The antidote to soulless, regurgitative AI? That would be the ineffable, hidden world of magic. Welcome to the revolution

The revolution will not be televised. Instead, it will be found in libraries, in old scripts tucked away in attic trunks, folded up and left like fortune cookies in vases for future generations. It will be reclaimed from sea-tossed bottles made of green glass, and be hand-carved from ancient wood. It will be old, and it will be impervious to the AI age. 

What the AI age threatens to wreck, the arcane will recuperate by harkening back into former modes of knowledge: enchantment, mystery. Magic. 

That this age is already upon us may or may not be clear. The book world often foresees these vast cultural shifts, and we are witnessing one now. Our collective obsession with fantasy—dragons, werewolves, vampires—presages this movement. 

The reasons why, though, are obvious. 

The cybersphere threatens a new Dark Ages, where all forms of communication are meaningless. 

Within the cybersphere, origins are erased. People are reduced to avatars. Every morsel of knowledge is but a palimpsest of something that came before, which in turn produces infinite, diluted, condensed and regurgitated copies. In this hall of infinite mirrors, meaning ceases to exist.

Magic, on the other hand, resists easy classification. Arcane magic is enchantment, and in many cases, re-enchantment. It demands sacrifice, but creates the conditions by which the impossible becomes grounded in the real. 

Grounded is the key word here. The cyber world remains untethered, while the arcane remains inextricably linked to history, both magical and mundane. It is the study of religion, sociology, ethnography, botany. Astronomy and craft. 

AI cites data without value; magic creates value. Arcane magic is hidden texts that can’t be subsumed by the greedy ones and zeroes. Arcane knowledges must be sought for, quested after, won through impossible battles. It must be learned through patient study and practice, cultivated like an endless garden.  

The cybersphere threatens a new Dark Ages, where all forms of communication are meaningless. The arcane is knowledge handed down, generation to generation, all the more valuable because it is kept secret, blooming in the dark. 

AI seeks to establish a mono-culture, one in which all people are subsumed into “the masses”—save the machine overlords. The arcane creates wealth that can be neither bought nor sold. It must be uncovered, added to layer by layer. 

The revolution will take place like sparks lighting the night sky, the stars returning to their rightful place after cutting through veils of light pollution. Yes, the arcane can be found scattered through the pages of history: it is embodied in Blake’s theories of the imagination, underlined in Yeats’ definition of magic. It rides in with the Knights Templar and Rosicrucians, builds temples to the lost gods. It knocks on the spirit cabinet walls in a Victorian parlour.

This is a revolution that takes place in every generation. But ours is the one that needs it the most.

Image: From The Book of English Magic, Philip Carr-Gomm & Richard Heygate. Pg. 323