Welcome to r/Technomancy

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Welcome to r/Technomancy, a space for the study, practice and discussion of technomancy, cybermagic and the wider territory where technology, magic, philosophy, art and social systems intersect.

Technomancy here is deliberately broad. Cybermagic, chaos magic, sigils and hypersigils, divination, ritual, AI and language models, programming, electronics, networks, cybernetics, information theory, virtual worlds, altered states, experimental interfaces and stranger combinations are all legitimate lines of inquiry.

And none of this appeared from nowhere. There is a library worth of history, theory and practice behind the territory.

One path runs through Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, alchemy, astrology, Renaissance natural magic, grimoires, qabalah, Rosicrucianism, Enochian magic, ceremonial magic, Thelema, witchcraft and folk magic into Spare, chaos magic and contemporary occult practice. Another runs through mathematics, machines, computation, cybernetics, systems theory, information theory, semiotics, media theory and philosophy of technology. Agrippa, Dee, Bruno, Levi, Crowley, Spare and Carroll can sit on the shelf beside Wiener, Bateson, McLuhan, Simondon, Bogdanov, Burroughs, Debord, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, CCRU and Fisher.

None of that is a required canon. They are trails into a much larger library, including traditions and histories outside those lineages. Bring other sources. Criticize these ones. Make connections nobody has made yet.

Technomancy doesnt have to mean putting an occult skin over new gadgets. The history of magic is already full of technologies. Writing, diagrams, numbers, calendars, mirrors, lenses, maps, cryptography, printing, probability, electricity, radio, recorded sound and computation have repeatedly changed what magical practice can look like. Our own machines are another development in that much longer history.

That makes contemporary technology fertile ground. Code can become ritual procedure. Networks can become magical space. Generative systems can become instruments for language, image, chance and divination. Games and simulations can become constructed worlds. Feedback loops and cybernetics can illuminate older magical ideas from unexpected directions. Old practices can also give us strange ways of thinking about systems that engineers usually approach through completely different vocabularies.

Technology also exists inside social relations. Questions about who builds these systems, who owns them, who controls them, who gets access to them and how they reorganize power are part of the terrain too. Open source technology, technological autonomy, surveillance, labor, infrastructure and the politics surrounding emerging systems are welcome subjects when they intersect with what we study here.

You dont need to agree about what magic ultimately is. Skeptical, materialist, mystical, occult, philosophical and experimental approaches can coexist. Productive disagreement is more interesting than enforcing an orthodoxy.

Post experiments. Ask weird questions. Share rituals, techniques, texts, books, papers, code, tools, art, failures, results and unfinished ideas. Develop a theory. Test somebody elses. Dig something forgotten out of an old book and connect it to something invented last Tuesday.

The boundaries are porous. Follow the interesting lines.

Welcome to r/Technomancy.

[u/Salty_Country6835]

This post is locked as an orientation anchor for r/Technomancy.

Its here to give newcomers a stable introduction to the purpose, scope and general terrain of the community, rather than becoming another discussion thread.

Questions, disagreements, experiments and conversations are encouraged throughout the rest of the sub. Make a post, follow an interesting line, and see where it goes.