People keep asking what i mean by calling myself a technopagan, and as this snapshot hopefully shows, my definition is still very much a work in progress. buffy may have popularised the term but i don’t think that makes it any less useful to me. i hope this is vaguely informative!
all the best things in my life were delivered to me by the internet. I’ve met chosen family members through a facebook group I joined because of a random encounter on twitter. i work in tech due to facebook ads. i’ve made friends, found lovers on dating apps, and found out people I thought were close to me weren’t who they said they were. all mediated through a screen.
some people pray and I just… come up with the right combination of characters for my incantations1 and search online.
this isn’t to say I think everything online, digital or technologically “advanced” is always good, hopefully obviously, but I really believe in the transformative power of technology in its broadest sense. when i say broad i mean broad. technology spans further than the horizon, from humans harnessing the power of fire, water treatment works, fermentation and preservation of food to beyond, obviously, the computers you’re reading this on/with. transformative, equally, means more than the qualities of creation, destruction, or sustainability.
I am still trying to work out the edges of these beliefs.
i believe on some level if it’s not online, if none of my techniques are working, and nothing is being returned, then it’s down to me to add to the corpus of knowledge. maybe what i want or need isn’t feasible; but maybe it’s just not possible right now, and one bright and shining day i’ll be able to add a new footpath through the dense forest of unknowns.
i believe in the magics of our infrastructure, in the “systemic sublime”, the feeling of looking around and realising part of what it took from the earth and from people, from energy, from air and water to get this device/cup of coffee/pen into your hands, and the awe and wonder in that. i believe in its spiritual opposite. realising that you can’t return your plastic-wrapped, also plastic object shipped from the other side of the planet, made probably in horrendous conditions, by people paid too little or not at all. that the only destination for it is probably landfill, where it will reside until all life on earth is scorched off the planet by the sun turning into a red giant, in all probability. the lord giveth and the lord taketh away.
i realise i’m forever changed by my christian upbringing, that i still believe on some level that we are the stewards of the earth - not its conquerors. i learn from technology every day. one thing i try to remember is that you can’t build software that connects with other systems, and which works for decades, without relying on old hardware and applying software patches. we are thrown, situated, we come from our pasts and build on them to have our futures, and cannot choose otherwise.
when i was a very young kid i took apart a cd player that didn’t work. yes my mum was horrified. no, she didn’t think i was going to be the next bill gates. yes, i wonder what my life would be like if i’d been encouraged in this predilection. i also took apart a broken robot dog, apparently not at all discouraged by the reaction the first time. electricity isn’t magic, but it has always felt like the closest thing to me. i wanted to understand it.
i’m more of a fictionalist, in terms of technopaganism, technomancy, or whatever word i’m choosing to use to describe this belief on a given day. a fictionalist take on magic is one where magic(k)s are treated as a “useful fiction” and so whilst not literally true, you can act as if they are.
there’s a whole community of SASS witches and whilst “science-seeking” grates on me for too many reasons to go into here, i like the approach. i don’t like to shy away from the spiritual just because i don’t necessarily believe it’s magic making things meaningful, or making them “work”.
technopaganism as the term - rather than technomancy2 or a new word - is mostly because i want to stay steeped in a heritage, even if its one i am still exploring, that is bound by place and heritage, to keep grounded and make sure the touching grass3 aspect of spirituality isn’t completely forgotten in my practices.
Footnotes
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https://udm14.com/ for google, but honestly why use google at this point? my personal fave at the minute is marginalia though that is mostly for indie and small web sites. i use kagi at time of writing in march 2025, but mostly cos i got a free trial emailed to me to try it again lol. ↩
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i kind of use the technopagan and technomancer interchangeably but for no real reason ↩
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does everyone know what this means? by ‘touching grass’ i mean “going outside - literally or spiritually - and being in the non-digital world to re-engage with your body”. ↩