Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information (Five Star Paperback)

“A most informative account of a culture whose secular concerns continue to collide with their supernatural flip-side.”— Voice Literary Supplement In this dazzling book, writer and cyber guru Erik Davis demonstrates how religious imagination, magical dreams and millennialist fervor have always permeated the story of technology. Through shamanism to Gnosticism, voodoo to alchemy, Buddhism to evangelism, TechGnosis peels away the rational shell of infotech to reveal the utopian dreams, alien obsessions and apocalyptic visions that populate the ongoing digital revolution. Erik Davis ’ work has appeared in Wired , The Village Voice and Gnosis , and he has lectured internationally on technoculture and new forms of religion. He is a fifth-generation Californian who currently lives in San Francisco. ERIK DAVIS 1 MYTH, MAGIC AND MYSTICISM IN THE AGE OF INFORMATION 1 TechGnosis 1 TECHGNOSIS 5 ERIK DAVIS 5 contents 8 acknowledgments 9 INTRODUCTION crossed wires 13 imagining technologies 24 The Divine Engineer 33 Inscribing the Mind 39 Humanist Hermetica 52 the alchemical fire 59 The Body Electric 63 Specters of the Spectrum 80 Like a Flash of Lightning 94 the gnostic infonaut 102 The Mythinformation Age 108 Priming the Spark 122 I V 133 techgnosis, american-style 133 Extropy, Ho! 151 the spiritual cyborg 165 Meetings with Remarkable Machines 169 Freak Technique 183 Altered Solid States 197 VI 206 a most enchanting machine 206 Social Imagineering 216 VII 236 cyberspace: the virtual craft 236 The Palaces of Data 245 In the Similitude of a Dream 251 Allegorical Machines 257 Dungeons & Digizens 270 VIII the alien call 277 Saucers Full of Secrets 280 Thy Alien, Thy Self 289 Level Above 298 datapocalypse 309 Eschatechnology 313 . . And Knowledge Shall Be Increased 323 Divine Interference 340 third mind from the sun 351 Meet the Beast 370 the path is a network 386 AFTERWORD beyond the boom 407 endnotes 419 index 431 How does our fascination with technology intersect with the religious imagination? In TechGnosis - a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword - Erik Davis argues that while the realms of the digital and the spiritual may seem worlds apart, esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated (and sometimes inspired) technological communication. Davis uncovers startling connections between such seemingly disparate topics as electricity and alchemy; online role-playing games and religious and occult practices; virtual reality and gnostic mythology; programming languages and Kabbalah. The final chapters address the apocalyptic dreams that haunt technology, providing vital historical context as well as new ways to think about a future defined by the mutant intermingling of mind and machine, nightmare and fantasy. "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 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."--BOOK JACKET 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.