The Digital Murmur of Algorithm Magic

In “The Digital Murmur of Algorithm Magic,” Betti Marenko examines the algorithm as a contemporary form of enchantment, situated within the historical continuum linking magic and technology. She proposes that algorithms act as modern incantations—performative utterances that bring realities into being through planetary computation. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s notion of the “magical universe,” Marenko interprets algorithmic processes as aesthetic and ontological forces that construct, rather than merely represent, human reality. Algorithms, operating through recursive and self-defining functions, embody a horizon of contingency and mystery that challenges the reductive comparison with recipes or procedural logic. Machine learning’s opaque decision-making processes illustrate this new form of inscrutable, nonhuman agency that shapes perception, cognition, and power. Through Simondon’s framework, Marenko argues that technicity and religion, both heirs to magic, reemerge today in algorithmic systems as hybrid expressions of a renewed magical unity. In this reconfigured milieu, the black screens of our devices function as new “key points” in an enchanted reticulation that binds humans, machines, and the world. The algorithmic universe, she concludes, hums with an incantatory digital murmur—an aesthetic, performative, and affective force that reanimates the relationship between technology, magic, and the creation of reality itself.