by Erik Davis
Praise for TechGnosis
“TechGnosis is stimulating and original, learned and readable. Erik Davis offers a wide-ranging and consistently thought-provoking guide to the hidden circuitry of the technological unconscious. Invaluable.”
—Geoff Dyer, author of Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It
“Erik Davis’s compendious recitation of the history of communications technology dominates the discursive landscape of techno-exegesis like a Martian war machine. In the grand style of H. G. Wells, TechGnosis is an apocalyptic synopsis of technological climax.”
—Terence McKenna, author of The Archaic Revival
“TechGnosis is a dazzling, sweeping look at the metaphysical urges underlying our technological progress. From exploring the Singularity to positioning man as the ‘spiritual cyborg,’ Erik Davis reveals our technological subconscious and writes with a flair that crackles the mind. I love this book.”
—Jason Silva, Emmy-nominated host of National Geographic channel’s BrainGames and creator of Shots of Awe
“Before The Matrix, there was TechGnosis—the classic and still-pioneering text on the historical and creative interfaces between the technological, the magical, and the mystical.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
“TechGnosis is a tour de force of scholarship, insight, and juicy writing. Like McLuhan, Erik Davis sheds light on the shadows—the places we’ve neglected to look, or have feared to look, in our search for the meaning of human invention.”
—Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
“TechGnosis is a delirious and exhilarating exploration of the metascapes of new mind and new nature. Pungent and profound, the writing is pure alchemy, and the reader is redesigned in the very act of reading. This is perhaps the best book written on where we are going and how we got there.”
—Jean Houston, author of A Mythic Life
“Religion constitutes the perfect content provider (it’s already virtual) and techgnosis makes the perfect religion for a world where Capital is god. But before you sign up to download your consciousness, better read Erik Davis.”
—Hakim Bey, author of T.A.Z.
“Davis takes on subjects that would appear to be ridiculous in the hands of a lesser writer and renders them appropriately sublime.”
—R. U. Sirius, cofounder and editor of Mondo 2000
“TechGnosis is at once an EEG of our silicon unconscious and a recovered memory of sacred technologies. Erudite but wired to the eyeballs, Davis is that rare blend: a postmodern classicist, equally at home with ancient automata and alien autopsies. A true believer in the politics of myth, he’s mindful, nonetheless, of the social issues that haunt our techno-eschatologies. Erik Davis is the perfect tour guide to our Disneyland of the Gods.”
—Mark Dery, editor of Flame Wars and author of Escape Velocity and I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts
“I guess you could say Erik Davis is a secret agent of informational change, but make sure you have your mirror shades on, ’cause the information is crisp and thoughtful, sharp as a monomolecular razor, and basically just straight up ridiculously well researched—all while being accessible and fun to read. Not since Jeremy Campbells’s groundbreaking Grammatical Man have we had as diverse and engaging a book on the linkages of information and culture, and how the two shape and mold each other. Davis’s book cuts through the jargon and empty rhetoric of electro-theory and goes beyond all the clichés of a culture of total amnesia. A new Rosetta Stone for the Digerati.”
—Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky
Copyright © 2015 by Erik Davis. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.
Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712
Cover art or photo by Fotosearch Illustration/SuperStock
Cover and book design by Howie Severson
Printed in the United States of America
TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.
North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, Erik.
TechGnosis : myth, magic, and mysticism in the age of information /
Erik Davis.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “A reissue of a classic media studies book exploring the connection between digital and spiritual realms and their effects on technological communication”— Provided by publisher.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-58394-931-3
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58394-930-6
1. Information technology–Religious aspects. 2. Technological innovations—Social aspects. 3. Information technology—Social aspects. I. Title.
BL265.I54D38 2015
303.48′33—dc23
2014035166
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Foreword by Eugene Thacker
Note to the Reader
Introduction: Crossed Wires
I. Imagining Technologies
II. The Alchemical Fire
III. The Gnostic Infonaut
IV. Techgnosis, American-Style
V. The Spiritual Cyborg
VI. A Most Enchanting Machine
VII. Cyberspace: The Virtual Craft
VIII. The Alien Call
IX. Datapocalypse
X. Third Mind from the Sun
XI. The Path Is a Network
Afterword (2004)
Afterword 2.0 (2015)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Acknowledgments
It would be impossible to fully trace the network of minds and hearts that helped bring this book into being, but some specific shout-outs are definitely in order. A number of the ideas animating TechGnosis have been pulsing in my brain for nearly a decade, and I am indebted to a handful of teachers and editors who have helped me shape them into worthy prose at various stages of my writing career: my undergraduate thesis advisers at Yale, Richard Halpern and David Rodowick; former Village Voice editors Jeff Salamon, Scott Malcolmson, Lisa Kennedy, and Joe Levy; Gnosis editors Jay Kinney and Richard Smoley; and ace cybercritic Mark Dery, who asked me to write the essay that formed the seed crystal for the present work. Even more invaluable have been the countless kaleidoscopic conversations about philosophy, science, and spirit I have had over the years with my great friends Julian Dibbell, JP Harpignies, and Marcus Boon, all of whom challenged me to find my own weird path into technoculture and to face the difficulties of writing it down head-on.
My buddy Dan Levy harangued me into shaping my stray thoughts into a book project, and then convinced someone to actually buy it. Relationships with huge and distant cor
porations can be rocky: thanks to Harmony editors Andrew Stuart, who swooped in midway to save the day with his generous attention and sharp suggestions, and Peter Guzzardi, who kindly shepherded TechGnosis through the end game. The book you hold would be a flabbier and more error-ridden thing were it not for the perceptions, pens, and pencils of my manuscript readers, who, if they have not already been mentioned, include Margaret Wertheim, papa Russ Davis, Rachel Koenig, David Ulansey, Jeff Gorvetzian, and my mother, Sandra Zarcades, who lent her razor-sharp copyediting skills to many of its drafts.
Wef Linson helped me keep perspective throughout the daily grind with his spiritual ruminations and carefree cracks, while the Midtown Niki Starving Writers Fund allowed me to focus on the task at hand. Thanks as well to the large circle of comrades and netminds who took the time to swap ideas, give me encouragement, or feed me nifty memes: Peter Lamborn Wilson, Mark Pesce, Scott Durham, Spiros Antonopoulos, Molly McGarry, Manuel DeLanda, Hermano Vianna Jr., Jordan Gruber, Terence McKenna, Charles Cameron, Tom Lane, James O’Meara, Paul Miller, Kate Ramsey, Konrad Becker, Craig Baldwin, Sam Webster, Mark Stahlman, and Grampa Jake, who sent me a steady stream of juicy newspaper clippings from the desert heartland. In particular, Pit Schultz, Diana McCarty, and the nettime crew plugged me into a community of technology critics whose trenchant debates helped me keep my cosmological feet on the ground.
Everyone knows that no single individual can write a book, even though one person, i.e., me, must take responsibility for its perhaps inevitable flaws and errors. This does not mean that writing TechGnosis did not sometimes make me feel as though I were alone in the Siberian wastes, trying to claw my way out of an ice cave with a toothbrush and a Bic lighter. I thank all gods for my love, Jennifer Dumpert, who not only scraped me up from the bottom of the barrel on a regular basis, but whose wisdom, patience, and incisive feedback helped me weave this labor into a life of riches.
All that remains is the possibility of communication.
—Captain Jean-Luc Picard
Foreword (2015): “We Cartographers of Old …”
In 1901 William James—eminent psychologist, philosopher, and pragmatist—delivered a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh. James had been invited to give the lectures a few years earlier, and he had not settled on a topic until a retreat he spent in the Adirondacks around 1898. Having struggled with intermittent health problems for years, James hoped the retreat would serve as a kind of convalescence. Instead, he experienced a complete physical collapse while on a hike, and, in his own words, “converted what was to have been a ‘walk’ into a thirteen-hour scramble without food and with anxiety.”1 Alone, lost, and in pain, James seems to have been impacted by the experience, and, during his recovery, he began work on the lectures, which would aim to provide an assessment of “religious experience” in the modern world.
Taking the position of neither the believer nor the skeptic—or, taking the position of both the believer and the skeptic—James determined that nothing would be off-limits in his survey. Everything would come under his view, orthodox or unorthodox, from medieval Christian mysticism to modern Spiritualist séances, from Hindu ascetic practices to diagnoses of depression in clinical psychiatry. James considered the case of drug use among poets and artists, and the reserved, professorial pragmatist even experimented with nitrous oxide. The lectures would later be published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that was at once erudite but that also reached a wide readership beyond the narrow confines of academic specialization. It was clear that, for James, what he referred to as “the religious impulse” was not limited to religion alone. In the modernist, industrial, clinical world of the early-twentieth-century, Anglo-American context, the religious impulse was far from having vanished; indeed, James’s lectures suggested that the reverse was the case.
I mention James’s classic text because the intuition of his study continues to reverberate to this day. Certainly Varieties has its share of shortcomings, as contemporary scholars are more than eager to point out. But the idea of a study of religion, without religion, is something that is arguably needed today more than ever: as we are continually confronted with the very real possibility of resource depletion and the effects of climate change, so-called social media intensify the obliviousness to the challenges of geopolitics. On the one hand, there is a booming industry surrounding yoga, self-help, and spiritual tourism, while on the other, traditional religions seem polarized between fanaticisms of all types and vapid, consumerist banalities of the “I’m spiritual, but not religious” sort. The continued, tired debates of science on one side and religion on the other serve to muddy the waters even more.
The 1990s, the millennial decade, may very well go down as the decade of science fiction. Just as the late nineteenth century struggled with the ascendency of science and the “death of God,” so did our own fin de siècle—or rather, fin de millennium—similarly struggle with rapidly developing forms of computer and information technologies, as they seemed to be futuristically recasting the planet as a net, and flesh as data. The more information we produced about the world, the more alien it seemed: literally every body, we were told, was a cyborg, and a whole bestiary of software bots, intelligent agents, and viral code made us aware of interconnectedness on a whole new ecological level; there were utopic visions of virtual communities, cloaked regions of dark fiber, and vaguely lawless evocations of an electronic frontier, no doubt a by-product of a digital divide and a dotcom frenzy that produced slums with digital satellite dishes; everything could be and would be encoded and recoded and decoded, down to the minutiae of our DNA and the cosmological contours of deep space wormholes; and at home, in our Ballardian near-future cities, our media screens morphed before our eyes, as digital media remediated TV, TV turned into reality, reality was virtual, and that was okay because reality was all but a simulation anyway. If the posthuman future seemed so close, so technological, so secular—it was because it was produced by the very media that were to be the harbingers of a Messianic singularity, a convergence of all things into a single, Borgesian database.
In situations like these, what is needed are those who can become more alien than the alien world that we have produced. What is needed are alien ethnographers, those who can, without simply affirming or denouncing, document the uncanny valley that we know as human culture. Perhaps, against the shock of the new, what is needed are “we cartographers of old …”
Into this scene, Erik Davis’s TechGnosis appeared, in 1998. TechGnosis was among a handful of books from the 1990s that took up James’s challenge for the postmodern, posthuman, post-everything era (I think also of Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity and Mark Dery’s Escape Velocity). But Davis’s book was unique in that it refused to see the development of new technologies as a purely secular phenomenon. Where the “religious impulse” cropped up could be in the most unexpected of places. Thus, nothing is off limits in TechGnosis: LSD research, the history of cybernetics, ancient aliens, sensory-deprivation tanks, Philip K. Dick, genetic engineering, Mondo 2000 magazine, religious cults, Gaia, computer viruses, nineteenth-century electromagnetism, cyberpunk, Scientology, ancient Egypt, Renaissance magic, G. I. Gurdjieff, raves, Marshall McLuhan, technopaganism, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Manichaeism, VR, and the Corpus Hermeticum. If TechGnosis is anything, it is a compendium of an overwhelming but relevant period in digital culture.
But at the same time, there is a method to this cyber-gnostic madness. As Davis makes clear in the opening chapter, the aim is neither to gloat enthusiastically over new trends nor to debunk technoculture in its entirety. Instead, TechGnosis is, in his words, a tracing of “a secret history of the mystical impulses.”2 In his study of religion-without-religion, Davis traces the twists and turns of this impulse, wherever it takes him. I have to confess that I don’t have Davis’s patience for some of the more inane, baffling, and cliché corners of popular culture. But, in a way, that is not the point. As an alien ethnographer, Davis’s
main concern is in tracing the religious impulse, no matter how surprising the contexts are in which it crops up. If there is a through-line in TechGnosis, it lies in Davis’s patient tracing of the religious impulse as it heads into the new millennium.
Looking back now, almost twenty years on, many of Davis’s connections have become the stock-and-trade of contemporary media studies and cultural studies, not to mention the study of religion. It was during the long 1990s, just when everything seemed absolutely technological, that everything was also saturated in the ideas, the language, and the iconography of religion—especially technology. Davis takes this thesis further, suggesting to us that not only was it the 1990s that expressed this technomysticism, but the history of technology—from hieroglyphics to computer code—is itself inseparable from the often ambiguous exchanges with something nonhuman, something otherworldly, something divine. Technology, it seems, is religion by other means, then as now.
—Eugene Thacker, associate professor,
The New School, New York
Note to the Reader
This book was first published in the late 1990s, in the shadow of the millennium, when the bubble had yet to burst and the towers had yet to fall. In this sense, TechGnosis is something of a time capsule. That said, the fact that the book has remained in print almost continuously since its appearance in 1998, and is now finding its way to print once again (and finally to ebook), is evidence enough that the particular history of the technological imagination I tell continues to resonate. Despite the tumult of technological change and our anxious addiction to novelty, secret histories can provide powerful maps for the high and sobering weirdness that lies ahead. After all—and despite the militant prayers of the skeptical atheist brigade—religious questions, spiritual experiences, and occult possibilities remain wedded to our now unquestionably science-fiction reality, both as ontological wagers and as forms of fantasy, collective creativity, and symbolic immunity.