In
most cultures, people have worn things around their neck to protect them from
negative energies, from evil forces, and also to give them positive energies,
constructive powers. It is a way of
projecting themselves onto the world in order to take a more effective control
over their lives. Amulets are the
objects used to protect against negative energy and talismans are the objects
used to generate positive energy. Both of
them are attempts to deal with the inchoate flowing blendable continual
phenomena, the existence of which people sometimes feel. Evil is a concept for dealing with everything
from natural catastrophes to criminal minds, and sometimes when natural catastrophes
occur, they are seen as being caused by criminal minds. Criminal minds that cause natural
catastrophes are called sorcerers in some cultures. Anyway, amulets supposedly help people ward
off the effects of sorcerers and other inchoate evil forces.
On
the other hand, talismans confer magical powers and endow a person with good
fortune. Although nowadays, the
distinction between witches and sorcerers tend to be blurred, traditionally
witches tend to use their powers for good purposes, at least in many cultures. Also nowadays, the use of talismans doesn’t
make a person a witch, but rather the emphasis is on giving a person good luck.
In
both cases, these objects confer an atmosphere to the people who wear them, a
spiritual atmosphere that transforms a person’s life in a positive way by
transforming his field of experience.
This atmosphere from the spiritual world subtly transforms a field of
experience in the material world.
Today
most people in modern technological society don’t wear amulets or talismans. Most people today would think of such objects
as being objects of superstition: a way of thinking that has little relevance
for most of us today. But I wonder if
people have truly moved so far away from traditional amulets and talismans in
today’s world. To the extent that modern
technology is so complex that most people today really have no feel as to how
it really works, such people would experience it as magical, something of great
power whose real workings are impenetrable to the average person. And to the extent that modern people wear
digital devices to either protect themselves from negative situations or to
give them positive powers, these people are, in effect, creating digital
amulets and digital talismans. On the
surface, it would seem that the more things change, the more they stay the
same.
And
yet perhaps that is not exactly true.
Modern wearable digital devices are different from traditional amulets
and talismans in a number of ways. First
of all, the activation of a wearable digital device leads to a somewhat
predictable purpose within a predictable time period. Granted that the mechanism and energy which
activate a particular process for a given goal may not be fully understood by
the average user, but the external presentation of the process is fully
understood. The cause of the process
emanating from the device is connected temporally to the effect or goal of the
process in a way that can be readily perceived.
This
is not true with traditional amulets and talismans. First of all, the precise defined discrete
goal of a process and energy activated in an amulet or talisman cannot be
easily grasped in advance. Many times,
events or situations occur after a person starts wearing a traditional amulet
or talisman that are claimed to be the result of wearing the amulet or
talisman, even though a direct causal chain cannot be visually
established. Furthermore, no one can
predict ahead of time at what time intervals such an event or situation will
occur after the person starts to wear the amulet or talisman. In the case of the wearable device, a person
knows what will happen after he starts to set in motion the process for which
the device is being used. Furthermore,
the person will know what amount of time would have to elapse before the device
reaches the desired goal. In other words, with wearable devices, there
is much more control in terms of the nature of the outcome and the time elapse
to the outcome. Part of this control is
based on the fact that the outcome of the wearable device is a defined discrete
phenomenon with a defined discrete beginning and a defined discrete
ending. This is true even though
paradoxically there is this flowing blendable continual spiritual faith in the technological processes involved, even though
most people have no real understanding of how they work. So most people today have a transcendent
spiritual faith in a very concrete though, at the same time, mysterious
technological process.
Mystery
is the key word here. The mystery of
today’s extremely complex technological processes blur into an almost religious
wonder, the kind that surround traditional amulets and talismans. And both modern technological processes and
traditional magical processes are powered by sources of energy that people
can’t mentally grasp easily. But the
fact that people can more easily control the presentations of modern
technological processes and energy than the presentations of traditional
magical processes and energy means that they can interact with the machine
manifestations more easily. I would
venture to say that these more frequent interactions lead to a kind of
addiction. Modern technology ends up almost
magically controlling its uses, particularly now that we have so many different
wearable devices. The more people end up
using modern technology, the more it ends up controlling them. Traditional magical events and experiences,
because people can’t control when or where they will occur with the same
accuracy, simply don’t have the same compelling effect on believers. Some might
say that precisely because traditional magical powers are so unpredictable,
that that would make people believe even more intensely to make them work. But I think that nothing convinces like
successful outcomes. The effects of
wearable devices are constant, the effects of traditional magic in terms of
manifestations are more spread out. So
paradoxically, today we are controlled by a more powerful magic than any that
traditional cultures ever experienced.
© 2020 Laurence Mesirow
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