Escape Velocity
Page 8
A “familiar,” according to The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft & Demonology, is “a low-ranking demon in the shape of a small domestic animal to advise and perform small malicious errands.”123 Fittingly, the dormant computer programs which, when triggered, engage in low-level decision making and information gathering on many BBSs are called demons. Similarly, “knowbots,” or knowledge robots–information-gathering computer programs currently in development-realize Tony Lane’s dream of an “electrical familiar.” The computer journalist John Markoff, who defines knowbots as “protoartificially intelligent creatures . . . that have the capacity to relentlessly prowl the [Internet] looking for information morsels,” has compared them to sorcerer’s apprentices.124
A long and winding discussion between BBSers all over the States spiraled off of Lane’s initial message, or “post.” Aga Windwalker (aka J. Palmer) recounted a venture into “CyberCraft” that involved casting a healing spell over phone lines when a friend suffered a grand mal seizure:
One day, I was chatting with [my friend’s] boyfriend [on a BBS] when he suddenly typed “GM” (which meant that the girl was going into a seizure and he had to go to her). [T]ouching my monitor, [I] started channeling energy. Through the monitor, down the cable, through the PC, into the modem, across the phone lines, and into her computer. I visualized it surrounding her, helping her. According to both of them, something DID happen. The boyfriend said he heard a sound from the computer, but couldn’t figure what it was. About that same moment, the girl stopped shuddering and called out my name. It wasn’t a statement, it was almost a confused question. . . . After a few moments . . . she was all right. As she opened her eyes she said she saw me hovering over her, and that I simply faded INTO her computer monitor and disappeared.125
Windwalker’s spontaneous CyberCraft is an eyebrow-raising example of the magickal use of the computer mentioned earlier, a “user application” undreamed of by PC manufacturers. Less dramatically, technopagans such as Maxwell X. Delysid use computers and computer networks as an integral part of their “ritual work.” A self-styled “computer geek,” Delysid has experimented with computer applications for the cabala, using his PC “to process cabala inquiries, making connections between phrases.”126
Though still not seduced by the computer, Genesis P-Orridge has made his peace with the machine by investing it with an animistic aura. He speaks to his PC before switching it on and keeps it swaddled in fur, which he believes maintains its “contact with the animal spirit kingdom.” He and other TOPY members have also dabbled in TV magick, converting the glass teat into a crystal ball by tuning it to an empty channel late at night, with the brightness and contrast turned all the way up-transforming an ordinary set, in effect, into a psychic TV. “[G]et close to the screen, switch off all other light sources and stare at the screen,” instructs P-Orridge.
First try [to] focus on the tiny dots that will be careering about the screen like microorganisms. . . . Suddenly time will alter along with your perceptions and you will hit a period of trance where the conscious and subconscious mind are triggered in unison by the mantric vibrations of the myriad dots. It’s quite possible that the frequency and pulse rates of the TV “snow” are similar to certain ones generated by other rituals (e.g. Dervish dances, Tibetan magick, etc.). What we have here is a contemporary magickal ritual using the medium, in all senses of the word, of television.127
Staring fixedly into a crystal ball, mirror, or any reflective surface as a means of inducing an autohypnotic trance-and, it is believed, precognitive visions-is known as “scrying.” As Erik Davis notes, P-Orridge’s use of the idiot box as a scrying screen is at once goofily banal, eminently practical, and triumphantly redemptive. “On one hand, you think, That’s so flaky, so pathetic, trying to take this stupid detritus from modern civilization and make magic with it,’” says Davis, “but on the other it doesn’t matter because from a practical perspective-practical in the sense of magical practical, spiritually pragmatic-it doesn’t really matter. John Dee used a crystal ball to channel the Enochian language [the purported language of the angels] and [scrying] is what TV magick comes out of.”
Again, the street finds its own uses for things. As Davis puts it, “The cyberpunk ethos has a spiritual dimension.” He calls technopagan practices such as TV magick “poaching,” a term borrowed from critical theory. The cultural critic Constance Penley defines poaching as the unsanctioned, idiosyncratic interpretation of books, TV shows, and other cultural “texts”—“an impertinent ‘raid’ on the literary ‘preserve’ that takes away only those things that seem useful or pleasurable to the reader.”128 Technopagans poach on cyberculture, suggests Davis, making off with technologies and scientific concepts that are then incorporated into a “resacralized,” reen-chanted worldview. In Davis’s eyes, such poaching “produces a very pragmatic spirituality that involves the immediate experience of life . . . which lends itself much more richly to computers and computer culture [than most belief systems].”
Like cyberpunk’s outlaw hacking and punk robotics, technopagan and New Age poaching have obvious political connotations. They act out a subconscious resentment engendered by science’s unquestioned cultural authority and give voice to the desire to democratize that endeavor-to make the stitching together of cultural explanations of the nature of the universe a more communal enterprise. “In its embattled attempts to practice a science pirated and reappropriated from the experts,” writes the cultural critic Andrew Ross, “the New Age community feeds off the popular desire for more democratic control of information and resources”–a pronouncement that holds equally true for technopagan poaching.129
Technopaganism conspires with recent philosophical challenges to scientific authority on the basis that, while supposedly objective, it often aids and abets cultural bias or political ideology. Much of this enterprise has been carried out by feminists, multiculturalists, and poststructuralists under the rubric of what has been called “social constructionism,” which states that science, like all cultural phenomena, is socially determined-blinkered by the biases of the society that produced it and dedicated, consciously or not, to the validation of that worldview. In a consummate irony, this critique unwittingly allies itself with “creationism” and other fundamentalist Christian critiques of science as a “secular humanist” conspiracy bent on usurping religion’s power to make sense of the world around us.
At the same time, technopaganism is concomitant with science’s own demolition of traditional notions of universal truth and objective reality, a process hastened along by Godel’s incompleteness theorem, a cornerstone of modern mathematics that the mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy defines as the assertion that “there exist meaningful mathematical statements that are neither provable nor disprovable, now or ever . . . because the very nature of logic renders them incapable of resolution.”130 The philosophical implications of Godel’s theorem are “devastating,” according to Hardy. The mathematician and cyberpunk novelist Rudy Rucker, who delights in such bombshells, asserts, “Godel has shown that the fundamental logical notion of ‘truth’ has no rational definition.”131 What’s worse, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a precept of quantum mechanics, leads to the inescapable conclusion that the very act of observation affects the state of the phenomenon observed, an axiom that plays havoc with the notion of objective truth. “The age of absolutes, if it ever really existed, is now most definitely and permanently passé,” concludes the mathematician John L. Casti. “Einstein’s work buried once and for all the concepts of absolute space and time, while Heisenberg shot down the belief in absolutely precise measurement. Godel, of course, stamped paid to the quaint and curious ideas of absolute proof and truth.”132
Philosophical upheavals such as these, from within and without the scientific community, have radically revised the rationalist/materialist world view, giving way to a quantum reality in which physics often borders on metaphysics. Technopagans place their faith in the liquid indeterminacy
of such a reality, hopeful that it might at least accommodate, and one day even validate, their cosmology.
Ironically, technopaganism simultaneously embodies the pervasive anxiety engendered by a reality rendered increasingly incoherent by science and ever more alienating by technology. In an essay on “Cyber-Superstition,” Bruce Sterling considers our relationship to the computer as a “Magic Machine”:
Computers are fearsome creations, redolent of mystery and power. Even to software engineers and hardware designers, computers are, in some deep and basic sense, hopelessly baffling. . . . Machines that perform millions of operations per second are simply far too complex for any human brain to fully comprehend.133
Furthermore, notes Gary Chapman, a former executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, these unfathomable, mercurial devices have hidden themselves in everything from household appliances to heavy machinery and are rapidly assuming control of the technosphere:
Embedded microprocessors that help run everything from cars to coffee makers to airliners are even more widespread than personal computers, but they are largely invisible to the casual viewer. Many people probably have a vague idea that there is a computer under the hood of the newer model automobiles, and that it helps run the engine. But how the computer does this, where it is, and how it can malfunction are typically mysteries for most people. . . . The automobile is no longer a ‘natural’ thing, that is, something that exhibits properties that can be grasped by a person with a reasonable exposure to physics, but is now a kind of ‘supernatural’ thing, since its operation is governed by invisible changes, embodied in software.134
In a world increasingly dependent on digital technologies, the esoteric knowledge and arcane terminology associated with computer science confers on it an almost religious status. To the laity, it seems that the death of God has merely made way for a theology of technology. Tellingly, magico-religious metaphors have swirled around computers almost since their invention. Room-sized, vacuum tube-powered monsters such as ENIAC (the first programmable electronic computer, officially operable in 1946) provided the mythic image of the computer as an intimidating, inscrutable deity, attended by white-smocked priests who bore a disquieting resemblance to the “machine-tickling aphids” Samuel Butler feared humans might one day become, as he cautioned in his novel Erewhon. Firmly fixed in the mass imagination through any number of SF films and Star Trek episodes, the archetype of the cyber-god is rendered most memorably in the apocryphal story recounted by the mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth:
[President] Eisenhower went into a room full of computers. And he put the question to these machines, “Is there a God?” And they all start up, and the lights flash, and the wheels turn, and after a while a voice says, “Now there is.”135
Campbell, who had recently purchased a desktop computer, noted that as “an authority on gods” he was inclined to identify the machine with “an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.”136
Writing on the eve of the PC revolution, the computer scientist and artificial intelligence enthusiast Christopher Evans presents a mirror image of Campbell’s reading of the computer as an arrogant, angry tin god. In The Micro Millennium, Evans reflects at length on the “ultra-intelligent machines” he speculates will spring from the computer’s brow. Like the more benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful deities of myth and religion, machines such as these, possessed of “theoretically limitless powers,” will deliver us from evil. “Even the most optimistic fan of human beings will admit that our world is in a most dangerously muddled state, and Man, unaided, is unlikely to be able to do much to improve it,” writes Evans. “[T]he temptation to turn to the computer for assistance will be overwhelming.”137 He concludes, “[T]here . . . remains the real chance that computers will be seen as deities, and if they evolve into Ultra-Intelligent Machines, there may even be an element of truth in the belief.”138
Of course, if computers are gods, those who intercede between them and mere mortals must be priests. In fact, there is a long-standing folklore of computer programmers as priests. In Tracy Kidder’s chronicle of the birth of a microcomputer, The Soul of a New Machine, a programmer recalls the thrill of learning the “assembly language” that enabled him to control the computer’s operations: “I could . . . talk right to the machine. It was . . . great for me to learn that priestly language. I could talk to God.”139 Steven Levy’s Hackers teems with religious and occult metaphors-obsessive programmers are “technological monks,” members of a “devout religious order,” or, to their detractors in the MIT math department, “witches.” Intriguingly, occult references outnumber priestly ones in hacker slang: The New Hacker’s Dictionary gives definitions for “deep magic,” “heavy wizardy,” “voodoo programming,” “cargo cult programming,” and “casting the runes.”
Moreover, it is a received truth in cyberculture that the computer has, in large degree, collapsed the traditional distance between word and deed. In an on-line roundtable devoted to outlaw computer hacking, Robert Horvitz, the Washington correspondent for the Whole Earth Review, notes,
There’s a traditional distinction between words-expressions of opinions, beliefs, and information-and deeds. You can shout “Revolution!” from the rooftops all you want, and the post office will obligingly deliver your recipes for nitroglycerin. But acting on that information exposes you to criminal prosecution. The philosophical problem posed by [outlaw] hacking is that computer programs transcend this distinction: They are pure language that dictates action when read by the device being addressed. . . . Actions result automatically from the machine reading the word.140
There is an irresistible tendency, in the face of such a seemingly supernatural medium, to wrap it in occult metaphors. Thus, Village Voice writer Julian Dibbell concludes that, in virtual environments, the computer operates on what amounts to
the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably. . . . They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment . . . knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.141
It is somehow fitting that technopaganism, with its emphasis on counterbalancing the power of the computer priests, should invert such metaphors. In a world where programming is seen as cybernetic cabalism, conjuration can be understood as magickal programming. “Programs are the ‘ritual’ for invoking the appropriate action,” analogizes Farrell McGovern, a technopagan participating in the “Cybermage” topic. By the same logic, he argues, a magickal ritual is a program:
[O]nce you have “compiled” and “run” your ritual once, you really don’t need to again, since that energy pattern is now in your head. . . . You just invoke the magickal headspace that the original “source” ritual created! This is how I do magick.142
To Rodney Orpheus, the ease with which such metaphors are turned upside down underscores his belief that there’s nothing oxymoronic about the term technopagan in end-of-the-century cyberculture. “People say, ‘Pagans sit in the forest, worshiping nature; what are you doing drinking Diet Coke in front of a Macintosh?’” says Orpheus, who in addition to being a card-carrying Crowleyite is a hacker and mind machine aficionado. “But when you use a computer, you’re using your imagination to manipulate the computer’s reality. Well, that’s exactly what sorcery is all about-changing the plastic quality of nature on a nuts-and-bolts level. And that’s why magickal techniques dating back hundreds of years are totally valid in a cyberpunk age.”
Orpheus’s rhetoric is bounded by unacknowledged limits. Philosophical challenges to the scientific worldview notwithstanding, many of us are still sufficiently constrained by it to have difficulty accepting Orpheus’s faith in the powers of mind over matter. Certainly, postmodern critiques, together with the paradigm-shattering breakthroughs of modern science (re
lativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory), have jimmied open the scientific world-view wide enough to admit ideas that would previously have seemed counterintuitive, even “irrational.” But that opening does not accommodate technopagan claims of channeling energy over telephone lines or discerning visions of things to come in “the mantric vibrations of the myriad dots” on a snowy TV screen.
Likewise, Dibbell’s eyebrow-raising declaration that the computer reduces the “tidy division of the world into the symbolic and the real” to a philosophical mirage merits closer scrutiny.143 Few would deny Dibbell’s premise, a cornerstone of corporate futurology and postmodernism alike, that our interactions with the world around us take place, more and more, in electronically mediated spaces (videoconferences, BBS discussion groups, and the like). Nor would many debate the notion that transnational corporate power is increasingly dependent on, and exercised in, cyberspace. Nor, finally, would anyone deny that word (programming language) and deed (information processing) become one in the computer, a symbol-manipulating machine operated by strings of arbitrary symbols. Then, too, language’s ability to act on the virtual world inside the computer via operating code is echoed in computer-mediated human interaction, where description is indistinguishable from action. For example, sexually harassing messages on electronic bulletin boards are experienced by some on-line recipients as “verbal,” even “physical” assaults, no less hurtful than the same actions in RL (“Real Life”).
In his argument that the computer collapses the difference between the actual and the virtual, Dibbell reaches for occult metaphors, implying in the process that the computer also does away with distinctions between magick and technology. Ironically, ritual magick offers a highly instructive metaphor for the divorce between the symbolic and the real-between cyberspace, where digital incantations “make things happen, directly and ineluctably,” and the embodied world outside. As Joseph Campbell notes, “When a magician wants to work magic, he puts a circle around himself, and it is within this bounded circle, this hermetically sealed-off area, that powers can be brought into play that are lost outside the circle.”144