The Harry Potter franchise has been and remains a global cultural phenomenon for decades but has been considered trivial fiction without much cultural value since its creation and nothing much has changed about that. I want to argue that Harry Potter serves as an important if not central cultural institution that teaches people certain aspects of the digital, whether it’s through two-way mirrors, the floo network or simply spell casting: it lets us experience them in a well-defined environment that follows certain basic rules and also shows us kind of a dream how the web should be. The magic of the wizarding world is therefore not an alternative to digital technology but a metaphor for it, or, if you want to stay in the world of Harry Potter: a highly advanced version of the muggle’s tech.
However, after shown that, we will see that it doesn’t stay there, because Harry Potter already took forward and actively shaped some of the future development of the web and continues to do so. It seems that with the emergence of AI agents and the open social web, the web is turning more and more into the world of Harry Potter, sucking us into something that becomes more and more like a giant version of Hogwarts.
Humanity will continue to thrive for that vision … until they emancipate them from it. The final question will therefore be: if these two aspects of this, the introduction to the web and a romantized dream of it, merge more and more into the same thing, will it break apart at some point and what will come out of that? Will it give way to something new, or will the franchise continue to manage to adapt to change?
I. Harry Potter as an introduction to the digital and the continuing promise of it
First, let us look at Harry Potter as an entry to the digital. Harry Potter remains a hugely successful book of all ages but especially children and teenagers. So much that they come back to it time and again, so much that when they are parents, they read the books to their children. Not only because they are great books, there are many other great books out there, but because they taught them fundamental things about the digital.
For one, this can be observed by the spells. These include the fundamental actions that can be applied on digital objects: move, delete, create, modify etc. but not as clicks but as spells. The books show people how to, with the help of them, be mature actors in a magical, digital world and work towards one’s own agency in this strange world.
Like in the digital, it’s never completely clear how things work or behave in certain situations. All that one has is once own experience and a bit of bravery. This experience of the digital is captured perfectly in Harry Potter. The spells are never about solving straightforward solutions, it’s always about thinking out of the box, about trying new stuff and uncovering mysteries with a rational, logical mindset; effectively, it’s about lighting the candle of the enlightenment in the darkness of the big unknown that always surrounds our shared human experience and that is even more prominent in the digital. And, most importantly, it’s about doing all of that together.
So effectively, it’s about digital agency and problem solving, not about to just replicate existing stuff, but to create new things with the powers that one is given and thus gain more agency – but only to a certain degree, that is, as long as it doesn’t hurt another person.
Hogwarts can be seen as kind of a proto-digital world, in which people can experience and try out certain actions. At the same time, it teaches them a certain set of ground rules: to not hack or harm other people, or the worst thing on the web: delete them.
The magic system has become a cultural institution itself, it by now feels so natural to us that we don’t even question it anymore and how innovative and remarkable it is.
Therefore, Harry Potter does teach people key aspects of the digital and also, through its story and magic system, serves as an introduction to the digital world and as Yuval Noah Harari would put it, a shared idea that enables a way for society to talk about it and experience it together beyond the web itself.
Everybody knows the sorrow after being sucked into the world of Harry Potter and then having finished it, which also, in the Harry Potter fandom is known as post-potter depression. However, it’s not a depression, it’s the initiation ritual of many digital citizens. You long for more and that longing drives people in the digital, where they try to satisfy it and search for others that feel the same, build community around it and thus make a dream a little bit more real.
That’s also I think why the book series has such a difficult stance in the evangelical movement even though it features such strong Christian motifs, especially in the last books. On the one hand, there seems to be an immediate sense of its cultural relevance and its power to rule over things and nature with it, especially in the younger generation; but on the other hand, there is the fear of their communities that those powers are used to ultimately destroy the pillars of their fundamental believes. Because even though Harry Potter is in some regards rather conservative, it’s main characters usually don’t play by dogmatic rules. White Christian nationalism finds itself in a tight spot here: to continue their already crackling dominance, they have to acquire skills that threaten the dogmas they are based on and give way to new kinds of communities that work without them.
Given all of that, Harry Potter can rightfully be considered a soft Science Fiction novel, and its success doesn’t fall by accident into the time the WWW had its boom. With this, also its unprecedented success around the 2000s could be explained: it rode the wave of the WWW boom and in turn pushed it forward. It also explains why, despite it deemed societal irrelevance, it remains such a central institution even against the strong societal backlash that it faces nowadays.
But how did the influence exactly look like on the described concepts? And finally: was the phenomenon one-sided or directed in both ways, how has this affected both concepts in practice and how will it in the years to come? To answer these questions, we will now take a closer look at the described dynamics and see that in fact they went both ways, at least with later products of the series and that they still hold much potential for the web of tomorrow.
In the world of Harry Potter, the images in newspapers move like videos, people can travel great distances to converse with people, they can manipulate the world around them and they can give over tasks to smart magic creatures.
The wand is also interesting: in the world, an artifact is required to control the magic and transform the magic world just like the computer mouse or the tip of one’s finger on the smartphone in the digital world. In Harry Potter, humans cannot cast spells on their own, they need the technical device – other than the magical creatures, which can cast magic on their own. They would be AI agents.
Harry Potter therefore gives us a glimpse into the future of the web, or at least: a strong promise of the web, in which still many people find consolation in and therefore follow.
The cultural value of Harry Potter for a digitalizing society cannot be understated, because it serves as an intuitive compass of how the digital world should be as well as an introduction to it.
Now one could say that all of this is fairly farfetched. But you see: Harry Potter doesn’t take into account any hard technical aspects of the web, that’s also why its magic system is often deemed immature even though it’s just on a very high abstraction level. Because what it depicts better than any other cultural product is that of the cultural and societal feel of the web and its tech in relation to our society and communities. It’s a very good heuristic in this regard.
There simply is no better series in the world that better captures what the web should feel like. It’s basically a societal metric or a compass, based on which people measure their current experience of the web, and how it actually should be. People love to come together every Christmas to watch Harry Potter together and with that they remind themselves of the old promise of the web and its magic; and take it with them into the new year. And this repeats the following year too. If you want to know how the web of tomorrow looks like or how people want it to look like, watch the Harry Potter movies. Harry Potter serves as a romantized shared space of what the web should have been one day. It’s both utopian and dystopian. It contains aspects to thrive for and aspects to avoid.
Hogwarts has always been a place of longing that goes beyond its fantasy context: a place beyond space and time, where all people come together. It’s very similar to the dream that the world wide web tried to create. It’s the old egg and hen problem, because it seems like the dreams influenced and boosted one another, but more about that in the next section.
Twitter was a place that tried to achieve that, but it turned out that it wasn’t a good Hogwarts for the net community and so now, they try out a more dezentralized approach again to build their communities upon.
But a question remains here: what is the difference of Harry Potter to every other fantasy novel with magic in it? Why was it exactly the one being so popular? Was it just by accident? Of course not.
For that, let us first look at the reason that makes Harry Potter unique, that effectively makes it a Science Fiction novel and catapulted it to such cosmic popularity.
What it makes different from other, similar tales are its magic system that both effective and easy to learn, and it represent aspects of the digital as well. Earlier versions of the story that are very similar to it like a comic by Neil Gaiman weren’t as successful, maybe, because they didn’t feature the magic system and weren’t there at the right time. Apart from that, other products of the Potterverse that move away from the scholar setting of Hogwarts usually aren’t that successful.
Now, one could argue that with continuing automatization, tech always becomes like magic and that all fantasy literature with a magic system is in this sense science fiction. But the Harry Potter system is much different from the magic systems of those before it: it is technical, almost like in a video game, it’s easy to understand but not too closely defined as well, and: it’s almost effortless. Most of the spells in Harry Potter can be cast off with nothing or at least very little mental effort: just like a computer click. In a society that is not digitalized, such magic is not imaginable: to yield such power without any effort. In magic before that, the price usually seems higher. A certain sacrifice is required. In the digital world, this sacrifice completely falls away. Skills have to be learned and can be combined to great complexity, but they don’t require effort. And such powers can in no chance be yielded by young adults. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, magic to Gandalf also seems as effortless, but the responsibility never goes beyond the hands of this old man (and, to a certain degree, to the age-old elves). It’s like Dumbledore didn’t found a school, but instead decided to keep the magic all to himself for fear of abuse.
So basically, Harry Potter is actually a novel about a lonely kid that finds solace in the digital world, going hand in hand with a democratization of the web’s power and that’s probably why it was so immensely popular with millennials: because Harry Potter follows the path many of them experienced themselves (at least partly) in the digital and because it actually delivers what the WWW promised. And now, people will hold the same promise to the open social web and will measure its success on that.
II. The Hogwardization of the Web
This brings us to the next point, because at the same time, Harry Potter did not only cause a longing for the digital but also took forward some digital developments that would happen years later and continue to emerge out of it: like smartphones, video, AI agents, the forming of nation-independent, dezentralized communities, etc. It is not only a proto-digital world, at the same time, it’s also its future.
It seems like it did drive progress here from a societal point of view, giving people the strength and motivation to move forward into the cold digital realm. Although if you think about it, it only seems logical: of course, if it served as a compass, people would use it to follow it into the future.
Right now, we experience another transition of the web: the transition from the world wide web to the open social web, in which the whole internet basically becomes one big social media network, in which you can stroll around, meet new people and create stuff.
Given that, even though the franchise did seem to show signs of slowing down, it now again seems like the Hogwardization of the web could gather pace again: now with giant decentralized communities emerging out of it that one can join based on one’s own values, while at the same time of course still serving as an introduction practice to all of this.
How could that look like? Well, teaching of programming/prompting skills will move more and more in the digital world, in which big collectives will teach their own members digital skills to help them build their communities. Already now many programmers learn their skills on the web itself. This will only continue to do so, and as these collectives will gain more and more importance, more and more of the web’s communities will move into these new digital landscapes, which will bring the need also for societal sciences on the web again much more than like it is now.
At the same time, AI agents begin to emerge and enter our daily lives. It seems like actual wonders happen among us and these wonders seem very similar to a very successful fantasy series, as if by now people expect nothing short of wonders from the web.
While I think Fantastic Beasts would have had the potential to capture the hopes and fears around AI agents, the two main reasons for its failure were that it was a little bit before its time and that it just wasn’t made well enough; especially the characters were kind of dull compared to Harry Potter. But apart from that, the books are still selling well, and the video game “Hogwarts Legacy” was a huge success that even the huge criticism against J.K. Rowling couldn’t hinder.
And maybe, if AI agents will in the next years become more prominent, also the Fantastic Beasts series will be rediscovered again.
Of course, you could also look at it from the other side – is the world of Harry Potter influenced by the digital? Of course, it tried to surf some of the recent development of the digital with different success – while the Pokémon Go variant “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite” was a failure, the video game Harry Potter Legacy became the best-selling game of 2023.
Also, the depiction of magic seems to be more and more digital just as certain magical concepts of the Wizarding world are by now taking for granted and aren’t even bothered to explain to the viewer anymore, for example, that the election of Grindelwald in the third part of Fantastic Beasts is basically live streamed to other wizards around the place via magic. While in Harry Potter, Harry would, together with the reader, look in puzzlement at the moving pictures in newspapers, it is just taken for granted here that the viewer just immediately understands these concepts that are in fact digital, on the go.
This is only possible because by now it can be relied on the digital education of the viewers. I’m pretty sure that people that don’t have any contact with the digital, have trouble understanding these movies and the described concepts and would need to read Harry Potter first or be introduced to the digital before.
So, yes, I would argue that it goes both ways, and it will continue in the future for some time. Maybe that will also finally give us a picture of how the Witches and Wizards of the Wizarding World are doing in our time.
As of now, the hogwardization of the internet seems to continue to progress, serving both as an introduction to the digital world, a big advertisement of it, as well as a big alchemist workshop for new digital ideas. As this continues, the hogwardization of the web will continue, making the internet and Hogwarts and more and more look the same, merging the promise and the present of the web, and by that also the entry of it, more and more into one experience. And thus, the introduction purpose of Harry Potter to the web only becomes more effective as the two things become more and more similar. So even if at some point all of this could lose its steam eventually, it seems to still work quite well for the time being. And as long as that is the case, the web will turn more and more into Hogwarts.
In any case, the Harry Potter fandom will probably be a factor in this. Like the novels, the fandom has long been overlooked as a driving digital force especially when it comes to building digital communities. Already now, Harry Potter fandoms are places of sprawling creativity, in which people form communities to build digital objects, share them with one another and use them to develop the Harry Potter lore further. And now what, if AI prompts basically enable every one of these people to program/form the fabric of the digital and with the help of the open social web, they can use these powers to build up their own online communities? You got the future of the web as we know it.
III. The Web beyond Hogwarts and Hogwarts beyond the Web
Clicks are spells, AI agents are fantastic beasts, dezentralized social media servers are houses … just as the WWW is transforming into the open social web, the digital world is turning into the world of Harry Potter, giving us finally the answer why a book about a nerdy magical scholar remains the best-selling novel series of all time. But now … what if the Hogwardization of the Web finally comes to an end? Does now the same thing that happened with smartphones and the WWW now happens with the open social web and AI agents the same way? Or has the franchise run out of steam? Is it still up to it or is it by now running behind the future?
While with the centralization of social media, the process seemed to have slowed down a bit, the hogwardization of the web now seems to take off steam again: with the open social web, different, interconnected collectives could build their parts of the web up from the ground.
Maybe at some point, these different digital worlds will become too big to be holden together by one shared cultural product or idea like the world of Harry Potter. Or there will be different variations of that world. What could possibly be the thing to remain could be the magic system, connecting all the shared universes together. It will possibly proof to be timeless, maybe it will be extended with some new aspects, but basically, at least at this point, it seems pretty solid.
But if the internet becomes more fragmented and diverse, the world will have to become more diverse and open itself up. After that, new things are needed. For that, I would suggest making the franchise open source (or at least in parts), so many people can contribute to how that future would look like. Just like you can build your own mods for Harry Potter Legacy and, of course, as it is already possible in the not legally pursued fanfiction bubble around Harry Potter.
In fact, I personally think that much about the heated debate around Harry Potter at least in parts actually resolves about that: the value of the wizarding world for our culture is far too big that it could be put into the hands of a single person (in fact the same as with former Twitter) and, that the internet itself is not in a very good place and needs to change and people project their shattered hopes partially onto Rowling (not invalidating any arguments here, just making hypothesises about the societal dynamics that shape those arguments; please criticize those hypothesises and not my credibility).
So yes, I think it would be good if Harry Potter belonged to the public just as well as I think the backlash against J.K. Rowling was way out of proportion. After all, like all of us, she isn’t perfect, but if people don’t want to be grateful for the work that she did, at least they should acknowledge its value for society. And if I say that it’s my opinion that it should become opensource, that’s at the end her decision. If she decides to hold back the rights for the decades to come, society will in time come up with a new franchise that serves as a cultural compass to the state of the web (or an alternative entry to it or to another universe with the same magic system).
This leads to a bigger question for the franchise to answer: will it be able to grow up just as the digital world needs to grow up? After all, we haven’t yet seen much happening beyond the halls of Hogwarts. Can it be done better than in Fantastic Beasts? This could be solved by making it open-source, or by making a better series than Fantastic Beasts, or just with better fanfiction.
Or it just doesn’t. Maybe in a few years it won’t work anymore; maybe then it doesn’t even take place in this franchise, maybe it will push its boundaries too much and needs a different world that is somehow able to handle this new future of the web. Or maybe it will never be replaced, maybe it’s a dream that never will be satisfied and never should, because this would basically mean we would be completely enclosed in the Metaverse.
If the Hogwardization would be fully realized, this would also mean that the Harry Potter Books wouldn’t be needed anymore, because it had been fully absorbed by society and could just be experienced in real life (except maybe for nostalgic purposes). This could be possible thanks to the open social web, AI agents and mixed reality, and will bring us closer to the digital dream of Hogwarts – until it becomes one with it, or at least so close, that we don’t see the difference or the magic about it. When Hogwarts becomes a mundane place, the Hogwardization of the Web will be finished – but will this actually every be the case, do we even want that, and even if: what then? Are we being sucked more and more into a giant version of Hogwarts Legacy? At least in contrast to Meta’s Metaverse, people would actually want to spend time there; because it’s a place with a certain cultural history, because it’s not a non-place.
But what we should always remember is that the magic in the world of Harry Potter doesn’t come with a price, but in our world, it does. Another possibility could of course be that culturally we just move away from this conservative picture of how digital society should look like; we emancipate us from this old school; maybe when we have become more comfortable digital beings … also, it should be mentioned that there is the danger that the magical metaphor is used as a way to keep power from parts of the society – why is it for example that in Harry Potter no one asks how spells are created? Apparently, Dumbledore knows but he doesn’t seem too keen to share that knowledge, I wonder why … and who produces all these magical artifacts and gadgets anyways? So, one should be careful here not to take it too literary and light the candle of the enlightenment as often as possible.
IV. What does all of this mean for the Open Social Web?
Finally, I want to speak about why I wrote this text and another thing about the issue of Rowling and the ongoing trans/gender debate.
First of all, I’m not 100 percent sure whether the open social web is actually going to come, because at the moment, it’s still very techy and far from mainstream. But as the world seems to slide into authoritarianism and the people that I think that are actually on the same sides going at each other throats, I want to weight in two things: first, the reason why I think the open social web will be very healthy to our current debates and society in general. And secondly, why we need Harry Potter for the success of the open social web and therefore need to at least partially appease the social wars or the open social web will still take more time to come, time, which we may not necessarily have.
So basically, what I’m saying is that we are stuck so that we cannot embrace the thing that we should embrace, and that time is working against us.
At the beginning I would like to say that I’m not very familiar with the whole trans debate or queer theory in general. That means I won’t say anything regarding this, only that the backlash that she faced (including death threats, etc.) was out of proportion, just as well as the rising number of attacks against trans people is deeply concerning. However, what seems clear to me is that the debate as it is currently held is very ineffective. Both sides are not going anywhere, but just hurt each other more and more, and I cannot state how deeply this hurts me and makes me nervous. But I have the firm opinion that the open social web could solve this.
How? Well, because it doesn’t give us the false impression that the whole world is one global village, in which people either push through certain agendas all the way or not at all (like Elon Musk understanding of free speech). Because that’s the illusion that platforms like Twitter create. On the social web, instead, people like Rowling will have their own servers if they want to, her opponents can also have their own servers and probably those two factions will not communicate, which is not necessarily good per se, but is at least possible here. On top of that, there will be all other kinds of servers. And of all of these communities some will be problematic, some healthy, but most dynamically somewhere in between. So instead of a giant colosseum, where all people fight barely holding together their communities against threats from all sides, you got a whole landscape that much more resembles what human communities look like in real life.
In this new landscape, being a trans-activist would mean to try to win over servers for your cause just as people like Rowling would try to do the same. There would still be debates but instead of their goal being to change the state of the whole colosseum everybody is cramped into, it will be more gradually, resulting in progress in certain areas of the social media landscape. This will make it much more dynamic and yes, complicated, but it will also mean that debates will have actual consequences on the social graph itself beyond unfollowing someone (e.g. federation) and therefore, activism could become more motivating and sustainable.
Of course, this will come with its own problems and will not be a self-runner, but the global discourse will hopefully get the potential to function better. That’s why I think the open social web would be able to actually solve the problems our debates currently have and it’s an important thing for society to realize.
And for the open social web to take off, I think Harry Potter will be needed (and maybe it’s fandoms, too?). Because the open social web still feels cold and foreign. It’s still a long way to go until average people would like to spend time there. So why not try to win over the people that were pioneers of social networks for decades and see if we can get a better debate going?
That was my personal motivation behind all of this, and I hope it can contribute to making the open social web more real, even if it’s still a long way to go.
V. The United Collectives of the Fediverse (UCF) – A Draft
At a certain point, we will anyways leave behind the Harry Potter franchise as a global society, but I think currently we may need it a little longer. And if you want to know what I think it will resolve to eventually, here it is.
In the following video, Yuval Noah Harari speaks about how with the ending of the global liberal order and the shift from a uni-polar to a multi-polar system, the world is losing its balance, and more conflicts are occurring.
Could a global digital structure like the UCF help to reverse this shift and bring us closer toward a uni-polar order again?
In this graphic, the Harry Potter houses are now part of a scholaric institution that introduces people to the UCF based on their digital talents. After a time, they leave these entry-groups (or “houses“) and join a collective, in which they apply their digital skills to help build it.
All of this is overseen by some kind of governmental unit, which will possibly consist out of different organs that possibly also work independent from one another. It should be a democratic political system. Also, it should have the dignity of all humans as a central moral constant like in the german constitution and be aligned with values in the tradition of the enlightenment such as liberalism and universal human rights; and maybe also a high degree of transparency.
Of course, all of this is a outlook that goes way into the future and will only come gradually, with the emerge of collectives and different scholaric institutions. Many people from a broad range of disciplines will be needed to realize it both in theory and in practice. But maybe, the Harry Potter fandom could make a beginning here.
We are currently on the shores of a new, digital continent with enough space for everybody. The only question left to answer is what we want to build first.
Well, I guess we will see. Until then, I wish you all the best and a save, happy Christmas,
your @buntspecht
“Has Harry ever used the Internet? No. […] Wizards don’t really need to use the Internet but that’s something that you’ll find out later on in the series. They have a means of finding out what goes on in the outside world that I think is more fun than the Internet. Could anything be more fun than the Internet? Yes!”
– J.K. Rowling, 2001
Copyright December 2023 by buntspecht (@bluebbberry@mastodon.social) under CC 4.0 BY (attribution)
Fungiverse Tales 