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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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“Hillary Clinton can still win the election - Google”

(Make sense out of humanity’s nonsense)

Taking part of technological culture, human kind evolved to homo technologicus, a rational, sensible, creature—not mythopoeic or religious, which she only becomes once she abandons the search for ‘technical’ solutions to his problems and takes off into the realms of fantasy and empty speculation. In google’s latest mystery, where Hillary Clinton is still able to win the election, you can see the effect of the homo technologicus on our macroscale media-ecology.

Our media-ecology drives on the logic of today’s digital technologies, which have reached the beachhead of the incorporeal, with the smallest components on some chips shrinking below the wavelength of visible light.

Micro-technologies reorganize matter; they invade and inhabit the body. The logic of technology has become invisible—literally occult. Occultism never before inhabited the body so literally and closely, whereas media has. By crossing the small border of true and false, it’s harder to identify reality - like the autocomplete of Google is proving. The mystic sees all reality as a stream of compressed data that most of us decode using habitual, consensual algorithms. Many forms of spiritual practice involve stilling the busy mind and being present to, without being hooked by, these incoming data streams.

The fuzzy uncertainty that floats around the idea of magic and occultism is more important than a slapdash explanation of how magic and occultism works, like the reality we shape as humanity. Catched in the prophecy of algorithmic predictions on our future behaviour, you could see occult technology as an equivalent to the oracle. The oracle used the alchemical quality of group dynamics to transform inside jokes, gossip, and petty infighting into advice fit for a king. The oracle processed groupthink as poetry. The oracle’s way of creating new things in the world was to convert nonsense into sense.

2017, Cyanne

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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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2. “I point my finger in the sky sky to buffer the pics of my Tinder-matches”

(Name behavior - Superstition/social habits as parameters for development)

Superstition is a belief that is not consistent with our know science. It often involves behavior aimed at improving good luck or avoiding bad luck. The main ingredient of superstitions is that they are inconsistent with what we know about the natural world, the things we embrace in our day-to-day life. They help us get in control of uncontrollable situations. By adopting these types of habits, we tend to feel more security or authority in our lives. I have authority when i point my finger in the sky to buffer the pics of my Tinder-matches.

There are a lot of superstitions and rituals that we perform with our technology. *magical thinking* The way we interact with any technological object, product, or service in the world around us is shaped by our previous experience. The idea of being able to catch the magnetic fields in the air to guide them to my service provides me with a secure feeling. There is something superstition about how we feel and make sense out of technology, in the rituals of how we repair it/force it to work, and our habits of how we figure out the use. Technological superstition is adopted in everyday life by everyone. When technology is not seen as only a mechanical utilitarian, but my finger in the sky as part of social habits, we might be able to make more effective use out if it.

2017, Cyanne

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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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4. “I use the horoscopes of my new MacBook as a manual”

(Sustainable innovation in the spirit of the device by play)

The computer is the most animated and intelligent machine we have ever possessed—the most interactive and the least mechanic. The more computed our environment becomes, the more it returns to our primitive past; it boomerangs us back to an animistic worldview where everything has a spirit. All of the objects in the world become more responsive; things that were once regarded as dumb become addressable; and that universal addressability—a network of things—creates an enchanted landscape. Something vital and mortal emerges from something as cold and lifeless as code; objects no longer have one specific purpose.

Technology develops through a process of innovation, involving the re-combination and re-deployment of a set of existing elements or procedures toward the attainment of new objectives. Innovation in technology does not usually arise as the result of the application of systematic thought to the task of supplying some obvious ‘need’. Technology changes, and with changes in technology, new needs come into existence. The source of this mutability and tendency toward ever-increasing elaboration in technology must be attributed to the cognitive role of ‘magical’ ideas in providing the orienting framework within which technical activity takes place. Technical innovations occur not as the result of attempts to supply wants, but in the course of attempts to realize technical feats heretofore considered ‘magical’. The element of fantasy bring technical ideas to fruition.

A degree of animism can also be seen as a psychologically appropriate and imaginatively pragmatic response to the peculiar qualities of a deeply mediated world. Infantilizing spells are designed to crush whatever critical distance still allows some of us to question the techno capitalist domination of the world. Rationality seems to no longer be capable of foreseeing what the influence on our behavior is. The emotional connections we forge with our technological devices are explored through object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new materialism. Animism is based on a feeling of being intimidated or mystified by technology; it becomes just another way to register a generational shift.

- 2017, Cyanne

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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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The idea of enchanted objects has deep roots in our childhoods, in our adulation of superheroes and fascination with fantasy and science fiction, and in the fables, myths, and fairy tales that go back centuries. As a result we have always longed for a world of enchantment.

Enchanted Objects, are ordinary objects augmented and enchanted with the use of emerging technologies (sensors, actuators, wireless connections and embedded processing). What makes the object extraordinary. The enchanted objects gains remarkable power or ability that makes it more useful, delightful, more informative, sensate, connected, engaging than the ordinary objects origin.

As the ordinary thing becomes extraordinary, it evokes an emotional response from you and enhances your life. Human drives towards enchantment: omniscience (know everything), telepathy, safekeeping, immortality, teleportation, expression. More

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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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Advertisers also use magic to deceive consumers into believing that products pave the path to the good life. Rose is so excited about what motivational fitness products like Nike + can do that he characterizes them as belonging to a magical lineage that includes the mythical “Hermes’s sandals” and cinematic “Dorothy’s slippers.” I felt like I was reading a script for a commercial when I got to the part where he praises them for “promising to transport us to a place of our dreams.”

In this spirit, rapper Macklemore (collaborating with Ryan Lewis) was right to lament being duped as a kid into believing that the expensive Nike Air Max was more than “just another pair of shoes” and actually contained the power to radically transform how he played basketball. For if we follow Rose’s lead and become enthusiastic about Nike taking “inspiration from the imagination that infuses our mythologies” and “fairytales,” we avoid acknowledging one of the blatant forces that perpetuates the “darker side of consumption”: idealized representations of artifacts. More

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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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*Architecture of Todays Technology* In the old days, at least, you could see 👁 or even touch ☝️the latest machines as they made their way through the world, grinding up raw materials, assembling objects, easy to understand that these contraptions were mere machines, exploiting perfectly natural forces through clever arrangements of mechanical parts and guileless forces of energy. ⚡️ But today’s digital technologies have reached the beachhead of the incorporeal, with the smallest (and most valuable material) components on some chips shrinking below the wavelength of visible light. 🌞 Micro technologies reorganize matter on the scale of silicon grains and genetic base pairs; they invade and inhabit the body; they sculpt vibrating streams of electrons into complex invisible architectures of logic and information. 🌬 #invisible #tech #technopagan #occultism #activism

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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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♉️ Occultus Rift ♉️ *How sciencefiction influences the development of technology* We associate intelligence with what reads and writes, and nowadays everything electronic reads and writes. The postmodern world of digital simulacra is ripe for the premodern skills of the witch and magical. To be sure, the 🌟“return of magic”🌟 may be just another story to while away the postindustrial night, but it is precisely through such stories that technologies gain their character, if not their lives. In this sense, evil AI’s, 👙sexy androids👙, and cuddly robots that keep popping up in comic books, video games, movies, and television are not just pop culture effluvium, but narrative figures who are helping to thicken the plots we are weaving with very real, and very spunky technologies. 📲 Magic too is a myth, but myths shape our machines into meanings. And nowhere is this metamorphosis more evident than with the most vivid and enchanting myth that computers have yet to conjure: the myth that they can act as portals to another world, another dimension of space itself. 🌃 - TELEMAGIC

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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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themodernsineater-blog · 6 years

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