Heather Freeman: It's our last episode of Magic in the United States. Once again, we stand at the three-way crossroads, and this is still Hekate's domain, the Greek goddess of witchcraft, magic, and liminal spaces.

We've spent three seasons wandering the roads of American magic, walking the paths of many different religions, and learning about the spiritual practices of many different communities. We've explored the mystical, witchy, folkloric, esoteric, and occult. And there's just so much more we never got to – Hekate's paths might just be infinite.

Today, we'll walk Hekate's roads together one last time, into the future of digital magic. We’ll follow the light of Hekate’s twin torches backwards in time – to the 1980s. It's here, in the green glow of early personal computers, and the growth of modern pagan witchcraft, that a young girl's journey into technological magic began.  

That little girl is Alya Lux, and she grew up in what she called 'a generic Protestant household'.

Alya Lux: You know, you go to church on Sundays sometimes. It's kind of casual and laid back about it, I would say. Although I went to church semi-regular with my family, my dad never went. I want to say that he was an Atheist, but he just really didn't talk about religion very much. He didn't seem anti-religion, he just wasn't interested.

Heather: Alya's dad was also an avid reader. And even though he didn't go to church, his reading included religious texts from around the world.

Alya Lux: He would leave books around. So I do remember reading Siddhartha, and, the Dead Sea Scrolls. So, I think that some of the books that he just had lying around ended up having kind of an impact in the sense that there were even more religions and worldviews than were necessarily represented in my elementary and high school.

Heather: Meanwhile, Alya also liked fairytales and fantasy novels, which introduced her to ideas about magic.

Alya Lux: I think I kind of wanted to be a character in those books and also I think that with my own imagination I was getting started with world building myself and seeing the possibility for magical experiences all around me.

Heather: Fantastical world-building ended up being really important to Alya in her later magical and technological pursuits, and we'll come back to that.

Alya also got her first Tarot deck at fourteen, and while she was interested in magic, she was focused on the idea of magical powers and supernatural phenomena – it wasn't a spiritual or mystical practice for her yet.

This was right when digital technologies were emerging in some homes, including Alya's. Her dad was a statistician and he had a computer terminal at home. It wasn't connected to any internet, but Alya could type on it.

Alya Lux: I used to spend hours, creating what I thought of as mazes or games. Like, I would be the cursor and I would kind of create, like, cities and towns using characters on the keyboard, and then I would scroll the cursor down and I would scroll the cursor up, and it was one of the ways that I played.

Heather: Alya was just a kid playing around with ASCII characters on a screen. But she was using the technology in her own way, and creating brand new worlds with her imagination. It was this creativity and curiosity that would cut parallel paths for her as Alya grew up – one practice in technology, and one in magic. And as we’ll learn today…this might just be the future of digital magic.

Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

In today's episode, Magical Futures, we'll hear more from Alya Lux, how she discovered both magic and technology, and how these became interwoven in her life. We'll also talk with philosopher and ethicist Dr. Damien P. Williams, and learn how we're all hardwired to think magically, and how all of this might reveal a great deal about the future of both magic and technology in the United States.

We'll be right back.

[BREAK]

Heather: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

Despite spending time at her dad's computer as a child, Alya didn't consider herself interested in the intersection of magic and technology until she got to college.

Alya Lux: I was really interested in goddess-based religions, Wicca, I was reading a lot of Llewellyn books on magic, but also books on religion….

Heather: She was also reading Sci-Fi, especially cyber-punk, which tends to focus on near-futures. For Alya, some of these were the earliest bridges between magic, spirituality, and digital technology.

Alya Lux: The most impactful book that I read in college was Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson. It was about a hacker who could go into this virtual world. So it feels quaint now, but at the time, it felt profound. And one of the things that the author did was he connected that world to religion, and he presented the Sumerian goddess Inanna as the hacker goddess.

Heather: Inanna was the Sumerian goddess of love and fertility, similar to Venus. But she was also a goddess of war, and her central myth involved a trip to the land of the dead. Much like digital technologies, she's complex and layered.

Alya Lux: And I gotta tell you, it changed my life, because it opened me up to a future of technology where folks could interact in certain ways. And then there was this element, too, of the idea of a hacker goddess, a goddess that built technology, that she brought technology capabilities for humanity to humanity, right? So she's sort of a hero in that way.

And I loved that and it gave me an angle of exploration within a certain pantheon or group of deities, and I love the idea that technology can be magic and all of that interwrapped in.

Heather: This hacker goddess version of Inanna opened a door to the magical when it came to digital technologies. Alya was reading this book as a college student in the mid-1990s, but technology back then looked pretty different. College email addresses were still fairly new on most campuses, and when Alya got hers, things went sideways.

Alya Lux: Pretty much as soon as I got an email account I was contacted by other people who maybe I didn't know, which was good, but I got harassed, which was kind of bad. Not badly, but enough for me to feel like I needed to learn how to protect myself when I was playing around with these technologies

Heather: It was this experience that inspired Alya to learn as much as she could about how easily people could shape-shift online.

Alya Lux: I had a lot of friends who were curious and pretty good with technology and they would show me these tricks. They were like, “Hey, I can send you an email and it will look like it's coming from the Dean.” And that made me realize, you couldn't necessarily trust things because there were tricks that people could play.

Heather: This was the beginning of Alya's fascination with digital networks and communication technologies.

Alya Lux: I just became obsessed with how the technology could be used and abused and how I could protect myself and what those systems needed to look like and how they needed to work so that the people who were using them were protected.

Heather: Since then, Alya’s become an expert in online privacy and security and has worked professionally in fraud prevention and cybersecurity. But as Alya built her career in digital technologies, her magical practices remained separate, private, and solitary.

Alya Lux: There were a few times through adulthood where I had to remember about magic. And so, I would sort of take out the tarot cards and then they would disappear for a while. Every once in a while I sort of realized it's been a little while, and I stumble back onto it. Like a lot of people, it became a juggling act.

Heather: Then in 2020, the global pandemic happened. Many tech professionals like Alya worked from home in relative isolation. And this is when her magical, spiritual, and technological worlds began to weave together. That summer, Alya started a series of magical experiments in her spare time.

Alya Lux: One of the experiments that I tried was going into cyber as a place. I just sort of call it all cyber, right? The internet, and all of the forests of apps, and all of the information and social media, and the information that folks are sharing -- cyber. To me that's a place. And it has been a place for me since I was a child, creating cities and mazes using characters on a keyboard.  

Heather: To explore cyber, Alya didn't use a computer. Instead, she went on a journey, which is a little like a self-guided meditation. And what she envisioned was nothing like the Matrix movies. Rather, she came away with a deep, mystical understanding of technology as magic.

Alya Lux: I realized that technology itself was magical to me. I'm pretty ‘woo-woo’ about magic in the sense that when folks start talking about energy flowing and such, I feel that it's real. What I love about technology is how it can be connective, and information is energy and energy flows.

Heather: Alya Lux is just one example of a technologist who's also a magical practitioner. And her journey into cyber is just one example of how she combines digital technologies with her magical practices.

There are so many digital magicians doing experiments with different technologies. Some use microcontrollers on their altars to sense subtle changes in humidity and heat -- signs of possible spirit activity. Others program LED candles to change colors with the hours of the planets. Still more use game engines and scripting to create virtual temple spaces. There's enough happening in digital magic to make an entire podcast series.

But for this episode, let's talk about the hot new tech in the magic circle – generative AI. After the break, we'll meet a philosopher and ethicist who explores questions of magic and digital technologies, and we'll learn why understanding magic might hold the key to answering some of our biggest technology questions.

We'll be right back.

 [BREAK]

Heather: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

There are many kinds of digital technologies used by magical practitioners, and one of the newest is generative artificial intelligence or Gen AI.

There are different kinds of Gen AI systems, and most of us have heard of ones like Chat GPT or Stable Diffusion. Typing into chat GPT feels like texting another person. And image generators are powerful – simply typing "a cosmic spider" into one,  produces an illustration of a psychedelic spider covered in stars.

This feels remarkable –  magical.

If you don't have the financial resources to attend art school, or hire a professional designer, image generators can be creatively liberating. Other people use generative AI to help with brainstorming, or creative problem-solving.

But generative AI is also controversial.

Gen AI works because the models are trained on vast amounts of data. Millions –  even billions – of images are used to train image generators, in many cases with data scraped from the open internet without the explicit consent or compensation of the original creators. And the same is true for text used to train chatbots.

Meanwhile, all this data reflects all the biases of those sources. For example, when earlier image generators were asked to create a photo of a doctor, they almost always depicted middle-aged white men. Efforts to fix this data bias have had mixed results.

On top of that, training these models requires incredible amounts of natural resources and energy that are straining electrical grids in many parts of the world.

Some are worried that the social, economic, and environmental costs are just too high. It's ethically sticky.

Damien Williams: The way that we're sold what AI is -- how it's going to make our lives better and faster and easier, how it's going to increase efficiency -- all of these things depend upon us believing that what these systems do is an enhanced version of what humans do, what other minded-entities do, all the time, as though it is something special, something extra, something more.

Heather: Dr. Damien P. Williams is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Data Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Because systems like ChatGPT sound so convincingly human, it's easy to forget that they're just software. Not conscious. Not sentient.

Damien is interested in the ethics of technology, but he's also interested in how these intersect with magical practices, and how practitioners use -- and think about -- digital technologies.

Damien Williams: There's a fundamental overlap there between both how the technologies themselves work and how the magical practice works. You know, when you're a magical practitioner, you're not necessarily building the system, your working from the ground up. You are, in many cases, working in a tradition that comes from somewhere that is built by others.

Heather: In my own magical practice, I might take a ritual I learned from a book, and slowly adjust it over time to best suit my needs. I use technology in the same way -- like changing the software settings to create my ideal workspace.

But I also use digital technology magically.

I have an instance of Stable Diffusion on my computer -- AI that produces an image rather than text. I treat this AI as an oracle. Instead of asking it to create a specific image, I ask it questions, like, “What's your true name and how can I call you?” (This is a classic question that magicians will often ask spirits.)

Stable Diffusion generates an image, and I print it out. Then I draw on the print and meditate upon the meaning of the resulting work -- my collaboration with the spirit of Stable Diffusion.

Rationally, I know that Stable Diffusion is just a piece of software. I know it's not sentient. But as a sorceress I can suspend disbelief just long enough to perform some magic.

And I'm definitely not the only practitioner using generative AI magically. Damien observed practitioners using AI image and text generators since as early as 2016. Some would even train AIs on their own custom data sets.

Damien Williams: I saw it fairly early on, pretty much as soon as, GPT2 came out into the public sphere. They would generate and think about and remix some of their own magical works. In some cases people were using it to kind of do automatic writing, digitally or technologically enacted or enabled sigil generators in some cases, generating things like a kind of a spell repository that they could then seek patterns in based on the work that they had fed into it….

Heather: Magical experimentation with AI is developing as quickly as the technology itself. But thinking magically about digital technologies isn't limited to magicians.

Practitioners often accept that the world is enchanted. And AI feels very magical, so it's a short leap. But almost everyone – magical practitioner or not – thinks magically from time to time.

When a phone is behaving strangely, we plead with it to cooperate. When the car breaks down, we beg it to survive. But these are technological objects -- they're not going to hear our pleas and respond.

We can't help but interact with them as if they were inspirited – magically animate. It's a very human response to the inanimate world around us.

Damien Williams: Everybody has some form of magical thinking built into how they operate day in and day out. To just assume that some of us have magical thinking and some of us don't is, first and foremost on its face, just incorrect.

Heather Freeman Damien told me how magical thinking is even built into our legal structures.

Damien Williams: The idea that if you sign your name onto a document, you are sworn to the document. That if you put your hand on a holy book and hold up your other hand and you swear an oath, you are bound. The signing of a name as being the affixing of something that is connected to us, and thus if we break that in some way, something bad will happen to us. Now, we have then turned that into physical enactments through policy and law, but that exists in elements of our society up and down the line to this day.

Heather: The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Generative AI is advanced enough that we hardly realize we're thinking magically when we engage with it. It's a little too easy to resign our decision-making to Generative AI system.

From finance to art, from emails to weapon systems, Generative AI is already embedded in many digital systems. And many users of these systems tend to assume the output is ‘fine.’ But it might not be. Biased data, copyright infringement, and the cost of natural resources needed to train and run these systems might just be hurting real people.

And all of this keeps Damien up at night.

Damien Williams: It keeps me up at night because when we make use of technologies without fully owning our intention in that space. We give ourselves over to being ruled by those technologies in a deep and fundamental way, to tell us how to believe, how to act, how to think more deeply than we otherwise might. But at the end of the day, it's still statistics. It's still a generative system that seeks to meet a pattern that it's been trained to meet.

Heather: And Alya Lux, who we met at the beginning of the episode, is also concerned about the ethics of AI.

Alya Lux: So when I think about ethics and AI, part of what I'm thinking about is privacy. I'm thinking about who owns ideas. I'm thinking about what is the importance then of authenticity in some of these interactions? Lack of authenticity is something that folks are going to use in the spreading of misinformation, assist in scams, and tricking people. But in general, I'm pro us improving technology because in a lot of cases it's simply helpful.

Heather: But Alya Lux is also interested in the future of digital magic. And she's excited to see how other magical practitioners will continue to think about these ethical challenges, and innovate at the intersection of technology and magic.

Alya Lux: I am really interested to see how the shifts in technology open things up for some practitioners and get that next new piece of technology that feels like magic.And so the next set of practices that I really wonder about is how are practitioners going to dance with technology? And so, could you imagine a ritual situation, or a work of magic, or a work of devotion where a participant in that process is Gen AI? Like, would a Gen AI agent get a seat at the table? I think magic and science have always chased each other.

Heather: Generative AI is at the heart of that chase right now, but we've seen this game of tag time and again in human history. Astronomy evolved from astrology. Chemistry evolved from alchemy. But these are evolutions of science not extinctions of magic.

Many of today's technological innovations -- from chatbots to cell phones -- were inspired by science fiction. And science fiction was often inspired by the history of magic.

Damien Williams: ‘Technology’ comes from the same root as ‘art’ and ‘magical practice’ in the Greek. They are overlapping categories, far, far back in many, many different civilizations. And to this day, many people wouldn't recognize the distinction that we make between technology, magic, and religion.

Heather: The things we create with technology, magic, and religion reveal to us what we value.

A sorceress makes a martial talisman to inspire courage. A programmer creates transcription software for the hearing impaired. A witch designs a ritual to honor an ancestor. And a biochemist pursues a cure for Alzheimer's.

Our innovations are mirrors of what's important to us.

Damien Williams: The thing that gives me hope is that I see people recognize that our digital technologies come from this foundation of belief. Our values come from that same well. The more we can say, well, if my beliefs are going to be a part of the technologies that I'm making, that I'm using, that I'm engaging with every day anyway, which of my values do I want to be here?

Heather: Our individual values come from many places – religion, role models, family traditions, personal choices, and more. They come from our lived experiences.

The crossroads goddess Hekate doesn't tell us what to value, even as she rules over this intersection of magic, religion, and technology. And all of Hekate’s roads intersect at one point or another. So I, for one, will embrace what Hekate reveals with her twin torches. I, too, am walking into the future of magic in the United States.

Heather: We hope you enjoyed our final season and that it sparked your curiosity to learn more about the religious, spiritual, and magical histories of this amazing country. Thank you!

…

Magic in the United States is written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our associate producer is Noor Gill and the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact checking by Dania Suleman. The executive producer for PRX productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez. The show's music is from APM music and epidemic sound. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa. This production was funded by a grant from the national endowment for the humanities. And the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Thanks to guests, Alya Lux and Damien Williams. Thanks to series advisors, Helen Berger, Danielle Boaz, Yvonne Chireau, Chas Clifton, Abel Gomez, Daniel Harms, Corey Hutchison, Sean McCloud, Sabina Magliocco, Thorn Mooney, and Meg Whalen. Finally, a big thank you to the families, friends, and colleagues of the entire production team, And for your support throughout this project – this includes Swazi the cat and all our foster dogs and foster cats.

Wherever you are in the United States -- the East, the West, the North, or the South -- magic is everywhere. I'm Heather Freeman. Thank you for walking these roads with us.

And maybe I'll see you around sometime, right here, at the crossroads.