A PAPERBACK ORIGINAL 'TechGnosi$ is a wonderfully written investigation of the dreams, hopes and fears we project onto technology. As comfortable with ancient gnostic lore as he is with modern day net politics, Erik Davis grounds his theoretical speculations in rigorous reporting ... a dazzling performance.' Jim McClellan 'A most informative account of a culture %yhose secular concerns continue to collide with their supei'natural Ifyprsi Sadie Plant, VLS \ \ From the printing press to the telegraph, through radio, TV and the Internet, TechGnosis explores the mystical impulses that lie behind our obsession with information technology. In this thrilling book, writer and cyber guru Erik Davis demonstrates how religious imagination, magical dreams and millennialist fervour have always permeated the story of technology. Through shamanism to gnosticism, voodoo to alchemy. Buddhism to evangelism, TechGnosis peels away the rational shell of info tech to reveal the utopian dreams, alien obsessions and apocalyptic visions that populate the ongoing digital revolution. Erik Davis offers a unique and fascinating perspective on technoculture, inviting comparisons to Marshall McLuhan, Greil Marcus and William Gibson. Lucid and hip, TechGnosis is a journey into the next millennium's hyper-mediated environment, whose morphing boundaries and terminal speed are reshaping our very identities. ISBN 1-85242-645-4 Cover by Stanley Donwood Cultural Studies/Popular Science/Philosophy £14.99 Serpent's Tail 852 426453 Erik Davis is a fifth-generation Californian who currently resides in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Wired, The Village Voice, Gnosis, and other publications, and he has lectured internationally on techno culture and the fringes of religion. He can be contacted at his Website: http://www.levity.com/techgnosis/ A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library on request The right of Erik Davis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Copyright © 1998 Erik Davis First published by Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc., New York First published in the UK in 1999 by Serpent’s Tail, 4 Blackstock Mews, London N4 2BT Website: www.serpentstail.com Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham, pic 10 987654321 F or M y F olks contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION: crossed wires 1 I imagining technologies 10 II the alchemical fire 39 III the gnostic infonaut 76 IV techgnosis, american-style 102 V the spiritual cyborg 129 V I a most enchanting machine 164 V II cyberspace: the virtual craft 190 V III the alien call 225 IX datapocalypse 253 X third mind from the sun 289 X I the path is a network 319 ENDNOTES 337 INDEX 346 acknowledgments It would be impossible to fully trace the network of minds and hearts that helped bring this book into being, but some specific shout-outs are definitely in order. A number of the ideas animating TechGnosis have been pulsing in my brain for nearly a decade, and I am indebted to a handful of teachers and editors who have helped me shape them into worthy prose at various stages of my writing career: my undergraduate thesis advisers at Yale, Richard Halpern and David Rodowick; former Village Voice editors Jeff Salamon, Scott Malcolmson, Lisa Kennedy, and Joe Levy; Gnosis editors Jay Kinney and Richard Smoley; and ace cyber­ critic Mark Dery, who asked me to write the essay that formed the seed crystal for the present work. Even more invaluable have been the count­ less kaleidoscopic conversations about philosophy, science, and spirit I have had over the years with my great friends Julian Dibbell, JP Harpi- gnies, and Marcus Boon, a\\ of whom challenged me to find my own weird path into technoculture and to face the difficulties of writing it down head-on. My buddy Dan Levy harangued me into shaping my stray thoughts into a book project, and then convinced someone to actually buy it. Relationships with huge and distant corporations can be rocky: thanks to Harmony editors Andrew Stuart, who swooped in midway to save the day with his generous attention and sharp suggestions, and Peter Guz- zardi, who kindly shepherded TechGnosis through the end game. The book you hold would be a flabbier and more error-ridden thing were it not for the perceptions, pens, and pencils of my manuscript readers, who, if they have not already been mentioned, include Margaret Wertheim, papa Russ Davis, Rachel Koenig, David Ulansey, Jeff Gorvet- zian, and my mother Sandra Zarcades, who lent her razor-sharp copy- editing skills to many of its drafts. Wef Linson helped me keep perspective throughout the daily grind with his spiritual ruminations and carefree cracks, while the Midtown Niki Starving Writers Fund allowed me to focus on the task at hand. Thanks as well to the large circle of comrades and netminds who took X acknowledgments the time to swap ideas, give me encouragement, or feed me nifty memes: Peter Lamborn Wilson, Mark Pesce, Scott Durham, Spiros Antonopou- los, Molly McGarry, Manuel DeLanda, Hermano Vianna Jr., Jordan Gruber, Terence McKenna, Charles Cameron, Tom Lane, James O’Meara, Paul Miller, Kate Ramsey, Konrad Becker, Craig Baldwin, Sam Webster, Mark Stahlman, and Grampa Jake, who sent me a steady stream of juicy newspaper clippings from the desert heartland. In par­ ticular, Pit Schultz, Diana McCarty, and the nettime crew plugged me into a community of technology critics whose trenchant debates helped me keep my cosmological feet on the ground. Everyone knows that no single individual can write a book, even though one person, i.e., me, must take responsibility for its perhaps inevitable flaws and errors. This does not mean that writing TechGnosis did not sometimes make me feel as though I were alone in the Siberian wastes, trying to claw my way out of an ice cave with a toothbrush and a Bic lighter. I thank all gods for my love, Jennifer Dumpert, who not only scraped me up from the bottom of the barrel on a regular basis, but whose wisdom, patience, and incisive feedback helped me weave this labor into a life of riches. All that remains is the possibility o f communication. — Captain Jean Luc-Picard TECHGNOSIS I ntroduction crossed wires This book is written in the shadow of the millennium, that arbitrary but incontestable line that the Western imagination has drawn in the sands of time. It is also written in the conviction that one hardly needs to be decked out in a biblical sandwich board or wired to the gills with the lat­ est cyborg gear to feel the glittering void of possibility and threat grow­ ing at the heart of our profoundly technologized society. Even as many of us spend our days, in that now universal CaUforniaism, surfing the datastream, we can hardly ignore the deeper, more powerful and more ominous undertows that tug beneath the froth of our lives and labors. You know the scene. Social structures the world over are melting down and mutating, making way for a global Me Village, a Gaian brain, and a whole heap of chaos. The emperor of technoscience has achieved dominion, though his clothes are growing more threadbare by the moment, the once noble costume of Progress barely concealing far more wayward ambitions. Across the globe, ferocious postperestroika capital­ ism yanks the rug out from under the nation-state, while the planet spits up signs and symptoms of terminal distress. Boundaries dissolve, and we drift into the no-man’s zones between synthetic and organic life, between actual and virtual environments, between local communities and global flows of goods, information, labor, and capital. With pills modifying personality, machines modifying bodies, and synthetic pleasures and net­ worked minds engineering a more fluid and invented sense of self, the boundaries of our identities are mutating as well. The horizon melts into a limitless question mark, and like the cartographers of old, we glimpse yawning monstrosities and mind-forged utopias beyond the edges of our paltry and provisional maps. Regardless of how secular this ultramodern condition appears, the velocity and mutability of the times invokes a certain supernatural qual­ ity that must be seen, at least in part, through the lenses of religious thought and the fantastic storehouse of the archetypal imagination. Inside the United States, within whose high-tech bosom I quite self­ consciously write, the spirit has definitely made a comeback—if it could 2 TECHGNOSIS be said to have ever left this giddy, gold rush land, where most people believe in the Lord and his coming kingdom, and more than you’d guess believe in UFOs. Today God has become one of Time’s favorite cover boys, and a Black MusUm numerologist can lead the most imag­ inative march on the nation’s capital since the Yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon. Self-help maestros and corporate consultants promulgate New Age therapies, as strains of Buddhism both scientific and techni­ color seep through the intelligentsia, and half the guests on Oprah pop up wearing angel pins. The surge of interest in alternative medicine injects non-Western and ad hoc spiritual practices into the mainstream, while deep ecologists turn up the boil on the nature mysticism long sim­ mering in the American soul. This rich confusion is even more evident in our brash popular culture, where science-fiction films, digital envi­ ronments, and urban tribes are reconfiguring old archetypes and imag­ inings within a vivid comic-book frame. From The X-Files to occult computer games, from Xena: Warrior Princess to Magic: The Gather­ ing playing cards, the pagan and the paranormal have colonized the twilight zones of pop media.