Technology is Re-Enchanting the World

Bouba Science, Silicon Sorcery, and HexTech

Magic has entered the Overton window again. Have you noticed our culture shifting? Astrology hasn't merely persisted—it's conquered new territory, expanding from newspaper back pages into dating apps. Tarot decks are now a suitable accessory for coffee tables, they will soon make it to your therapist's waiting room alongside the latest issue of Psychology Today. Meanwhile, WitchTok flourishes, with an audience larger than most religions could claim a century ago. Magical metaphors have become ambient, almost unremarkable. More, importantly, even magical worldviews are making a comeback. Rationalist bloggers are talking about ancient Canaanite Gods, and business strategists are advocating for telepaths tapping into universal consciousness.

The typical story goes that technological development has accelerated disenchantment by reinforcing a mechanistic worldview. The calculating logic of machines and the success of science seems to have confirmed a universe devoid of inherent meaning, while fully explainable in technical terms. According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, technological culture privileges rationality aimed solely at practical and measurable outcomes. It disregards metaphysical questions, and reduces humans to functions, gradually stripping life of its spiritual depth and existential meaning.

Technology and science were historically blamed as the engines of disenchantment. However, the tables have turned. In collaboration with Philip, I argue that our latest scientific understanding and technological paradigms lead to a re-enchantment of the world. This re-enchantment is not just the pendulum swinging back, a regression to naive magical culture. Rather, it is a spiral, a new cultural development now integrating magic and rationality.

Shifting Grounds: the Magic of Science & Tech

Culture rides the wake of the currents generated by science and technology. The re-enchantment we're witnessing isn't some nostalgic cultural whim, but rather the visible tremors from deep epistemological fault lines shifting beneath our feet. Like seismologists tracking the hidden movements that precede earthquakes, we'll first map the scientific and technological developments that have created space for wonder to seep back through the cracks.

Bouba Science: Mystery re-enters Science

In pop science, the analogy of a Newtonian billiard ball universe persists: science is breaking down the world into ever smaller pieces and will eventually understand how it all fits together. However, actual scientists have long moved on from that view. Much as Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx (the "masters of suspicion") destabilized previous certainties about human nature and society, we are witnessing another paradigm shift through three major developments: quantum mechanics, complexity science, and consciousness studies.

As trite as mentioning quantum mechanics to make cultural arguments has become, society still hasn’t metabolized that paradigm shift after almost a century. Crucially, the inherent limits to what we can measure, as demonstrated by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, undermine the still prevalent view that science can ever gain complete understanding. Gödel's incompleteness theorems revealed similar limits of knowledge in mathematics around the same time. The fact that there are fundamental limits to what science can know makes room for mystery. Oh, and phenomena like superposition and entanglement boggle our minds enough to evoke child-like wonder.

Limits to knowledge are not just found on the subatomic scale or in formal math. Complexity science revealed how even simple rules can generate patterns that exceed our computational capacity to predict. Complex systems—from weather patterns to ecosystems or economies—demonstrate emergent properties that cannot be reduced to their parts. Rather than seeing ourselves as disconnected observers of mechanical processes, complexity science situates us within nested systems of organization—what Ken Wilber calls "holons within holons"—each level exhibiting properties irreducible to its components. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis represents one application of these insights, proposing that Earth's biosphere functions as a complex, self-regulating system.

More recently, the study of consciousness has reopened fundamental questions about mind and matter. Beginning with Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" and crystallized in David Chalmers' articulation of the "hard problem of consciousness," philosophers and scientists have been forced to reckon with the limitations of purely materialist explanations of subjective experience. While there are promising approaches (e.g. Tononi and Koch's Integrated Information Theory or Dehaene's Global Workspace Theory), no consensus exists about the nature of consciousness. Some prominent thinkers like Koch, Chalmers, Strawson, and more recently Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman have revived various forms of panpsychism and idealism, suggesting consciousness may be a fundamental aspect of reality rather than an emergent property of certain physical systems. Questions like "Could a forest possess some form of consciousness? Or the Earth itself?" have become philosophically respectable again.

These three paradigm shifts all set limits to science and even invalidate the very stance of the detached observer running scientific experiments. They tear down false certainties and re-situate the human as a part of the cosmos. A fundamentally wondrous cosmos that we won’t ever fully understand. When trying to encapsulate this cultural shift, the phonetic symbolism of "Kiki" (sharp, angular) versus "Bouba" (round, flowing) came to mind.

The previous reductionist approach to science, with its clean disciplinary boundaries and analytical incisions, is Kiki. The emerging paradigm, with its wave functions, feedback loops, and gradient boundaries, feels more like Bouba. This isn't to suggest science has abandoned rigor or precision. Rather, it has matured to recognize its own boundary conditions. Bouba Science has re-introduced fundamental mystery, and a sense of enchantment is downstream of that mystery. Will Heisenberg, Lovelock, and Nagel be known as the masters of re-enchantment?

Silicon Sorcery: The Magic of Computing

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

While science has re-introduced mystery while grappling with its own limits, technology is giving rise to an increasing crescendo of magical metaphors. Magical metaphors feel so natural for technology precisely for the reasons Clarke intuited: when the underlying mechanisms exceed our comprehension, the result seems magical. We feel that sense of wonder with every new computing paradigm. AI and blockchain now empower users to transition from passive wonder to active spell crafting.

Magic in the Aesthetics of Technology

Magic has woven itself into our technological vocabulary so seamlessly that we barely notice it. “Wizards” guide our software installations while invisible “daemons” maintain our systems behind digital curtains. We no longer share media—we “cast” it across devices as if by incantation. We don't call a taxi—we “summon” an Uber from the ether. The linguistic pattern reveals our relationship to technology that has outpaced our comprehension.

The word “magic” itself runs like a current through Silicon Valley's history: From Apple's suite of Magic devices (mouse, keyboard, etc.) to the aptly named General Magic (whose innovations laid the groundwork for the smartphone revolution). Magic Leap, aiming to pick up that thread, lept a bit too far. This isn't mere branding coincidence but reveals an aesthetic lineage from ancient Kabbalists who taught clay to live to modern technologists who taught sand to think. Venkatesh Rao recently described the parallels between the silicon valley ideal of the garage hacker and hermeticism: solitary practitioners working at the boundaries of established knowledge, manipulating hidden forces through specialized languages.

Nowhere is this magical lexicon more apparent than in blockchain technology. “Ethereum” explicitly evokes the ethereal planes of mysticism while 'oracles' serve as bridges connecting this digital realm to external realities. “Genesis blocks” echo creation myths, and “burning tokens” recreates ritual sacrifice in digital form. The ecosystem teems with explicitly magical nomenclature: from the “Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians” (a technical working group) to infrastructure providers like “Alchemy” and ecosystems like “Gnosis”. Even the spectral realm has materialized in digital form through the “Phantom” wallet and the “Aave” money market (Finnish for “ghost”). Our “crypto-economic” infrastructure is haunted by the language of the occult at every level.

From Technological Magic to Magick

The more advanced the technology, the more magical it seems. Increasingly complex and layered tech stacks have widened that gap between UX and understanding.

Consider the smartphone you may be reading this on—our phones feel like contemporary scrying glasses connecting us to invisible forces because we have no idea how they work. Their inner workings include advanced photolithography, transistors optimized at the nanoscale, and global telecommunications infrastructure, for starters. There is not a single person in the world who could rebuild a smartphone from scratch. Yet we know the right taps and swipes required to make them deliver the desired outcomes. Is this relationship fundamentally different from the ceremonial magician's approach to their tools?

This trajectory only accelerates with AI agents and magic internet money. Interacting with LLMs feels like commanding a servitor in magical practice, an ethereal helper operating according to its own hidden logic. Neural networks are black boxes by architectural necessity; it’s impossible to trace the exact pathways by which they transform input to output. Similarly, blockchain transactions resemble elaborate spells: precise formulations that, when properly executed, produce verifiable transformations in a shared reality.

What is new is the democratization of these magical capabilities. Previously, only specialized priests (engineers, lawyers, etc.) could work technological magic. Now, increasingly, everyone can command AI assistants to code or create binding smart contracts.

Technology transforms from Magic to Magick (to borrow Crowley’s distinction): from passive wonder to active participation in shaping reality.

Let's hope we don't get ahead of ourselves. The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the Golem of Prague read less like ancient myths and more like prophetic scenario planning for our current moment. The letter that transforms "emet" to "met" on the golem's forehead—truth to death with the removal of a single character—feels unsettlingly resonant in an age where automated systems can be catastrophically derailed by a misplaced semicolon in their code.

HexTech: When Magic Becomes Technological

“Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology”

We've seen how the advancement of science re-introduced mystery into the scientific worldview and how technology feels increasingly magical as it progresses. There is an analogous development happening in the other direction: Magical practices become more subsumed by technology. As our understanding increases and our maps become more flexible, the dividing line between magic and science blurs increasingly.

In the animated series Arcane, "HexTech" represents the fusion of arcane magic with scientific innovation. Just as the engineers of Piltover harnessed magical crystals through technological frameworks, today's researchers are applying scientific methodologies to practices once dismissed as superstition.

Tech Eats Magic

What was once the exclusive domain of ascetics sitting cross-legged in Himalayan caves has now entered the laboratories of elite research institutions. Richard Davidson's lab has used EEG to reveal deep changes in brain regions associated with attention and emotional regulation in Tibetan monks.

This scientific validation has enabled mindfulness to move from the fringes into mainstream medicine. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is now a staple in medical interventions. From there, meditation has found its way into smartphone applications and corporate programs (e.g. Google’s “Search Inside Yourself”).

A similar movement of scientific validation and commercialization into medicine has happened with psychedelics, especially psilocybin and MDMA. Substances that were once consumed in ceremonial contexts to commune with spirits or divine realms are now administered in clinical settings with standardized psychological assessments.

The Wim Hof Method provides a compelling case study of this techno-magical fusion. Hof combined elements from Tummo (inner heat meditation) and other traditional practices into a system that achieves feats previously thought impossible, including voluntarily influencing body temperature and immune system function. Other examples include explaining the energy system of chakras and nadis with the lymphatic system, and the effect of mantras with how vibrational frequencies are stimulating the vagus nerve.

Modern adaptations of ancient techniques strip away their ethical and cosmological frameworks, focusing instead on operational effectiveness. Like HexTech crystals extracted from their original context, these practices have been refined and repurposed for contemporary applications.

Tech Can’t Fully Digest Magic

When ancient practices enter our technological paradigm, they undergo a transformation. In the effort to make them safe, simple, and "scientific," something essential is lost. An eight-week mindfulness course bears little resemblance to a three-year retreat on the Yogas of Naropa. Beyond mere cultural context and dosage, what is stripped away are precisely the radical, subversive elements of these traditions—the aspects that don't merely help us function better within existing structures but fundamentally question those structures, and create new ways of being in the world. Techno-capitalism eagerly extracts the procedural knowing from these traditions while systematically disregarding their participatory knowing. As Foucault might observe, institutions excel at incorporating potentially disruptive practices by carefully excising their transformative edges. Executives practicing corporate mindfulness rarely confront the insight that their attachment to wealth and status is itself the root of their suffering.

Yet despite science's ongoing efforts to validate, operationalize, and productize these ancient practices, they retain an untameable core. Like the HexTech in Arcane that retained its unpredictable, transformative power even after careful engineering, dedicated meditation and deep psychedelic journeys maintain their capacity to fundamentally rewire our understanding of reality. These practices weren't designed merely to reduce stress—they emerged within complex ecologies of practice with comprehensive worldviews, and aimed at deep personal transformation.

Ironically, the commercialized versions of these techniques often function as Trojan horses. They appear compatible with consumerist values while quietly drawing practitioners toward deeper engagement. McMindfulness becomes a pipeline to the Dharma Overground. This is how these traditions maintain their transformative potential even as they're packaged into products and protocols. Mindfulness always leads back to Buddhism, psychedelics always lead back to Shamanism.

The resistance isn't limited to traditional lineages. High-dose engagement with these practices frequently leads to encounters with experiences that defy conventional explanation—from paranormal phenomena to encounters with seemingly autonomous entities. This frontier of "high weirdness" remains utterly indigestible by the technological paradigm. What began as an attempt to harness the power of ancient magical practices may yet catalyze outcomes far more radical than their scientific validators ever imagined: nothing less than a fundamental shift in our dominant worldview.

Magic: from Metaphor to Worldview

While magical metaphors have become commonplace in science and technology, the underlying worldview of most people is still firmly locked into modernist rationalism. In “Technic and Magic”, Federico Campagna describes our current dominant worldview as "Technic": A worldview that reduces everything to measurable, fungible units within a system of absolute instrumentality. Each element functions as a replaceable part in the vast clockwork of society. This is Max Weber’s age of disenchantment, where myth and mystery are removed from social life and replaced by rationality, bureaucracy, and science—what I've previously called the global religion of Scientific Consumerist Humanism.

The proliferation of magical terminology in technology isn't merely coincidental—it prefigures a deeper shift in worldview. The alternative reality system Campagna proposes—"Magic"—centers on what he calls "the ineffable," that which cannot be fully captured, measured, or instrumentalized. From this fundamental mystery emerges a sentient world characterized by rhythms, symbolic resonance, and plurality—aligning with what I've described elsewhere as a magical way of looking.

How might our culture transition from Technic to Magic? Campagna identifies an “indigestible kernel” that can’t be captured by Technic’s language and quantification as the catalyst for a paradigmatic flip in our cultural worldview. This indigestible element expands into the inherent mystery at reality's foundation—the ground from which Magic as a worldview arises. This parallels the transformative aspects of ancient practices that resist complete technological domestication. A few executives practicing corporate mindfulness will actually get a world-shattering glimpse of emptiness. Some carefully controlled psychedelic sessions will not just reduce depression, but trigger profound ontological shifts. These are instances of Magic disrupting Technic from within.

The emergence of what we've called "Bouba Science" represents another manifestation of this worldview shift. Quantum mechanics places limits on what can be known in principle, not just in practice. Complexity science reveals emergent properties that cannot be reduced to their components. Consciousness studies confront us with the hard problem that seems to resist complete materialist explanation. Each of these represents an encounter with the ineffable at the very heart of our most sophisticated knowledge systems. Technic is Kiki, Magic is Bouba. The scientific paradigm shift from reductionism to complexity and emergence is now being mirrored, decades later, in our broader culture.

This cultural transformation finds theoretical grounding in developmental models proposed by integral theorists like Ken Wilber and metamodernist thinkers like Hanzi Freinacht. Both describe cultural development not as a linear progression but as a spiral that ultimately reintegrates elements previously transcended. The integrative/metamodern stage doesn't reject rationality but contextualizes it within a larger framework that can also accommodate the direct knowing and participatory characteristics of earlier magical stages.

We are witnessing the emergence of a sophisticated synthesis capable of holding apparent opposites in productive tension—where analytical measurement exist within a broader recognition of meaning, mystery, and direct experience.

An Enchanted Future

Throughout our exploration, we've witnessed a remarkable convergence emerging between science and magic. On one side, science increasingly leads us toward mystery rather than away from it. At the same time, as our technologies become more powerful, they increasingly feel magical. On the other side, ancient magical practices are being validated by science and operationalized through technology. What was once a rigid boundary between scientific and magical thinking has become a permeable membrane, allowing ideas, methods, and experiences to flow in both directions.

This exchange isn't merely superficial. While for most people, magic still operates at the level of metaphor, it increasingly reshapes our worldview through two powerful mechanisms: the bait-and-switch of scientific paradigm shifts that reintroduce mystery at their core, and the Trojan horse of psycho-technologies that smuggle transformative experiences into mainstream contexts. As we look ahead, the convergence of these trends points toward a world that feels increasingly enchanted—not because we've abandoned reason, but because we've expanded it to include what it previously excluded.

In this emerging paradigm, the Bouba quality we identified earlier—rounded, flowing, interconnected—doesn't replace the Kiki quality of sharp analysis but provides the larger context for it. Technology doesn't become less technological, nor does magic become less magical—rather, each reveals itself as aspects of a single continuum of human engagement with reality. Our fundamental worldview becomes magical while we continue to wield rationality and technology as sophisticated tools within that larger frame. The relationship becomes fractal in nature: the enchanted world of Magic holds the context for the application of Technic, which in turn encounters mystery at its core.

The scientist who smashes particles together and the meditator who experiences "neither perception / neither non-perception" are approaching the same mystery from different directions, with different technologies. Both stand at the edge of the known, peering into the ineffable with their respective instruments. Both of them encounter a world that is profoundly mysterious and full of possibility. And critically, both recognize that as powerful as their technologies are, they will never be able to exhaust the burgeoning plurality of an alive cosmos. We are not returning to a pre-modern enchantment but spiraling forward to a post-rational re-enchantment that integrates rather than rejects our scientific and technological achievements.

We will find ourselves in an enchanted world once again.