Based on a panel that took place at ASAP/15: Not a Luxury at the CUNY Graduate Center on October 17–19, 2024, this cluster considers the relationships between algorithms and divination, examining a range of media objects as ways of engaging with platform labor, digital hauntings, environmental thinking, and the luxuriousness of prediction.
The black-boxed nature of algorithms imparts to their inner workings a sense of mystery, turning programmers into sorcerers.1 Critics have observed the metaphysical dimensions of predictive technologies such as large language models (LLMs), and where some users see in them the doom of potential extinction, others see the ability to communicate with the dead or achieve digital immortality.2 In their omnipresence and putative prescience, even more mundane contemporary media technologies take on occult attributes, whether channeled through Alexa’s disembodied voices or Co–Star’s astrological push notifications. Media’s capacity to speak to the spirit realm—through radio static, telegraphic co-presence, or the creepy shadows of Kirlian photography—precedes the digital, even as algorithms vector and intensify these occult energies in new ways.3 Like pre-digital forms of spirit communication and divination, predictive algorithms present the possibility of order in chaotic times. The occult offers comfort in the face of extractive precarity.
Our contributors draw their work from diverse media disciplines and practices, particularly those ones that blend critical and artistic methods. Taken together, these essays and other creative works reveal how algorithmic imaginaries, as extensions of older mediated hauntings-as-comfort, offer new synergies between predictive technology and the spirit realm.
Each contributor to this cluster grapples with the ambivalent feelings attached to algorithms as divinatory tools, tying the metaphysics of algorithms and their predictive qualities to longer media histories, material inequalities, and uncertain futures. Emma Quilty considers the collective power of hexing white supremacists on TikTok. Christine Tran and Jess Rauchberg also turn to TikTok algorithms, exploring the role of the platform’s hope-laden memes around the 2024 United States Presidential election as a form of algorithmic conspirituality. Lucile-Olympe Haute and David Benqué provide another kind of cyber cursing technique, using sigil séances against tech billionaires like Elon Musk as a form of resistance. Alex Ketchum presents work from her digital exhibit, unpacking the stakes of cyber spell books in an age of generative AI. Arelí Rocha, Sara Reinis, Katerina Girginova, and Kyle Cassidy tie the history of spiritualism to contemporary extended reality (XR) practices, drawing on research for their exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania.
Xiaowei Wang, Dorothy Santos, and AX Mina, from the Tarot and labor-themed Five and Nine podcast, offer a collection of five ESP cards, or Zener cards, in aesthetic conversation with the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Alexandro Segade also presents a Tarot deck for uncertain times, using the internet’s favorite figure of the cat to apply divination as a salve to uncertainty. Şerife (Sherry) Wong uses the historical form of the séance to interrogate how algorithmic culture makes users vulnerable to false hope, further entrenching us in structures of exploitation. Jeffrey Moro examines the astrology app Co–Star’s claimed use of NASA data, vectored through artificial intelligence, within a long occult media history of leveraging environmental data in the service of prediction. And finally, Tamara Kneese and Briana Vecchione describe the implications for users who might rely on chatbots for spiritual guidance, drawing on their experiences evaluating spiritual chatbots for potential harms.
While these essays and artifacts indicate a need for caution when it comes to the intersection of psychic spirituality and automated systems, they also speak to the meaning that people take from their interactions with metaphysical systems—and the importance of such meaning within our fractured present. As much as we seek in this cluster to articulate the harms associated with algorithms, we also want to understand historical and contemporary relationships between algorithms and the occult as generative practices and alternative epistemologies—ones that may very well help us in the broader project of substantiating and protecting what is truly human within these technical systems.
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Endnotes
- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2008): 148–171.
- Williams, Damien Patrick. “Any sufficiently transparent magic . . .” American Religion 5, no. 1 (2023): 104-110. https://dx.doi.org/10.2979/amerreli.5.1.06; Beth Singler, Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction (1st ed.) (London: Routledge, 2024); Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres, “The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence,” First Monday 29 (2024): 4. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636.
- See John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air (University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke University Press, 2000).
Tamara Kneese
Jeffrey Moro
Briana Vecchione