UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Modern Magics: Examining Occult Infrastructure Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/31j8t05n Author Slaughter, Richard Aubrey Publication Date 2020 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Modern Magics: Examining Occult Infrastructure DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Informatics by Richard Aubrey Slaughter, IV Dissertation Committee: Professor Geoffrey Bowker Chair Professor Matthew Bietz Professor Theresa Tanenbaum Professor Aaron Trammell 2020 © 2020 Richard Aubrey Slaughter, IV DEDICATION To my interviewees and interlocutors Family and friends My deepest gratitude ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii VITA viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ix INTRODUCTION 1 Examining Infrastructure 3 Studying Magic 7 The Occult 9 Human Relations to the Occult 16 METHODS 19 Corpora Content and Data Collection 19 Student Answers Corpus 19 Magical Practitioner Interviews Corpus 22 Informatics Corpus 25 Control Corpus 26 Limitations in Corpora and Data Collection 26 Automated Qualitative Processing and Distant Reading Methods 30 Manual Qualitative Processing and Close Reading Methods 31 Limitations to Qualitative Processing and Analysis 32 CHAPTER 1: STUDENT DATA 33 iii What is a Relationship With Infrastructure Like? Touching the Elephant 40 Legs Like a Tree: Natural Metaphors in Human/Infrastructural Relations 41 Trunk like a Snake: Anthropomorphic Metaphors in Human/Infrastructural Relations 43 Side Like a Wall: Architectural Metaphors in Human/Infrastructural Relations 48 The Elephant in The Room: Metaphors in Human/Infrastructural Relations 50 Infrastructural Fantasies: Imaginative Conceptions of Systemic Mysteries 51 "How is this even possible?" Surprise and the Infrastructural Unknown 59 Ability and Inexplicability 61 Hoi Polloi 62 Time is Relative 63 Magic and Legerdemain 65 Chapter Conclusion 68 CHAPTER 2: HERMES, NEWTON, AND WEINER 70 Hermes 74 As Aircraft Above, So Anti-Aircraft Below 77 CHAPTER 3: Magic Data 82 Making Yourself Aware of the Pipes 86 As Above, So Below: Analogizing the Occult 94 Casting Circle or Weaving Webs: Interpolating Structure in Magical Practice 101 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Prediction, Failure, and the Perils of Hyperfunction 106 Cautionary Tales 110 As Above… 117 CHAPTER 4: AUTOMATED QUALTIATIVE DATA 119 iv CHAPTER 5: Discussion 126 CHAPTER 6: Conclusions 136 BIBLIOGRAPHY 149 APPENDIX A: Informatics 3: Internet, Technology, and Society 168 APPENDIX B: Programmatic Occult Interview Protocol Draft 177 APPENDIX C: EmPath Categories 180 APPENDIX D: Adjusted EmPath Term Frequencies 252 v LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1 Occult Cycle 134 Figure 2 VAE Numerals (Doersch, 2016) 147 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It has been a delight to work with Professor Geoffrey C. Bowker. I would be hard-pressed to find an advisor or committee chair more suited to my interests, and he continues to be an invaluable source of wisdom and joy. This dissertation would have been unthinkable without Geof. I would also like to thank Professor John Seberger for his help and feedback throughout the doctoral program. John is a scholar with a keen and critical eye, made truly formidable by his depth of knowledge. I am particularly beholden to him for his insights on phenomenology. I also owe Ted Grover my thanks for suggesting the use of EmPath, without which my analysis would have been frankly infeasible. The care and attention with which he instructed me on the implementation and use of qualitative analysis tools made him an ideal colleague, and I sincerely appreciate his assistance. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my partner Jina Hong, who has handled my increasingly erratic behavior over the course of the writing process with verve and aplomb. As a fellow researcher in the field, Jina’s insights and perspectives inform the very core of my work. vii VITA Richard Aubrey Slaughter, IV 2010 B.A. in Anthropology and Plan II Honors, University of Texas, Austin 2011 M.A. in Social Science, University of Chicago 2011-12 Healthcare Informatics Consultant, Epic Systems, Ltd 2012-18 Teaching Assistant, in Informatics, University of California, Irvine 2018 Instructor of Record in Informatics, University of California, Irvine 2020 Ph.D. in Informatics, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Human Relations to Infrastructural Systems PUBLICATIONS The Hearth of Darkness: Living within Occult Infrastructures Co-Author | Dr. Geof Bowker, Dr. Steve Slota |Chapter in Handbook of Digital Media and Communication Forthcoming The Mystics and Magic of Latent Space: Seeing the Unseen Co-Author | Dr. John Seberger | Article in Membrana Journal Forthcoming viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Modern Magics: Examining Occult Infrastructure by Richard Aubrey Slaughter, IV Doctor of Philosophy in Informatics University of California, Irvine, 2020 Professor Geoffrey Bowker, Chair Infrastructures are vast, relatively obscure systems that subtend our everyday. Infrastructures are often built to be hidden from view, or become relatively invisible through familiarity. Users of infrastructural systems are unable to directly examine infrastructures and their relations to the human. As a result, adaptive and creative infrastructural imaginaries are deployed in order to render otherwise occult infrastructures relatively relatable to the anthropic. While this is an ongoing concern for users of technical infrastructures, magical practitioners of various traditions have historically dealt with occult infrastructures and their imaginaries. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how these practices aid users in effectively relating to infrastructural systems. This project examines conceptions of infrastructure in both technical and magical contexts through the use of manual and automated qualitative methods. Using EmPath, a neural network designed for the qualitative assessment of texts, I analyzed data from university students and magical practitioners pertinent to their relations towards infrastructural systems. I theorize that human relations towards occult infrastructures can be understood through an extension of Daniel Dennett’s typology of the ix perceived intentionality in relatively agential systems, and argue that magical practices aid in the this process of rendering occult infrastructures relatable to the anthropic. x Introduction Let us consider cows: they are a good subject for analysis; humans have learned a good deal about them over the period of their becoming one of our companion species (Haraway, 2003). One of the interesting things we’ve learned about cows over the years is that, given their druthers, cows will tend to orient themselves along a North/South axis (Begall et al., 2008). How and why this happens is still a matter of scholarly debate, and recent research disputes the methodology used in these studies. (Weijers et al., 2018) That said, there is substantial support for claiming that cows do indeed orient themselves along the N/S axis. That is, unless the herd is grazing underneath a high-voltage powerline. Generally speaking, there is not much in the way of a relationship between cows and high-voltage powerlines. Cows are not particularly relevant to electrical infrastructures; they neither buy nor sell electricity, and are only tangentially energy producers in the sense that their manure produces methane. Likewise, electrical infrastructures are not a pressing concern for cattle; power pylons make poor fodder and worse mates. Yet despite this seeming lack of a connection, our electrical infrastructure incidentally impacts the arrangement of nearby cows, leading them to align with the magnetic field given off by the power lines, rather than the N/S geomagnetic field of the Earth (Burda et al., 2009). If, for example, the cattle in question are resting under a powerline producing an E/W magnetic field, the herd would orient itself along the E/W axis rather than the N/S axis. This constitutes a case of incidental infrastructural impact, in which an actor is not in a direct relation to a given infrastructure their actions are still impacted by its presence. Outside of an abattoir, it may seem irrelevant how cow’s need orienting, and inside an abattoir there is little need to orient cattle gently (Grandin, 2007). That cows are affected by magnetic fields is trivial; how cows are affected, and the mechanisms through which this effect occurs, are of vital interest. The case of the compass cows is fairly cut and dry: high-voltage powerlines produce magnetic fields, and cows somehow sense these and use them as orientation. One of the reasons that the cow case is simple to parse is because we can see that the cows’ orientation are impacted, and we can measure the electromagnetic force producing said impact. What we do not know, and what biologists are still struggling to ascertain, is the mechanism through which cows receive and process this data. Similarly, infrastructural studies has many times demonstrated the effects of infrastructure upon humans (Anand, 2017), and produced metrics to explain these effects (Ottinger, 2010), but the mechanisms through which infrastructural imaginaries are produced, made mobile, and implemented is an understudied area. That infrastructures, and other infrastructurally