Arthur C. Clarke told us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Head back to the 1800s with a Taser or a Prius or an iPad and the townsfolk will no doubt either burn you at the stake or worship you.
So many doors have been opened by technology in the last twenty years that the word “sufficiently” is being stretched. If it happens on a screen (Google automatically guessing what I want next, a social network knowing who my friends are before I tell them) we just assume it’s technology at work. Hard to even imagine magic here.
I remember eagerly opening my copy of Wired every month (fifteen years ago). On every page there was something new and sparkly and yes, magical.
No doubt that there will be magic again one day... magic of biotech, say, or quantum string theory, whatever that is. But one reason for our ennui as technology hounds is that we’re missing the feeling that was delivered to us daily for a decade or more. It’s not that there’s no new technology to come (there is, certainly). It’s that many of us can already imagine it.
I like to talk a lot about how culture is reactive, meaning something to the effect of "art exists in the voids left in the wake of change." That is to say, we're fond of worrying that some new change or new technology will obliterate the essence of meaning from the artist or the parent or any such thing. Or in the above case, the worry that technology is obliterating the essence of magic.
And of course technology does obliterate these things, but of course some new, equally meaningful perspective enters the scene, precisely because the old one was transformed. I sometimes draw this as the below (referencing a sociocultural flavor of the Adjacent Possible popularized by Steven Johnson, as a way to illustrate the notion that art exists on the cultural periphery):
The idea is that what's on the center today will be on the periphery tomorrow, and the nature of what's on the periphery today will find itself in the cultural center in some distant (or not-too-distant) tomorrow as well.
Or, in other words: there will always be something for culture to react to; as long as culture continues to change, there will forever be art and magical, wonderful things.
With that said, it's strange that I actually do relate to Seth's notion above. It's a curious thought that's come to me as I started thinking on how to make magic explicity from technology. My first approach came to me when realizing that the Android task automation app Tasker could potentially conjure all sorts of magic-seeming illusions, since this incredibly robust app allows you to command any kind of action that your phone can produce from any trigger that your phone can sense.
So I crafted a variant of the standard "I know what card you picked without you showing it to me" slight. Instead of just revealing the card to the participant, I'd subtly place it on my phone, which through the proximity sensor (the one that normally detects when your face is pressed against it) would then trigger a pre-loaded text message to the participant (with their card in the message).
It was interesting to see that time and time again this actually garnered far less wonder than if I had just physically pulled the card out of the deck to reveal their card - even if it was in no way apparent that the card touching the phone was the trigger of the text (I could just as easily achieve trigger the text by the motion of turning in a certain direction with the phone in my pocket).
...It's an old adage among magicians to leave no explanation for the audience to come to other than magic. In both cases it can be somewhat understood that I knew the card beforehand, but that fact is far more explicit when delivered by text. Physically producing the card leaves a lot of room for magical explanation - was it intensly acute slight of hand? Was it produced when I wasn't looking?
The text message on the other hand says very clearly: "Kyle knew this card beforehand, and was able to text it to you." The explanation instantly becomes less about how I was able to produce the card, and much more about figuring out how my phone was able to able to send the text.
I often say that at it's core there's nothing particularly special about magic - we may not realize it, but what we're rewarding when we applaud magicians is not the fact that they hold some secret that we don't, it's the fact that they've put the thousands of hours of work into making 15 seconds of slight flawlessly spectacular.
I actually often point to an earlier Seth post to illustrate this point, in which he points to the difference between knowing how to do something and doing it: "It's like the annoying kid at the magic show shouting, 'I know how you did that trick!' Of course you do." (I illustrate this with a very simple slight in which one card in hand is instantly changed to another, at the snap of the fingers. The trick is easy to understand - there are just two cards between my fingers. But just because someone knows that, doesn't mean they can replicate the illusion when I had the two cards over to them. It's far more a spectacle of fast-action muscle memory than it is knowing anything about 'magic.')
All of this has got me thinking that there is in fact a difference between magic and technology: we've come to understand that we can figure technology out - so the difference might be that we're aware that the work driving the illusion is all automated.
