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Abstract: New technologies often carry a patina of magic. It has been well established that historical relationships between media forms (telegraphy, photography, radio, film, and television) often co-emerge with occult beliefs and practices. In this article, I demonstrate how late twentieth-century Technopaganism and the internet developed in tandem, speaking to many of the same desires and methodologies. Technopaganism can be characterized as inherently do-it-yourself (DIY), building on a hacker ethos, and embodying a desire to exceed magical metaphors. Collectively, these characteristics suggest a medium that articulated a magically tinged user-centric desire to hack reality.

Recently developed technologies—those that sit at the edge of human capability while peeking into the future—can often carry the patina of magic. This was most famously noted by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who once wrote that “\[a\]ny significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”[\[1\]](#N1) Certainly, there is an appearance of magic for non-expert technology users. The construction of an ethereal-seeming presence wherein human communication is articulated across the spectrum of time and space might seem at times to mimic the desires of older esoteric systems. Human technologies and occult beliefs have long functioned in tandem with each other, fostering a soft space between a belief of otherworldly phenomena and a disbelief in spectacular innovation.

The correspondence between media technologies and magic is not new. By correspondence here, I am not necessarily suggesting a causal relationship but one in which media and magic concurrently respond to and echo similar cultural shifts. Jeffrey Sconce and John Durham Peters demonstrate that there is a relationship between the emergence of telegraphy and the Spiritualist movement of the 1800s.[\[2\]](#N2) Specifically, Sconce argues that contemporary narratives of the “power” of media come from this intersection, creating an impression of electronic media as embodying “sovereign yet displaced, absent, and parallel worlds” reminiscent of séances.[\[3\]](#N3) While it is easy to dismiss occult beliefs as superstitions of the past, esotericism continued to quietly thrive in Western cultures through the twentieth century, often diffused into mass culture. This tendency can colloquially be referred to as “occulture.”[\[4\]](#N4) A Western revival of occultism in the 1970s often functioned in conversation with the broader counterculture.[\[5\]](#N5) The revival was fluid and sometimes mixed and matched elements from the New Age movement, the transformation of witchcraft into Wicca, an embracing of Indigenous and Eastern forms of mysticism, Neo-paganism, the resurrection of magical organizations, and the creation of Chaos Magick.[\[6\]](#N6) In other words, if the public understanding of Spiritualism helped to create an explanatory power for the dramatic shift in communication technologies of the 1800s, then it is worth considering how occulture within and around the tech scene of the 1980s to 2000s similarly corresponded to the rise of the internet as it evolved from a niche hobbyist activity into a cultural imperative.

While the science and sense of progress inherent in emerging technologies might imply a tacit atheism, this is not necessarily the case. David Noble notes that, rather than being a product of rationalism, the militaristic origins of the internet were born of ideologies of Christian salvation: “A thousand years in the making, the religion of technology has become the common enchantment, not only of the designers of technology but those caught up in, and undone by, their godly designs.”[\[7\]](#N7) At the same time, a survey of pagans conducted by Margot Adler in the 1980s discovered that their most common career was in computing. Often those she interviewed saw a correspondence between the two, suggesting that computers functioned with a kind of “symbolic thinking and patterning \[that\] are essential to magical thinking” and that, similar to magic, “computers work in unseen ways to accomplish tasks.”[\[8\]](#N8) In a similar study in the United Kingdom, T. M. Luhrmann suggested that in the 1980s computing was the most common profession for magical practitioners.[\[9\]](#N9) By the 1990s, a broad umbrella group of practices, often referred to as “Technopaganism,” emerged in concert with internet technologies. Technopaganism, as I will detail, was not a single belief system or set of practices but a confluence of several, largely born out of counterculture, magical beliefs, internet communications, and do-it-yourself (DIY) experimentalism.

This article relies on the premises of contemporary magic. This is not to say that I, personally, argue for the existence of magic so much as I demonstrate that magical practices of the late twentieth century mimicked, and were mimicked by, technological innovations of that time. Throughout this article, I lean on Aleister Crowley’s infamous definition of magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”[\[10\]](#N10) This view of magic, commonly held among practitioners from the twentieth into the twenty-first century, allows for a slippage where ordinary things can be understood as inherently magical. For instance, the invoking of “change to occur in conformity with will” can be applied to simple acts of persuasion or writing: I say or write words that might persuade others, which ultimately achieves my so-called will. This flexible definition of magic can be applied to the creation of contemporary digital technologies, wherein programmers and creators write code to invoke changes that then make things happen on and beyond screens that will (hopefully) align with their will. Granted, this definition might seem too broad. After all, what can’t be called magic under these terms? Yet, as I will demonstrate, the definition has allowed both magical practitioners and skeptics to align in a starry-eyed vision of emerging technologies.

In what follows, I argue that Technopaganism at the dawn of the internet gives us an opportunity to reconsider how the idea of magic continued to play a role in defining and reconciling with emerging media technologies. The shared conceptual tool kits of Technopagans and early technologists predicted a changing relationship between media and audiences. Technopagan magical styles were inherently DIY, building on the then-emerging hacker ethos and embodying a general desire to exceed magical metaphors. Collectively, these characteristics suggest a medium that is not just broadcasting but creating a democratizing sense of empowerment, with a user-centric desire to hack reality broadly, by any means necessary. Thus, like the relationship between telegraphy and Spiritualism, the esotericism in the 1980s to 2000s tells a story of a medial shift wherein magic once again created a tool kit to comprehend changing communication technologies, in this case the arrival and mass acceptance of the popular internet.

## Media Technologies and the Occult

Media historians have discussed how a multitude of pre-digital technologies—including telegraphy, photography, radio, film, and television—emerged as counterparts to occult practices. Esoteric practices, such as the summoning of spirits (sometimes of the dead, sometimes of generalized non-corporeal entities), have long shaped perceptions about invention points within mass media progress. The nature of mass media and the idea of spiritual presence, according to Sconce, form an essential link between electronic media and the occult. Sconce suggests that the “animating at times occult sense of ‘liveness’ is clearly an important component in understanding electronic media’s technological, textual, and critical histories.”[\[11\]](#N11) It is therefore sometimes difficult to disentangle the desires and intentions of the occult from those of electronic media.

Despite the correspondence between the Spiritualist movement of the 1800s and the invention of electronic and mass communication, it is worth considering that even before the invention of the telegraph, distance communication was postulated by itinerant magicians that predated the scientists and technologists. In The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers, Tom Standage makes a brief reference to “sympathetic needles” marketed “across Europe” as “magical devices that allowed people many miles apart to spell out messages to one another.”[\[12\]](#N12) Whatever the truth of these claims, the use of magical devices in a manner that prefigured electronic technologies is crucial. Esoteric communities attempted magical means of constructing distance communication long before the technology got there and by remarkably similar theories.

Peters argues that the trajectory of mass communication can be linked to spiritual claims, formed of Christianity and alternative esoteric beliefs.[\[13\]](#N13) His work suggests that changing concepts of body and soul allowed humans to leap toward electronic forms of communication. The “heart of the Spiritualist tradition” proposes that “communication happens best when bodies and language are transcended in favor of more ethereal modes of thought transference.” This tradition also holds that “meaning is separable from media,” “content from form,” which in theory achieves a meeting between minds and souls that exceeds bodily containers.[\[14\]](#N14)

The relationship between telegraphy and nineteenth-century Spiritualism has been well documented. The invention of the telegraph, for instance, has been neatly aligned with the uptick in the popular use of psychic mediums to converse with the dead. Peters explains that Spiritualism “decisively shaped the popular reception of the technology.” “Spiritualism, the art of communication with the dead,” he continues, “explicitly modeled itself on the telegraph’s ability to receive remote messages.”[\[15\]](#N15) Typically, the congruence between these things is attributed to Kate and Margaret Fox, sisters from Hydesville, New York, who used table rapping to communicate with ghosts. While the sisters later confessed to faking their contact with the dead, most discourse during the time compared their communication process with that of the telegraph. The comparison rendered the Spiritualist movement and the technology better understood across a society that was still adjusting to considerable leaps in technological progress.[\[16\]](#N16) Of these connections, Sconce explains, “Conceptually energized by the example of the telegraph, spiritual science would promote the wonders of physical discorporation and a dream of social emancipation all to be realized through the telecommunication wonders of electronic presence.”[\[17\]](#N17) In other words, Spiritualism created a pathway for technological developments to be understandable within mass culture.

Similarly, Tom Gunning documents the nineteenth-century use of “spirit photography”—using double exposure to capture a phantom-like image—which Spiritualists of the time employed to suggest a supernatural otherworldly presence aligned with the photograph’s subject.[\[18\]](#N18) Tracing the simultaneous trajectory of other Spiritualist rituals, such as séances, Gunning argues that, “\[t\]he role of the mediating apparatus becomes literalized in spirit photography as the process of photography takes over the medium’s role.”[\[19\]](#N19) These practices shaped film technique, particularly through Georges Méliès’s use of photographic trickery, which teased out a relationship between film and magic, transforming spirituality into a kind of mass media entertainment.[\[20\]](#N20) Yet even this was not an entirely new phenomenon. In late 1700s France, long before the birth of film, phantasmagoria shows used shadow boxes and lighting to conjure ghostly spectacles for audiences, creating an illusion of animation. The spectacles relied on dissolves and fades, a baseline for what would later become film editing.[\[21\]](#N21) Another related phenomenon is the illusion of Pepper’s Ghost, which created an appearance of ghosts for live audiences.[\[22\]](#N22) The development of cinema as a medium is tied into occult traditions of visual illusion.

Radio and television, despite their distinct genealogy from film, were also tied to occult traditions, this time related to broadcasting. Jonathan Sterne remarks that “\[t\]he spirit world was alive and well in telephony and radio.”[\[23\]](#N23) Sconce argues that if the tradition of telegraphy ran concurrently with the Spiritualist séance traditions or “voices from the void,” then television and radio were a response to the liveness of national networks. If the media reflected anxieties of alien others, television involves “the paradox of visible seemingly material words trapped in a box in the living room and yet conjured out of nothing more than electricity and air,”[\[24\]](#N24) turning television into an “electronic nowhere.”[\[25\]](#N25) The uncanniness of broadcast technologies allowed machines and objects to shape a medium that replaced psychic mediums: “The historical proximity and intertwined legacies” of the two terms are “hardly a coincidence” according to Sconce.[\[26\]](#N26) In particular, the wirelessness of radio and television spoke to an inherent uncanniness as well as a shifting vision of spiritual beliefs. Sconce argues that the “discorporation” of bodies, both auditory and visual, projected wirelessly into boxes created an eeriness that “heralded a radically different vision of electronic presence.”[\[27\]](#N27) Removing the wires disconnected the relational space between “mundane here” and “transcendental there” in a way that implied an atomization of “abandoned bodies and a dispersed consciousness across the vast expanse of the universe.”[\[28\]](#N28) This medial shift moved beyond the table-tapping Spiritualists toward a more cynical and anxious understanding of what the technologies wrought.

Collectively, these phenomena form a historical narrative wherein technological developments occur in tandem with and sometimes reify the magical and occult beliefs of their time and place. They also provide explanatory power in which the magic of black-boxed technologies buttresses various modes of spiritual beliefs and in which these beliefs function as a means of making significant technological strides comprehensible to users. As Marina Warner notes, “New technologies for seeing, recording, and picturing have reconfigured the traditional materials from which soul and spirit have been formed by imagination.”[\[29\]](#N29) As technologies develop, they often replicate ineffability, using material to construct what had previously been immaterial.

This is not to imply that the process of discursive construction is necessarily conscious. Rather, the imbrication of magic and media technologies points to the collective fashioning of a cultural tool kit. By “tool kit,” I refer to Ann Swidler’s approach to explaining the relationship between culture and action. Swidler argues that a cultural tool kit offers “symbols, stories, rituals, and worldviews, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems,” and focuses more on the process and strategies of action than on the end results of those actions.[\[30\]](#N30) From this perspective, I argue that the shared West Coast experiences that wove counterculture, esotericism, and the emerging technologies of a nascent Silicon Valley borrowed from similar tool kits that spoke to the desires and concerns of their time and place. As the internet emerged so, too, did a concurrent form of esotericism, each drawing on similar tools and concepts.

## Magic at the Birth of the Internet

Given the complex, global contexts behind the internet’s origins, no single source can account for its form, culture, and output. As Kevin Driscoll writes of internet history, “The histories we know aren’t wrong. They are incomplete.”[\[31\]](#N31) There are pocketed histories of influence that we often don’t acknowledge or that remain largely unseen. Late twentieth-century esotericism is not the only one, but it remains understudied. The shared tool kits of occult beliefs and digital strategies of the late twentieth century hint at broader anxieties and desires at the moment when the internet emerged.

While many histories focus on the militaristic origins of the internet via ARPANET, in recent years it has been acknowledged that one of the biggest influences on early computing and the internet was the 1960s and 1970s counterculture.[\[32\]](#N32) In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner demonstrates how West Coast hippie counterculture transformed into what eventually became Silicon Valley, best characterized by Stewart Brand and his flagship magazine, Whole Earth Catalog (WEC).[\[33\]](#N33) Jon Markoff comes to a similar conclusion about this transformative era, demonstrating how the psychedelic studies taking place practically next door to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Menlo Park helped early technologists to use mind-expanding psychedelics to reimagine human-to-machine interfaces.[\[34\]](#N34) What is less acknowledged are the influences of esoteric beliefs, some of which were counterpart to entheogenic mind expansion and some that were part of the aforementioned occult revival already underway.

These waves of esotericism found their way into early computing culture. Jacques Vallée, who co-invented TCP/IP at the SRI, reflects on a secret ARPANET group known as “The Midnight Irregulars,” who “dealt in esoterica, magic, advanced software, cryptography, and occasionally exchanges of drugs for money, using the network facilities” and who were ultimately the innovators of early viruses and worms.[\[35\]](#N35) In addition to Brand, 1960s and 1970s counterculture figures such as Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson continued to enjoy a celebrity status, often referring to alternative spirituality in their written works and public talks. Leary frequently referenced Aleister Crowley. McKenna talked about using hallucinogens to replicate Indigenous shamanistic practices. And Wilson used magic themes to argue for consciousness raising.[\[36\]](#N36) In addition, the Esalen Institute became popular as an exclusive mystical education center located in Big Sur, and the quasi-Paganism of Burning Man spread its influence as well.[\[37\]](#N37) Collectively, these moments, locations, and personalities point to a broader zeitgeist that contextualizes the emergence of Silicon Valley culture in the latter part of the twentieth century as one that, periodically, was equal parts technological and mystical.

Internet users, too, aligned with esoteric belief systems. In many ways, non-normative spirituality found a home in the anonymity of the early internet. Following in the wake of the satanic panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a general desire to keep non-hegemonic spiritual practices, particularly those that could be conflated with Satanism, out of the public eye. The early internet provided a perfect means for occult practices both new and old to be passed around with speed and enthusiasm. Pre–World Wide Web, the dominant forms of hobbyist computer use was through Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) and Usenet. These systems often gave a primacy to text-based documents of “hard-to-find print materials,” ultimately developing, according to Driscoll, into a “distinct genre of electronic publishing.”[\[38\]](#N38) While esotericism was not the only worldview that circulated on these systems, occult materials and texts certainly benefited from their streamlined methods of transmission. For instance, MagickNet (later PODSnet—the Pagan Occult Distribution Systems Network) was a network of over seventy esoteric-themed BBSs, as diverse as Wicca, Paganism, Hermetic magic, Discordianism, Satanism, Setianism, and generalized spirituality, many of which housed text-based documents of often out-of-print occult texts, ultimately creating their own book of shadows.[\[39\]](#N39) Usenet groups such as alt.magick, alt.chaos, and alt.discordia created a space where internet users could share and compare magical practices. These online venues were well populated and active, even after the World Wide Web became dominant. alt.magick served almost 16,000 threads of content between 1991 and 1999.[\[40\]](#N40) Of course, it was not only Neo-pagans and the magically inclined who found safety in the anonymity of the early internet. Avery Dame-Griff chronicles how the early internet was a source for supporting emerging trans identities.[\[41\]](#N41) Thus, the rise of the internet created a protective space for those who did not feel that their identities aligned with the broader hegemony of cultural beliefs. Yet Adler and Luhrmann’s surveys of Neo-pagans occupying a cozy home in early computer industries and cultures suggest that a disproportionate percentage of early internet users aligned with non-hegemonic spiritual practices. Broadly, BBSs and Usenet created a vast network of shared documents that had not previously been witnessed in occulture. If occult is defined as that which is hidden, then the internet simultaneously occulted and de-occulted its spiritualist contingent, helping anonymize identities, on the one hand, and making previously hidden works more accessible, on the other.

By the 1990s, practices directly and indirectly related to the occult were referred to as Technopaganism. No one tradition or form of expression entirely characterizes the Technopagan movement. Instead, it involves a broad spectrum of practices that interpreted technology in magical terms and, for some, the belief that using computing technologies produced magical outcomes. In 1995, Erik Davis summarized the movement in a Wired magazine article, describing it as “a small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism.”[\[42\]](#N42) Similarly, Douglas Rushkoff described it in his book Cyberia as a religious movement that relied on “pagan ethics, reliance on technology and interconnectivity through vast networks,” incorporating “ancient and modern skills in free-for-all sampling of whatever works, making no distinction between occult magic and high technology.”[\[43\]](#N43) It is difficult to find a singular experience that characterizes the Technopagan ethos of the 1990s. For instance, the Wired article describes a CyberSamhain ritual conducted by Bay Area technologists and led by Mark Pesce, the co-inventor of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). For others, such as computer game designer Brenda Laurel, it was about projecting “techno-optimism” onto the “tabula rasa of technology.”[\[44\]](#N44) These developments ran concurrently with a brief, and much less popular, Zippy (Zen-Inspired Professional Pagans) movement in the United Kingdom. Zippy was a term coined by publisher Fraser Clark to avoid the occult-sounding baggage of Paganism—a “cuddly media self-tag” that roughly approximated Technopaganism.[\[45\]](#N45)

In some ways, Technopaganism was also the logical child of cyberpunk literature and film of the 1980s. While cyberpunk was techno-futurist, the literature often conflated computing desires with magical ones. For instance, Vernor Vinge’s novella True Names, largely considered the first work of cyberpunk fiction, begins with the provocation, “In the once-upon-a-time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession” and uses the word covens in reference to hacker groups.[\[46\]](#N46) Similarly, William Gibson’s Neuromancer invokes a semi-magical “Voudou” that is equal parts technology and magic.[\[47\]](#N47) And in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the corporate antagonists use the esotericism of an ancient Sumerian language combined with computing as a form of mind control.[\[48\]](#N48) In this sense, Technopaganism in the 1990s teased out a cyberpunk desire wherein technology was easily able to be slipped into magical conceits, and vice versa.

Technopagan influences wove their way into a variety of outlets and subcultures in the early 1990s internet-adjacent culture. For instance, tech-inspired counterculture magazines such as Mondo 2000 and its precursors High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, as well as bOING bOING and FringeWare Review, all published articles and imagery that regularly winked at magical themes.[\[49\]](#N49) Coupling the imagery of cyberpunk and technofetishism with spirituality, these magazines often presented an image of technology as inherently magical. By the time the World Wide Web had caught the interest of the public, there were already a great number of occult-documents floating around the internet because of the BBS and Usenet text file dumps. These documents found their way onto web sites such as Disinfo.com, TOTSE (The Temple of the Screaming Electron—which was originally a BBS), the Witches’ Voice (WitchVox.com), and the Mage’s Guide to the Internet (MaGI). These web sites saw increasing traffic through the 1990s.[\[50\]](#N50) Disinfo.com, for instance, had roughly 16,000 daily visitors—impressive for the late 1990s and early 2000s—largely because it was featured on the landing page of Netscape Navigator, the primary web browser of the 1990s.[\[51\]](#N51) TOTSE, which was not entirely esoteric materials but did include a broad range of rare occult text files alongside broader counterculture and conspiracy theories, had served 63 million pages by early 2000.[\[52\]](#N52) By the same year, the Witches’ Voice had over 13 million page views and 102 million hits.[\[53\]](#N53) While this all speaks to a pocketed and specific audience, it is worth considering who that audience was: many of the folks within and beyond the Bay Area who collectively helped to build and define the internet not just as a technology but also as a culture.

What might these beliefs in technologically themed magic tell us broadly about the internet as a mass medium? Like the telegraph, the internet co-emerged within and around some decidedly esoteric beliefs. This does not suggest a direct causal relationship wherein 1990s tech makers and enthusiasts all participated in variants of Technopaganism (although some of them certainly did). Rather, the proximity of West Coast esoteric practices to computing cultures shaped a co-emergent tool kit, demonstrating the twinned anxieties and desires that magic and technology grappled with at that moment. The tool kit, as we will now see, reveals three characteristics of Technopaganism: (1) a DIY sensibility toward magic, (2) a hacker ethos toward the reconstruction of reality, and (3) a desire to exceed metaphorical language between computing and magic.

## DIY Magic

Technopaganism’s DIY sensibility tracks easily with the general zeitgeist of the 1970s and 1980s countercultures and subcultures, many of which were invested in DIY aesthetics. For instance, the WEC is built out of the advocacy for the use of available tools, both esoteric and otherwise, to improve life. Davis describes the WEC as maintaining a “freak-geek ethos of spiritual bricolage and mystic pragmatism” that “plucked tools and methods from ancient texts or religious traditions and reframed and recombined them as part of an informal, experimental, and sometimes hedonistic assemblage of hands-on human possibility.”[\[54\]](#N54) Specifically, the WEC looked for content that was both “useful as a tool” and “not already common knowledge.”[\[55\]](#N55) This, of course, aligns with other variations of DIY during that era, from punk rock to zine culture.

Magic, too, embraced DIY starting in the 1970s and flourishing into the 1980s and 1990s through a newer tradition known as Chaos Magick. Earlier traditions in Western esotericism often deployed occulted Hermetic practices—magic built on the apocryphal mythic magus known as Hermes Trismegistus—which were core to any number of ceremonial rituals of the Renaissance, notably after the invention of the printing press. Throughout the Age of the Enlightenment, into the nineteenth century with the Theosophy movement of Helena Blavatsky, Hermetic magic found a home in a variety of esoteric orders. Later, this expanded to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century groups the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (HOGD) and the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.).[\[56\]](#N56) Typically, Hermetic magic traditions involve highly specific rituals, with the threat of dire consequences when done improperly, and the summoning of pre-established entities, often labeled as demons or angels. Chaos Magick was different. The general ethos of Chaos Magick was established in two books, both written in the 1970s and published in the 1980s: Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll and The Book of Results by Ray Sherwin.[\[57\]](#N57) While traditional Hermeticism relied upon archaic esoteric systems and magical lodges, practitioners of Chaos Magick used a more entrepreneurial sensibility, highlighting DIY innovation and placing an emphasis on practice and results over belief. Certainly, Chaos Magick deployed some of the older traditions, but there was also a sense that a practitioner should use any means available to achieve their goals. Colin Duggan argues that Chaos Magick itself depends on a constant interplay between perennialism, which indicates a “vast array of historical occultural elements in which the current or latest instance of knowledge or wisdom is just as valid as the oldest instance,” and iconoclasm, “an irreverent act of tearing down and deriding the established, the dogmatic, or the conventional.”[\[58\]](#N58)

Often Chaos Magick texts cite quantum physics and chaos theory mathematics, specifically Bell’s theorem of non-locality, to suggest that matter itself is unknowable and therefore mutable. For instance, in his foundational primer on Chaos Magick, Carroll writes of quantum physics, “Even the physical sciences have begun to blunder into the aetheric with their discoveries of quantum indeterminacy and virtual processes in subatomic matter.”[\[59\]](#N59) In this sense, the sort of core science that many Chaos Magicians place as a theoretical justification for actions made this kind of occult practice particularly attractive to those in technology-adjacent careers. Furthermore, Chaos Magick disentangled rituals from a deeply dedicated belief system. One could practice forms of magic without belonging to an occult organization, which seems pertinent during the aftermath of the satanic panic. Like the rhetoric of the WEC, Chaos Magick texts in the late twentieth century suggested magical practices that used whatever tools were available to generate a desired outcome.

These esoteric texts, alongside a variety of early internet forums and mailing lists, helped Chaos Magick practices spread within online occulture, and while not everyone who was part of Technopaganism would have considered themselves a Chaos Magician, Chaos Magick helped to establish the DIY of distinct and individual practices stemming from these traditions. Thus, whether a tool or practice came from Wicca, Hermeticism, or popular culture, it was all equally usable if it was useful as a tool, to deploy the language of the WEC. In his books Pop Culture Magick and Multi-Media Magic, Taylor Ellwood writes about using various pop culture characters and themes in magical rituals and technologies such as video games to perform personalized magical practices.[\[60\]](#N60) He writes that readers should “use the basic tools of communication to rearrange the way reality unfolds.”[\[61\]](#N61) Other proponents of Chaos Magick similarly used emerging technology to perform ceremonies, such as Pesce’s aforementioned CyberSamhain ritual. This experimentalist bric-a-brac formed a new magical ethos in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, demonstrating how magical thinking exceeded the boundaries and limitations imposed by past occult traditions. Genesis P-Orridge, the lead singer of the industrial band Throbbing Gristle and the experimental art collective Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), advocated using the electronic fuzz of untuned television sets as a scrying tool for divination.[\[62\]](#N62) P-Orridge writes, “The magick of the Temple wasn’t the magick of the Golden Dawn, designed for the stately Victorian manor; it was the magick designed for the blank-eyed TV-flattened, prematurely abyss dwelling youth of the late Twentieth Century.”[\[63\]](#N63) Collectively, this emerging DIY aesthetic often found itself in conversation with tech tools.

While Ellwood’s version of Technopaganism invokes overtly magical practices, other variants were subtler and less explicitly esoteric but still offered a DIY take on magic. “Technoshamanism” of the 1990s provides an illuminating case. Rushkoff describes technoshamanistic practices as a kind of electronic leadership via noise and image: “Like the shamans of ancient cultures, \[technoshamans\] must translate the wave forms of other dimensions into the explicate reality for the purposes of forecasting the future and charting a safe path through it.”[\[64\]](#N64) In other words, technoshamanism was deeply related to techno, dance, and rave culture of the 1980s and 1990s that sought to use various technological and entheogenic tools to bring participants to a different level of reality. Yet, as esoteric historian Christopher Partridge explains, technoshamanism remained a distinct practice: “technoshamanism is the low church, dance-oriented spirituality of the biosphere; technopaganism is the high church, gnosis\-oriented, cyberspirituality of the technosphere.”[\[65\]](#N65) Often, technoshamanism was aided by a variety of personal tech, particularly mind machines—boxed devices that used a combination of flashing lights and binaural beats with the intention of inducing specific brainwave states. Tech culture magazines of the moment including Mondo 2000, bOING bOING, and FringeWare featured mind machines heavily, both in articles and advertisements.[\[66\]](#N66) The proliferation of technoshamanistic practices and the pervasiveness of these tools as part of the youth club scene demonstrate that one did not need to explicitly believe in magic to take on ritualistic practices that emulated it—the magic and the technology both deployed the same tool kit components.

## Hacker Magic

Hacking was a common idea in technoculture by the 1980s. The Hackers Conference was originally organized in 1984 by Stewart Brand, an effort that connected it back to the DIY of the WEC.[\[67\]](#N67) Turner argues that the WEC mode of counterculture was pivotal to the rise of hacker culture, alongside Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Levy defines the hack as a “project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement.”[\[68\]](#N68) The Hackers Conference allowed a group identity to emerge for budding technologists in the Bay Area and beyond.[\[69\]](#N69) While the conference never fully agreed on a proper definition of a hacker ethic, hacking itself can be broadly understood as a desire to creatively retool existing systems (both for personal and broader use) in ways that are constructive and have transmutational possibilities.

Building on this existing aesthetic, the idea of hacking was an appealing one within Technopagan culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, to those in counterculture who dabbled in various forms of esotericism, the idea was not to hack a computer system but reality itself. This is most resonantly seen in Reality Hackers magazine, the second iteration of the publication that would eventually become Mondo 2000. Editor-in-chief R. U. Sirius explains that the publication decided to migrate away from the psychedelic focus of the first iteration of their publication (High Frontiers) and chose the name Reality Hackers after a gathering of Bay Area tech folk at the publication’s headquarters (a mini mansion in Berkeley Hills).[\[70\]](#N70) Allan Lundell, a regular writer for the magazine, remarked that the group’s members were not “hackers” but “reality hackers”—a name that stuck for two issues.[\[71\]](#N71) The first issue of the magazine begins by asking the question, “What are the reality hackers doing?” The publication responds:

1.  Using High Technology for a life beyond limits.
2.  Expanding the effectiveness & enjoyment of the human brain, mind, nervous system, and senses.
3.  Blurring the distinction between science fiction & reality.
4.  Making big bureaucracy impossible.
5.  Entertaining any notion—using what works.
6.  Infusing new energy into post-modern culture.
7.  Using hardcore anthropology to understand human evolution.
8.  Using media to send out mutational memes (thought viruses).
9.  Blurring the distinction between high technology & magic.
10.  Replacing nerd mythology with sexy, healthy, aesthetic & artful techno-magicians of both genders.[\[72\]](#N72)

The early items on this list are a mix of WEC\-style DIY of creative uses of technology, but the list remarkably ends with an occult turn. The final two items very clearly suggest that hacking reality is a magical endeavor and advocate for the transformation from technologist to techno-magician. Contemporarily, Sirius describes the intention for the new title as an attempt at “\[h\]acking the limitations of what a human can do and what the human can do in conjunction with the world, the environment, and all that is to extract something marvelous from it.”[\[73\]](#N73) The magical references were not incidental, and he remarks, “Certainly, we were all taking some influence from magick at the time so that played into it, for sure.”[\[74\]](#N74) In other words, to many within the 1980s counterculture scene in the Bay Area, hacking resonated with magical work, the two concepts often finding points of intersection. If one can hack reality by some combination of perceived technological and magical methods, they could evolve into a new kind of techno-magician.

Reality hacking as a form of magical practice demonstrates a shift. Until this point, Hermetic magic was most typically employed to fulfill personal goals—wealth, glamour, finding lost objects, and love spells. Now, the reality hacking mode of magic transforms the underlying ambition, applying magical theory to transform culture writ large.[\[75\]](#N75) The idea here is that, just as proposed by broader hacker culture, magical thinking could be a tool applied to institutions that could, themselves, be hackable. Or rather, within the slippage between literal computer hacker and magical/counterculture reality hacker, there was a sense that the goal was to broadly disrupt and retool reality. This goal, inflected with the DIY aesthetic, was achievable by any means necessary, magical or otherwise.

Disinfo.com offers the clearest example of this reality hacker logic. A hodgepodge of irreverent conspiracy theories and overtly esoteric texts and methodologies, Disinfo regularly offered itself as a kind of assault on consensus reality with the slogan “Everything you know is wrong.”[\[76\]](#N76) At their one physical convention—DisinfoCon—organizer Richard Metzger spoke of causing “consensus reality to burst like a piñata,” and in his edited collection, The Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult, the title page proclaims the book’s goal: “Being an alchemical formula to rip a hole in the fabric of reality.”[\[77\]](#N77) Thus, within the combination of conspiracy theory, technology, and deliberate magical workings—all of which Disinfo had overt buy-in with—they saw so-called consensus reality itself as inherently hackable. This combination of hacker language aligned with the notion of a fluid reality suggests a broader sea change wherein similar methodologies could be deployed toward disrupting the broader culture. The twinning of this magical methodology alongside conspiracy rhetoric seems to uncomfortably get to the heart of the WEC’s use of available tools. Either way, practitioners were engaged with and attempting to push back against the stable hegemonic sense of reality offered by mainstream media sources.

At the same time, hacker language found its way into the magical discourse from this early internet era and neatly blended with computational language. An example of this is in an early 1990s ritual by writer, Setian, and frequent FringeWare editor/contributor Don Webb, called “The Rites of Cyberspace,” which made an appeal to XaTuring, God of the Internet.[\[78\]](#N78) Webb initially invoked XaTuring as a “great worm” to “eat that data which would oppress us, plant that data that will empower us, and to cloud that data which does not amuse us” and to allow the network to achieve consciousness.[\[79\]](#N79) Webb initially published the ritual in a print literary magazine, and it was later digitized, then reposted on TOTSE and other online forums.[\[80\]](#N80) There are a lot of notable things about XaTuring—a ritual that is still passed around the internet today—but its use of mechanistic hacker-speak is one of the most compelling aspects. In addition to using shared language of a “giant worm” to describe the incarnate intelligence, the ritual involves counting in binary and copy/pasting text to create spiritual protection of one’s devices to strike back against so-called oppressive data. It is, in effect, a magical mirror image of the hacker culture from the period. Through the 1990s, this combination of hacker-speak with a shared DIY aesthetic blended with magical concepts leaking out of counterculture and helping to create a broader sense that reality itself was manipulatable, much like the content of a computer.

## Magic Without Metaphors

References to technology as magic at the dawn of the internet were both literal and metaphorical. The technological comparisons built out of magical metaphors allowed users to construct the maps to understand the black boxes that veil innovation, making them comprehensible. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun notes that software’s ineffable functionality that is often incomprehensible to non-experts leads to magic 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.”[\[81\]](#N81) The metaphorical relationship between emerging technologies and magic is undeniable—enough so that hardware and software developers often lean in to the correspondence in consumer advertising, with words like magic, wizardry, and alchemy figuring prominently on product web sites and in advertising. Much has been written about the use of the word daemon for UNIX processes and the esoteric term avatar, which carries weight in both the Hindu religion and nineteenth-century Theosophy.[\[82\]](#N82) Metaphor plays an important role in making the newness comprehensible but also desirable.

Yet the historical precedence of Technopaganism hints that metaphor is only part of the story. Let us recall Crowley’s definition of magic as the “Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” The plasticity of the concept allowed Technopagans who found a home on the internet, often in tech careers, to easily apply their labors to a kind of magical thinking, even while still acknowledging the pragmatism of science and innovation. The term Technopaganism found its way into magazines and popular counterculture texts of the time and was deployed loosely in a way that made the tacit suggestion that magic was inherent in technological progress. It was not that technology was a metaphor for magic so much as technology might as well be magic. This distinction might seem subtle, but it clarifies how the Technopaganism of the 1990s was able to straddle the seemingly impossible contradictions between the material and the spiritual.

The perfect example of this comfortable marriage between magic and technology is in “Load & Run: High-Tech Paganism—Digital Polytheism,” a 1988 Reality Hackers article co-authored by Timothy Leary and VR pioneer Eric Gullichsen. The authors begin with three epigraphs—one from Crowley, one from cyberpunk’s Gibson, and one from physicist Edward Fredkin—and posit that technology has allowed humans to bypass traditional understandings of reality with magical implications. They write, “More and more of us are becoming electro-shamans, modern alchemists. . . . Today, digital alchemists have at their command tools of a precision and power unimagined by their predecessors. Computer screens are magical mirrors, presenting alternate realities at varying degrees of abstraction on command (invocation).”[\[83\]](#N83) Computers are not just metaphorically like magic; they allow magic to resonantly exist (at least in the broader, Crowlian sense) for those who know the proper incantation. The slippage allows for a very distinct kind of fuzzy spiritualism that places magic and technology as strange but somehow comfortable bedfellows.

On the flip side, occult practitioners from the era often used techno-speak to explain magic. In his popular book Condensed Chaos, Phil Hine uses the COBOL programming language to unpack how Servitors—magician-created autonomous spirit entities with specific tasks—are constructed and controlled. He writes, “Computer program flowcharts contain options such as ‘IF . . . THEN . . .’ If x = 1, then y = ‘print screen’—If y doesn’t equal 1, then no action is taken. A Servitor can be given an IF . . . THEN option. For example, if a particular condition is fulfilled, then the Servitor becomes active.”[\[84\]](#N84) In this excerpt, Hine assumes a magician audience who is (at the very least) familiar with programming logic. The back-and-forth between technological and magical instructions here demonstrates a relationship that exceeds metaphor and develops into a kind of correspondence, built out of a shared tool kit. Just as one could re-program computers, one could re-program reality with similar operations and processes, allowing magic and technology to cohabitate. Hine concludes the section by suggesting that within our contemporary world, we have “shifted the emphasis from seeking that which is ‘magical’ as that which lies beyond the known world” to “recognizing that the world itself is magical.”[\[85\]](#N85)

The mixing of magical and technological metaphors relied on vast infrastructural systems with detailed histories and processes. For each system—magic and technology—innovation often occurs at points when a practitioner both acknowledges and strays from the collective knowledge from the past. Technopaganism and the collective desire to understand technology in magical terms (and magic in technological terms) demonstrates an alignment between occult and early internet culture during this transformative period..

## The Internet as a Magic Medium

In the autumn of 1991, Alison Bailey Kennedy (known by the nom de plume "Queen Mu") stood on a stage at Big Heart City in San Francisco. Kennedy, the publisher and "Dominedtrix" of Mondo 2000 smiled broadly at the crowd of several hundred technologists and counterculture fans and quipped, “We are no longer urban peasants. This is no peasant revolution.” Taking a brief pause, she added, “We’re Technopagans.” She laughed and the crowd cheered wildly to this proclamation.[\[86\]](#N86) The term Technopagan, in this context, is worth unpacking. Kennedy was not suggesting that the crowd perform some kind of occult ritual; there was no summoning of demons or alchemy to speak of. Kennedy was talking about a zeitgeist that sits somewhere between magic and metaphor, technological and mundane. It was a DIY magic meant for hackers—both the reality kind and the computer kind. As implied by Kennedy, the Technopagan vision was seeking a kind of freedom from the peasantry, characterized by the top-down mass media outlets. Her audience no longer saw themselves as an underclass that took whatever media content was foisted upon them; their Technopaganism was a wizardry of presumed agentic power over the consumption and distribution of media.

Sconce’s and Peters’s arguments regarding the parallels between Spiritualism and telegraphy never imply that non-corporeal spirits were literally guiding the technology, nor do they imply that Spiritualism was a globally adopted movement. The significance of these historical developments rests in their corresponding discourses. The intertwining of Spiritualism and telegraphy helped to foster a leap to the new mode of communication and to create maps for understanding. By the 1990s, a similar communications shift was stirring with the growing popularity of the internet. The Western world was at the dawn of a new millennium—buttressed by anxieties about the future, rapidly changing communication technologies, and increasingly complex legislation regarding those technologies. By the late 1990s, legitimate anxieties about the threats posed by our reliance on those very technologies manifested into discussions of a potential Y2K apocalypse. At the same time, several different forms of alternative spirituality continued to influence countercultural thinking, often creating intersections with West Coast technologists. Those traditions sometimes coalesced and sometimes stayed separate but expressed similar desires of power and control over both personal and institutional spaces. Technopaganism drew upon and informed a cultural tool kit for both comprehending and controlling these rapid changes. It did not matter if the magic was literal or metaphorical, nor did it matter if the magic was not supernatural; it was magical enough to transform so-called urban peasants into Technopagans.

Another way to think about it is that the previous mass medium to dramatically overhaul our culture was television, which (again, according to Sconce) replicated esoteric desires by trapping the immaterial inside of the material to suggest a disembodied, otherworldly presence. That presence was singular, at least in the sense that it was a stand-in for the least-common denominator of hegemonic culture, offering a finite number of network programs for a generalized mass population. To that end, much of 1990s counterculture understood television as a tool of the power elite, often described as singularly promoting monoculture. Genesis P-Orridge’s suggestion of scrying to television fuzz was poignant because it resisted planned programming in favor of a void of content. So, if the rhetoric around television articulated it as a kind of disembodied wireless magic, then television was the magic of a perceived oppressor: a top-down model of medium. The internet, by the 1990s, was understood differently. It was a space that was inflected with a DIY sensibility and where multiple cultures could simultaneously co-exist. If the medium of television promoted a singular vision of reality and mass culture, then the internet represented a reality that was fractured, revealing a cacophony of voices that could, theoretically, hack and mutate the essence of humanity in what was then understood to be a democratizing way. Yet while this vision of a democratic medium was a utopic ideal for libertarian-tinged Silicon Valley, this is (of course) not really the way that things worked out. We now live in a post-truth era, characterized by science denial and a mistrust in traditional news venues.[\[87\]](#N87) The decentralized nature of the internet has created soft spaces and fractures, wherein information is embedded in increasingly pronounced echo chambers, bubbles intended for specific audiences.

There is always a temptation to be causal when thinking about magic. After all, Metzger of Disinfo.com did, indeed, attempt an alchemical formula to “rip a hole in the fabric of reality,” and our cultural sense of reality does seem to be replete with a non-negligible amount of tearage.[\[88\]](#N88) The goal here is not to argue that a 1990s techno-magician was successful at manifesting our contemporary predicaments vis-à-vis digital technologies and their ramifications. But, at the same time, his desire seems to have been successful, demonstrating that (magical or otherwise) some of the goals of the early internet builders and users did often seep into the outputs.

Perhaps, however, it is worth asking this question in a slightly different way, pushing past the causal temptations toward one with explanatory power. Metzger’s ripped hole was only one example of a broader trend that was not casual, but (because they were sifting through the same tool kit) predictive. In magical terms, one can think of the outcome of Metzger’s spell as something closer to divination rather than manifestation. Metzger, as an early internet adopter, saw the ebb and flow of information online and wrote an alchemical formula that mapped to a future that he would have seen as inevitable: one of decentralized media flow. Similarly, Don Webb’s XaTuring spell, perhaps, did not conjure a reality that necessitates protection from data abuse but saw a future where it would become increasingly necessary. Without being dismissive of the beliefs of spellcasters, it is worth considering how reading the desires and concerns embedded within the magical workings of early internet Technopaganism predicted a changing relationship between media and audience that occurred at the close of the twentieth century. Regardless of whether Metzger’s magic worked—whether or not he magically ripped a hole—we can look to his magic to understand the hole’s dimensions and the broader implications of a continued thread wherein media technologies and magic continue to be strange bedfellows.

Acknowledgments: The author expresses gratitude to Kyra Hunting for feedback on an early draft of this article. Additional thanks to those who provided insights along the way: Erik Davis, Taylor Ellwood, Alison Bailey Kennedy, Brenda Laurel, Allan Lundell, Richard Metzger, Paco Nathan, Mark Pesce, Douglas Rushkoff, R. U. Sirius, and Don Webb.

* * *

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74.  Sirius. [↑](#N74-ptr1)

75.  To be clear, there was still some personal magic to all of this, as is evidenced by the uptick in discussions of “smart drugs” and mind machines that were meant to hack the personal body. [↑](#N75-ptr1)

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