Strange magic

So much of our fiction and social commentary involves the dangers of technology, ad how the use of it destroys the soul and removes magic from the world, metaphorically speaking of course. You can't spend any time on social media without seeing some meme expressing nostalgia for the times when we weren't connected, or bragging about how someone still uses/knows about older tech like VCR's or whatever.

And of course we keep finding ways to kill each other with technological advancements, so there is that.

I am not saying it is wrong exactly to be distrustful of technology, but I feel like we don't approach this with the correct mindset.

Leaving aside religious persecution, wizards, witches, alchemists, wise men/women, and mystical sorts of all types had one thing in common, knowledge, and those claiming that knowledge were usually held in esteem by those around them. That is something we don't respect as much as we should anymore.

A wizard, with his crystal ball or scrying pool, could seek out answers to problems, find people, and gain insight beyond that which the average person was capable of. With some little work, he could have the answers to the mysteries of the universe for anyone willing to pay his price.

I can do that with a cell phone and my laptop.

Well, not all the mysteries of the universe, but the average person doesn't go to a wise person to understand quantum theory or why they were born, they go to one to decide when the right time to plant is, or for advice about marriage, or to predict the weather, or for what to do if their leg turns green. All these are questions any of us can answer now (go to a doctor if your leg turns green please) but now we complain about the access we have to that knowledge.

I watched a short video earlier today, it told the story of a magical creature who, as humanity encroached and industrialization increased, lost the magical powers that it had and became for a time no more than a regular human, as time passed however it was remade using that same technology to something just as wondrous as before, The show was not about that loss, or condemning technological progress, but rather how wonders are what we make of them, the metamorphosis from one type of understanding to another.

Each of us has so much power available, we could each be our own wise person, our own alchemist or sage, but we have been told for so long that if something is easy there must be something wrong with it, that if we can do it it isn't special, because power doesn't come to the average, it only comes to the powerful.

This is a lie that we believe because it is easier, and because it is what we know, and because it suits those who wield temporal power over us that it be so.

It's not so simple obviously, obstacles to overcoming the imbalance of power are far greater than just knowledge, but it is a start, we need to learn how to be educated, to educate ourselves and others. We need to respect knowledge and those who have it, because we all can have it, which means we all deserve that respect. Reveling in our ignorance isn't working, embracing old ways is also not working embracing technology as the new magic, not in the sense that it is mysterious and unknowable, but rather to understand it as an almost spiritual connection to knowing.

We look at our access to information as a toy, as a distraction from the real world, but that information is just as real as anything else, our view of it is false, is social media obsession a real societal problem? I dunno, maybe, personally I think probably not but I am prepared to be wrong, does almost every major online community openly support white supremacy? Sure! But it doesn't have to.

We can't grab political or financial power from those who have it right now, that just isn't happening, we can't fix the environment with thing as they are, or tackle any of the other massive societal problems we face with a serious expectation of success. There is systemic opposition to a sea change of that nature that we don't possess the means to overcome, but we have access to knowledge, we have access to each other, the technology that can change the world for the better is out there, sometimes it is the same as what made it worse, but we can teach ourselves to use it better. We can learn to organize and to teach, we can become powerful.

We can be wizards, we can be wise.