TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  TechGnosis was an attempt to read the signs of the times; nearly a decade after first planning the project, it’s hard to resist pulling out the scorecard. Some developments I discuss (online spirituality, technopaganism) continue to bloom, while others (mystical role-playing games, UFO mania) seem to be in abeyance. As noted above, I am also “happy” to say that I was spooked enough to have caught a glimpse of our present darkness. But nothing pleased my inner Nostradamus more than the explosion of pop gnosticism. When I wrote the book, “gnosticism” sounded to most people like a kind of disease; by the end of 2003, Time magazine was splitting the hairs between Marcionites, Ebionites, and the Gospel of Thomas. Indeed, from the Hollywood canonization of Philip K. Dick to the blockbuster success of Dan Brown’s potboiler The Da Vinci Code, gnosticism and esoteric Christianity have opened their gates to the mass mind.

  Of course, the Great Work of pop gnosticism remains The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers’ film that restaged Gnosticism’s ancient mystic conundrum for the PlayStation generation. The Matrix illustrated two of my book’s basic points: that information technology has an inherently dualistic or “gnostic” tendency that undermines the claims of the world around us, and that following this hunch down the rabbit hole is not necessarily a bad thing, spiritually or otherwise. Though the gnostic hunch may be born of intense alienation, it also drives the search for deeper things; questioning the world becomes a questioning of the self and undermines, at least in principle, the ready-made myths that keep us from engaging things as they are. In their follow-up film, the underrated Matrix Reloaded, the Wachowskis explored the difficulties that greet the awakening techgnostic soul as it attempts to navigate a universe of nested realities in an age of technology. The film poses the core question of the spiritual cyborg: what is the nature of control? By their third film, Matrix Revolutions, the Wachowski brothers had grown too self-conscious about their popcorn gnostic gospel, but in the end that’s what feels true, or at least contemporary, about their trilogy: its excessive self-consciousness about selves and consciousness. For all their muddled and cheesy moves, the films serve a classic gnostic suspicion: There is a crack in the cosmic machine, and we are the crack.

  The belief that there is a crack in the universe emerges, in the West, during late antiquity, when gnostic paranoia was only the most extreme expression of a widespread transformation of religious consciousness. Marking everything from the Mithraic mystery cult to the nascent world cult of Jesus Christ, this new structure refocused religious consciousness from the collective to the individual soul, now seen as immortal, mobile, and detachable from tribe and homeland. With the proper initiations and shifts in identity, this essentially free agent could escape into a spiritual world set above a lower world now seen as ruled by darkness, or at least mottled inconstancy. This thirst for transcendence contrasted with earlier mythic-religious systems that affirmed the basic orderliness and holistic integrity of the world system, and that thereby subsumed the individual into the cosmic hierarchy of the state. While Rome was one of the most dominant of states, it also created the conditions for the new religious structure to emerge: increasingly rootless, urban, and syncretic, the people under Rome were prepared to embrace a fundamental mutation in consciousness.

  Today I see a similar change brewing at the edge of things. Pop gnosticism also arises in the context of a new global empire, but now an essential reversal in the sense of transcendence has occurred. The ancient gnostics believed that the cosmic prison was the material world, the world of flesh and fate. But in today’s Matrix model, the false world has become the world of mediation; its rulers or archons are not carnal demons but captains of propaganda and brainwashing. In this new vision, spiritual awakening does not catapult you into an incorporeal heaven but plugs you back into the actual, physical world—a place that follows deeper rhythms than CPU cycles and the hum of global networks. The core of our new gnosis, I believe, is the earth, in all its limitations and extraordinary fecund power. That’s why the “secret Christianity” that lends The Da Vinci Code its sparkle is not focused on mystical transcendence so much as an erotic and even heathen yearning for the earth and the feminine, for an old holism that might restore the extraordinary rift that has opened up between civilization and the natural world. But it also seems important that we are drawn to a secret Jesus, a kinder and more mercurial shadow of the macho patriot that has grabbed the heart of so many American Christians today. Gnosis reminds us that there is another way to be true to our Western spiritual heritage than embracing this consumer religion of arrogant election and intolerant fear.

  If the original gnostic moment reflected an emerging sense of the self as a free agent, the latest mutation also gropes toward an embodied awareness of the collective dimension of being. After all, the myth of the individual—with its desires, its rebellious spunk, and its hopeless immortality projects—is now the dominant fiction of the corporate consumer world. What we are moving toward, perhaps, is an awakened consciousness of our links in this place, and the corresponding need to sustain this place with these relations in mind. For many, this consciousness takes the form of a nostalgic longing to return to wholeness, to Gaia or the One. But I suspect something more tricky is required, a path that does not try to wind things back to the old unity where everything has its place, where the crack that we are is sutured by a suffocating myth. Instead, we may want to actualize the self as a singularity, a unique spark in a transpersonal web of relations. One can see technological reflections of such a path in the rise of mediated group minds: in blogspace, in flash mobs, in all our new peer-to-peer networks, virtual and real, political and spiritual.

  The gnostic turn also reflects the recognition that religion, like neuroscience, must plunge into the enigma of personal experience. The crux of The Matrix is the choice that Morpheus gives Neo: the red pill or the blue pill. The fact that Morpheus hands Neo a pill reminds us that we have decisively entered the age of the pharmacological self, where both spirituality and dysfunction are mediated, not by ancient cosmologies or Freudian structures of meaning, but by psychoactive technologies and metaphors of brain juice. Neo’s choice is a good one to keep in mind, even if it begs the ultimate question: how can I tell the difference between a red pill and a blue pill? Does a substance that alleviates anxiety free me up from compulsion in order to better engage life, or does it stupefy me into a corporate trance? The answer, such as it is, lies nowhere outside the twists and turns of experience itself, which means that nobody else can take the ride for you—and that the communities that help you shape and understand your open-ended experiences are crucial.

  As I show in TechGnosis, the contemporary roots of such soul-tech lie in the 1960s and 1970s, when a generation embraced a wide range of “sacred technologies” that included drugs, media, and spiritual techniques. Despite the narcissism and foolishness that marked this generation of bodymind explorers, their tradition did not die with the passing of the hippies. In some ways, in fact, it has returned with a vengeance. A hip new psychedelia is moving in from the margins of electronic culture, infecting Hollywood film, dance music, and computer animation with visions of Amazonian jungle spirits and DMT elves. Buddhism continues to influence secular society, where its dispassionate techniques mesh with a sober and even reductive view of human psychology. And hatha yoga continues to explode in popularity, a mass conversion that at this point dwarfs any previous fad. Most yoga practitioners probably think of their bendy devotions as an essentially physical regime served up with a pinch of exotica and a dollop of self-help. But yoga is an alchemical time bomb, and its chakra plumbing charges the bodymind with energies that may not only restore some semblance of balance to our off-kilter lifestyles, but may set us up for the peculiar challenges faced by a posthuman culture.

  In other words, what is most important about pop gnosticism is not the heightened spiritual impulse it may reflect. Consumer spirituality is a mixed bag, and given the role that religious passion plays in current events, i
t may be preferable to keep our difficult and often sad modern world as disenchanted as possible. What intrigues me about the embrace of DIY psychic technologies today is that they seem to unconsciously prepare us for the brave new world just around the bend: a tsunami of official consciousness technologies that will include neural implants, trance-inducing electronics, and a range of pills targeted for memory, forgetting, performance enhancement, ADD, anxiety, and wakefulness. In order to navigate this world, we need to get our own hands on the dials of the bodymind, to take responsibility for the fact that consciousness is a deeply embodied and deeply mediated process. In that sense, we cannot escape the world of mediation. Instead, we may need to fully accept and embrace the human design process, and bring it into consonance with our bodies, our communities, and our deepest dreams—as well as those vast cosmic webworks whose own mysterious designs we may glimpse, if at all, in moments past all sense or reckoning.

  Afterword 2.0 (2015)

  It makes me slightly pained to admit it, but the most vital and imaginative period of culture that I’ve yet enjoyed unfolded in the early 1990s (with the last years of the 1980s thrown in for good measure). There was a peculiar feeling in the air those days, at least in my neck of the woods: an ambient sense of arcane possibility, cultural mutation, and delirious threat that, though it may have only reflected my youth, seemed to presage more epochal changes to come. Recalling that vibe right now reminds me of the peculiar spell that fell across me and my crew during the brief reign of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which began broadcasting on ABC in the spring of 1990. Today, in our era of torrents, YouTube, and TiVo, it is difficult to recall the hold that network television once had on the cultural conversation, let alone the concrete sense of historical time. Lynch’s darkside soap opera temporarily undermined that simulacra of psychological and social stability. Plunging down Lynch’s ominous apple-pie rabbit hole every week, we caught astral glimmers of the surreal disruptions on the horizon ahead. I was already working as a culture critic for the Village Voice, covering music, technology, and TV, and later that year I wrote an article in which I claimed that, in addition to dissolving the concentrated power of mass media outlets like ABC, the onrushing proliferation of digital content channels and interactive media was going to savage “consensus reality” as well. It wasn’t just the technology that was going to change; the mass mind itself was, in an au courant bit of jargon from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, going molecular.

  Molecular meant a thousand subcultures. Pockets of alternative practices across the spectrum crackled with millennialist intensity in the early nineties, as if achieving a kind of escape velocity. Underground currents of electronic music, psychedelia, rap, ufology, cyberculture, paganism, industrial postpunk, performance art, conspiracy theory, fringe science, mock religion, and other more or less conscious reality hacks invaded the spaces of novelty and possibility that emerged in the cracks of the changing media. Hip-hop transformed the cut-up into a general metaphor for the mixing and splicing of cultural “memes”—a concept first floated by Richard Dawkins in 1989. Postmodernism slipped into newsprint, Burning Man moved to the desert, and raves jumped the pond, intensifying the subliminal futurism of American electronic dance music into a sci-fi hedonism that turned the DJ into a nerdy shaman and the nervous system into a launching pad. The ambient music designed to fill chill-out tents helped stage a return of a pop-tech mysticism, intensified by MDMA’s glowing body-without-organs and the return to serious psychedelia aided and abetted by Terence McKenna and other Internet-enabled psychonauts. The eighties zine scene continued to flourish, but new production tools allowed publications like Mondo 2000, Magical Blend, Gnosis, and the “neurozine” Boing Boing to catapult from the DIY zone onto the magazine racks. At the same time—and with enormous effect on the weirdness to come—the zine ecology began colonizing the online hinterlands of BBSes, Usenet alt groups, and the Well (which was, well, a big BBS). Even cable access TV was getting pretty strange (at least in Brooklyn). Some wags joked that Hendrix had rightly prophesied, and that the sixties had turned out to be the nineties after all. And while that fantasy radically distorted the street politics of the former and the technology-primed economics of the latter, it did announce that the old hippie divide between a computerized technocracy and an earthy analog underground had not only broken down but dissolved.

  This was, quite simply, an awesome time to be a cultural critic. At the Village Voice, then a feisty paragon of identity politics and primo alternative journalism, I was encouraged by a handful of highly skilled (and highly tolerant) editors to write about everything from cosmic heavy metal to posthumanist philosophy to The X-Files to the Zippies. Following the steps of my Voice pal and fellow tech journalist Julian Dibbell, I got a Panix dial-up account in 1993, and dove into the weirdness of alt groups, French theory listservs, and the social experiments of LambdaMOO, where I encountered a crew of highly intelligent and creative anarchist pagans that blew my mind. Those years were, by far, the most fun I ever had online. But the real initiation into the stream of technomagic that inspired TechGnosis occurred a couple of years earlier, when I flew from New York to the Bay Area in order to attend the first and only Cyberthon, a paisley-flaked technology gathering whose speakers included Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, and Bruce Sterling. Virtual reality, now making a belated comeback through Oculus Rift and related gamer gear, was all the rage. I strapped on dread-headed Jaron Lanier’s data-glove rig, and I toured the VR lab at NASA Ames with the deeply entertaining John Perry Barlow. I met a sardonic William Gibson, who single-handedly engineered our “collective hallucination” of cyberspace, and a standoffish Stewart Brand, whose Whole Earth tool fetishism presaged the Cyberthon’s meet-up of counterculture and cyberculture. For me, born in the Bay Area but raised and living on the East Coast, the Cyberthon was a strange kind of homecoming: one that only strapped me onto a new line of flight, a cruise that rode the growing updrafts of what would become the mass digital bloom.

  TechGnosis was in many ways woven from the travel diary of that cruise. As an journalist, as well as a heady seeker of sorts, I was already devoted to tracking the juxtaposition of spirituality and the material grit of popular culture, a juxtaposition that in the nineties came to include new technologies, human augmentation tech, and the dawning “space” of digital mediation. Once I tuned into this techgnostic frequency, I realized that the waves radiated backward as well as forward, not just toward Teilhard’s apocalyptic Omega Point or McKenna’s jungle Eschaton, but toward the earliest technical stirrings of Paleolithic Homo sapiens. I became seized by the McLuhanesque conviction that the history of religion was really just a part of the history of media. As a pagan dabbler, I grokked that the hermetic and magical fabulations that had gone underground in the modern West had returned, like Freud’s repressed hankerings, in technological forms both built and imagined, demonic and transcendent, sublime and ridiculous. I began to track these secret histories, and my notes grew until they demanded to be a book.

  Today there is so much wonderful and intelligent material on occult spirituality—in scholarship, literature, and the arts—that it is hard to remember just how esoteric this stuff was in the nineties. Peers at the time suggested that, outside certain recondite circles, my research might prove bootless given the more pressing issues—and pragmatic opportunities—associated with the digital revolution. And yet, as the pieces fell into place, as I befriended technopagans or stumbled across cyborg passages in hermetic texts, I felt I no longer had choice in the matter. I was possessed by what Teilhard had called the “demon (or angel) of Research,” which is one way of describing what takes place when the object of study turns around and grabs you by the balls. I had to write TechGnosis. And though other writers and historians were tuned into these questions both before and alongside me, I am chuffed, as the British say, that scholars, hackers, mystics, and artists alike continue to draw from the particular Wunderkammer I assembled.

  I think TechG
nosis continues to speak despite its sometimes anachronism because it taps the enigmatic currents of fantasy, hope, and fear that continue to charge our tools, and that speak even more deeply to the profound and peculiar ways those tools shape us in return. These mythic currents are as real as desire, as real as dream; they do not simply dissipate when we recognize their sway. Nonetheless, technoscience continues to propagate the Enlightenment myth of a rational and calculated life without myths, and to promote values like efficiency, productivity, entrepreneurial self-interest, and the absolute adherence to reductionist explanations for all phenomena. All these daylit values undergird the global secularism that forms the unspoken framework for public and professional discourse, for the “worldview” of our faltering West. At the same time, however, media and technology unleash a phantasmagoric nightscape of identity crises, alternate realities, memetic infection, dread, lust, and the specter of invisible (if not diabolical) agents of surveillance and control. That these two worlds of day and night are actually one matrix remains our central mystery: a rational world of paradoxically deep weirdness where, as in some dying-earth genre scenario, technology and mystery lie side-by-side, not so much as explanations of the world but as experiences of the world.