In “The Dark Throne – magic power
Technology in the contemporary world”, Andrea Venanzoni outlines a profound connection between digital and esotericism.
Andrea Venanzoni collaborates
He writes for Il Foglio, Libero and Il Riformista. He has published, among others, the volumes “The tyranny of emergency” (Liberilibri, 2023) and “Digital sovereignty between national security and constitutional order”, with M. Proietti (Pacini Giuridica, 2023) and “The dark throne – magic, power and technology in the contemporary world” (LUISS University Press, 2022), on which this interview focuses.
Interviewing him is Roberto Siconolfi
Sociologist, essayist and mediologist. He has been collaborating with numerous magazines and newspapers, both paper and online, since 2016. He writes essays and scientific publications at CRIFU, teaches Sociology and Mediology for UniTre, and is a speaker for the YouTube channel Libreria Cavour Esoterica. He is also a speaker for Lab Academy and the author of many of our blog posts.
During the interview
it is highlighted how the Gnostic tradition is reflected in the ambitions of Silicon Valley. This “technognosis” would profoundly influence individuals. Especially through tools such as “Data Voodoo Dolls”, that is, digital alter egos of people created through mass profiling. Data, information have now surpassed material reality in value. Let’s delve into these issues.
Nowadays this might seem like an intrinsic contradiction, but for a very long time science and magic have, so to speak, joined hands in an attempt to rationalize the irrational and protect the individual from the mysteries of the cosmos.
Every discovery every invention
Carries with it the weight of a wound, of a rupture, so much so that we speak of the disruptive value of high technology: traumas always require adequate understanding, not only intellectual but also spiritual, in order not to generate mechanisms that are only destructive. And they equally require a medicine that keeps the demons of chaos at bay.
When we are unable to explain
A phenomenon, when, for example in the area of artificial intelligence, science merges in symbiosis, in the Chinese in America collective narrative, with dystopia and science fiction, and we fear intelligent mechanical forms that could despotically take over human beings, here the shadowy outline of magic returns to take shape along the horizon, called upon to give explanation and substance to what our mind cannot, or does not want, to understand.
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The Dark Throne: interview with Andrea Venanzoni
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So what does this magical action at the basis of the technological world consist of, or rather, where have the magicians of the digital world, of the world wide web, of cyberspace acted, in which area of reality?
The creative destruction imported by high technology must be mastered. But mastering it completely is not a simple operation. This is why we usually look at the titans of digital as demiurgic, visionary figures, capable of impressing radical and drastic changes on society and on our very way of being in the world.
When the rabbinical tradition
Devised the figure of the Golem, which has now become a full and well-known literary topos – I am thinking of Meyrink’s novel Afghanistan phone number list ‘The Golem’ – it actually gave life to inert matter for protection purposes, turning it into mechanical life connected to the will of the one who brought the clay being to life.
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This is an element that has always been inherent in the human mind and that needs to reduce any mystery to a procedure. The magical rite, like the religious rite itself, are forms of protection of the human being from the cosmic unknown and from the mysteries of nature.
