Alan Jacobs, “Fantasy and the Buffered Self,” The New Atlantis (2014):

The rise of the buffered self occurred because people were willing to endure disenchantment in preference to living in fear of invisible and irrational powers; and fantasy has become a more and more central artistic genre insofar as it appears to offer temporary and partial respite from disenchantment. But now the very social, political, and economic forces that have ruled modernity — the Age of the Buffered Self — are happy to sell us the means by which we may forget that the buffered condition can feel like solitary confinement. Technocracy is Janus-faced. It speaks dark words of disenchantment with one mouth, and the bright promise of re-enchantment with the other. This is why when the engineers at Apple released the iPad they kept saying over and over that it is a “magical device.” If, as Arthur C. Clarke said, any smoothly functioning technology gives the appearance of magic, it may well be because a very large industrial system needs it to be so.