Magic and the Conspiracy

"The eye in the triangle of the security state is becoming self-aware. It has plotted your data points. It can predict your actions. It owns you and it molds you. We rebels have reason to be concerned. We are not considered the conscience of society nor transformative pioneers, we are the enemy of the corporate state which dismantles non-human and human communities alike. The state and the corporation are one and the same, the one percent. We are raw materials, production units, disposable assets or less politely, slaves.


Some will ask, what does this have to do with magic? The answer is of course, everything. The fact that such a question can even be asked shows how disconnected we have become from the world, and our perceived powerlessness in harnessing its occult virtues. Those who claim we should not be political need to answer this question: If the secret forces we connect with are sullied by acknowledging realpolitik, how can the Archons plunder the symbol set for their dramas with impunity.


So are we players, or pawns, ogling their superbowl spectacle? Are we stars or submissives? Do we pursue power or passively consume? Passive is the key word here. I will argue that we are being engineered into docility and that it is the docile body which is the enemy of magic.


Perhaps in a world of Julian Assange, Edward Snowdon, Chelsea Manning, Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Schwartz we have something to contribute. After all, we are heirs to the first and greatest game of secrets. Our adepts have always been in an entangled relationship with state power and the intelligence agencies, whether John Dee, Aleister Crowley, Cecil Williamson or even Michael Aquino. Ours is the cypher, the code word, the clandestine gathering, the secret plan, the powers of prediction and malediction, of striking at a distance. We have something to hide and we know how to hide it; or so we thought. In truth, we have lost out to the dealers, the activists and the anarchists with their antique nokia bricks and an understanding of security culture which is manifestly lacking in occult circles." (source)

The Magic of Film

Shadowrun

"So here's my next step: we are living in a 21st century that resembles a mutant Shadowrun—by turns a cyberpunk dystopia and a world where everyone has access to certain kinds of magic. And if you want to explore the human condition under circumstances which might plausibly come to pass, these days the human condition is constrained by technologies so predictably inaccessible that they might as well be magic. So magic makes a great metaphor for probing the human condition. We might not have starships, but there's a Palantir in every pocket (and we might not have dragons, but some of our wizards are working on it )."

  Charles Stross, "Not-A-Manifesto," Oct. 10th (Antipope.org)