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

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, theater, 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).

If magic is dangerous to the nonmagical, the powers it gives to the magical are more limited than those who are nonmagical might realize while being envious. The genie could do many things, but he could not free himself from the enslavement forcing him to use his powers as commanded by his master; his manumission depended on Aladdin’s whim. Likewise, it is a rare tale in which the most powerful male magician is also the king. In The Tempest, Shakespeare places magical power and political power in opposition to one another. Sylvia Federici (2004, 8n1) writes, “Didactically, [Prospero’s] misfortunes are attributed by Shakespeare to his excessive interest in magic books, which in the end he renounces for a more active life in his native kingdom, where he will draw his power not from magic, but from the government of his subjects. But already in the island of his exile, his activities prefigure a new world order, where power is not gained through a magic wand but through the enslavement of many Calibans in far distant colonies.” In Susannah Clarke’s (2004) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and in Zen Cho’s (2015) Sorcerer to the Crown, magicians are useful servants to the crown, magically augmenting England’s military capacities in the Napoleonic wars, but they do not themselves wear the crown. Both Clarke and Cho even imagine some magicians whose magic is illusory. Clarke’s tale begins with the members of the magical society stunned by Mr. Norrell’s demonstration of actual magic. Cho’s politically powerful society of wizards is full of men bluffing to cover the weakness of their magic and resenting and undermining the head of their organization, because of his enslaved Afro-Caribbean origins, while being heedless of the consequences of their imperialist interventions around the world.

And when women have magic? Well, “witch” is not a term of admiration and does not indicate a person with social esteem. In fantasy literature, magic appears variously and multifariously as a body of knowledge, a skill requiring practice, an innate ability that some humans have and others don’t, something for which humans are dependent on other-than-humans, a (super)natural resource that can be depleted, degraded, or hoarded. Magic can cause physical action at a distance, alter the chemical structure of substances, and at least temporarily control others’ behavior to an extent beyond what can be done with nonmagical efforts of persuasion. But magic cannot grant political authority of widely accepted legitimacy, nor can it solve social isolation and opprobrium. Misogyny is more durable than magic.

What if we all have magic? The Tales of Beedle the Bard introduces us to “heroes and heroines who can perform magic themselves, and yet find it just as hard to solve their problems as we do. Beedle’s stories have helped generations of Wizarding parents to explain this painful fact of life to their young children: that magic causes as much trouble as it cures” (Rowling 2008, viii). In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, when the minister of magic warns the muggle prime minister that a struggle within the wizarding world is likely to spill over to endanger the muggle population, the prime minister bursts out, “You can do magic! Surely you can sort out—well—anything!” But the minister of magic has a ready and discouraging response: “The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister” (Rowling 2005, 18). Tomi Adeyemi, author of Children of Blood and Bone and Children of Virtue and Vengeance, in an interview in December of 2019 explained, “The older I get, the more I realize the power of institutions. And institutions are old. They’re powerful for a reason. They have been set up a long time ago by very rich and powerful people to disenfranchise you systematically.” Later in the interview, she added, “It’s like: Yes, you can focus on getting magic, but then you’ll see that magic wasn’t completely the problem. The entire system is against you. So what are you going to do?” (Garcia-Navarro 2019).

To the extent that magic enables work, the social sanction to perform magic can even be a mark of social inferiority rather than honor. In Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho shows us an elite boarding school at which daughters of the wealthy are trained to suppress their capacity for magic, to the detriment of their health; the only spells they are taught are ones they turn on themselves as hobbles. Magic is not ladylike. When house servants use magic to keep up with the tasks that enable their employers’ conspicuous consumption, however, the employers pretend not to notice the unfeminine deployment of magical power and don’t bother to suppress it. It is, after all, not social or political power, and they do not see it as a threat. In Cho’s (2015) version of early nineteenth-century England, the use of magic brands its working-class female users with their already established disempowerment. In our world, tales of George H. W. Bush’s bedazzlement by a 1980s supermarket checkout scanner, even if wildly exaggerated in the retelling, still point to the inverse relation between social power and the use of (some) magic/technologies (Snopes 2001). The story had staying power because it encapsulated something people already knew: handling the magic of bar codes is menial work.

What if we take the profound thought experiments and social insights of our fantasy-fiction writers seriously as lessons for understanding the social role of technology in our world? If we recognize technology as the word that we use in lived experience for what we call “magic” in stories admitted to be fictions, we can ask the same questions Rowling, Cho, Clarke, Andersen, Sondheim, Adeyemi, and countless others ask.

Of course, consigning magic to the realm of the fictitious is a fairly new move in Western thought. People did live with (and kill) witches in early modern Europe and in early modern Europeans’ North American colonies (Federici 2004). Even now, magic and magical thinking are only barely hidden beneath the disenchantments of our language of technology and progress. Alf Hornborg (2008, 4) writes, “Technologies are never ‘merely’ material strategies for getting certain kinds of work done; they also tend to embody tacit assumptions about their own rationality and efficiency. In other words, significant aspects of the functioning of technological systems rely on beliefs about their efficacy. Many anthropologists have thus already accepted that the boundary between technology and magic is difficult to draw.” The contributors to this special issue write in the magic-suppressing language of technology while retaining the wisdom to ask the questions that storytellers ask about magic.

First of all, the easy and obvious lesson: technology is no more a magic bullet than magic is. The development and deployment of new knowledge and new technology reshape the terrain on which conflictual class relations are enacted. The course of a social conflict may develop differently depending on what technological tools are developed and deployed by whom (and, reciprocally, social conflicts may influence what technological tools are developed and deployed by whom). But technologies do not and cannot obviate social conflicts. Incidental to the problem of the twenty-first-century digital divide is its specifically digital nature; its social stratification is fundamental. Arundhati Roy (2020) noted the importance of this point in an interview last summer. And as technologies become a focus of contention, they can even intensify conflict.

The contributors to this volume bring the powerful and flexible tools of Marxist analysis to bear in an analysis of these conflicts. Marx himself connected magical (or religious) thinking and social conflict in his potent concept of commodity fetishism. When we allow the social relations of production to hide behind a veil, the work of people is misunderstood as a power originating in objects: “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form as a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race” (Marx [1867] 1990, 165). Marx adopted the word “fetishism” from its anthropological use, describing the ascription of sacred powers to physical objects. The anthropologists of Marx’s day were confident that the objects’ powers derived from believers’ faith; those physical objects had no powers prior to that faith. Analogously, Marx observed that when we encounter commodities in the market, we see the price as a characteristic of the commodity rather than as an effect that we created. He saw this as a fetishistic delusion. A commodity’s price, he argued, does not really reflect the qualities of the object as object. Instead, a market price reflects the relations in which the object was produced and exchanged. There is no price prior to our belief. The power of price is magnified when we fail to see its origin in ourselves (Sherman 2015). Recognition of class conflict is thus a disenchantment.

Facebook’s public statements continue to promise, despite the counterevidence, that widespread use of the extraordinarily powerful technologies of their platform will bring the world together and solve social problems. As Shahram Azhar highlights in “Consumption, Capital, and Class in Digital Space: The Political Economy of Pay-per-Click Business Models,” if we unravel the threads of the fetishistic veil, we find the familiar conflictual class and nonclass processes of capitalism. Facebook directly employs and exploits labor: the fundamental class process of capitalism (as Resnick and Wolff call it) is found here as wage laborers work continuously to build and maintain the digital space where users gather, creating the conditions of existence for Facebook to sell the commodity “audience” to advertisers. Labor produces what is necessary for its social reproduction; labor also produces a surplus; capital appropriates that surplus (Resnick and Wolff 1987). Simultaneously, by providing tools to other capitalists and by securing monopoly power, Facebook has positioned itself to receive distributions of surplus appropriated elsewhere in conjunction with their technologies. Facebook, Azhar says, has not evaded the social conflicts inherent in the class structure of capitalism; it has—for now, at least—been on the winning side of the conflict.

Yet Facebook occupies with us a more-than-capitalist world (as Gibson-Graham calls it). Even when capitalism seems to be everywhere and touch everything, under a coexistent range of other class processes, surplus labor is performed and appropriated under other, noncapitalist arrangements (Gibson-Graham [1996] 2006). In “Digital Feudalism: Sharecropping, Ground Rent, and Tribute,” Stan Harrison centers the relationship of Facebook to its users and finds exploitative class relations there, too. But these are not the relations of capitalism. Instead, Harrison says Facebook’s technologies have created a new territory in which formerly land-based feudal class processes play out on new digital terrains. Facebook users are thus sharecroppers. He also considers the place of ISPs and sees a case of ground rents paid by users to their ISPs and tribute paid by weaker, lower-tier ISPs (especially from the Global South) to more powerful tier-1 ISPs.

Vangelis Papadimitropoulos also sets his sights on the more-than-capitalist range of class processes that can harness new technological tools. This technology does not end exploitation, but people using technology can. As he explains in “Platform Capitalism, Platform Cooperativism, and the Commons,” nonexploitative social arrangements can be enacted on digital terrains alongside and even in interaction with capitalist uses of the same technologies. Marxism’s tale of capitalist primitive accumulation has traditionally been the story of a one-way flow of value, from the commons into capitalism. But capitalism itself can be leaky (Gibson-Graham [1996] 2006), and Papadimitropoulos suggests that value can flow the other way, from capitalist circuits of accumulation and exchange into the commons.

Bartosz Mika contributes to our understanding of the development and deployment of knowledge embedded in new technologies of production in his essay “The Dialectic of Knowledge: A Contribution to the Theory of Knowledge in Advanced Capitalism.” Within capitalist production, knowledge, which is always social in origin, appears as though it belongs to capital, seemingly endowing capital with productive powers.⁶ Margaret Jane Radin (1982, 980), in her reading of the Communist Manifesto, writes that “property in the means of production is not the type of property that forms the basis for personal freedom.” Radin, along with Marx and Engels in the Manifesto, seems to be thinking of material property, but property in knowledge surely gives rise to unfreedoms for nonowners as much as does property in manufacturing plants and equipment. The representatives of capital strengthen their claim on knowledge by withholding knowledge from workers, pushing a process of the deskilling and reskilling of workers, simultaneously or in alternation. Work and workers are deskilled as workers become adjuncts of machines while decisions about technique are made elsewhere; work and workers are reskilled as new, different competencies are required to function in a differently mechanized workplace.

But information and knowledge do not function in contemporary capitalism only as means of production; they become fetishized commodities themselves. In “Deconstructing the Discourse of Self-Corrective Intellectual Property Markets,” Boran Ali Mercan and Altuğ Yalçıntaş examine how the fairy tale of self-correcting markets has been applied to intellectual property markets —despite the contradictions and logical gaps involved in seeking the apparition of the invisible hand in such a setting. Proponents of the self-correcting-market tale must fear, they surmise, that admitting any flaws in the market solution to the allocation of the products of intellect specifically would undermine the foundations of market fundamentalism tout court. They embrace rather than fear such deconstruction, but they do not exactly disagree that delegitimization of intellectual property markets threatens the legitimacy of markets in general; they deploy a critique of IP markets as an entering wedge.

Symbolically and functionally, the terms of our contacts with technology assemble collectivities. Whatever else is being produced, the assembly line assembles an industrial working class, for example. But our collectivities do not necessarily map onto neatly differentiated class roles in the circuits of capital. Aras Özgün and Andreas Treske explore the collectivity of audiencehood in “On Streaming-Media Platforms, Their Audiences, and Public Life.” They contrast the synchronous mass audiences of twentieth-century television broadcasting to the asynchronous, smaller, custom-made batches of contemporary streaming-media audiences. Streaming platforms enable a proliferation of stories that might not have made it in a communications environment of mass broadcasting; devotees of a niche interest that could not have commanded time on a major network may yet be numerous enough to warrant a show in the fragmented environment of streaming media. At the same time, much of the revolutionary potential of this proliferation is muted by the algorithmic matching of audience to content. Netflix preaches to every choir, but each choir hears only the sermon meant for them. Streaming media’s targeted audience-assembly operation is unlikely to surprise the previously unaware with new content.

This collection of essays offers a many-faceted view of the entanglements of class with technologies/techniques/information. Some mark the pathways linking circuits of accumulation to neocolonialism. Yet gender and race remain mostly missing as categories of analysis. Let us remember, then, that we live class in raced and gendered ways. At the 2020 Eastern Economic Association Annual Conference,⁷ William Spriggs shared the results of his archival research into the postservice careers of members of an elite U.S. army unit with radio expertise who served during World War I. They were all Black. Many kept up their skills after the war with technical projects of their own and in hobbyist clubs, but all were categorically excluded from employment in the burgeoning radio industry despite the rarity of such extensive training and expertise in a brand-new technology. A century later, the industries developing the newest technologies remain notoriously hostile territory for Black people, who are absurdly underrepresented in middle- and high-status employment in the so-called tech sector. As is typical, racial and gender stratification intersect. The intersection of the two came to the fore in December 2020, when Google fired AI researcher Timnit Gebru in apparent retaliation for her critiques of racism within the company and for her planned presentation of a conference paper about the racial bias encoded in the company’s facial-recognition technologies (Allyn 2020).

This issue’s reviewed book, Anjali Vats’s The Color of Creatorship, is an important new contribution to the critical-race intellectual property literature. Vats traces how U.S. intellectual property law, in its legislative crafting and judicial interpretation, has continuously (re)constructed racial in-groups and out-groups, from the first copyright law in the brand-new nation late in the eighteenth century until today. Over and over, the creativity and ingenuity of Black and indigenous and other racialized people within U.S. borders and of people of the Global South have been treated as raw, open-access resources. Once appropriated by an individual or corporation with the social power of Whiteness, this social knowledge often acquires, in the eyes of the law, the refinement and distinction to be copyright-able or patent-able, its owner endowed with the exclusionary privileges of ownership.

The magical vocabulary of enchantments and incantations is etymologically linked to singing and songs. (“Chant” remains in English as a sometimes-magical, sometimes-mundane term; Romance languages retain more workaday uses of similarly derived words: e.g., canto in Spanish and Italian, chanson in French.) “Spell,” as David Abram (1997) notes, means both a magical technique (“cast a spell”) and the ordering of letters to make words. Singing and spelling are both durable, powerful technologies for encoding information in order to preserve and transmit it. Both work in conjunction with our brains—our thinking, dreaming meat, as Terry Bisson (1991) jokes. Music and literacy can expand our capacities, but they can also leave us spellbound. Newer digital technologies also encode, preserve, and transmit information through an information circulatory system that includes our brains (hardware, software, wetware). Like earlier information technologies, they can both expand our capacities and leave us spellbound.⁸ Contemporary information technologies have enough novelty to retain an aura of magic, if only fleetingly, but there is as much of continuity as there is of rupture between the newest digital technologies and the millennia-old technologies of pitch and rhyme or ink and papyrus/parchment/paper. There is as much of continuity as of rupture in these technologies’ effects. Social power is always at play.

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.