Why Techno-Fascism Requires Magic✨
Meditations on Magic, Discourse, and Mythos
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Hi, I’m Dr. Shira Chess, professor and curator of weird internet shit. Once upon a time I wrote about video games, but now I don’t. My new book The Unseen Internet is available now. I’m currently co-authoring a history of the notorious 90s cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000. I don’t study the center of culture; my research lives in the marginalia.
I spend a lot of time thinking about magic, lately.
Let me be clear, I’m not talking about cauldrons and spells here; I’m talking about the discourse of magic.
Our magical discourses are everywhere, inflected and weaved into our everyday lives in ways that are both seen and unseen. They are buried in our politics, slid into our entertainment, and definitional to our black-boxed technologies. We exist with a kind of faith that our magics will work, and when those magics break down, we are inert, impotent, incapable of conjuring an alternative future.
Our current state of techno-fascism necessitates a kind of magical thinking that allows us to disengage with the complexity of our messy-ass 21st century humanity: an occult black box that allows us to relinquish our autonomy.
When I speak of magic, people often look at me anxiously or with incredulity. It’s just silly superstitions, right? Or scary? Or just metaphorical marketing speak, perhaps. But while techno-magical discourse isn’t novel, it points to some unsettling things about our current predicaments.
Technology as Magic
Famously, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is the third of his “Laws of Science Fiction” — the law to wrap up all laws — meant to demonstrate the potential for literary slippage.
What I find useful about the “law,” however, is that for magical practitioners it creates a pathway for non-magical magics. If something looks like magic, tastes like magic, appears like magic, it might as well be magic.
Most contemporary magical practitioners — folks that perform ritual work to arrive at a physical or spiritual state change — eschew the idea of magic in the poof sense. Regardless of tradition, most practitioners are generally focused on magic of the will as opposed to conjuring things out of thin air. To that end, the most commonly used definition of magic from the 20th into the 21st century comes from Aleister Crowley, the proto-edgelord of all edgelords.1 In Magic in Theory and Practice Crowley defines magick2 as the “Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”
The thing that works so well about Crowley’s definition of magic is its fluidity. Rhetoric can be magical. Memes can be magical. Our machines can be magical. The process of transforming Will into Change is all that is necessary, and if one is disinclined from buying into the woo-woo, the core tenets of magical thinking still adhere.
Clarke’s Law allows for a sense of wonderment in how we approach our new technologies. Crowley’s definition allows for a sense of mundanity in how we think about magic. Collectively, they create a kind of slippage where belief becomes simultaneously both hyper-relevant and not relevant at all.
The non-magical magics inferred by both Clarke’s Law and Crowley’s definition create a neat path for how we tend inflect esoteric thinking into our products and marketing. In Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun unpacks how the ineffability inherent in software programming lends itself to magical metaphors:
“The linking of rationality with mysticism, knowability with what is unknown, makes it [computers] a powerful fetish that offers its programmers and users alike a sense of empowerment of sovereign subjectivity that covers over—barely—a sense of profound ignorance.”3
I don’t know how my computer works. Do you? It’s not magic, but it might as well be.
This slippage finds itself weaved into marketing materials and pitch decks. We want to see our products as magic because we really don’t want to stare down those sausage-makers too hard. The tech elite leans on magic to place a Disney-like sheen, obfuscating the ominous uncanniness of their products.
Case Study #1: “This Isn’t Airport Security — This is Magic”
Recently I traveled to Chicago to present my research on Mondo 2000 at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Given the tense nature of air travel in 2026, I was both surprised and unsurprised to encounter this airport signage for CLEAR, the biometric security service:
“This isn’t Airport Security. This is Magic.”
Using magic tropes in tech marketing is not unique. There are plenty of examples in recent years. The most obvious culprit is Apple, who likes to add the word “magic” into peripherals, downplaying the actual labor of design and production. Coke had their AI-adjacent campaign to “create real magic,” Intuit calls its products “automagical,” and Panasonic went entirely low-effort with the all caps “MAGIC” campaign.
But what’s being advertised in the CLEAR marketing is not technology as magic. It’s the security itself. “This isn’t Airport Security. This is Magic.”
In a paper in Marketing Theory, Darren Kelsey et al argue that military advertising often uses mythical discourse, with the archetype of the magician being a crucial framing of heroism in US army materials. However, instead of focusing on the typical archetype of a lone magician, the military-magic discourse shifted to a kind of magical collective. They write:
“The transformational energies of the Magician archetype reflect a crucial archetypal complexity for modern times: an oscillation between the individual and the collective. […] The coda, or moral of the story, would typically be cast as fulfilling a greater, common good that protects or benefits the community rather than the individual. The Magician serves by ‘channeling power’ for the greater good.”4
It’s worth returning to the image used on the CLEAR sign. The photo that I took is somewhat visually misleading — the angle almost looks like a reflection of an empty TSA booth. The booth in that photo is not a reflection, however; it is embedded in the signage. If CLEAR’s magic keeps us secure, then it does so by creating a vacuum that exceeds any singular wizard and places us in a strange void of magical collectivism. The image almost appears as though it were a looking glass into an alternative, safer reality.
The marketing for CLEAR combines the uncanny outcomes of data-collection tech with a strange brew of government bureaucracy and military dominance. Give us your face, your data, your fingers, whatever is in your head and poof, you get your magic security. It’s not like magic. It’s actual magic. Pay no attention to the fascist behind the curtain.
Case Study #2: Netflix Tarot
On the face of it, Netflix’s “Discover Your Future” Tarot themed campaign appears significantly less ominous than CLEAR’s magical workings. Honestly, the campaign is cute. Folksy.
Widen & Kennedy developed a 50-card deck for Netflix using the artwork of Maria Jesus Contreras, based on upcoming content.5 In January they placed a 12-foot Tarot booth in Grand Central Station where travelers could learn their “future” — what they will be watching. There is also a digital short, starring a fortune tellered up Teyana Taylor. In it, a mousy woman finds Taylor in the back of a convenience store, who mysteriously promises to tell the future. Taylor sends mousy woman on a slop-ridden Mary-Sue style ride through Netflix IP before depositing her back in the real world, knowledge of her future achieved. Convenience, indeed.
Of course, we can’t all have Teyana Taylor telling us our futures, so the campaign also includes an “interactive” component: a digital Tarot experience that combines randomness with data collection. “Let’s Bring Your Future Into Focus!” it invites. You select a card. You answer some questions. It predicts your next three shows. Voilà! Divinatory Magic on demand.
None of us are fooled, exactly. No one thinks that this is actual magic by any stretch. We all understand at this point in the 21st century that our algorithms have a certain degree of divinatory je ne sais quoi. And, honestly, the algorithms themselves are better at predicting my viewing future than whatever this Netflix Tarot nonsense is.6
At the same time, the rhetoric of magic is not insignificant here. Our algorithms have become so uncanny that it is easier to explain them away with magic than reconcile with the amount of personal data that they would need to work. That discomfort invites magical discourse to ease any mild concerns.
I mean, look. I get it. We are so inured to handing out our data points that we give it out like Halloween candy, a fun-sized bit in everyone’s bucket that accumulates and feeds an army of masked little monsters. We thoughtlessly give our photos to OpenAI so they can transform us into some twee doll-version of ourselves. Cute. I’m a Barbie now. Like. Like. Dopamine Hit. Next.
This kind of magical discourse, in some ways, is more insidious than the CLEAR campaign, because of its folksy appeal. Pay no attention to the vaudevillian fascist behind the curtain. He’s just trying to entertain you with his magics. All it costs is a little more data. You won’t even miss it.
Whose Will? Which Magic?
In early April, we were all informed that the new Anthropic algorithm is such a terrifying monster that it cannot be released to the public for security reasons. We should be nervous, they say. This ain’t no friendly Claude-bot, this is the real deal.
They’ve called their model “Mythos” — a word that means a “pattern of belief” but also winks at the supernatural, the legendary, the magical.7 The name feels wildly appropriate for our strange moment, at the precipice of whatever this may be. We need a new mythos to navigate the strange geographies that we have found ourselves trapped in, what Katherine Dee cleverly points out is a kind of “fairyland.”
Peter Nagy and Gina Neff argue that metaphors of algorithms function as a kind of stage magic. They write:
Modern stage craft reduces magic from the supernatural and the attempt to control nature to the performance of illusions, often involving misdirection, sleights of hand, trickery, or deception.”8
I’d push their argument further to suggest that the magic being proposed by our tech is not trying to conjure stage magic, but actual magic. When we watch a stage magician, we are always looking for the strings and loopholes. Even that Netflix campaign, the one that isn’t actually fooling anyone, necessarily uses the silliness of a 50-card Tarot deck to hide the actual trick.
Crowley’s definition of magic — “The Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” — is the best articulation of this. Crowley’s definition suggests that if the powers-that-be functionally cause our Will to change to their Will, then magic has occurred. But if stage magic is about trickery then actual magic is about power. And, as with the Netflix campaign, one can easily design stage magic to obscure the real.
We started with ones and zeros. Then we added a layer. And then a layer upon that. And then we added cute metaphors of desktops and folders and an animated paperclip, to obfuscate all of those ones and zeros. From there, the only path forward became the mythos of magic. That mythos sets up the next illusion: the creation of life. Behold the golden AGI that will steal your jobs and seduce your women. It is just the ones and zeros in disguise, actually, but believing that the ones and zeros are magic allows us to not question their autonomy.
The intentional obfuscation and mythos-layering within techno-fascism continues to estrange us from our technological processes. As we become more alienated, our magics will increasingly correspond to the Will of the unseen magicians, encoded with their beliefs and sorcery. And their mythical golem may be coming for us all. We must stay on guard against any mythos that transforms them into magics, rewriting our realities and patterns of belief to align our Will with the Will of the techno-fascists.
For those of you who have never read about the magical battle that happened between Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats, get some fucking popcorn out.
Crowley used the “ck” spelling of magic, though I tend towards the perhaps more provincial magic-with-a-c. Practicing magicians often use the “ck” spelling of “magick” to distinguish it from stage illusion. I do appreciate the distinction and respect the inclination, though go with “magic” more often than not.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 18.
Darren Kelsey, Natalia Yannopoulou, Andrea Whittle, Teresa Heath, Artyom Golossenko, and Ana Maria Soares, “The (Army) Hero with A Thousand Faces: A Discourse-Mythological Approach to Theorizing Archetypal Blending in Contemporary Advertising,” Marketing Theory 23, no. 1 (2022).
The choice of 50 cards seems weird here. A traditional Tarot deck has 78 cards. A normal card deck has 52. Rounding it off to 50 feels inauthentic, but it’s not like someone is actually shuffling a deck so I suppose it doesn’t matter.
The Tarot predicted Love is Blind in my future, which is honestly hilarious. In fairness, the algo also thinks I want it because I assign the pilot to one of my classes every semester and re-watch just the one episode, twice a year. (We always watch only the original pilot because there is nothing so pure as the first season of a reality TV show.) All of this is to say, no matter how good an algorithm ever thinks it is at divination, context collapse will always be a flaw.
Last night I asked my teen if he had heard about the new Anthropic model. “Do you mean mystic, he asked?” While he got the name wrong, I found his mis-memory compelling here. “Mystic,” too, implies a mode of spiritualism that is inherent to how we are talking about the next AI model.
Peter Nagy & and Gina Neff, “Conjuring Algorithms: Understanding the Tech Industry as Stage Magicians,” New Media & Society 26, no. 9 (2024).
Interesting piece. Not really seeing “our current state of techno-fascism,” though. Not everything anti-leftist is fascism.