Why doesn't technology work with magic?
wizard war criminal (she/they)AFAIK we don't ever get an explanation, it just doesn't. And IIRC we never even really get an example of what happens when the two interact, so it might just be racist wizard bullshit
Ultimate Dumbledore FanI just think it's odd, since a book is technology, a wand is definitely technology, even brooms are
wizard war criminal (she/they)What people probably mean by "technology" is "things that use electricity"
Ultimate Dumbledore FanSo anything past the late 19th century
wizard war criminal (she/they)But I've never really understood why the two would react badly, considering wizards use radios that (presumably) work using radio waves but are powered by magic.
Helios [xe/xem]I mean Arthur added magic to a car and it went feral/ sentient
StarsTechnology doesn't work with magic is an extremely puzzling sentence when you realize that diagon alley is an extremely magical district in the middle of London with no issues
wizard war criminal (she/they)And the MoM is right under London too
StarsSt.Mungos as well iirc
wizard war criminal (she/they)So either magic only breaks tech when it's in the immediate vicinity, it doesn't break tech at all, or it does and nobody ever bothered to investigate further
Ultimate Dumbledore FanIf it's in London, that would threaten the entirety of the Wizarding World. If all the electricity goes out, people are gonna start investigating. No wizard is involved as there's no magic use, and suddenly people stumble upon an entire "new" force of the universe which can do a lot. Magic is now public knowledge
wizard war criminal (she/they)Personally I think that magic does interfere with electricity, but only when magic is used directly on whatever is using electricity. So your smartphone isn't going to explode from being in the area of someone casting a spell, but using a Silencing charm on someone's ringing phone would break it.
Ultimate Dumbledore FanAnd if people start forgetting about it, others might figure out that there are humans capable of using magic
The Statute has fallen.
hallowflame1The car may have been a fluke. Sirius's/Hagrid's motor bike seems to operate just fine with magic, with none of the sentience.
Helios [xe/xem]maybe it just doesn’t work in Hogwarts because of the ambient magic or something
wizard war criminal (she/they)I also think that you can fairly easily modify something that is powered by electricity to accept magic as a power source instead, and the magic will kind of mimic what the electricity would do, so you could have magic smartphones if you tried
hallowflame1I could see some authority figure in the past perpetuating the "tech doesn't work here" myth while deliberately setting some spell/ward to cause tech to fail, with the rationale that it would force muggleborns to integrate more quickly/thoroughly.
Helios [xe/xem]I did see one interpretation that magic had a higher voltage than regular electricity so if you ran things off of magic you would need to make a converter for it
wizard war criminal (she/they)I mean, I'd certainly prefer a magical version that can turn into a ring or a necklace or whatever so I'd stop losing it, but at this point giving up the ability to access pretty much the entirety of human knowledge is kind of unfathomable.
Ultimate Dumbledore FanLol imagine some dumb student accidentally destroys the Statute by accidentally uploading the wrong pictures to Instagram
wizard war criminal (she/they)I do think wizards would benefit from an accessible archive of knowledge, though.
Ultimate Dumbledore FanMe too
wizard war criminal (she/they)Magic wikipedia; Magic wikiHow
Ultimate Dumbledore FanBut then the worth of books kinda collapses, sort of
Why go through all the trouble of finding an Occlumency book when you can find one online?
wizard war criminal (she/they)I mean, you don't have to make your super secret books public, you can just. Not share them. Or have an exclusive library of them
Helios [xe/xem]Some of the rarer books would need to be found in order make electronic copies and we don’t have every book online, or for free
Ultimate Dumbledore FanYou can pirate them though
Helios [xe/xem]They’d still need to be online for that
wizard war criminal (she/they)But the fact that Hogwarts doesn't have a functional potions or defense or history class is. Very much a problem. An accessible archive would help alleviate a lot of the problems their society is going to face in the next half century
Helios [xe/xem]Especially with all the types of magic that aren’t part of the curriculum
Ultimate Dumbledore FanLike the Statute possibly maybe collapsing into tiny pieces
wizard war criminal (she/they)They probably lost a lot of knowledge during those two civil wars, possibly forever
Just to people dying without teaching them, with family libraries becoming out of reach with their deaths, and with a culture so traumatized by that
Helios [xe/xem]Like, currently the internet is filled with tons of information that would be lost if it was all physical, and it’s helps keep languages from extinction so the magical world would definitely benefit from it
wizard war criminal (she/they)I don't think that the british wizarding world is really going to recover from the 20th century
Like I genuinely think their society is going to either change so radically that they cant be called the same culture or it's just going to collapse
And honestly I can't say it'd be a bad thing if it did
Serious ScribbleI think the technology debate has two aspects. First of all, the quote in the books says things running on electricity don't work in Hogwarts, because it's too magical. I wouldn't insist on the "in Hogwarts" qualifier, though, since HP magic is conceptual, so the words can be taken literally -- something that is "too magical" in general, not just Hogwarts, can't have electricity, simply because electricity would make magic un-magical, it makes it boring and normal, the whimsy, the weirdness is gone, and thus so is the magic. But as magic beats the mundane, you have to invert this, and instead of electricity killing magic, it's magic killing electricity. Regarding the Ford Anglia, this makes perfect sense, because like any old '50/60s car, it's mechanical, not electrical, and presumably Arthur's tinkering is precisely to substitute what little electrical functions (lights etc.) is left. And for the London places, well, it's not said that the Muggles close to Diagon don't experience weird interferences and unreliable electrical systems. I'd find that perfectly plausible, and then, like always, they make up explanations and excuses in their heads, just so as to not believe it's magic.
The second thing is that wizards don't use technology - and the word is used in a, for me, perfectly intuitive way, meaning "any one complex thing using science to make it work", while "science" means "any kind of research and description of nature that does not consider magic and thus is wrong". And then, clearly, there are degrees, so a18th century weaving machine is more technological than a 16th century printing press, and a 1900s radio set is more technological than the weaving machine and so on. But right, so they don't use technology since and if A) there is no point, everything technology can and will be able to do, magic can do better, and B) it disrupts their leisurely way of life. A) doesn't preclude using the ideas -- a wizarding wireless set will only look like a normal wireless set, it's not literally a charmed radio. And similarily, the Hogwarts engine needn't be a regular engine where you simply use a boiling charm on the heater, you can skip all the intermediate steps and just directly charm it to move.
B), however, does limit what wizards will use, and is therefore the more important one. You can run through all the examples in the books, and it's always that -- the world is at a point before it got fast and loud, when elegance and style mattered more than efficiency and speed. There's no true point, for example, to have elevators the Ministry. You could apparate up and down. Except if you're like me, you read the descriptions and are suddenly taken back to an old grand hotel, with the golden grille and marble floors and so on, and the point becomes one of aesthetics and atmosphere. Similarily, there is no point to even have the Hogwarts express. Children from Hogsmeade get apparated to London to travel back to Hogsmeade. It's inefficient as all get-out. Except there is the ritual of boarding a train to take you away, the symbolical crossing from child to wizard-in-training, and thus, the point becomes one of bonding and social cohesion, because the express is indiscriminate (Muggleborns use it and Malfoys, too).
And for a counterpoint, this is, as Rowling said, why there will never be a magic internet. It fundamentally alters the lifestyle, and that's not acceptable. Wizards will continue to use books and quills and flickering torches, fundamentally not because they couldn't come up with something else, but because they don't want to come up with something else and don't need to come up with something else: magic will always be able to overcome anything mundane, and safe in that knowledge, they have settled into the world that best fits their aesthetics and values. It's a bit like Amish communities, in this sense; the same logic applies.
So the TL;DR is, "technology" is defined such that it's the conceptual opposite of "magic", you can always substitute the latter with the former, but it's only done when it integrates into the wizarding world without bringing undue change.
I Live In Seven CloudsThen you get colins muggle camera which is somehow able to work using the magic to power it up
Magpie she/herThis is all a brilliant and thoughtful analysis. I love the idea of wizards/magic relying on old things and ideas for some reason to do with magical compatibility instead of senseless technophobia. Symbolic power, almost? The steam train is the inheritor of a traditipn of things used to travel dating back thousands of years when the steam engine was conceived; it's a symbolic journey from the ordinary world of parents and siblings and so on to the world of hogwarts, and like you said it doesn't discriminate. And I like to think most "technology" that relies on mechanical parts set in motion by some form of energy i.e. old cars and printing presses like you said could be animated by magic—either magic takes the role of moving physical parts (no more need for combustion) or it does more complicated stuff too, and you have to strip out the electrical bits.
I love the idea of areas around diagon having electrical problems lol
I also keep wondering why electricity specifically? I mean, magic can create and control fire, start fires that go on to burn normally using carbon fuel, conjure potable water, affect a nervous system, etc. So clearly it has influence over the physical world and energy, and electricity is a physical thing, it's just the controlled motion of electrons through a conductive material that allows for that movement—could there be a magically compatible version of that? Electricity driven not by, idk cathodes and anodes on batteries, but magic somehow?
If anyone better than me at chemistry wants to weigh in here please do lol
Serious Scribble Well, this really depends a bit on what you think HP magic is, @Magpie she/her. If you're like me, and don't think of it as "energy" but as something symbolic and conceptual - something where "music" and "love" is, quite literally, magic - then electricity is just the personified antithesis of magic, the culmination of technology, so to speak, and hence both can't exist simultaneously.
Magpie she/herAh okay so its like the symbolic antithesis?Power through logic and control rather than imagination, will, and intent?
I like that its rather poetic
Serious Scribble It's why the Dursley's residence is particularly un-magical, and the Dursleys themselves are the people "most unlike" wizards (McG in PS), because it's all standartised and normal and regulated and ordinary. There is literally no magic left there. I think something similar would apply to e.g. a big factory. Whereas if you imagine some old-fashioned sweets shop full of wonderfull smells, or a dusty antiquary with lots mysterious things and books with unread stories, that's as close to magic as any muggle will come.
Magpie she/her Does that kind of imply that muggles could access a...version of magic? Perhaps not casting spells or brewing potions per se but the sorts of herb, crystal, tarot card etc magic lots of irl Wiccans and neopagans practice? Like if it's a certain state of mind, a willingness to invite whimsy and mystery and "real" things into your life rather than cold hard factual modernity, could an average muggle tap into it?
Taken to a real extreme, i can see a fic where muggle is a nonsense category; everyone can work magic but if you're raised muggle you almost certainly will lose that ability because it'll be trained out of you in favor of empiricism and other post-renaissance rational virtues. Muggleborns are those children with uniquely strong imaginations or who do some kind of accidental magic when they're little and notice thereby preserving against all odds their capacity for belief in it
So then preserving the wizarding way of life is literally self defense against the loss of magic itself
Theoretically in this way the statute of secrecy was a reaction to the rise of modern religion AND modern science AND the rapidly rising global population all of which made "witches and wizards" an outcast category who went into hiding to protect themselves from losing their entire craft. Hm.
Im thinking like Artemis fowl, you know, he was a genius so despite his youth he possessed the intelligence to actually find a theoretical hidden fairy society, but because of his youth he hadn't stopped believing in the possibility of fairies, and thus he unlike adults was able to find the fairy society
I Live In Seven CloudsAlso, Percy Jackson with the mist