Sources with a ⭐ are those that I particularly enjoyed.

@[email protected] / @porges on Twitter

Articles on the rise of occult practices

Title Slide

• Geometrical Psychology: Mathematical Models of Consciousness by the 19th-Century Psychologist Benjamin Betts – The Marginalian (the spiral)

General Reading

• “What is Code?” in Bloomberg (Paul Ford, 2015)
  • probably the best article ever written about programming (as a profession)
• Schemas of Uncertainty has many good articles:
  • ⭐ Algorithms as Cartomancy (Flavia Dzodan, 2019)
  • What if Technology were a Prayer? (Danae Io, interview with K Allado-McDowell)
  • The Future-Oracular: Prediction, Divination, and the Politics of Uncertainty (Emily Rosamond, ?)
• “What Kind of Sorcery Is This? - Why Code is So Often Compared to Magic” in The Atlantic (Samuel Arbesman, 2016)
• Three Thousand Years of Algorithmic Rituals: The Emergence of AI from the Computation of Space - Journal #101 (e-flux.com) (Matteo Pasquinelli, 2019)
• Coding the Digital Occult – Etic Lab (Stephanie, 2018)
• HackCurio: Decoding the Cultures of Hacking (Alex Ketchum, 2022)
  • and the associated Airtable - From Tech Wizard to Cyber Witch Gallery
• ⭐ TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Erik Davis, 2015)
  • Reflections on Erik Davis’ Techgnosis | Let's have a mind and raise flowers. (wordpress.com)
• Magical Code and Coded Magic: The Persistence of Occult Ideas in Modern Gaming and Computing (2013)
• There's a Ghost in my Mouse: How the Occult Informed the Dawning of the Age of the Internet (2018)
  • review of a talk
• God and the Chip: Religion and the Culture of Technology (William Stahl, 1999)
  • especially the chapter “Venerating the Black Box”
  • cites The Notion of Magic (Murray and Rosalie Wax, 1963) & The Magical World View (1962)
• “When Books Read You, a Defense of Bibliomancy” (Ed Simon**,** 2018)

Stuff I only browsed

• Finite of Sense and Infinite of Thought: A History of Computation, Logic and Algebra, Part I (Ron Pressler, 2018)
  • this is very good but I haven’t had the time to read it!
• Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural (Natale & Pasulka, 2019)
  • read only extracts for citation