Harry Potter is in many ways the product of its time, with JKR devising various elements of wizarding Britain to parody the Muggle Britain of the 80s and 90s. But each of those elements tends to have a whimsical nature rather than being a direct 1:1 magical version of the Muggle thing.

For example, when it comes to communications, you have post (owls) and telephone (floo) but nothing for mobile phones, email etc. which were not really that prevalent at the time.

If you were writing a story set in the wizarding world in the 2020s, what magical innovations would you add to function similarly, as whimsical parodies of contemporary Muggle society?

One thing we were just discussing in Discord is the fact that Harry's Hogwarts letters turned up inside the Dursleys' eggs in Philosopher's Stone. This made me think of a wizarding parody of Amazon which is committed to delivering your products in record time - and uses increasingly extreme delivery methods to achieve it.

Other aspects of modern society that may be worth a parody:

- Mobile phones
- The internet
- Social media
- Specific apps like Spotify
- AI
- Ubiquitous advertising

Ideas?

 

For portable music I think a tiny set of instruments that literally play what you ask them to on demand, verbally, would be pretty funny. Bonus points if the instruments have to have heard it before.

For mobile phones, do something like the deluminator that still uses floo powder? Feels like I'm still missing the necessary twist though. That or the mirrors, but the mirrors insist on being part of the conversation too. Bit extra given that the mirror worked pretty normally in canon though.

There's definitely something there for Facebook but I can't think of it right now

For an LLM/AI, it's almost tailor made to have a Dresden Files Bob who has approximate knowledge of many things, but takes great amusement in telling small lies while doing so.

Going to have to let this marinate a little and think of better ones.

* Video games
* On demand video or video in general

For advertising/the internet, I was thinking of a book of books where the books fight over which will be first to be read. All the information you could ever want, so long as you can get past the popups. Or if books literally popped out of it wanting to be read.

 

For advertising:

Comedy example, but we know that proprietary spells are a thing (e.g. Patented Day Dream Charms) so conceivably there could be a way to slip advertising into them.

 

Another thing for wizarding parody: everything being outsourced to China.

All the talking mirrors can now only speak Mandarin and some very broken English.

 

I’d imagine phone equivalent may be more books that mirror each other.

Write someone’s name on top, then send them an note that appears in their book right away.

Dean Thomas
“You see the quidditch game last night?”

Or a sketch of your cock and balls for a dick pic.

 

Those two-way mirrors can easily be made into phones. You just need one of your mirrors to be in a central location where, either through magic or a house-elf, it's matched with the requested person's half. I'm partial to having a telephonist to give that retro vibe. Text messages can be implemented with a little notebook whose pages are linked with the Protean Charm. Just give a paired page to a friend and anything written or doodled appears for both.

Linking these two features in a single product would make for a mobile analogue, I picture a nice leather case with the mirror on one side and the notebook on the other. Eventually more features could be added in a similar analog fashion. Enchanted doohickeys, basically apps in physical form, to be crammed into a single case with only magic keeping it practically sized.

And by broadening the mirrors' capabilities anything from TV, youtube and live-streaming could be reproduced.

 

I think magical portraits could be cool for ai.

Instead of painting a real person, you paint an imaginary one with the same spell set, then cram the portrait full of various memories related to the task you want the portrait to do.

The whimsical twist is that as you have no template for the personality, magic fills in the gaps building from the memories you give it in a highly unpredictable way. So you end up with a nihilistic personal assistant, a flamboyantly gay investment adviser, a hippy German farm manager.

Could be fun.

 

When you think about it JKR was actually ahead of her time. Flu is basically already facetime.

For the internet I'm imagining a huge library that has some sort of input device for your thoughts/questions and it brings the correct books and essays directly to you, flipped to the right place. You could play around with interactive books as websites as well.

I was thinking like Riddle's diary. I know it's a fragment of his soul but it very much gives me GPT vibes.

 

For food deliveries: magical cupboards.

The 200 loaves are sent to a warehouse.

Molly Weasley opens her cupboard and notices she’s out of bread.

Molly Weasley taps her wand or triggers some sort of charm.

A loaf of bread vanishes from the wizarding warehouse and appears on her shelf.

Molly makes herself a sandwich

The wizarding supplier automatically deducts the price of the bread from the Weasley’s vault or bills them at the end of the month.

This could easily be done with fully made food from restaurants too, but instead it just pops out of the fireplace.

 

I think it would be more fitting to just expand the floo network into a mobile variety than give a new mobile device.
Like how mobile phones were just another version of landline phones early on.
Perhaps you just have a lighter with you, which is connected to the floo network, and when you want to call someone you just sprinke some floo powder into the flame, to create a live image of the person you talk to int he smoke or something, with the same thing happening at their lighter/fireplace. Perhaps you could even use this to transport small objects to them.

Just a network of connected books, represented by a real magical web in the ministry. The books are animated in a rudimentary manner to obey commands and answer question, like a lesser form of riddle's diary, and you can tell them to connect to specific books and retrive or deposit some information from them. Also includes animated pictures and whatever that implies.

part of the book network, people just stick their own pictures into their books, where others can access them.

Dream Advertising like in Futurama. We know Dream messangers are a thing since Uagadou sends invitations to students that way.

People could even get some product samples in their hands after waking up like the stones do.
I could also see George Weasley adopting the model for his Daydream Charms(which are vastly more popular in the future), with there being one cheap or even free option that includes heavy product placement George is paid for, with adfree version being more expensive.

 

Most of you are thinking too much about how you would replicate muggle things with magic, and not what the magical way of doing it would be. Need a little twist to give it that je ne sais quoi.

 

I remember reading an incomplete fic where there was massive self updating index of a book where people added their own discoveries and it became available for everyone to see.

You can only get in if someone already inside introduces you and there is deadline by which you have to prove that you can be useful to codex index otherwise you will be kicked out and all its knowledge will be wiped from mind

I dont remember fics name. but it was awesome for sure and sadly incomplete

that could be very cool idea for social media or Wikipedia of sorts for wizarding world

 

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Alternatively, a pixie who follows you around screaming the latest news at you, with no ability to make it stop.

 

"Hey! Listen! The dark lord is back! He was spotted escaping a break in at the ministry"

 

NextDoor would be nice.

You want a bit of transfiguration you can't quite get? Nextdoor got you bruh

Spatial charms you can't quite safely perform? I bet there's an OWL seeker student that would love to have a go. You have a bit of property on a cursed bit of, 'hypothetically' conquered, Roman land, well I bet there's an OWL student hunter or NEWT solver and conjurer who would hit you up for a few galleons.

For real contracts and mortgages and ancient tombs and other assorted gobbledegook goodnaturedness: read, the ensorcelled, or, using a goblin appropriated word, "naive," there's your Semantics Wizards (and goblins) and/or Enthusiastic!! (goblins) who understand the magic of wordplay! Sorcerers who can navigate the jinxed insinuations as well as hexed, and hidden obligations, and the cursed contractual, "constitutional" associations that seek to entrap you with your own, supposed, knowledge of chicanery!

For what wizard or witch can really intimate the duplicitous, double-dealing dishonesty of the goblin-kind?

Please send your nearest owl/witch/wizard/muggle to your nearest goblin.

pls send muggles

 

Also, the News Pixie is incredibly right wing.

 

Maybe they should hire some magical foxes to get the stories? Rather sneaky your average fox. Would make a good investigative reporter. Fox News could be a big thing.

 

Don't they have beetles for that?

 

That clearly calls for the development of Pixie-Blockers, small critters that sit on your shoulder and viciously maul any pixie that dares approach. Though the Pixie Lobby may be quick in trying to get them banned or, failing that, develop stronger pixies that can defend themselves. The ensuing ever escalating arms race being known as the Pixie Wars.