Mirror mirror on the wall, show me the best of them all.

Whenever I’m asked if I’m on Instagram, I find it hard to reply with something concrete - so I usually go with “I do, but I don’t”. What does that even mean?! Not sure, but I’d like to explain here. For myself, Instagram is used as a digital media book - it’s curated highlights of all the moments I’ve found and would like to remember, with a caveat that I try to limit sharing to only people I meet in person. To do this, I pretend the follow features don’t exist which allows for control over what the platform shows me.

This kind of usage is intended to limit the weird one way (diode-like) form of Instagramming (or other types of social media) that’s pervasive in society today, where it’s just used to get a quick hit of dopamine. Plenty of studies have been done done on the effects of excessive social media usage*, but just even anecdotally, I find that constant updates on the best accomplishments and successes of others to be a source of envy, disappointment, and insecurity. The key here is excessive - the world is becoming increasingly intertwined with no signs of stopping (and there’s really no reason to, people want to talk and see what friends or loved ones are up to), but my belief is that there’s a limit to the amount of relationships each person can handle.

Like I alluded to earlier, I’ve been thinking about social media more as a magic spell, so turning to thoughts and quotes about magic in literature might yield insights - such as this thought in the Witcher series:

It is Art, Chaos, and Science: a blessing, a curse, and progress. It all depends on who calls upon it, and for what purpose.

It’s no surprise that magic is seen as a tool, with a similar neutral alignment, and that the wielder or user is the ultimate determinant of its effects. As with most tools (and magic), there are guidelines (and ministries) created to regulate and prevent misuse. Maybe if we treat instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms as the magic spell of scrying (which is surprisingly similar - here’s a definition, kinda), then a set of rules may follow:

  1. Don’t scry on people you don’t know. (Edit - this could be better amended as “Be cautious of insights gained from scrying on people you don’t know.”, which is similar to #2.)
  2. Some people know that they’re being watched, and so will show you what they want you to see.
  3. Scrying for more than a few hours at a time may lead to blindness and a disjointed sense of reality.

The last one was sorta kidding, but it really feels like after a long session of scrolling downwards, a sort of mind rot takes over - it’s just so easy and never ending and hard to stop, you never know what might come next, after all.

As a kid, I was never too impressed with magic. I’m still not, but now even more so, because we have entire worlds in our pockets. What’s a magic mirror to Instagram, what’s a magic 8 ball to Twitter? It’d be interesting to see what new insights can be found if we treat some technologies as magic, or vice versa, try and implement magic spells using technology.

So, what’s magic? The very first spell was probably fire - essentially light and heat. Even in it’s untamed form, it was vital to human life by providing vision, warding off predators and pests, and killing off harmful bacteria. Now half of that spell (or all, in the case of some Samsungs) sits in our pocket and is controlled by the tap of a screen. So maybe technology is then the evolution of control over the wild, and ranges from whittling sticks to create flame, to a tap, to even just a thought which, going by Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk, of course, is exactly where we’re headed. So then what’s could the world world be like when the primary interface is thought?