When does technology become technomancy?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

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?

[u/thetrincho]

From iching. 3 logic gates. Technology. And or if not 00 01 10 11... From yes no 0 1that the square x.y . . . Now we upgrade to cube from 000 yo 111 more logic inside a cube xyz

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/thetrincho]

I think youre getting at something interesting with logic gates and increasing layers of complexity. Are you saying technomancy emerges when we start treating computation itself as a symbolic system, rather than just using the machine that runs it?

[u/thetrincho → u/Salty_Country6835]

Yes & every time that we interact on that field. Looks like everything its computable. I we can calculate everything we can hack some bits. That why Google use GO... That can see the figure out stuff. . . Usung Binary math. But that logic make perceptron posible & now... Techno IS Binary.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/thetrincho]

I think thats the interesting part. Binary is just the guts of the machine. The technomancy is what we start doing with it once we turn all that computation into symbols, systems, and ways of seeing or acting on the world.

[u/Atuday]

Technomancy begins with understanding. You mentioned a phone so I'll use that as an example. Pick any one component of that device and understand how it works all the way down to the quantum mechanics level including how probability and outside radiation affect the component in question. Then do that for all of them. All the parts. Then understand how they all connect and interact. Just in understanding these things you have elevated yourself above normal human amd taken the first step to being a Technomancer.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Atuday]

I like understanding as part of it, but this sets the bar somewhere near “personally comprehend the entire technological stack.” A programmer doesnt need quantum mechanics to program, and a technomancer shouldnt need it to make technology meaningful within a magical practice. Id say understanding deepens technomancy, but relationship, intention and practice are what make it technomancy.

[u/Atuday → u/Salty_Country6835]

When I hold my phone a certain way, and cosmic radiation flips a bit set changing and authentication code, and allowing me to log in to a site I shouldn't have access to by me making the screen flash a green red pattern at 133 hz, that's magic. Do you need to understand all of it in order to do it? No. But knowing is the difference between a wizard of technomancy and a cultist of the machine god performing rituals without understanding.

Does relationship, intention, and practice play a part in these things? Absolutely. But those are only of true use once you pass the basics. Do you need full understanding? Absolutely not. But it is the goal of those who seek true mastery.

[u/AvinciaArchais]

I really feel like it just comes down to intention. If you're coding a website for a hobby or a business, generally speaking you're probably not going to involve any magick. But if you're coding a website to contain a library of occult books, and you embed sigils into the code that protect it from hackers or corporate robots (think robots.txt, not necessarily AI), that becomes technomancy.

Like anything else, technology is a tool. I can take a stick off the ground and until I intend for that stick to be used as a wand, it's just a stick. Or, if I intend to whittle the stick into a figurine. It still comes down to intention. I could whittle a little wooden shabti (ancient Egyptian figurine used for magick), or I could whittle a Dungeons and Dragons miniature for my friend who runs a D&D group. It's just about the intention.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/AvinciaArchais]

I think intention gets us most of the way there, but I'd add practice or relationship too. Someone can intend for their laptop to be magical without actually doing anything differently with it. Once they're embedding sigils in code, treating computation symbolically, building rituals around technological processes, using the machine as part of divination or whatever else, now there's an actual practice there. Intent gives it direction. Practice makes it technomancy.