The Best Advice I Can Give You

…is design for action. There is surely a place for speculation in the occult, but so much of what has been written about magic and technology together suffers from too much hyperbole, abstraction, or generalization. Here is one example:

High technology and high magic are the same thing. They both use tools from inner resources and outer resources. Magic from the ancient past and technology from the future are really both one. That is how we are creating the present; we're speeding up things, we are quickening our energies; time and space are not as rigid as they used to be; the belief system isn't there. Those who did control it have left the plane; they have been forced out because it no longer is their time. Those of us who know how to work through time and space are using our abilities to bend time and space into a reality that will benefit people the most.1

Sounds pretty cool, right? But what does it really say? Certainly not much about how to do technomancy. Remember this from the first lesson: the computer is a medium, and what most differentiates it from other media is interactivity. Designing for doing, for action, will “quicken your energy” as a technomancer much more than conflating magic and technology in a merely speculative or figurative way. Magicians tend to be pretty good at making connections between things, so think about connecting the magical with the computational physically, somatically, ritually; not just conceptually or poetically.

The second best advice I can give you is this:

When in doubt, make it weird.


  1. Douglas Rushkoff (quoting Green Fire), Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (HarperCollins, 1994).