From Ancient Rome to Instagram: Magical Writing Practices in Contemporary Digital Culture

Rose Rowson 10620400 rMA Media Studies University of Amsterdam June 2015

Supervisor: Niels van Doorn Second Reader: Bernhard Rieder Third Reader: Esther Peeren

1 Table of Contents

List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………………………… 3 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4 Chapter 1: What is Magic?……………………………………………………………………………………. 6 Chapter 1.1 Magic, Religion, Science………………………………………………………………………… 6 Chapter 1.2 Performance vs. Magic: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way………………………………… 10 Chapter 1.3 Do You Believe in Magic?……………………………………………………………………… 12 Chapter1.4 Conclusion: Materiality, Labour, Community…….…………………………………………… 14 Chapter 2: What is Writing?……………………………………………………………………………….… 15 Chapter 2.1 Writing from Above: Foundations of the Written Word …………..…………………………… 16 Chapter 2.2 Curses! The Transitional Written Word as Magical …………………………………………… 18 Chapter 2.3 Printer’s Devils………………………………………………………………………….……… 21 Chapter 2.4 The Problem with Phonetics: A Shift to Computation………………………………………..…23 Chapter 2.5 Conclusion: The Writing’s on the Wall ..…….………………………………………………… 27 Chapter 3: (pre)Cyberspace Era Perspectives on Information Technologies……….……..………………… 29 Chapter 3.1 Programming High Priests: Magic as Hierarchies of Power ……………..…………………… 30 Chapter 3.2 Time Will Tell: Journalistic Perspectives on Computers and Magi ………….….…..…………. 32 Chapter 3.3 “cyber-candles will do fine”: Computers and/as Magic…………………………………………35 Chapter 3.4 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….37 Chapter 4: Magical Writing in Contemporary Digital Culture……………………………………………… 38 Chapter 4.1 What is Contemporary Digital Culture?……………………………………….……..………… 38 Chapter 4.2 Literal Magic/Rhetorical Magic……………………………………………………….…..…… 39 Chapter 4.3 Automatic Magic: The Problem with Conflation…………………………………………….….41 Chapter 4.4 “You Didn’t Say the Magic Word”: MediaWiki and Death Note Online…….…….……………43 Chapter 4.5 On “Saucery”; or, Magic as Protection and Importance on Gmail and Tumblr………..….…….46 Chapter 4.6 #safetykitty: User Generated Deity……………………..…………………….…………………50 Chapter 5: Conclusion: From Ancient Rome to Instagram; Fearful Magical Futures………………………..53 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………….55

2 List of Figures

Figure 1: Bill Gates spins his disk of the cover of Time (Source: TIME Magazine) Figure 2: The rules of the Death Note (Source: Death Note Online) Figure 3: Protective Sigils on Tumblr Figure 4: Safety Kitty (Source: demon_violet) Figure 5: Safety Kitty and her hashtag (Source: we_are_on_fleek3) Figure 6: Repost or die (Source: foxy_the_fox_foxy1987) Figure 7: Bed Bugs (Source: creepypasta.sally.williams)

3 Introduction

In Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (2005), media theorist Florian Cramer explores the cultural precedent for executable code in computation, proposing that its history extends further back than the invention of the computer, with its roots instead found in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition, and experimental poetry. He states that “the technical principle of magic, controlling matter through manipulation of symbols, is the technical principle of computer software as well. It isn’t surprising that magic lives on in software, at least nominally” (2005: 15). He uses a Google search of “magic” and “software” in combination to prove his point, and surely it does, yielding fifteen million pages that use both words. Performing a second Google search for only the term “magic”, Cramer’s third result down is a software company. Aside from the claim that both magic and software control matter through the manipulation of symbols, and that they are nominally linked, Cramer offers us no clues as to how and why magic and computational code came to be associated with one another historically. He also fails to provide an adequate definition of what he considers magic to be within his discussion, aside from quoting Aleister Crowley’s definition of his own brand of occult practice, that “magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will” (1986: xiii). Indeed, I performed the same Google search as Cramer, and found that ten years on from his experiment the terms “magic” and “software” together yield one hundred and eleven million results. A search for “magic” alone conversely to Cramer directs me to Canadian reggae-fusion one hit wonders Magic!, as well as card based strategy game Magic: The Gathering. Does this tell us that we have come to associate magic less with software? That magic and reggae-fusion are inextricably linked? That there are more websites online today than there were ten years ago? It certainly doesn’t help discover whether there was or is any link between digital computation and magic.

This is a gap that I want this thesis research to fill. While I have found that media theorists often describe the execution performed by computational code as magical, they seldom if ever provide a definition of what magic is and how its apparently fundamental qualities are embodied in computational code. As well as Cramer, this tendency to liken the executability of code has made cameos in the writing of Friedrich Kittler, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Mark C. Marino, amongst others. This discourse also exists within the programming community, who have been wont to describe themselves as priests and their skills as magical. And yet, there has not yet been a significant study on this association between magic and the written word as it applies to computational code, and the digital culture that surrounds it. Because Cramer was correct in this sense: to understand why magical qualities have been ascribed to computational code we must dig deeper. To truly understand this link, to find out why magic and code are mentioned in the same breath, I must first discern what magic is and what writing is. Have they always been inextricably linked? And if so, has the magic of writing changed as means of inscription have developed? Surely they have. It is not as easy as declaring that magic and writing have always been somehow linked, but to question how and why such associations were made, and how they have changed as the medium of writing has developed. In Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Friedrich Kittler notes that “to transfer messages from one medium to another always 4 involves re-shaping them to conform to new standards and materials” (265). As such, an important part of this study is to explore such re-shaping. In this thesis, I will be performing an analysis of magical writing from a materialist perspective, acknowledging that the power of inscription lies in its conditions of deployment. With limited space to cover a hefty portion of Western history to cover, it is necessary that I address the history of inscription in epochs, taking snapshots of certain practices in certain eras to give a flavour of the development of writing and its association with magic, rather than focussing on the minutiae that one may find in other studies. In my first chapter, I pledge my allegiance to a certain definition of magic, which is concerned with human process and materiality. Thus, when I come to analyse my case studies of magical writing practices in contemporary digital culture, I take a far different approach to magic than is typically made within the field of new media. While within contemporary programming practices and media theoretical analyses, magic is taken as a means to describe abstraction and as an automated command of a process which is hidden, drawing on anthropological approaches to magic I shall on the contrary argue that magic is efficacious in its tangibility for the human subject, that it is the doing of magic that holds the key. Rejecting the colloquial use of magic as something that is automatic and instantaneous, I instead perform a combined analysis of both user and programming based magical writing practices, examining different approaches towards magic within contemporary digital culture. This research project is thoroughly interdisciplinary, drawing from various academic fields in order to discuss how and why magical writing practices are performed in contemporary digital culture. While I have had to draw from various sources, my aim with this thesis project is to provide a critique of approaches to magic within the field of new media. In this project I wish to offer a new perspective on contemporary digital culture, demonstrating the need to thoroughly critique metaphors that have been pervasive in both practical and academic approaches to contemporary digital culture. Covering subjects from Ancient Roman curse tablets to H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, on to Gmail importance indicators as magic and hashtags on Instagram as a means of protection, this thesis is a wide spanning examination of how the characteristic of magic as placed onto practices shape their meanings as they continue to develop.

5 Chapter 1: What is Magic?

In order to discuss magical writing in contemporary digital culture, I must first provide some definitions for both magic and writing. I shall begin here with magic, before moving on to the subject of writing in chapter two. I am approaching the constituent elements of my discussion in this order because it is magic in turn that helps defines writing; as we shall see, magical qualities seep into my discussions of writing from the outset. As such, it is prudent to first tease out an idea of what magic is. This is easier said than done. Magic has been practiced in discrete cultural moments throughout human history, thousands of miles and thousands of years apart. For example, we think of Renaissance period alchemy and modern day Louisiana Hoodoo as being forms of magic, despite the fact that their composing qualities and practices are quite different. The same can be said for any number of magical practices. As such, it is not viable for me to attempt present magic here as a universally definable category. What I am going to do, however, is approach magic as something to be defined relationally. In classical anthropology, magic is often approached and thus defined in relation to religion and science. Magic has overlapping qualities associated with both, but is ultimately defined by what distinguishes it from religion and science. At the risk of making a foregone conclusion, it is rational at this point to posit that magic is generally considered as being able to do something. As such, having distinguished magic from science and religion, how can it be differentiated from performance? Having discussed magic in relation to performativity, before coming to my working definition of magic, I will tackle the concept of belief as applied to magic. Having done this, I will finally provide a working definition of magic, one which can be applied generally to writing practices as they transform in light of their specific material placements. In his paper “What is a Magical Text? Methodological Reflections aimed at Redefining Jewish Magic,” Judaism scholar Yuval Harari has argued that one can create culturally discrete definitions of magic using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance.1 While this is certainly a useful approach for analysing a discrete culture, as I need to apply magic to a longer view of cultural development, I have decided to create a very general definition of magic, that can be applied to magical writing practices from Ancient Rome to Instagram.

1.1 Magic, Religion, Science

In my first step towards providing a working definition of magic, I will consider classical anthropological debates. Bronisław Malinowski’s essay “Magic, Science and Religion” (1948) and Marcel Mauss’ book A

1 Wittgenstein’s family resemblance works on the proposition that while members of the same family may have shared attributes, these attributes are interchangeable, and no two members of a family’s attributes will be exactly the same. He uses the example of games to further elaborate on this overlap and absence of characteristics: gin rummy, Tetris, basketball, Scrabble, hockey, Call of Duty, solitaire, and so on are all understandable as games, but none share all the attributes of the others. 6 General Theory of Magic (1950)2 are of particular interest for me here because – as Malinowski’s title suggests – they are concerned with the linkages and discrepancies between magic, science, and religion. They do so following Scottish anthropologist James Frazer’s highly influential text The Golden Bough (1890), which proposes that mankind progressed from practicing magic at a primitive level, which developed into organised religion, before coming to science at his most advanced. For Frazer, there is no constructive social relationship between these three categories, and each exists at odds with the others. Frazer argues that while magic and science work on similar approaches to the nature of our world – i.e., based on “the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically” (32) – for the primitive minds which concern Frazer, “magic is always an art, never a science; the very idea of science is lacking in [the] undeveloped mind [of primitive man]” (15). Indeed, he states that “it is a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science” (31). Frazer thus removes any personal agency from both the magician and the scientist, who have no personal power or influence over the ways of the world, for they are merely following the laws of nature. He presents religion, on the other hand, through its supplication to the higher being(s), as “clearly [assuming] that the course of nature is to some extent elastic or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events from the channel in which they would otherwise flow” (32). Philosophers I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi criticise the “evolutionary scheme” that shapes Frazer’s approach to magic, science, and religion in The Golden Bough. They argue that while “magical thinking” may have developed into “religious thinking” and then onto “scientific thinking,” this does not dictate that one mode of thought abruptly ended and led to the next. They further argue that this scheme is unconvincing because it does not account for the link Frazer makes between magical and scientific thought: “It is hard to conceive of one way of ‘thinking’ giving way to another and then reasserting itself, unless it was possible for them to also coexist” (59). Despite the problems evident in Frazer’s work, it has nevertheless been influential, having sparked a continued anthropological interest in the links between magic, religion, and science. While both Mauss and Malinowski draw on Frazer’s work, they rightly complicate his approach by conceding that magic, religion, and science are not fundamentally separate categories, but there exists a flow between the three. Let me begin with Malinowski. While he also focuses on so-called primitive man, Malinowski opens “Magic, Science and Religion” by stating that “There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at once, any savage races lacking either in the scientific attitude or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them” (1). Malinowski goes on to denounce the attitude within his field of anthropology, specifically that of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, that primitive man is “Incapable of dispassionate and consistent observation, devoid of the power of abstraction, hampered by ‘a decided aversion towards reasoning,’ […] unable to draw any benefit from experience, to

2 A General Theory of Magic was originally published in 1902, written in collaboration with Henri Hubert. It became more popular and influential when republished in 1950 with Mauss as its sole author, and that is the version I am using for my analysis. 7 construct or comprehend even the most elementary laws of nature” (9; Malinowski quoting from Lévy- Bruhl’s How Native’s Think (1910)). Malinowski uses his fieldwork from the Trobriand Archipelago in Melanesia to argue that, on the contrary, primitive people are indeed capable of reason, being skilled fishermen, traders, manufacturers and gardeners. Yet despite this reason and skill, they still employ magic. This, Malinowski argues, is because “even with all their systematic knowledge, methodically applied” (13), these primitive people know that they cannot know everything. Or, rather, despite their rational capability to create a functioning society, they know they are still at the mercy of the forces of nature they cannot control. This is why, as a canoe is built using the requisite skills and materials, it also has magic performed on it to ensure safety within the unknowable conditions of the sea. It is crucially important here to note that magic does not replace labour. The canoe must be built, or the crops must be yielded, and so on, through labour and knowledge. But magic can supplement this labour, and in “precarious conditions, [primitive man] holds fast to the safety and comfort of magic” (14). In other words, Malinowski proposes that magic is performed as a method of alleviating fear in the face of uncertainty, done in specific circumstances for specific results. It is on this point that Malinowski makes the distinction between magic and religion: that “while in the magical act the underlying idea and aim is always clear, straightforward, and definite, in the religious ceremony there is no purpose directed toward a subsequent event” (21)3. Mauss agrees with Malinowski on the last point, that the rituals of magic oppose those of religion as they are functional, whereas religious rituals are “directed towards more metaphysical ends” (174). However, Mauss further elaborates on the difference between magic and religion as having its base in institutionalisation of practices. He states that “religious rites […] even fortuitous and voluntary ones, are always predictable, prescribed and official” (29). Magical rites, in comparison, “may occur regularly (as in the case of agricultural magic) and fulfil a need when they are performed for specific ends (such as a cure), [but] are always considered unauthorised, abnormal and, at the very least, not highly estimable” (29). As such, the difference between magic and religion for Mauss lies firstly in whether direct causation occurs as a result of a ritual, but moreover in the formalisation of practice. He notes in the prologue to A General Theory of Magic that “Magic is an institution only in the most weak sense; it is a kind of totality of actions and beliefs, poorly defined, poorly organised even as far as those who practise it and believe in it are concerned” (13). Without a formal structure like the church, magic becomes illicit, an other. Mauss acknowledges that both religion and magic are social phenomenon, with the underlying difference between the two being that religion is practiced in public, while magic is secret. He states that while “religion in all its aspects is essentially a collective phenomenon” (111), the social aspect of magic is crucial for its continued practice, with collective agreement on the efficacy of a ritual leading to the belief and subsequent repetition of said ritual. Mauss further notes that magic holds some similarity to science, in that it is concerned with natural causality and a reverence for nature: “the magician is a person who, through his gifts, his experience

3 We can appreciate this as fully different from Frazer’s argument that religion is bound to supplicating the gods and asking them for specific things, which Malinowski would conversely view as magic. While a far more detailed analysis of the difference between these approaches could be performed, there is too much additional material to cover in this research to allow time to dwell on Frazer for too long. 8 or through revelation, understands nature and natures; his practice depends on this knowledge” (94). Mauss does, however, fall into a similar trap to Frazer, likening magic to a primitive form of science, rather than a category of thinking and doing which is completed in itself. Upon making his conclusions, Mauss notes that “Magic has no genuine kinship with anything apart from religion on the one hand and science and technology on the other” (174). Does this dictate that magic sits comfortably between religion and science, in a holding position of the void between the two? In On The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), French sociologist Bruno Latour presents a more contemporary approach to the question of religion in relation to science. He argues that they are “two regimes of invisibility” (112) that must be overcome. The invisibility of religion lies in our inability to recreate the events as they took place in scripture: as such we must have faith that such events occurred and in their irreproducibility. The invisibility of science lies in that in order to “see” science we must examine it in laboratory conditions, outside of its natural existence where it is often invisible to the naked eye. Latour argues that these apparently diametrically opposed systems have been incorrectly reduced to caricatures of belief (religion) and knowledge (science); he argues on the contrary that we must view religion and science – in light of their invisibility – as part of “the same broad set of [mental] competences applied to two chains of mediators going in two different directions” (122). What Latour does moreover is argue that by trying to “freeze-frame” – i.e., remove and examine in isolation – individual instances of belief or knowledge in relation to religion and science respectively “forbids the meaning to be carried in truth” (122). In other words, we should “not isolate an image out of the flows that only provide them with their real […] meaning” (123). Latour doesn’t want us to think about religion and science as based upon belief and knowledge, but the intersection he places between the two is nevertheless a useful tool to think about the place of magic in this study, and indeed what magic is. This is not to say that magic can sit comfortably in the middle ground between religion and science; rather we can use this arguably false dichotomy of belief and knowledge to assist with feeling out the “truth” of magic that is carried in its meaning, as Latour has attempted to do with religion and science. What can be understood from Mauss and Malinowski is that magic does indeed exist in a space between knowledge and belief, which itself is mediated by uncertainty. While a group such a Malinowski’s Trobriand islanders may have knowledge of their surroundings, and have the rationale and skills to perform tasks for the prosperity of their societies, the knowledge that they cannot know everything necessitates the use of magic.

I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi state that “In spite of all the wars waged between science and religion in the West, in spite of a long and deeply entrenched tradition of hostility, the two now coexist cosily. Magic, however, is still the outcast […] Religion, as practised in the West, is not practical but moral; whereas science and magic both claim immense pragmatic value […] A Westerner may invest much in religion, but unlike the primitive magician he expects no immediate practical returns from his rituals” (58). From this statement, as well as the work of Frazer, Mauss, Malinowski, and Latour, one crucial characteristic of magic that we must take with us is that it is able to do something. But can it be as simply stated as this? In the next section of this chapter I will consider magic in relation to performative utterance, considering what overlaps

9 exist between the two and how magic differentiates itself. In doing this, I will also introduce the magick of Aleister Crowley, and in doing so justify why I am not going to include Crowlian magick as a part of my wider discussion of magical writing practices. While I shall go on to dismiss Crowley, I am including him here because his definition of magick is the one taken as read by Florian Cramer in his claim that magic lives on in the executability of computational code. While my attention shall not be fully devoted to computation until further on in my analysis, I wish to address Crowley now in my defining stages of the term magic so I will not have to devote any more time to him later on in this research.

1.2 Performance versus Magic: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

In his book Magick4 in Theory and Practice, occult practitioner Aleister Crowley famously decreed that “Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will” (xiii). This is very vague and general: Crowley defines the action of breathing as magickal5, as it embodies the will-to-live. In The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema (2003), Lon Milo Duquette defines Will as any willed action, giving the examples of “brushing your teeth, walking the dog, or even paying your taxes” (11), if it plays a part in your wider universal purpose. Under Crowley’s purview, any of the above actions are magickal because they are wilfully performed by the individual. Something being wilful in Crowley’s religion of Thelema does not refer to stubbornness, but rather of a person engaging with their true purpose, which is achieved in line with the will of the universe. Duquette further states that any “habitual or reactive behaviour that overrides the momentum of one’s life focus” (11) is not magick. This could include, for example, scratching at chickenpox in your sleep, smoking a cigarette, or having one too many drinks. At first glance, Crowlian magick appears to be far too general to be of any use to us here, as we have already explored the social position of magic in relation to science and magic. Indeed, Crowley doesn’t consider magick to be the same as magic, stating that “All the works of witchcraft are illusory; and their apparent effects depend on the idea that it is possible to alter things by the mere rearrangement of them” (24). In Crowley’s magick, there is no magic. In which case, if he so shuns association with the object of my study, why discuss Crowley at all? This is because Crowley provides a means for me to discuss what magic is not: namely, performance. Marcel Mauss notes that “the kind of traditional practices which might be confused with magical activities include legal actions, techniques and religious ritual” (23): I do not wish to risk such a confusion here, particularly as later on in my analysis I will be discussing the performativity of computational code. While both magic and performance do things, I must here work to establish why they are not the one and the same thing. I will as such propose that Crowley’s prerequisites for Will to be accomplished are strikingly similar to the felicity conditions that allow performative acts to happen. I will

4 Crowley uses the word “magick” with an added k to differentiate his practice from other forms of magic

5 While Crowley himself uses the term magical without his special added k, I will be using one here as shorthand to indicate when I am specifically discussing Crowlian magick rather than any other kind of magic. 10 perform this analysis by concentrating on J. L. Austin’s concept of performative utterances – or speech acts – as presented in his classic book How To Do Things With Words (1962). I am using Austin’s speech act theory as a means to discuss performance as it is primarily concerned with words, which I must necessarily return to in my discussion of writing. In his theorems for Will, and as such magick, to be accomplished, Crowley states that “The first requisite for causing any change is through qualitative and quantitative understanding of the conditions” (xiv). For Crowley, the embodiment of Will is enabled through conditions of “psychological, physiological, and physical law” (98). To help the would-be practitioner of magick to understand this, he offers “a very simple example of a magical act: that of a man blowing his nose” (97). In order for the nose to be successfully blown, it must be the man’s Will to blow his nose. Furthermore, his nose must be “capable of being blown”, assumably by having nostrils, as many noses tend to. Finally, the man must have “at command an apparatus capable of expressing his physical Will in terms of material force” (98) – in other words, having a paper tissue, handkerchief, or pavement on which to eject his build-up of mucus. Without such mental, bodily, and material conditions, the nose, according to Crowley, would “will remain unblown through all eternity” (98). In How to Do Things with Words, Austin similarly argues that certain felicity conditions must be in place for a speech act to be performed. He greatly elaborates on these conditions throughout the book, but surmises them thus: “There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons under certain circumstances” (26). An oft cited example of a speech act is that which is said by an officiant during a marriage ceremony: “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” This statement in itself is not performative, and is said in circumstances such as children at play, or by actors in a film, without being lawfully binding. For such a speech act to be illocutionary, it must be said not only in the mental, bodily, and material conditions essential for Crowley’s nose blowing Will to be enacted, but furthermore conditions upon which it can socially and lawfully be agreed that a couple are indeed married. Speech acts or performatives do things, in a similar way that magick as Will does something. Magic, at a base level, also does something. So what is the difference between performativity and magic? For Crowley in particular, for True Will to be enacted, the individual must have knowledge of themselves and of their surroundings. He uses the example of a man who wishes to be a painter, and his failure in that endeavour being due to “ignorance of [his] own True Will, or of the means by which to fulfil that Will” (xiv). For Crowley, magick is “a question of discovering and employing hitherto unknown forces in nature” (xvi): as such, magick is a practice based upon accumulating knowledge of both yourself and the world around you, in order to enact your True Will. Speech act theory is itself, in a different way, concerned with knowledge or certainty. In order for a marriage ceremony to be correctly performed, one must be certain of the felicity conditions. There is no room for ambiguity when pronouncing a couple to be married. The officiant and the couple know that the conditions are just so that the speech act can be effectively performed. So, while performance in these examples is enacted with the precedent of absolute knowledge that they will be efficacious, magic is on the contrary an act of contingency. For a performative utterance or Crowlian Will,

11 control over a given situation is implied by the performance itself; magic, on the other hand, is enacted in the awareness that control is not implicit, and must be gained through ritual. Belief in and performance of magic is, as such, done in acknowledgement of uncertainty. So, the real discrepancy between performance and magic lies in the difference between ambiguity and control. While those who perform magic believe in its efficacy, for Crowlian Will, belief in the self is all that is required. Moreover, for a speech act such as “I pronounce you man and wife” or “I declare this legislative session open” – although, I hasten to add, not all speech acts – the difference also lies in institutionalisation. While I can declare that I do not believe in the institution of marriage, this does not detract from the married-ness of other people in the eyes of the law. Even if I were to get married, declaring that I do not believe in marriage as the speech act is spoken in felicitous conditions, the notion that I do not believe in marriage does not lawfully unmarry me. But how can we think about belief in relation to magic?

1.3 Do You Believe in Magic?

In this chapter thus far we have seen that magic exists as a social category alongside religion and science, enjoying parallels and overlaps of interest with both. We have also seen that magic is distinct from performativity, in that performativity requires certain controlled conditions as precedent to be enacted, while magic is an active acknowledgement by the practitioner that they do not have control. But what exactly can be understood by the term belief? In this final section before concluding this chapter, I will consider several different approaches to belief in tandem with arguments made by Mauss and Malinowski. Through doing this, I wish to construct an understanding of belief in a magical context that can then assist us in creating a definition of what magic is. In the titular essay in On The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Latour opens his discussion by stating that “belief is not a state of mind but a result of relationships among people” (2010: 2). By this, Latour is indicating that belief is not only defined by how one community forms its practices, but by how communities perceive each other. In his analysis, Latour works to eradicate the distinction between fact and fetish, or between the found and the made. He starts to do this through an imagined conversation between West Coast Africans and their colonial invaders, the Portuguese. In this imagined dialogue, the Africans do not or cannot distinguish between having fabricated their idols, and worshipping them; the Portuguese argue that if the idols are made, they are therefore false and illusionary. The Portuguese, or the “Moderns,” distinguish between facts as objective and fetish as fabricated and as such subjective. A fact, in the Modern view, is autonomous, existing on its own without the need for human intervention. A fetish, on the other hand, is fabricated, and involves human beings projecting their beliefs onto a passive object. Latour, working against this view, argues that both facts and fetishes are constructed, and comes to propose the portmanteau factish as a means of understanding this. The Moderns approach fact as being able to crush fetish, as the latter is constructed and the former is not. Latour, on the contrary, argues that fact is just as constructed as

12 fetish6. In Pandora’s Hope (1999), Latour states that “if we now speak of factishes, there exist neither beliefs (to be fostered or destroyed) nor facts (to be used as a hammer)” (1999: 287). While the Moderns approach anything that has been constructed as false, Latour argues that “it is because it is constructed that it is so very real, so autonomous, so independent of our own hands” (1999: 275). He states that “if the iconoclast could naively believe that believers exist who are naive enough to endow a stone with spirit […], it was because the iconoclast also naively believed that the very facts he employed to shatter the idol could exist without the help of any human agency” (1999: 274). For Latour, therefore, the concept of belief is projected by Moderns onto those who worship fetishes: they know that their fetishes have been fabricated by their own hands, and thus do not have to believe in their power, as they know that through their very creation the fetishes have power. I find Latour’s approach to belief as a category that must be eliminated problematic. In Latour’s view, belief is always projected by Moderns as a means of differentiating themselves from savages, who themselves apparently do not believe in anything. In doing so, Latour paints belief as negative, a derogatory characteristic that Moderns place upon savages and, in doing so, embody themselves.

To continue my discussion of belief, I want to retain the idea by Latour that the power of an object is defined through a human’s relationship with it, with the act of fabrication in itself giving power to an object. This will be an important point to return to later in this research when I begin to discuss magical writing practices. However, I feel that Latour’s rejection of belief as a concept is not useful to dwell upon here. I indeed must take the role of the Modern in my analysis and make the assumption that those who practice magic believe in it. While Latour denounces belief in the face of fetish because the creator of said fetish knows it has been created by his hand, I have discussed the use of magic up until this point as at odds with absolute knowledge, and finding its necessity in uncertainty. I propose that for an idol or a magical rite to be fabricated, there must first have existed a moment of uncertainty, a point where that rite or idol was needed. But, as Latour would surely reply, if such a rite or idol was created, there must first exist a confidence in such an idol or rite to catalyse their fabrication. He states that “nonhumans are at once pliable and durable; they can be shaped very quickly but, once shaped, last far longer than the interactions that fabricated them” (1999: 210). While I concede that nonhumans are indeed pliable and durable – think, for example, of the Christian crucifix – I believe that Latour underestimates the time span of interactions and fabrications. I would like to posit that for magic, belief is tied up in the fabrication of rites and idols, and such fabrication occurs not in a moment, but in a continuous action. Mauss states that “Magical beliefs, of course, derive from experience: nobody seeks out a magician unless he believes in him; a remedy is tried only if the person has confidence in

6 Latour uses the discovery of microbes by Louis Pasteur to elaborate upon this. He argues the conditions through which Pasteur performed his experiments were fabricated, but this does not remove from the concept of pasteurisation becoming accepted as fact and/or truth. “The artificiality of the laboratory does not run counter to its validity and truth; its obvious immanence is actually the source of its downright transcendence. How could this apparent miracle be obtained? Through a very simple setup that has baffled observers for a long time and that Pasteur beautifully illustrates. The experiment creates two planes: one in which the narrator is active, and a second in which the action is delegated to another character, a nonhuman one” (1999: 129) 13 it” (114). If magical belief derives from experience, I would therefore posit that such belief is maintained through sustained efficacious fabrication. In other words, belief in magic is made through successful doing in the face of uncertainty. To further elaborate on this assertion, I will now turn to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his approach to belief. In The Sublime Object of Ideology (2008) he argues, following Jacques Lacan, that our emotions and our beliefs lie not in our interior thoughts, but rather “belief […] is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people” (31). The example Žižek takes to make his point is a writing practice: Tibetan prayer wheels. He describes the practice thus: “You write a prayer on a paper, put the rolled paper into a wheel, and turn it automatically without thinking […] In this way, the wheel itself is praying for me – or, more precisely, I am praying through the medium of the wheel” (32). The example that Žižek uses is taken from a religious context; as we have come to understand, religious rituals act towards a metaphysical end, as opposed to the causal purpose of magical rituals. For magic, belief is also expressed through doing, but moreover with the expectance that it will yield a specific result. Indeed, even more so than religion, magic is “embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people.” Malinowski argues that magic is a “special mode of behaviour, a pragmatic attitude built up of reason, feeling, and will alike. It is a mode of action as well as a system of belief, and a sociological phenomenon as well as a personal experience” (Malinowski 8). That fabrication in turn consolidates belief. For magic, unlike religion, and similarly to science, belief is a feedback loop, and cannot be rendered separate from the repeated action of doing. As Mauss states, “actions which are never repeated cannot be called magical” (23). Belief is thus not only a projection by others onto practitioners of magic. Rather, belief is collectively embodied in the thoughts and sustained fabrication of a community.

Chapter Conclusion: Materiality, Labour, Community

It has been my aim in this chapter to create a working definition of magic. By exploring these different approaches to magic(k), performance, and belief, I have also aimed to highlight what magic is not. As such, for the purpose of this thesis research, I deem magic to be a collectively understood conflation of belief and fabrication, legitimised through sustained and efficacious action. While exterior to the institutions of church or state, magic is nonetheless social. A Mauss states, “if the whole community does not believe in the efficacy of a group of actions, they cannot be magical. The form of the ritual is eminently transmissible and this is sanctioned by public opinion. It follows from this that strictly individual actions, such as the private superstitions of gamblers, cannot be called magical” (23). As well as being collectively embodied yet distinct from the institution, I define magic as different from performative utterance or Crowlian Will because its successful deployment is first dependent on an acceptance of uncertainty. Why use magic? Because we do not and cannot know the entire truth of our world. In my discussion of magic, I have found the action of magic to be tied up in volition of an individual inherently tied up in community practice, to depend on material conditions to deploy, and be a supplement to labour.

14 Chapter 2: What is Writing?

Having now formed a definition of magic for the context of this research, I must now analyse what writing is. At first glance, this is a relatively simple question: structuralist linguists would argue that writing is a system of signs that materially represents speech. But this is surely not all writing is: as a material entity, as opposed to ephemeral speech, writing can travel in space and time, leaving traces of its development in its wake. As such, writing can surely do things that speech cannot. Despite the unique characteristics of writing that distinguish it from speech, claims have been made that speech has more power than the written word, or the written word only becomes powerful once it has been read aloud. In this chapter, I will be challenging these claims, by examining several moments in Western history. To do this, I will primarily be drawing on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (1982) and Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). I will also be questioning what writing is with an eye on Friedrich Kittler’s concept of the discourse network. Rather confusingly translated from the German aufschreibsystem – literally, system of inscription – Kittler describes discourse networks as “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (2004: 369). This is not wholly dissimilar to Michel Foucault’s episteme as discussed in The Order of Things (1970), the episteme being the conditions of possibility by which knowledge exists. While Foucault frames the episteme as “configurations within a space of knowledge” (xxiv), Kittler’s discourse network on the contrary is specifically concerned with the materiality of inscription and its surrounding mechanisms as a means of collecting and processing knowledge. As such, I believe it is prudent within this thesis project to approach magical writing practices as deeply material, following on from my definition of magic in the previous chapter, which states that magic depends on certain material conditions to be efficacious. With a few millennia to cover and limited space to do so, this chapter will make quite a few time jumps before arriving more or less in the present. On our way there, I will touch upon the role of writing in the foundation of world religions; Greek and Roman spells; the perfectionist wrath of medieval book scribes; and the trouble with phonetics and computation. Echoing the anthropological arguments from the previous chapter, for the writing practices I shall discuss here, magic is sandwiched somewhere between religion at the foundation of writing, and science as we move towards computation. I shall cover my topics here relatively quickly: it is not the purpose of this research to dwell upon the minutiae of Mesopotamian trade secrets, or the daily life of a scribe in the Middle Ages. What this chapter intends to do, on the contrary, is show what writing was, what it has become, and how that transformation relates to magical qualities as applied to inscription. I will be arguing that the written word has been associated with the supernatural since more or less its conception; and that in order to study how and why these uncanny qualities of writing have seeped over into our contemporary digital sphere, we must once again question what writing is.

15 2.1 Writing from Above: Foundations of the Written Word

As Walter Ong notes in Orality and Literacy, the consensus is that the first instance of a writing system occurred in ancient Mesopotamia, approximately 3500 B.C.E.. This was an ideographic protoscript: in other words, it made direct illustrations of concrete objects, intended as a method to assist trade relations, with particular symbols representing barley, livestock, and so on7. This system was first inscribed onto stone and clay tokens, immediately material and able to do what speech alone could not: objectively confirm that a trade of goods had taken place. Starting as pictograms, the system developed into cuneiform – a writing system using wedges – thereby becoming more abstract. Able to convey more nuanced meaning than concrete drawings of cows, the use of writing thus extended beyond the marketplace and into other facets of life in Mesopotamia, including politics, the military, and religion. Around two millennia after this cuneiform was developed, Semitic people in the same geographic region as Mesopotamia conceived the first alphabet. Ong notes that “every alphabet in the world — Hebrew, Ugaritic, Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Tamil, Malayalam, Korean — derives in one way or another from the original Semitic development” (87). The development of an alphabet as opposed to an ideographic or cuneiform system marks the shift to phonetic writing, wherein each discrete symbol or combination of symbols directly relates to the sounds that make up words. The written form of the English language, for example, uses the Latin alphabet to represent the distinct sounds – or phonemes – that make the spoken form of the language understandable. With this system, a native or fluent speaker should be able to “sound out” the written script, transferring its material presence as an inscription into an oral rendition. It was at this moment of the alphabet, Ong proposes, that writing became a system of symbols that represent speech. While Ong argues that the use of written language was well established as an economic device before it was used for “imaginative creations” (84), Judaeo-Christian, Samaritan, and Gnostic foundation myths are all based upon letters of the alphabet. These creation myths can be distinguished by the number of letters that were allegedly used to create the world. As detailed by Judaism scholar Tzahi Weiss, Samaritan, Jewish, and Gnostic foundation texts claim that God created the world either through the tetragrammaton – often transliterated into Latin script as YHWH; – all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet; or all 24 letters ,יהוה of the Greek alphabet. Weiss notes that “these three traditions [demonstrate] that in several late antique contexts, the belief that the world was formed by means of letters was familiar and accepted” (105). These foundation myths incorporated writing systems after the fact, as it were, of the development of writing by man. I posit that these legends therefore imply that although writing systems were first utilised by man for economic reasons, they were not conceived by man and man’s ability to write is in fact the result of divine intervention: these creation myths present writing as an inherent characteristic of the universe, the world inscribed by god. This also signifies that the written word exists with a purpose greater than enabling the trade of cattle; rather, it is the very essence of the divine within our human world.

7 For detailed discussions of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, see Jean Bottéro’s Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning and the Gods (1992) 16 This concept of written language as a gift from a higher power is recounted in Plato’s Phaedrus, wherein Plato’s Socrates tells the story of the god Thoth offering King Thamus the gift of writing to distribute to the people of Egypt. As paraphrased by Erik Davis in Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), “[Thoth] promised Thamus that the new invention would not only augment memory, but amplify wisdom as well. Thamus carefully considered the matter, weighing the pros and cons of this major communications upgrade. Finally, the king rejected the gift, saying that his people would be better off without the new device. And reading between the lines of the story, it’s clear that Socrates and Plato agree” (1998: 29-30).8 Here Plato clearly does not believe that writing is the underlying essence of our world, but nevertheless subscribes to the notion – at the very least allegorically – that writing was passed onto man by a higher power. Using Socrates as his surrogate, Plato criticises writing as “[creating] forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves” (Phaedrus). In an irony pointed out by Davis, copies of the Phaedrus can be found “in the philosophy section of your local bookstore,” augmenting memory and creating forgetfulness in philosophy students worldwide. Davis further argues that Plato’s exposure to writing shaped his thought process (31), echoing McLuhan – “Plato shows no awareness here or elsewhere of how the phonetic alphabet had altered the sensibility of the Greeks; nor did anybody else in his time or later” (25) – and Nietzsche’s aphorism, “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts” (Kittler 1999: 200). Returning to the realm of religion and the gift of literacy, this concept of thought process development as influenced by the written word is also apparent in the foundations of Islam. As recounted by Kittler, the archangel Gabriel descended from heaven to ask Mohammed to read a verse from the Qur’an: “Mohammed, however, answers that he, the nomad, can’t read; not even the divine message about the origin of reading and writing. The archangel has to repeat his command before an illiterate can turn into the founder of a book based religion. For soon, or all too soon, the illegible scroll makes sense and presents to Mohammed's miraculously alphabetised eyes the very same text that Gabriel had already uttered twice as an oral command” (1999: 7). Kittler here presents Mohammed’s instantaneous embrace of the written word as deterministic: for the longevity of Islam, it is imperative that its teachings be transferred into inscription. In Judaeo-Christian biblical texts, there is also the example of Belshazzar’s feast in the Book of Daniel. Belshazzar and his cohorts eat and drink from holy vessels looted from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, .Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin”) on the wall“) ”מנא, מנא, תקל, ופרסין“ when a hand appears, inscribing the words Unable to understand this message, Belshazzar summons Daniel, who interprets it as predicting the imminent fall of Babylon to the Medes and the Persians. In this case, the devout Daniel is able to construe meaning from the word of God, while the blasphemous Babylonians cannot, and subsequently pay with their lives. In these biblical examples, the written word is the technology that links together gods and their disciples. Religion as an institution is enabled by its believers and their ability to “select, store, and process relevant

8 Just to reiterate: Davis is of course referring to Plato’s imagined version of Socrates for his own purposes in the Phaedrus. Socrates himself did not write anything down. 17 data” (Discourse Networks 1800/1900 369). Writing is a form of divine intervention: a gift, a warning, a set of rules from a higher being. The durability of the written word as opposed to its ephemeral oral counterpart as used in these cases is indicative of the telos of inscription technologies: to manipulate the human mind, and to spread the word of god. With these religious approaches to the written word, I want to emphasise that supernatural qualities have been placed upon inscription technologies since their inception. In contemporary Western society, although increasingly secular, there remains a cultural awareness of these foundational texts, and the relationship of the written word with divine power. This is not to say that whenever a word is written, one recalls the finger of god engraving the ten commandments into stone atop Mount Sinai. Rather, I want to argue that through the development of inscription in the Western world, there has been a steady fascination with the idea of words being able to do something. Moving on with my brief history of the written word, I want to emphasise this fascination and in doing so challenge arguments made in particular by Ong that writing is “dead” and not powerful as a material entity, and also the Saussurian view that writing is only a representation of speech.

2.2 Curses! The Transitional Written Word as Magical

In the previous section, I highlighted the importance of the written word to the foundation of major world religions, arguing that the idea of writing being able to do something has existed not since the dawn of the written word, but as soon as the written word became advanced enough to be used as a method to describe its own creation. Despite the evidence that I have put forth, linguists often argue that magical power is present only in the spoken word, or when the written word is read aloud. These arguments tend to be made while comparing literate and non-literate societies, with Walter Ong in particular making the generalisation that “deeply typographical folk” are unable to think of words as primarily oral when written down, and thus do “not so readily associate [words] with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection” (32)9. Ong’s text was thematically followed by Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, which further explores the development of typographical man. In this text, McLuhan describes the era before the printing press as “primitive” (142). McLuhan uses the terms “primitive” and “auditory” or “audile-tactile” interchangeably (21), indicating a similar approach to Ong. McLuhan founds the adequate advancement of man beginning with the development of moveable type. I will address the development of the printing press and magic associated with the printed word in the next subchapter. In the mean time, I will use two examples to argue for magic as associated with the written word in itself due to material conditions specific to inscription. These are Ancient Greek and Roman curse tablets, and Medieval book curses. As with my prior examples of religious foundation texts, these curse

9 There is a strong history within horror fiction of a written document being able to unlock all kind of terrible ills once it is read aloud. Examples of this in feature film include The Mummy (1932/1999), The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead II (1987), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012). 18 tablets and book curses are based in part upon religious belief. Following my definition of magic in chapter one, however, I have deemed these examples to be magical as they use writing as a means to perform a specific ends, practiced by individuals but more importantly legitimised through group belief. Of course, Ancient Greece and Rome and Medieval Europe are not “deeply typographical”; neither are they illiterate. Rather, they lie in a transitional phrase of growing literacy, where the technologies enabling writing are still being developed. My examples of curse tablets and book curses emphasise the importance of materiality to the written word in and of itself during this developmental stage, not just as undead marks empowered by speech. For these examples, the alleged primary orality of words holds no influence over their magical power as incription. Ong states that “In western classical antiquity, it was taken for granted that a written text of any worth was meant to be and deserved to be read aloud” (112), before rather amusingly using the example of Greek Tragedy to legitimise his point. While it goes without saying that plays are written down with the understanding that they will be memorised and performed aloud to an audience, Ong uses this example to propose that all that is written down is meant to be spoken. Ong is unable to conceive that writing may be able to do something all by itself: as a call to a malevolent deity, or as a faithful protection of scripture. Archaeological evidence of curse tablets, also known as tabella defixiones or katadesmos, has been found throughout the Greco-Roman world. Typically made of lead, clay or wax, these curse tablets feature inscriptions, with the writer asking the powers that be to perform some generally negative change upon a person or object. These tablets were then typically fixed with a nail, and buried underground or dropped in a well10. Aside from standard forms of written Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, archaeological remains of these curse tablets have also included incomprehensible script – or voces mysticae – which is unrelated to any known language. In his extensive study of curse tablets, John G. Gager proposes, quoting from Stanley J. Tambiah’s “The Magical Power of Words,” that “the voces mysticae represent ‘the language that demons can understand’” (9). While Tambiah discusses the language of demons as vocally performed in Sinhalese exorcism ceremonies, Gager materialises this approach. Tambiah emphasises that although there is “a prevailing misconception that Sinhalese mantra are largely unintelligible or even nonsensical […] the ‘demon language’ is consciously constructed to connote power, and [… is] based on the theory of language that demons can understand” (177-178). He further argues that it is irrelevant whether or not the exorcist fully understands the words in a spell, what matters is that their construction is based upon the logic that demons can understand them. While these Sinhalese ceremonies are vocal, the voces mysticae are decidedly material. As opposed to Ong's assertion that the power of words is derived from their enunciation, voces mysticae are powerful on the basis that they cannot be read and therefore cannot be spoken. And while their inscription indicates that the writer believed deities could interpret the writing, it would be incomprehensible to the writer and their fellow humans. Quite apart from letter combinations not corresponding to meaning, writing voces mysticae in an unknown script leaves them literally unpronounceable, but nevertheless material marks that are imbued with meaning and belief.

10 My brief description of curse tablets here is made with reference to John G. Gager’s extremely detailed study Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (1992) 19 In the case of curse tablets, given their nefarious nature, the writing of an incantation as opposed to speaking it also helped establish some space and time between the invoker and divine being they were envoking. As argued by magician-cum-linguist Patrick Dunn: “To write down a spell and drop it in a well is to send it like a letter to the underworld. It simultaneously curses and keeps the curser at arm’s reach from the powerful and sometimes unpredictable chthonic deities. More pleasant spells were probably spoken, not written, and therefore were ephemeral” (70-71). For the casting of these curses, belief in the ability of the written word to do something specifically without needing to be read aloud is inherently tied up in the material basis of the inscription. Belief in and fear of the chthonic deities influences the material deployment of the spells: such is the power that these mortals wish to invoke, the further away from it they can be, the better. So, as opposed to Ong, these words are actions in themselves, acting without the alleged power of speech and within the rubric of material inscription. My second example of the magical power of writing during the transitional phase of growing literacy are Medieval book curses. Before the advent of the printing press, books – and most particularly the scripture – were laboriously hand copied by monks, whose sole task it was to ensure an exact replica was produced. Production values were high: not only because of the time and effort that went into creating a single book, but because these books contained the word of god. In Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses (1983), Mark Drogin states that as a scribe went about the process of his copying, he knew that “to make an error was to commit a sin […] if he believed, religiously, in the power of his task, he knew that his labour with pen was the equivalent of another’s with sword or battering ram: his was the responsibility of fighting the devil by multiplying God’s words” (12-14). The Christian Bible – unlike the Torah or the Qur’an – was not written in a sacred language, and as such “was never explicitly worshiped as a cultic object.” On the other hand, “Christians were more interested in the text as a vehicle for the transmission of the logos, God’s spoken word and transcendental plan” (Erik Davis 1998: 40). As such, the same language that the Bible was written in could be used as a means of protection, as well as spreading the word of God. This was not, Drogin notes, by official decree the church. He quotes from the Council of Paris in 1212, where it was officially ruled that “from the present date, no book is to be retained pain of incurring a curse {i.e. stop trying to scare off potential borrowers by laying anathemas}, and we declare such curses to be of no effect” (62). However, this official word did not cease the the practice of placing curses on books, with Drogin noting that the choice to place curses on volumes ultimately “seems to have been primarily the decision of the scribe” (62), which was given legitimacy as it developed into a community practice, with books all over Medieval Europe including curses added by scribes. Drogin notes that the popularity of placing curses upon books did not abate until the advent of the printing press in the mid-15th century, “which finally made the production of books so economical that a single volume ceased to represent an enormous expense calling for heavenly protection” (100). This statement tightly binds these book curses with their means of production. Although the word of God continued and continues to be spread through the use of books, the task of copying out the good word was no longer placed in the hands of the scribe monks. Indeed, while the word of God remained precious, the means

20 by which it was transported became cheaper. Monks placed curses onto books to protect them from being stolen, damaged, or destroyed: this was linked not only to the scripture as sacred, but moreover to the time and effort it took a monk to write out a single book by hand. Dedicating months to a single purpose in human eyes warrants protection. As we can see from these examples of the transitional written word, writing is not deemed powerful only when it is read aloud. Rather, its power is inherently linked to its materiality. While human labour performing the divine work of God warranted some written security measures, the mechanised production of a book, by contrast, has less value. This is not to say that magic as it was applied to inscription disappeared once its means of production and distribution changed. Rather, as these methods changed, so did the role of magic. I have this far emphasised human process as linking magic to inscription. But how does this change when the human moves further away from their writing?

2.3 Printer’s Devils

The first European book printed, The Gutenberg Bible, was initially associated with magic. When Gutenberg’s associate Johann Fust first arrived in Paris in the mid-15th century, selling copies of the Bible for almost ten times less than that charged by scribes, he was welcomed with open arms. When he produced copies to match demand and halved his price again, however, Parisians became suspicious. How was he producing the Bibles so quickly? And at such a low price? Upon inspecting their newly purchased books, they discovered that each edition seemed to be an exact replica of the last. Not an exact replica as a scribe would produce, with all the words present and accounted for. Rather, each letter of the alphabet was identical in all its appearances throughout, even when two different copies were compared. Having never seen a printed book before and unable to comprehend how the Bibles had been created, Fust was arrested under the charge of witchcraft and associating with the devil. Indeed, such was the hysteria that surrounded these mass produced tomes, that the red ink used on detailing was believed to be Fust’s own blood. We can see in this example that it is not what the writing says that makes it magical, or in this case, associated with magic, but it is rather its material existence and means of production. While the hysteria surrounding printing has clearly subsided over the last six hundred years, magic has nevertheless continued to be associated with the printed word. As with the Gutenberg Bible, this association is not linked only to what the books said, but more crucially to their means of production and distribution. One such example of this is fictional play The King in Yellow. A false document featured in several of author Robert W. Chamber’s short stories, The King in Yellow is a play that causes anyone who reads beyond the end of its first act to go mad. It appears most prominently in “The Repairer of Reputations” (1895), in which the protagonist describes the fits of joy and terror that befell him after he accidentally glimpsed the opening page of the second act. The narrator notes that “when the French government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most

21 advanced of literary anarchists” (“The Repairer of Reputations”). While it is never explicitly stated how, indeed, The King in Yellow spread like an infection, I posit that this spread was enabled, of course, by mechanical reproduction. While somehow retaining the horrific and compulsive reaction brought on by reading the words, a mechanical printer – unlike a scribe – would not have to read them to reproduce the book. The magic of the printed word lies not only in the production of books, or even necessarily the reading of said books. Rather, I propose it lies in the mechanisms that mediate a book’s existence in the world: referencing systems and libraries. Indeed, as Kittler states in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, “all libraries are discourse networks” (369), as they are intimately concerned with the structuring of knowledge through the organisation of the written word. To briefly consider this assertion, I will turn to the intertextual relationship between Chambers’ fictional play The King in Yellow and H. P. Lovecraft’s more notorious imagined grimoire, the Necronomicon. In Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind Lovecraft’s Legend, Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce note that Lovecraft “tells us in ‘History of the Necronomicon’ that the Necronomicon inspired Chambers to write about [The King in Yellow]. However, Lovecraft did not encounter [Chamber’s] book until May of 1927” (25). While Lovecraft first featured the Necronomicon in his 1924 short story “The Hound,” by attributing it as an influence to an earlier work Lovecraft lends authenticity to his fictional creation. The inclusion of the Necronomicon by other authors associated with Lovecraft in their own stories spreads the legend of the grimoire further. In “Forbidden Words: Taboo Texts in Popular Literature and Film” (2015), Stephen Whitty states that given the detailed and plausible history Lovecraft constructed for his creation – including relevant name checks such as Elizabethan occultist John Dee – is it “any wonder that people still wander into bookstores and university libraries, looking for a copy?” (7). As we can understand, and in consideration of Kittler, Lovecraft and his associates intentionally manipulated the creation of a discourse network, using mechanisms intended to reinforce the legitimacy of a work to create a false history, an imagined reality has seeped over into our own, where the dangerous Necronomicon exists, and can be found if you follow the right channels. This idea of searching for the non-existent, the unknowable, the magical, is a notion that permeates Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” (1941). In this story, the narrator is one of many men who was born in and inhabits an endless library, made up of room upon room of all the books possibly written using 25 basic symbols: 22 letters, the comma, the full stop, and the space. A great many of these books are gibberish, but the library also seemingly includes every book ever written, in multiple languages. While these “perfect” books exist, alongside them also exists imperfect versions, which may have one letter out of place, or thousands. Given the surplus of information in the library, the narrator notes that superstitions have sprung forth, with groups of inhabitants scouring the great depths of the library for the Crimson Hexagon, in which they believe to be held books containing magic. As we can understand from both Borges’ allegory for the unknowability of our existence, and Lovecraft’s manipulation of citation systems, as the written word became mechanised there arose with it new ways for magic to be associated with it. For these, it is not necessarily human production of inscription that offers it magical power, but rather

22 how we interact with it, how we project our own limits as human beings onto the vast unknowability of existence. Given this very human inclination to try to discern order from chaos, and to transfer a rush of information into meaning, I will now turn to my final discussion in this chapter: computation.11

2.4 The problem with phonetics: a shift to computation

In the final section of this chapter I will consider structuralist approaches to writing – as championed by Ferdinand de Saussure – and how these approaches have been challenged by inscription practices in computation, both at code and interface level. In the previous section I emphasised means of storage and distribution as lending magical qualities to the printed word: material traces such as references and library idea cards hint at a secret knowledge, hidden away. Before embarking on my discussion of digital computation, I must acknowledge that within this context, storage and distribution become inherently wrapped up in writing itself. In “A Brief History of Text and the Computer” (2012), Adriaan van der Weel argues that “text-based pursuits” (106) lie as the base of digital culture, including chatting, word-processing and browsing the internet. He correctly identifies text as existing at the base of all software dependent facets of the digital, including music and images. In this section, I am going to follow N. Katherine Hayles in her analysis of how the “legacy systems” (2005: 8) of speech and writing are complicated by their placement and use in the digital realm. I will begin by introducing the sign as it is understood within the field of structural linguistics. Following that introduction, I will consider arguments made by Hayles and Lydia H. Liu which challenge this concept of writing as purely phonetic within the context of computation. In this chapter section I will not be discussing magic as it applies to writing, as that discussion shall be reserved for my final analysis of magical writing in contemporary digital culture. In that analysis, I shall return to concepts introduced here and discuss them in tandem with my definition of magic from chapter one. Structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure argued that writing exists in direct relation to and as a lesser form of the spoken word, designed to be a material representation thereof and nothing more. Saussure bases his claim around the concept of the signifier and the signifed, as explained by Lydia H. Liu: “the signified consists of a conceptual image or idea that is arbitrarily fixed onto the sound image, arbitrarily in the sense that no natural correspondence exists between sound and concept” (2010: 319). A popular example to demonstrate this is that of the tree: the written word “tree” is the signifier of the image of the tree, which gathers its meaning from the tree itself, the signified. Thus, when one sees a tree, we know that the signifier for it is the word “tree”; in equal measure, when one hears the word “tree” one knows that it is referring to the object “tree.” Saussure contends that a written sign has no meaning unless those who perceive it interpret

11 Regrettably, I do not have space in this research to include a discussion of early technologies of information transferral, such as morse code and the telegram, which led up to the development of the computer as we know it today. However, an excellent study on these technologies has been performed by Jeffrey Sconce in his incomparable Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (2000). Given the depth of Sconce’s study, I doubt that I could in any brevity here do it justice, or indeed provide any insights that he has not already provided. Thus, to fill an unfortunately necessary gap in this study, I refer you to him. 23 it as having meaning; it is thus arbitrary. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida denounces the concept that written language is merely the representation of speech. He quotes Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first” (Saussure in Derrida 23; italics in original), adding that Saussure’s approach “describes or rather reflects the structure of a certain type of writing: phonetic writing, which we use and within whose element the episteme in general (science and philosophy), and linguistics in particular, could be founded” (30). As is highlighted by Derrida here, entrance into the episteme – or, rather, discourse network – of computation dictates that the purely phonetic approach to the written word must be challenged In My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), N. Katherine Hayles discusses the arbitrariness of the sign in relation to computational code. She emphasises that while Saussure underplays the importance of materiality for deployment of meaning in speech and writing, for computational code materiality is of utmost importance. She states that “for code, […] the assumption that the sign is arbitrary must be qualified by material constraints that limit the ranges within which signs can operate meaningfully and acquire significance” (2005: 43). Translating and thus transforming the idea of sign and signifier to the context of computation, Hayles proposes that we could see binary voltage changes at machine level as signifiers, and see the higher level programming languages interpretation thereof as signs. While Hayles can successfully apply Saussure’s concept onto computation, this move is made at the cost of a primary element of his approach to linguistics: that writing is a phonetic representation of spoken language. So while we can borrow terms from linguistics and apply them to writing within computation, we must begin to think about writing in this context not as a representation of speech, but as a representation of machinic processes. Of course, it is not as simple as completely rejecting human language in favour of code. In “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media Specific Analysis” (2004), Hayles states that “electronic hypertexts are bilingual, written in code as well as natural language” (2004: 74). She further argues that electronic texts are multilayered, with “natural” language typically being found at interface level, “although it is also frequently found at lower coding levels in comment lines” (2004: 79). What is most important here, perhaps, is that Hayles once again emphasises that specific material conditions are required for writing to perform its function within the context of computation. She notes that “rigorously speaking, an electronic text is a process rather than an object, although objects (like hardware and software) are required to produce it” (2004: 79). This is not only for computational code as executable, but also for human communication via information technologies: to send a message is dependent on the material capabilities of the machine, and the compatibility of software with that machine. This once again brings us back to Ong’s assertion that speaking constitutes an event, while the written word is “dead”. The shift from spoken word as an event to written word as a process lies in the specific material positioning of code as writing within the context of the computer itself. If I were to carve a line of computational code into a lead tablet and throw it down a well, for example, it would not execute.

24 New Media Theorist Alexander Galloway states in his paper “Language Wants to be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology” (2006) that “code is the only language that is executable” (325). He makes this claim following Hayles, in her argument that the execution of code is “quite similar to speech act theory and the notion of the illocutionary speech act, defined as a verbal expression that when uttered changes some state of affairs in the world” (325-6). As discussed in chapter one, a performative speech act must have specific known conditions in order to execute, and the speech act alone out of context will not have the same outcome. Galloway argues, in line with Hayles, that while a speech act such as “I pronounce you man and wife” is performative, in that it results in behavioural change as enabled by social conditions, it does so due to “an intersubjective infrastructure” (326), as opposed to the specific material conditions required for the execution of computational code. What they do have in common, nevertheless, is that both speech acts and executable code are performative on the basis of certainty in their conditions of placement. Galloway further states that “code is machinic first and linguistic second” (326). In other words, while the logic and readability of code by humans enables the greater ease by which code can be written without error, the perception of code by human beings is subordinate feature to ability to execute within the material context of the machine. Writing with computers is dependent on a level of hybridity in order to be understandable by both humans and their machines, but it is not dependent on linguistic structures to function. As such, Liu argues that “as the technology continues to evolve and morph into something we may not yet know how to characterise, one of the first things we should interrogate is the idea of the phonetic alphabet. Inasmuch as the alphabet lies at the foundation of our literacy, literary theory, linguistics, and information theory, the theoretical implications of this construct need to be rethought in light of the advent of postphonetic writing and new media” (“Postphonetic Writing and New Media”). What does Liu mean when she talks about postphonetic writing? While she doesn’t offer an exact definition, her primary means of discussing this concept is through information theorist Claude Shannon’s “Printed English.”12 In his 1951 article “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English,” Shannon proved that entropy within transferral of information using the Latin alphabet was reduced with the addition of a twenty seventh “letter”: a blank space. In information theory, the term entropy refers to the uncertainty of information transferred during a certain event. For the transferral of information in a digital setting, it is a question of “extracting ‘signal’ from ‘noise’ in a communication channel” (Mirowski 62). Shannon’s addition of the blank space is a means of clarifying signal from noise, and in doing so reduce uncertainty or entropy. In The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (2010), Liu discusses “Printed English” specifically in relation to this addition of the space. She argues that "the letter [space] owes its existence to the statistical, rather than visual or phonemic, parameters of symbols. It has no linguistic meaning as far as conventional semantics is concerned but is fully functional as a meaningful ideographic/ mathematical notion. In fact, the twenty-seven letters of Printed English belong to an altogether different

12 “Despite its name, which can be misleading, Printed English does not have much in common with the mechanical reproduction of the written English word or any visible printed marks we usually associate with the printing press. Printed English is a concept strictly defined through mathematics and statistical science” (The Freudian Robot 46) 25 metaphysics than that targeted by Derrida's critique [of Saussure] because the binary opposition between speech and writing does not obtain here. What we find instead is a statistical thinking that arbitrates the entropy of discrete alphanumerical symbols in a binary opposition of 0 and 1” (59). I disagree with Liu’s assertion that the letter space is purely statistical, rather than visual or phonemic. The typed word as it appears in digital computation owes its heritage to the typewriter, with the Hansen Writing Ball – the first commercially available model, discussed by Kittler at length in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999) – featuring a discretely placed but nevertheless present space key. Indeed, even when handwritten, the space between words in the English language owe their ease of comprehension to a skilfully placed blank space. Indeed, think of the role of the space in Borges’ infinite library, in all its painfully analogue glory. In speech, also, silence can provide meaning. Nonetheless, I appreciate Liu’s intentions with this statement: by referring to the blank space as “functional” she motions towards its executability, and rightly – as I pointed out in my introduction to Saussure – rejects Derrida’s critique as unfit for purpose when the notion of writing as a reduction of speech is no longer applicable. Indeed, Liu flips the notion of writing emerging as a material child of speech by pointing to text-to-speech synthesis, enabled by the development of Printed English, is a prime example of postphonetic writing. She argues that text-to-speech “refigures the biomechanics of human speech in such a way as sound and speech may be produced, rather than reproduced, as an artefact of engineering” (“Postphonetic Writing and New Media”). While this reversal of speech and writing has a sort of pleasing symmetry, we must remember most importantly that the question of speech opposing inscription is a material one. Within the realm of digital computation, never mind a device’s ability to turn writing into sound mimicking human speech, unlike its biological counterpart, it leaves a material trace. Ong states that “Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might ‘call’ them back – ‘recall’ them. But there is nowhere to ‘look’ for them. They have no focus and no trace (a visual metaphor, showing dependency on writing), not even a trajectory. They are occurrences, events.” (31) For computational code, writing comes before the event; it is the reason that the event occurs. What Liu makes clear is that for writing as a functioning constituent element of information technologies, the binary opposition between text and speech is irrelevant. What is important is the ability of information to be processed in its correct material placement without further human intervention, and by doing so perform a function. On a material level, this is what distinguishes spoken words, words on wax, clay, or lead, words in tomes and words typed out on a Hansen writing ball, from words written out as computational code. Ong states, “it is impossible for script to be more than marks on a surface unless it is used by a conscious human being as a cue to sounded words, real or imagined, directly or indirectly” (73). This assertion by Ong was made in 1982, more than three decades after Shannon conceived Printed English. As the information age has progressed, it has come deadly clear that Ong’s “impossibility” has been overruled. Outside of the executability of code level inscription, the role of writing within information technologies has also moved away from being only a representation of speech in human to human communication. Aside from the ubiquity of acronyms, the surging popularity of emoji in recent years has challenged writing practices as an artefact of human speech. Embedded within the typing of

26 words, emoji are in some ways a visual representation of the hybridisation of writing within digital culture. With such shifts appearing at interface level years after the establishment of code as executable, can we really discuss writing and speech as a dichotomy? As I write this, more than thirty years after Ong, it is clear that the structuralist bible of words from our mouths lying dead on the page must be shut.

2.5 The Writing’s on The Wall: Chapter Conclusion

In this chapter I have examined religious, linguistic, and informatic approaches to writing. But to what end? The aim of this thesis project is to look at instances of magical writing within contemporary digital culture. In order to do so, I have first and foremost shown the long standing historical precedent for my research. Supernatural qualities have been ascribed to writing practices for millennia, and it is crucial to consider how and why these tropes have emerged and reemerged over such a wide stretch of human history. I have found that as inscription technologies developed, so did the ways in which magical qualities were ascribed to them. Whether it is in the freedom of scratching out an idiosyncratic script supplicating a to chthonic deity, or lost in the unknowable rooms of an endless library, magic follows writing. Secondly, I have examined several different perspectives on writing, particularly concentrating on the opposition between speech and the written word. I found many arguments made by Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy especially problematic when applied to information technologies due to his insistence that the power of words lies in their oral rendition. Moreover, I found in my historical examples of curse tablets and book curses debunk Ong’s claims that supernatural qualities of words are found only when they are spoken. After analysing Saussure’s structuralist approach to writing as merely phonetic signifiers for spoken human language, it became clear to me that this was an unusable model for approaching writing practices within digital culture, as writing in this context is not dependent on oral delivery in order to perform their function. By performing analyses of both magic and writing, I am now in good stead to approach magical writing practices in contemporary digital culture. Before I do that, however, in my next chapter I will discuss (pre) cyberspace era attitudes towards information technologies concentrating on three groups: journalists, programmers, and technopagans. While the main focus of this thesis is on writing practices, I feel that it is crucial to engage with these discourses to establish a cultural precedent for my research. We have seen in this chapter how perceptions of technology can be transferred as said technology develops, but also how they can transform. Before I can proceed in my analysis of magical writing practices in contemporary digital culture I must therefore examine the conditions by which the culture as we know it today was established. Therefore, by looking at creators (programmers) and mediators (journalists), I am going to propose that the metaphor of magic as applied to information technologies is rife within the mid to late 20th century, but it also goes through a process of transformation. First used as a metaphor by “high priest” programmers in the 1940s and 1950s as a means to maintain a hierarchy of control over computation, the rhetoric of magic was absorbed by journalists in the 1970s and 1980s to describe information technologies as special and new. The Technopagan programmers who inhabited Silicon Valley in the 1990s approached digital computation and the internet in

27 particular as not only as a means of practicing magic, but as a metaphor for magic itself. How have these discourses affected digital culture today?

28 Chapter 3: ”The Magic in the Machine": (pre)Cyberspace era perspectives on Information Technologies

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there is currently being taught – as of the spring semester 2015 – a class entitled “Indistinguishable From… Magic as Interface, Technology, and Tradition.” Its name referring to science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s aphorism, that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” this course describes itself as aiming to “[understand] the traditions and vocabularies behind [magical] tropes” that appear in relation to technology. Incorporating sleight of hand magic tricks in tandem with exploration of information technologies, the course guide further states that “‘magic’ is still the word we use to encompass the wonders of a new technology before it becomes ubiquitous” (“MAS S66: Indistinguishable From… Magic as Interface, Technology, and Tradition: Syllabus”). When interviewed for the “Magic” episode of Digital Human, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2015, Dan Novy, one of the course instructors alongside Greg Borenstein, stated, “When you present people with technology they haven’t seen before, they build their own metaphors to understand it, with whatever they have to hand. So our users are going to see and understand technology through magical metaphors regardless of what we do” (Krotosky). Ironically Novy doesn’t acknowledge that discussing magic in relation to technology on BBC radio, or teaching a course on magic and technology in a world ranking university may influence the sustained development of this discourse. On this point, I reject Novy’s assertion that faculty at MIT or mass media have little or no influence over user comprehension of technologies or the metaphors attached to them. In light of this, in this chapter I will be discussing mid to late 20th century perspectives on information technologies, specifically in relation to magic as both metaphor and practice, by concentrating on three groups: media professionals (or journalists), computer programmers, and the Technopagan community. I will be arguing that together, these three groups perpetuate the idea that computers are somehow magical, but the idea of what this magic is shifts from group to group. From the 1940s until the 1980s, those within the programming community held onto the self-made perception that programmers are “high priests” in control of esoteric knowledge – computational code – that is incomprehensible to laymen. In the 1980s and 1990s, journalists from Time magazine grasped onto the concept of information technology as magical, disseminating the idea of computers and/as magic to a mass audience. Finally, Neopagan programmers working in 1990s Silicon Valley embraced programming, and the internet in particular, as embodying the connective and amorphous power of the universe. The discussion of magic as related to technology does, of course, span a larger period than this. Sociologist Max Weber’s discussion of the disenchantment of the world places the rise of modernity and technological innovation as occurring alongside the decline of magic. For Weber, this disappearance of magic is predicated on the idea that “the world is embarked on a path at the end of which there will be no more mysteries” (Jenkins 15). While I have neither the space here nor the inclination to cite my problems with Weber’s argument (which, indeed, have already been made by others including Richard Jenkins), my argument thus far should indicate that I do not follow Weber’s thesis about the separation of magic and technological advancement. Works that are more

29 sympathetic to the association of magic with technology include Pamela Thurschwell’s Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking: 1880-1920 (2001), and Erik Davis’ TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998). I of course cannot replicate the size or the scope of these studies in this chapter; nevertheless, this research is performed with an awareness that it exists in the legacy of studies such as these.

3.1 Programming High Priests: Magic as Hierarchies of Power

I will begin by discussing self perceptions of magical power within the programming community in the 1940s until the 1980s. In “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun quotes Fortran developer John Backus as describing early machine language programmers as practicing “black magic” and being like “members of a priesthood guarding skills and mysteries far too complex for ordinary mortals” (30). She also quotes computer scientist Mildred Koss as arguing that if it were not for the development of higher level programming languages, “which democratised problem solving with the computer […] programming would have remained in the hands of a relatively small number of technically oriented software writers using machine code, who would have been essentially the high priests of computing” (30). Machine level code is code at its point of least abstraction: arduously written and complex, it is a purely numerical system the meaning and ultimate function of which is unreadable to laymen. Prior to the hybridisation of code with human language, computer programming could only be performed by an elite group who were able to comprehend endless lines of numbers, the smallest error in which would upturn the functioning of the code, and would be invisible to the untrained eye. Machinic programming was considered as “black magic,” therefore, because it was a complex system of knowledge that would be unwieldy in the hands of a novice practitioner. Chun quotes both Backus and Koss in acknowledgement of the resistance within the early programming community to the development of programming. Yet, when programming languages matured beyond machine level and became more abstract, with human readable language incorporated into the numbers, and the number of programmers thus increasing, there still remained the idea of the high priest of programming. In a working paper for MIT in 1974, systems developers Charles Rich and Howard E. Shrobe note that “programmers are popularly and correctly identified in the public mind as practicing black magic” (10). Writing on symbolism and information systems development in 1991, Rudy Hirschheim and Mike Newman put forth that “the systems developer is not uncommonly portrayed as that of the ‘high priest of technology,’ the individual (or group of individuals) who can harness the power of computer technology to the benefit of the organisation […] As the high priest of technology, the developer possesses the apparent magical quality of making the computer productive, transforming a highly unintelligible piece of technology (to the lay person) into a key organisational tool” (40). In Digital Woes: Why We Should Not Depend on Software (1994), Lauren Weiner quotes software pioneer David Parnas arguing that “technology is the black magic of our time. Engineers are seen as wizards; their knowledge of arcane rituals and obscure terminology seems to endow them with an understanding not

30 shared by the laity” (1994: ix). We see that magic and programming continue to be associated, despite the shift away from purely machine code. This discourse surrounding these programmers is a mixture of magical, religious, and scientific. For these programmers, the skill of being able to make a computer do something being seen as akin to magic. Yet they are also repeatedly referred to as being high priests, terminology that is typically used in a religious context. And finally, most importantly, programming and its development is a foundational aspect of computer science. As such, should we begin another debate on the relationship between these three categories? If we recall Florian Cramer’s arguably limited discussion of magic and coding in my introduction, I would propose that, aside from the real engagement with computer science, these programmers are using magical and religious references in name only. What should become clear from these examples, however, is that magic for these programmers is based upon power through knowledge, and most specifically, knowledge that is kept within a small group of practitioners. As we recall from my definition of magic, secrecy is an important aspect of magical practice. However, secrecy does not equate to magic. Furthermore, despite the description of programming as magic, we have already come to understand that magic and performance are not the same thing. Finally and most crucially, following Bronisław Malinowski, magic emerges as a community practice informed by lack of knowledge, or the embracing of uncertainty. The ambiguity present in magical rituals is absent from computation by definition. Programming requires certainty to be successful, and knowing how and why a programme is or isn’t running is essential for the job to be performed properly. If there was ever any doubt: these programmers are not performing magic. Then why describe themselves as doing so? I believe that programmers described their practice as magical as a means of maintaining a hierarchy of control between programmers and laymen. We can see from Mildred Koss’ testimony in particular that the nominal use of magic and associated terms was a means by which to fight the democratisation of the machine. By describing programming as magic, programmers attempted to paint their skills as unknowable and unlearnable: a black box into which laymen could never enter. The programmers know the code, and as such have power over the functioning of our computers. Moreover, secrecy within this context is not the hushed reverence for a dangerous and arcane knowledge that must be kept out of the hands of the layman for his own protection; on the contrary, and especially for early programmers, keeping such knowledge within a small community meant less competition for jobs. Chun notes that “we ‘primitive folk’ worship source code as a magical entity — as a source of causality — when in truth the power lies elsewhere, most importantly in social and machinic relations. If code is performative, its effectiveness relies on human and machinic rituals” (2008: 311). While Chun erroneously approaches magic as merely causal, she rightly points to human and machine relations as the source of power. These programmers describing their practice as magical as a means of maintaining the hierarchical status quo is a simple yet effectively tenacious use of magic as metaphor.

31 3.2 Time Will Tell: Journalistic Perspectives on Computers and Magic

Having proposed that the use magical language by programmers to describe their practice was a means by which to control layman perceptions of computation, and keep knowledge of computer programming in a small community to limit job competition, I will now discuss the absorption of magical language as applied to information technologies into mainstream journalism. With this absorption, the purpose of magical language was adapted to suit the needs of its new context. I will be framing my discussion of this transferral of magical language through examination of Time magazine. Time was founded in 1923 by Yale graduates Henry Luce and Britton Hadden, with its aim to produce “narratives for the busy man with neither the time nor the inclination to follow the comparatively longwinded daily press” (Monmonier 62). While these figures have dropped slightly in recent years, in the mid 1980s it had an average circulation of 4.6 million in North America. Several academic studies have been performed on magical language in Time magazine, but while these examine the magazine in relative isolation, I would here like to propose that magical language as applied to information technologies by Time is in fact incorporating rhetoric already present in the programming community. We have seen the propensity for programmers to describe themselves as having magical power as a means of maintaining control. This language has also slipped into academic and specialist circles, reinforcing the view that programming is akin to magic for those already invested in the study of digital computation13. But what purpose could such magical language play for a popular magazine? Targeted at the very laymen the use of magical language by programmers intends to alienate, there must therefore be a specific purpose for such language to be beneficially transferred into the context of a commercial magazine. On April 16 1984, Microsoft founder Bill Gates was featured on the cover of Time magazine (Figure 1). Wearing a powder blue Oxford shirt with matching button down cardigan, thick framed glasses, an awkward smile, and a wonky fringe, Gates gives the appearance of a typical nerd. But on his left index finger, a floppy disk sits suspended, a black box with an all seeing eye gazing out at the reader. Above Gates and his gravity defying disk, the headline reads: “COMPUTER SOFTWARE: The Magic Inside the Machine.” With this cover, Time transfers the concept of the programmer as a high priest and repurposed it for a mass audience; Gates is the poster boy for computer software, and Time is the mediating force that enables that perception. What this cover moreover does is specifically identify software as the “the magic in the machine” as opposed to computers as magical in themselves. Not only references that it is the coding of computers in particular that is magical, but also continues in line with the promotion of programming languages as being incomprehensible to laymen. In this cover, Gates as programmer shields programming knowledge from laymen, and Time is complicit in this. Yet, the purpose of this language for Time isn’t to aid and abet the self-aggrandising narrative of the programming community. Rather, Time needs to sell

13 Indeed, Chun also argues in “On Software” that both academics and corporations resisted the democratisation of computational code, as it required them to spend more money on hardware, rather than the relative cheapness of hiring a programmer. 32 Figure 1: Bill Gates spins his disk magazines. The use of this magical language within this context thus must have a transformation of meaning, wishing to entice sales rather than estrangement. In William A. Stahl’s 1995 paper “Venerating the Black Box: Magic in Media Discourse on Technology,” he analyses Time articles on computers from 1979-1988, highlighting not only that the number of articles on information technologies increase over this period, but also that many of said articles contain what Stahl describes as “magical language”. Stahl interprets “words like magic, wizard, sorcerers and conjured [as being] explicitly magical” (239), without providing a full list of words included in his study. What can be garnered from this casual approach to magical terminology – Stahl does not become particularly absorbed in defining his terms – is that magic is approached by Time in a colloquial manner, concerned with magic not as a mode of belief and practice but as a metaphor. Stahl argues that information technologies were described as magical in order to familiarise audiences with technologies that they did not understand: “Computers may have been magical; toasters were not” (252). As opposed to the programmers who use magic as a way to maintain control through a hierarchy of knowledge, Time uses magic to describe something as new. Once again, this is a move away from our definitions of magic in chapter one: as we recall, Marcel Mauss in particular notes that “magical beliefs, of course, derive from experience” (114). Time, on the contrary, use magic as a means to describe that which has not yet been experienced, something which is new to the consumer. Stahl argues that the power of mass media is both ontological and authoritative: Time uses an already existing metaphor from the programming community to reproduce and circulate the authority of the community’s self definition, restructuring reality as it is perceived by their four and a half million strong readership and restructuring technology as magical for commercial purposes. 33 As opposed to the programmers, who used magical language in relation to knowledge that they judged in need of protection, Time used magical language to describe information technologies for a different reason completely: to sell magazines, and to sell advertisement space within those magazines. Take, for example, Time’s 1995 special bumper issue, “Welcome To Cyberspace”. In Karla Saari Kitalong’s article “‘You Will’: Technology, Magic, and the Cultural Contexts of Technical Communication” (2000), she critiques both the editorial content of the magazine, and its accompanying adverts. With this issue, Kitalong argues that “under the guise of an informational journalistic overview of the newly commercialised internet, Time staff members simultaneously promote the internet and teach readers with no direct internet experience what and how to think about the internet” (296). As well as including editorials on the internet, “Welcome to Cyberspace” featured a set of exclusive advertisements by American telecommunications giant AT&T. These advertisements acted as a series, taking the form of well known fairytales. In this case, however, AT&T technology aids our heroes, ensuring that Hansel and Gretel don’t get lost in the woods thanks to their navigational system, voicemail warns Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother about the big bad wolf, and so on. Kitalong notes that “optimistic magical promises borrowed from the media and subsequently enfolded within prescriptive technological discourse create and sustain consumers’ extravagant expectations about technology” (293). While I have proposed here that the idea of magic already existed within technological discourse before it was taken up for commercial purposes, what is interesting here is that such discourse works to disempower the user from different angles. While programmers attempted to disempower laymen by painting the realm of computing as unknowable and mysterious, Kitalong argues that commercial use of magic as a metaphor promise the user too much, a promise which is broken when trying to operate their machines. In their chapter “Fun is a Battlefield: Software between Enjoyment and Obsession” from Olga Goriunova’s Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing (2014), Chun and Andrew Lison reiterate that the introduction of automatic programming was viewed as a way of disempowering the programming high priests and their self-perceived “super human knowledge.” They concede, however, that “this language of high priests and wizards has not disappeared with [the introduction of] higher-level languages, although this disempowerment has spread everywhere, allegedly for the good of the programmer and the advancement of technology” (178). So while programmers have typically used magical language as a way to alienate laymen, Time as an example of journalistic practice uses magical language to entice laymen. This does not, however, lead directly to user empowerment, as in the 1980s and 1990s users were still becoming accustomed to their new machines, and magical rhetoric used in advertisements such at the AT&T fairytale campaign made promises the machines couldn’t keep. Even the integration of magical language into the machines themselves as a means of assisting this familiarisation didn't help. Kitalong specifically critiques software wizards that are intended to guide users through particular programmes. She states that by offering only a limited repertoire of responses, and providing users with only the minimum of information needed to perform a certain task, “instead of empowering the novice user, in the end, wizards function to maintain the rift between novice and expert users by preventing novices

34 from becoming experts” (293). So we see, during this early period of popular computer usage, despite commercial efforts to introduce users to information technologies, such technologies were not yet equipped to offer even a simulation of the magical promises advertisements made. In the last section of this chapter, I shall focus on one final group during the late 1980s and early 1990s, for whom computers and the internet in particular became both a metaphor for and a means for practicing magic: Technopagans.

3.3 “cyber-candles will do fine”: Computers and/as Magic

In 1986, American author and Wiccan high priestess Margot Adler performed a survey of American Pagans for the first revision of her book Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, originally published in 1979. Her results showed that a “surprisingly high percentage” (446)14 of the witchen community were working in the burgeoning information technology industry, a finding echoed in Erik Davis’ later assertion that Neopagans15 were “one of the first religions to colonise cyberspace” (1994:184). Suggested reasons for this, as paraphrased by Venetia Robertson, are “that computers are analogous to magic and can be used for magical purposes; paganism is a practical religion, utilising available tools; communication is greatly increased through internet services and allows pagans to share information; digital interaction provides a balance for people who involve themselves heavily in nature and vice-versa; and ‘oddball people’ or ‘unenculturated, solitary, creative thinkers’ are attracted to both Paganism and computers” (286-7). Of this list, what is of most interest to us here is that magic could be considered as analogous to computers, and that magic can be practiced using computers. Given the history of inscription technologies being affiliated with magic as discussed in chapter one, it is imperative to explore in which ways this may have transferred into information technologies. In his 2002 paper “Technophilia and Nature Religion: The Growth of a Paradox,” Shawn Arthur states that “the paraphernalia of formal Wiccan ritual are not lost or forgotten in online rituals. They appear as words instead of physically for the community of practitioners, and their usage is written as a means of performance” (306). This concept of words as analogue is also presented by Stephen D. O’Leary in his discussion of cyberspace16 as sacred space: “The ritual objects of fire, bread, salt, and knife are embodied in the words: ‘fire,’ ‘bread,’ ‘salt,’ and ‘knife.’” (797). The concept of objects acting as analogue for elements is

14 16% of Adler’s respondents were working in the computer technology industry; Stef Aupers further notes that Tanya Luhrmann repeated Adler’s research in the United Kingdom in 1989 and found that one in five neopagans worked with computers “in some way or the other” (221).

15 Neopagans is a general term to describe a group of religions including Wicca, Druidism, and Shamanism. In this section I will be primarily be discussing Technopagans, the subset of Neopagans who are specifically concerned with using computers and/as magic.

16 Cyberspace was an early means by which to describe the internet, a term borrowed from William Gibson’s science fiction novel Neuromancer (1984). While today the internet and its associated technologies have become intimately tied up with events in the physical world, the term cyberspace differentiates between the online and “real life,” considering cyberspace to be a world in and of itself. 35 common practice in Pagan ritual. For example, a blue candle can be used to invoke the element of water, or a yellow candle can be used to invoke the element of air (“Candle Magick – Which Colours?”). As rituals are already representative, the step to practicing magic on computers via the internet seems logical, widening the community and using information technologies pragmatically as tools. However, the internet as a tool for practicing magic, empowering Pagan users and widening the scope of the religion, only scratches the surface of magic as it was practiced with computers during the late 1980s and 1990s. Beyond using computers and the internet as a tool, one particular set of programming Technopagans working in 1990s Silicon Valley came to view digital computation as an analogue for magic. One programmer in particular in this group has come to play the role of figurehead, and is discussed in studies of Technopagans in studies by Stef Aupers, Venetia Robertson, and Erik Davis. Mark Pesce, the creator of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), is noted as having been “converted [to Technopaganism] by the machine itself” (Aupers 2010: 225). In other words, before working as a programmer Pesce had no inclination towards magical practice, and was led to the craft by studying the intricacies of computers. Pesce, alongside other Silicon Valley Technopagans, came to view the internet as a functional analogue to the occult forces in the physical world. Davis quotes Pesce as arguing that “both cyberspace and magical space are purely manifest in the imagination […] both spaces are entirely constructed by your thoughts and beliefs” (“Technopagans: May the Astral Plane be Reborn in Cyberspace”). Given my earlier discussion of the importance of materiality to the successful deployment of both executable code and human to human communication, I find this claim by Pesce a ridiculous one to make, particularly for a programmer working in the field. Nevertheless, it is an interesting view to follow on a metaphorical basis. This sentiment is further elaborated on by Technopagan Gwenny. As she tells Aupers:

I think that like me a lot of computer pagans view the internet as a model of the universe. That we are all connected on a spiritual level and that we are all connected on the internet level. That appeals to me very much: the idea that we are all interconnected. The internet is kind of organic, just like the universe is. And you can grow your little servers, realities and universes; they spring up all over the place... The universe is ever-changing just like the internet is. (2010: 227)

Unlike their programming forefathers who described programming as magical as a means to control it, these Technopagan programmers on the contrary view the internet in particular as something that defines itself. While it can indeed be used as a tool for the practice of magic, this does not negate its allegedly organic nature. While these Technopagan programmers acknowledge the internet as something amorphous that cannot necessarily be controlled, they nevertheless have the skill set to cause change within this sphere. Indeed, these Technopagans as practitioners of literal magic have, fittingly, come the closest to embodying my definition of magic in chapter one thus far. They are a community that acknowledges the unknowability of their sphere, using tools as a means to perform rituals that are absorbed in labour. Nevertheless, given their temporal placement, the practice of magic by these Technopagans is performed on the basis that although the internet may be a spiritual model of the universe, they have the knowledge and the skill to at least break the

36 surface of it. While they may be practicing magic, they are still programmers. What I want to discover in my next chapter is, how can we discuss magic in digital culture as it is practiced at interface level, by people who have little if any knowledge of what occurs beneath the surface?

3.4 Chapter Conclusion

Up until the 1990s and early to mid-2000s there remained an inclination to market and present computers as magical, with Microsoft for example including an assistant on their operating systems called Merlin up until 2007. However, in more recent years this inclination has decreased, with magic being directly associated with information technologies only occasionally, such as the description of the iPad upon its launch in 2010 as “magical and revolutionary” (Apple Inc.). The word “revolutionary” offers us the key here: once again, as in Time magazine, the iPad is described as magical because it is new. Information technologies have on the whole, however, become banal to users. Such is the ubiquity of computation, there is no longer the necessity to market it with the wow factor of metaphorical magic. Indeed, the finding that “oddball people” are invested in both magic and computers no longer holds traction: while so-called oddballs may indeed still practice magic and use computers, there is hardly a claim to be made that all those who use computers in 2015 also practice magic. Computers have come to melt into the background, verging on invisible when they act as they are supposed to. This does not dictate, however, that users are completely empowered by their machines. I ask that we recall Stahl’s statement that “computers may have been magical; toasters were not” (252). Now, while computers are ubiquitous in the West and are routinely used in everyday life, this does not dictate that users know exactly how their machines work. Unlike the hot glow of the filament we can watch crisping the surface of our bread, interface level offerings – although allowing users to click and type and seemingly cause change – does not equate to transparency. So, in this chapter I presented three groups – programmers, journalists, Technopagans – with the aim of arguing that magic presented as a characteristic of information technologies was pervasive in different fields in the build up to our current era. But what can be said about contemporary digital culture? Magic has seemingly become absent from the digital as we experience it today. We no longer need to be told by advertisers that our machines are magic: we are used to them, they are a necessity, and no longer need to be sold to us as special. I posit that it would be highly unlikely to find Mark Zuckerberg gracing the cover of Time magazine in 2015 claiming a feature of Facebook to be magical. However, elements of these magical rhetorics have discreetly made their way into our current approaches to information technologies. As I will argue in my final chapter, we still see programmers discuss certain practices as magical, but this description holds little influence over the users of the machine. But what of the users? With more emphasis being placed on user generated content in contemporary digital culture, how do users contribute to magical writing practices that have been thus far discussed only in relation to programmers?

37 Chapter 4: Magical Writing in Contemporary Digital Culture

Having provided a working definition of magic in my first chapter, an exploration of writing and how magical applications of writing have transformed in my second, and use of magic as a metaphor and practice using information technologies in the build up to our current era in my third, I shall now in my final chapter analyse magical writing practices in contemporary digital culture. A great portion of my thesis thus far has been concerned with contextualising this final analysis. While ideally I would be able to devote more space to the analysis this contextualisation has been building up to, offering an adequate precedent for this research was crucial for me to cast a new eye on my object of research. I have critiqued new media theorists for using the term magic loosely as a synonym for the executability of computational code, and in this final analysis aim to demonstrate how one can perform an effective analysis of magical metaphors as the antithesis to magic in practice. In this final chapter, I shall offer a nuanced approach to magic and its written application within contemporary digital culture, considering both user and programmer practices.

4.1 What is Contemporary Digital Culture?

I wish to begin my discussion of magical writing in contemporary digital culture by briefly making clear precisely what contemporary digital culture is. We can begin to think about what digital culture is today through looking at Tim O’Reilly’s concept of Web 2.0. O’Reilly notes that one of the most crucial elements of Web 2.0 is its “architecture of participation” (“What is Web 2.0?”) where the successful functioning of a website or platform is dependent on user generated content. Take, for example, Facebook. Facebook’s wild success as a platform is dependent on people having Facebook: if there is no-one using the platform, there is no-one to become friends with, no-one to message, wish happy birthday to, et cetera. A similar statement can made about video sharing platform Youtube: for it to define itself thus, Youtube must have users sharing videos on it. This is described by Grant Blank and Bianca C. Reisdorf as a “network effect,” “the idea that some things are more valuable when more people participate” (538). To further solidify this architecture of participation, videos from Youtube can be shared on Facebook, crossing platform boundaries. As explored by Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond in their paper “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-Intensive Web” (2013), platform functions such as Facebook’s “Like” and “Share” buttons have extended well beyond the boundaries of its original environment, being embedded into websites otherwise external to Facebook. This effectively transforms the web at large “by asking users to express various affective reactions to web content in the form of a click on a Like button, these intensities can be transformed into a number on the Like counter and are made comparable” (11). This ensures that user engagement can be collected as data, commodified, and sold to the highest bidder. But contemporary digital culture isn’t just an embodiment of Web 2.0 as a business model. Digital culture has become increasingly complex, and despite the ubiquity of computers users are nevertheless black boxed out of the technical and sociopolitical workings of their machines. Through his discussion of the term

38 platform, Tarleton Gillespie reveals the complexities of these services, with platforms such as Youtube having to “present its service not only to its users, but to advertisers, to major media producers it hopes to have as partners and to policy makers” (348), and the term platform in itself revealing the computational, architectural, figurative and political drives behind digital services. Friendly interfaces offer users the impression that they are in control of their devices, that “my typing and clicking seem to have corresponding actions on the screen” (Chun 2005: 45). Behind the user generated content that apparently drives Web 2.0, these platforms are ruled not by the users themselves but by software giants such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, which are in turn subject to the rules of those governing their physical locations. In their article “Captives of the Cloud Part I” (2012), research and design collective Metahaven note that “user data and content materials are dispersed over different servers, domains, and jurisdictions (i.e., different sovereign countries)” and that “where and by whom sites are registered and data is hosted matters a great deal in determining who gains access to and control over the data.” They make a specific example of the USA Patriot Act, which enables the American government to access the data of people from around the world, as long as their information is stored on the servers of US run companies. In contemporary digital culture, despite near universal access to computers in the West, our machines are not our own. On a global political level, this was made abundantly clear by NSA dissident Edward Snowden, who in June 2013 via The Guardian leaked information about the US government’s PRISM surveillance programme, which exposed the great extent to which mass data collection and surveillance was being performed, unbeknownst to the general public. On a more personal level, general unease proliferates contemporary digital culture through vernacular means. Will Wiles discusses the user generated online folklore phenomenon creepypasta, which has a predilection for focussing on an unknowable evil lurking in our software, file attachments, video games, and so on. Wiles states that “our use of networked computers is daily coloured by fear of infection and corruption, of predators and those who would assume our identity, of viruses and data-sucking catastrophes” (“Creepypasta is how the Internet Learns Our Fears”), positing that the uncertainty users have when using their machines has become embodied in the wide distribution of these stories. As such, I posit that we can consider the pervasiveness of the digital within contemporary Western society to be both a necessity in terms of enabling communication, but additionally something that users view with unease, increasingly aware of something else occurring behind their screens that they may or may not have control of.

4.2 Literal Magic/Rhetorical Magic

Now that we understand what is meant when I use the term contemporary digital culture, we can begin to examine my case studies of written magic within this realm. As I introduce them, I must immediately acknowledge that they emerge from two groups: programmers, and users. The programming practices I am going to discuss use the term “magic” as a means of describing abstraction; that is, magic as shorthand for a more complicated process. This abstraction is described as something occurring automagically, a

39 portmanteau of automatic and magic. After providing a detailed analysis of what automagic means, I will discuss some discrete examples of this phenomenon. This includes the Magic Word function on MediaWiki software, and the description by Google of one of their email importance algorithms as “magic sauce.” Two of my case studies of user practices use magical writing as a means of protection. For example, the hashtag #safetykitty is used on photo sharing platform Instagram as a means of warding off death threats, ghost and demon manifestations, and spider attacks. Protective sigils on Tumblr work in a similar way, warding against posts threatening family, guilt trips, evil spirits, and bad luck. I am also going to discuss an instance of magical writing being used as a threat, with Death Note Online, a fan website of the manga and anime Death Note, on which users could write the names of individuals they wanted dead. With this split between programmers and users, there is also a clear split between the term magic being used rhetorically or nominally, or being thought of literally. We should already be familiar with the concept of rhetorical magic from my discussion of programming priests and “the magic in the machine” from the previous chapter. As we have seen, the rhetorical use of magic is malleable, and is not necessarily concerned with magic in practice. While our programming priests ascribed to the Maussian view of magic as secret, the application of magic to the precise realm of computation does, in my view, immediately overturn the uncertainty of the world at large that necessitates the use of magic in the first place. With Time magazine’s approach to information technologies, magic as a means to describe newness in itself negates the assertion that the belief and practice of magic are derived from collective experience. For these contemporary uses of magic as a description of abstraction in programming, the meaning has shifted once more. I will discuss the problems we face with the term automagic in the next section, before moving on to compare literally magical and rhetorically magical case studies. I briefly explored literal magic being practiced by Technopagan programmers in the early 1990s, acknowledging that while they viewed the internet in particular as organic and having unknowable properties, their ability to practice magic via their machines was partially enabled by their fluency in programming. In this case, I am going to be discussing users practicing magic only at interface level, assuming for my purposes here that they do not have any programming experience. For our literally magical writing practices, I ask that we recall Bronisław Malinowski as discussed in chapter one. Malinowski proposes that magic exists not in the complete absence of reason and knowledge, but as a means of supplementing gaps in knowledge, or acknowledging that some things are unknowable. An example he uses to explain this concept is lagoon fishing in the Trobriand Islands. He notes that “in the Lagoon fishing, where man can rely completely upon his knowledge and skill, magic does not exist, while in the open-sea fishing, full of danger and uncertainty, there is extensive magical ritual to secure safety and good results” (14). Let us think about literal magic in contemporary digital culture in a similar way. As can be understood from my brief definition of contemporary digital culture, those employing the use of written magic within this context surely have a more than adequate grasp of how to use their devices, and how various platforms on the web work. The emphasis online on user generated content in particular dictates that users must have enough knowledge of their machines to produce and share said content. However, this knowledge or understanding

40 is often limited to interface level, with the technical and sociopolitical complexities that exist beneath the surface being beyond the purview of the average user. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is the view that users have of their devices, where graphics of folders, wastepaper baskets, and so on act as visual representations of processes happening deeper in the machine. Wendy Chun discusses the success of the GUI in relation to suspension of disbelief by users, enabled through clear causality: that “everything has meaning: there can be no coincidences” (2005: 41). She further discusses machine interfaces as “visibly spectral” (2008: 323) and “productively spectral” (2008: 300), indicating that while we can see and do things via our interfaces, they are in fact hiding processes that are happening elsewhere. So perhaps we can think of those users who employ magical writing practices at interface level as working under the same conditions of knowledge and uncertainty as the Trobriand fishermen, with the surface of the water acting as an interface between the known world above and the uncertain seas below. The fishermen build their canoes, of which they can be confident will serve their purpose in shallow lagoons. In a similar way, the user knows the shallow surfaces of their devices, they know the platforms. Indeed, these have been designed to be user friendly. However, beyond a certain point, the average user ceases to comprehend how their machines work, and know that their machines can indeed turn against them. This technical uncertainty is exacerbated by social uncertainty and surveillance culture, that our machines are able to do things with our information once it is released which is out of our control. The use of written magic by users mediates this uncertainty. Before analysing examples of literal magical writing, I will first discuss potential problems with the word automagic and its associated practices when these two forms of magic are considered together.

4.3 Automatic Magic: The Problem with Conflation

In this section I will elaborate on the term automagic and its derivatives, coming to compare this example of rhetorical magic to the characteristics of literal magic as we have come to understand them. The portmanteau automagic combines the words “magic” and “automatic”; the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the term “automagically” originated in American advertising in the 1940s, and is now used “chiefly” as a computing colloquialism. For something to be automagic it must perform an action “automatically, especially in a way that seems ingenious or inexplicable; as if by magic” (“Automagically, Adv.”). Computer jargon website Catb. provides a more compelling definition of the term than the neutral OED: that something is automagic when it is automatic, “but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn’t feel like explaining to you” (“Automagically”). This latter definition acknowledges that for something to be automatic it necessarily disguises a function, and is also far more crude than the former, framing automagic as a term to be used only by those who have the apparent authority to do so and who are wholly unwilling to enlighten others around them. The term automagic works to obfuscate the material labour that enables a function to be performed by a computer, with the Catb.

41 definition in particular indicating that such material labour is correctly hidden from those unworthy to understand it. Let us consider the constituent parts of the term automagic and how they relate to one another. I will begin by discussing the concept of automatic within computation, before moving on to discuss how this sits in line with our already established definition of magic. In “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Wendy Chun states that “Automatic programming is an abstraction that allows the production of computer-enabled human-readable code – key to the commodification and materialisation of software and to the emergence of higher-level programming languages” (2005: 30). A shift from the machine programming so beloved by the early programming priests of chapter three, this abstraction to the automatic allows our computers today to do things by themselves. In his discussion of automation as a principle of new media in The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich states that automation dictates that “human intervention can be removed from the creative process, at least in part” (53), while using automation as a means to discuss filters on Photoshop. Chun argues that (automatic) programmability should be viewed in a more complex way than this, that “programmability does not only mean that images are manipulable in new ways but also that one’s computer constantly acts in ways beyond one’s control” (2005: 46). Chun elaborates that this means our computers now conflate reading with writing, and “for a computer, to read is to write elsewhere” (2005: 46). In other words, as we interact with our machines, our machines are reacting behind the scenes, performing invisible processes that do not appear on our interfaces. For something to be simultaneously automatic and magical, following Malinowski, the process that the machine performs would also have to be active and in the hands of a human. A human can make a machine magical, or use a machine to practice magic, but a machine acting alone cannot be magical. The removal of “human intervention” as stated by Manovich is of utmost importance to us here. In the Catb. definition of automagically, it is implied that it is the human as mediator that lends automatism its magical qualities: the magic is used as a means of throwing a curious body off the scent of process. For something to be automatic “but in a way […] the speaker doesn’t feel like explaining to you” indicates that there is a process that the speaker does know of. It is not, however, that process that is being described as magic in itself. On the other hand, it is the obfuscation of the process to laymen that is magic for the speaker. In his chapter “Language” in Matthew Fuller’s Software Studies: A Lexicon (2008), Florian Cramer states that “In its most powerful Turing-complete superset, computer control language is language that executes. As with magical and speculative concepts of language, the word automatically performs the operation” (170). In this statement, Cramer conflates the magical with the automatic: a word automatically performs its function because it is magical. Given my definition of magic, we can understand this view point as very misguided. As proposed both by Mauss and Malinowski, magic is inherently process based. In chapter one I further proposed a critique to Bruno Latour’s approach to belief, arguing that for magic, belief and fabrication are one and the same thing. While in magic, objects can be used in representative capabilities – such as my example of the elements being represented by candles in chapter three – for automatic programming there is increasing levels of abstraction, not a “mere translation” (Chun 2005: 46) but a

42 removal from the original machinic process of coding. In “Language Wants to Be Overlooked: Software and Ideology” (2006), Alexander Galloway argues that “One should never understand this ‘higher’ symbolic machine as anything empirically different from the ‘lower’ symbolic interactions of voltages through logic gates. They are complex aggregates yes, but it is foolish to think that writing an ‘if/then’ control structure in eight lines of assembly code is any more or less machinic than doing it in one line of C […] The relationship between the two is technical” (321; emphasis in original). Chun argues against Galloway’s assertion that the machinic performativity of code is empirically equal in high and low level languages, and I follow Chun in this. She argues that “to use higher-level alphanumeric languages is […] to anthropomorphise the machine, and to reduce all machinic actions to the commands that supposedly drive them” (309). Abstraction of code is the removal of action. As such, I believe that the term automagic is an oxymoron, based almost entirely on the automatic programmable abstraction of machinic processes and using the term magic to add mystique to this process. As stated by Mauss, “Magic is essentially the art of doing things, and magicians have always taken advantage of their know-how, their dexterity, their manual skill” (175). Without this human influence, automagic processes are magic in name only. In light of this assertion, I will now consider rhetorical “magic” functions in programming as compared to literal magical practices performed by users at interface level.

4.4 “You Didn’t Say The Magic Word”: MediaWiki and Death Note Online

Now that I have presented the problem with the term automagic, as it conflates magic with the abstraction of process when the efficacy of magic lies in the action of performing magic itself, I will move on to analyse two examples of magical writing: one rhetorical, and one literal, both requiring specific material conditions in which to perform their operation. Magic Words in MediaWiki software – on which ever popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia runs – are an interface level abstraction of more complex commands, that when written within the context of the software cause a prescribed result. Fan webpage Death Note Online was influenced by internationally successful anime and manga series Death Note (2006), which follows the megalomaniacal adventures of teenage genius Light Yagami, who discovers a notebook dropped down to earth by a God of Death or Shinigami that will kill anyone whose name is written within its pages. Having discovered this power, Light attempts to become an arbiter of peace and create a new world order, using the notebook to dispatch all known criminals. The series’ main focus is Light’s increasing megalomania, while he plots and uses the Death Note to kill innocent people who interfere with his ideological goal, and in his attempt to rid the world of criminals becomes the only criminal remaining. Death Note has transcended its fictional origins, with real life versions of the notebook being sold for the purposes of fancy dress or cosplay. These Death Notes – and the influence of the series overall – have been implicated in murder cases and incidents of violence in schools. Death Note Online allowed users to write the names of those they wanted dead in an online analogue of the fictional Death Note. These two examples are incredibly different: one an innocuous way to enable users to edit articles using MediaWiki software, the other an arguably misguided tribute to a series that has been accused of causing real life violence. Despite their differences, I will be

43 discussing these two in tandem to elaborate on the difference between rhetorical and literal magic, building on my declaration of the automagic as being unrepresentative of actual magical practice. In this section, I will highlight the unpredictability or unknowability of literal magical practices as spurred on by the conflation action and belief, as compared to rhetorical magical practices which, as placed in the rubric of computation, are concerned with a certainty that mediates their execution. For one wishing to make use of the Magic Word function on MediaWiki software, an abundance of information is available. MediaWiki provides a list of Magic Words, describing their use. I will not give a detailed list of these uses here, but suffice it to say they are words or phrases flanked with either two underscores on either side, like so: “__”; or two curved braces on either side, like so: “{{”. As with Mauss’ description of religion, the Magic Words are “predictable, prescribed, and official” (29): when using Magic Words, precision is required, and the use is performed within the “institution” of MediaWiki software. On the front page of Death Note Online, users were greeted by the rules of the Death Note as they initially appear in the anime (Figure 2). During the course of both the anime and the manga, these rules are supplemented with

44

Figure 2: The Rules of the Death Note additional information about the Death Note as Light uses it more. On the “back cover” of the site, the designer included the following disclaimer: “This public death note is made just for pure fun. Please do not be offended. All names of the person [sic] written here will not die instantly. Remember, this is only a joke. Try to have fun with it, please?” (“Death Note Online: Back Page”). The site’s designer also acknowledges on the back cover that Death Note Online was unauthorised by the creators of Death Note. What we are presented with by these two case studies, therefore, is MediaWiki as an institution presenting a series of programmed, abstracted functions as rhetorical magic, and an unofficial parody page built with “a guestbook script from flumpCakes” (“Death Note Online: Back Page”) that acknowledges that despite the rules it presents to users as they first enter the site, does not actually have any effect on the people whose names are written within it. Despite this acknowledgement, Death Note Online was nevertheless had an effect on a real community when the names of teenagers its teenagers began appearing en masse on the site. The ever unreliable and eternally offensive internet phenomena MediaWiki Encyclopaedia Dramatica includes an entry on Death Note Online. Despite being peppered with obscenity, this entry provides a crude description of events related to Death Note Online involving Kittatinny Regional High School in Newton, New Jersey, in late 2007. Encyclopaedia Dramatica describes the high frequency of names from the school as being “more accurate than the yearbook” (“Death Note Online”), and provides a selection of – now dead – links to entries that the curators of Encyclopaedia Dramatica found particularly amusing. Page 645 of the site, as scraped by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine on November 16 2007, has the following entry:

Megan Smith Murdered Three days from now Megan’s body will turn up floating in Swartswood Lake [a body of water found close to Kittatinny – RR]. Her neck will be rather alarmingly bruised, leading the police to suspect strangulation. Further investigation on their part will reveal that Megan was murdered by Jon Roymns, who claimed to be “over it”. He will be sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Megan Smith didn’t die, and neither did Jon Roymns kill her. Nevertheless, the placement of these names amongst others on the site allegedly – given my rather unreliable source – caused furore in the small community of Kittatinny. Despite the names written on Death Note Online not resulting in execution, pun intended, the material conditions of their placement nevertheless lent legitimacy to their statements. Death Note Online was designed to be as visually similar to its fictional analogue as possible, with lined “pages” and the image of a pen, poised and ready to be clicked to add a new entry. The skeuomorphism used on the site highlights the importance of material conditions required for the Death Note to perform its deadly magic. However, returning to Kittler’s assertion on mutating transformations from one medium to another: an online interpretation of a fictional deadly book does not a killer website make. The disclaimer is correct: no one will die as a direct result of having their name written on the website. In “Evil Must Be Punished: Apocalyptic Religion in the Television Series Death Note,” Dennis Owen Frohlich provides a list of events in schools in 45 which physical Death Notes were used by teens “for personal vendettas or revenge rather than judging heinous criminals” (151). Frohlich notes that in these cases, disciplinary action was taken against these adolescents “was more an overreaction to the idea of Death Notes rather than a reaction to actual violence” (151). What Frohlich dubs an “overreaction” I would conversely view as an awareness on the part of these schools of the magical perception of the Death Note as embodied in its materiality. We can see this materiality not only transferred over into digital space but moreover consolidated. For a teenager owning a Death Note and bringing it to school, questions regarding intentions and emotions can be dismantled by the claim that they are using it for fancy dress. However, this claim is not so easily made when the names of students from one particular high school appear on what is, for all intents and purposes, a kill list. Despite Death Note Online being a bizarre underground tribute to a popular yet still niche manga and anime series, it still held more real life influence than the Magic Words of MediaWiki. Magic Words have no such tales of slipping from their boundaries and infecting the real world, the power of their magic becoming uncontrollable when placed in the hands of malicious adolescents. For Magic Words, given their precise and controlled nature within the confines of their software, are not inclined to exit them. And while the description of software as magic in the past was able to control user perceptions of information technologies, users are now able to create their own concepts which surround computation. While the concept of the Death Note is borrowed from popular culture, the repurposing of it within the material context of the web gives it new life, shifting from fictional to real, albeit without the requisite deathly qualities. In which case, if magic does something, then how can we consider Death Note Online to be magic? Despite the website’s less than efficacy, the unrest that it induced lends the website a different kind of effect: the confirmation that in the minds of users, the written word as it is applied within the context of digital computation has an effect beyond the marks on the surface, that our machines are able to do things out of our control. Indeed, this quality is in some ways linked to the real efficacy of the Magic Words: what is confirmed in the executability of software shifts into user vernacular.

4.5 On “Saucery,” or Magic as Protection and Importance on Gmail and Tumblr

In the previous section, I argued that the unwieldy and malleable nature of literal written magic online distinguishes itself from rhetorical written magic online, which unlike literal magic is institutionalised and based on control. With Death Note Online, we saw that although the site didn't kill anyone, the process of writing down a name and method of death of an individual wields the power of its material placement. While Magic Words on MediaWiki are powerful in their own right, and perform the function allotted to them within the context of that software, their function does not transcend the boundaries of their placement, having its place in the institution and not beyond. In this section, I will be discussing two examples of magical writing as used for protection. Once again, I will be performing a comparison between literal and rhetorical magic. However, while in the last section I discussed the unconventional and relatively unknown Death Note Online in relation to the institutionalised MediaWiki, here I will be comparing magical writing practices that appear

46 on Gmail and Tumblr. Gmail, Google’s email service, from which I am taking my example of rhetorical magic, as of May 2015 has 900 million users (Gmail); Tumblr, a microblogging service owned by Yahoo! from which I am taking my literal magical writing practice, at time of writing has 242.4 million active blogs. As these figures make clear, this is no longer a question of Death Note Online as a quirky anomaly of users employing magic online. On the contrary, such practices are embedded within the mainstream web. On January 17th 2015, Tumblr user demonglitchwitch posted a series of magical sigils to protect users against chain posts (Figure 3). Each of these sigils has a specific purpose, protecting the user from chain posts threatening bad luck; attempting to guilt trip users; threatening family members; and the apparition of evil spirits. Demonglitchwitch notes alongside these sigils that “I’ve made some protective sigils against chain posts if anyone wants them. These have been created to negate the effects of these posts […] I noticed a surge of posts on Tumblr lately that have comments like ‘I’m not risking not reblogging’ because they say things threatening bad stuff if you don’t, as well as a lot of posts implying that you’re a bad person if you don’t reblog something […] If you [reblog the sigils], or you save the images, or save it to your drafts, or copy out the sigils into a notebook, then you are exempt from the negative things you see and you’re protected from all other curses that fall under these categories” (demonglitchwitch). Demonglitchwitch followed his original post on January 18th, with the addition of a sigil to protect against creepy posts, after a request by a follower. At time of writing, the original post has 57,790 notes17, and the second post has 40 notes.

Figure 3: My redrawing of demonglitchwitch’s original sigils. From left to right: bad luck, guilt trips, family threat, evil spirits, and creepy posts

On Gmail, there has been an algorithm developed that measures the importance of an email on a user by user basis. Gmail employs “a per-user statistical model of importance […] ranking mail by how likely the user is to act on that mail” (Aberdeen, Pacovsky and Slater 1), and labels importance by placing a yellow arrow next to each email that it has deemed to be important. Importance is based on various factors such as who is emailing you, which emails you reply to, what keywords are included, which kinds of emails you routinely delete, and so on (“Gmail Help: Importance ranking and markers”). These reasons for email importance are then included with an “important” email, and encapsulated in a phrase such as “important mainly because of your interaction with the messages in the conversation.” With this phrase, for example, we

17 On Tumblr, a note is either a reply to a post, a like, or a reblog 47 can assume that there are other aspects of the email that make it important aside from your interaction with the message, but that is the primary indicator. However, another importance indicator also occasionally appears that is decidedly less transparent than than the others, which mysteriously deems an email “important according to our magic sauce.” In my discussion of these two case studies I must firstly acknowledge why I am including these sigils in a discussion of magical writing practices, as at first glance they seem only to be symbols. This is perhaps best explained by calling upon Patrick Dunn, who previously helped with the discussion of curse tablets in chapter two: “a sigil is a monogram in which desire, spelled out in English, is made into a single symbol by combining letters” (9). He goes on to state that sigils are magically activated by “achieving gnosis, a state in which one’s conscious mind shuts down briefly […] after achieving gnosis while contemplating the sigil, the magician is supposed to forget the operation” (9)18. Dunn further notes that for a sigil to be successful it reformulates “desire into a symbol that does not recall the desire” (9), leaving the magician to contemplate the purpose of the sigil without actively engaging with the emotion that catalysed its creation. So we can see here, the process of making a sigil is intimately tied up in the reprocessing of the English language in such a way that it achieves meaningfulness by rejecting the meanings of the words that formed the spell to begin with. Sigils are, as such, an abstraction that is firmly based in human process. To create these sigils, demonglitchwitch must have activated them with the intention that they would be able to protect anyone who used them. For those who come across the sigils on Tumblr, there is no such process of production involved: they are directly told what each individual sigil intends to protect one against, and through this telling imbue the sigil with meaning independently of its original creation. As such, demonglitchwitch’s placement of sigils within this context seems as if it would compromise their power. Without personally performing the rituals of drawing the sigils themselves, how can users gain protection by them? While I question how the practice of sigil making has successfully transferred over into the digital realm, the number of notes that accompany demonglitchwitch’s offering to his community indicates that despite not performing the abstraction themselves, users have embraced this magical practice and have thus transformed its purpose to exist within the platform functionality of Tumblr. Similarly to the Tumblr protection sigils, and in concert with my other examples of rhetorical magic as stemming from my definition of automagic at the beginning of this chapter, the “magic sauce” importance indicator on Gmail is also an example of automatism based on abstraction. Unlike the MediaWiki Magic Words from the previous section, this magic sauce has less of a direct point. We have seen that the Gmail importance indicator is more than capable of providing reasons for why an email is important: this is its raison d’être. If all emails were marked as important because of the faintly icky notion of Gmail’s magic sauce, then the function would be useless, the rhetoric of magic meaningless. But if the algorithm is able to learn which emails users reply to, which they delete, which they are likely to be interested in based on keywords, then why is it necessary to deem an email important because of rhetorical magic sauce? While no

18 Gnosis is most commonly achieved through orgasm, but can also be reached through meditation, self-suffocation, or intense pain. 48 clue has been given by Google themselves as to why “magic sauce” is included in their importance line up, I propose that when an email has too many incorporating factors to decipher which one is the most, as it were, important. I posit therefore that by referring to this occurrence as magic acts as a means to conceal the process by which the algorithm learns how to denote mail as important for an individual. Alleged “email expert” Heinz Tschabitscher states, writing in 2011, that one may see older messages marked as “important according to our magic sauce,” indicating that those emails received at the early stages of learning what an individual user considers important are a mystery to the machine. While users on Tumblr wish to protect themselves from the unknowable power of these chain posts through an abstraction of human language, programmers at Google use the term magic as an abstraction in itself as a means of presenting the limits of their mail sorting algorithm, hiding the process in which the algorithm learns how to identify emails as important for a particular user. In the obfuscation of this process, however, Gmail creates not awe or reverence for the magic they can perform. Rather, users react with annoyance and confusion. For example, user mirrorrorrim complains on the Gmail Help forum that all of his emails have been labelled as important due to magic sauce, neither incredulous that Gmail is able to label all his mail as such nor curious as to what this magic entails. For our Tumblr sigils, on the other hand, their magic as a means of protection is greatly appreciated by users, who embrace it as a means to abate anxiety caused at the hands of the machine. We can see through this comparison that while there are still references to magic made by programmers, subtly continuing the use of magic as a rhetorical device to imply mystery and as a means of describing abstraction, users have come to repurpose magic for their own concerns, forming communities who express their belief in a practice through reblogging and favouriting mystical symbols that aim to protect users from the fear and uncertainty brought on by their devices. In this section I have discussed a rhetorical magical writing practice which is thoroughly embedded in the material functionality of a platform, and a literal magical writing practice that, while primarily concerned with the anxiety of users on a blogging platform, is decidedly separate from the functionality of the platform itself. In the final section of this chapter before concluding my thesis, I will discuss a literal magical writing practice that is thoroughly embedded in its platform. #safetykitty serves the same general purpose as the Tumblr protection sigils: protecting Instagram users from the threats made by scary chain images. As opposed to these sigils, however, #safetykitty functions as both a repellent and a call, with the very images she is meant to protect users against springing up on the hashtag’s index page.

49 4.6 #safetykitty: User Generated Deity

At time of writing19, photo sharing platform Instagram has more than 80,000 images indexed under the hashtag #safetykitty. A great many of these posts show one of two images (Figures 4 and 5), posted again and again by different users. Alongside either a stylised or more naturalistic image of a cat, these images both contain the same text, identifying Safety Kitty as protecting a user from “all chain mail and scary posts” if she is reposted. Figure 5, however, includes one additional piece of text above Safety Kitty herself, identifying #safetykitty as her associated hashtag. Amongst the myriad images of Safety Kitty found under the #safetykitty hashtag, Figure 4: Safety Kitty there are also many of those images that Safety Kitty promises to protect users against, as shown in Figure 6 and. This second type of image found under #safetykitty often threatens users with death, or having what is shown in the image become manifest in real life. As Instagram does not have an inbuilt repost function, these images are reposted either by using an external application, or through users taking a screenshot of the image and reposting it manually. This leads to both information found in the image being cut off, and degradation of the image itself through lossy compression. This lends these scary chain images a sense of creepy authenticity which is similarly enjoyed by found footage horror films. But if the image of Safety Kitty is used as a means of protecting users from the Figure 5: Safety Kitty with her hashtag threat of such images, then why do we find them indexed under #safetykitty? What has occurred here is a transfer of power from the image to the hashtag associated with the image. As this transfer occurs, it changes #safetykitty from being merely “a bookmark of content [and into] the symbol of a community” (Lei Yang et al. 261). But rather than only being a symbol of the protective powers of the image of Safety Kitty, #safetykitty becomes a means of protection in and of itself. This is most apparent in the use of the hashtag as a repetitive chant under an image. In Figure X, we see that user creepypasta.sally.williams has made a screenshot of a screenshot made by user thuqqinn_, who laments not having reposted a chain image warning her that spiders would manifest. As she reposts the image,

19 June 2015 50 creepypasta.sally.williams uses #safetykitty, despite it not being an image of Safety Kitty herself and thus presumably using it as a means of supplementing the protection offered through reposting the image. The users who comment under the image with #safetykitty do so without reposting the image itself, and thus actively change the way that #safetykitty is used. In its hashtag indexing function, Instagram only allows owners of images allocate which hashtags through which said image will be identified. For example, if one was to post a self portrait alongside the hashtag #selfie, it would be indexed under said hashtag. If another user was to comment Figure 6: Repost or Die underneath the image with #ugly, the image wouldn’t be indexed as such, because the first user hadn’t deemed their self portrait to be ugly. In the case of #safetykitty, therefore, users repeatedly commenting #safetykitty under images that are not their own has no purpose when we consider the hashtag only as an indexing function. Therefore, I posit that the repetitive chants of #safetykitty under an image denotes a shift in community practice, to accepting a hashtag as a fabricated representation of Safety Kitty as having the same level of power of her image, if you will, in talisman form. As an act of inscription, #safetykitty is transportable and repeatable in the way that an image of Safety Kitty is not. Indeed, the need for #safetykitty in addition to her image implies that the use of the image alone was ineffectual as posted on an individual’s personal page. Through this inscribed magical writing practice, a community of believers can more readily come together than through the individual posting an image of Safety Kitty. Indeed, as stated by Mauss: “Actions which are never repeated cannot be called magical. If the whole community does not believe in the efficacy of a group of actions, they cannot be called magical. The form of the ritual is eminently transmissible and this is sanctioned by public opinion” (23). Through their use of a metadata indexing function to practice magic, #safetykitty disciples have paved an easy road to the origins of their belief. Every photograph on Instagram tagged by its uploader with #safetykitty adds to a fountain of knowledge, and can gives clues on how #safetykitty developed into a community practice. We can, as such, understand that #safetykitty is a fabrication: a user generated deity on a manmade platform. If we go far back enough into #safetykitty’s index, we can find the first image that made use of the hashtag, showing from where the practice emerged. But what would we achieve by performing such as action? If we recall the argument made by Latour in On The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, the power of West African fetishes lie in their fabrication. He states that the fetish “modifies the very quality of human action and work […] by revealing that only human action gives voice and power to objects” (9). This same approach can be made to #safetykitty: while she is fabricated, and we can easily trace the origins of her fabrication, her power lies in the fact that she was fabricated in the first place. By creating Safety Kitty, her believers acknowledge that there are aspects to their digital interactions that they do not understand, but which they can fight against by using the interface level offerings of their devices. This user

51 Figure 7: Bed Bugs development of a thoroughly integrated magical writing practice indicates that users feel somewhat empowered by the way they can use their machines via the interface. Indeed, it is not surprising that Safety Kitty found her ultimate power in the form of a hashtag: from the Arab Spring onwards, the idea has been presented that user power can be embodied in the careful placement of relevant hashtags.

52 5 Conclusion: From Ancient Rome to Instagram; Fearful Magical Futures

The purpose of this research was to interrogate the placement of magical qualities onto writing practices in contemporary digital culture. In doing so, I have found that the association of inscription with the supernatural goes as far back as the foundations of Western culture, forming the base for Abrahamic religions. We have seen that writing was given magical qualities in ancient Greece and Rome, used as a way of mediating communications between mortals and the gods. The first book ever printed, the Gutenberg Bible, was originally associated with magic because of its means of production. In turn, the library as the home of books and knowledge was mystified by Borges, who imagined men driven to madness as they searched for the promise of magic amongst the noise. When discussing magical writing practices in contemporary digital culture, I revealed that I would be discussing two types of case studies in my exploration of magical writing in contemporary digital culture: rhetorical and literal. In this distinction lay two distinct groups: users, and programmers. Through my analysis of these two types of magic and these two types of practitioner, I can provide some conclusions about magical writing in contemporary digital culture. Digital culture post Web 2.0 is driven by user generated content, enabled through complex, interlinking platforms built by programmers. While computer users have the power to share content and connect with other users via these platforms, the functioning thereof is dependent on a programmed source code that is kept out of the hands of the consumer. While some platforms may allow access to their API for fellow programmers to create tie in applications, an average user is black boxed out of their machines. But as our machines become more complex, the interface level offerings seem to allow us to do more, empowering users, for example, through creations of hashtags such as #safetykitty. But I have really only scratched the surface of this study. What I have provided in this study is a rudimentary frame, through which in the future further and more detailed analyses of magical writing practices in contemporary digital culture can be analysed. In my analysis, we have seen that these community practices can be broadly separated by whether they engage with written magic on a literal or metaphorical level. Through this distinction, we can also see an apparent break between users and creators. While Google, for example, uses “magic sauce” as a metaphor for its secret mail sorting algorithm, users of #safetykitty take their magic literally. I would argue that for Google in particular the use of magic as a metaphor is done with an awareness of the history of programming, a nod to the priestly forefathers of the profession. For #safetykitty disciples, on the other hand, the hashtag is magical in part because of its functional status on Instagram as a platform, but also due to these mostly adolescent users projecting fear onto their devices. Despite these ‘digital natives’ allegedly having in depth knowledge of their devices and the digital landscape, a continued engagement with magical folklore practices such as #safetykitty indicates that even familiar information technologies remain uncanny and unknowable. The propensity to link information technologies with the supernatural is further encouraged by popular culture, with films such as teen horror Unfriended (2014) perpetuating the idea for teens especially

53 that their machines are not what they seem. Malinowski argued, for his primitive man, that “the function of magic is to ritualise man’s optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear” (70). For our users of written magic, I believe that their magic lies not in optimism but in uncertainty: an unease surrounds information technologies. In his afterword 2.0 to Techgnosis, Erik Davis states that “it is maybe in horror that we most clearly see the traces of technological enchantment today.” As we have seen with my examples of magical writing practices, we can see that a crucial element of literal magical writing practices performed by users online is as a means of alleviating fear. Extending Davis’ tentative gesture, I propose that enchanted horror is only at the beginning of its reign.

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