of AI proponents, biotechnology enthusiasts, and creators of information systems.[11] Researchers and scientists whose work is steeped in the computational might project their humanity upon these computers in a manner consistent with our nature to see reality through an anthropocentric lens. Lines of code, circuitry, and silicon transistors cease being elementary components and work together towards the emergence of something beautiful, sublime, and larger than programming. Indeed, this technological sublime, to David Noble, is age-old spiritual transcendentalism breathing through machines.[12]
A belief in magic, mysticism, or religion is possibly the greatest affront to the mind of a self-proclaimed rational thinker. Yet they accept practices going on all around them which are no different from the magic they so contempt. “Even today’s fortune tellers”, writes Jacque Ellul, “have taken a rational turn. Never has the future been so scrutinised, but now we do it scientifically. Forecasts, projections, possibilities, prospects – these enterprises abound.”[13]Do we rail against meteorologists and call them con artists when a weather forecast turns out wrong like many would against a fortune teller or tarot reader? When the market takes a turn contrary to an economist's prediction do our hands reach for their throats? No. In these and many other scientifically educated guesses, we just accept the freak variables and move on.
Tech scientists and engineers must be modern magicians and mystics. Otherwise, why else would enlightened society expect technology to fix all its problems? Humanity aspires to create a technological utopia, where “the inefficiencies or problems of nature and society have been solved and people humans have achieved optimum health and happiness”[14], one automation at a time. Aside from this utopia being a pipe dream, the decision-makers seem unable to grasp that many societal problems are a by-product of the same tech they’re using to enact that ideal. Pollution, war, propaganda, mass media, and displacement are all persistent threats to humanity which find their perpetrator in technology. Yet we keep drinking the Kool-Aid that a greater saturation of technology in society is the answer.
If you doubt humanity’s utopian goals with technology, take a moment to imagine the chaotic dystopia the world would be plunged into if all our technology suddenly vanished. We implicitly believe technology to be omnipotent while, paradoxically, missing the point that it hasn’t helped us achieve our utopia. As quality of life decreases with geopolitical tensions increasing, our magical relationship with technology deepens as we wish even more to be saved by it.[15] With the messianic expectation of redemption humanity impresses upon technology, we fashion it into something more than a collection of disparate devices. More than the vehicle for the anthropocentric ideal, we fashion it into the ideal itself. These machines are made in the image of their gods, perfectly suited to serve their makers.
Maximum efficiency, production, and consumption are the cornerstones of a technological society.[16] All flaws must be engineered out of a system. Productivity is sacrosanct, at the cost of everything else. The vicious feedback loop where we use technology to alleviate problems created by its alleviation, the subsequent degradation of the natural environment, the reinforcement of a throw-away society, and the flippant disregard for human and planetary life make it shockingly clear that technological utopianism isn’t about the future. It’s the endeavour to construct and preserve an eternal and perfect present for the elite, ruling class.[17]
It can often feel like the world is in swift regress. One step forward followed by many steps back. It’s no surprise many people are stressed out, bothered, and left with a profound sense of powerlessness. These people, according to Mircea Eliade, are the most predisposed to mystical thinking.[18] Magic and mysticism become not only a form of escape but also uniting oneself with what they suppose nature is.
Integral to the practice of magic is mythmaking and storytelling. In pre-modern times, the most important stories imagined the origins of creation, one’s ancestors, or a future utopia.[19] These societies organised themselves around these stories and their symbolism, something which bore great effect on their lives. In some corners of our modern society, we continue to share such stories as the pre-moderns, but the vast bulk of our stories reckon with different subjects. Most of them tell the tale of what someone did and when, where they went, and who they were with, with an acute emphasis on what they consumed. Every Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat story ever. Unlike the pre-modern people, we’ve extended the medium of storytelling from simply talking to include images, videos, souvenirs, texts, and gossip. People are constructing their own individualistic and constantly unfurling myths, written on social media feeds.
And you need the proper storytelling devices to convey these myths…
In the summer of 2023, Apple allowed tech reviewers to try their new VR/AR headset called the Vision Pro. All the reviewers left feeling the same thing: the eye-tracking camera allowing them to interact with the user interface entirely with their eyes was pure magic.[20] In the opposite camp, Google released their Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones in October 2023. Their ferocious advertising campaign singled out the Magic Eraser, Audio Magic Eraser, and Magic Editor features of its camera. Giving unprecedented control over the image, and subsequently reality, users can remove objects or people from a photograph, change people’s facial expressions, or remove a layer of sound from a video. Trickery which previously required time and proficiency in Photoshop or Auditions can now be done instantly at a tap.
Just like everything, the dissemination of magic has been turned into a business too. With a gut-wrenching minimum price tag of the Vision Pro at £2,800 and the Google Pixel 8 Pro at £999, the privilege of accessing the technological magic is reserved for the few with pockets deep enough. This stratification becomes more pronounced with cutting-edge devices, such as the Vision Pro, unintended to be mass-market products… yet. A small cadre of early adopters will use these devices and influence their design and use direction, which will be realised after an obstacle course of redesigns and revisions for the mass market. The common people must wait until the magic filters down into their hands, by which time the rich early adopters will be under the spell of some other tech.
Magic changes according to what is perceived to be sacred, according to Stivers,[21] and as we currently find image and spectacle to be most sacred, magic has simply adapted to allow its capture. Isn’t the whole point of social media to curate an alternate representation of the Self – the individualistic myth -broadcasted and passed off as the truth? These alternate realities are conjured up using the magical capabilities of our technology. Gabriel Vahanian observes that without the belief in the soul or its equivalent, one turns to the perfection of the body as a substitute.[22] For those who can’t afford cosmetic surgery, there’s Photoshop or a vast array of Instagram effects and lighting filters. The body becomes the conduit through which the technological magic flows. With the equalising force of the spectacle blurring the distinctions between reality and image, the latter – being quicker and easier to consume – becomes more important than the former. As such, people’s individualistic myths become commodities to be consumed by doom scrollers. Ultimately, people become so objectified as commodities that they become equal to their Image.[23]
Controlling the image ensures control over the perception of reality. Altering reality without even interacting with it is the greatest feat we’ve achieved with technologized magic. This achievement is epitomised in the Magic Eraser, Audio Magic Eraser, and Magic Editor features of the Google Pixel 8 phones I mentioned earlier. Such effortless doctoring of the image portends a paradigm shift in the role photography plays in the recording of a historical archive and our perception of reality. Imagine how easy it would be to gaslight someone by changing their facial expression or surgically removing an element in a photograph.
But before that outcome ever materialises, humanity will continue to create history through their compulsive photography. A useless image of your coffee, taken out of its isolation and amalgamated into the collective social media stories of humanity, represents the creation and recreation of society from the perspectives of storytellers who are constantly reinventing themselves.
Alfred Gell describes the enchantment of technology as the power technical processes have of making us see our reality enchanted.[24] If our assimilation with technology were removed then we would surely be constantly awe-struck by its enchantment. Thus, the technology of enchantment is technology itself. We’ve fulfilled most of our wishes, imbued ourselves with power equally creative and destructive, and have realised entire universes before even venturing into our own.
What started as a utilitarian endeavour to make our lives easier is incrementally inching towards the creation of an entirely new species. Technology is subject to natural selection too whereby new iterations of every device have previous bugs, glitches, and flaws designed out of them. By suffusing technology into every aspect of our lives, humanity has become the training data for its coming of age. Right now isn’t the right time to answer the question of whether or not a sentient supercomputer looking at a toaster will feel the same ancestral connection as a human looking at the artefacts of their progenitor.
For good and mostly ill, we’ve altered the face of the Earth and reshaped our lives using the sweeping powers of technology. However, it was merely the means to actualise our ambitions. We’ve baked our magical thinking into the devices we use every day. Much like the Cornicello and the Nazar, our devices are talismans in their own right, the silicon in the transistors and motherboard influencing energies as crystals do. It is in what society deems irrational that we can find not only something approaching fulfilment but also resistance against the rational technocratic regimes that seek to control and fry our imaginations.
Bibliography
1. Stivers, R. (2001). Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum. p.6.
2. Mauss, M. (1972). A General Theory of Magic, trans. Brian, R. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. p.127.
3. Stivers, R. (2001). Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum. p.4.
4. ibid. p.136.
5. ibid. p.2.
6. ibid. p.24.
7. Bloomberg UK. (2023). Generative AI Takes Stereotypes and Bias From Bad to Worse. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-generative-ai-bias/
(Accessed 22nd November 2023)
8. Stivers, R. (2001). Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum. p.6.
9. Wittgenstein, L. (1993). Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,trans. Miles. A.C. Denton: The Byrnmill Press. p.8e.
10. Dery, M. (1996). Escape Velocity. New York: Grove Press. p.48-66.
11. Stivers, R. (2001). Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum. p.5.
12. Noble, D.F. (1999). The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Penguin. p.5.
13. Ellul, J. (2012). Hope in Time of Abandonment. Eugene, USA: Wipf and Stock.
14. Stivers, R. (2001). Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum. p.41.
15. ibid. p.41.
16. ibid. p.39.
17. ibid. p.41.
18. Eliade, M. (1954). The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Trask, W. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ch.3
19. Tambiah, S. (1973). “Form and Meaning of Magical Acts: A Point of View” in Modes of Thought, eds. Horton, R. and Finnegan, R. London: Faber and Faber. pp.218-27.
20. Marques Brownlee. (2023). Apple Vision Pro Impressions!. Available at: https://youtu.be/OFvXuyITwBI?t=177
(Accessed 22nd November 2023)
21. Stivers, R. (2001). Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum. p.28.
22. Vahanian, G. (1961). The Death of God. New York: George Braziller.
23. Stivers, R. (2001). Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum. p.121.
24. Gell, A. (1994). “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology” in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, ed. Coote, J. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p.44
