When you think of Roman soldiers marching into war, you probably don’t picture them carrying chickens to predict the army’s fortunes. And you likely don’t throw spilled salt over your shoulder to ward off bad luck. If superstitions like these seem silly to us now, it’s because we’re modern, enlightened people living in an age of digital wonders.

Who needs superstition when you’ve got apps and algorithms to manage things? As it turns out, plenty of us do—especially when it comes to that very same tech.

First, there’s the superstition that some people’s energy fields can cause tech of all kinds to malfunction. Not a single well-designed study has ever been able to prove it, but the belief persists.

Then there’s the superstition of keeping ‘magic’ talismans on or near your devices to keep them running smoothly. Some IT techs even store a pleasant image in a root directory to help prevent bugs and glitches.

And in Taiwan, there’s a widespread belief that keeping fresh bags of a certain corn snack near your computer will bring good luck. The snack is called Kuai Kuai, which means ‘be good’ or ‘behave’. As the BBC reports, even police stations and engineering firms use the snack as tech talismans.

At first glance, relying on magical thinking in our high-tech age seems like a contradiction. After all, superstitions have always been a form of protection against the unknown—everything from lightning to plagues. Perform a ritual, carry a talisman, appease the gods, and those powerful, inexplicable forces can be held at bay.

But we live in the most technologically advanced era anyone has ever seen, with apps and devices that eliminate uncertainty down to the nanosecond. We know our sleep and hydration status in detail. Digital trackers show the location of our kids, cars, and pets in real time. Important documents can be signed online and delivered in seconds—with digital trails to confirm receipt.

There hardly seems much uncertainty in our daily lives at all.

Except for one important thing: the technology itself.

When it comes to modern tech, we’re a lot like the people that used to rely on superstition to explain things like illness or volcanoes. We don’t have a clue about the tech we use every day. We can’t explain wifi or cloud computing, and even the basics of device maintenance are often a mystery.

Just like the science behind a solar eclipse eluded ancient people, our digital devices are a powerful yet incomprehensible force to us. Magical even. As a Vice article put it, “when humans know just a little bit of how something works, the rest of it gets relegated to the realm of mystery and magic.”

So we cross our fingers and hope things work. We perform our rituals and maintain our superstitions. We wave our phones in the air or turn in circles as we try to conjure a better signal—trying to harness an invisible field we don’t quite understand.

Our superstitions don't always work, of course. But if all else fails, you can always try turning it off and turning it back on again. 

Photo by Malvestida on Unsplash