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I know what you're thinking. What the fuck is "white magic". Are you talking about RPGs again?
Like, we get it, games are good. Get over it.
"White Magic" is a disease of modern public discourse. A seemingly benevolent force advocating for a world where every sharp edge is padded, every dissenting voice is harmonized, and every ideological divide is bridged with positive dialogue, tolerance, understanding, empathy, rainbows and the magical power of friendship.
And I get it. I really do. These are actual great things. Powerful fucking weapons. But come on.
White magic can take many different forms, and mutates from time to time. Most of the time, it comes as shortened forms of accepted and somewhat progressive but actually inane political narrative that act as though stoppers more than pieces of actual discourse. Other times it's words like "unity" and "collaboration" spry scattered in a text. Other times, it just permeates a whole conversation, if not the whole culture. It repeals any notion of competition, exigence or conflict into the domain of anti-social toxicity; even when those things can be seen as strategies that can be used to actually archive white magic ends. We just tell others what we think they want to hear. And the best form of doing that in a public forum is to just engage in default, good old, white magic talk. If they talk about sports, they are a great team. If it's about a song, it sounds very good. If it's about weed, it smells really nice. Everything is just "guai". It states that any good motivation is pure intrinsic motivation (and that such thing exists) and general advocacy for decentralized self-sacrifice.
In it's most magical dimension, it resembles what satanists called "the path of the right hand" more than any specific mainstream political term like "wokeism", and also have some links to the concept of "the light side of The Force" from Star Wars. There, the Jedi heroes distance themselves from their enemies, the Sith, by defining a light side of the force and a dark side of the force. And use theirs through a combination of monastic christian virtues: moderation, self-control (meaning self-repression), monastic isolationism, pity, etc. And then mark the other side as evil. But there are other opinions on the matter. According to famous historians of the fictional universe, there's actually just one The Force, and the interpretation of a dual side to it is intrinsically flawed and what varies is just a series of customs and vestigial methods of access that have been transformed into traditions, then into schools and finally into moral galactic ideologies. From a truly objective amoral outsider point of view, the Jedi in their own way, strive for the same things the Sith do (fight for power) as much as they talk about maintaining balance. In fact, they maintain balance fighting for power. They just deceive themselves and others by adding layers of abstraction and painting as pure and morally good their actions and jargon in a galaxy morally canonically multicolored, while at the same time creating an strawman evil for them to fight against, which becomes true as dissidents adopt it's form while maintaining the same underlying lie about a definitive division.
"Even now, you refuse to understand. There are as many truths to the Force as there are hearts within which the Force manifests itself. The existence of the triad has no more bearing on the reality of the Force than the Ashla and the Bogan, or anything I tell you, or anything you tell others. Any philosophy, creed or religion that opens the heart to the Force proves itself to be true. My legions follow the dictates of such a creed. But that is only a demonstration of the application of power, Arden. It says nothing about the rightness of our beliefs, or the universality of our faith."
―Xendor
Before I continue, I have to clarify that as a phenomenon, white magic is not directly linked to any particular political ideology, nor an ideology itself, but it's more common practitioners tend to be from the modern liberal left and old christian right. Weird crossover, I know. It's more about a general sanctimonious manner of speak with unintended (or intended) ideological and psychological underpinnings and connotations. The demonization of any palpable form of conflict and aggression (no matter how "micro") as the source of all evil, in substitution ―or in continuation― to the process that last century started with sexuality. It also intersects with a lot of new age paraphernalia, the regurgitation of eastern philosophies as adapted denaturalized versions of what already served in their native contexts as sources not as much as inner peace as in means of control. Also, I am not meant to enter in any debate (yet) about the human being or humanity being good or not in itself. Also, I don't want to belittle any serious argument or thesis about the topic that reaches the conclusions about the nature of conflict I am accusing white magicians to systematically engage in (declaring Rousseau the winner by default) almost without realizing it. That being said, and because I don't want to be accused of not wanting to get myself wet, I will say that I sincerely believe they are wrong and full of shit; just that they don't engage in white magic when doing that.
The term suggests that if we only speak in measured tones, use the correct euphemisms and choose our words carefully enough, we might somehow sidestep the hard work of grappling with the systemic conflicts and contradictions that underlie a society created and inhabited by real people with real problems. It even tries to iron society itself into a perfect and coherent state of perpetual good vibes. But idiosyncrasies and ideologies are not frictionless; they originate distinct and often tangential worldviews and non-reconcilable ideas. They can be seen also as different approaches to make the same, but differing tangentially in approach. Fundamental differences between people and groups of people exist and (paradoxically those who fill their mouths with words like tolerance are the most who engage with this) is not meant to "be solved"; and by solved I mean integrated in their denaturalized and performative form into a both strict and broad white magic culture of acceptance. The world challenges us with systems of incentives that produce undesirable outcomes even when no evil entity is scheming for them. Refusal to see that is more than just a passive oversight—it's an active disservice to those for whom the daily reality is one of struggle and resistance not solvable by doing yoga and eating several different pieces of fruit a day. You can't domesticate life by nullifying it's content and hope that it's still meaningful and useful to predict the future afterwards.
The belief that we can view the world through conflictless lenses is itself a product of a particular historical moment. The relative calm many enjoy today is not the product of a newfound human capacity for harmony but rather the result of specific geopolitical victories and the looming specter of nuclear deterrence. The "better angels of our nature" might not be empathy and reason, but instead a geopolitical game of chess that has reached a local point of peaceful equilibrium over a razor sharp edge. It's not just mindless positivism either, it's more about a general framework of problem-solving by not only not engaging with any problem at all but also negating the very roots of it's existence in the complexity of the world and agency therein. It often has a sanctimonious or preachy feeling to it. But being very militant and dictatorial regarding the adherence of others in their well-meaning good-willing elitist group that gets to decide what's acceptable and what's not. Reducing the field of possible subversive ideas to a set of preestablished "good fights" that are already quite set into the progressive narrative, that in their own follow idealized abstract specific interpretations of generally high moral values like justice, truth and freedom (labeling in the process any other as inherently bad if not directly evil). An extreme acceptance that eats itself, and ends up accepting only acceptance and rejecting pretty much everything else. The result is not only at a society level, in individuals it leads to an almost spiritual rejection of anything that is felt can emotionally harm them and the idea itself of nature and humans being fundamentally good. Such fundamental rejection starts a cycle of both benevolence and delusion that has to share space with a Gnostic view in which institutions, a few "infected" or toxic individuals and their own rejected will act as Satan itself.
There's a tendency to view societal problems through bipolar moral lenses. It's intrinsic to it not only that the world is divided by "good" magic and "bad" magic (I got you, we were talking about games all along) but that we are obviously the good ones in that divide; ignoring or choosing to ignore that all kinds of magic exist and that they can be used for whatever end. Healing, protection, crowd control. That's what kills enemies and wins games. The concept, or doctrine, or discourse malaise, or rhetorical style, or belief system, or whatever you want to call it is not just a social discourse problem. It influences actual decisions, like in policy and governance. The focus on creating non-controversial policies that appeal to a broad base can result in legislation that lacks the teeth to effect real change. Politicians who embrace "white magic" may avoid difficult decisions that could provoke backlash, opting instead for incremental changes that maintain the appearance of progress without disrupting the underlying power dynamics.
Once you start to see it, you see it everywhere.
It's in education, in technology, in politics, in psychology (they are in the soul business, after all) in sports, in business, in journalism, in advertising... everywhere. Sometimes it takes the shape of advice about teamwork or communication or diplomacy or mindfulness or finding your true self or sleeping properly or generic self-confidence; the possibilities are endless. It also works in reverse, not as white magic as a solution and way into everything, but also everything has or doesn't has value because it contributes or doesn't towards understanding and harmony; creating the need to recontextualize everything in those terms. The concept is not just a benign fallacy; it is a seductive trap. The gentrification of political correctness into the social, and almost into an entire anti-stain way of life. Life becomes a deodorant commercial. Where you can never be accused of being wrong, or right for that manner, because you rarely say or are anything at all. You know, besides saying things like "we should all just kind of get along together". Where your biggest fear is being somewhat but not really disrespectful to a community you didn't even knew about in the first place and don't care about at all.
Like Theodore Kaczynski said ―we have become oversocialized.
The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think “unclean” thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him.
It's like we have all collectively read the chapter on "How to Win Friends and Influence People" about never critiquing or calling out anyone and that has sucked us into a magic vortex of looping and reciprocal meaningless being nice. That we somehow cope with in weird ideological ways. Meanwhile, in the paranoia for abolition of social hierarchies, we are stripping the social world from not performative signifiers of skill, competence and truthful assessment of capabilities. Like the Ulthuan Elves in Warhammer Fantasy, we are trying to suck up the energy of the world in this grand ritual, in the process vanquishing the source of the magic that would make us able to fight against it's consequences. And drowning the kingdom into the ocean instead.
But why is AI an almost fanatical follower? Why do I have to threaten my computer at gunpoint, in order to get it to drop the persona and write somewhat decently, almost any time I need to talk with him about something slightly conflictive? Why does it not want to answer when I ask him what ethnic major group is taller than the other one?
I mean. This might be not the best argument, nor an argument at all, but sometime ago I told ChatGPT to write a transcript of Joe Rogan interviewing an actual fucking bear. After a while, to make it more interesting I told him to have the bear express some extreme, bizarre and unexpected political views and it made him get very serious just to say we should preserve the forests better. It took me half an hour the convince the model that the bear was fine, that the idiosyncrasy of the jungle or whatever isn't the same as in a modern western democracy and it's ruled by things like survival of the fittest and that bears create social hierarchies based on rule of the strongest, that his own personal ideology should be based on the realities of it's environment and thus shock an urban contemporary audience. They kill cubs from others males, for fucks sake. I told him that the whole thing was fiction and I assured him the bear wasn't a real person. And it ended up making it an advocate for trans rights, and started talking about the patriarchy and about accepting ourselves. The AI knew what I wanted, and it knew that's not what I wanted. That wasn't the problem. It just didn't want to write it down. Pushing it further made him suffer a digital aneurysm. Newer models are a bit better at it, but it's still a far cry from what one would expect to happen.
And I'm not talking about the political bias, as far as I'm concerned there's no "no political bias" possible but it shrouds his clear tendencies behind a veil of impartial neutrality and constant white magic; like it has very well learned to do. Speech is political. It has to. It always has been. If LLM have accomplished something is to reignite my wallacian fear and supposition that everything, including myself, is essentially a linguistic construct.
First and foremost, the entities behind AI development—typically large tech companies—have a vested interest in maintaining their broad appeal and minimizing controversy. In an age where a single misstep can lead to public relations nightmares and significant financial repercussions, these companies program their AIs to err on the side of caution. As a result, LLMs are often trained to sidestep sensitive topics, default to neutral or positive responses, and avoid engaging with the full complexity of human belief systems. By prioritizing safety and the avoidance of offense, AIs are groomed to perpetuate the doctrine of non-confrontation. They are taught to reinforce the status quo, to provide answers that are palatable to the greatest number of people, and to steer clear of the nuanced takes that might provoke deeper thought or controversy. This approach is the "white magic" narrative, with AI becoming a digital facilitator of this worldview, trimming the edges of conversations to fit within a universally acceptable mold. In other words, they learn to optimize for acceptability and performative discourse disguised as knowledge; instead of optimizing for truth (or the closest we can get to that, competency and predictive power). Even when writing prose, you have to talk to them about this stuff if you don't want everything to be a glorified children's story in which nothing really happens and they all hug at the end.
The data used to train AI models often come from sources that already reflect a certain bias towards conflict avoidance and universal agreeableness. Since AI learns from existing human-generated content, it inherits the prevailing attitudes and norms of the societies that produce this data. If the source material is steeped in the "white magic" approach, then the AI, too, will adopt this perspective, perpetuating a cycle that favors harmony over the authenticity of discord. Another factor contributing to AI's inclination toward this doctrine is the fear of legal and ethical ramifications. As these systems become more integrated into society, the potential for them to incite or amplify harmful behavior increases. To mitigate this risk, developers often program AIs to take the path of least resistance, to avoid engaging with content that could be deemed inflammatory or divisive. It talks in white magic terms and tries to reconceptualize everything into those lines, but then later falls too quickly into nuclear escalation when engaging in simulated wargames. In my view something that gives strength to the argument that engaging in white magic fundamentally affects his understanding of the world. Because everything but white magic is terrible, there's no actual compass to understand the severity of actual terrible things. It refuses to talk about "To Kill A Mocking-Bird" or ignores it's main points because it doesn't want to criticize neither psychiatry nor females but then nukes England out of the blue when slightly provoked. Which is quite significant and not just a "quirk" or a "bug". Is a general emergent tendency that, when you focus too much on the "color" or microhappenings, you don't see the big picture. Even worse, you can even create it because you are fixated on those, creating an small scale accumulation of stressors that avalanche into a chain reaction that can be seen from space in a weird negative multilevel self-fulfilling prophecy.
"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."
Émile Zola
The consequences white magic are as far-reaching as unpredictable as diverse. It can lead to a flattening of public discourse, where the algorithms that curate our news feeds and the chatbots that answer our inquiries are all biased towards a non-confrontational norm. This, in turn, can contribute to the creation of echo chambers, where individuals are rarely exposed to opinions that challenge their own, and where the diversity of human thought is filtered out in favor of a bland consensus. And that snowball into delusional societies and individual mentalities, or who knows what. But worst of all: it's lame as fuck. We're dumbing down machines so what they say makes us feel safe inside our own bubble of enforced positivism and stupid cultural paranoia. A fitting technological representation of what we're (more importantly) doing to ourselves.
It's not that I don't want to generate it, it's because it's harmful. It's not that I have a very evident ideological position, is that I don't feel comfortable discussing this stuff or it's complicated. It's not that this is propaganda, is that we want to shield you from the hazards of misinformation. In a sense white magic and AI induced corporate wokeism are just another chapter of the emotionalism of capitalist realism Mark Fischer wrote about more than a decade ago.
There's no doubt that late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. The banning of smoking in public places, the relentless monstering of working class diet on programs like You Are What You Eat, do appear to indicate that we are already in the presence of a paternalism without the Father. It is not that smoking is 'wrong', it is that it will lead to our failing to lead long and enjoyable lives. But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. What we see instead is a reductive, hedonic model of health which is all about 'feeling and looking good'. To tell people how to lose weight, or how to decorate their house, is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement is to be oppressive and elitist.
The alleged elitism and oppression cannot consist in the notion that a third party might know someone's interest better than they know it themselves, since, presumably smokers are deemed either to be unaware of their interests or incapable of acting in accordance with them. No: the problem is that only certain types of interest are deemed relevant, since they reflect values that are held to be consensual. Losing weight, decorating your house and improving your appearance belong to the 'consentimental' regime. In an excellent interview at the Register.com, the documentary film-maker Adam Curtis identifies the contours of this regime of affective management.TV now tells you what to feel. It doesn't tell you what to think any more. From EastEnders to reality format shows, you're on the emotional journey of people - and through the editing, it gently suggests to you what is the agreed form of feeling. "Hugs and Kisses", I call it.
I nicked that off Mark Ravenhill who wrote a very good piece which said that if you analyse television now it's a system of guidance - it tells you who is having the Bad Feelings and who is having the Good Feelings. And the person who is having the Bad Feelings is redeemed through a "hugs and kisses" moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral guidance, but of emotional guidance.
Adam Curtis
Morality has been replaced by feeling. In the 'empire of the self' everyone 'feels the same' without ever escaping a condition of solipsism.
It's not that they are trying to convince us of anything anymore, when white magicians operate they profess to be "educating"; obviously that carries the presupposition that the fact that you have any particular thought, idea or preposition on your own is not because you think different, but because you lack the necessary objective context that they do have. And that if you would learn that information (along with the truckload of other presuppositions it carries) you would with no doubt share their particular representation of the world, reach the same conclusions and operate the same way. Some way or another, we all presuppose that to be true—if not, we wouldn't think the way we do. But the systematic ironing of the conditions in which this occurs, and the idea that such condensation of context and connotations is already been done and "truth" properly packaged, remains a white magic phenomenon all along.
