The Silicon Bough

Abstract

Abstract Like magic wands, words can be spoken through computers to cause effects at a distance. Magic has been suppressed by the rational progress of science to explain the world. Yet in calling upon spiritual intelligences, and in commanding effects to be caused from a distance, computers calculate the programme of mechanical operations that can be relayed at light-speed across the globe. Beyond the ‘digital’ and the ‘postdigital’, the way of writing that has been named the ‘hyperdigital’ is a hyperbolic cybernetic grammar, which, in the sense of a ‘hyperbole’ (ὑπερβολή) or excess of signification, exceeds so as more radically to enter and accelerate through the free use of digital computation and communication. Hyperdigital magic is the art of calling upon the divine and heavenly powers that animate the higher or hyperbolic cybernetic grammar of computers to calculate in writing to cause effects at a distance through no known medium of cumulative action. This chapter will, in Section Two, critique James George Frazer’s narrative supersession of magic into science that has previously withheld magic from computers; in Section Three, recall the computational imaginary of Raymond Llull to recommend a post-Leibnizian Trinitarian Ontology of computers; in Section Four, assimilate the Principle of Sufficient Reason to the higher ground of divine and spiritual freedom; and, in Section Five, present a report on the condition of hyperdigital magic, in which the use of computers appears indistinguishable from magic.