---
date: 2022-10-31
title: Ubiquitous, Mundane Magic
#heroImg: /img/20221031-hero-laura-ockel-nIEHqGSymRU-unsplash.jpg
#heroImgAlt: "A macro shot of a silicon wafer with dozens of uncut ICs visible. Credit: Laura Ockel on Unsplash."
tags:
- magic
---

I've been thinking again lately about how we live in a world with ubiquitous,
mundane magic.

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We feed lightning into tiny, intricate structures made of sand and metal to
compel them towards thought, keeping their own internal time using perfectly
beating hearts made of crystal, sustaining themselves with energy from blocks
of solid metallic acid, communicating with other thinking structures using
meshes of invisible light all around us.

We have opportunities to learn how to harness and direct the thoughts of these
structures in school---how to make them think more quickly, or more creatively,
or more aesthetically and approachably for those not familiar with the arcane,
inscrutable languages used to form those thought-directing spells. We routinely
collaborate in the creation of these spells with people from distant cities
with whom we have not, and perhaps will never meet face to face. We refer to
spellcrafting techniques by the names of their original codifiers ("Kruskal's
Algorithm for Minimum Spanning Forests").

We carry opaque slabs of inorganic materials in our pockets, skeletons of glass
and resin, veins of copper and gold, capable of near instantaneous
communication across the entire world via metal obelisks placed in strategic
geographic locations, able to divine for us our precise positions around the
Earth with the aid of constellations of artificial stars that we've placed up
in the sky and their precisely manufactured atomic hearts, calibrated to
accommodate for the measurable difference in the *speed of time* that they
experience from their homes in the sky.

We have an incredible wealth of knowledge at our fingertips---literally, even
setting the Internet aside, thanks to readily available thumbnail-sized flakes
with memories capacious enough for entire books, entire shelves, entire
*libraries.* This cannot be overstated: do you actually *know* how big a
terabyte is? The human mind did not *evolve* to realistically comprehend
numbers at that scale.

And yet that's all just... normal? Even though there's a whole, real,
fantastical world all around us? I find that blasé attitude fascinating.
Clarke's third law---that any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic (and the designer's corollary: that any technology
distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced)---if the magic it refers
to is meant to carry the same sense of wonder which I associate with the term,
the law seems to have... forgotten, or perhaps ignored, human neuroplasticity's
capacity for forcing even the wildest realities into boring, routine
familiarity, and I feel like that loss of wonder is a shame.

That's why today, for Halloween, even though I'm not wearing anything different
from what I usually wear, I'm dressed as a witch. :mage_woman: