On the night of this party, he hired much like Simon does, nice young people. He mostly just hired young women—not Simon obviously, but the man in Niagara. He took these nice young women and he put skates on their feet. He clamped them into this metal track. You should be able to know where this is going. He stuck light bulbs in their hands and he ran an electrical current through them. Yes, he lit them up. We are not talking about a contemporary current. There is relatively or just enough to light up little light bulbs, and to give you a little bit of static cling, which I am sure was very attractive. For an entire evening you had young women skating around the party—I know, how can you not be mesmerized by that—with little tiny light bulbs in their hands. They were wonderfully called the electric fairies which has got to be the best thing ever. It ought to be a line on your resume. What else can you do? “I can program, and I was once an electric fairy.” It’s like go.

This particular notion about electricity, as a thing of beauty and a thing to be admired, it goes on in many other ways. Mary Astor had herself made a dress entirely of light bulbs and so light bulbs sewn up the entire front of the dress. During the Christmas season she would answer her front door in Manhattan standing on a plate. When you pressed the doorbell an electric charge went through her feet into her dress. What do you say to that except “Go Mary!” There was at least a five-year period where if you were a wealthy family in Manhattan, you had a doorbell girl who lit up when the doorbell was pressed. That was kind of her function in life. She stood on the plate and people pressed the button and she lit up. There are so many things that one can critique about this, about why this is women’s bodies that we run electricity through and what it means to do that—blah, blah, blah. Insert feminist criticism or technology and gender here.

Imagine that equally importantly here is the notion that technology was about creating a spectacle. It was about being a beautiful thing. It was a thing you could see, a thing you could revel in, and a thing that caused you go in kind of splendor. It was about a moment of wonder. Electricity continues to be kind of a remarkable thing. We wander at its absence when we have devices that need charging. We get very excited when we can plug things into walls. To this day, there is something kind of splendid about the power of electricity.

On a slightly less, I guess, happy note in the same time period there is a fascination in the West with radium. In 1898 Marie Curie discovers the particular particles of radium. She discovers that they glow. This becomes very quickly a very interesting thing outside of the scientific field. Radium is first used in healing practices. It finds its way in hospitals as a mechanism for treating various kinds of cancer, but it rapidly moves out of the hospital and into an entirely different realm where it is marketed under the label eternal sunshine, where you could have eternal sunshine radium suppositories. Yep—where the sun doesn’t shine, you could put it right there. You could have radium drinks. You could have your own do-it-yourself luminosity kits, and so you could paint anything with radium. There was radium nail polish, radium lipstick, radium blusher.

There was a very famous musical in 1904 on Broadway called unhappily, ”Piff! Paff! Pouf!” which featured the Radium Dance. This illustration was taken from where all of the clothing was dipped in radium and all of the theatre lights were turned down, so that you could see the characters dance across the stage. Now, there was a lot of fascination with radium. It lasted for about 15 years. There was an extraordinary kind of attraction to it until we discovered that it was deadly—and discovered that it was deadly in some fairly awful ways.

The “radium girls” quote, unquote, who are kind of the first of the big environmental lawsuits in the United States where young women who worked for a watch factory, their responsibility was to paint luminous characters on the watch dials. They were taking radium-based paint and painting the dials of the watch. They had been taught to tip the paintbrush with their lips. They put the paintbrush in their mouths; put it in the radium, and then pull it back through their lips again so that it got the perfect point to illustrate on the dial. Most of them died in kind of awful and unimaginable ways. The lawsuit that followed is the very first to enshrine in America a set of workplace health safety standards, about what it is that you should use with technology. As a result, some of the luster of radium kind of faded here.

We go through cycles of technologies that have a kind of splendor to it and an excitement to them, but I think that there is this perennial tension between moments of wonder and excitement and dystopian realities that frequently follow.

Where does that leave us? For me it comes back to thinking about this question about magic and technology.

I think that we have gone through an extended and protracted period of a kind of death of magic. It is clearly the birth of fear that comes almost directly with it, but it leaves me with this question about the fact that I suspect as human beings there is a kind of desire to have those moments of magic and wonder. There is a desire to have that moment of light flickering; the first time a light bulb came on; the first time there was electricity; the first time there was clean water; the first time you could flush a toilet and it didn’t just go into the septic pile behind the house, which is kind of splendid in its own way; the first time that television flickered on; the first time you went to the movies; the first time that you used a touch screen, or the first time you used an ATM machine where you didn’t have to deal with the fact that the UI and the buttons never line up. Those are all moments of wonder big and small.

There is an attraction to those things, a sense that those are good moments to think about. For me sitting where I sit in the kind of technology ecosystem, I wonder what it would take for us to architect back to wonder, to kind of say that if we can manage through the fear—we know where it comes from. We can ask different questions about what it means to make ourselves human and to think slightly more critically about that. What would it mean to architect wonder into the system, to architect for magic.

Of course, there is a very famous line by Arthur C. Clarke that suggests something like it. Obviously, Clarke is another kind of well-known science fiction writer, this one British. He wrote a long time ago, which he has a series of three laws—the first two of which I find deeply self-serving, but the third one of which is really interesting. He says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Of course, he was interested there in the advanced technology, and I’m interested in the magic.

I wonder if in some ways we can’t rethink that statement just a little bit, and say in fact that it is the technology that is indistinguishable from magic that is the advanced stuff. It is the magical capacity of the technology that is actually interesting. That is what you should be designing for. It is not that it should be indistinguishable from magic, but it actually should be creating possibilities of magic and possibilities of wonder. When we critique technology as being somehow deeply needing to be vested in a particular set of projects, we miss the possibility and the prospect of the fact that wonder and magic are things that we are always seeking, and arguably at some level always missing.

The same Japanese roboticist who has been working for a long time building extraordinary robots in Japan wrote a book a long time ago in which he talked about the fact that robots would achieve buddhahood before people did, because he said that robots were capable of infinite patience—which is a kind of extraordinary notion. He is also famous for having coined a phrase, uncanny valley. Riffing him mostly on Freud’s notion of the uncanny but a few others, he kind of presupposes this theory that says that particularly in robotics, but in a range of other sort of aesthetic fields, there is this moment where in the robot field the robot doesn’t look really human; it looks mostly human. And then it creeps it out, and then it eventually looks totally human. There is something about the field of robotics which has been driven by getting across the uncanny valley as quickly as you can. You don’t want to get stuck there when people are going “hmm, we don’t know what to think about that!”

I wonder if this is not the wrong notion; that in fact particularly as anthropologists, as people who spent our time thinking about boundary objects and things that are neither one nor the other—of objects that mediate boundaries between things you can see and things you cannot see—I am thinking here about all of the boundary objects that we know in our lives whether it’s money that effectively makes cash like credit cards, or banks that make money visible, because money is effectively an invisible thing; churches and rosary beads and prayer beads that make God visible; watches that make time visible, or mobile phones that make the Internet visible.

As anthropologists, as social scientists and designers, we spend a lot of time playing in that space of the things that sit on the boundary between the invisible and visible. For technologists there is a constant push, and in some ways a real impulse to make things both visible and real—and as real as to be almost human—which is probably not the right direction. That seems to come with an inherent kind of anxiety and fear.

I was thinking about how you end a story about magical thinking. How do you end a story that goes from the invention of the watch, the telescope, and the microscope, through a lot of ducks to the present moment.

I think that for me it is about a kind of request of all of us, particularly for where I work and many of us who work in the tech field, I actually think our biggest challenge here is not just about making technology that people want, but it is about making technology that brings wonder to the fore. It is about making technology that creates the possibility of magic that creates the possibility of a narrative, a sociotechnical imagination that is not about fear.

I have to wonder if one of the ways to do it is to not run through the uncanny valley, but to set up camp there instead. There is something in that moment about when technology is not quite doing the work we imagine where possibilities and prospects really lie. There is something here about not falling hostage to some of the stories that we tell about what technology should do, actually asserting a different set of stories—asserting a different sociotechnical imagination. For me that is one that has to be rooted in history. I don’t think that we can have a conversation about contemporary technology without having a story about our past. I think that it has to always already be comparative. I think it is impossible to tell a story about technology that imagines its sole point of invention is Galileo and Byron, because we know that there are other stories there. I think that there is a responsibility to think about what is the work that technology could, should, and will do. It cannot just be about solving a particular set of problems, and it cannot just be about a notion of replacing humans; although, I think there was an interesting conversation to be had about what makes humanness.

There is a charge here, or at least for me, and I would hope for many of you in the room, to think about how it is that we not only critique the existing sociotechnical imaginations, but then how we create the possibility of a whole new set of them—and a set of them that are open, rich, and that have the possibility of magic. That is what I ask. Thank you.

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference 2013. © Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, some rights reserved.