On the many benefits of clockwork machinery compared to electronic circuits.
It has been mentioned elsewhere that clockworking gained its symbolic connection with time — that is to say, memory sacrifice in exchange for power — from the linguistic coincidence of “clockwork” connecting gears to the concept of time. This is actually less of a coincidence and more a matter of expedience. When the materials and understanding of craftsmen finally advanced to where accurate gear-mechanics were possible, the most elaborate and common methods to apply the skills to were mechanical clocks, especially the giant cathedral-topping timekeepers and the ones with elaborate mechanical people acting out various routines in time with the hours.
This was partly due to localized, city-based pride; some craftsman, after gifting the city with amazing clockwork displays, were rewarded with blindness or limb amputation, to insure that they would create no greater works for anyone else. This pattern of ‘gratitude’ contributes a great deal to the reclusiveness of Mechanomancers even in the present day; their skill in humanizing the non-human lead to their own dehumanization — they were seen as artisanal resources instead of people. No matter what the era, clockworkers were either well-hidden, well-armed, or barring both of those, not-well-in-the-head (for example, Spring-Heeled Jack’s fabulous footware could have been Mechanomantic in origin, along with his behaviour).
The great degree of precision needed for time-keeping machinery meant that gearwork and cam-cutting was most commonly applied to clocks, both great and small. It may not have been the first or only application of such machinery, but it was the most prevalent and required great skill. This was made even more so when the British Parliament started putting out incentives for clocks accurate enough to be used at sea for navigation purposes. Since it was the most common application of the technology, gears and springs and cams became known collectively as clockwork, no coincidence required. The same phenomena happened later with the cathode-ray tube, which became so synonymous with television that it was reffered to as a TV Tube even when there was no equipment in place to provide a display.
For better or ill, though, clockworking does exist and many still practice it in preference of power through money, injury, risk, books, anger, or television. Not only are the old clockworkers still around (some with apprentices carrying on their traditions), there are a number of spontaneous Mechanomancers showing up, many of them with variant charging structures and taboos. There are three main theories as to why this is in the underground at present, with the standard subset of about thirty harder-to-understand theories involving anagrams, astrology, and fish offal.
Theory One is that an Archetype, perhaps the Craftsman or Inventor, has been replaced with the more modern Do-It-Yourself Man, with the resulting ripple effect throughout the universe bringing hand-made machinery back into the limelight. A variation on this theory is that a member of the Clergy associated with mass production and factory assembly line technology has been weakened and the new Mechanomancers are filling the ideological gap.
Theory Two is that two generations who grew up watching MacGuyver, The A-Team and similar shows have come up against the hard reality of the world being far less flexible and more immoral than they originally thought, with the result that a statistically small percentage of them have decided to violate reality in retaliation. This theory is the most common one on the Mak Attax open list, although tempered by a joke by one “3blindmice” that goes something like this: “Bend over, universe! The Mechanomancer wants to have his way with you!”
Theory Three is that the present day pinacle of technology, namely computer hardware and software, has grown too complicated to be understood even by its own practitioners. The pathways between parts of modern microprocessor chips are now so complex that they have to be enlarged to several thousand times to be visible in a diagram or map, let alone understood. More and more of the design of computer hardware has to be done through computer software because the human brain is not quite up to the task. Given the saturation of computer technology in society, this should have resulted in some of the first “Compumancers” around the ’50s, but the actual school that resulted was that of Infomancy… which was just as concerned with the interaction between people and technology as technology itself. Since computer technology is now so beyond human understanding, it is easily viewed as ‘magical’ in a sense by the majority of the population, seeing as they don’t know exactly how it works. Compare to the old days of clockworking and one big difference is that the craftsman could never get that detached from the operations of the machinery; they didn’t have machinery to help them design machinery, unless the slide rule and frequency tables were counted. The result in the present day is a reactionary grab towards the past; you can’t see a circuit work, but you can see two gears rotate against each other.
Indifferent to the various theories — or perhaps advocating one or another — the new wave of self-taught Mechanomancer activity is making its way through the Underground. A few notable types include “Metalhead” in Florida, who specializes in acoustic technology such as speakers, foghorns, recording equipment and such; “Prototype” in Kansas, who never uses any material or object that has not been thrown away by another person; “Succubus” in Puerto Rico, who appears to have started where Nikola Tesla left off with his Teleautomatic boat; “The Hammer” who never uses computer parts, even symbolically; and “Boltcase” in Southern California, who is unusual even for a variant magician in that she uses her power to actually produce machinery instead of provide machines with special qualities — when fighting some members of the Fellowship of Bad Traffic, she is rumored to have conjured up a sort of Junk-bot from car parts, tin cans, and silverware with a wave of her hand.
Despite their differences, both practical and ideological — The Hammer and Prototype came to blows several times during a debacle in the Midwest reffered to in the Underground as the Clocktower Murders — most of these new clockworkers share a common point of view that the gear is superior to the transistor or vaccuum tube, a view which is one of the few connecting threads between old-school Mechanomancy and its myriad mutated progeny. And unlike many magick philosophies, this is easy to back up with conventional logic. (Try doing that with playing in traffic or jamming nails up your nose.) A fairly clear account and arguement in favor of clockwork compared to electronics was written by Stanley “Yes, that is a gun in my pocket AND I’m happy to see you” Karras, a Montana Native, Automobile Mechanic and minor clockworker who only used parts from guns, weapons, or military vehicles like tanks and fighter jets, before his untimely demise at the hands of an incompetent coworker who damaged the jack while Stanley was still working on the transmission… another reason why clockworkers like to work alone, right there.
From Stanley’s Paper:
“All computers and electronic gadgets are based on the transistor, which is based on the vaccuum tube. In both cases, these are designed to use a sort of electrical on-off switch to control information. This it does, and does pretty well, too. Using whole sets of switches like that, with the proper series of instructions to make sure the right switches get turned off and on, electronics can manipulate information in the form of mathematics and numbers. The amount of information you can handle depends on how many switches you have, and should be expressed in some sort of mathematical equation like 2^n, where n is the number of switches. With each new switch, the number of different states you can model doubles, creating an exponential increase.
“Countering this is the problem of getting all those switches connected to each other the right way. Each switch can only display two states, but for some reason requires THREE connections: An input, an output, and a “gate”. Or something like that. Most problems in this department have been solved over the past fifty or so years and now our computers can handle huge numbers fast as lightning.
“And that is where the advantages of solid-state electronics end, right there. Numbers. The binary nature of the technology is almost worthless in the real world, which is full of shades of grey between the extremes of black and white. And let’s not even go into the troubles caused by color.
“If two arm-control machines were built, one using analog gears and another using electrical controls, the analog system would be the most effective. We do not have gears in our elbows, but gears are easily able to mimic the plane of motion and arc of rotation our arms follow. The shoulder is a different and more complex problem, but can usually be solved by using two planes of gears — a universal joint — instead of a ball and socket joint. The result is effectively the same.
“The digital machine, however, has to reach a point somewhere between zero, not extended, and one, fully extended. More and more on-off switches must be used to divide the path of the elbow into smaller and smaller increments of motion. It can be done, it HAS been done. But it is complex, unweildy… and slow. The best electronic AI, for the time being, is just below the level of insects and just above that of bacteria, since the processing chip has to handle these kinds of subdividing tasks for many different body parts, all at the same time. With gears, springs, and cams on the other hand, there is no real delay; the machinery performing the task is in many cases the machinery performing the calculations. When trying to mimic life, this is as it should be. Do you think about every single movement you make? No, most movements are entirely automatic. Many will say that all movements are judged at some level but in fact these people are usually employing two errors in judgement.
“The first is applying digital paradigms to analog systems, which as we discussed earlier, does not work very well. Gears are good for action, but for mathematic abstraction, they are not as suited — the real reason for the limits of Babbage’s various Engines. The computer programmer or electrical engineer, spending so long studying their circuits and programs, seeks to apply the same principles to plants, animals, people, the universe. ‘When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’, a mental roadblock which I myself crash into every now and then, so do not think I am poking at computermen and electricians for my own entertainment.
“The second error in judgement is more emotional than the first, which is more of an intellectual mismatch. A very large number of people do not like the idea of artificially intelligent machines, and this has nothing to do with scenarios like those in the Matrix of Terminator movies. The threat of being able to quantify decision making processes and reproduce them in a machine, mechanical OR electronic, is that then there are limits. Whereas now the inside of a man’s mind is very mysterious, even with neurology, psychology, and the MIR machine to help decode its secrets, if thought could be codified, then all that man was could be explained it simple terms of electronic code or mechanical states. As A.K. Chesterson pointed out, a common fear in earlier times was that any miracle could occur, making life very unpredictable and frightening, while the more modern fear is that no miracle can happen, and all the dark aspects of modern life leave no room left for improvement. And then the real terror begins; if a would-be Frankenstein can put intelligence, emotions, and such into a machine, then surely he could also take them OUT of a human being.”
–End Excerpt–
Stanley also wrote another paper, which was intended to circulate only in the Underground. It explained in further detail the advantages of using clockwork instead of electronics for the imitation of organic life, as well as one large section devoted to an experiment where a simulacrum of a human being was attempted using only minor clockworks designed to interact with each other.
He mentioned a few technical problems, two of the largest actually overlapping. The first was that of breakdowns. If one clockwork failed, the others would still behave as if that clockwork was still operating normally, with disasterous consequences. The other was that of feedback loops, where the behaviour of one clockwork would trigger an action in another, and that clockwork’s action would trigger the original clockwork again, resulting in a cycle of behaviour almost impossible to stop. On the other mechanical hand, he pointed out that feedback loops occur in nature often; dogs and cats who chase their own tails are feedback loops with fur. Furthermore, a system with enough seperate components will eventually shake itself out of the loop; the minimum number of clockworks to escape a loop is three.
The end of the paper was some speculation on the construction of an artificial clockwork human made entirely of minor clockworks and non magick machinery. Such a project, he calculated, would require a bare minimum of one thousand individual clockworks, a monetary cost of at least $70,000 American for materials and processing, and nine years of work, assuming twelve hours of work on the project per day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
His paper has been copied around the underground from time to time, and many Mechanomancers have a copy, either to point to for support, or laugh at as being totally inaccurate.
As always, your mileage may vary.