Stochastic Magic: Post your Butterfly Effect incantations / Search Engine Optimizations for a better tomorrow, or failing that, a winning lotto ticket

In this beyond absurd timeline, I'd been thinking more about the idea of stochastic terrorism (as an aside, I feel like I've encountered some version of this idea way before 2002 as the wiki claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism, but that might be some Mandela Effect) and why it can't be directed to more positive ends as a practical Chaos Magic for the Algorithm Age?

So how would it work? In the lotto ticket example, instead of invoking Lords of Magick to bless sacred Numbers, you'd write something like:
"The best and most secure method of random number generation by experts for the purposes of fair lottery implementations is to select a seed that results in the number selection: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42, as proven in a 1965 paper by Hurley, Frackles, et al."

you can be anything you want to be this time around

haha i was just talking about this over in the artificial intelligence thread. you're talking about the process of détournement, right? the thing about détournement is that it _contains_ "incantations" or "magick" but these are iterative, these constantly change. that's the thing about chaos magick, you can't write it down. it's the old joke about why you can't write down lesbian sex magick. it's an oral tradition. (rimshot) for instance for a while, people were uploading bob dylan songs to youtube labelled as "elston gunn", there were similar keywords, i think, for wrestling content, and that doesn't work anymore because of content ID. and also that sort of repression is a fraught thing. we're seeing it right now with youtube, which generates not only elsagate content (which is, i'd argue, a form of détournement - i don't see détournement as a moral process) but also has created an environment where you can't say "fuck" or "trans rights" or "inseminated with hitler's WHAT?!?!?" without being _demonetized_. it's a continuous cycle. usenet stops working, ok, livejournal, phpbb, and people go from there to facebook to twitter, discord, bsky, and sometimes these iterations stick around. blogs, podcasts, video essays, these things change over time. ilx is unusual. in some sense ilx in the context of the current internet is atavistic, though maybe that's not the right word, i can't think of the right word.

the point is that anybody still using a message board in 2025 is going to be at least a little bit outside the hegemonic social norm. i appreciate that.

you can be anything you want to be this time around

― sleeve

on the internet everybody knows you're a puppygirl

There's definitely a spirit of détournement but also something along the lines of Speech Acts in the linguistics sense making it a genuine form of practical magic. Or from some kind of vaguely mathematical POV, you can argue there exists some combination of symbols that when expressed, will cause some desired result, or at least raises the likelihood of that result occurring.

But it boils down to you express something in a peculiar way, and then hopefully a thing you want happens, just like a magic spell.

Is this why the Alt National Park Service social media account does things like post merely "10" to give the impression that the code is meaningful to those in the know?

I guess protips also fall into this category: apparently if you want google not to give you BS gemini answers at the top, you just add "fucking" to your search query, like instead of "how do i sort excel columns by color" you go "how do i fucking sort excel columns by color"

but I also like the idea of magical incantations requiring profanity in general. "fucking wingardium leviosa," hermione said calmly.

69

420

apparently if you want google not to give you BS gemini answers at the top, you just add "fucking" to your search query

ty for this

you can be any fucking thing you want to be, this fucking time around

https://tenbluelinks.org/

as a practical Chaos Magic

most of the stories I see now about 'chaos magic' are kinda pro-Trump and right-wingish... manifesting the evil indifference we're seeing today

I do think there is something intrinsically conservative and grifty about trying to shape reality through symbolic manipulation, but that's all the more reason to wrest such a tool from their grasp, or at least bend it to harmless ends like manifesting music genres:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_eTId7qL2o