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Celerity

(42,663 posts)
Sun Jul 18, 2021, 05:54 PM Jul 2021

Magic Itself Is No Magic Bullet: Technology and Social Conflict

Abstract

New technological tools “work like magic.” At the extreme, we apply the term “magic” to indicate minimal one-off effort and total permanent success: a magic bullet. But neither magic nor technology can solve social problems. In fantasy literature, magic can cause physical action at a distance, alter the chemical structure of substances, and at least temporarily control others’ behaviours. But magic cannot grant political authority of widely accepted legitimacy, nor can it solve social isolation and opprobrium. What if the profound thought experiments and social insights of our fantasy-fiction writers were taken as serious lessons for understanding the social role of technology in our world? The contributors to this Rethinking Marxism special issue, bringing the powerful and flexible tools of Marxist analysis to bear, write in the magic-suppressing language of technology while wisely asking the questions that storytellers ask about magic. Technologies, they show, do not and cannot obviate social conflicts.


https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08935696.2021.1893083?scroll=top&needAccess=true

Zoe Sherman

New technologies can feel magical. “Any sufficiently advanced technology,” Arthur C. Clarke said, “is indistinguishable from magic.” In response, Oscar Marín Miró (2018) playfully maps selected technologies from the industrial and information ages into magical categories: regression analysis appears as an instance of divination, video streaming as an instance of clairvoyance. When playing with a new technological tool, we exclaim, “It works like magic!” We mean that the mechanisms are at least a bit obscure to us (sometimes entirely obscure) and the effort is less than expected for the result achieved.1 Expectations, meanwhile, adjust with familiarity. Even though stories of magic often explain magic as rooted in ancient knowledge, real-world technologies retain their magical aura only as long as they feel new. Indeed, when technologies become familiar, we stop even thinking of them as technologies, let alone as magical; pencils and paper, gas stoves, and flush toilets are all technologies. For the world’s wealthier strata, experiences of sitting in an upholstered chair cruising horizontally at 500 miles per hour while suspended several vertical miles above the surface of the earth or of seeing a dozen different friends or collaborators spread across thousands of miles of real geography as moving images in a rectilinear array across an illuminated screen and hearing their voices reacting to one another with only brief time lags have come to seem unremarkable, even tiresome, not magical at all! By the time the fourth Harry Potter book was published in 2000, some of what seemed magical in the first three had become commonplace in the real world, and J. K. Rowling had to explain why, for example, witches and wizards were crouching in front of the fireplace and sticking their heads into the flame with a dash of floo powder to talk to someone far away rather than, you know, making use of a cell phone as most anyone else in Great Britain would have done (Rowling 2000, 548)2

At the extreme, we apply the term “magic” to indicate minimal one-off effort and total permanent success: a magic bullet. Admittedly, magic bullets are more often remarked on in their absence than their presence. “Magical thinking” is often used as a pejorative term for delusional optimism. But magic is, after all, seductive. Magical thinking attracts. We wish—What do fairies and imps and genies do with their magic powers in our tales? Grant wishes!—for our problems to be magically solved. Techno-optimists and -enthusiasts and -opportunists and -swindlers promise to do just that. Some of us succumb to the temptation to leave it to technological miracles to save us from danger. Some as-yet-unimagined technological solution will arrive in time to save us from the hard, incremental work of reducing carbon emissions, allowing us to keep our daily habits and our climate both simultaneously unchanged. Medical breakthroughs will continue to defeat or at least delay more and more causes of death and spare us the disappointment of departing too soon and maybe eventually from the necessity of dying at all. A dominant narrative of Western science is of advancing knowledge and, with it, of increasing power to bend the environment and the unruly elements of ourselves to suit our consciously articulated goals. This confidence is absorbed into economics with a narrative of advancing knowledge and increasing power generating economic prosperity (for two examples of many, see Stiglitz 2019; Romer 2006).

Even a cursory reading of the literature of magic provides us with counternarratives of doubt, however. The ensemble in Into the Woods sings, “Wishes come true, not free” (Sondheim and Lapine [1986] 2020). The Blue Fairy can do a lot for Geppetto the puppet maker and Pinocchio the puppet, but—as retold in the movie Geppetto—she moderates unreasonable expectations with the warning, “Just because it’s magic doesn’t mean it’s easy” (Walt Disney Studios [2000] 2009). In the oral, literary, theatre, and film traditions that live most intimately with magic, magic itself is no magic bullet. One sort of problem arises when magic is not available to all through equal and open access. “In muggle3 fairy tales,” J. K. Rowling (2008, vii–viii) explains in the introduction to The Tales of Beedle the Bard, “magic tends to lie at the root of the hero’s or heroine’s troubles—the wicked witch has poisoned the apple, or put the princess into a hundred-year’s sleep, or turned the prince into a hideous beast.” Not having magic when others do is clearly a severe disadvantage. Those who have magic are liable to press their advantage. Magic wielders can be of a nitpicky, legalistic bent, as when the imp takes the woodcutter’s idiomatic use of the phrase “I wish” as a formal request and uses up what could be a powerful deployment of magic on the rather mundane matter of serving sausages for supper (Zemach 1986). Those with magic must be treated with caution lest they take offense and use it against you. Exchanges with those who control magic are rarely equal exchanges; with their monopoly, they can charge a very high price for their services. The Little Mermaid learned this painfully.4 Even the magic that appears at first to be bestowed as a gift may in fact entrap the recipient in tangled obligations. Magic stolen by a subordinate rather than bestowed escapes the control of the misappropriator and becomes a punishment, as in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,”5 or in Anthony’s misadventure with Strega Nona’s magic pot (dePaola [1975] 2015).

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