I was planning for my next big post to be a video of my latest routine with a further video explaining its origins, similar to the post I made for the tooth fairy act but watching back the performance, I just wasn’t happy with it yet.
Needs longer to cook.
However it got me thinking about video content and specifically about magic youtubers and such, which all led to with this video my friend and long time reader sent me.
In synopsis, the guy in the video, Cavan Booth, is salty because his application to the magic circle was rejected. Not because he wasn’t good at magic, but because he runs a youtube channel teaching magic, which goes against the exposure rules of the magic circle constitution¹. His argument is that he teaches magic to share his passion with other budding magicians, in much the same way new circle president Marvin Berglas does through his Marvin’s Magic products (available in all good toy stores). The only difference is that Cavan teaches for free, and restricting the spread of magic knowledge behind a paywall is just making the artform pay to play and the sole reserve of the bourgeoisie.
Put away the hammer and sickle we’re not done yet.
Now having read my thoughts on similar topics you probably assume I’m on Cavan’s side of this argument, but I think there’s extra nuance here. The exposure rule never explicitly says magic can only be taught for a price. It states that magic secrets may only be revealed to genuine students of the art.
You see, I am a member of The Magic Circle and I teach music for free. I have two students and we meet over zoom on Thursday nights, and when I wanted to put together some reference videos for my students I uploaded them to YouTube as unlisted videos. Unlisted videos don’t appear publicly on the site, the only way to view them is to have the direct link to the video. A lot of people use unlisted videos as a way to provide special content for subscribers only, with the link on their Patreon.
I do not have a patreon, or subscribers, or any of that. In my case the only people with the link to my reference videos are my two students. No one is looking for my videos, even if I did list them on my channel the chance of anyone watching them is next to zero. So why bother?
In a word: The Algorithm².
The intent of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter X, and every other one of these websites is to maximise the number of eyeballs on their content, in order to serve sponsored advertising to them. They do this by algorithmically deciding what videos and posts to shove into people’s recommended feeds. The people who carve out a fanbase on these platforms are doing so with a similar intention, to grow their subscriber count to as many people as possible. The higher this count goes, the more they get recommended to similar content viewers and the higher they appear in search results.
This, to me is the crux of the difference between teaching magic and exposing magic. Cavan may not have been charging for his lessons but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t getting paid. Indeed he was getting paid in the form of youtube ad revenue³, because YouTube is basically the modern equivalent of TV, and if you teach magic tricks on TV you get booted out or at the very least refused entry to the magic circle. Even Stephen Mulhern wasn’t above that and he presents Catchphrase now.
If you allowed people to upload magic tutorials to millions of YouTube viewers, you may as well allow magic to be taught on daytime TV, thus completely obliterating the exposure rule altogether.
A Tangent
One thing I found fascinating in Cavan’s video about being refused entry from the Circle is that one of his lines of defence states that the tricks he’s sharing are all his own invention, as if what the magic circle really cares about is copyright. While I’m sure The Magic Circle does care about copyright, that’s not what the exposure rule is about. It doesn’t have to be, we already have a rule for that outside of the Circle. It’s called copyright.
The exposure rule is more of an ideological stance about the nature of secrets, and in many ways that’s the key tenet of the whole club. These days people join The Magic Circle as a way of proving their status, being a Circle member has a certain degree of social cachet, but when the club first formed it’s entire purpose was to define an in group of people who would not share secrets to anyone outside of it. The secrecy was the point. Having a problem with keeping secrets and joining the magic circle is like turning up to a vegan gathering with a McChicken sandwich.
If you even want to be a member of The Magic Circle, you have to believe on some level that secrecy is important.
Cutting A Baby In Half
So this is where my ego gets the better of me and I step in with a solution. I’m gonna get King Solomon on y’all.
Sort of.
At the time of writing, Cavan Booth has approximately 21 thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel. Let’s assume half of them are interested in learning magic and the others are there for the drama posts⁴.
He can’t do what I do and host live sessions over zoom. 10,000 people can’t join at once and they probably aren’t all available simultaneously. I wouldn’t expect him to spend every waking hour repeating his lessons for people in different time zones. But what he can do is make his videos, upload them as unlisted videos and share the link on his own website. Most importantly, he can do the opposite of SEO⁵ on any page where the videos are listed, mark it so that search engine webcrawlers are told not to index them. Maybe even ask people to sign up to an email list where the links are posted.
You’re probably thinking thats exactly the same thing with more steps, to which I would say the extra steps are the point.
It’s not that people have to pay for magic that makes it exempt from the exposure rule. It’s that paying for it acts as a filter to make sure only people who are actually interested in learning magic will actually read/watch them.
Without the algorithm boosting eyeballs on the unlisted videos, its not TV. It’s a video archive. He can still post his drama stuff and just put a link down in his video description saying he teaches magic on his website. That’s it. That’s the filter. No enticing thumbnails or searchable “How does this trick work” curiosity bait. Just lessons from a teacher in a website only magic students will bother visiting.
Maybe you could even start a Discord, but that’s a topic for another time.
¹ I have written about this extensively in the past.
² Okay “the algorithm” is 2 words but without the “the” it makes very little sense and isn’t nearly as ominous.
³ And possibly also in the form of donations from his subscribers, I don’t balance his books so how would I know?
⁴ Source: I made it the fuck up. Seriously though I assume more than half of his viewers are there for the tricks but lower numbers are better for him, so give me this one arbitrary statistic.
5 Search Engine Optimization is one of those weird dark arts where it gets used by people who desperately want traffic to draw in curious Googlers who were looking for something else, meaning the people who are providing what people actually want have to also employ similar underhanded tricks to even have a fighting chance of being found.