Today’s techno-world makes reality more inseparable from fiction than Victorian séances did

Evidence

Fin de siècle speculative imaginations relished the entanglements of the rational and the irrational, the fictional and the real. As we have seen, nineteenth-century speculators mixed the “magic” of prophecy with an otherwise rational conduct of life—their journeys meandering between the paths of faith and reason. … But our current techno-world blurs such boundaries further still. Where Victorian séances often took the form of theatrical performances, our own reality seems increasingly inseparable from fiction. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 168

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the reader’s silence research — Victorian electrical technologies making ‘magic into a daily routine’ echoes earlier material on how technology folds the supernatural into everyday life.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘reality appears inseparable from fiction’ as the structural successor to Victorian theatrical séances — a continuum of speculative media from telegraph to feed-optimized algorithms.