Shira Chess joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse, arguing that online culture has always been shaped not just by code and commerce but by myth, ritual, and “enchanted logic.” The conversation traces how early internet and 90s cyberculture overlapped with Technopaganism and other non-mainstream spiritual currents, creating a productive (and sometimes destabilizing) fuzziness between “technology as magic” and “magic as technology,” echoing Arthur C. Clarke’s famous formulation (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”). Chess explores how this occult-inflected sensibility persists today as background “wallpaper” in everything from simulation theory and reality-shifting to conspiracy culture and politicized “meme magic,” while also touching on the loss of open-web imagination among younger users, the fragility and importance of digital archives, and how fragmentation at scale has helped erode consensus reality, leaving us in an internet-shaped world where, as the counterculture mantra goes, “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
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Shira Chess:
The thing about that Arthur C. Clarke quote that always sort of struck me was that it works in both ways, right? Any significantly advanced society is indistinguishable from magic, or technology is indistinguishable from magic. But any any magic is also indistinguishable from an advanced technology. And I think that slippage helped create a kind of fuzziness, right? Where it can both be magical and not magical at the same time, right? And people could kind of choose how they wanted to look at things. I think that was very much part of the Technopagan ethos. It wasn’t some people absolutely believed in literal magic. Some people just were like — well, the technology that we have is magical enough.