Otherkin: elaborazione cooperativa del sapere magico e scenari di rete

This essay moves from a recognition of the role played by subcultures related to magic and occult on the process of social shaping of the Internet, and then propose a detailed case study on how the network is reshaping the forms of magical knowledge. In particular, the paper addresses the production and sharing practices of the belief system typical of the Otherkin subculture, one of the newest forms of techno-paganism, mainly born and spread on the network. These production practices of shared knowledge appear in fact closely following those typical of the open source community, with repercussions on the form of the magical culture as a whole. The magical subcultures appear so not only to play a role in the processes of development of the latest communication technologies (one of the main drivers of the modernization process), but they also seem affected by the ongoing general processes of cultural transformation, thus appearing very different from the ‘immobile residual pre-modern’ described by the paradigm of modernization. The study of the relationship between new media and magic is thus a contribution to the attempt, by the social sciences, to deconstruct the ideological representation of Western modernity as a univocal process of systematic rationalization in favor of a more complex view of the transformation processes typical of the Western modernity