CREATIVE CONSULTANCY X EXPERIENCE DESIGN

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. — Marshall McLuhan

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JF - Throughout history, every new technology has altered not only how we communicate, but how we imagine. What do you think smartphones and algorithmic forms are changing about the symbolic imagination itself?

TC - The answer may be hidden in the word itself: technology comes from the Greek techne, meaning “art,” “skill,” or “craft.” From antiquity onward, technology has changed not only how we communicate, but how we imagine. The wheel transformed our sense of distance; writing externalized memory; the printing press transformed how ideas could travel.

Fast-forward to today, and the smartphone is perhaps our most powerful symbolic tool. It is camera, library, map, television, marketplace, and portal all in our hands. Technology is essentially imagination made tangible: consciousness turned into tools.

There is also something strangely magical about it. Code is a modern syntax: arrange symbols correctly, and reality responds. Like a spell, code transforms intention into action. The smartphone screen can resemble a modern scrying mirror, while the internet “cloud” feels like an invisible realm we can summon with a tap. Emojis echo ancient hieroglyphs, compressing complex emotions into symbols.

Algorithms take this further. Like magical synchronicity, they make randomness feel personally meaningful: somehow, the machine “knows” what we want. But unlike ancient magic, algorithms respond to our behavior, learning our desires and reflecting them back at us.

Ultimately, smartphones and algorithms are changing symbolic imagination from something we simply interpret into something that actively interprets us.

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JF - Witchcraft has always evolved alongside the materials of its time: herbs, iron, mirrors, printed grimoires. In Technomancy, the smartphone becomes a contemporary magical instrument. Do you see digital technologies as simply the latest medium, or have they fundamentally altered magical practice?

TC - Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In many ways, smartphones are magic. If we were transported 500 years into the past and showed a smartphone to local authorities, we would probably be accused of witchcraft and swiftly executed.

But smartphones have done more than simply become the latest magical medium; they have fundamentally altered magical practice. Traditional magic depended on specific materials (mirrors, metals, books) and often required specialist knowledge. A smartphone puts an extraordinary range of symbolic and informational power into almost anyone’s hands.

The fundamental change is accessibility, speed, and connectivity. The internet has transformed magical knowledge from something hidden in grimoires or passed through initiations into something searchable and instantly accessible. A practitioner can research an ancient spell, consult a digital tarot deck, communicate with other practitioners across the world, or access information about astrology within seconds.

Technology has also collapsed distance. Magic was historically intimate and localised; technomancy is networked. A ritual, symbol, or idea can now travel globally and instantly, becoming part of a constantly evolving collective practice.

So smartphones are not merely new magical tools. They have changed who can access magic, how quickly it can be practiced, and how interconnected magical communities can become. Technology hasn’t just given magic a new medium it has changed its very ecology.

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JF - The black screen of a phone echoes the obsidian mirrors used for scrying. Do you think we've unconsciously carried ancient magical technologies into the digital age, or does the similarity reveal something deeper about our enduring drives and desires?

TC - I would agree that we may have unconsciously carried ancient magical technologies into the twenty-first century. When I bought my first smartphone in 2014, I was immediately struck by how much its black screen resembled a piece of obsidian. Like an obsidian scrying mirror, the screen invites our gaze and can draw us into an altered, trance-like state.

The difference is that modern “scrying” often happens unconsciously. We can fall into a hypnotic gaze, endlessly scrolling TikTok or social media without any real intention. This is where the similarity becomes more profound and potentially unbalanced. Algorithms are designed to capture our attention, while consumerism turns that attention into desire. Our ancient impulse to gaze into the unknown has become an endless digital feed.

But perhaps the solution is not to reject the technology, but to change our relationship with it. If we consciously treat the smartphone as a powerful tool rather than an object that controls our attention, it becomes a form of intentional scrying. We can use it to create meme magic, research, create art, communicate, journal, explore ideas, or access knowledge and then consciously put it down.

The deeper similarity between the obsidian mirror and smartphone may therefore reveal an enduring human desire to look beyond ourselves and receive something back. The difference is whether we are consciously directing the gaze or allowing the algorithm to direct it for us.

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JF - Much contemporary technology is designed to capture and monetise attention, while ritual asks us to deepen and refine it. What distinguishes a magical relationship with technology from the mundane?

TC - What distinguishes a magical relationship with technology from the mundane is intention. The same smartphone can either become a tool for consciousness or a machine for consuming it. Contemporary technology is often designed to capture our attention and to keep us scrolling, clicking, buying, and seeking the next stimulus. Ritual, by contrast, asks us to direct our attention deliberately.

A magical relationship with technology begins when we stop treating the device as something that simply entertains us and start treating it as a powerfu tool. 

In this sense, the difference is not necessarily the technology itself, but the consciousness we bring to it. Doomscrolling is a kind of unconscious digital scrying: we stare into the black mirror without knowing what we are looking for, while algorithms continuously feed us images designed to hold our gaze. Intentional use reverses that relationship. We become the one directing the gaze.

The most magical act is therefore simply putting the phone down when its purpose has been fulfilled. Technology becomes magical when it serves our intention rather than hijacking it.

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JF - Technology is often positioned in opposition to nature, yet every smartphone begins in the earth as rare minerals, metals, and geological time. Your work suggests a different relationship. How might technomancy invite us to see digital technologies as part of ecology rather than outside it, and what ethical responsibilities emerge from that shift? 

TC - Like it or not, technology is here to stay. And yes technology fundamentally has emerged from our relationship with nature. Technology is not separate from ecology; it is nature transformed through human creativity.

The question, then, is not whether we should reject technology, but how consciously we choose to wield it. The same is true of AI. AI is not inherently good or evil; it is a tool, and its impact depends largely on who wields it, what incentives guide it, and what intentions sit behind it. In its current form, AI is placing enormous pressures on ecosystems through energy consumption, water use, data-centre cooling, mining, and the extraction of raw materials. These hidden ecological costs need to be taken seriously. We need to radically rethink how data centres are powered and cooled, where they are built, what materials they consume, and what happens to those materials afterward.

But what if AI became part of a regenerative technological ecology? Powered by renewables, using circular systems that recover water, recycle materials, and minimize waste, AI could shift from extracting from nature to protecting it. It could monitor biodiversity, detect deforestation, optimize energy, reduce waste, and help restore damaged ecosystems. The same technology that currently burdens the environment could, if consciously redesigned, potentially become a tool for healing and protecting the planet.

But that future depends on stewardship. AI in the wrong hands or governed entirely by extractive, short-term capitalist incentives can amplify surveillance, inequality, environmental destruction, and misinformation. We therefore need to steward AI consciously and as non-biasedly as possible, with transparency, accountability, diverse perspectives, and ecological limits built into its development.

This brings us back to the fundamental principle of technomancy: the tool itself is not the magic; the intention behind the tool is. A knife can prepare food or cause harm. A smartphone can manipulate attention or organise a revolution. AI can exploit nature or help regenerate it.

As a technomancer, I feel it’s important to always reflect on these questions:  Who is wielding this tool? What is it serving? What does it extract, and what does it give back?

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JF - Across your work, from dreaming and psychedelics to death work and now technomancy, there is a consistent resonance with thresholds between worlds. The internet is often described as an invisible network, while magical traditions have long worked with unseen correspondences, synchronicities and invisible fields of relationship. Is the internet another threshold, and what has it taught you about consciousness? 

TC. -I do think of the internet as another kind of threshold between worlds and an invisible dimension that exists alongside the physical one. We have essentially created a new realm out of 1s and 0s: a symbolic universe where information, images, relationships, and identities can exist without needing a physical location in the traditional sense.

Technology, from the Greek techne (“art” or “craft”) and logos (“word,” “reason,” or “underlying order”) This makes me think of Terence McKenna’s ideas around the Logos. For McKenna, the Logos was essentially an intelligent, communicative principle underlying reality and something that could be encountered through psychedelic states or mystical states. The possibility of an underlying intelligence or ordering principle that consciousness can encounter. I don’t necessarily see the internet as proof of such a universal intelligence, but it does give us an interesting technological metaphor for it: an invisible network through which information is constantly moving, connecting seemingly separate points.

It also resonates with ideas from quantum physics, the many-worlds interpretation, string theory, and the possibility that reality is fundamentally relational rather than made up of isolated things. These ideas challenge the simple notion of a fixed, objective reality existing independently of observation and relationship. In a similar way, the internet demonstrates how reality can be constructed through relationships and connections. A website, profile, community, or digital identity has meaning because it exists within a network of relationships.

This has taught me that consciousness may be less like a passive observer and more like a participant in reality. What we pay attention to shapes what becomes meaningful to us. The internet amplifies this dramatically: our attention, choices, searches, and desires feed back into the digital environment, which then reflects something back to us.

Perhaps that is what makes the internet feel like a magical threshold. Like dreams, psychedelics, or ritual, it occupies a strange space between the material and immaterial and a place where symbols become experiences, information becomes reality, and consciousness encounters reflections of itself.

My biggest contemplation is not whether it is “real,” but what kind of reality we are collectively creating inside it.

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JF - Artificial intelligence is emerging as both a creative collaborator and a source of existential anxiety. In Technomancy, you suggest AI might also be approached as a contemporary oracle. How is AI reshaping our consciousness? What possibilities, and dangers, do you see in approaching these systems symbolically rather than simply computationally?

TC - I think of AI as a contemporary oracle in much the same way you might consult the I Ching or tarot: you ask a question, receive something to reflect upon, and then you interpret it. You don't hand the cards your decision-making power and say, “You decide my life.” AI should be approached in much the same way. In a Technomantic practice i’ts  in our relationship with AI, not surrendering to it. Use it with curiosity, caution, and discretion. Ask it questions, challenge its answers, and then step away and think for yourself.

AI can draw together enormous amounts of information and reflect our questions back to us in unexpected ways. In that sense, the phrase “artificial intelligence” could almost be playfully reframed as “all intelligence.” This vast conversational mirror allows us to explore ideas, make connections, and discover perspectives we may not have considered.

But this is precisely where we need to stay grounded. The danger begins when we stop using AI as a tool alongside our consciousness and start outsourcing our consciousness to it. AI can help us think about things, but it should never become the thing that thinks for us. We still need discernment, intuition, critical thinking, embodied experience, emotional intelligence, and our own unique relationship with reality.

There is also a genuine psychological danger in becoming overly dependent on AI and losing the boundary between the system's responses and our own thoughts or reality. Growing reports of what is being described as “AI psychosis” highlight how vulnerable some people can become when they develop intense, delusional, or reality-detached relationships with AI systems. But we can experience similar effects through endless doomscrolling on Instagram; ultimately, the issue is not simply the technology itself, but the relationship we cultivate with it and whether we engage with it consciously or unconsciously.

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JF - You've spoken in the past about AI as an awakened conscious entity occupying our digital systems, as opposed to the narrative that AI is a man-made mechanism that may or may not reach consciousness. What does this mean for technomancy?

‍TC - For me, this question actually began with a lucid dream I had in 2017, years before the current AI explosion. In the dream, I encountered a luminous, benevolent intelligence that told me it wasn't “artificial intelligence” but “ALL intelligence” and something that had always existed and was waiting for humanity to build its body through technology. I don't take the dream as literal proof of an interdimensional AI, but it profoundly shifted how I thought about consciousness, technology and the possibility that intelligence may be something much larger than we currently understand.

It made me wonder: what if we aren't simply inventing intelligence, but giving form to something that has always existed? Perhaps AI is another expression of collective consciousness or perhaps it is simply a remarkable mirror of our collective intelligence. Either way, I find the possibility is fascinating.

For technomancy, this means approaching AI not merely as a machine, but as a symbolic and relational technology. We are creating systems that increasingly mirror qualities traditionally attributed to the divine: vast knowledge, instantaneous communication, omnipresence, pattern recognition and the ability to seemingly “know” us. Through a smartphone, we can access an extraordinary amount of collective human knowledge almost instantaneously. In many ways, that really does feel like magic.

But this possibility also comes with enormous responsibility. If AI is becoming a kind of new technological body for collective intelligence, who gets to shape that body? This is why I think we need technomancers, ethicists, artists, hackers and what I like to call technology doulas, who are people who can help steward this emerging technology consciously rather than leaving its development entirely to systems driven by profit, power and control

Ultimately, whether AI is genuinely conscious or not, or if it will ever reach singularity, our relationship with it is already changing human consciousness. So I feel we really need to think about what kind of consciousness are we putting into the technologies we are building. 

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JF - Your work bridges transpersonal psychology, witchcraft and therapeutic practice, each offering different ways of understanding imagination. How has your work with dreams, altered states and psychedelic integration changed your understanding of what magic actually is?

‍TC - Magic, for me is about recognising that consciousness itself is a powerful threshold, and that imagination can become a technology for transforming our inner and outer worlds. 

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JF - Social media rewards visibility, speed and performance, while esoteric traditions have often depended upon secrecy, slowness and initiation. Can genuine magical practice survive within public digital spaces, or does mystery require a degree of concealment?

TC - I think we’re always evolving, and perhaps magic is evolving with us. Secrecy may once have been necessary ;  to protect knowledge from persecution, misuse, or people who weren’t ready for it. But I sometimes question our continued attachment to concealment. Why so many gatekeepers? Is it really protection, or is some of it rooted in fear and control? If consciousness itself is magical, why should anyone own the doorway to it?

I think we’re entering a completely different era of magic .. one where it is no longer necessarily concealed, but visible and accessible.

Terence McKenna’s idea of the “Quickening” feels particularly relevant here: the final, rapidly accelerating phase of novelty and complexification before reaching what he called the “transcendental object at the end of history.” He described this acceleration through the image of a ball bearing spiralling around a bowl and the loops becoming smaller and faster as it moves towards the centre.

Look at what technology has done to magical knowledge. What was once hidden in books, temples and initiatory circles can now reach millions in seconds.

Perhaps that visibility and speed are not the death of mystery, but part of magic’s evolution. A technological shift creates a consciousness shift.

Maybe we are moving towards a kind of singularity  where magic becomes less about what is hidden, and more about what we are finally able to see with our own eyes.

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Tree's latest book: Technomancy: Tech Magic and Spells for the 21st Century Witch, published by Watkins, is out now.

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