March 1 - 10 of Wands

In March 2025, I posted one card I drew from Suzanne Treister's Hexen 2.0 Tarot Deck per day of the month.

The case of the Hexen 2.0 tarot deck, featuring the illustration for "cyberwar." The Sun is inside of a mountain, and clouds and waves around the mountain represent related concepts like hacktivists, terrorist networks, and government cyber command The back of the cards, which depict a psychedelic rendering of a double atomic explosion.

The deck consists of all the major and minor arcana depicted by alchemical drawings of people and things from the history of technology, or, more specifically, "the scientific underpinnings of what Michel Foucault called bio-political governance."

Why? Because I had to do some tech-related talks that month, and also with the dark side of tech being so blatant lately, I felt the need to think about it more, and explore my associations/values etc!

The Ten of Wands, representing Post WWII Early Computers. A network of rings represent early computing projects (ENIAC, CSIRAC, EDSAC) with what they were used for written inside the rings and influential figures like John Von Neumann appearing in clouds around the edges and connected to projects they worked on.

Starting with the 10 of Wands, typically representing overload, burden.

Here it is represented by a variety of early computing projects, many subsidized by their respective governments.

I think of how before a computer or calculator was a thing it was a job. Even after they existed, people still had to mediate, calculate, punch cards, interpret, etc. And in my own work I still often feel like a babysitter of inflexible computational quirks... why can't the spreadsheet software, or CMS, or database just do that mind-numbingly boring and burdensome stuff for me?

I also think how, even if it's built on what were once dull analog tasks, it's not -exactly- the same though, is it? In middle school computer lab I was taught a bit of BASIC, and being able to make a simple text "frogger" or branching adventure program, even if they were super rudimentary, was more compelling for some reason than imagining them or drawing them in a notebook... the sort of action at a delay/distance that computing offers, or that is computing's illusion...