The rhetoric and terminology of modern technology and online culture is full of references to magic and the occult--wizards walk us through software installation, daemons perform background tasks, and we navigate a web full of trolls, talking cats, and unicorns. This language has been part of tech and the network for a long time, but the way networked tech is a part of our lives is changing, rapidly. With these changes our fantastical vocabulary becomes increasingly noticeable and, at times, troubling. Is magic merely an instrument of obfuscation, masking technical complexity and with it, ethics and accountability? Can magic serve useful ends to challenging current paradigms in tech? (More to the point: can magic keep the internet weird?) Magick Codes is an attempt to convene people from technical, theoretical, and magical backgrounds to explore how we live with magic, how we live with machines, and what it means to live with both.
Secret histories, futures and futurisms, predictive analytics, loops, ghosts in the machines, sigils, runes, totems, scrying, divination, the social graph, fanfiction, seapunk
Power and control, witchcraft & gender hysteria, shamanism, apprenticeship, spy vs. spy culture, sleight of hand, privilege, othering, muggles, spells, subtweets
Mechanical Turks, #brands, disappearing acts, making something out of thin air
Twitterbots, meme creatures, daemons and demons, AI/Machine learning, pervasive surveillance, drones
Tech campuses, pilgrims, 'the cloud', conferences/product demos, vagabonds, nomads, virtual reality, infrastructure