I came to Federico Campagna's Technic and Magic with one hand already raised in objection. I'm a software person by trade and by vocation, and while Campagna is careful to distinguish Technic from technology per se, the two are close enough cousins that I spent much of this book feeling mildly accused. That said, the charge is interesting enough to take seriously, and so I made myself work through it.
The book's central gambit is to propose two "cosmogonic forces" — vast, world-shaping metaphysical principles — called Technic and Magic. Technic is the ruling force of modernity: not quite technology, not quite capitalism, not quite rationalism, but something that encompasses all of these while being reducible to none of them. It is relentlessly instrumental, totalizing in its use of language, and — crucially — self-destructive, consuming the very reality it attempts to construct. Magic, its counterpart, is organized around the principle of ineffability: that which exceeds language and refuses capture. Where Technic colonizes the world with representation, Magic acknowledges a remainder, a residue that escapes the net of naming.
The book is structured as a path through a diagram — Campagna's own neo-Platonic schema of "hypostases" and "emanations" — twin cosmogonies laid out in parallel. Technic emanates from absolute language down through measure, the processor, life-as-vulnerability, and finally safety. Magic begins from the ineffable and passes through person, symbol, paradox, and salvation. This structure threatened to lose me almost immediately: the diagram had an air of elaborate systematicity that triggers my skeptical instincts like a gong. But I kept reading, partly out of stubbornness, partly because something kept glinting in the murk.
The most coherent version of the Technic critique, for me, is essentially a long meditation on what Heidegger called Gestell — the enframing tendency of modern technology to reduce everything to standing-reserve, to see a forest only as board-feet of lumber. Campagna frames this as the hegemony of "absolute language": a metaphysical commitment, so deep it's invisible, to the claim that truth is representation and representation is truth. Everything real must be nameable, measurable, serializable. What cannot be captured is not real — or it is merely not-yet-captured, a problem for the R&D department to solve. He illustrates this with the image of Technic's relationship to life itself: what resists measurement isn't recognized as a limit, only as a problem to be dissolved into "problematic possibility." The phrase he uses is "ontological mutation and blackmail," which I found strangely apt.
What I found genuinely clarifying — and genuinely unsettling, for someone in my position — is his reading of the processor as Technic's archetypal figure: a subject stripped of autonomous existence and volition. This is almost an anti-Turing argument, and it resonates with the "situated action" critique of GOFAI: the idea that classical AI misconceives cognition precisely by treating it as symbol manipulation, reducing the agent to a processor of representations. Campagna is drinking from the same Heideggerian well as Dreyfus, and despite the very different registers, the critique lands.
My main technical objection to his picture of Technic is that it caricatures actual practice. Campagna claims that the system of data and representation rests on a belief that everything ontologically relevant can be reduced to the serial units of absolute language. But practicing data scientists and scientists generally are exquisitely aware of the gap between their models and reality — error, incompleteness, and underdetermination are the bread and butter of the craft. The best technologists, whatever their sins, do not confuse the map for the territory. When the one place this theory intersects with my area of expertise it gets things slightly wrong, I notice. I had an oddly similar experience with Graeber's Debt.
Still, I think there is a version of the critique that survives this objection. If Technic is a psychosocial dynamic rather than a philosophical thesis, if it's more like Blake's Urizen — that tremendous figure of the rationalizing intellect devouring the world — then individual technologists' epistemic sophistication doesn't really exonerate the system. Campagna himself suggests that Technic and Magic are "hyperobjects," forces that operate at a scale above any individual practitioner's intentions. The analogy that came to me, after some resistance, is that capitalism's problems aren't dissolved by the existence of individual capitalists who care about their employees. The force and the practitioner are not the same level of analysis.
The Magic half of the book is harder for me to evaluate honestly, partly because I can't get beyond a residual nerd's scorn for the very word. Magic is organized around ineffability — around what cannot be captured by language in any form — and its hypostases trace a kind of inverse cosmogony: from the unspeakable ground of existence, through the person as "vessel through which the ineffable resounds," through symbol (as opposed to allegory, which is Technic's preferred representational mode), through paradox, to salvation. Where Technic's end-value is safety — becoming frictionlessly managed, all resistance resolved — Magic's is salvation, understood not as transcendence but as the restoration of an entity to dimensions of itself that exceed its linguistic definition.
The most useful concept in the Magic half is the strategy of the as if, drawn partly from Hans Vaihinger's 1911 Philosophie des Als Ob. Campagna follows Vaihinger in suggesting that we always navigate the world through fictions — useful, operational fictions — rather than through direct access to truth. The person of Magic treats the world's linguistic scaffolding as real enough to inhabit, while remaining aware that it is a fiction, wearing it "as if." This is close to fictionalism in philosophy, and it's also close to the aesthetic of Pessoa and his heteronyms: wearing personae as costume, treating them as real without being identical to them. I find this genuinely attractive. It is, in effect, a practice of holding your models lightly — which is, come to think of it, what good scientists and good engineers actually do.
The political valence of Magic is anarchist-adjacent. Campagna explicitly compares the adoption of Magic's reality-system to anarchist "prefigurative practices" — living now as if radical emancipation has already been achieved, carving out spaces of alternative habitation rather than contesting the existing territory directly. Ernst Jünger makes an appearance, in his late, post-atomic phase, as someone who recognized Technic's nihilism and sought a way to survive it rather than defeat it. The idea is not revolution but what you might call ontological desertion: inhabiting a different architecture of reality, voiding Technic from within.
What I took away from the book, finally, is something like this: Campagna has identified something real — the Blakean / Ginsbergian Moloch that animates late modernity — and named it Technic. His critique of Technic's self-destructive character, its conversion of everything (including life itself) into processable standing-reserve, is substantially right. His proposed remedy — Magic, ineffability, the as-if — is more suggestive than actionable, and the neo-Platonic architecture that houses all of this is, at best, a useful fiction (in the Vaihingerian sense). The book works better as prophetic poem than as philosophy, and if you approach it that way, like Blake's Prophetic Books with footnotes, the vast warring abstractions start to feel less like a crackpot schema and more like a genuine attempt to give form to something formless and urgent.
I don't think technology and poetry are as opposed as Campagna's parallel structure implies. In my experience, the best technologists are also artists, and the best artists are also in some sense technologists. But I take the point that in the mainstream apprehension, in the way the system actually works on most people most of the time, something like Technic is in charge. And I can't entirely claim exemption. Technic is in my bones too. Maybe that's why I found this book worth the argument.