Breaking the Phone Habit

This is another thing I'm going to focus on this year: a rule I've put in place regarding phone magic. Partly as a challenge to myself and partly because I believe it will create stronger magic overall.

iPhone magic is seductive because a lot of it is incredibly strong, it's convenient (you almost always have your phone on you), and most of it is very easy. And it seems perfectly normal to pull out your phone, as opposed to a deck of cards or four half-dollars.

Fifteen years ago, there were a lot of people who derided "phone magic." At that time it made sense. Most of the magic for phones was trash. There would be a cartoon-looking coin that would float around the screen and you could "pull it out" of the phone. Or cheap graphics of a deck of cards they could flick through and you'd know what card they stopped on.

Older magicians would say, "If you do a trick with your phone, people are just going to assume it's technology." With those types of apps, that was definitely true.

But in the years that followed, apps got much more sophisticated, streamlined, and invisible. And, interestingly, even though the technology involved got far more complicated—it also became more hidden. Cell phones became so ubiquitous that people didn't just assume it was the phone doing all the work.

But still, it's possible to rely on the phone too much. And that's what I found myself doing recently.

So my new rule is that no more than one in four tricks I do for someone will involve the phone. If all your tricks use a phone, or a deck of cards, or slips of blank paper, or keys on your keychain, then all the energy gets sucked into those objects. The "magic" doesn't feel like this expansive substance that might affect anything around you—it begins to feel like this thing you do with that one particular object.

"He does tricks with his phone."

"He does tricks with little cards he carries in his wallet."

"He does tricks with sponge balls."

Magic should feel like they have no idea what's going to come next. We've all had the experience of people losing interest in our magic, even when the tricks we’re showing them are better than the ones we showed them before. That's what happens when predictability enters the equation. Mixing up not just what you do, but what you do it with, is a big part of preventing that—which is why I'll leave the phone in my pocket a bit more this year, where the EMFs can slowly roast my sperm to the point of complete inviability. A small price to pay for wonder.