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CHAPTER EIGHT

SILICON VALLEY

THE CO-CONSTITUTION OF THE DIGITAL AND THE SACRED1

Dorien Zandbergen

Introduction

In the early 1990s in the San Francisco Bay Area, the utopian and spir- itual dreams of the 1960s and 1970s spiritual movements made a come- back in the public scene through the realm of the digital (Rushkoff 1994; Dery 1996; Hanegraaff 1996: 11; Davis 1998). eTh rise and populariza- tion of digital technologies such as Virtual and the Internet in this period was accompanied by the hopeful expectation of spiritual seekers that these would make permanently available the utopian worlds and the altered states of sought aft er by a previous genera- tion of . As one of the spiritual of the 1960s, (1994: 5) put it: “spiritual for centuries imagined” could perhaps now “fi nally be realized” through the “electronic-digital”. An example of a digital-spiritual dream that surfaced in this period was the that immersive Virtual Worlds would make the use of verbal language obso- lete, and facilitate instead direct, total and spiritual communication between people using communication methods such as colors, sounds and body movements (e.g., Barlow 1990). Another expression of cyber- in this period was the idea that through the accumulation of knowledge on the Internet, cyberspace itself became the instantiation of the collective higher consciousness that spiritual seekers had envisioned

1 Th is paper is based on research conducted in the context of the project ‘Silicon Valley New Age’, one of the three research projects belonging to the ‘Cyberspace ’ project. Th is project is funded by the NWO as part of their ‘Future of the Religious Past’ program and is supported by the University of Leiden, University of Rotterdam and the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (ASSR). I would like to thank NWO and the University of Leiden for funding this project and the Cyberspace team and the LOBOCOP group at the University for providing valu- able comments on this paper. 162 dorien zandbergen for decades. In the 1970s, spiritual seekers had referred to this as Gaia. Th is term was coined by the bio-chemist James Lovelock in the 1960s who developed the idea that the earth is a self- organizing system in which all living matter functions as a single organ- ism. In the following decades, this assumption became incorporated in the worldview of spiritual seekers as the idea that the earth actually is a living organism with a higher consciousness. In the early 1990s, as Rushkoff observed (1994: 5), spiritual seekers in turn conceptualized the Internet as the “fi nal stage in the development of Gaia, the living being that is the Earth, for which humans serve as neurons.” In his book on the New Age movement, Wouter Hanegraaff (1996) referred to such expressions of cyber-spirituality with the term “high- tech New Age” or “New Edge” and dubbed it a “trend too recent to put into clear perspective” (1996: 11). While scholars such as Hanegraaff abstained from analyzing the New Edge in such an early stage, spokes- persons of the New Edge produced their own refl ections on the affi nity between spirituality and digital technologies. Th ese refl ections oft en simply depicted the affi nity as “natural”. Timothy Leary provides the prime example of such narratives. In his book “Chaos and Cyberculture” (1994) Leary sketched an “Evolution of Countercultures” in which he described the 1965–1975 hippies as “anti-high-tech”, whereas the 1990s hippies are a “super high-tech New Breed” (1994: 81). Th is “super high tech” orientation of the New Breed can easily be accounted for, accord- ing to Leary, because of the “inherent spiritual characteristics of digital technology”. According to Leary, some of the “traditional attributes of the word ‘spiritual’; mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied, ideal, platonic” also defi ne “the electronic- digital”. As should be clear, Leary’s refl ection on the phenomenon of high tech spirituality is tautological and a priori confi rms the assumptions on which the discourse of New Edge is based. It is furthermore grounded in a reductive and deterministic notion of the spiritual as well as of ‘the digital.’ However, as an explicit New Edge proponent Leary can be for- given for affi rming the New Edge message while refl ecting on it. Yet, tautological and deterministic refl ections on the affi nity between digital technology and spirituality also colored various early academic texts. Many of the so-called ‘fi rst generation’ of scholars of and (cyber) technology (Hojsgaard 2005) adopted the premises of the New Edge discourse in equal measure by explaining cyber-spirituality as a natural outcome of supposed intrinsic spiritual characteristics of digital