The Algorithm Holy: TikTok, Technomancy, and the Rise of Algorithmic Divination

Abstract

The social media app TikTok was launched in the US in 2017 with a very specific purpose: sharing 15-s clips of singing and dancing to popular songs. Seven years and several billion downloads later, it is now the go-to app for Gen Z Internet users and much better known for its ultra-personalized algorithm, AI-driven filters, and network of thriving subcultures. Among them, a growing community of magical and spiritual practitioners, frequently collectivized as Witchtok, who use the app not only share their craft and create community but consider the technology itself a powerful partner with which to conduct readings, channel deities, connect to a collective conscious, and transcend the communicative boundaries between the human and spirit realms—a practice that can be understood as algorithmic divination. In analyzing contemporary witchcraft on TikTok and contextualizing it within the larger history of technospirituality, this paper aims to explore algorithmic divination as an increasingly popular and powerful practice of technomancy open to practitioners of diverse creed and belief.