Semantici.st

This article was originally published at Witchvox.

At times, Technopaganism can seem like an almost invisible niche of Paganism. Mainstream books and online resources nearly always have a very heavy pastoral or rural slant and it can be very difficult to find real examples of everyday Technopagan practices. To help counter this, I am going to present both the use and source code of one tool I’ve developed – Twittermancy, available at http://twittermancy.com.

Twittermancy is a form of divination, which is somewhat akin to traditional bibliomancy. The idea is to generate a bunch of text, which you can then interpret according to the situation. In bibliomancy you might open up a book to a random page and pick a random line to start reading from. With Twittermancy you give the site a focus word and it generates a few lines of text based on what people have posted to the Twitter microblogging service. Twitter has hundreds of thousands of users posting a total of over three million messages per day, so this provides an excellent source of fresh text to pick from.

The ease with which we can generate ‘randomness’ – or ‘entropy’, as it’s known in cryptography jargon – is one of the strengths of using modern methods for producing material to interpret for divination. The key to divination is to have a suitably random source that your brain can use to see a connection between the seemingly disparate elements. Producing non-repeating randomness quickly can be difficult using traditional means.

A common example of real-world randomness, clouds, are a great source of randomness but they change relatively slowly. This makes it difficult to do multiple readings from the same source of randomness. In turn this makes it difficult to ‘ask’ follow-up questions or explore other lines of thinking.

Systems that do allow for a high degree of non-repeating randomness have tended to come with a well-defined stock of interpretations. For instance, I learned to use tarot cards from a book and have found that between the learnt interpretations and the overly-specific imagery it is very difficult to move to a more fluid interpretation. A system that produces just free text leaves me able to interpret the results using all my experience of language and meaning, which is much broader than the relatively static interpretations available through tarot cards.

Generating random free-form text quickly and without repeating elements is extremely difficult using traditional means. Bibliomancy is effective, but using the same text too frequently will bias the results and not every book is really suitable.

However, using a computer for this is easy, because there is a huge amount of text available through social networking services like Facebook, blogging/microblogging services like Twitter, and text search engines such as Google.

Beyond this the study of entropy is a vital part of cryptography (the use of encryption to protect data) . Cryptography is vital for the existence of the commercial Internet, so there are many good sources of randomness available on every computer. They can be harnessed to feed into different kinds of output, such as generating random pictures or text.

In addition to being available for use at http://twittermancy.com, I’ve also made the source code to the Twittermancy site available on GitHub – a service which hosts computer source code. It can be accessed at http://github.com/johnd/Twittermancy/tree/master.

Twittermancy is written in Ruby, a programming language that is quite easy to pick up and is growing in popularity as a web development language. Making the source code available allows other people to make their own customized – and improved! – versions of Twittermancy, or to take parts of the base idea and adapt them to other services or purposes.

The use of open source is absolutely essential for the growth and health of the Technopagan community. People drawn to Technopaganism are more likely to already be familiar with the concepts behind open source development. Primarily this means the idea of ‘viral’ licenses that allow you to reuse and modify code, but only if you release your new version under the same terms as the original code. This ensures that people who benefit from open source code contribute back to the community by publishing their improvements and alterations.

At its best, this can create a ‘virtuous cycle’ where the improvements to a project cause it to become more popular, which in turn causes more people to work on and improve the project. When this happens a project can undergo rapid evolution and can produce some really excellent tools.

If this were to happen with Technopagan tools, we could create new techniques and methods which Technopagan developers can adapt and customize to their specific needs but which could also be deployed more widely in more generic forms so that the entire community can benefit. This includes more traditional Pagan and Witchcraft communities, as Twittermancy can prove useful to anyone who is interested in divination!

I hope that Twittermancy can represent a new generation of Technopagan tools – tools which are easily usable by the entire Pagan community, but which can be adapted by the Technopagan community to produce new and interesting tools, which themselves will be available for use and further adaptation. By having a working tool to start from, I hope to make it easier for people new to Technopaganism and software development to start to create their own tools.

Programming a computer can be an incredibly empowering experience. Computers are the most complex machines we interact with and for most people they represent an unknowable ‘black box’. However, for me an important part of Technopaganism is being able to open the box and understand how it works. Being able to make your ideas reality can give you a huge sense of accomplishment and personal power – programming is not an unreachable goal!

An example of a community that has done this is the Organisation for Transformative Works. Their project to create a fanwork archive (http://transformativeworks.org/projects/archive) brought together many people who were interested in seeing the project succeed, but did not have any experience in creating this kind of software. Their developer community largely learned from each other and, almost uniquely for an open source project, have a majority of female participants.

The OTW are an excellent example of how people who traditionally would not have attempted to take control over the ‘black box’ were able to crack it open and learn to control it. They also chose Ruby to base their system on, and I believe that the accessibility of the Ruby programming language has been a major contributing factor to their success.

The Pagan community at large tends to have experience with cracking open things that are supposed to be ‘unknowable’. I see no reason why the wider Pagan community, which has a similar demographic make up to the OTW’s supporters, could not learn to take control over the unknowable artifact on their desks.

I hope that open sourcery will over time be able to provide new tools for all Pagans to use, provide multiple easy entry points into Technopaganism, and help people gain a better understanding of how they can create their own tools and express their own ideas and concepts through computer software.

Ages ago I registered urbanpaganism.info, and set up a basic wiki for a community I’d set up for people who practice Paganism in urban environments and were fed up the usual hippy clap-trap advice like ‘grow plants in a window box’ and ‘visit the countryside’ when it came to experiencing Paganism in the city.

It never really took off, and I’ve decided to scrap it and revisit an idea I had when I originally registered it, but didn’t pursue. That application’s not ready yet, although I think I understand everything I need for it, and plan to work on it a bit tomorrow.

Random image generated from the word 'Sinatra'

While the random image divination tool is actually quite basic, I’m really pleased with what I’ve done. It’s written using Sinatra, which I’ve never used in anger before. For such a simple application, it’s an obvious choice, and it fitted into how this application was developed, too.

The initial Ruby code I wrote for this was a command-line tool that produced the image file and printed out the filename. This was never intended to be a final version, but it let me quickly test and refine the code. To use it with Sinatra, I wrapped the script in a class, specified an interface and required it from my very simple main Sinatra app file. If your web interface isn’t much more than a wrapper around a class, Sinatra’s a much better choice than something like Rails.

Writing the code like this was a good experience at writing just Ruby rather than “Ruby on Rails”. I did have to require ‘activesupport’, because you get too used to the nice extras that gives you, but it’s nice to write something simpler and leaner.

The templating was also a departure, as I wrote them in HAML. I’m pretty sure I’ve missed something, since HAML doesn’t seem like more than a pretty way to write HTML. If there’s any helpers, they weren’t helping me. I suppose it’s neater than just raw HTML, but I won’t be switching from ERB in my Rails projects.

As the actual ‘business logic’ (if it can be called that!) was pre-developed in the command-line tool, only a little bit of development using Sinatra was required. Thankfully, Phusion Passenger cheerfully supports Rack applications, so this was easy to set up in both my development and production environments.

What wasn’t so easy to set up was RMagick itself – I suspect that there’s no painless way to get it working on Mac OS X with the Apple-supplied Ruby. I’ve had to switch using the MacPorts Ruby, and spent some time figuring out which gems I needed to reinstall. Pretty frustrating, and led to much swearing on Twitter.

The end result of all this is a simple tool that draws lines, arcs, squiggles (technically polylines), and rectangles in a semi-random way. When fed the same starting phrase it’ll always draw the same thing (I’m using String#hash on the phrase to seed Ruby’s random number generator, using srand()), but there’s also the option to not enter anything and get a non-repeatable pseudorandom image. I’m hoping that these random/semi-random images will be useful for focussing on when contemplating what to do or where things are going – a form of iconomancy, I suppose.

I’m not convinced that they’re entirely fit for purpose, but if nothing else I do find them largely aesthetically pleasing.

This kind of goes against my earlier post about not keeping learning projects around for too long, since a play-around with RMagick turned into something that’s living on my deployment VM, but I’m fine with this. It’s a small simple app that does one simple thing, and it’s nicer to tidy it up enough to deploy (ie, give it a tolerable interface) than to just chuck it away. And it’s nice to know that even if I’ve not got the replacement for urbanpaganism.info done yet, at least I’ve got some new content out there in the world.