TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Preparing this new edition of TechGnosis, I have pruned unnecessary and dated references, though readers will still note a number of nineties throwbacks, embedded in the prose like orthoptera in amber. I have for the most part resisted the urge to update citations, clarify the occasional wobbly argument, and dial down the hepcat excesses of a younger man’s voluble prose. Occasionally I have added more contemporary examples in order to show the continuity of some of my points, but the bulk of my more recent reflections will be found in the two afterwords, one written for the 2004 edition of TechGnosis, and one written a decade later for the current edition.

  Introduction (1998): Crossed Wires

  One hardly needs to be decked out in a biblical sandwich board or wired to the gills with the latest cyborg gear to feel the glittering void of possibility and threat growing at the heart of our profoundly technologized society. Even as most of us spend our days, in that now universal Californiaism, surfing the datastream, we can hardly ignore the deeper, more powerful, and more ominous undertows that tug beneath the froth of our lives and labors. You know the scene. Social structures the world over are melting down and mutating, making way for a global McVillage, a Gaian brain, and a whole heap of chaos. The emperor of technoscience has achieved dominion, though his clothes are growing more threadbare by the moment, the once noble costume of Progress barely concealing far more wayward ambitions. Across the planet, global capitalism continues to yank the rug out from under the nation-state, while the earth spits up signs and symptoms of terminal distress. Boundaries dissolve, and we drift into the no-man’s zones between synthetic and organic life, between actual and virtual environments, between local communities and global flows of goods, information, labor, and capital. With pills modifying personality, machines modifying bodies, and synthetic pleasures and networked minds engineering a more fluid and invented sense of self, the boundaries of our identities are mutating as well. The horizon melts into a limitless question mark, and like the cartographers of old, we glimpse yawning monstrosities and mind-forged utopias beyond the edges of our paltry and provisional maps.

  Regardless of how secular this ultramodern condition appears, the velocity and mutability of the times invokes a certain supernatural quality that must be seen, at least in part, through the lenses of religious thought and the fantastic storehouse of the archetypal imagination. Inside the United States, within whose high-tech bosom I quite self-consciously write, the spirit has definitely made a comeback—if it could be said to have ever left this giddy, gold-rush land, where most people believe in the Lord and his coming kingdom, and more than you’d guess believe in UFOs. Self-help maestros and corporate consultants promulgate New Age therapies while the power elite guzzle ayahuasca and strains of Buddhism and yoga, both scientific and healthy-minded, seep through society at large. The surge of interest in alternative medicine injects non-Western and ad hoc spiritual practices into the mainstream, while embattled deep ecologists turn up the boil on the nature mysticism long simmering in the American soul. This rich confusion is even more evident in our brash popular culture, where science fiction films, digital environments, and urban tribes are reconfiguring old archetypes and imaginings within a vivid comic-book frame that allows the pagan and the paranormal to further colonize the twilight zones of pop media.

  These signs are not just evidence of a media culture exploiting the crude power of the irrational. They reflect the fact that people inhabiting all frequencies of the socioeconomic spectrum are intentionally reaching for some of the oldest navigational tools known to humankind: sacred ritual and metaphysical speculation, spiritual regimen and natural spell. For some superficial spiritual consumers, this means prepackaged answers to the thorny questions of life; but for many others, the quest for meaning and connection has led individuals and communities to construct meaningful frameworks for their lives, worldviews that actually deepen their willingness and ability to face the strangeness of our days.

  So here we are: a hypertechnological and cynically postmodern culture seemingly drawn like a passel of moths toward the guttering flames of the premodern mind. And it is with this apparent paradox in mind that I have written TechGnosis: a secret history of the mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world’s obsession with technology, and especially with its technologies of communication.

  My topic may seem rather obscure at first, for common sense tells us that mysticism has no more in common with technology than the twilight cry of wild swans has with the clatter of Rock’em Sock’em Robots. Historians and sociologists inform us that the West’s mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations, and apocalyptic visions crashed on the scientific shores of the modern age. According to this narrative, technology has helped disenchant the world, forcing the ancestral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular game plans of economic development, skeptical inquiry, and material progress. But the old phantasms and metaphysical longings did not exactly disappear. In many cases, they disguised themselves and went underground, worming their way into the cultural, psychological, and mythological motivations that form the foundations of the modern world. As we will see throughout this book, mystical impulses sometimes body-snatched the very technologies that supposedly helped yank them from the stage in the first place. And it is these technomystical impulses—sometimes sublimated, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes masked in the pop detritus of science fiction or video games—that TechGnosis seeks to reveal.

  For well over a century, the dominant images of technology have been industrial: the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, the mechanization of work through the assembly line, and the bureaucratic command-and-control systems that large and impersonal institutions favor. Lewis Mumford called this industrial image of technology the “myth of the machine,” a myth that insists on the authority of technical and scientific elites, and in the intrinsic value of efficiency, control, unrestrained technological development, and economic expansion. As many historians and sociologists have recognized, this secular image was framed all along by Christian myths: the biblical call to conquer nature, the Protestant work ethic, and, in particular, the millennialist vision of a New Jerusalem, the earthly paradise that the Book of Revelation claims will crown the course of history. Despite a century of Hiroshimas, Bhopals, and Chernobyls, this myth of an engineered utopia still propels the ideology of technological progress, with its perennial promises of freedom, prosperity, and release from disease and want.

  Today, a new, less mechanized myth has sprung from the brow of the industrial megamachine: the myth of information, of electric minds and boundless databases, computer forecasts and hypertext libraries, immersive media dreams and a planetary blip-culture woven together with global telecommunication nets. Certainly this myth still rides atop the same mechanical behemoth that lurched out of Europe’s chilly bogs and conquered the globe, but for the most part, TechGnosis will focus on information technologies alone, placing them in their own, more spectral light. For of all technologies, it is the technologies of information and communication that most mold and shape the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self.

  From the moment that humans began etching grooves into ancient wizard bones to mark the cycles of the moon, the process of encoding thought and experience into a vehicle of expression has influenced the changing nature of the self. Information technology tweaks our perceptions, communicates our picture of the world to one another, and constructs remarkable and sometimes insidious forms of control over the cultural stories that shape our sense of the world. The moment we invent a significant new device for communication—talking drums, papyrus scrolls, printed books, crystal sets, computers—we partially reconstruct the self and its world, creating new opportunities (and new traps) for thought, perception, and social experience.

  By their very nature, the technologies of information and communication—“media” in the broad sense of the term—are technocultural hybrids. On the one
hand, they are crafted things, material mechanisms that are conceived, constructed, and exploited for gain. But media technologies are also animated by something that has nothing to do with matter or technique. More than any other invention, information technology transcends its status as a thing, simply because it allows for the incorporeal encoding and transmission of mind and meaning. In a sense, this hybridity reflects the age-old sibling rivalry between form and content: the material and technical structure of media impose formal constraints on communication, even as the immediacy of communication continues to challenge formal limitations as it crackles from mind to mind, pushing the envelope of intelligence, art, and information flow. By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other, and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, for what we now increasingly think of as “the social construction of reality.”

  Historically, the great social constructions belong to the religious imagination: the animistic world of nature magic, the ritualized social narratives of mythology, the ethical inwardness of the “religions of the book,” and the increasingly rationalized modern institutions of faith that followed them. These various paradigms marked their notions and symbols in the world around them, using architecture, language, icons, costumes, and social ritual—and often whatever media they could get their hands on. For reasons that cannot simply be chalked up to the desire for power and conformity, the religious imagination has an irrepressible and almost desperate urge to remake the mental world humans share by communicating itself to others. From hieroglyphs to the printed book, from radio to computer networks, the spirit has found itself inside a variety of new bottles, and each new medium has become, in a variety of contradictory ways, part of the message. When the Norse god Odin swaps an eye for the gift of the runes, or when Paul of Tarsus writes in a letter that the Word of God is written in our hearts, or when New Age mediums “channel spiritual information,” the ever-shifting boundaries between media and the self are redrawn in technomystical terms.

  This process continues apace, although today you often need to dig beneath the garish, commercialized, and oversaturated surface of the information age to find its archetypes and metaphysical concerns. The virtual topographies of our millennial world are rife with angels and aliens, with digital avatars and mystic Gaian minds, with utopian longings and gnostic science fictions, and with dark forebodings of apocalypse and demonic enchantment. These figures ride the expanding and contracting waves of media fads, hype, and economic activity, and some of them are already disappearing into an increasingly market-dominated information culture. But though technomystical concerns are deeply intertwined with the changing sociopolitical conditions of our rapidly globalizing civilization, their spiritual forebears are rooted in the long ago. By invoking such old ones here, and bringing them into the discourse and contexts of contemporary technoculture, I hope to shine a light on some of the more dangerous and unwieldy visions that charge technologies. Even more fundamentally, however, I hope my secret history can provide some imaginal maps and mystical scorecards for the metaverse that is now swallowing up so many of us, all across network earth.

  You may think you are holding a conventional book, a solid and familiar chunk of infotech with chapters and endnotes and a linear argument about, in this case, the mystical roots of technoculture. But that is really just a clever disguise. Once dissolved in your mindstream, TechGnosis will become a resonating hypertext, one whose links leap between machines and dreams, information and spirit, the dustbin of history and the alembics of the soul. Instead of “taking a stand,” TechGnosis ranges rather promiscuously across the disciplinary boundaries that usually chop up the world of thought, drawing the reader into a fluctuating play of polarities and hidden networks. The connections it draws are many: between myth and science, transcendent intuition and technological control, the virtual worlds we imagine and the real world we cannot escape. It is a dreambook of the technological unconscious. Perhaps the most important polarity that underlies the psychological dynamics of technomysticism is a yin and yang I will name spirit and soul. By soul, I basically mean the creative imagination, that aspect of our psyches that perceives the world as an animated field of powers and images. Soul finds and loses itself in enchantment; it speaks the tongue of dream and phantasm, which should never be confused with mere fantasy. Spirit is an altogether different bird: an impersonal, incorporeal spark that seeks clarity, essence, and a blast of the absolute. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman uses the image of peaks and valleys to characterize these two very different modes of the self. He notes that the mountaintop is a veritable logo of the “spiritual” quest, a place where the religious seeker overcomes gravity in order to win a peak experience or an adamantine code worthy of ruling a life. But the soul forswears such towering and otherworldly views; it remains in the mesmerizing vale of tears and desires, a fecund and polytheistic world of things and creatures, and the images and stories that things and creatures breed.

  Spirit and soul twine their way throughout this book like the two strands of DNA, both enchanting and spiritualizing media technologies. On the one hand, we’ll see that technologies can serve as the vehicles for spells, ghosts, and animist intuitions. On the other, they can provide launching pads for transcendence, for the disembodied flights of gnosis. The different “styles” of spirit and soul can even be seen in the two basic encoding methods that define media: analog and digital. Analog gadgets reproduce signals in continuous, variable waves of real energy, while digital devices recode information into discrete symbolic chunks. Think of the difference between vinyl LPs and digital music files. LPs are inscribed with unbroken physical grooves that mimic and represent the sound waves that ripple through the air. In contrast, CDs and MP3s chop up (or “sample”) such waves into individual bits, encoding those digital units into tiny pits that are read and reconstructed by your stereo gear at playback. The analog world sticks to the grooves of soul—warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeality. The analog soul runs on the analogies between things; the digital spirit divides the world between clay and information.

  In the first chapter, I will trace the origins of these two strands of technomysticism to the ancient mythological figure of Hermes Trismegistus, a technological wizard who will inaugurate the dance between magic and invention, media and mind. Tracing this hermetic tradition into the modern world, I will discuss how the discovery of electricity sparked animist ideas and occult experiences even as it laid the groundwork for the information age. Next, I will recast the epochal birth of cybernetics and the electronic computer in a transcendental light provided by the ancient lore of Gnosticism. Then I’ll show how the spiritual counterculture of the 1960s created a liberatory and even magical relationship to media and technology, a psychedelic mode of mind-tweaking that feeds directly into today’s digital culture. Finally, I’ll turn to our “datapocalyptic” moment and show how the UFOs, Gaian minds, New World Orders, and techno-utopias that continue to haunt us subliminally feed off images and compulsions deeply rooted in the spiritual imagination.

  Given the delusions and disasters that religious and mystic thought courts, some may legitimately wonder whether we might not be better off just completing the critical and empirical task undertaken by Freud, Nietzsche, and your favorite scientific reductionist. The simple answer is that we cannot. Collectively, human societies can no more dodge sublime imaginings or spiritual yearnings than they can transcend the tidal pulls of eros. We are beset with a thirst for meaning and connection that centuries of skeptical philosophy, hardheaded materialism, and an increasingly nihilist culture have yet to douse, and this thirst conjures up the whole tattered carnival of contemporary religion: oily New Age gurus and Christian reconstructionists, Buddhist geeks and hedge-fund yogis, cosmic Burners
and posthuman theologians. Even the cosmic awe conjured by science fiction or the outer-space snapshots of the Hubble telescope calls forth our ever-deeper, ever-brighter possible selves.

  While I certainly hope that TechGnosis can help strengthen the wisdom of these often inchoate yearnings, I am more interested in understanding how technomystical ideas and practices work than I am in shaking them down for their various and not inconsiderable “errors.” Sober voices will appear throughout my book like a chorus of skeptics, but my primary concern remains the spiritual imagination and how it mutates in the face of changing technologies. William Gibson’s famous quip about new technologies—that the street finds its own uses for things—applies to what many seekers call “the path” as well. As we will see throughout this book, the spiritual imagination seizes information technology for its own purposes. In this sense, technologies of communication are always, at least potentially, technologies of the sacred, simply because the ideas and experiences of the sacred have always informed human communication.

  By appropriating and re-visioning communication technologies, the spiritual imagination often fashions symbols and rituals from the technical mode of communication it employs: hieroglyphs, printing press, the online database. By reimagining technologies in this way, new meanings are invested into the universe of machines, and new virtual possibilities emerge. The very ambiguity of the term information, which has made it such an infectious and irritating buzzword, has also allowed old intuitions to pop up in secular guise. Today there is so much pressure on information—the word, the concept, the stuff itself—that it crackles with energy, drawing to itself mythologies, metaphysics, hints of arcane magic. As information expands beyond its reductive sense as a quantitative measure of meaning, groups and individuals also find room to resist and recast the dominant technological narratives of war and commerce, and to inject their fractured postmodern lives with digitally remastered forms of community, imagination, and cosmic connection.