TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Of course, as any number of “new paradigm” visionaries or Wired magazine cover stories prove, it’s easy to lose one’s way in the maze of hope, hype, and novelty that defines the information age. As any extraterrestrial anthropologist beaming down for a look-see would note, the computer has definitely become an idol—and a rather demanding one at that, almost as thirsty for sacrifice as the holy spirit of money itself. Since the empire of global capitalism is wagering the future of the planet on technology, we are right to distrust any myths that obscure the enormous costs of the path we’ve taken. In the views of many prophets today, crying in and for the wilderness, the spiritual losses we have accrued in our haste to measure, exploit, and commodify the world are already beyond reckoning. By submitting ourselves to the ravenous and nihilistic robot of science, technology, and media culture, we have cut ourselves off from the richness of the soul and from the deeply nourishing networks of family, community, and the local land.

  I deeply sympathize with these attempts to disenchant technology and to deflate the banal fantasies and pernicious hype that fuel today’s digital economy. In fact, TechGnosis will hopefully provide some ammo for the debate. But as both the doomsdays of the Neo-Luddites and the gleaming Tomorrowlands of the techno-utopians prove, technology embodies an image of the soul, or rather a host of images: redemptive, demonic, magical, transcendent, hypnotic, alive. We must come to grips with these images before we can creatively and consciously answer the question of technology, for that question has always been fringed with phantasms.

  One thing seems clear: we cannot afford to think in the Manichaean terms that often characterize the debate on new technologies. Technology is neither a devil nor an angel. But neither is it simply a “tool,” a neutral extension of some rock-solid human nature. Technology is a trickster, and it has been so since the first culture hero taught the human tribe how to spin wool before he pulled it over our eyes. The trickster shows how intelligence fares in an unpredictable and chaotic world; he beckons us through the open doors of innovation and traps us in the prison of unintended consequences. And it is with a bit of the trickster’s spirit—mischievous, riddling, and thoroughly cross-wired—that I shoot these media tales and technological reflections into the towering din.

  I

  Imagining Technologies

  Human beings have been cyborgs from year zero. It is our lot to live in societies that invent tools that shape society and the individuals in it. For millennia, people not so dissimilar to ourselves have constructed and manipulated powerful and impressive technologies, including information technologies, and these tools and techniques have woven themselves into the social fabric of the world. Though technology has only come to dominate and define society within the lifetimes of a handful of human generations, the basic equation remains true for the whole nomadic trek of Homo faber: culture is technoculture.

  Technologies concretely embody our ability to discover and exploit natural laws through the exercise of reason. But why do we choose to exploit certain natural laws? In what manner and toward what ends? Though we may think of technology as a tool defined by pragmatic and utilitarian concerns alone, human motivations in the matter of technology are rarely so straightforward. Like the rationality we carry within our minds, whose logical convictions must make their way through the brawling, boozing cabaret of the psyche, technologies are shaped and constrained by the warp and woof of culture, with its own peculiar myths, dreams, cruelties, and hungers. The immense machineries of war or entertainment can hardly be said to proceed from rational necessity, however precise their implementation; instead, we find their blueprints inked upon the fiery human heart.

  The interdependence of culture and technology means that the technologies of the premodern world, despite being the most logical of crafted objects, nonetheless had to share the cosmic stage with any number of gods, sorceries, and animist powers. As the French anthropologist of science Bruno Latour explains, premodern and indigenous people wove everything—animals, tools, medicine, sex, kin, plants, songs, weather—into an immense collective webwork of mind and matter. Nothing in this webwork, which Latour calls the anthropological matrix, can be neatly divided between nature and culture. Instead, this matrix is composed of “hybrids”—“speaking things” that are both natural and cultural, real and imagined, subject and object. As an example, think of a traditional Inuit who hunts and kills a caribou. On one level, the animal is a fat, tasty object that he and his people exploit in perfectly reasonable ways that satisfy human needs and desires. But along with providing sustenance and nifty threads, the caribou is simultaneously a sacred spirit, a numinous actor in a cosmological drama ritually maintained by the prayers, perceptions, and rituals of Inuit life. The caribou and the weapon, as well as the dream that sent the hunter on his way that morning, are all hybrids; all are part of a collective song that can never be fully resolved as mythology or concrete reality.

  We don’t generally think this way today because we are basically moderns, and modernity is partly defined by the enormous conceptual barrier erected between nature and culture. In his book We Have Never Been Modern, Latour dubs this wall the “Great Divide” and places its foundations in the Enlightenment, when Descartes’s mechanistic thought invaded natural philosophy and the cornerstones of modern social institutions were laid. On the one side of the Great Divide lies nature, a voiceless and purely objective world “out there,” whose hidden mechanisms are unlocked by detached scientists using technical instruments to amplify their perceptions. Human culture lies on the other side of the fence, “in here,” a self-reflexive world of stories, subjects, and power struggles that develop free of nature’s mythic limitations. The Great Divide thus disenchants the world, enthroning man as the sole active agent of the cosmos. From within the paradigm of the Great Divide, technology is simply a tool, a passive extension of man. It does not have its own autonomy; it simply acts upon, but does not change, the world of nature.

  So far, this is relatively routine stuff. Where Latour parts ways from most thinkers is his provocative insistence that the modern West never really left the anthropological matrix. Instead, it used the conceptual sleight of hand of the Great Divide to deny the ever-present reality of hybrids, those “subject-objects” that straddle the boundaries between nature and culture, agency and raw material. This denial freed the West from the inherently conservative nature of traditional societies, where the creation of new hybrids—new medicines or weapons—was always constrained by the fact that their effects were felt throughout the entire matrix of reality. By denying hybrids, modern Europe paradoxically wound up cranking them out at an astounding rate: new technologies, new scientific and cultural perspectives, new sociopolitical and economic arrangements. The West drastically reconstructed “the world” without acknowledging the systemic effects that its creative activities had on the interdependent fabric of society—let alone the more-than-human world of rock and beast that provides the material for that fabric.

  Today, when human societies are more densely interconnected than ever before, Latour argues that we can no longer sustain the illusion of the Great Divide. Each new hybrid that arrives on the scene—test-tube babies, Prozac, the sequencing of the human genome, space stations, global warming—pushes us further into that no man’s land between nature and culture, an ambiguous zone where science, language, and the social imagination overlap and interpenetrate. We begin to see that everything is connected, and this recognition invokes premodern ways of thinking. Latour uses the example of ecological fear, comparing it to the stories of Chicken Little. Now “we too are afraid that the sky is falling. We too associate the tiny gesture of releasing an aerosol spray with taboos pertaining to the heavens.”1 We return—with some profound and irreducible differences—to the old anthropological matrix. “It is not only the Bedouins and the !Kung who mix up transistors and traditional behaviors, plastic buckets and animal-skin vessels. What country could not be called ‘a land of contrasts’? We have al
l reached the point of mixing up times. We have all become premodern again.”2

  If Latour is right, and I believe he is, then we have some important stories to tell about the ways that modern technologies have become mixed up with other times, other places, other paradigms. Though the bulk of this book focuses on the mystical currents coursing through the information technologies of the scientific era, this first chapter turns to more ancient wellsprings. By delving into some of the ways that the Greco-Roman world imagined mechanical invention and information technology, we will discover some of the icons, myths, and mystic themes that populate the archetypal strata of the modern technological psyche.

  Ancient Greece glowed with the first blush of the West’s tragicomic romance with science, for it was the Greeks who first embraced the amazing belief that we could really know things, in the full philosophical sense of the term. But even before the Apollonian rise of Greek rationalism, which led to the construction of everything from astronomical computers to pneumatic automata, the ancient poems of Homer dripped with a pagan materialism that exulted in technology. Though Homeric verse was the product of an archaic and oral society, it did not reflect the deep immersion in the more-than-human world of weather and tree and beast that marks most indigenous lore. In those more “ecological” worldviews, the mythic perceptions of human beings were immersed in nature; the world was seen through the lens of animism, a magical mode of thought that reads and experiences the surrounding world as a living field of psychic presences.

  Though the animist traces of the gods are everywhere in Homer, the spirits of the bush have retreated, and what comes to the fore—besides powerfully human personalities and concerns—are the enchantments of human craft. As Samuel C. Florman writes in The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, “We emerge from the world of Homer drunk with the feel of metals, woods and fabrics, euphoric with the sense of objects designed, manufactured, used, given, admired, and savored.”3 The ancient bards who collectively composed the Homeric epics even went so far as to imagine artificial objects that could reproduce the demiurgic spellcraft of their own chants. In a famous passage in the Iliad, the crippled blacksmith god Hephaestus hammers out a great shield for Achilles (an early instance of the military-industrial complex driving technological development). With the aid of comely androids, “handmaids of hammered gold who looked like living girls,” the god fashions a bronze plate that he magically decorates with all the heavens and the earth. The shield’s intricate scenes of battle, harvest, and celebration come to life like a metallurgic cartoon, forming the first virtual media in Western literature, a most ancient artifact of what Disney now calls “imagineering.” But Hephaestus also limps along on withered limbs, anticipating the great insight that both Plato and Marshall McLuhan would later insist upon: that technologies extend our creative powers by amputating our natural ones.

  Another Greek tale implies that this fundamental disequilibrium in the order of things is the essence of both man and technology. After the gods give Epithemeus the task of creating living creatures, the Titan—whose name means “afterthought”—botches the job. He grafts all the useful DNA into animals, so that when man finally crawls out of the Titan’s lab he is nothing more than a soft and mewling babe, without courage, cunning, or fur. In desperation, Epithemeus turns to his brother Prometheus, who is graced with the more auspicious name of “forethought.” Thinking ahead, Prometheus gives humans their upright gait and makes them tall and far-seeing like the gods. Then the Titan flies to heaven and steals the fire from the sun, which he bestows upon our still rather clueless ancestors. “Though feeble and short-lived,” reads one ancient verse, “Mankind has flaming fire and therefrom learns many crafts.”4 Zeus is not impressed with this unauthorized transfer of power and chains Prometheus to a rock for his crimes, where he remains until Heracles releases him. But the Titan’s rational fire sparks the technocultural imagination of the West to this day. Freethinkers from the Enlightenment on have embraced the Promethean flame as an antiauthoritarian symbol of human self-determination, while Neo-Luddites demonize it as a corrosive and destructive force that may well reduce the earth to a crisp.

  Though the tongues of the Promethean flame will wag throughout this book, our main focus remains not the technologies of power, but the technologies of communication, and the myths and mysteries that enchant those media. And the obvious Attic psychopomp for such mysteries is Hermes, the messenger and mediator of gods and men, souls and meanings, trivia and trade. Of all the godforms that haunt the Greek mind, Hermes is the one who would feel most at home in our wired world. Indeed, with his mischievous combination of speed, trickery, and profitable mediation, he can almost be seen as the archaic mascot of the information age. Unlike most archetypal figures, who lurk in the violent and erotic dream-stuff beneath the surface of our everyday awareness, Hermes also embodies the social psychology of language and communication. He flies “as fleet as thought,” an image of the daylight mind, with its plans and synaptic leaps, its chatter and overload. Hermes shows that these minds are not islands but nodes in an immense electric tangle of words, images, songs, and signals. Hermes rules the transtemporal world of information exchange that you and I are participating in right now, me as I tap out these pixelated fonts and you as you absorb their typographic twins through your eyeballs and into your brain.

  More than a mere delivery boy, Hermes wears a host of guises: con artist, herald, inventor, merchant, magus, thief. The Romans called him Mercury, the name that came to grace the solar system’s hottest and fastest orb, as well as the moist element beloved by later alchemists. Those of us familiar with the logo of the floral delivery service FTD will recognize Hermes at once: a young, androgynous man with a bumpkin’s cap that betrays his humble origins and a pair of winged sandals that show his addiction to speed. To round out the image, all we need to do is restore Hermes’s caduceus, the magic rod topped with two serpents twining like the double helix of DNA—a fit device for a god who brings the twists and turns of information to life.

  Already in Homer, Hermes is a multitasking character. The figure who flits through the Iliad as a messenger and thief becomes in the Odyssey a guide of souls and a shamanic healer, curing Odysseus from Circe’s witchy poison. But the god really doesn’t find himself at center stage until the pseudo-Homeric Hymn to Hermes, written around the sixth century BCE. The poem begins with the nymph Maya, lately loved by Zeus, giving birth to a boisterous child. Leaping instantly out of his crib, the babe Hermes dashes into the outside world, where he happens upon a turtle. He kills the creature, takes up its shell, and invents the lyre, becoming “the first to manufacture songs.” Lord of the lucky find, Hermes crafts opportunity like those brash start-up companies that fill a market niche by creating it in the first place. Even as he’s improvising a crass ditty, he ponders his next scheme: to steal cattle from his rival, the golden god Apollo.

  The Greeks make no bones about it: Hermes is a thief. (During one festival on the island of Samos, people honored the god by gleefully committing highway robbery.) But Hermes’s banditry should not be confused with appropriations based on raw power. The information trickster works through cleverness and stealth; he is not the mugger or the thug, but the hacker, the spy, the mastermind. When Hermes makes off with Apollo’s cattle, he sports specially designed footwear that leaves no tracks, and he forces the animals to walk backward in order to trick his pursuers. When Apollo finally catches up with the kid, Hermes fools him by proclaiming oaths that, like the slickest legal contracts, do not mean what they seem to say. He tells the god of truth that “I don’t have any information to give, and the reward for information wouldn’t go to me if I did.”5 Finally, the duo journey to Olympus to resolve the conflict. Hermes gives Apollo the lyre, which so pleases the archer that he lets Hermes keep the cattle and grants the young demigod a measure of divine power and prestige.

  The conflict between the aristocratic lord Apollo and the young upstart god is instructive. Apollo can be con
sidered the god of science in its ideal form: pure, ordering, embodying the solar world of clarity and light. Hermes insists that there are always cracks and gaps in such perfect architectures; intelligence moves forward by keeping on its crafty toes, ever opening into a world that is messy, unpredictable, and far from equilibrium. The supreme symbol for the fecund space of possibility and innovation that Hermes exploits is the crossroads—a fit image as well for our contemporary world, with its data nets and seemingly infinite choices. In ancient days, the Greeks marked crossroads, village borders, and household doorways with the herm, a rectangular pillar surmounted by the head of Hermes (and graced as well with a healthy phallus). At the base of these pillars, hungry travelers would sometimes chance upon offerings to the god—offerings they would duly steal, not to thwart Hermes but to honor the lucky finds he bestows. Some herms were later replaced with wooden posts used as primitive bulletin boards; it may be that the word trivia (literally, three roads) derives from the frequently inconsequential nature of these postings.

  Crossroads are extremely charged spaces. Here choices are made, fears and facts overlap, and the alien first shows its face: strange people, foreign tongues, exotic and delightful goods and information. Crossroads create what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal zones”: ambiguous but potent spaces of transformation and threat that lie at the edge of cultural maps. Here the self finds itself beyond the limits of its own horizon, “Through Hermes,” the mythographer Karl Kerényi writes, “every house became an opening and a point of departure to the paths that come from far off and lead away into the distance.”6 As Norman O. Brown points out in his study Hermes the Thief, the liminal quality of the crossroads also derives from the more mundane traffic of trade. In archaic times, the exchange of goods often took place at crossroads and village borders; these swaps were fraught with ambiguity, for they blurred the distinction between gift, barter, magic, and theft. As the commercial networks of the Greek city-states developed, this economic border zone eventually shifted from the wild edges of the village into the more organized markets at the heart of the new urban centers. The outside was swallowed within. Hermes became agoraios, “he of the agora,” the patron saint of merchants, middlemen, and the service industry, while the god’s epithet “tricky” came to mean “good for securing profit.”7