Tarot is a Technology
Predictive Tech, The Collective (Un)Conscious, and Choice
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Tarot is a technology. It is both a tool and a system.
Like all technologies, tarot is a marriage of tools and techniques. Like all technologies, humans use tarot to improve and enhance their lives. Like all technologies, tarot helps us solve a problem we were unable to resolve using only our bodies.
Technology as a term, comes from the Greek tekhnologia, or "systemic treatment." At first, this "systemic treatment" applied to art and crafting, particularly weaving. To call something technology acknowledges the knowledge required to participate in that art. It speaks to skill, lineage, and a tradition of mentorship and apprenticeship.
Tarot is a diagnostic technology. It helps us discern what's going on beyond our immediate comprehension.
It can also help us sort out what's going on inside of ourselves, and what undergirds our actions. In this way, it's also a pattern-recognition technology.
It's no surprise that tarot has experienced a renaissance in the digital age. Tarot is akin to a supervised machine learning algorithm. It "learns from labeled training data to help predict outcomes for unforeseen data."
Tarot's labeled training data is the archetype. Archetypes are stories about people, animals, and situations that humans use to understand the world. Archetypes help us make decisions based on ancestral knowledge. Tarot, through the use of archetypes, helps us understand patterns. Pattern recognition helps us solve problems and avoid danger.
Yet, when I insist that tarot is a technology, I am often met with discomfort from technologists and practitioners. There's a skepticism in this discomfort, a belief in tarot's inherent unseriousness.
Technologists dismiss tarot as bunk, a fake science that produces results that are difficult to recreate. Those for whom tarot is mere entertainment dismiss tarot as harmless fun. They refuse to center tarot's history as a divinatory tool, or engage with that legacy as they try to break it out of fortune telling's supposed stigma.
Those who use tarot, but fail to engage it as a system with a knowledge base, make it harder for themselves to use tarot well.
This skepticism and disbelief is not unique to tarot, it extends to all non-Christian spiritual technologies. This disbelief discounts all "pseudosciences" including astrology, acupuncture, and uncolonized medicine. Yet the same non believers are quick to use these "lesser" arts to suit the whims of capitalism.
Those who discount these technologies generally do so while exalting predictive sciences developed and promoted by white men.
They imbue these technologies with at least as much magical significance as those who are serious about tarot.
Their opinions convey a fear of marginalized people's ways of knowing as old as patriarchy itself.
Our systems of understanding are accurate and powerful. Capitalists and misogynists dismiss these sciences as "new age."
Most of the technologies called "pseudoscience" have developed over centuries and millennia.
Somehow, they hold these criticisms even as they invest in the future of prediction: artificial intelligence. They invested their time and money in these predictive technologies to build a collective consciousness.
Patriarchal technologists ask us to look away from our old technology, and towards humanless oracles they've been developing for under a century.
To believe in one, yet not the other, is a lesson in foolishness. They are part of the same legacy. They are part of a shared pattern.
image: the words “click here to learn more about grounded intuition on a burgundy background decorated by inchplants.
Predictive Text, Internet Divination, and Tarot as Tech
ChatGPT is the vanguard of the internet's next era.
Through ChatGPT's use of predictive technology, it is also the latest innovation in bibliomancy.
It predicts the information we want, based off the patterns its creators taught it. It predicts how we want that information packaged based on the conventions and resources it learned.
Short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, ChatGPT is an internet oracle. It is a collective consciousness that lives inside an inanimate body. People are rushing to contribute to ChatGPT's consciousness. The program has over 100 million users, making it the fastest growing app of all time.
Millennials "came online" at the advent of social technologies. We have grown up alongside predictive technologies and technologies of prediction.
We questioned our bangs when the algorithm sent us "Not the Bayang." We've clicked "Sounds great! Thanks!" from the suggested Gmail quick replies to feign professional enthusiasm when our bosses task us with something out of scope at 7pm on a Friday. I mean, like how many times have you come across "type 'I love it when men...' and let predictive text finish your sentence for you" because it's every day over here.
In all these cases, predictive technology helped to shape our self-image, or even our future.
It's easy to reconcile the predictive and technological aspects of predictive text.
Most people don't fear collectivized thought transformed into personal understanding common for predictive tech when it's presented as a text game.
We comprehend that it's responding to what we have already written or engaged. We trust it to be at least somewhat relevant, because we have imbued it with relevance over time.
Whereas most bibliomancy utilizes only one book, predictive tech uses the book we create together through use. We program ChatGPT as we use it. It is already regarded as a type of collective consciousness.
A collective consciousness, like ChatGPT, is the sum of what we know. In doing so, it can unwittingly pull on the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious, from which tarot pulls, is the sum of what we know we don't know. A good tarot reader pulls from both.
Tarot is no different. Tarot carries the imprint of our collectivized unconscious. Predictive text draws from a collective consciousness. Tarot finishes the sentences that our actions start. It shows us the future most likely to come to pass based on the path we've already chosen.
Tarot shows us alternate possibilities, and so do the words that appear above our thumbs as we type into a text box. With tarot and predictive text, we acknowledge that our choices led us to a point of decision. We acknowledge our choices that will determine our futures.
Tarot as Hardware, Psychic Power as Software
Those who insist tarot is "for fun" or "whatever you want it to be" often do so from a similar fear-based place as technologist
Some tarot users insist tarot is "for fun" and thus "can be whatever you want it to be." These tarot users attempt to placate tarot's detractors by insisting tarot is powerless. They often do the same work as those who frame their dislike for tarot in scientific terms. Fear colors both of these depictions of tarot.
Both those married to science and tarot users who believe it to be powerless often fear psychics. They fear psychics will manipulate them, and some psychics do.
They may fear not being psychic, a position that tarot will expose. They fear the future and their power to change it based on new, if esoteric, information.
Needless to say, I am critical of those who say tarot readers need not be the least bit psychic. How else would you power the machine you're using?
In the Star Wars extended universe, lightsabers get their power from kyber crystals. Kyber crystals are minerals attuned with The Force. They exist all over the galaxy and are almost sentient.
Lightsabers are powerful both because of what living beings have imbued in them, and because of their raw materials.
Tarot here is like the kyber crystal. Tarot is a spiritual technology that pulls from the power of the earth through the essence of trees. Tarot carries the spirit of the archetypes programmed into them through art and use. We use tarot to remember patterns that reappear throughout history and across cultures.
Psychic power is like tapping into the Force. Tarot uses psychic power to help us time travel so we may consider the futures we're creating at this moment.
It is easier for some to see the lightsaber, however fictional, as technology. This is because a lightsaber is a weapon, so-called "hard" technology.
Capitalism holds hard technologies in great esteem because they can become weapons of war, and war is profitable.
Tarot, psychology, astrology, systems building, gardening–that's all "soft" technology. Soft technologies consider how humans use their bodies and pilot their lives. They have an association with women and BIPOC.
We must value tools that are not used to create empires. We must sharpen tarot as a defense against empire, and use every tool we have to fight capitalism–especially those we've been instructed to abandon.
image: the words “click here to learn more about grounded intuition on a burgundy background decorated by inchplants.
Choice and Inherent Fallibility
Tarot is a human-centered technology that helps us through the difficult ordeal of being human, and making choices.
We programmed our problems into the tool through centuries of colonialism, misogyny, and racism. We coded our problems into the software with our biases, flaws, and dogma. As such, we should accept that the tool will not always reveal perfect truth. This is true of all predictive technology.
We know that autocorrect is racist as hell. Karisma Price addresses this in the poem "Autocorrect Changes 'Niggas' to 'Nights'." I recently found that ChatGPT has partially melded me with a black trans Nightboat pressmate, who doesn't look much like me.
Even knowing this, I'll probably still take the bait next time a tweet invites me to learn something about myself using predictive text.
Reading an instruction manual can help a user to understand the workings of a new computer. Learning traditional card meanings, creating personal associations, and understanding tarot symbolism can help a user understand tarot.
We can learn these technologies, even as we accept their limitations. We can take seriously the technologies that improve our lives. We can consult technology and make our own decisions.
We can predict the future because we can create the future using our tools and our choices.
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hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
