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