The loss of magic
Tech used to be magic. Now it is losing its sense of wonder. Will it ever regain its lustre? How do we grapple with this loss?
A piece of technology, sufficiently advanced, is a sliver of magic. Shaped by human brain for human hands. The same minds that dreamed up the cold, gleaming dark glass connecting our hands to the vast world, reflecting our faces in its glistening black pool, once probably read the tales of the magic mirror, the science-fiction and horror and folktales that speak of two worlds, connected by a gilded, floor-length mirror in the attic. Or the tale of Narcissus, transfixed by his own visage, just like the way we edit and reedit our images to our own satisfaction with our thumbs sliding scales and selecting filters, mesmerised by our capacity to remake and unmake our self-image in seconds. As if our look could be waved away with a magic wand that rewinds time and all its marks on our skins, enlarged our eyes and made our faces as smooth as the poisoned apple, our cheeks as sharp as witches.
The creation and evocation of magic is an inherent mission of tech. The key to its ability to enrapture media and consumers (us, all of us, into breathlessness). How it turns even jaded gizmo reporters and seen-it-all reviewers into a moment of breathless sigh, a choked laugh, a whisper of wow. It’s the conjuring of the impossible, sitting firmly in our hands. Excalibur made everyday.
Right now, these moments still exist, like ever-scattered glittering dots in an increasingly capitalistic and world-weary industry. Seeing the bystander in the background of our shot whisked away like a ghost at one, two, three taps. The way a special pen connects with glass in perfect mimicry of a brush, fluid and soft lines dancing across hard solid screen as if it were parchment, before exploding into colours. A broadcasting stream that turns a live moment in one corner of the world — surreal, funny bits of our existence — into entertainment for millions. Typing an animal on a search engine and instantly finding its three-dimensional recreation rolling or yawning or sleeping in our rooms, nestled on the edge of our coffee-stained couch.
This magic still exists. But they are in short, dwindling supply. And it’s not just because the industry has plateaued in true innovation or ambition, the gap between the wide-eyed idealism of tech can make a better world / we are the good guys withering into press releases about product launches, IPOs and maximising sales. Performance, productivity, platitudes.
The old magic is peeling away like a dying tree, as if our eyes are now immune to enchantment once invincible. We are doing what we can / it’s the reality of business / we are learning from our mistakes is the new mantra, self-defeating. A knight’s shrug as he stares off an unwinnable war and walks away. We are packing up and going home. The kingdom is just a barn. And the gleaming piece of glass that tethers us to the world, that once made everything impossible within reach, has dissolved to dust come midnight. The gig economy is disintegrating under the weight of recklessness. The dream of connecting the world struggles to contend with complex realities. Social media became playgrounds for fake news and fringe ideas, injected right into the bloodstream of a rapid-fast news cycle by well-meaning quote-retweets. Visionary tech rock stars and poets took off their masks to reveal flawed figures, their omniscient eyes clouded by blind spots (like yours and mine). Utopian visions of benevolent creativity are only made possible by slave labour, wilful blindness to undemocratic regimes and disregard for environmental waste, discarded metal parts piling up in landfills and poisoning waters somewhere our eyes can’t reach.
And across brands and platforms, technology envisioned to take smart devices to the next frontier — predictive algorithm, facial recognition, IoT — now turns upon itself, becoming tools of surveillance and inequality. This is a reckoning, and it’s coming down hard and fast.
It’s easy to get pessimistic about the future of tech. To look at this vapid landscape and see a graveyard masquerading as a glittering palace, filled with beautiful manifesto in elegant sans serif that meant nothing. To weigh the solid device in our hands and wonder about the cost of it all. But there’s a silver lining. In every tale of fantasy there has always been a reckoning. The destruction of an old world in favour of a better one. Disillusionment is a blueprint for deconstruction and in it, a promise of elusive change.
And disillusionment is not a terrible thing. It means recognising the world for what it is, no matter how flawed. To look at our smartphone and understand with perfect clarity that this breathless magic, this glistening glass that connects us to the fibre of the universe with a few perfect taps, this irreplaceable extension of our hands and brains, is a creature made possible by our world’s gaping inequality and a business model who rolls with it without blinking an eye. A feat of ingenuity and creativity, yes, but also that of trembling hands in industrial factories where fantasies had no room to breathe. Disillusionment is accepting that the world you love would never be as beautiful as it once seemed, that there was now a glitch in the system you could never unsee, like scars stitching a perfect sky. And maybe, once you’ve got accustomed to registering that glitch at the edge of your vision, you’ll wonder if there’s something you can do to fix it.
Recently, in the wake of J.K. Rowling’s transphobic rants, my Potter-loving friends and other fans of the author had to grapple with the loss of a reader’s innocence. The tainting of fantasy creature-comfort stories always hits the hardest, like being severed from the umbilical cord that once nourished your existence. But how Rowling’s now-disillusioned readers fought back to shape a sense of purpose out of this disillusionment is a blueprint worth following. They vowed and retweeted and found ways to highlight fantasy and childhood tales by transgender and non-binary authors. Some who have grown up inspired by Potter’s imaginative world to become authors in their own right plan to create inclusive stories that, as the tale of an orphan magical wizard once did, would soon engraft itself like code into the consciousness of the genre — making inclusion a foregone conclusion.
Tales of magic are also about disruption. It’s not the reheated script about how we are revolutionising the industry / we are cutting inefficiencies / we are creating a new economy, but a deeper, harder kind of job. In fantasy, tools once used to oppress can in fact be repurposed into nobler purposes. A sword that once kills now used to slay a dragon; a repentant sorcerer’s terrible spell wielded to fight a tyrant king and rescue those locked in dark towers. But it took understanding what that tool is capable of being, the damage it has inflicted and would again, when left alone.
The devices that we hold in the palm of our hand and the social media content we consume with ravenous eyes well into midnight could be that sword embedded in stone, or a cruel spell yearning to be transformed into a good kind of storm. And maybe, whenever we use these tools for good, to amplify the good work that others are doing, to educate ourselves on the vast gulf of inequalities enabled by tech and turning everything we absorb into action (helping others, raising funds, or supporting causes that matter to us physically or through whatever resources we could provide), we too are casting our little ripple of magic.
After all, in the most beloved of tales, magic has always been less about all-powerful engineers and alchemists who hold the universe in their slippery mercy, and more about ordinary people doing their best to fix a broken world.
I am Arlene, a Singapore-based writer currently working at a local startup. In my spare time, I write about tech, culture, fiction, entertainment and life.
