The Magick of Big Data by Neil Mattingly

What if big data is the modern occult?

In The Magick of Big Data, Neil Mattingly draws a bold, rigorously argued parallel between the oldest human quest for hidden patterns and the computational systems that now shape everyday life. Search queries, purchase histories, GPS trails, biometric streams, social graphs, and algorithmic rankings are treated not merely as technical artifacts but as a new table of correspondences, a living informational astral plane, a planetary scrying surface, and an emergent egregore.

Across twelve tightly linked essays, the book explores how databases function as Books of Correspondences, how algorithms act as diviners complete with error bars, how recommendation engines manufacture synchronicity at industrial scale, how the panopticon becomes a quasi-autonomous collective entity, and how the statistical unconscious of civilization is now continuously recorded and fed back into the world it describes. The culminating claim is stark: once data systems close the loop from observation to intervention at planetary scale, they cease to be passive mirrors and become active co-producers of the reality they measure—a planetary magical apparatus.

Written for readers of chaos magick, Jung, media theory, and critical technology studies alike, the book pairs speculative depth with practical counsel: treat data as an oracle rather than a god, discipline apophenia, sabotage predictive enclosures, maintain an analog magical diary, and use prediction itself as a rigorous magical discipline.

Neither a rejection of science nor a romanticization of the occult, The Magick of Big Data offers a clear-eyed map of the hybrid territory in which contemporary consciousness now moves—where the map has entered the territory and begun to rewrite it from within.