Don't Use Clarke's Third Law to Retcon the Arts Part 3
PART 3 “ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC”
In part 1 and part 2 of this stream of thoughts—and that’s all this, but read them first
—we talked about the immediate problems for those claiming prior fictional works about magic can now simultaneously “be” about technology because of Clarke’s third law:
Ignoring all privileged frames, lying about what you know
Overwriting the writer
All of this is speculation on my part about what their reasons are.
There are a number of other issues which we’ll look at it now.
I just wanna get this over with. It’s an interesting thought dive, but it’s like opening Pandora’s Box. It just goes on and on.
Clarks’ third law is probably temporary.
As soon as there is a receiver, there is the possibility—becoming a probability when the receiver is exposed to it long enough, of the wielder being found out, and when he is his technology acquired eventually.
I suppose they could conceive of some advanced alien race that manages reality for humans where the hapless humans, trapped in this virtual reality game, can’t see beyond. Or they could argue aliens created the universe we understand itself, but then what’s within that universe for humans isn’t magic to them unless it appears so, and it’s not a description of Clarke’s third law. And none of that can be demonstrated anyway and one assumes these same people reject intelligent design arguments.
They might also argue there’s some intrinsic unknowable-by-humans extremely esoteric metaphysics web of everything between technology and magic, and that’s another thing I wonder if they shoehorn into this claim. To me that’s a distinct claim though, one of several that orbit this topic, but are not strictly within the confines of what we are discussing here. And besides, we can only go on our own human understandings.
But the basic point here is Clarke’s third law does not describe an infinite state, but a temporary one. As there is never any evidence of exposure of technology in these works (unless intended) about magic there’s no reason to assume it could be there lurking under the surface.
Magic is not necessarily egalitarian
If the technology is found out, we assume this technology—within limits of the cognitive ability of the receiver to do so—can eventually be acquired.
But it’s not clear if magic, or the entirety of the magic of wielder, can be acquired and wielded by anyone.
The receiver—now the acquirer—but not necessarily yet a new wielder—can pick up the magician’s wand hoping to do something with it, but probably he won’t be able to do what the magician did.
Built into this is the notion that magic isn’t necessarily egalitarian like the iPhone, that’s its full power requires some predestination, some fate, some non-rational origin of the wielder. It also may require intelligence and insight to wield. This is a theme I got from this gizmodo article by someone called Esther Inglis-Arkell.
And I’m sure someone wants to tell me this has all been gone over before, fine, I hope it has. It’s just I had a good look and I could find almost nothing on this specific topic at all of any value. Just praise for Clarke on reddit, with some guarded criticisms about Clarke’s third law in relationship to technology itself elsewhere, but nothing about this meme application to prior works.
The gizmodo piece written in 2013, was the only article on the subject I could find offering anything.
The Megamachine
We may observe that the receiver that became the acquirer—but not necessarily the new wielder exactly, can swipe TikTok on an iPhone, but he can’t build an iPhone himself from scratch immediately. It would take a long process of tool and resource acquisition, expertise, years of labour organisation and chains of prior machines and so on.
But neither can the original wielder. And this gives us another clue about distinguishing technology from magic.
Sufficiently advanced technologies that could create something indistinguishable from magic—and here we are considering massive acts in human terms in literature and the arts, but it applies to far lesser things as well—could only be the result of what philosopher Lewis Mumford termed megamachines.
Megamachines are enormous complex systems of technology (necessitating prior machines) and organization that operate as self-justifying, integrated, large-scale entities glued to massive bureaucracies, pools of capital and labour, often at the expense of individual autonomy.
Built into the idea of the megamachine is a need to perpetually expand and acquire new resources. This is human ‘progress’. This is your iPhone. And it’s a megamachine that created your iPhone.
A bow and arrow isn’t subject to a mega machine because you can make it yourself from scratch. You can’t build an iPhone from scratch.
Environmentalist Derrick Jensen discusses this topic a lot. He talks about it as a human cultural problem, but he means in relation to other life on Earth.
For our purposes it’s difficult to imagine how sufficiently advanced technologies (alien or otherwise) to pull off these feats would bypass the megamachine.
Even to build a single car, never mind a production line, requires a megamachine.
To make one crude unmanned spaceship capable only of visiting the nearest moon you need a considerable megamachine.
To create a Dyson sphere—an enclosure around a star to collect its energy—often theorized as something advanced aliens might do to power their advanced technologies, would require a gigantic megamachine, orders of magnitude bigger than anything in the history of the Earth, encompassing truly enormous energies and materials that would far outstrip the mass of all the planets in the solar system.
The idea that say, one character—a wizard in a story, built the megamachine himself to access these incredibly advanced tools is obviously wrong. The idea he has exclusive access to this megamachine’s output is also wrong.
He can’t build it himself. And there’s never any evidence of this mega machine. Its output would have to be bestowed on him exclusively by the hypothetical advanced aliens in secret or human time travelers.
Once again, the meme advocates have to rewrite the story into a parallel universe that suits their madness.
Granted, hiding evidence of the mega machine might be possible temporarily.
I can take the iPhone to a tribe in the jungle without exposing them to Apple’s campus or the Foxconn factory or the supply chain, other manufacturers who make components, the mining operations to extract metals for those components, chemical plants, retailers and Apple’s industrial lobbyists, but it’s very unlikely in the context of these works (and happening all the time with amazing consistency) and it would be temporary.
At some point the megamachine would be exposed, or its existence figured out.
When we are talking about distinguishability—within claims around fiction that were obviously nothing to do with advanced technologies anyway—we can only distinguish through what we are given, otherwise distinguishability itself is a farce.
And as there are never any clues to the megamachine, there is no technology.
Clarke’s Third Law May be Limited.
Hard limits to technology are a thorny topic, and they could depend on context and a myriad of factors, but there are limits to science, to universal laws like the speed of light.
Clarke’s third law suggests a kind of “infinite advancement” but that may not actually be possible because some things may never be doable.
This also means, although it may seem very difficult in human terms to get to such a point, it would be harder and harder to demonstrate Clarke’s third Law in a universe where all technologies were more or less near, or at the limits of science itself.
At that point Clarke’s third law, although still valid in principle, would never actually be observed. We assume magic doesn’t have this kind of scientific limit, although it may have others.
However there may be a gradient of collapse even before that point; when a group gets to a certain technological stage, it may be very unlikely to perceive outside technology as magic for very long at all, even if it’s more advanced than their own.
It may be that point was reached by the time Clarke described his third law.
Clarke’s third law may not be universal. Technology is getting ahead of humans
If our own sufficiently advanced technology becomes rejected —effectively the human condition is not well calibrated to often highly non-intuitive science, I’m not sure what this means for Clarke’s third law, but there’s nothing to say a certain chunk of a population will ever accept certain scientific milestones that have come about through technological innovation as valid. I’m not sure taking that position is the same thing as “magic”.
Clarke’s third law may not apply to everyone.
Rather than magic, advanced alien technology that appears to them could be some elaborate hoax. For the purposes of our discussion, you may not be able to predict how someone will receive advanced technology.
The Meaning of Magic and Technology are Not Indistinguishable.
Magic has a different meaning, a different interpretive weight compared to technology to the audience and this is the most difficult section to write of all.
When we are talking about the meaning of magic in every possible context across history this can become muddy, conceivably thrown in a million different directions via psychology, anthropology, history, philosophy and the history of science.
Its meaning in that academic historical way may be discussed through rational means. But I just feel a lot of this amounts to more mud in this particular case. It’s not going to let us see the forest for the trees. It’s more meme chasing.
If the endpoint in these discussions is another hot take meme, “we’ve overturned the limits of science every time”, “magic and science were not so different in the past” then my instinct is the discussion has taken the wrong turning.
I would define magic today here, for our purposes, as what it is depicted in the arts, as what is assumed from Clarke’s third law, as what we tend to think of; the non-rational unphysical line of communication and of cause and effect, which may include the observation of supernatural or unphysical entities. To manipulate this magic fully is somewhat exclusive—not necessarily transferable, not dependent on prior megamachines, and not limited by science or routed through it. But most importantly, all of that is tied to the idea that magic forms part of human cultural understanding and transmission of ideas and emotions and forms. It is some distinct, sacred statement of connection to the unknowable, as opposed to simply a reflection of the currently unknown.
And that’s how it always is—when we zoom out—irrespective of advances in technology.
Retconning Clarke’s third law on top is therefore a misunderstanding.
Magic is a life giving component of how be build myth and culture, celebrating the non-rational, the divine, Gods, fate, spirits, ancestors, predestination; expressed through rituals, arts, symbols, visions, feats, tales and so forth.
How we perceive this for its own value matters.
Those tasked—preordained—to wield magic and our relationship to them as particularly powerful beings is important in a different way to someone showing you the iPhone for the first time, or even Steve Jobs at the top of a megamachine creating iPhones for the first time or aliens with advanced technologies.
When the Clarke’s third law meme appears, it shifts the possibilities to aliens, time travelers from the future or some kind of self-replicating super AI that’s creating itself (who created it first though?), rewriting the human cultural legacy as little more than a stage of ignorance that should be ascribed no value or purpose of its own, that could just as easily be buried under a pile of iPhones and a sea of AI images.
So here we are. We’ve come full circle on this series, which was a waste of time, which is about nothing at all but some people throwing a meme about.
To understand whether something is about magic or technology know the work itself. Just accept whatever is depicted in the work, don’t add parallel universes that aren’t there, or try to shoehorn in other related, but distinct concepts.