Practices

Imaginative people can do imaginative things with supposedly static structures. Hacking them apart to reconfigure those structures, these people use various tools – technology, philosophy, art, politics, and, occasionally, magick – to remake what was into what can be. With the correct gear and the right ideas, you don’t even need to be a mage in order to hack the dominant paradigm… just ask Osama bin Laden’s ghost. When you are a mage, however, you can employ those tools to remake Reality on a grand scale.

Typically associated with the Virtual Adepts (and, to a lesser extent, the Cult of Ecstasy), the reality-hacking practice can be used by any mage with the proper mindset and expertise. The core idea – reality is flexible – seems familiar enough these days. As a practice, reality hacking uses an array of technologies to rework the systems that govern our world: its commerce, politics, media, memes, connections, faiths, physics, and so forth. By concentrating on specific systems and ideas, the mage can start remixing expectations into some new and interesting shape.

Sound like anarchy? Sometimes it is. Many of this practice’s oldest adherents and principles, however, come from the Order of Reason and Technocratic Order. After all, it was early Technocrats who hacked the human concepts of the universe, God, governments, and other technologies. Technocrats shaped fencing (a sword-fighting hack), the physical sciences (an elemental hack), exploration (a geographic hack), mass media (a consciousness hack), and the space program (a planetary hack). It’s no accident that the Virtual Adepts and Society of Ether began as Technocratic Conventions. And despite their unruly applications of technology, they’re just keeping that old hacker ethic alive.

(Ironically, one could argue that the Order of Reason hacked the Traditions by replacing the High Mythic Ages with our industrial era. That idea would make a Black Suit chuckle, but he wouldn’t disagree.)

The postmodern reality hacker tends to employ information technologies – not simply computers, but also memes, media, and other forms of mass intellectual access. As demonstrated by 9/11, she doesn’t have to be a computer nerd – simply a visionary who notes the weakness of a structure and the method that exploits it. The transhumanist idea of reality as information – epitomized by the Data and Primal Utility Spheres (see pp. 524-527) – provides leverage for a reality hacker mage. Channeling her ideas and energies through computer code, social media, videos, slogans, pranks, guerilla theatre, movies and videos, graphic novels, music, fashions, Internet memes, and the clever manipulation of vibrant symbols (masks, puppets, iconography, remixed media, and so forth), that mage can re-contextualize reality as the Masses understand it, then take advantage of those new perceptions. It’s not as quick or gratifying as a thunderbolt, but it tends to be a hell of a lot more powerful… and more coincidental, too.

Like cybernetics, dominion, and the Art of Desire (all related practices), reality hacking aims more toward influence than raw force. The reality hacker strives to modify the system to her advantage, rather than blast it apart. Even so, certain tools – like terrorism and atrocity – can be incredibly violent in both implementation and results. Even then, however, that violence serves as an extension and instrument of the hack; the power of terrorism, for example, comes more from the atmosphere of dread and fury than from the casualties themselves. Sphere-wise, reality hacking favors Correspondence (for drawing and exploiting connections), Entropy (for spotting flaws and arranging probabilities), Forces (directing or destroying electrical systems), Mind (influencing ideas and the folks who have them), Life (rewiring the human animal), Prime (drawing, raising, and directing energy), and Time (re-contextualizing the perceptions of time), and uses instruments that express and subvert those principles in the modern world.

Associated Paradigms: A Mechanistic Cosmos; A World of Gods and Monsters; Bring Back the Golden Age; Creation’s Divine and Alive; Divine Order and Earthly Chaos; Everything is Chaos; Everything is Data; Everything’s an Illusion, Prison, or Mistake; Might is Right; One-Way Trip to Oblivion; Tech Holds All Answers

Associated Abilities: Academics (history, philosophy, social sciences), Art, Belief Systems, Computer, Expression, Government, Media, Politics, Science (psychology as well as physical sciences), Subterfuge, Technology

Common Instruments: Artwork, books, brain/ computer interface, computers and IT gear, devices and machines, drugs, eye contact, group rites, language, mass media, money and wealth, music, nanotech, sex, social domination, symbols, thought forms, tricks and illusions, voice, weapons