The world has never been disenchanted

Prediction, magic, and a new life for this newsletter

I contributed a short text to the new publication All Media is Training Data, accompanying Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s exhibition at Serpentine Galleries in London, UK. Thanks to everyone, especially the Arts Technologies team, for bringing it into the world.

The publication made me think about the mid-2010s when I first met some of the contributors. I’d recently moved to Berlin, and I attended every annual transmediale new media art conference.

Though likely an illusion, cultural production felt ahead of technology in some respects. Keller Easterling had the Ethereum launch video looping on slides. Several artists seemed to see in faint outlines on the horizon where its potential, chaotic paths would lead.

Among other markers like the Truth Terminal chatbot, seeing Holly and Mat’s exhibition signified a larger threshold moment for me: the potential paths of technology many friends made work about arrived. Art had been made about artificial intelligence agents, decentralized autonomous organizations, and the combination of the two. These supposedly passing trends seem like they’ve nestled permanently in a corner of the popular psyche. While their impacts are unevenly distributed so far, most people expected Lil Miquela to never post “on her own.”

This threshold moment also marks something jarring: the previously barely visible outlines on the horizon are beneath our feet in several domains. Though likely another illusion to be revised in the future, it feels like technology has begun to surpass cultural models of its impact.¹

In my contribution to the publication, titled “It is not solely what the system dreams but what it remembers,” I wrote about how we face the gradual untethering of our concept of memory from human senses. Between the multiple facing mirrors of artificial intelligence agents, few “pre-existing” concepts stand.

The impact of today’s technologies will not be explainable in pre-existing concepts. I wonder, though, are they ever? Is our understanding of technology one long process of describing horseless carriages, not quite ever having the right understanding at the right moment, anchored somewhere in the model of a world that passed decades ago without any funeral?²

Though I used to look in the direction of familiar cultural production for signposts in the dark, I now find myself reading papers by Michael Levin, Nikolay Kukushkin, and Sara Walker as more apt guides. Online posts, likes, and trailheads are harder to find, though still there. It might be more instructive to read The Cloud of Unknowing than any social media feed, because in a way, all bets are off.

This threshold moment marks an arrival, but it also questions the continued viability of predictive modes of cultural production, mine included. Given their deep prescience, artists operating in this way like the friends mentioned above already understand this coming change. This is, in part, what The Nemesis Guide to Being Early articulates well, writing, “As the cost of creating new things approaches zero, the mean value of new things does too.”

Jean-Pierre Luminet, “Image of a Spherical Black Hole with Thin Accretion Disk,” 1978, CC BY-SA 4.0: The first predictive image of a black hole produced by hand based on a computer simulation.

I think it’s also a greater irony, like some type of law: the more we build technologies with predictive models of the world, the less predictable the world becomes.

All technologies imply some predictive model of the world, whether they’re functional or dysfunctional, an internal combustion engine or an orgone accumulator. They harness supposedly existing forces toward expected outcomes. It becomes more complex when technologies create expected outcomes over time and through feedback loops, then act on the model of the world that they’ve created, as is the case now.

This isn’t the source of coming doom, however. After all, the accuracy of short-term weather predictions continues to increase. Instead, it’s a threshold moment that lies in this coming reversal within my familiar contexts: whereas culture predicted technology, increasingly technology predicts culture. The questions become less like, “What will technology do in the future?” and more like, “What does human sensing do now?”

Like two loving siblings caught in an eternal tug-of-war, technology and culture are not separable. Ultimately the perceived predominance of technology within a cultural niche is a temporary condition, one that has happened before and one that depends on where you’re standing. As a focal point, the predominance of technology can occur even within cultural niches against said technology. Some would attribute this to corporate capitalism, and others would attribute this to bureaucratic malaise. Some cultural niches remain less affected.

But if, from where you’re standing, bets are soon to be off, it’s important to recognize this fact.

The world has never been disenchanted

During times when bets are off, popular understanding has it that people turn to magic to navigate the world. You can see the word magic popping up again frequently.³

To many people, magic usually means superstition, illusion, and pattern matching, the original, albeit flawed predictive arts. Its invocation can also suggest the “reenchantment” of a world alienated by industry.

Magic is a word that feels familiar to me, though not really in the senses meant above. The world has never been disenchanted. If teaching grains of sand to think, as some describe modern computation, is less miraculous than a vision causing St. Bernadette to dig until a spring appeared in Lourdes, then perhaps the world would not seem enchanted under any circumstance.

Calls for “reenchantment” more often desire to grant permission to feel this enchantment, observing the deep surprise that life, mind, and matter exist at all, in whatever religious, spiritual, or materialist means may be available. In this sense, magic doesn’t operate as the borderland between the rational and the irrational, as it’s mostly understood. Magic isn’t always irrational; it seems that way because it has less certain epistemic allegiances. Instead, it operates through the endless, contested edges of permitted experience.

Magic metaphors applied to technology will continue until coherence improves, especially as familiar cultural production signposts begin to wane in meaning. For this reason, it might be as important that we explore what “magic” is as it is that we try to understand once more how technology operates.

A new life for this newsletter: magic, memory, and technology

So since bets are off at being early, especially on these topics, this year I’m considering writing about magic, memory, and technology through more frequent posts on this newsletter under a new name.

Taking the opportunity afforded by my move to the mountains to spend more time with my library, the result would be a syncretic mix of ideas. Posts would be on things like the historical concept of avatars in relation to agent-centric DAOs, prediction markets versus “prophetic culture,” what happens when digital computation entwines even more with landscapes, creatures, and objects, the role of transubstantiation in twentieth century media theory, a connection between Hellenic memory palaces, Theravada Mātikās, and so-called mindfulness technologies, and the importance of a particular, first millennium Greek sect’s temples for neural media.

I’d share realms I’ve dove deeply into at one point or other in my life, representing a process of synthesizing many years of private thought in public. Part of my motivation for this project comes from the fact that by default we consider technology, culture, and nature as separate entities instead of integrated. I don’t desire either to center or to banish emerging technologies, like most work does, but to weave them in with notions of experience, place, and predictive arts.

As we struggle to understand emerging technologies through the usual reactive labels, I’d like to see if I can help to place a few small lights on the darkened footpath toward uncertainty. In connecting historical research with emerging technologies, however, it’s not about restoring a simpler, more magical past, especially now that culturally modeling the future based on the past is likely harder than ever before. Instead, it’s about centering the opening into uncertainty that magic affords. This project should provide novel ways to think about building technology at an important moment for anyone working at these eclectic intersections.

This post is a vibe check for forging ahead. If you’d be interested in supporting this project, please pledge an amount above. The posts will be essays that, together, comprise a larger project, so it might be better to consider a pledge as an amount toward making this project happen, not a subscription fee for weekly insights. The posts will likely be published every three to six weeks. I’m hoping to receive enough contributions to justify committing to this as at least yearlong project.

1. By cultural models, self-consciously, I mean a narrow, institutionally adjacent set of ideas, conversations, and works related to art and technology that happened from 2010 to the present, in which of course, this newsletter can’t escape participating.

2. It could be related to the saying, shared by Soygal Rinpoche, “Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.”

3. For recent indicative examples, see Packy McCormick’s The Return of Magic and Venkatesh Rao’s As Above, So Garage.