TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information - Softcover

Davis, Erik

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852427728 ISBN 13: 9781852427726

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2004

Synopsis

Techgnosis uncovers the hidden mystical and religious impulses that animate our contemporary obsessions with media and technology. It is a wild ride, chock full of curious characters, esoteric information and visionary insights. The book tells the story of the alchemical origins of electricity, the occult dimension of computer games, and the Zen of cybernetics. It reminds us of the irrational, even dreamlike underside of our supposedly rational machines. Techgnosis was first published in 1998, and it is now a cult classic, one of the key texts of the media underground. It has been translated into five languages. This updated edition will feature a new afterword, placing the book in our moment.

About this title

About the Author

Erik Davis's work has appeared in Wired, The Village Voice andGnosis, and he has lectured internationally on techno-culture and the fringes of religion.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Techgnosis by Erik Davis

Leadtext: The following extract is from Erik Davis's afterword to Techgnosis.

Terence McKenna, the cultural theorist who affixed his swirling psychedelic thumb-print on the technocultural debate throughout the 1990s, used to argue that time is a struggle between habit and novelty. Novelty, he defined somewhat nebulously, was the density of connection or complexity of a system; the more complex a system is, the more novelty it engenders. McKenna saw the universe as a kind of "novelty-conserving engine:" novelty is produced, gets set in historical concrete, and become the basis of further transformation. We spiral up. Multicellular life eventually becomes the basis for the Indian railway system or the Human Genome Project or Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. But the process is not perpetual. In McKenna's scenario, the fluctuating wave of novelty that is human history ultimately reaches a limit point, a "singularity" in the words of more mainstream futurists like Ray Kurzweil. At that point, the human design process - which includes culture, technology, and the manipulation of matter - achieves a sort of infinite velocity: everything becomes linked with everything else, or matter becomes mind, or something like that. For McKenna, this transcendental object radiates its influence into the past like a tractor beam, so that the increasing rate of change and the sense of liminal confusion so many of us feel is actually a sign that the rug is already being wrenched from beneath our feet.



I do not take McKenna's millennialist myth literally, at least most of the time. But it certainly embodied the secret thrill of the 1990s, when an upsurge of technocultural mutation remade America and, to some extent, the world. It is a mistake to reduce this phase of technoculture to a "bubble", that economic metaphor that now dominates - in the insidious way of economic metaphors - our cultural memory of the time. That decade was more than a shell game of smirking geeks and IPO pyramid schemes: it was an epochal convergence of new media, global flows of information, and an innovative, boundary-dissolving multiculture of hacking, sampling, and hybrid experimentation - a culture just beginning to lick its posthuman lips. As the human design process plunged into the virtual space of computers, the space of possibility itself expanded. New worlds, from online multiplayer computer games to CAD simulations to mathematical domains of chaos and complexity, grew on silicon. The rhetoric of science fiction entered mainstream discourse, academic theory, business strategy and popular culture. The economy itself came to resemble a vast "possibility machine", as investors placed bets on possible futures hovering in the convergent etherspace defined by new software, new hardware, and the fruitful properties that emerge - in that most '90s of verbs - from ever more complex and intensified networks of money, algorithms and human desire.



Techgnosis was written on the crest of this wave of novelty. Rather than make canny investments (silly me!), I used the highs and heights afforded by this uplift to ask certain questions: how is technology changing - dare we say it - the soul? How do media machines - those chattering products of scientific rationality and its quest for efficiency and profit - mold our visions and twilight drifts, our nightmares and secret gods? How does it feel to find ourselves ghosts in a dreaming machine?



In approaching these questions, I didn't buy the idea that the past cannot help orient us in our unprecedented and deeply confusing world. Indeed, the very vertigo of our moment compels a search for roots, which partly explains the continual appeal, at this late date, of nationalism, traditionalism, and the "eternal verities" of religion - not to mention those curious subcultures that fetishistically resurrect Civil War battles and big band couture. But there are many traditions in the world, many religions, many hidden nations. Instead of taking the traditionalist approach, and digging for solid bulwarks against the sea-change at our doors, I wanted my underground history to deepen, indeed complexify, our conundrum. That's partly why it's a thorny, associative, almost ridiculously dense text. I wanted to simulate a hypertext, to throw up as many ideas, images, gods and stories as possible, hoping that, like shards of a broken mirror, they might offer us glittering but necessarily fragmented reflections of our deepening posthuman condition.



For make no mistake: the combined forces of capital, technical innovation, and desire are continuing to drive us toward an apotheosis of technical mediation. Today, the accelerating perceptual technologies of media are on a collision course with the scientific understanding of how the human nervous system produces the real-time matrix we experience as ordinary space-time. As we amplify our knowledge of the neural basis of consciousness, we will see artists, marketers and ideologues of all stripes attempt to shape the immediate contents of consciousness with ever finer and more crafty techniques. One fears that the day is not so distant where we will find ourselves waltzing with Tom Cruise through the invasive personalized ads of Minority Report. The digital universe is no longer "in there:" it is everywhere. So though today's special effects-driven entertainments, computer games, and theme park rides continue to draw us ever deeper into virtual realities, the real action is in the "meatspace" that still surrounds us. Already, the convergence of wireless technology, cognitive science, GPS, and surveillance technologies are creating, or at least suggesting, a new form of information totality, a sentient landscape that turns us all into animists again.



The intensification of mediation does not stop with the tools conventionally referred to as "media." Genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and the explosion of new materials also suggest that matter itself is finalizing its transformation into a programmable medium, a plastic vehicle of design and experiment and control. It is extremely difficult to imagine where this revolutionary transformation will lead, especially since the logic that drives so much of this development is clearly "unsustainable," which in this context is just a polite term for suicidal. And so our poor beleaguered earth and its dying biota have become the final frontier of the human design process. Though it is presumptuous to assume we are facing apocalypse, the intensification of media, technology, and globalization may look a hell of a lot like the end of history.



Somehow, though, the novelty of media tech no longer packs its former punch. The collapse of the dot.com bubble put the visionaries back in their padded rooms, and this "return to the real" was cemented by 9/11. Utopian euphoria and posthuman giddiness are out; bottom lines and familiar brands are in. Instead of greedy boundary dissolution, we have seen, in American politics at least, the restoration of anxiously defended boundaries: nation, intellectual property, the Christian religion, and the sober but otherwise sleepwalking self. Even academics and intellectuals, formerly taken by all manner of French discursive diseases, have staged a sort of Revenge of the Enlightenment, fomenting a new distrust of the more irrational, surreal, and visionary dimensions of the contemporary project.



This loss of technocultural euphoria, and especially the enthusiasm surrounding the Internet, was thoroughly predictable. One of my goals in Techgnosis was to show how, over and over again, technical innovations in modern communications technology open up a temporary crack in social reality. This smooth, undefined space blooms for a spell with all manner of dreams and utopias, some infused with profound mythic imaginings and spiritual wants. This crack gradually gets filled with business as usual; dreamspace becomes marketspace. The Internet and digital media have followed this time-worn pattern.



But in our contemporary case, dreamspace has also become, well, something of a nightmare. Even creepy developments like brain fingerprinting and psychoactive neural implants can't hold a candle to more tangible terrors: melting ice caps, the collapse of the fuel economy, dirty nukes, John Ashcroft's mutts on your secret shames. The "attention economy" of the 1990s hasn't disappeared - it has simply mutated into a fear economy. Rather than deflate the space of possibility that defined much of the previous decade, the fear economy instead infuses that space with dread. Possibility is now linked to fear. That's the logic of terrorism of course, but it has also been the logic of America's anti-terrorism. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, you could not turn on the radio or open up a newspaper without encountering some pundit or professional body articulating, in sometimes juicy technical detail, how a madman or a troop of jihad jockeys might unleash mayhem by exploiting weaknesses everything from viral DNA to sewer systems to air traffic control. While this explosion of techno-thriller plot points was motivated by actual threats, it cannot be said to have been entirely rational. American continued to plumb the space of possibility, but shifted its focus from utopia to Dis, from the boom to ka-boom!



This darkside futurism also almost immediately become an instrument of statecraft, as America's triumphant neo-conservatives sought to manufacture consensus through fear. Paranoid futurism also helped justify the Bush doctrine, inspiring the pre-emptive logic that drew the U.S. into Iraq. This logic did not rely on rational debate or, as has become perfectly clear, on truth. Instead, it relied, in its public face anyway, on the manipulation of imaginative possibility. That is, though terrible things have always hovered in possibility space, those terrors became so imaginable, the threat so "real," as to justify a new order of American power and control, one that violently nips possibilities in the bud. Following the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration continued to play the game domestically, as if Americans had forgotten the lesson of the boy who cried "Wolf." How many times did the FBI warn Americans of heightened threat, color-coded like M&Ms, only to ask that we go about our daily business? It was a classic crazy-making double-bind - "perception management" designed to make us cross-eyed. In the occult terms that underlie more of our modern media than we suppose, it was pure witchery. Sorcerers derive their power, at least in part, from the rhetorical manipulation of images and emotions that compose the nightside of the psyche, and the Bush administration brought the shamanic stagecraft to an entirely new level of soul disturbance.



The sense of psychic dislocation that followed 9/11 also reflected the intensely religious forces suddenly unleashed on the world stage. On the surface level, we experienced the religious dimension of the conflict as a disjunction: the secular democratic west faced an intolerant Islam whose most extreme imaginings - the fragrant houris jumping the bones of martyrs in heaven, for example - struck many as totally delusional. But beneath the secular surface, the Bush Administration was running its own scriptural scenarios. Most concrete were the tactical alliances made between Israel hawks and fundamentalist Christians, who believe that the continued presence of Jews in biblical Israel is a necessary pre-condition for the glorious end of the world. More pervasive than this specifically apocalyptic agenda was the government's indirect message - in turn nakedly delivered from pulpits across the land - that the conflict in the Middle East was a kind of crusade, that the enemy was not just Saddam or Osama but, in the immortal words of the Pentagon intelligence officer Lt. Gen. William Boykin, "a guy called Satan." The rest of us looked on in horror, as the children of Abraham staged a spiritual war between two different Great Satans.



The soul disturbance of America was also deepened by Bush's expansion of the secret or "shadow" government. As the administration placed more of its plans and doings beyond public accountability, a cavernous crevice opened up between the surface level of media theater and the literally unseen forces working behind the scenes: oil buddies, guilds of torturers, Biblical literalists with apocalyptic bets on a Zionist Israel. These two levels always characterize political power to some degree, but the Bush regime widened the gap into a chasm. As they did so, a growing sense of unreality began to pervade the middle ground of consensus reality. The attempt to understand "what's really going on" moved into an almost dreamlike space of projection, pulsing with archetypes and fantasies, as ever more baroque networks of conspiracy and subterfuge - both real and imagined, and sometimes both - took root in the gap. Nor did it help that one of our main research tools - the Internet - is a veritable conspiracy machine, hyperlinking fact, rumor, delusion, and deliberate distortion. Surfing for truth, one found oneself spinning toward the abyss of paranoia: Manchurian candidates, genetically-engineered psychoactive "vaccines," and all manner of mischief about dummy planes and burning towers. If you devote a day or two perusing the more rigorous and cogent online critiques of the official account of 9/11, I suspect you will come away, at the very least, a bit rattled. As Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the congressional 9/11 panel in 2004, "We fought many phantoms that day."



Even though most of these conspiratorial phantoms are false, even delusional, they are nonetheless part of today's political imagination. They animate its margins and shadows, the way that pornography secretly animates fashion ads and MTV; when the secret shadows grow, they grow as well. That's why many progressive paranoids almost breathed a sigh of relief when the logo for John Poindexter's secretive Office of Information Awareness peeped through the veils of the Pentagon. There it was on our web browsers: a pyramid topped with a massive Masonic eye, blazing like some scatter-beam ray gun from Sirius onto our poor passive planet. The fact that this evil genius icon cloaked nothing more than DARPA vaporware did not undermine its power as an almost pagan symbol of spectral control. At the time, many drew connections between the OIA and the horrible Patriot Act; while false on a literal level, these connections were true on an imaginal one. The fact that Poindexter's dream agency was devoted to Information Awareness was almost too perfect, because the shift toward shadow politics has only been magnified by the tightening loop of information technology and consciousness. Even before 9/11, the rapid intensification of global monitoring and surveillance technologies had already engineered a new sense of self; on some deep instinctive level, we now know that we are always watched.



So instead of Marshall McLuhan's global village, we get the global panopticon. But even McLuhan believed that an electronic culture of global citizenship would face some tremendous growing pains-and that is how we must see the current crisis if we are not to succumb to it: as very narrow straits with a wider world beyond. In a bit of SciFi that seems more prophetic now than when I first quoted it in Techgnosis, McLuhan wrote that, with coming of planetary electronic culture, "we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors...Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time." Paranoid politics and the Gaian mind are two sides of the same coin, spinning like our planet through the cosmos, everything still possible because everything's still moving.



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 the 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 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 alleviate 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 70s, 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 timebomb, 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, it 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 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.



© Erik Davis

Edition details

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852427728
• ISBN 13: 9781852427726
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448