SIn my previous post I talked about The Magic Circle’s rules regarding exposure and teaching magic on public platforms, and I did it on the basis of controlling access to information to only people directly seeking it. And I ended with “Maybe you could even start a Discord”.
Today I want to drill down into that a little more, in terms of one of the things I think is lacking when you teach magic on a public stage like a youtube channel or even a website:
Community
Now you can get your hammer and sickle out.
Social media is something of a misnomer really. Its initial promise was that it could provide a way for people to interact with all their friends simultaneously. No longer would you have to tell all your friends about an important life event, you could instead write the announcement once and all your friends would immediately know the big news and they could cheer you on on the comments. When I rather reluctantly joined Facebook it was because a friend of mine had opted to use it to coordinate invitations for their wedding and the only way to be invited was to have a Facebook account.
Fast forward about 16 years and now I barely see anything my friends post. There are so many people I’ve connected to out of politeness that my feed is almost entirely full of near total strangers. TwitterX, Instagram and all the others have gone the same way, except they make the relationship more explicit; you follow people. On most social media platforms now there is no such thing as a friend, only mutuals. That’s to say you follow them and they follow you back.
The key difference between a friend and a follower is that two people who are friends with the same third person are more likely to become friends with each other, especially if they are actually friends in real life. But there are accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers none of whom know each other or have any interest in each other. Because the only thing those people have in common is being fans of the same content, and if it suddenly disappeared they would just turn their attention elsewhere. I forget where I read it¹ but I always think of this quote:
“People desperately want to be part of a community but they end up as part of an audience.”
Wait we were talking about magic weren’t we?
The Great I Am
Before I said that Cavan was getting paid in terms of ad revenue for his content, buy with only 21 thousand followers, he’s not exactly Mr Beast. Rather what he has gained from it is something money can’t buy², which is 21 thousand fans. Those people are his audience, but as much as the YouTube creator guidelines might encourage you to describe them as such, they are not a community.
In fact I would argue the same about all the big name magic YouTubers, many of whom actually use the phrase “The Magic Community” to refer to the wider world of magic and magicians that they feel they are contributing to.
I recently had a conversation with a friend and reader about Craig Petty³ on the topic of why he runs Magic TV. It’s an expensive and time consuming endeavour, emotionally draining as he has to deal with the backlash from almost everything he says and does. If he is to be believed doesn’t make any money from it, and on top of that he’s got pricks like me making supercuts of his sweary rants.
He’s appeared genuinely upset a number of times and made very thinly veiled threats about wanting to meet his detractors face to face for “a little chat” in Blackpool⁴, and I could not for the life of me imagine why he would keep doing something which absorbed so much resource, brought nothing in return and had a clearly deleterious effect on his mental health.
And my friend said:
“His youtube channel? It used to be something for him to do during the pandemic but now it seems like it’s a legacy thing where he’s trying to make it look like he wants to be looked at as “someone who contributed to the art by helping magicians” rather than being known as the Red guy.”
– My anonymous friend
Now the Red thing, although funny, was a bit of a low blow. I do however think there’s a vital bit of insight here about the mindset a lot of people slip into.
In a world where you cant join a community, only an audience, and you can never be someone’s friend, only their fan, it becomes something of a driving imperative to become a figure head for people to flock around.
In the modern world, magicians aren’t a community. They’re a complex venn diagram of overlapping fandoms. An intricate network of parasocial connections. Maybe they always were.
You can see groups stratifying at magic conventions, people with similar levels of notability hanging out together in a clique. Sometimes you see tables where a big name everyone wants to see is sat surrounded by their small trusted entourage who act as a miniature security team gating access to their idol. Everyone clamours to gain the attention of people higher up the tree than themselves, so that they may be given a hand up.
I have felt the pull myself, the desire to release magic tricks and build an audience in order to elevate my status and gain access to those spheres.
To become one of the beautiful people.
But this is an illusion. Capitalism of the attention economy. A twisted economy of admiration.
The last thing we need as a community is more leaders seeking to spread their name and stand above the rest. If they truly embraced their role as teachers, helpers, guides, they would instead host interactive events, discussions, conversations in which others may find their voice.
What I would love to see is these figureheads of magic not running a platform where they speak and everyone listens, but running meeting places, discords, regular zooms, where they may decide upon the rules of discourse and general tenets of the space⁵ but after that their opinion is just one of many. Maybe one day they can step back entirely, happy to have created a community where no one even remembers their full name, but where the principles they believed in have thrived and flourished.
No one will find their voice by listening to a person who refuses to stop speaking, and a community where only the few have a voice is no community at all.
This was meant to be the second part of a two part article, the first being Ban Hammer, to give a fun motif of Hammer and Sickle.
You know, Communism ☭
But actually this is going to be the middle part of a trilogy Ⓐ.
¹ Lets be honest, “read” here is probably a verbal stand in for something less intellectual. There’s a 99% chance I heard it in a Bo Burnham interview.
² Okay I suppose technically if you had enough money you could easily pull off Mr Beast level stunts and get your fans that way but you still have to put in the effort to make content centering yourself. The only other alternative is to purchase Twitter itself for hundreds of billions of dollars, rename it to X and be an absolute piss baby about other users of the platform having to respect you.
³ Full disclosure, this conversation was recent but we talk about Craig a lot. He’s like an infinitely fascinating artefact, a 4 dimensional entity swirling through our mundane world, revealing new forbidden eldritch geometries at every planar turn. And now he even has a child, making the pair of them something like a hypertorus, apparently independent but intrinsically linked.
⁴ If you’re reading this, Craig, and your response is “I only meant we should talk face to face like civilised Englishmen, what are you implying?” All I can say is that you really need to learn a bit about body language. No one watching that thinks for one second that you’re up for a stimulating debate. It comes across as someone wishing to use their physically imposing figure and violence to shut someone up. It doesn’t help that the venue of your meeting would be Blackpool, a town where they basically issue you a broken bottle on arrival and have to book a litter strewn alleyway in advance a week before the fight.
⁵ For example the magic circle with it’s view on exposure and secrecy. People within the circle may disagree with the exact interpretation of this but you would not expect a member to completely disagree with its existence.