Repost or Die

This chapter is concerned with the analysis of contemporary, community-based practices surrounding the user-generated deity Safety Kitty on the image-sharing platform Instagram. Users engage with Safety Kitty both as an image and through the associated hashtag #safetykitty to protect themselves from the existential threat of supernatural chain images shared on the platform. This chapter first demonstrates that the use of “magic” as a rhetorical tool by programmers and advertisers to describe the various mysteriously obfuscating and wondrously enabling qualities of information technologies has fallen out of popular use in recent years. Attention is then shifted to magical thinking as manifest within lay users’ participation on the social web. Drawing from early sociological approaches to magic in conjunction with new media theory, this chapter proposes that the Instagram-based rituals associated with protection from supernatural threats is indicative of a collective understanding of the unknowability of the processes behind our personal devices.