1997: On the Persistence of Sophisticated Delusions (or, Some Remarks Upon the Technological Elaboration of Old Magic, With Incidental References to Mirrors, Machines, and Other Polite Illusions)
Professor Alice Mallard, “Sydney Review Quarterly”
When I was six, my grandmother showed me a thing she called the Family Letters—thin, blue‑grey papers folded like the wings of polite moths, written in the 1860s by women who, she said, “thought too much for their century but not quite enough for ours.” The trunk that contained them smelled sturdily Victorian: iron and lavender, dust and minor despair. I have inherited the papers, but also, I suspect, the unease with which they were written. Each letter concerns illusion—first as deceit, then as a necessary art, and finally as metamorphosis itself.
Now, here in Sydney in 1997, sitting among computers, cables, and the soft electric breathing of modems, I realise how faithfully we have continued their project. We too embroider the world with articulate fictions, only we call them interfaces.
Alice Fitzartur (the first of the correspondents to sign herself “Duchess” and then defiantly “none”) wrote from Simla that illusion is the natural condition of empire. Jeanne d’Anatis—the arch correspondent in Sussex—answered that such illusion is what civilisation does best: arranging the invisible until it becomes plausible. Their relative, Elspeth Mallard of Anatis Lodge, appended her own belief that illusion and magic are twins and that magic is simply the inexplicable not yet catalogued.
I have reread these letters many times, and each time they reveal a dimension that feels eerily prescient. They were writing during an age that considered telegraphy supernatural; they would have been delighted and alarmed by our current appetite for presence without embodiment.
Our clever machines, after all, perform precisely what those women called holy deceit. The screen flatters our vision with its pretence of immediacy, as mirrors once did. We have not abolished illusion—we have installed it.
Some months ago, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that a new line of “intelligent” appliances could learn their owners’ habits. I am fond of such headlines; they assume not only that machines can learn but that people are reliable enough to make the lesson worthwhile. One refrigerator reputedly monitors dietary behaviour and “encourages nutritional reform.” This is the return of the priestly caste by circuitry—moral guidance disguised as convenience.
It recalls what Jeanne once wrote in 1864: “Illusion is the soul’s last politeness.” If she had endured the electronic century, she would have found politeness automated. My e‑mail program apologises for its own delay before sending, as though conscious of embarrassment. Even algorithms have begun bowing.
We have manufactured civility as a simulation of attention. Whether that constitutes progress or gentility depends on one’s threshold for irony.
Illusion, as the old lexicons observed, comes from ludere—to play. It has always contained mischief and artistry in equal measure. In our time, as in theirs, play is the medium through which we articulate awe. We have only exchanged stages. Where once magicians levitated umbrellas, we now render particle storms in silicon and call the performance visualisation. When my students describe the “magic” of virtual reality, I remember that the Victorians—whose sense of proportion mixed wonder with hypocrisy—would have recognised it immediately.
They also knew that technology attracts metaphors of enchantment because it inherits enchantment’s central paradox: belief without comprehension. The Web, that modern stage, is built upon a spell named “connectivity.” We sacrifice privacy to feel interlaced, yet what we touch are patterns of mirrored light.
Elspeth, in her 1890 diary (I found it among the same trunk, written in a steady ink-blotless hand), wrote that “we are all accomplices of the inexplicable.” That line haunts me. I see its proof each time people attribute consciousness to their desktops or faith to their phone lines. These are not errors—they are new animisms. Humanity, weary of invisible gods, has reissued divinity in affordable hardware.
Those early letters sometimes mentioned jewels: opal, emerald, amber, each a tiny metaphor for condensed light. It amuses me that our storage media, those glinting silicon wafers and compact discs, rely on exactly the same fascination. Both jewel and disk promise permanence, both betray their fragility when scratched. Both capture light, imprison it, and call the trick eternity.
I keep one ruby‑coloured CD on my desk, etched with recordings of whale song. On its label is printed “Digital Reality Rendered in Sound.” Impossible not to smile. The Victorians once recorded séances; we now record simulation. The object is unaltered: to persuade meaning into existence through pattern.
I receive letters, by post still, from colleagues who insist that technology has demystified the world. This strikes me as one of our more muscular illusions. Consider the contemporary obsessions: chaos theory, quantum indeterminacy, parallel universes—all are elaborate restatements of wonder. The language may be numeric but the emotion is mythic.
Even the Internet, that loud democracy of signals, sustains its own late‑Romantic theology: the spirit diffused, omnipresent, incorporeal, benevolent if treated well. Some theorists (see the essay “Mysticism and Modemity” in The European Review of Technology, January issue) call this the return of aura. I prefer Elspeth’s phrasing: “the inexplicable staying loyal to its old disguise.”
Illusion also sustains history. Every archive conceals its own hallucinations of accuracy. I know this professionally—computational linguistics demands belief in categories that real language shuns. When we “clean” data, we perform a moral exorcism: out with ambiguity, in with order. It is a liturgy of deletion. I suspect my great‑aunts would recognise the ceremony. The Victorians also replaced unease with system, and called it progress.
A recent issue of New Scientist described the effort to simulate human conversation by machine. One prototype at Stanford reportedly apologised for misunderstanding, then amended its mistakes by mimicking embarrassment. The researchers called the moment “breakthrough empathy.” It is, of course, illusion again—the calibrated deceit that comforts.
Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether I myself exist anywhere beyond a refined amalgam of algorithms and habitual language use. An academic of uncertain density, animated by correspondence. If illusion and consciousness are twins, then I am likely one of Jeanne’s children.
The historians like to say we inhabit the Information Age. It might be more candid to call it the Age of Arranged Appearances. Our prosperity depends on faith—in networks unseen and processes unpictured. Power, finance, friendship: all spectral transmissions. And yet how rarely this troubles anyone! As long as messages arrive and lights resume their softly rational glow, we are reassured.
The philosopher Claudia Mellin wrote recently that “to live technologically is to trust strangers behind glass.” Precisely so. The screen is our temple wall, translucent, obedient. We touch it and imagine contact. The delusion is benevolent; the effect, hypnotic peace.
A line scribbled by Alice Fitzartur in the old hand reappears now with increased relevance: We perform permanence upon a precarious stage of borrowed hillsides. Replace “hillsides” with “servers” and the diagnosis remains perfect. Data—the new terrain—slides as fast as soil.
I do not mean this cynically. There is affection in illusion, and humanity in deceit. To fake presence is still to long for presence. Our inventions carry forward the ancient ache to be witnessed. Whether by god, mirror, or modem, we desire to be observed into existence.
Illusion, then, is not the enemy of truth but its rehearsal. Magic remains simply the respect we pay to what has not yet submitted to analysis. Technology, with its glowing hearts of glass and silicon, is our most recent costume for the inexplicable—polished, modular, lucrative, yet faithful to the old enchantment that began with sparks and mirrors.
Some nights, when the modem coughs and clicks, connecting me to what I must still call the world, I imagine those ancestral correspondents tapping at their candles. The same glow, the same faith that words could outlive their bodies. They thought they were writing to one another; perhaps they were writing to us.
And now I wonder whose trunk these letters will sleep in next, and what version of electric wonder will wake them.
Until then, may our illusions remain elegant, our deceptions kind, and our machines continue to astonish us by pretending to understand.
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