I'm going to give you an example of gray magic. How this magic is gray rather than 'white' or black is something that should probably seem intuitive by the time I am done explaining my trick. A little while back I made a performance art piece where I played the character of someone tricking the public into considering them to be a reputable source in order to peddle an inherently oxymoronic Nihilistic Religion. I assumed the role of someone who was willing to start a fake cult in order to feel reputable in a way that satirized people that want to cheat the system by manipulating others into believing a claim for reputability rather than earning that claim through education and/or experience. To effectively pull this off I made the philosophy of the cult be based around the premise that everything is a lie so that I'd be relatively safe regarding Poe's Law. It's built to be self defeating because if everything is a lie then obviously that means everything you're reading is one big lie.
I did a few things here and there to embellish the performance art piece by making the line between me and the art ambiguous to the point that you could be questioning at nearly any point if you're just interacting with a very immersive unfiction project or someone who's literally trolling the shit out of you in front of your face by just being themselves under the pretense of performance art; a living shitpost. By building a big web of misunderstanding and artistic communication of an idea relating to living within a complicated web of manipulation and altered objectivity that exists in superposition with being immersive looking enough to seem like a mentally ill person with motives for writing controversial ideas that seem fictional as a career safety net I have created a gray magic receptical for ideas that people will digest more thoroughly than normal in context with wishing to understand a metanarrative. Essentially, manipulation to the end of artistically commenting on manipulation in a way that appears to be manipulative yet very easily could just be a meta extention of artistic intention or yet another layer accounted for with complicated manipulation, etc. An exit is also an entrance is also an exit is also an entrance is also an exit is also an entrance...
Anyways, that's just one example of gray magic. It's generally morally gray. Often when I employ this type of magic it's to cultivate a superposition between multiple ways to read something I've made. There's benefits in that, if performed correctly, it can multiply the amount of time a person spends interacting with a work, which, generally, coaxes people into being more familiar with a work than they would be otherwise. If the human brain spends a lot of time with an idea under the guise of an overarching meta-experience then it starts to consider that idea to be kin after a certain point. Isn't psychology fun? Some things you can explain straight to someone's face how you do while you do it to them without them noticing. I figure that the more people are made aware of these tools and how to look out for them in malicious circumstances the better off we'll be. You can consider all of this to be a kind of contextual vaccine that can build up mental antibodies for situations where others who have realized the phenomena I've observed decide to hone it for malicious purposes like, y'know, actual cults. I don't like cults. I don't even really like cults of personality either. The parasocial boundary is really just a carefully crafted lens applied to people in order, to use a sound design term, to 'equalize' their subjectivity. People you see online have motives for growth and vicariously through that have motives to appear like your helping friend or the most wise educator that you know. Regardless of how much personal intention there is to 'be' one's helping friend or most wise educator one knows, through the quest of motive for growth all of that personal intention becomes a resource to tap into in order to cultivate verisimilitude as an action towards the end of continuing the quest for growth. I want growth, you want growth, we all quest for growth. Stay vigilant.