Published on reincantamento: https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-7-a-report-on-techgnostic-phenomena
Soon after entering the tech industry many years ago, I've been collecting notes, writings, quotes, bits and pieces of information about magic practices performed by the people who today create the digital technology we use. Mind, I'm no cultural anthropologist, let alone one specializing in magic. My background is technical and my work of documentation is being conducted without any ambition to be rigorous.
I've never given structure to these notes, and I'm not planning to do it here. Nonetheless, my friends at Reincantamento asked me to share some of this work and write a few paragraphs to publish some of the material sitting on my desk, in my bookshelves.
Focusing on low ritual magic is, I believe, the way to highlight the least known practices that are pervasive in the process of software development, the form of digital production I've witnessed the most due to my personal journey.
These practices are loosely grouped by association and purpose: a more rigorous work of categorization should be done by professionals. I simply document what I see around me.
I also decided to ignore the abundance of high magic that guides the actions of the digital aristocracy: techno-animists, AGI-believers, singularitarians, Mars-escapists, longtermists, and many other sects that attribute transcendental properties to modern software and that nowadays are fully involved in the public sphere. The work of other experts like Federico Campagna, Tommaso Guariento, Daniele Gambetta or Matteo Pasquinelli do a better job documenting them than I will ever be able to achieve. Reincantamento itself is a great source of insight on these topics.
Central to the ideology of software magic is the need to protect your artifacts from chaos. Chaos is presented in the form of bugs, unforeseen behaviors, and mismatches between the model we have of the world and the world as it presents itself to the software. The failure of software is everywhere. It is a daily occurrence, and therefore it seems natural to submit to higher forces to protect the software or the developer from this pervasive mist, endlessly undoing what the developer does.
The most common form of protective low magic is a ritual called zero-indexing. While it is considered normal to start counting material entities starting from 1, it is customary to start counting digital entities starting from 0. The first element of any series of values is the number 0, the second is the number 1, and so on. Any programmer will react very aggressively to any suggestion of indexing starting from 1. They will consider you completely insane if you suggest other options, such as -1 or 2. Programming languages that force you to start counting from 1, such as LUA, are considered inferior, impure, and prone to bugs, lacking the magic protection of the 0.
The role of this ritual is evident: counting from 0, a round shield of protection is necessary to distinguish the orderly digital entities from chaotic material entities. It's a way to reinforce the magic barrier that separates, in the practitioner’s mind, digital and analogic, abstract and material.
While zero-indexing seem to be firmly embedded and standardized across the whole tech world, other forms of protective magic seem to exhibit a higher variance from community to community, from region to region.
One such example is the inventory of shielding rituals required to protect oneself from Surveillance, a kind of pervasive eye observing users and developers alike, bringing bad luck. An eye reminiscent of the Bad Eye, a magical force present in the magic ideology of many Mediterranean cultures.
In the magic ideology of the tech sector, the world is represented as a simplified conflict between two opposing forces: Surveillance and Privacy. This conflict happens on a plane that is not physical, but physical consequences and physical protections might interact with the dynamics of the battle, deflecting the worst of it from the individual performing the ritual.
Let's start from something quite rare and flamboyant: some individuals, convinced of being observed by machines capable of recognizing their facial trait, paint their own faces with specific patterns of colors said to trick the machine into believing they are not human. Weirdly shaped jewelry, clothes with purposefully-designed colorful patterns and sometimes sunglasses and masks can function in the same way. The idea is that these solutions can deflect the "bad eye" of Surveillance and cloak the wearer to make them invisible.
The idea is not too dissimilar from how the "bad eye", usually driven by envy, is deflected in Mediterranean rituals: mirrors or stains are used to disguise the object desired by others. Additional solutions involve using grains of salt, brooms or other things the evil eye will be forced to count, eventually losing interest and chasing another target.
In the same vein, we can mention the practice of wrapping hardware devices such as smartphones in aluminum foil, to protect the device from the inquiring eye. Since it's very impractical, very few people perform this ritual.
A more common practice, performed by tech creators as well as tech users, is to repeat ritual formulas when sensitive information is being shared online, to invoke the forces of Privacy over the conversation. Here follow a few examples, drawn from a much broader pool collected between Berlin and Milan in the years between 2017 and 2023:
Person A: "Did you know that John has started putting LSD in random products at the supermarket?" Person B: "Good morning, officer. Do not worry, my friend is obviously joking."
Or also: