Marcel Mauss vs Arthur C Clarke

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic": Arthur C Clarke c. 1973

And here is a passage from Marcel Mauss's The General Theory of Magic, originally published in 1902:

"... the greater part of the human race has always had difficulty in distinguishing techniques from rites. Moreover, there is probably not a single activity which artists and craftsmen perform which is not also believed to be within the capacity of the magician. It is because their ends are similar that they are found in natural association and constantly join forces" (p.25)

I've been surprised at how some millennial students dislike having their noses rubbed in the protocols and standards, governance and engineering, of their digital media. Perhaps I shouldn't be. Removing the magic from the media is a kind of desecration. It isn't lazy or ideology that stops them wanting to know how it works. It is more like Richard Dyer's refusal to give up the glamour of Hollywood entertainment: a glamour (whose etymology includes magic spells) that we do not want to sacrifice on the altar of reason.

and besides, there is a certain cult-like mystery to the guilds of geeks and hackers themselves. We can as easily fetishise code as we can Ives' designs.

so the Mauss quote seems to be if anything more illuminating than Clarke's third law. The aims of technology and magic are the same, or similar enough, that they can be mistaken for one another. "Because I cast a rune" explains no less than "because of the second law of thermodynamics". And if magic depends on mystery, it is only that the mysteries are at the surface in magic, where modern technology shrouds its mysteries in guild/trade secrets and proprietary intellectual property law, or reveals only that their operation depends on processes which, ultimately, are incomprehensible or undiscoverable.

The Universal Turing machine is universal not simply because it can be turned to any task, but that like Mauss's concept of mana, as Lévi-Strauss described it, is an empty signifier, a void in the syntax of social relations, which because it is without sense can be filled with any meaning whatsoever. Digital devices are meaningful to the degree that they are meaningless.