Money and Technology as Modern Magic

Abstract: The modern distinction between technology and magic relies on the conceptual separation of technology and economy. However, as the efficacy of modern technology is contingent on the world market, and the alchemy of market exchange is a social convention indistinguishable from magic, technologies are ultimately societal strategies implicating subjective intentions, relations of power, and unequal exchange. This conclusion harmonizes with Bruno Latour's observation that humans use artifacts to create more extensive social systems but is also aligned with the Marxian notion of fetishism (from a Portuguese word for magic), which Latour has rejected. Beyond what Marx called money fetishism and commodity fetishism, modern people tend to be deluded by technological fetishism: the illusion that technological artifacts should be conceptually excised from the global social relations of exchange which make them possible, and which they reproduce. The article compares ancient bronze metallurgy with eighteenth-century steam engines as examples of how technologies tend to be understood as exhaustively accounted for by reference to esoteric knowledge systems, rather than acknowledging the systems of long-distance exchange on which they depend. In both cases, fetishized artifacts are ontologically excised from social relations. This is also the case with digital technologies.