Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is upon us and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will not be put through.  If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. 

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.  And further:  I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week.  This is my eighty-second and most recent published book, a book on UFOs somewhat unoriginally titled The UFO Book. It's from the same publisher as my titles The Occult Book and The Conspiracy Book, and like them it's a coffee table book, with 100 vignettes from the history of unexplained things in the sky. It's not like my other book on the subject, The UFO Chronicles, in that I don't propose explanations -- this is purely a chronology of remarkable sightings from around the world and across the years. What's behind them? That's for you to decide. It was a fun project, and should be fun to read. Interested? You can get copies here if you live in the US, and at your favorite online or bricks-and-mortar bookstore otherwise. 

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it! 

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Is Big Tech Cursed?

[anonymoose_canadian]

I've been thinking a lot about the intersection of magic and the internet lately, and have started to wonder if part of the problem is that the tech world is under the influence of a self-inflicted curse. As I understand it, curses are caused by recognizing (on some level) that a pattern of thinking and behavior held will lead to some sort of doom, and then refusing to do anything about changing the problematic pattern of thinking and action, and that the curse works out as a consequence of the frantic effort to do anything other than the one thing that will prevent the horrific fate.

Well, if this is the case, then it seems like there is a good case to be made that there is a self imposed curse on the tech world. Quite a few people correctly anticipated exactly why an advertising business model would inevitably lead to disaster, including, most famously, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The problem though is that there is so much money to be had with advertising, especially with the promise of targeting individuals, and some of the core myths of the internet make it very hard for people to imagine alternatives, even as they are thriving. The result is that nearly all of these people who correctly explained why advertising would corrupt and ruin the internet eventually dove into an advertising business model; and their prior concerns were proven right. This seems like a phenomenal way to induce a self-imposed curse, and would explain a lot of the oddities of the tech world.

Do you think this sort of analysis is plausible?

Re: Is Big Tech Cursed?

[ecosophia]

That makes enormous sense.

"You who Google holds in thrall,
Share its feast and share its fall!"