In case anyone hasn’t seen it, a few days ago, Mishaal Khan posted a video exposing the true identity of (or doxxing) “The Mask Magic,” a content creator who’s made his name exposing magic tricks to his audience on various social platforms. To be clear, I’m not stating that I’m in favor of The Mask Magic’s style of content. While I don’t have any problem with “exposure” overall (a subject I will probably discuss further in the future), I do find his style of content, where the creator shows secrets to their audience in an attempt to let said audience act smug and superior, to be shitty and unhelpful to anyone. Exposure for the sake of lauding power is a bullshit thing to do, and I ultimately don’t think The Mask Magic is doing much to help magic grow.
However. He’s also not hurting it. If exposure of any kind could kill magic, none of us would be doing this right now. People wouldn’t be increasingly seeking magic in the age of the internet if access to information was enough to destroy our lives. And yet, once more, all the magicians see a guy doing what is, ultimately, an annoying but compared to what happened to him quite neutral action, and treat it like it’s the coming of the magical Antichrist, screaming and kicking like children at the thought that someone who didn’t pay $500 for the secret to their favorite card trick might learn it (as if we don’t freely share ideas and secrets at our own jam tables).
But this goes further than complaint. This was an intense effort to track this man, through linked accounts and other sleuthing, in order to put a name to someone who doesn’t want one. This is doxxing, a thing that I thought we as a collective internet ruled was Not Fucking Cool, especially for something that is this mild. Exposing an ICE agent committing violence against citizens? Sure, that has a rationale. Giving the same treatment to a random Italian man because he shows off a gimmick you like? No, I don’t accept that.
Reading the comments on Khan’s video, as well as the Facebook and Instagram posts I’ve come across, I’m surprised and horrified at how unanimously celebratory the response has been, magicians of high status thanking Khan for his work and calling for the man behind The Mask Magic to be shunned from magic entirely, with seemingly no one giving any sort of push-back on either the action or the tactics involved. If I have to be the dissenting voice here, then so be it. When we embrace these kinds of actions, we create a surveillance culture that seeks to deal with internal problems (because, let’s face it, no one outside of magic gives a fuck about exposure) via destruction of the “perpetrator.” We create a culture that puts our little methods above the identities and private information of individuals. And, while I would guess it will have little consequence for the man behind The Mask Magic, the moment this gets turned on someone with more to lose, it will be a shitstorm (hell, there’s a reason we all go by pseudonyms here. If someone doxxed us the blog would just shut down entirely). Magic secrets are not a life and death matter, but doxxing absolutely can be. Knock it off.
Leave a Reply