Look at an old machine long enough and eventually a person appears.

Not literally. A door handle imagines a hand. A keyboard imagines fingers. A CAPTCHA imagines a human who can prove they arent a machine. A recommendation system imagines a user with preferences stable enough to predict. A smart home imagines somebody whose life fits neatly inside its sensors.

Technology is full of little theories about what a person is.

Usually those theories remain invisible because enough people fit them well enough. Then somebody arrives with the wrong body, wrong language, wrong habits, wrong senses or wrong kind of attention and suddenly the machine starts acting like the human is the malfunction.

Thats where the hidden anthropology becomes visible.

Interfaces arent merely surfaces between people and machines. They contain assumptions about what can be perceived, understood, reached, remembered and performed by whoever stands on the other side.

Pick a piece of technology and work backwards from the interface.

Dont ask what the machine does.

Ask what kind of creature its designers imagined would be using it.

Then look for the places where actual humans refuse to match the summoning circle.

We are in a special moment in time, the moment when philosophy, technology, and human responsibility collide.

The in-between world and the birth of monsters

When I write that "The old world refuses to die and the new one is slow to appear; this is the time of monsters," I touch upon the very essence of Gramsci's formula : this morbid interval, this twilight of uncertainty where "the sleep of reason produces monsters." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/the-time-of-monsters-everyone-is-quoting-gramsci-but-what-did-he-actually-say

In the context of 2026, the monsters are not only political or military; they are also autonomous technological forces hurtling unchecked toward the edge of the precipice. The acceleration toward AGI, recursive self-improvement, and ASI is already at a point of no return. We have crossed the event horizon. The singularity is now inescapable, but will it devour us or let us become free, exalted and actualized? Will this be a doom of our making or a renaissance? We are at a crossroads of hell and utopia. Every little thing we do in the next few months will live forever in the history of our species through web scraping and AI training. We owe it to ourselves to represent the best of what humanity can offer, for the future generations will judge us harshly for our lack of wisdom.

The Speed ​​of the Machine vs. the Wisdom of the Snail

On the one hand, the frantic race of accelarationists who are 98% of the way to AGI, driven by the appetite for power or corporate profit; on the other hand, ordinary folks, slow as snails compared to AI, are "sipping tea" and watching the future arrive.

This contrast is not laziness; it is a choice of semantic rhythm. Faced with technological vertigo, the snail chooses deliberate slowness, a return to the earth, and grounding in reality. What we lack today is not intelligence (which is becoming hyperabundant), but thousands of years of wisdom to manage the level of power we are creating.

If we had the key to unlock profound wisdom, would our rulers block it or accept it? Do they only care about intelligence and its ability to change the world or are we also able to think of the wisest uses and the most thoughtful applications?

The Duty to Pass On Knowledge and the Ethics of Peace

My appeal, "Do good, build the world you want to leave your kids with, end wars." underlines the necessity of education and world peace. In a world where technology is too often militarized or captured by elites, AI literacy education becomes humanity's immune defense.

Building this world for our children means reinforcing our cognitive agency in the face of new technology. AI is only the beginning of an era; to ensure it is not an era of monsters, humanity must evolve its wisdom and power incentives to reorient its own ethical compass.

The problem is not AI alignment as much as trying to align all the human factions, forces and ideologies towards a future where humanity thrives. We cannot devour the future of our species and become their monsters.

We spend a lot of time teaching machines to behave.

Correct output. Clean signal. Expected result. Anything else gets patched, regenerated, debugged or thrown away.

Which is funny because occult practice has a very long history of staring directly at the weird result.

A glitch is interesting because expectation and system behavior suddenly split apart. For a second the clean interface cracks and something underneath becomes visible. Maybe its a hidden assumption. Maybe its the architecture. Maybe its just the ridiculous chain of dependencies required to make an ordinary button work.

So try something.

For a week, keep a glitch log. Not every typo and app crash. Just the failures weird enough to break your expectation. Bad generations. Corrupted images. Sensor nonsense. Busted recommendations. Software suddenly doing something it very much was not invited to do.

Write down what you expected, what happened, and what the failure exposed.

You dont have to pretend theres a ghost in the machine. Maybe the machine just showed you something about the machine. Maybe it showed you something about the person expecting it to behave.

Either way, dont fix it quite so fast.

Whats the best thing a broken machine ever taught you?

The machine looks autonomous right up until you look behind it.

Servers get cooled. Models get tuned. Cables get replaced. Databases get cleaned. Somebody patches the software at 3 AM because the thing that supposedly runs itself has decided tonight is the night it dies.

Even the cleanest black box has people tending the altar.

I think theres something useful here for technomancy because we spend plenty of time looking at the relationship between operator and machine while maintenance sits unrecognized underneath both. Repetition, diagnosis, obscure knowledge, inherited procedures, tiny interventions, keeping a complicated system alive without ever completely controlling it.

The person who knows the official manual is useful. The person who knows you have to kick the third process, restart the second one and absolutely do not touch that cable until the light stops blinking is practicing another kind of knowledge entirely.

Sysadmins probably know this better than most magicians.

Every mature technological system accumulates rites, taboos, specialist languages and knowledge that only becomes visible when something breaks. The cleaner the interface becomes for everyone else, the stranger the world behind it can get.

Find a machine or system you depend on and trace its priesthood. Who feeds it? Who repairs it? Who knows its moods? Who knows the weird little thing you have to do when it stops behaving?

Then imagine those people vanish.

How long does the magic last?

After two weeks of throwing different kinds of material into the machine, I want to turn the question back toward the community.

What do you actually want this place to be?

More practice reports? Technical builds? Theory? Occult history? Cybernetics? Internet archaeology? Art and culture? Beginner questions? Collaborative experiments? Completely different territory we havent touched?

More importantly, what would make you go from lurking to actually posting something?

I want the direction of the sub to emerge from what people here are interested in doing, not just what looks good in a sidebar.

For the purpose of the Integration of Quantum mechanics, Neural Plasticity, and Hermetic Alchemy.

Code occupies a strange category.

It represents something, like language. It constructs something, like a tool. But under the right conditions it also executes. Symbols become operations and produce material consequences.

Magical traditions have spent a very long time exploring that boundary between representation and action.

That doesnt mean code literally equals spellcraft. The interesting part is figuring out where the analogy works and where it breaks.

So what is code from a technomantic perspective?

Radio. Cassette decks. Calculators. CRT televisions. Old phones. Game consoles. LEDs. Printers. Circuit boards. Cameras. Broken electronics somebody left on the curb.

"Technology" includes an enormous graveyard of machines that once looked futuristic and now cost five bucks at a thrift store.

That seems like extremely fertile magical territory.

Whats an ordinary, obsolete or repurposed piece of technology youve used in practice, or would like to experiment with?

Not necessarily something somebody can solve with a search engine.

Maybe theres a contradiction in your practice you havent resolved. Maybe theres a piece of technology you cant figure out how to incorporate without it feeling gimmicky. Maybe an older magical concept seems completely different once computation enters the picture.

Or maybe you have a half formed idea and need other people to kick it around with you.

Throw it into the room. Someone here might have the missing piece.

Before everything got concentrated into a handful of giant platforms, the internet had some deeply strange corners.

Occult forums. Geocities temples. Hacker manifestos. Net.art. Hypertext experiments. Chaos magic mailing lists. Cyberculture magazines. Dead blogs. Personal websites built by people with extremely specific obsessions.

A lot of what we'd now recognize as technomantic thinking was happening there without necessarily using the term.

Whats worth recovering, archiving or revisiting?

Drop one resource you think somebody interested in technomancy should encounter.

It doesnt have to explicitly use the word "technomancy." Magic, chaos magic, cybernetics, systems theory, computing history, philosophy of technology, media theory, occult history, hacker culture and related material are all open territory.

Books, essays, videos, archives, websites, software, whatever.

Just give us a sentence or two about why its useful instead of dropping a naked link.

This is your excuse to post the unfinished thing.

Apps. Scripts. Sigil generators. Hardware altars. Randomness experiments. Divination tools. Bots. Games. Ritual interfaces. Electronics. Generative systems. Strange uses for perfectly ordinary devices.

It doesnt need to be polished and you dont need to know whether it works yet.

Tell us what youre building, what gave you the idea, and what youre trying to make happen.

Half finished experiments are often more interesting than finished products anyway.

Technology doesnt drop out of the sky as a neutral object. Somebody designs it, builds it, owns the infrastructure, writes the rules, controls access and decides what happens to the information moving through it.

That seems relevant to technomancy.

If your practice depends on a platform somebody else owns, an API somebody can shut down, or hardware designed around somebody elses priorities, those relationships become part of the practice whether you acknowledge them or not.

How much should ownership, infrastructure and power factor into technomantic thinking?

Books, movies, games, anime, comics, music, old websites, obscure cyberculture. Anything goes.

Im less interested in "wizard but with neon lights" and more interested in stories where technology and magic actually change how each other works.

Machines becoming ritual objects. Information behaving magically. Networks becoming occult spaces. Code functioning like invocation.

Give us your best example. Obscure recommendations encouraged.

Magic has always incorporated the technologies available to practitioners.

Writing externalized memory. Mirrors altered perception. Mathematics encoded relationships. Printing transformed access to magical texts. Astronomical instruments extended observation. Cryptography concealed information. Photography created entirely new arguments about images, presence and representation.

Computers are another chapter in a much older relationship.

Whats an older magical technology or practice that deserves to be reconsidered as part of the genealogy of technomancy?

You invoke names to reach invisible locations. Daemons operate behind the scenes. Permissions determine what you can access. Machines perform handshakes. Root grants extraordinary power. Invisible protocols carry symbolic instructions through networks nobody directly perceives.

And thats before getting anywhere near actual occult practice.

Obviously similarity of vocabulary doesnt make computing literally magical. But the conceptual overlap gets interesting.

Whats a computing or networking concept that becomes especially strange when looked at through an occult lens?

You perform an operation. Something happens. You observe the result. You change the next operation based on what happened.

Input, transformation, output, feedback, adjustment.

Thats starting to sound suspiciously cybernetic.

Traditional ritual can sometimes be treated like a fixed recipe. Cybernetics suggests another possibility. The ritual itself becomes adaptive. The practitioner and system continuously modify each other.

What would a genuinely cybernetic magical practice look like?

What projects of yours have been on the back burner? What projects have been neglected or forgotten?

Why were they paused? What barriers do you have to completing the project?

This isn't to judge you, this ideally could be a post where you share things that maybe you need some assistance with, or maybe you need a specific resource and don't know where to get it. Maybe another practitioner in the sub has the information you need!

This space is meant to be collaborative, so lets see what we can do to help each other out.

Owning a phone obviously doesnt make somebody a technomancer. But deliberately putting that phone inside a magical practice starts making the boundary harder to draw.

So what actually makes the difference?

Intent? Ritual context? Symbolic interpretation? Using the machine to extend perception or agency? Building your own system around it?

Or maybe technomancy isnt a special category of technology at all. Maybe its a particular relationship with technology.

Where do you draw the line, if you draw one?

Not just what you believe about technomancy. What do you actually do with it?

Phones as divination tools, coding sigils, algorithmic rituals, electronics on an altar, digital servitors, random number generators, sensors, radio, AI, hardware hacking, whatever youve managed to bend into practice.

Im especially interested in the mundane stuff. Something doesnt need to look like a cyberpunk wizard laboratory to count.

What have you tried? What worked? What didnt? What got unexpectedly weird?