Why Magic Stinks
Bruce Sterling's keynote at Ubicom last month questioned the proclivity of some thinkers to turn to magic to help understand what "things" might be like when they're all networked and tagged. The presentation triggered a great discussion on the Institute for Distributed Creativity listserv, to which he has just rebutted, raising the stakes by drawing parallels between magical obscurantist thinking, Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bio-ethics, and the a Russian biologist Trofim Lysenko who's quack theories led to the demise of genetics and the death of hundreds of scientists in the Soviet Union. I appreciated the the image so much I made a mock-up in Photoshop.
"We're not seeing any hot Two Cultures combat between stoic masculinist engineering types and tender soulful magic poets. That's just not in the cards right now, not what's going down at this era in time. Instead, we're seeing massive, global culture war launched against every form of enlightened behavior by heavily armed, fanatical fundamentalists. These are guys who read one book, one sacred book alone, swallow every contradictory screed in it, and then launch imperial wars and blow themselves to shreds right in the shopping malls.
If you're really upset about ontological imperialism from the arrogant scientific set, then you've got a major ally: Leon Kass, the architect of stem cell policy and the head of the President's Council on Bio-ethics. While civilized ontological feminists are sipping tea and logic-chopping, this guy's actually cutting the science budgets. That's serious. Meanwhile, in the basement next door, Exxon-Mobil is spewing carbon monoxide fumes all over the climate-science findings. That's serious, too -- very serious. Compared to these massive predators, Aleister Crowley the Great Beast is like some kind of lab-hamster.
So, I think there's a moral issue here. If you're a pop musician or an actress, it's kind of cute to declare that you really, really believe in real magic. It's got a nice period Woodstocky feel. But it is corny, and, as a method of describing emergent technologies, "magic" is just way too easy -- it's fatuous, like telling a little
kid that Santa Claus brought her the presents.
Worse yet, if you're techno-intelligentsia in a time of violent Lysenkoism and you are promulgating magic, you're in complicity with the dark side of the force. Because you're a minor obscurantist in an era of major ones.
And yeah, that kinda stinks."