The vulnerabilities of enchantment

Daniela Jaramillo-Dent and Michael Latzer (2025, this issue) call for an examination of creators’ disenchanted sensemaking and enchanted sensemaking. Disenchanted sensemaking is strategic work, involving the laborious process of gathering data and managing parasocial relationships. It is an approach underpinned by logic and rationality. It captures the technical expertise of influencers, who pull from experience and knowledge-sharing to amass significant data about the ways that platforms work and leverage this in efforts towards visibility. As influencers are culturally positioned as frivolous, vain and problematic, it often feels necessary for scholars of influencer ecologies to defend them by demonstrating that they are serious, hardworking and technically proficient. In my own work, I’ve re-emphasised the ways that influencers inform and architect cultures online, focusing on the way that non-influencers end up creating content and the pools of knowledge we have available about algorithms and how they work (Bishop, 2025). Daniela Jaramillo-Dent and Michael Latzer's exploration of disenchanted approaches is therefore highly relevant and necessary. Examining creators’ work through this lens shows how influencers are impelled to engage in constant, surveillant and painstaking work.

Through their other line of enquiry, enchanted sensemaking, Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer seek to capture how creators understand the unexplainable, search for meaning, cope with uncertainty and – the most compelling feature of all – ‘experience transcendence’ (Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer, 2025, this issue: 2). The authors also show how enchantment can mean that content creation is joyful, creative and even magical – an important intervention that offers insight into another side of platform and influencer work. In pursuit of this sense of magic, my own short intervention will bring the ideas from Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer's paper in conversation with one of the most enchanted kinds of creators I could think of – tarot readers.

Tarot readers make content on the platform, providing general or targeted readings, insights about different cards and tips for those looking to improve their reading skills. In looking to these creators, I wanted to extend the examination of superstitious beliefs accounted for by Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer, including how the participants in their study discussed techniques of ‘projection’ – a form of magical thinking that affords creators a belief that they can control whether a video goes viral. Writing about tarot on TikTok, Eric Chalfant argues that ‘digital media and divination share a holographic ontology in which any piece of “data” can be made to act on any other’ which can position the creator (and their audience) as a ‘creator of their own reality’ (Chalfant, 2025, 646). Surely, too, in their ability to divine the future, tarot influencers may have a unique advantage in foreseeing what algorithms ‘want’ and pursuing virality. In this short piece, I will explore the ideas raised in Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer's piece by applying them to a tarot reader who primarily creates content on TikTok, who I will call Faye. Faye is based in the UK and has 970,000 followers. She is a white woman with a scissor-chopped fringe and spindly tattoos of bunny rabbits and butterflies winding up her arms. She sits in a William Morris wallpapered room or sometimes in her car and delivers readings tied to dates, situations or the lunar calendar. Faye's work demonstrates the double-edged nature of enchantment. The charmed nature of her content surfaces the religious and ‘transcendent’ possibilities within content creation, while her positioning as a hyper-enchanted individual outside of commercially friendly spaces reveals the vulnerability of individuals located within enchanted ecosystems.

For you

Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer draw heavily from the work of British anthropologist Arthur Gell. For Gell (1992, 59), ‘artists are “half-technicians, half mystagogues”’. The same could be said for TikTok creators. There are 34 million videos uploaded every day on TikTok, according to the statistics website ‘Social Shepard’ (2026) (a website that is a bit dubious but indicative enough, in my opinion, for this exercise). For me now and definitely for Gell (who was writing in 1994), it is a ‘technical miracle’ that influencers create TikTok content from their home or their car, and it reaches anyone at all. When we are confronted by such a work of art, ‘we are essentially at a loss to explain how an object comes to exist in the world’ (Gell, 1992, 62). How can any of us explain the way we make, send and receive content, and whether it is or is not intended for us? The concept of assemblage can explain the unexplainable in an ‘ecology’ like TikTok, which is given life by a moving collection of creation, engagement, technology, advertising, law and politics. Anna Tsing characterises assemblage as a form of ‘polyphony’ in which ‘autonomous melodies intertwine’ (Tsing, 2017, 23) – there is certainly an absence of a central melody on TikTok, but maybe we can be attuned to the multiple rhythms of the app. In this sense, we can ‘tune in’ and ‘notice’ tarot practitioners and their processes of enchantment.

Tarot creators on TikTok claim that videos are ‘sent’ to specific viewers (who are open to receiving them) because those very viewers were called to see them. A common video opener might be ‘if you’re seeing this then it will most likely be for a reason’ or ‘this video found you, because it is for you, and it is such an honour to serve you in this way’. In one video, Faye discusses a moment when content from her own channel arrived on her own For You Page with a message that she believes was intended for her at the time. She says, ‘this is not the first time this has happened and I honestly think … quite honestly, sometimes I am the only person I will listen to’. She is particularly convinced that the reading from the video was sent to her at that very moment, because in the video she is wearing orange, her favourite colour.

Jaramilo-Dent and Latzer (this issue, 2025, 9) write about the temporal side to enchantment, which can mean ‘suspended time’ that slows or is refigured. TikTok's algorithmic flow is somewhat detached from time; content is intentionally decoupled from a ‘timeline’, and dates are often inscrutable in video metadata. TikTok's enchanted relationship with time represents a risk and an opportunity for tarot readers who are predicting specific things that might happen during defined temporal windows. Every day, Faye gives her audience a dated ‘24 hour message’. She says: ‘if you are seeing this on the 29^th April, this is your 24 hour message … let's see what's going on with your day today, or if you’re seeing it later on what you could reflect on’. But if the message comes to you later, there is no problem. She follows up, ‘when people say I’m seeing this like two months later, it doesn’t matter when you’re seeing your reading my love, I’ve told you that since day dot. Energy is energy and the reading that is meant for you will find you when you need it and you’re aligned with it’. Faye here leverages the ambiguous temporal flows that underpin content creation as a central feature of her content – just like Jaramilo-Dent and Lazter (this issue, 2025, 5) observe ‘the rational rules of the offline world do not apply’ in spaces of enchanted content creation.

Vulnerabilities of enchantment

One of the more disenchanted parts of tarot on TikTok is the prevalence of scams. Faye was one of the many tarot creators I encountered (or maybe who were algorithmically channelled towards me) who had messages either in the videos or channel description specifying that they would not ever reach out to a client. Faye opens every reading with a message she quickly chants: ‘as always my love, take it how it resonates, leaves what does not, yes this is my only account and no I will not reach out to you first’. This kind of opener is designed to mitigate against the impersonation scams that are uniquely common to the digital service of tarot reading. The scammer will create an account that mirrors the TikToker, repost much of their content and then approach their followers offering tarot readings, sometimes for a discount. Tarot readers are particularly vulnerable because the industry is not regulated, with such services banned from several payment platforms. An article published in the Guardian notes ‘[tarot] practitioners say institutional disregard has left them and their clients open to swindlers’ (Paul, 2024). The tarot community have been left to patchwork their own solutions, including the development of a platform called ‘Moonlight’ that offers additional layers of verification checks, including trialling readings with tarot readers upon signing up. However, the problem persists. Searching TikTok for Faye's name, I encounter an account using her pictures and videos claiming to be a ‘professional conception and fertility psychic’ (which Faye is not) with ‘over twenty five years’ experience’ – despite Faye being visibly in her early twenties. There is also a reposted (deleted) video of Faye crying in her car, after someone has ‘called the authorities’ after a scammer contacted them, impersonating Faye.

Karen Gregory (2012, 276) refers to tarot as a kind of ‘mundane enchantment’ that aims towards a ‘real enchantment’ that often fails: ‘falling sadly into a real insistence that things can be enchanted if we try hard enough’. Her thoughts chime with my experience that the most magical spaces online can be, in practice, the most banal or even the most harmful. Another example of this can be found in Ashley Mears’ (2023) recent study of magicians, who chase online engagement by revealing how magic tricks work, but are often ostracised from the magic community in their pursuit of virality. While Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer (this issue, 2025) point out the euphoric nature of enchanted spaces, enchanted spaces are also detached from professional standards and institutional protections. The lack of support from core platforms and governments is something keenly experienced that is felt by the wider creator economy, which researchers suggest feels unsupported and powerless in their working relationships (Cotter, 2021; Duffy and Meisner, 2023; Taylor and Abidin, 2025).

In closing, I want to push the concept of enchantment a little further, to test what it does. I have more questions than answers here. I wonder, how do the belief systems of enchantment and disenchantment impact the way that creators work and how they live? If enchantment flourishes outside of institutions, this means it flourishes when it's removed from social protections, welfare economies and the coordinated spaces of care. In this sense, the most enchanted individuals are the most vulnerable. Enchantment may not be an explanation of why creators continue to pursue creative careers but an in-built condition of their lack of power in their working relationships. The relationship between magic and precarity is well conceptualised (Gregory, 2012; Mears, 2023; Tsing, 2017). If enchantment is deployed or utilised by creators who are coping with uncertainty, then what kind of reassurance, support and could it be replaced with? The authors note that procedures of (dis)enchantment work in a productive tension, but I argue that there is a final point to consider – what do they produce?