Liber Indigo: The Affordances of Magic

by Justin Kirkwood

Liber Indigo leads us down a winding path through interface design, semantics, dreams, rainbows, materialism, magic, divination, and poetry, intersecting with the ideas of Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, William James, Alan Turing, and others along the way. Borrowing terminology from industrial design, physiology, and geometry, we create the scaffolding for a new system of metaphysics and mystical praxis. Liber Indigo is a new prism for scattering the spectral colors of reality, built upon earlier structures designed by Plato, Sir Isaac Newton, and the Gnostic traditions.

Genres: Nonfiction

151 pages, Paperback

Published July 21, 2024

Reviews

[Justin C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Welp, since I wrote the book, I may be a bit partial. But I think it's a perfectly adequate read. The rectangular shape is pleasing to the eye, and the pages smell delightful. Highly recommend!

[Peter Hoffmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional depiction of a viewpoint in which to explore new ways of understanding ones place within the mysterious realm of consciousness. Justin, in my opinion, has in so many words given a manual of sorts to be able to grasp the wonders of the universe and our place in it. I can't help but feeling both fulfilled, and a yearning for more, both from him specifically, and from what I can learn and understand of myself and ourselves in this place we call existence.

[Wes Ford · Rating 5 out of 5]

The amount of knowledge contained herein is vast for its length. It opens your eyes to wonders and leaves you clamoring for answers to the great mysteries of the universe — and with the toolset to succeed.

[Kaitlin LaRosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first found Justin’s work on TikTok, which was so deeply impactful to me I bought the book! I’ve read it slowly over time since then and it was a delicious blend of technology and mysticism that showed me the role of different advances in shaping perception. Our roles as magicians and designers of human systems (software user interface or AI, for example) is irrevocably linked and it’s the seekers and the poets role to harmonize the two. As within, so without.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a UI designer for the better part of a decade. Spent most of that time inside big tech, building interfaces that were ultimately in service of engagement metrics, dark patterns, and quarterly earnings. I got good at the craft, but somewhere along the way the craft stopped feeling like it belonged to me. The language of design, the way I thought about affordances, interactions, the relationship between a person and a system, all of it had been lobotomized by corporate culture. I didn't even notice how deep it went until I started pulling at the threads. Liber Indigo gave me new threads to pull.

What Kirkwood does here is genuinely rare: he takes the vocabulary of interface design and industrial design, terminology I've lived inside professionally for years, and re-situates it within a framework of metaphysics, mysticism, and meaning. Affordances stop being about button states and become about how consciousness itself interfaces with reality. It reminded me that the concepts I work with daily, interaction, feedback, signal, noise, perception, these didn't originate in Figma or Adobe. They are ancient. They belong to something much larger than software interface design.
The best part about this book is that this isn't a self-help book. It is not going to tell you to quit your job and follow your bliss. It is weirder and more rewarding than that. It pulls from Jung, Gnostic traditions, Newton, Huxley, Turing, and stitches them together into something that feels less like an argument and more like a prism you can hold up and look through. The book affirms the way creative people actually think: associatively, in spirals, not in a straight line toward a thesis statement.
If you work in design or tech and feel like your sense of wonder has been quietly hollowed out by years of sprints and stakeholder reviews, read this book. It will give you back a sense that the way you see the world is worth something beyond its market value.

[Jack McConnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book (and the companion video essay series) has a phenomenal introduction to the ideas of Ted Nelson. Beyond that, the book draws a bit too close to the ramblings of its partial namesake 'Liber Novus' by Carl Jung, and to the forever extrapolating, meandering style of philosophy one might see in Thomas Moynihan's 'Spinal Catastrophism'.

Can't help but feel this would be a much stronger book with heavy pruning, and more self-restriction. The author seems to have woken up with a brilliant idea, and then clung to that idea for dear life, for fear of never having a good idea again—continually attatching new limbs to his Frankenstein philosophy to keep it from dying. But like that modern prometheus, 'Liber Indigo' has a big beating heart at its core.

Looking forward to more work from Justin Kirkwood.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to give this one a rating, but I give it a 4 for the sheer directions its sent my mind.

To my materialistic mind its all 'Woo' but I think the author and others would acknowledge that - and the book does as well in calling out the materialistic mind vs a mystical, magical, or subjective mind. When I think magic or 'woo', I think of some unobservable force acting on the observable universe. However as I get older, and something this book also shows, is that this is less magic than some sort of rhythm to the universe, and its not about one acting on the other but rather finding that rhythm and your place in it. That doesn't make sense, so I'll use an anecdote:

In the book there's a section about composing a glyph to find a lost key. You use this symbol and that, compose them in an aesthetically pleasing way, close it off with a circle - and in doing so you may or may not find the key. Instead you may find another key that opens a door or cabinet with something you had forgotten about that brings up fond memories. You may find a reason to not need to open the lock at all. The glyph itself is immaterial, its the mindset it puts you in. The practice of composing the glyph, of pondering it, opens up your mind to other possibilities.

In a similar sense my Grandmother would say a simple prayer to St. Anthony to find lost things - 'St. Anthony please come around. is lost and it cannot be found." St. Anthony, God, Jesus, or whatever other mystical force out there, won't conjure the item and put it in your hand. Instead you will seek with fresh eyes, a new perspective on what you seek.

Its funny - the whole impetus for this book is a dream about a Windows OS that never existed. The discussions start from how we interact with computers but quickly lose sight of that. Honestly a book simply about Magic and Mystical Thinking would never have interested me - it was couching it in the question of 'Why is it called the desktop? Why is there an enforced hierarchy of folders?' that really got me interested.

There is also a companion video series on YouTube and I recommend that as well.

[Nathan Stern · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will not be for everyone, but it was definitely the kind of book for me.

Regardless of how seriously you may take it, I think there is a lot of fun in this book to be had. It brings back the wonder and joy that adult life forces you to kill for survival. Our imagination is far too oppressed by reality, but Justin manages to give that childlike wonder a proper place in our universe through metaphysics, philosophy, and a really cool operating system metaphor. If you are an artist, religious, or spiritual person. Someone who gets wrapped up in ideals, fantasies, and dreams. Someone who is not taken seriously by others because of these dreams. If you struggle to justify to other people how important these things are to you, then this is the right book for you.

10/10. Can't wait to see what other crazy and beautiful things Justin will create in the future.

[Thomas Reads books · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately a rare case where the movie is better than the book.

Justin Kirkwood's "Liber Indigo" series on YouTube is excellent, and does a lot to question the architecture of computer systems/interfaces whilst linking it with the esoteric and historical philosophy. I was excited to read the book after viewing however, there is a small % of OS/GUI philosophy and rather a heavy leaning into anecdotal examples such as dream scapes.

I really appreciate the Liber Indigo film series, and I *want* to love this book (and maybe you will) - but it missed the opportunity to put the two subjects side by side with deep analysis.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book opens up by taking some wild swings which got me rather excited but that drops off after 20 pages or so. The computing/HCI angle is rather underdeveloped and mostly present in the form of clunky metaphors thrown in once or twice per chapter, not so much a novel framework. The latter half of the book mostly just presents some shallow perennialism, building your own esoteric system is a fun exercise and there's some insight and novel ideas here but for the most part it's pretty standard fare you can get from any new age paperback and the correspondences are tenuous and presented without much justification. The prose is tepid and the book does not appear to have been proofread.

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book about rejecting materialism and believing in the power of the mind, dreams, coincidence, and magic. It would go in the New Age section of a bookshop - whether that's praise or criticism is in the eye of the beholder.

To support his views, the author relies mainly on anecdotes from his own life, such as precognitive dreams, and appeals to authority in the form of citing famous and important scientists who held non-materialist beliefs. The arguments against materialism are not very fleshed out or compelling, and they fail to respond to some of the most common arguments used to support materialism. The talk of philosophy (materialism vs. idealism, monism vs. dualism) is, on the whole, quite thin, and won't be treading new ground for people who have read and thought very much about these ideas.

The book goes on to create a circular diagram in the vein of the zodiac wheel, to be used for divination. It describes a magic ritual to help find a lost key that involves drawing sigils on paper, placing candles on an altar, and touching things with a finger wearing a special ring.

There is not much talk of interface design, and although there is criticism of the common "desktop" interface to computers, there is little discussion about alternatives, and a vision of a new interface is hardly mentioned, much less explored.

There is little in the way of history, philosophy, science, or design here.

[Reilly Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely phenomenal

[Ryan Crouch · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Social experiment: explain this book to an astrophysicist

[Daniel]

at a loss of what to make of this.