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’ behaviors. 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.

Key Words:

• Class
• Commodity Fetishism
• Intellectual Property
• Magic
• Technological Change

Notes

1 The technology-magic analogy is only one possible analogy, and seems to be a distinctively Western invocation. David Graeber (2001) differentiates magic from religion by categorizing as magic effects that we recognize as the work of other people, not of God or the gods, without quite knowing how they did it: that is, we are sure that there were no divine interventions, and we are sure that the magician did not really saw the assistant in half, but we’re not necessarily sure how the magician tricked our eyes into thinking that’s what we saw. David Abram (1997, 13–15) is an experienced sleight-of-hand magician whose performances in his native country of the United States fits the Graeber definition. But when he took his skills to Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia for a cross-cultural magician-to-magician exchange, he found that the magicians he met in his travels did not think of what they did as performance art meant to deceive the audience. Instead, magicians were those with highly developed skills of shifting their own perceptions to better understand the ecological relationships between the human community and the rest of nature. They were recognized as healers within the human community. Although their healing rituals often used the techniques of perceptual (mis)direction that Western magicians like Abram use in their performances, their ability to heal illness within the human community was an outgrowth of their primary responsibility for overseeing the healthful embedding of the human community in ecological relationships with other species. The perceptual shifts that they directed others through were shifts they had cultivated in themselves, not tricks they wanted others to half believe in while they themselves did not believe at all. For purposes of this essay, I will mostly stick with the technology-magic analogy but do wish to acknowledge some of what I have excluded.

2 As usual, Hermione explains: “All those substitutes for magic Muggles use—electricity, computers, and radar, and all those things—they all go haywire around Hogwarts, there’s too much magic in the air.”

3 For those who have not visited the Harry Potter world and learned the lingo: “Muggle” is an adjective used to describe a nonmagical person and the artifacts and culture pertaining to them. “Muggle” can also be used as a noun to refer to a nonmagical person.

4 Consult the Hans Christian Andersen ([1837] 2004) tale rather than the Disney animated film adaptation (Walt Disney Studios [1989] 2013).

5 See any telling of the legend, such as Goethe’s 1797 poem, Cooke’s (1947) adaptation based on Paul Dukas’s musical fantasy, or the segment in Disney’s movie Fantasia (Walt Disney Studios [1940] 2000).

6 This mystification developed with changes to the scale and organization of capitalist firms. Adam Smith ([1776] 2013), however, did not fall for it. His argument for the benefits of the division of labor includes the supposition that, by specializing, workers will develop specialized knowledge that will enable them to devise and share better ways of accomplishing their tasks. For Smith, labor, not capital, was the source of technological innovation.

7 It was one of the last large, live events before the pandemic shutdowns. The event took place in the same city—Boston, Massachusetts—and on the same end-of-February weekend as a notorious COVID-19 superspreader event, a Biogen conference.

8 The business model of the social-media platform is to spellbind us, to capture our attention for resale.