Computers do actually turn the world into a place of magic boxes.

To understand the problem, imagine being Joe Miller, space detective, and having to clear one of those party tents from Harry Potter. You’ve got someone with a deathly fear of doors and corners, but unlike normal space where you can eventually say “clear!”, you go into one of those Harry Potter tents and you don’t know how much of it there is. A room you just walked out of could have changed behind you, and now there’s enemies in there.

You can’t clear a space like that.

A lot of our animal sense of safety is based on “clearing” territory. We thoroughly search the cave and once we’ve seen every part of it, we can calm down, think creatively, take our time. But until we can clear it, we need to be on high alert, ready for saber tooth tigers.

Every animal, especially animals with an evolutionary history of being prey, has a need psychological need to have all the territory mapped out, before we can feel safe.

And cyberspace – the set of states and their transition pathways that a person can travel through as they use software – doesn’t work like normal space. It’s not finite. It’s not easily mappable. It’s not consistent. When you’ve cleared a room, it doesn’t necessarily stay clear. The rules you need to memorize to know whether it’s clear change from room to room.

It feels extremely unsafe UNLESS the software world can be constrained to operate in a known manner, consistently, that doesn’t change too much from context to context, that has consistent behaviors throughout. Then we can start to feel safe with it.

This is a problem for all of humanity. Cyberspace doesn’t feel safe to us. It’s exciting, for sure. It’s powerful and useful, but it is an alien world and we do not feel at ease there unless we can inhabit a small part of it that always behaves consistently. That’s the only software we can feel comfortable with. Like a calculator, or a video game. Finite, consistent behavior.

But even the finite, consistent behavior is a facade, an illusion. Depending on our tech culture, we always have some degree of fear that the “space-like” consistency of the software we’re using is actually a thightly-constrained magical illusion. You might think you’re in your own house, for instance, but you’re really in some wizard’s illusion.

Cyberspace, even the extremely well-regulated parts like apps we use every day, are places built and controlled by wizards, and there might be sneaky shit going on behind the scenes. What might appear to be a magic-free zone might actually have magic happening just subtly, in a way meant to mimic consistent reality.