Jack Faust today made a post about Digital Magic, how cyberspace has a role in magic, and some examples of experimentation.
Jack is right and there have been successful cyber magical workings. I have used various kinds of Mercurial magic on the net and in the Strategic Sorcery Mini Grimoire there are a couple spirits that specifically manifest to work that way. Really when you think about it, the need for cyber magic is vital. You apply for most jobs online, and if you don’t have some magic that travels that route, you might never get to the interview.
Apart from magic that uses the internet explicitly like curses on FB pictures, Lodge Rituals in Second Life, and spells to spread info through Net Memes, the cyber age also provides new metaphors and techniques for dealing with states of mind and magic that we already knew.
An example of this is the Mental Plane and the so-called Akashic records. This is the plane beyond the astral, where there is still a sense of subject and object, but no spacial dimension. In the past people mostly interacted with this plane through astral temples, or scrying, or other means that basically amount to GUI’s for the underlying info. Now that people are used to using computers there are more and more people interacting with the plane directly: finding the information that rides upon and makes up the energy and astral substance. Many magicians find they are able to copy and paste and edit this information, something that I doubt would even have occurred to people 100 years ago.
I expect all the spirits I work with to be able to manipulate a random number generator
I understand that there is a form of Saraswati which oversees computers and info tech.