[An earlier version of this post was published in UofWinds 422]
If one examines a magical formula, it is often seen that a spell or a prayer does little more than identify the activity which is being engaged in and defines a criterion for “success’ in it. ‘Now I am planting this garden. Let it be so productive that I will not be able to harvest all of it. Amen’. Such a spell is meaningless by itself, and it only fulfils its technical role in the context of a magical system in which each and every gardening procedure is accompanied by a similar spell, so that the whole sequence of spells constitutes a complete cognitive plan of ‘gardening’.
Magic consists of a symbolic ‘commentary’ on technical strategies in production, reproduction, and psychological manipulation. I suggest that magic derives from play. When children play, they provide a continuous stream of commentary on their own behaviour.
Gell, Alfred. “Technology and Magic.” Anthropology Today, vol. 4, no. 2, 1988, pp. 6–9. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3033230.
Last month, I was lucky enough to hear Alec Karakatsanis speak on a panel in which he shared some insights from his recent book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. In his comments, Alec’s gently admonished his university-educated audience and let us know that he knew that we held our own false beliefs about crime, police, and safety, even through we (likely) eschewed Fox News and the like. It was essential for us to understand that our position on the political spectrum did not make us immune to the power of influence.
This reminds of a blog post I recently read.
One of the major turning points in my life was reading my dad’s copy of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as a teenager.
Other highlights of my dad’s library – he was a organisational psychologist before he retired – included books by Fanon, Illich, and Goffman and a bunch on systems thinking and systems theory so, in hindsight, I was probably never not going to be idiosyncratic.
But Cialdini’s book was a turning point because it highlighted the very real limitations to human reasoning. No matter how smart you were, the mechanisms of your thinkings could easily be tricked in ways that completely bypassed your logical thinking and could insert ideas and trigger decisions that were not in your best interest. He documented tactics and processes used by salespeople, thieves, and con artists and showed how they could manipulate and trick even smart people.
Worse yet, reading through another set of books in my dad’s library – those written by Oliver Sacks – indicated that the complex systems of the brain, the ones that lend themselves to manipulation and disorder, are a big part of what makes us human.
These are the opening paragraphs of a post called, Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk. It’s a long post and so you might not get to Bjarnason’s key recommendation, so I will share it here: “The only sensible action to take – which was also one of the core recommendations I made in my book The Intelligence Illusion – is to hold off.”
To me, this recommendation rhymes with the sound parental advice to children to avoid older people who want to talk to you about religion [YouTube short]. It is essential to know that there are traps being laid for you in this world and to learn their tell-tale signs in order to avoid them.
While we cannot assume that we are immune to falling into Technologies of Enchantment, we can still can learn from anthropologist Nick Seever’s Trap Theory to try to avoid them the best we can, by learning how they work.
What has happened to magic? It has not disappeared, but has become more diverse and difficult to identify. One form it takes, as Malinowski himself suggested, is advertising. The flattering images of commodities purveyed in advertising coincide exactly with the equally flattering images with which magic invests its objects. But just as magical thinking provides the spur to technological development, so also advertising, by inserting commodities in a mythologized universe, in which all kinds of possibilities are open, provides the inspiration for the invention of new consumer items. Advertising does not only serve to entice consumers to buy particular items; in effect, it guides the whole process of design and manufacture from start to finish, since it provides the idealized image to which the finished product must conform.
Gell, Alfred. “Technology and Magic.” Anthropology Today, vol. 4, no. 2, 1988, pp. 6–9. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3033230.
