Stanislav Panin, 2024-06-23
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When one begins to navigate through cyberpunk and related genres, it immediately becomes obvious that a programmer or a hacker often appears there as a magician-like figure. The name of William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984), one of the foundational texts of cyberpunk, hints that hacking is akin to μαντεια, divination. The 1999 movie The Matrix, full of Gnostic references, tells a story about hackers who, through digging into the depths of the net, find out that our world is a lie, an illusion, a computer simulation, and hack their way to freedom. In the tabletop RPG The World of Darkness, one of the powerful magical groups operating in the setting is called the Virtual Adepts. To quote from The Unofficial White Wolf Wiki[i],
Central to their magic is the idea of Information as a metaphysical component of existence. There is Information describing all objects, people, places, and ideas; changing the Information changes reality. According to the VAs view of the universe, … [m]agic is then performed by lowering their consciousness into Virtual Space to perceive that Information, and then changing it through force of will… . Treating the universe like a computer provides a model with which most VAs are already familiar, and gives them some sense of how to go about “hacking it”…
This image of a hacker-magician is no coincidence. It is a result of important structural similarities and historic connections between magic and computer programming.
The Oxford Dictionary of Computer Science (7th ed., Oxford University Press, 2016) defines the original meaning of the word “hacker” as “a person who had an instinctive knowledge enabling him or her to develop software apparently by trial and error.” The New Hacker’s Dictionary[i] (ver. 4.2.2, 2000), gives a more elaborated definition:
1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. … 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
From the introduction to The New Hacker’s Dictionary, we also learn that hackers produce a distinctive type of culture, the “hacker culture,” –
a loosely networked collection of subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. Because hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves partly by rejection of `normal’ values and working habits, it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional culture less than 40 years old.
While most of the time people talk about hackers in the context of computers and programming, it is also common to use this word in a wider sense. There exists, for example, the word biohacking that refers to people trying to upgrade their own bodies through a variety of means, from nootropics to electronic implants. Richard M. Stallman, one of the key figures of the free software movement, defined[i] the hacker like this:
It means someone who enjoys playful cleverness, especially in programming but other media are also possible. In the 14th century, Guillaume de Machaut wrote a palindromic three-part musical composition. It sounded good, too—I think I played in it once, because I still remember one of the parts. I think that was a good hack. I heard somewhere that J. S. Bach did something similar.
Another example of analysis of hacking in a wider sense is McKenzie Wark’s book A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004) where she defines the hacker as a person navigating the realm of “the virtual” (which she understands as the world of possibilities) making possible (i.e., virtual) actual. This is not limited to virtual reality in computer sense and can be applied to many areas of life – art, creative writing, invention, and so on. Ultimately, as Wark explains in an interview[i], “anyone whose efforts produce intellectual property” is a hacker. As she further elaborates in the book (§074),
The virtual is the true domain of the hacker. It is from the virtual that the hacker produces ever-new expressions of the actual. To the hacker, what is represented as being real is always partial, limited, perhaps even false. To the hacker there is always a surplus of possibility expressed in what is actual, the surplus of the virtual. This is the inexhaustible domain of what is real but not actual, what is not but which may become.
Put differently, hackers, or tinkerers, perceive the actual world as limited and imperfect, perceive virtual world as real, and see their mission as actualizing the not-yet-existing possibilities of the virtual.
Magician, too, inhabits a virtual reality, the world of imagination, the astral plane, and so on. One could argue that modern magic is commonly understood by its practitioners as a way of manifesting one’s imagination into reality. However, the idea concerning the importance of imagination is by no means new in Western magical practice. Already in Corpus Hermeticum one finds the following analysis of imagination as a way of divinization (quoted in: M. van den Doel, Ficino and Fantasy, Brill, 2022, 58):
See what power you have, what quickness! If you can do these things, can god not do them? So you must think of god in this way, as having everything – the cosmos, himself, <the> universe – like thoughts within himself. Thus, unless you make yourself equal to god, you cannot understand god; like is understood by like. Make yourself grow to immeasurable immensity, outleap all body, outstrip all time, become eternity and you will understand god.
During the Middle Ages, Arab thinkers further elaborated the notion of imagination in its magical sense, while their European counterparts developed theories of imagination within the context of Christian mysticism and the theory of knowledge acquisition. From there, the doctrine of imagination came into European Renaissance sources and, eventually, made its way into modern Western esotericism.
The doctrine of imagination in Western esotericism has some clear parallels with the Wark’s notion of “the virtual”: both represent the realm of possibility that can be manifested into being, as well as the medium through which this manifestation becomes possible. In a very literal sense, journeys to the astral plan within Western esotericism can be seen as direct precursors to modern developments in virtual reality.
This parallel did not escape magic practitioners themselves either. Edain McCoy, in Astral Projection for Beginners (Llewellyn Publications, 2004), recommends a practice of creative imagination as a step towards astral projection. In this practice, an aspiring magician is instructed (17; emphasis mine):
Choose a scenario you find irresistible and let it unfold in front of your inner eyes as if it were being projected onto a 360-degree movie screen. This is your chance to enter the best kind of virtual reality there is – the chance to live out your greatest desire.
This, of course, is not the only possible parallel. Patrick Dunn, an English professor and a practicing magician, describes magical instruments as “macros” (in computing, groups of commands combined to automate common tasks) in his book Postmodern Magic: The Art of Magic in the Information Age (Llewellyn Publications, 2005, 55):
…a macro on a computer program can save you a lot of typing, so making a mental “macro” with, say, your athame, can save you plenty of ritual effort.
Importantly, the connection between programming (or hacking as its special case) and magic is not limited to metaphors. There are plenty of magicians who, just like the Virtual Adepts of The World of Darkness, seek to enact magic through technological means. I will not be able to focus on many such examples here, but I will briefly describe two of them.
Cy X[i] is an artist and writer self-described as “poetic technologist” and “cyber witch” based at Brooklyn, NY. In one of their texts, Cy X describes[ii] that they had engaged in practicing more traditional magic before they immersed into modern creative technologies, which led to a mixture of the two:
It felt just as magical as the spells I did with plants and other elementals, which produced profound effects. When I started implementing magic into my own cyber artforms … I was pleasantly surprised to find deep intention, focus, and energy work as I chose materials for portal devices, created sounds to guide me through ritual, and crafted code to create glitches… . Over the years, I have been deeply moved by the digital realm, finding my way toward other portals that shifted my understanding of how this world functioned, as new worlds opened and revealed themselves. The digital realm is a visceral and profound convergence of where the imagined (virtual) meets the material…
Note the explicit parallel between the magical world of imagination and the virtual in this passage. The art forms created by Cy X, often presented as “spells,” intentionally combine elements of magical practice with modern technologies to produce the desired effect on the audience.
Another interesting experiment in technomagic is the work of Joshua Madara, the author of ELDRITECH[i] and Technomancy 101[ii]. Whereas the first example was that of an artist using digital technologies and programming as instruments of artistic-magical work, the second example has to do with a more systematic utilization of programming as a magical instrument.
The beauty if Technomancy 101 is that it is as much of a magic manual as it is a programming manual that teaches a high-level programming language called Scratch, originally designed for teaching programming to children. The website guides an aspiring technomagician through a series of programming exercises in which the student will create meditation aids, divination tools, and even material magical instruments powered by microcontrollers like Arduino.
Unlike some other texts about technology and magic emphasizing virtual reality as non-physical, Technomancy 101 explicitly rejects this approach and, in contrast, prioritizes blurring of the borders between physical and non-physical empowered by computers:
Mixed-reality and blended spaces combine the virtual and physical, digital and material, in ways that involve more of our bodies in our interactions with computational media, taking advantage of our perceptual intelligence8 and sense of presence, and possibly enriching our interactions beyond “the poverty of our ocularcentric metaphysical tradition and its representationalist æsthetics.” It is a kind of magic to conjure the imaginal or conceptual into the perceptual—to reify it, make it real—but without falling into the trap of realism, of merely imitating what already exists when we might create something new. Although mixed reality takes advantage of the kinds of physical actions we are used to performing—pushing, pulling, lifting, grasping, pointing, &c.—the interactions we design need not merely represent things from the natural world, but may also represent unnatural, preternatural, or supernatural ontologies.
Hacking and magic intersect on multiple levels:
1. Structural similarity between the two enables programming to serve as a metaphor for magic, and vice versa – computer slang is full of word related to magic.
2. Computers and programming are directly used as magical instruments by those magicians who perceive programming as a way to perform magic.
3. Finally – the most important part – hackers and magicians share very similar ethics.
In one of the previous essays[i], I have argued that a Gnostic metaphor embedded into computers can manifest in two distinct forms. For regular users, a computer is a magical machine that enchants them and traps them into a virtual reality created by corporations, media, and governments. This, as I argued[ii] in a different place, can be understood – in esoteric terms – as a form of black magic, or “artificial mania,” to put in Éliphas Lévi’s terms.
For a “hacker,” or programmer, however, a computer becomes an instrument of escaping the world of illusion; the same thing that can be weaponized as an instrument of control can also serve as an instrument of personal liberation. Within the hacker’s ethics, this means transcending the limitations imposed by technology itself. For a magician, it means transcending the limits imposed by the everyday physical and social reality.
Poimandres, one of the most well-known texts of Corpus Hermeticum, notably describes this transcending as dematerialization (or virtualization) of a Hermeticist (B. P. Copenhaver, Hermetica, 6):
First, in releasing the material body you give the body itself over to alteration, and the form that you used to have vanishes… . Thence the human being rushes up through the cosmic framework, … [a]nd then, stripped of the effects of the cosmic framework, the human enters the region of the ogdoad; he has his own proper power, and along with the blessed he hymns the father… . They rise up to the father in order and surrender themselves to the powers, and, having become powers, they enter into god. This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god.
However, the ethos of magic is not purely the ethos of transcending material reality. As Dion Fortune notes concerning the practice of modern European occultism in The Mystical Quabbalah (Red Wheel/Weiser, 2000 (1935), 11),
[The Western occultist] does not try to escape from matter into spirit, leaving an unconquered country behind him to get on as best it may; he wants to bring the Godhead down into manhood and make Divine Law prevail even in the Kingdom of the Shadows.
Just like Wark’s hacker, who ventures into the virtual to manifest possible into actual existence, magicians of modern Western esotericism are people who ventures into the world of imagination seeking to materialize the imaginary through their magical tinkering. The difference between the two – when it exists – is that of metaphysics but it is, in practice, much thinner than what one could anticipate.