An Interview with Toby Shorin, Baukunst's First Researcher in Residence

Right now, we're thinking quite a bit about magic and its parallels to technology. As if by magic, years of exposure to our devices and the content they deliver have quietly altered our forms, leaving lasting changes in their wake. And at this point, any claim that culture has little influence on the very technologies that sustain it isn’t just a misguided statement, it's arguably a perilous one.

In what ways does internet culture embody forms of magic? What spells do our devices cast on us, and how have we been inevitably transformed? How might critical examination advance the medium, enabling technology and culture to shape each other in new ways? Baukunst is currently embarking on our very first research residency with writer Toby Shorin in order to explore these very questions and more.

Shorin recently joined Baukunst co-founders and General Partners Kate McAndrew and Tyler Mincey, along with Baukunst Stories' Managing Editor, Allison Fonder, to dive deeper into this interplay between magic and technology.

Allison Fonder

Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you would describe the work you do?

Toby Shorin

I'm a researcher, and a lot of what I do is embed myself at the forefront of emerging technology communities and cultural movements to understand new kinds of institutional experiments, new kinds of social experiments, and the ways that culture is changing. I'm broadly interested in the spectrum of cultural creation, from cults to the kinds of communities that form around merchandise or brands or cryptocurrencies and tokens. And these days, I've been asking questions about the communities that form around health and wellness concepts, spiritual practices, and healing modalities.

Allison Fonder

What interests you about this topic of magic and how does it relate to some of the other work you've done in the past few years?

Toby Shorin

Since I’m basically interested in how cultural change happens, I’ve looked a lot at both the media and the content of what people believe. This means trying to understand the symbolic structure of our world and sometimes making an intervention in it. That’s one way to think about what magic is. Back in 2016 when 4chan people were creating all these memes and doing numerology to claim that Trump’s election was pre-ordained, Adam Elkus on Twitter said “meme magic is real because a symbolic economy yields disproportionate benefits to people skilled in symbol manipulation.”

That can look like understanding where there’s a semantic void in the cultural economy, and filling it with a concept like “headless brand.” It can also look like trying to invest new life into terms like “public goods” to update their meaning for the cultural moment and redirect how technological media are used. That’s some of the work we did at Other Internet.

Image: Collage feat. Taeyoon Choi, Superstudio

Recently I’ve also been paying more attention to archetypal stories and roles. I’m reading a lot of older epic poems and seeing the role that these narratives, like Prometheus or the fall from grace, still play in our culture. My partner has a long-standing tarot practice and I’ve also been learning a lot about those archetypes from her, and with another friend I’m trying to figure out how the archetypes relate to physical states. Now that I’m looking more at spiritual and health communities, which are more often centered around charismatic people and mystical practices, this way of looking at magic is especially relevant.

Allison Fonder

I've been reading a lot, trying to understand how you define exactly what magic is, and what it might mean for us today. I read a definition from a scholar of magic who said magic is direct human participation in the universe, the idea that we have influence on the world and the world has influence on us. What have you been thinking about in terms of modern translations of magic that interests you?

Toby Shorin

First of all, I don't think magic needs a modern translation. It's here. This is something Kate could probably speak to. My version of that is like—why is magic timeless or, why is it already modern, even if it's also ancient? Why is it there at all?

Kate McAndrew

What comes up for me is that both magic and technology coexist across time and space. My concept of technology, until quite recently, was in the context of computers, because that is what felt like to me like the dominant technology force that I was interacting with. And in my adult coming of age, software was the dominant technology wave we were experiencing. I think it took some real convincing by Tyler to understand that software or computers are two technologies in the lineage of human technology, going back to fire and wheel. The trebuchet, the printing press. I remember being in sixth grade and learning about all of these inventions. Thinking about technology this way, as part of humanity’s broader evolution, actually felt relaxing. It diminished the primacy of software in my mind.

I find the relationship between technology and intuition compelling, as well as the interplay between science and magic. I'm obsessed with witchcraft, and how feminine knowledge, traditionally preserved by women as healers, birth workers, and caretakers of the body, formed the basis of modern science and medicine. Today medicine and chemistry are often male-dominated fields, but historically, they were domains of women. Traditionally feminine knowledge gets recast as masculine when it enters the academy or formal institutions. This is related to how “magic” is often used as a label for things we can’t yet empirically explain. Over time, the boundary between magic and technology shifts with our ability to describe the world scientifically. Astronomy and space, for example, began as astrology and mythology, but once institutionalized and empirically understood, these realms became masculinized, owned by institutions that have power.

So really, the relationship between magic and technology is timeless. They're always in conversation with one another. They're also often about the discourse between the masculine and the feminine, or what lives institutionally and what's being monetized, versus what lives communally and what's being shared. There’s a tension there. A lot of what we think of as being magic today, in 20 years will be neuroscience. I'm watching this happen in my community, and it's fascinating. I believe that in my lifetime what is currently considered magic, such as casting a spell and intent on the world, will firmly be in the world of science. We will have mapped the brain and be able to measure the brain sufficiently that the culture at large will be comfortable with being able to describe it empirically, which sanitizes it.

I think the encroachment of science can basically never eradicate magic, because magic has to deal with symbols and meaning.

So there's yet another relationship here between our comfort with what can be measured versus our comfort with the unknown. One of the things that’s cool about working in technology is living in the borderlands of these tensions. Can we welcome both into the discourse and somehow not make one better than the other?

Toby Shorin

I think that the encroachment of science can basically never eradicate magic, because magic has to deal with symbols and meaning, and even if it were possible to describe the world a fully deterministic or behaviorist sense, which it is not possible to do, things still mean things to people. And it's because we see something and it means something bigger to us that it seems to possess causal power or that.

Here’s one way to put it. The field of meanings exists with all these dynamic narrative tensions. Isolation, connectedness; industry, post-industrialization; enchantment, disenchantment—these kinds of narrative structures. Then there are certain kinds of strange attractors that come up in these fields, that somehow embody that tension and redirect social energy. That's what a Trump type of figure is. He represents for some people everything that is wrong. For other people he represents something against everything that is wrong. So he really captures everyone's energy in a both antagonistic and positive way.

That's why his presidency actually was ordained the first time, he really fulfills a symbolic function. He means more than what he is. There are these concentric levels of symbolic meanings. When Janet Yellen is explaining something about the dollar being the global reserve currency, and then the crest of the United States falls off the wall behind her, we can't help but take that as representative of a bigger whole. Where there are resonances between those smaller things and bigger things, magic is occurring.

Tyler Mincey

I think in some ways technology is increasing the symbolic connections between us all too, making us more magically connected. Not to say that we weren't before. We're definitely connected in magical ways in the “natural” world. But these days I feel like I can transmit symbols to all the rest of the world more than I could 100 years ago, via the internet and communication technology. It’s all “nature,” but we’re changing the magical fabric between us.

There's an inherent subject and object, or action and consequences, involved with the dialogue of magic. To make something technological is an amplification of that. Technology fundamentally deals with these layers of abstraction, symbolism, and things like spells and sigils. Often there's an aspect of harnessing greater forces rather than power being totally self originated.

Allison Fonder

Something I've been thinking about too is what we might miss about the evolution of technology if we don't recognize and lean into knowledge that’s less empirical, and how it’s already informing technology. Take for example the nature of algorithms and AI, how they are considered black boxes, and how there's a sense of a lack of control. If there's more curiosity around the idea of technologies resembling magic, how can we better create them or understand them?

Toby Shorin

One thing that comes to mind is that algorithms kind of work on symbolic logic too. A recommender algorithm is basically taking a person, chopping them up into their credit card purchases and the pages they've looked at. Well those pages mean things to those people. They don't really mean anything to an algorithm, but the algorithm abstracts those into a larger data set of similar looking things, then tries to feed that back to a person. That's why you get these personality extrusion effects. It’s why people get radicalized. The algorithms effectively are casting spells on people to make them double down on the existing symbolic architecture that they have. That's one clear intervention point where you can definitely do different types of magic. Different algorithms could probably reconstruct you out of combinations of archetypal characters, like the High Priestess or the Magician or the Fool.

Kate McAndrew

I feel like we should talk about the residency for a minute. Why are we doing this? A belief we share at Baukunst is that there is inherent value in asking deeper questions and that it's important to support that, as a practice and as a culture. One thing that I really like about the format of a residency is they are not short term transactional relationships. At the very least they are medium term, sometimes long term. A residency is a media in itself. We want to be in communication and in engagement with you in a sustained way. Anytime you want to get beyond a sound bite, you need time. Residencies lend themselves to deeper work. And that's something we philosophically believe in, doing the deeper work.

Tyler Mincey

I can't boil this down into a nice sound bite yet 😉 but we talk about this Venn Diagram of design and technology all the time with Baukunst. That is an extremely magical concept to me still, where the design side is the vision casting and symbology, and the technology is the actualizing it. I think that everybody that sits at the intersection of those two things is practicing something that looks fairly magical, and we want to learn about that as a group.

When I think about the research that can most inform us advancing the art of building, it’s zooming out and looking at what is happening culturally right now that matters in our domain.

That's a wider sense of magic, but that is extremely core and not woo woo. It’s real. So it’s a service of the organization to everyone that's a member here. Supporting the research of this topic is an extremely core affordance.

Kate McAndrew

When I think about the research that can most inform us advancing the art of building, it’s zooming out and looking at what is happening culturally right now that matters in our domain. If technology is our domain, what's the role of that? That can inform all we do, not just how we can eke a little bit more out of this market size and that CAGR. If what we're trying to do is build fundamentally new things like that, research like that is less impactful than it is to think at a philosophical level.

Toby Shorin

At Baukunst there is a real cultural interest that's really obvious, even from being in the office and seeing the McLuhan library. The engagement with culture here is on its own terms and is sincere, and that's why it this is a great place to do this work. There's a real shared ethos here that I appreciate a lot. I don't actually know what the residency be like or what will come out of it yet, and how that will be taken up by the Baukunst Collective. But if we knew what that looked like, then we probably wouldn't be doing it.

Kate McAndrew

I think part of why it works is because we're comfortable with that mystery. We don't know either, and that, in and of itself, makes it a worthy pursuit.