An e-mail that changes your life. Marketing segmentation profiles based on demographic and psychographic data. The latest management guru's solution to save your company. A culture-jam by activists that launches a public campaign and deposes a corrupt CEO. Admonishments by terrorists, filmed on digital video and with a public relations firm on retainer, that are spread virally by the media. Designer religious viruses and operant mythologies based on the Faustian promise of artificial intelligence and biotechnology. Where John Dee used scrying stone and Cagliostro used hypnosis, the contemporary spell-caster relies on digital video and the Internet, on statistical deviations from the group mean, and on superseding planning by the art and science of strategic foresight.

Prologue: How to Monitor Dotcom CEOs and Evade Stock Losses

Technology enhances the ability to cause brain-change and alter will. Targets can be monitored in real-time 24-7. Knowledge management tools enable the collation of data and searching for common patterns. Behavioral characteristics and subjective values can be profiled using a variety of tests and tools. As a test of magic-oriented technology, during the dotcom deathwatch period in 2001, I kept the Razorfish and Salon CEOs under surveillance. I waded through their company press releases, analyzed interviews in the business press for key-words and metaphors, tracked their 10-Q filings with the Securities and Exchanges Commission, listened to conference calls for voice-stress markers and reactions from investment analysts and scanned their streaming media presentations for the eye-accessing cues taught in Neuro-Lingustic Programming. The mistakes of magicians past their prime mirrored the faux pas of narcissistic CEOs faced with de-listing warnings and company mythologies that had become cul-de-sacs. In the flux-and-flow of the dotcom landscape, magic-oriented technology provided the tools to probe beneath the surface and discern their true characters. The stocks still continued their descent into oblivion.

The Internet updates the parlor game tradition of magic, notably the Masonic and Theosophical traditions, that flourished in the late 19th century. The French historian and social critic Jacques Ellul warned in his book The Technological Civilization (New York: Random House, 1967) that this reliance on technology, while hyper-efficient in some ways, left individuals, subcultures and societies more vulnerable to complex and subtle forms of manipulation. The early intellectual salons and fringe communities, for example, now face the AOL Time-Warner leviathan. Richard Stivers's book Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational, in the tradition of Ellul, Jerry Mander and Neil Postman, updates this critique of techno-determinist logic and techno-utopian myths, for a contemporary audience.

Defining the Realms of Magic-oriented Technology

Sir James Frazier believed that magic was "failed science" whereas anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued that it filled technological gaps. [1] Marcel Mauss contended that magic was about "wish-fulfilment." Stivers concurs that it "is effective only in relation to humans and only when they believe in it." [2] Magic-oriented technology is not just the realm of Techno-Pagans like Genesis P-Orridge and techno-savvy goddess worshippers. Stivers shows, in a penetrating overview, that magic-oriented technology has infiltrated three broad domains: advertising and the mass media as forms of addictive consumption; psychotherapy and positive thinking as cybernetic adjustment to socioeconomic exploitation; and managerial stratagems (from Frederick Taylor's scientific management to humanistic/relational techniques) as ways to self-motivate employees to pre-determined goals. Our faith in instrumental rationality and technical causality, Stivers argues, risks turning us into fakes.

"Ellul's objection to technology is not philosophical; it is historical," Stivers notes. [3] Accelerating technology has outpaced adjustments in ethics and law. After the World War II horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, techno-determinist and techno-utopian thinking created a new kind of bureaucratic society. Operations research and management by objectives defined the post-war corporate ethic. The microchip and the computer enabled the collection and analysis of vast amounts of data. Entire populations became subjects for cultural anthropology studies. The historical role of ethics and law as a filter for technological innovation became unbalanced. The ghosts of Goebbels and Turing assumed new forms.

Techno-pundits misperceive that the current era was historically inevitable. Stivers elaborates on Ellul’s description of three milieus: the natural (agricultural), the social, and the technological. In this three-fold model, similar to those proposed by Joachim of Fiore and Alvin Toffler, "each new milieu mediates the subsequent ones." [4] Each milieu has a discernable pattern of cultural evolution: from animistic and shamanistic practices (natural) to seeking control over the tribal band or institution (social) to mass control by dramatized information, statistics and knowledge-based systems (technological). The multiple overlays and cross-shifts of each milieu explain why Ellul's technological milieu can be imbued with the aura of magic and evocations of paradise.

The Neuro-linguistic Inquisition

Technology mediates social power. In the current era, the specter of the Medieval Inquisition has been replaced by Senate hearings and cyclical "purity crusades." The Oprah Book Club, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble stores replace the Witch-finder General through computerized stock control systems, marginalizing the small presses and driving boutique stores out of business. These business conglomerates grasped the age-old truth that the power to name means the power to control and that corporate logos are techno-sigils.

Psychological Magic: Dramatized Information

George Orwell parodied this trend with Newspeak, a dystopian visage of thought-control by restricting language, which he synthesized from Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Socialist Britain. Orwell's grim vision has come to pass, hopefully not to stay, as an over-reliance on advertising visuals and jargon-filled conversation. Uwe Poerkson observed that jargon was plastic words: "a category of words that aspire to be scientific or technical but end up being amorphous." [5] The popularity of semiotics and the evolution of digital editing systems means that jump-cuts, oblique images and visual static will increasingly dominate the mediaspace. [6]