My friend Carl Willat (of the Willat Effect) is an amateur magician. I sent him this link (“Is the Internet Destroying — or Transforming — the Magic of Magic?”). He replied:
I hadn’t seen that article, but I follow this debate and read both sides of it almost daily. He raises some good points and others I disagree with, but in the end it doesn’t matter because the trend of revealing magic secrets is unstoppable, regardless of what I think. But calling it a good thing doesn’t really make sense. Steinmeyer says people overestimate the value of secrets in magic by a factor of ten, and this is true in the sense that the secret is not the effect. I can enjoy magic performances even if I know the secret, but if I’m fooled I enjoy it more by a factor of ten, let’s say. The engine isn’t the only important thing in my car but it won’t go without it.
Yeah, I agree, the democratization of science and the democratization of magic (not to mention photography and film-making) are related. Perhaps I should have a blanket opinion about this stuff but you are the first person to raise the issue.
In the 16th century or thereabouts, mathematicians had contests about solving equations. It wasn’t known how to solve a 3rd degree equation (e.g., x^3 – x = 5). Finally one guy figured it out. It gave him a huge advantage. Of course he kept it a secret. When mathematical knowledge became better known, because of books, they stopped having those contests. Mathematicians could no longer make money and impress women by winning them. Math stopped being a kind of sideshow similar to magic and eventually became the foundation of engineering and science. This couldn’t have happened if it was still a bunch of secrets.
It is early in the democratization of magic, but I think a similar story is plausible — not likely, just plausible. One possibility is that democratization “cheapens” everything or at least makes it harder to make a living at magic. The whole enterprise withers and dies. Another possibility is that, as the Masked Magician said, the revelation of techniques pushes people to invent new ones. They can no longer keep doing the old ones. I think he is perfectly correct. I think the reason that fashion evolved (a feature of our brains) is to push artisans to keep inventing. You really do need to give people a push, otherwise they will stagnate. A third possibility is that the democratization of magic will push the ideas out into a much wider range of people and these people will see the ideas in a new way. They won’t merely invent new tricks; they will begin to grasp how the underlying ideas can be applied in other places.
As a professor of psychology I think I can say this: academic psychologists such as myself have almost no interest in using the ideas we discover and study to help people. (That I used them to lose weight is unprecedented.) It is all about publishing papers, getting tenure, getting promoted, perhaps even winning prizes. That’s neither bad nor good, it’s human nature. The magic you do, on the other hand, is applied psychology. It is entirely useful. So magicians have (a) figured out psychology that works and (b) use it all the time to get something they want (attention, money). That is no small achievement. But they have zero interest in systematizing it (asking: what are the general principles?) and applying those principles in other domains. Other people, however, could easily want to do this. The ideas have to reach those other people for the systematization and application to happen. Nowadays the ideas behind magic tricks are reaching a wider audience so this is becoming more likely to happen.
So I’m like someone in the 15th century who tells the mathematician who has discovered how to solve cubic equations: hey, tell other people your secrets, it will be great! It would sound crazy. But if you want my overall opinion, I think that magic has stagnated, like many other areas of life. I think the democratization has been a powerful force for innovation, just as the Masked Magician claimed, although you would know better than me. I also think, unlike anything the Masked Magician said, that the ideas behind magic are far more important than what present-day professional magicians are using them for. Professional magicians are too busy doing what they have done for the last 20 years and too busy trying to make a living to take advantage of this (which will have zero monetary payoff, at first). But other younger people are more flexible.
A couple of points:
First of all, I recently read a book called, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions, by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde. It wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be, but I think the very existence of the book is a sign that magic is expanding beyond its usual domains.
Second, I’m all in favor of revealing the secrets behind magic tricks. Hucksters like Uri Geller, Sylvia Browne, and Jonathan Edward (among many others) prey on naive people who don’t realize how easy it is to be fooled by simple conjuring tricks. Perhaps if some of these tricks become common knowledge, the public will become slightly less gullible. One can only hope, anyway. (On the other hand, even people who ought to know better can be duped. See this write-up of James “the Amazing” Randi’s Project Alpha.)
Filmmakers will tell you exactly how they perform their cinematic magic, down to the equipment used and the technical specs. This wide sharing of knowledge has resulted in the quality of special effects rising, and the costs dropping, exponentially. The movie-going public has developed higher standards of verisimilitude as a result, but it hasn’t put them off watching movies.
Reading and writing are a form of magic: “grammarye.” One of my brothers said as a conversation topic that he was going to learn everything he needed to know by watching videos. What kind of programmer would someone be who’s only seen people sitting at terminals trying to program in videos and hasn’t read anything about it? Enough said.