TECHGNOSIS PART 1

TECHGNOSIS BY ERIK DAVIS

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 cybercritic Mark Dery, who asked me to write the essay that formed the seed crystal for the present work. Even more invaluable have been the countless 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 Guzzardi, 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 Gorvetzian, 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 the time to swap ideas, give me encouragement, or feed me nifty memes:

Peter Lamborn Wilson, Mark Pesce, Scott Durham, Spiros Antonopoulos, 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 particular, 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.

— C aptain Jean Luc-Picard

I n t r o d u c t i o n

c r o s s e d w i r e s

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 latest cyborg gear to feel the glittering void of possibility and threat growing 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 capitalism 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 networked 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 quality 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 selfconsciously write, the spirit has definitely made a comeback—if it could 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 imaginative 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 technicolor 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 simmering in the American soul. This rich confusion is even more evident in our brash popular culture, where science-fiction films, digital environments, and urban tribes are reconfiguring old archetypes and imaginings within a vivid comic-book frame. From The X-Files to occult computer games, from Xena: Warrior Princess to Magic: The Gathering playing cards, the pagan and the paranormal have colonized the twilight zones of pop media.

These signs are not just evidence of a media culture exploiting the crude power of the irrational. They reflect the fact that people inhabiting all frequencies of the socioeconomic spectrum are intentionally reaching for some of the oldest navigational tools known to humankind; sacred ritual and metaphysical speculation, spiritual regimen and natural spell. For some superficial spiritual consumers, this means prepackaged answers to the thorny questions of life; but for many others, the quest for meaning and connection has led individuals and communities to construct meaningful frameworks for their lives, worldviews that actually deepen their willingness and ability to face the strangeness of our days.

So here we are: a hypertechnological and cynically postmodern culture seemingly drawn like a passel of moths toward the guttering flames of the premodern mind. And it is with this apparent paradox in mind that I have writtenTechGnosis: a secret history of the mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world’s obsession with technology, and especially with its technologies of communication. My topic may seem rather obscure at first, for common sense tells us that mysticism has no more in common with technology than the twilight cry of wild swans has with the clatter of Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

Historians and sociologists inform us that the West’s mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations, and apocalyptic visions crashed on the scientific shores of the modern age. According to this narrative, technology has helped disenchant the world, forcing the ancestral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular game plans of economic development, skeptical inquiry, and material progress. But the old phantasms and metaphysical longings did not exactly disappear. In many cases, they disguised themselves and went underground, worming their way into the cultural, psychological, and mythological motivations that form the foundations of the modern world. As we will see throughout this book, mystical impulses sometimes body-snatched the very technologies that supposedly helped yank them from the stage in the first place. And it is these technomystical impulses—sometimes sublimated, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes masked in the pop detritus of science fiction or video games—that Tech Gnosis seeks to reveal.

For well over a century, the dominant images of technology have been industrial: the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, the mechanization of work through the assembly line, and the bureaucratic command-and-control systems that large and impersonal institutions favor. Lewis Mumford called this industrial image of technology the “myth of the machine,” a myth that insists on the authority of technical and scientific elites, and in the intrinsic value of efficiency, control, unrestrained technological development, and economic expansion. As many historians and sociologists have recognized, this secular image was framed all along by Christian myths: the biblical call to conquer nature, the Protestant work ethic, and, in particular, the millennialist vision of a New Jerusalem, the earthly paradise that the Book of Revelation claims will crown the course of history. Despite a century of Hiroshimas, Bhopals, and Chernobyls, this myth of an engineered utopia still propels the ideology of technological progress, with its perennial promises of freedom, prosperity, and release from disease and want.

Today a new, less mechanized myth has sprung from the brow of the industrial megamachine: the myth of information, of electric minds and boundless databases, computer forecasts and hypertext libraries, immersive media dreams and a planetary blip-culture woven together with global telecommunication nets. Certainly this myth still rides atop the same mechanical behemoth that lurched out of Europe’s chilly bogs and conquered the globe, but for the most part, TechGnosis will focus on information technologies alone, placing them in their own, more spectral light. For of all technologies, it is the technologies of information and communication that most mold and shape the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self.

From the moment that humans began etching grooves into ancient wizard bones to mark the cycles of the moon, the process of encoding thought and experience into a vehicle of expression has influenced the changing nature of the self. Information technology tweaks our perceptions, communicates our picture of the world to one another, and constructs remarkable and sometimes insidious forms of control over the cultural stories that shape our sense of the world. The moment we invent a significant new device for communication—talking drums, papyrus scrolls, printed books, crystal sets, computers, pagers—we partially reconstruct the self and its world, creating new opportunities (and new traps) for thought, perception, and social experience.

By their very nature, the technologies of information and communication— “media” in the broad sense of the term— are technocultural hybrids. On the one hand, they are crafted things, material mechanisms that are conceived, constructed, and exploited for gain. But media technologies are also animated by something that has nothing to do with matter or technique. More than any other invention, information technology transcends its status as a thing, simply because it allows for the incorporeal encoding and transmission of mind and meaning. In a sense, this hybridity reflects the age-old sibling rivalry between form and content: the material and technical structure of media impose formal constraints on communication, even as the immediacy of communication continues to challenge formal limitations as it crackles from mind to mind, pushing the envelope of intelligence, art, and information flow. By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other, and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, for what we now increasingly think of as “the social construction of reality.”

Historically, the great social constructions belong to the religious imagination: the animistic world of nature magic, the ritualized social narratives of mythology, the ethical inwardness of the “religions of the book,” and the increasingly rationalized modern institutions of faith that followed them. These various paradigms marked their notions and symbols in the world around them, using architecture, language, icons, costumes, and social ritual—and often whatever media they could get their hands on. For reasons that cannot simply be chalked up to the desire for power and conformity, the reUgious imagination has an irrepressible and almost desperate urge to remake the mental world humans share by communicating itself to others. From hieroglyphs to the printed book, from radio to computer networks, the spirit has found itself inside a variety of new bottles, and each new medium has become, in a variety of contradictory ways, part of the message. When the Norse god Odin swaps an eye for the gift of the runes, or when Paul of Tarsus writes in a letter that the Word of God is written in our hearts, or when New Age mediums “channel spiritual information,” the ever-shifting boundaries between media and the self are redrawn in technomystical terms.

This process continues apace, although today you often need to dig beneath the garish, commercialized, and oversaturated surface of the information age to find its archetypes and metaphysical concerns. The virtual topographies of our millennial world are rife with angels and aliens, with digital avatars and mystic Gaian minds, with utopian longings and gnostic science fictions, and with dark forebodings of apocalypse and demonic enchantment. These figures ride the expanding and contracting waves of media fads, hype, and economic activity, and some of them are already disappearing into an increasingly market-dominated information culture. But though technomystical concerns are deeply intertwined with the changing sociopolitical conditions of our rapidly globalizing civilization, their spiritual forebears are rooted in the long ago. By invoking such old ones here, and bringing them into the discourse and contexts of contemporary technoculture, I hope to shine a light on some of the more dangerous and unwieldy visions that charge technologies. Even more fundamentally, however, I hope my secret history can provide some imaginal maps and mystical scorecards for the metaverse that is now swallowing up so many of us, all across network earth.

O You may think you are holding a conventional book, a solid and familiar chunk of infotech with chapters and endnotes and a linear argument about the mystical roots of technoculture. But that is really just a clever disguise. Once dissolved in your mindstream.Tech Gnosis will become a resonating hypertext, one whose links leap between machines and dreams, information and spirit, the dustbin of history and the alembics of the soul. Instead of “taking a stand,” TechGnosisranges rather promiscuously across the disciplinary boundaries that usually chop up the world of thought, drawing the reader into a fluctuating play network of polarities and hidden networks. The connections it draws are many:

between myth and science, transcendent intuition and technological control, the virtual worlds we imagine and the real world we cannot escape. It is a dreambook of the technological unconscious. Perhaps the most important polarity that underlies the psychological dynamics of technomysticism is a yin and yang I will name spirit and soul. By soul, I basically mean the creative imagination, that aspect of our psyches that perceives the world as an animated field of powers and images. Soul finds and loses itself in enchantment; it speaks the tongue of dream and phantasm, which should never be confused with mere fantasy. Spirit is an altogether different bird: an impersonal, incorporeal spark that seeks clarity, essence, and a blast of the absolute. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman uses the image of peaks and valleys to characterize these two very different modes of the self. He notes that the mountaintop is a veritable logo of the “spiritual” quest, a place where the religious seeker overcomes gravity in order to win a peak experience or an adamantine code worthy of ruling a life. But the soul forswears such towering and otherworldly views; it remains in the mesmerizing vale of tears and desires, a fecund and polytheistic world of things and creatures, and the images and stories that things and creatures breed.

Spirit and soul twine their way throughout this book Uke the two strands of DNA, both enchanting and spirituaHzing media technologies. On the one hand, we’ll see that technologies can serve as the vehicles for spells, ghosts, and animist intuitions. On the other, they can provide launching pads for transcendence, for the disembodied flights of gnosis. The different “styles” of spirit and soul can even be seen in the two basic encoding methods that define media: analog and digital. Analog gadgets reproduce signals in continuous, variable waves of real energy, while digital devices recode information into discrete symbolic chunks. Think of the difference between vinyl LPs and music compact discs. LPs are inscribed with unbroken physical grooves that mimic and re-present the sound waves that ripple through the air. In contrast, CDs chop up (or “sample”) such waves into individual bits, encoding those digital units into tiny pits that are read and reconstructed by your stereo gear at playback. The analog world sticks to the grooves of soul—warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeaHty. The analog soul runs on the analogies between things; the digital spirit divides the world between clay and information.

In the first chapter, I will trace the origins of these two strands of technomysticism to the ancient mythological figure of Hermes Trismegistus, a technological wizard who will inaugurate the dance between magic and invention, media and mind. Tracing this hermetic tradition into the modern world, I will discuss how the discovery of electricity sparked animist ideas and occult experiences even as it laid the groundwork for the information age. Next, I will recast the epochal birth of cybernetics and the electronic computer in a transcendental light provided by the ancient lore of Gnosticism. Then I’ll show how the spiritual counterculture of the 1960s created a liberatory and even magical relationship to media and technology, a psychedelic mode of mind-tweaking that feeds directly into today’s cyberculture. Finally, I’ll turn to our “datapocalyptic” moment and show how the UFOs, Gaian minds. New World Orders, and techno-utopias that hover above the horizon of the third millennium subliminally feed off images and compulsions deeply rooted in the spiritual imagination.

Given the delusions and disasters that religious and mystic thought courts, some may legitimately wonder whether we might not be better off just completing the critical and empirical task undertaken by Freud, Nietzsche, and your favorite scientific reductionist. The simple answer is that we cannot. Collectively, human societies can no more dodge sublime imaginings or spiritual yearnings than they can transcend the tidal pulls of eros. We are beset with a thirst for meaning and connection that centuries of skeptical philosophy, hardheaded materialism, and an increasingly nihilist culture have yet to douse, and this thirst conjures up the whole tattered carnival of contemporary religion: oily New Age gurus and Pentecostal crusaders, existential Buddhists and liberation theologians, psychedelic pagan ravers and grizzled deep ecologists. Even the cosmic awe conjured by science fiction or the outer-space snapshots of the Hubbell telescope calls forth our ever-deeper, ever-brighter possible selves.

While I certainly hope that Tech Gnosis can help strengthen the wisdom of these often inchoate yearnings, I am more interested in understanding how technomystical ideas and practicesw ork than I am in shaking them down for their various and not inconsiderable “errors.” Sober voices will appear throughout my book like a chorus of skeptics. but my primary concern remains the spiritual imagination and how it mutates in the face of changing technologies. William Gibson’s famous quip about new technologies—that the street finds its own uses for things—applies to what many seekers call “the path” as well. As we will see throughout this book, the spiritual imagination seizes information technology for its own purposes. In this sense, technologies of communication are always, at least potentially, technologies of the sacred, simply because the ideas and experiences of the sacred have always informed human communication.

By appropriating and re-visioning communication technologies, the spiritual imagination often fashions symbols and rituals from the technical mode of communication it employs: hieroglyphs, printing press, the online database. By reimagining technologies in this way, new meanings are invested into the universe of machines, and new virtual possibilities emerge. The very ambiguity of the term information,which has made it such an infectious and irritating buzzword, has also allowed old intuitions to pop up in secular guise. Today, there is so much pressure on information—the word, the concept, the stuff itself—that it crackles with energy, drawing to itself mythologies, metaphysics, hints of arcane magic. As information expands beyond its reductive sense as a quantitative measure of meaning, groups and individuals also find room to resist and recast the dominant technological narratives of war and commerce, and to inject their fractured postmodern lives with digitally remastered forms of community, imagination, and cosmic connection.

Of course, as any number of “new paradigm” visionaries or Wired magazine cover stories prove, it’s easy to lose one’s way in the maze of hope, hype, and novelty that defines the information age. As any extraterrestrial anthropologist beaming down for a look-see would note, the computer has definitely become an idol—and a rather demanding one at that, almost as thirsty for sacrifice as the holy spirit of money itself. Since the empire of global capitalism is wagering the future of the planet on technology, we are right to distrust any myths that obscure the enormous costs of the path we’ve taken. In the views of many prophets today, crying in and for the wilderness, the spiritual losses we have accrued in our haste to measure, exploit, and commodify the world are already beyond reckoning. By submitting ourselves to the ravenous and nihilistic robot of science, technology, and media culture, we have cut ourselves off from the richness of the soul and from the deeply nourishing networks of family, community, and the local land.

I deeply sympathize with these attempts to disenchant technology and to deflate the banal fantasies and pernicious hype that fuel today’s digital economy. In fact,TechGnosis will hopefully provide some ammo for the debate. But as both the doomsdays of the neo-Luddites and the gleaming Tomorrowlands of the techno-utopians prove, technology embodies an image of the soul, or rather a host of images: redemptive, demonic, magical, transcendent, hypnotic, alive. We must come to grips with these images before we can creatively and consciously answer the question of technology, for that question has always been fringed with phantasms.

One thing seems clear: We cannot afford to think in the Manichean terms that often characterize the debate on new technologies. Technology is neither a devil nor an angel. But neither is it simply a “tool,” a neutral extension of some rock-solid human nature. Technology is a trickster, and it has been so since the first culture hero taught the human tribe how to spin wool before he pulled it over our eyes. The trickster shows how intelligence fares in an unpredictable and chaotic world; he beckons us through the open doors of innovation and traps us in the prison of unintended consequences. And it is with a bit of the trickster’s spirit— mischiWous, riddling, and thoroughly cross-wired—that I shoot these media tales and technological reflections into the towering din.

I

imagining technologies

Human beings have been cyborgs from year zero. It is our lot to live in societies that invent tools that shape society and the individuals in it. For millennia, people not so dissimilar to ourselves have constructed and manipulated powerful and impressive technologies, including information technologies, and these tools and techniques have woven themselves into the social fabric of the world. Though technology has only come to dominate and define society within the lifetimes of a handful of human generations, the basic equation remains true for the whole nomadic trek of hom o faber:Culture istechnoculture.

Technologies concretely embody our ability to discover and exploit natural laws through the exercise of reason. But why do we choose to exploit certain natural laws? In what manner and toward what ends? Though we may think of technology as a tool defined by pragmatic and utilitarian concerns alone, human motivations in the matter of technology are rarely so straightforward. Like the rationality we carry within our minds, whose logical convictions must make their way through the brawling, boozing cabaret of the psyche, technologies are shaped and constrained by the warp and woof of culture, with its own peculiar myths, dreams, cruelties, and hungers. The immense machineries of war or entertainment can hardly be said to proceed from rational necessity, however precise their implementation; instead, we find their blueprints inked upon the fiery human heart.

The interdependence of culture and technology means that the technologies of the premodern world, despite being the most logical of crafted objects, nonetheless had to share the cosmic stage with any number of gods, sorceries, and animist powers. As the French anthropologist of science Bruno Latour explains, premodern and indigenous people wove everything—animals, tools, medicine, sex, kin, plants, songs, weather— into an immense collective webwork of mind and matter.

Nothing in this webwork, which Latour calls the anthropological matrix, can be neatly divided between nature and culture. Instead, this matrix is composed of “hybrids”— “speaking things” that are both  natural and cultural, real and imagined, subject and object. As an example, think of a traditional Inuit who hunts and kills a caribou. On one level, the animal is a fat, tasty object that he and his tribe exploit in perfectly reasonable ways that satisfy human needs and desires. But along with providing sustenance and nifty threads, the caribou is simultaneously a sacred spirit, a numinous actor in a cosmological drama ritually maintained by the prayers, perceptions, and rituals of Inuit life. The caribou and the weapon, as well as the dream that sent the hunter on his way that morning, are all hybrids; all are part of a collective song that can  never be fully resolved as mythology or concrete reality.

We don’t generally think this way today because we are basically moderns, and modernity is partly defined by the enormous conceptual barrier erected between nature and culture. In his bookWe Have Never Been Modern, Latour dubs this wall the “Great Divide” and places its foundations in the Enlightenment, when Descartes’s mechanistic thought invaded natural philosophy and the cornerstones of modern social institutions were laid. On the one side of the Great Divide lies nature, a voiceless and purely objective world “out there,” whose hidden mechanisms are unlocked by detached scientific gentlemen using technical instruments to amplify their perceptions. Human culture lies on the other side of the fence, “in here,” a self-reflexive world of stories, subjects, and power struggles that develop free of nature’s mythic limitations. The Great Divide thus disenchants the world, enthroning man as the sole active agent of the cosmos. From within the paradigm of the Great Divide, technology is simply a tool, a passive extension of man. It does not have its own autonomy; it simply acts upon, but does not change, the world of nature.

So far this is relatively routine stuff. Where Latour parts ways from most thinkers is his provocative insistence that the modern West never really left the anthropological matrix. Instead, it used the conceptual sleight of hand of the Great Divide to deny the ever-present reality of hybrids, those “subject/objects” that straddle the boundaries between nature and culture, agency and raw material. This denial freed the West from the inherently conservative nature of traditional societies, where the creation of new hybrids—new medicines or weapons—was always constrained by the fact that their effects were felt throughout the entire matrix of reality. By denying hybrids, modern Europe paradoxically wound up cranking them out at an astounding rate: new technologies, new scientific and cultural perspectives, new sociopolitical and economic arrangements. The West drastically reconstructed “the world” without acknowledging the systemic effects that its creative activities had on the interdependent fabric of society—let alone the more-than-human world of rock and beast that provides the material for that fabric.

Today, when human societies are more densely interconnected than ever before, Latour argues that we can no longer sustain the illusion of the Great Divide. Each new hybrid that arrives on the scene—test tube babies, Prozac, the sequencing of the human genome, space stations, global warming—pushes us further into that no-man’s-land between nature and culture, an ambiguous zone where science, language, and the social imagination overlap and interpenetrate. We begin to see that everything is connected, and this recognition invokes premodern ways of thinking. Latour uses the example of ecological fear, comparing it to the stories of Chicken Little. Now “we too are afraid that the sky is falling. We too associate the tiny gesture of releasing an aerosol spray with taboos pertaining to the heavens.”^ We return—with some profound and irreducible differences—to the old anthropological matrix. “It is not only the Bedouins and the !Kung who mix up transistors and traditional behaviors, plastic buckets and animal-skin vessels. What country could not be called ‘a land of contrasts’? We have all reached the point of mixing up times. We have all become premodern again.

If Latour is right, and I believe he is, then we have some important stories to tell about the ways that modern technologies have become mixed up with other times, other places, other paradigms. Though the bulk of this book focuses on the mystical currents coursing through the information technologies of the scientific era, this first chapter turns to more ancient wellsprings. By delving into some of the ways that the Greco-Roman world imagined mechanical invention and information technology, we will discover some of the icons, myths, and mystic themes that populate the archetypal strata of the modern technological psyche. Ancient Greece glowed with the first blush of the West’s tragicomic romance with science, for it was the Greeks who first embraced the amazing belief that we could really know things, in the full philosophical sense of the term. But even before the Apollonian rise of Greek rationalism, which led to the construction of everything from astronomical computers to pneumatic automata, the ancient poems of Homer dripped with a pagan materialism that exulted in technology. Though Homeric verse was the product of an archaic and oral society, it did not reflect the deep immersion in the more-than-human world of weather and tree and beast that marks most indigenous lore. In those more “ecological” worldviews, the mythic perceptions of human beings were immersed in nature; the world was seen through the lens of animism, a magical mode of thought that reads and experiences the surrounding world as a living field of psychic presences.

Though the animist traces of the gods are everywhere in Homer, the spirits of the bush have retreated, and what comes to the fore— besides powerfully human personalities and concerns—are the enchantments of human craft. As Samuel C. Florman writes in The Existential Pleasures o f Engineering,“We emerge from the world of Homer drunk with the feel of metals, woods and fabrics, euphoric with the sense of objects designed, manufactured, used, given, admired, and savored.”^ The ancient bards who collectively composed the Homeric epics even went  so far as to imagine man-made objects that could reproduce the demiurgic spellcraft of their own chants. In a famous passage in the Iliad, the crippled blacksmith god Hephaestus hammers out a great shield for Achilles (an early instance of the military-industrial complex driving  technological development). With the aid of comely androids, “handmaids of hammered gold who looked like living girls,” the god fashions a bronze plate that he magically decorates with all the heavens and the earth. The shield’s intricate scenes of battle, harvest, and celebration come to life like a métallurgie cartoon, forming the first virtual media in Western literature, a most ancient artifact of what Disney now calls “imagineering.” But Hephaestus also limps along on withered limbs, anticipating the great insight that both Plato and Marshall McLuhan would later insist upon: that technologies extend our creative powers by amputating our natural ones.

Another Greek tale implies that this fundamental disequilibrium in the order of things is the essence of both man and technology. After the gods give Epithemeus the task of creating living creatures, the Titan—whose name means “afterthought”—botches the job. He grafts all the useful DNA into animals, so that when man finally crawls out of the Titan’s lab he is nothing more than a soft and mewling babe, without courage, cunning, or fur. In desperation, Epithemeus turns to his brother Prometheus, who is graced with the more auspicious name of “forethought.” Thinking ahead, Prometheus gives humans their upright gait and makes them tall and far-seeing Hke the gods. Then the Titan flies to heaven and steals the fire from the sun, which he bestows upon our still rather clueless ancestors. “Though feeble and short-lived,” reads one ancient verse, “Mankind has flaming fire and there from learns many crafts.”“* Zeus is not impressed with this unauthorized transfer of power and chains Prometheus to a rock for his crimes, where he remains until Heracles releases him. But the Titan’s rational fire sparks the technocultural imagination of the West to this day. Freethinkers from the Enlightenment on have embraced the Promethean flame as an antiauthoritarian symbol of human self-determination, while neo-Luddites demonize it as a corrosive and destructive force that may well reduce the earth to a crisp.

Though the tongues of the Promethean flame will wag throughout this book, our main focus remains, not the technologies of power, but the technologies of communication, and the myths and mysteries that enchant those media. And the obvious Attic psychopomp for such mysteries is Hermes, the messenger and mediator of gods and men, souls and meanings, trivia and trade. Of all the godforms that haunt the Greek mind, Hermes is the one who would feel most at home in our wired world. Indeed, with his mischievous combination of speed, trickery, and profitable mediation, he can almost be seen as the archaic mascot of the information age. Unlike most archetypal figures, who lurk in the violent and erotic dreamstuff beneath the surface of our everyday awareness, Hermes also embodies the social psychology of language and communication. He flies “as fleet as thought,” an image of the daylight mind, with its plans and synaptic leaps, its chatter and overload. Hermes shows that these minds are not islands, but nodes in an immense electric tangle of words, images, songs, and signals. Hermes rules the transtemporal world of information exchange that you and I are participating in right now, myself  as I tap out these pixelated fonts and you as you absorb their printed twins through your eyeballs and into your brain.

More than a mere delivery boy, Hermes wears a host of guises: con artist, herald, inventor, merchant, magus, thief. The Romans called him Mercury, the name that came to grace the solar system’s smallest and fastest orb, as well as the moist element beloved by later alchemists.

Those of us familiar with the logo of the floral delivery service FTD will recognize Hermes at once: a young, androgynous man, with a bumpkin’s cap that betrays his humble origins and a pair of winged sandals that show his addiction to speed. To round out the image, all we need to do is restore Hermes’ caduceus, the magic rod topped with two serpents twining like the double helix of DNA— a fit device for a god who brings the twists and turns of information to life.

Already in Homer, Hermes is a multitasking character. The figure who flits through the Iliad as a messenger and thief  becomes in the Odyssey a guide of souls and a shamanic healer, curing Odysseus from Circe’s witchy poison. But the god really doesn’t find himself at center stage until the pseudo-Homeric Hymn to Hermes,written around the sixth century b .c .e . The poem begins with the nymph Maya, lately loved by Zeus, giving birth to a boisterous child. Leaping instantly out of his crib, the babe Hermes dashes into the outside world, where he happens upon a turtle. He kills the creature, takes up its shell, and invents the lyre, becoming “the first to manufacture songs.” Lord of the lucky find, Hermes crafts opportunity like those brash start-up companies that fill a market niche by creating it in the first place. Even as he’s improvising a crass ditty, he ponders his next scheme: to steal cattle from his rival, the golden god Apollo.

The Greeks make no bones about it: Hermes is a thief. (During one festival on the island of Samos, people honored the god by gleefully committing highway robbery.) But Hermes’ banditry should not be confused with appropriations based on raw power. The information trickster works through cleverness and stealth; he is not the mugger or the thug, but the hacker, the spy, the mastermind. When Hermes makes off with Apollo’s cattle, he sports specially designed footwear that leaves no tracks, and he forces the animals to walk backward in order to trick his pursuers. When Apollo finally catches up with the kid, Hermes fools him by proclaiming oaths that, like the slickest legal contracts, do not mean what they seem to say. He tells the god of truth that “I don’t have any information to give, and the reward for information wouldn’t go to me if I did.”^ Finally, the duo journey to Olympus to resolve the conflict.

Hermes gives Apollo the lyre, which so pleases the archer that he lets Hermes keep the cattle and grants the young demigod a measure of divine power and prestige. The conflict between the aristocratic lord Apollo and the young upstart god is instructive. Apollo can be considered the god of science in its ideal form: pure, ordering, embodying the solar world of clarity and light. Hermes insists that there are always cracks and gaps in such perfect architectures; intelligence moves forward by keeping on its crafty toes, ever opening into a world that is messy, unpredictable, and far from equilibrium. The supreme symbol for the fecund space of possibility and innovation that Hermes exploits is the crossroads—a fit image as well for our contemporary world, with its data nets and seemingly infinite choices. In ancient days, the Greeks marked crossroads, village borders, and household doorways with theherm, a rectangular pillar surmounted by the head of Hermes (and graced as well with a healthy phallus). At the base of these pillars, hungry travelers would sometimes chance upon offerings to the god—offerings they would duly steal, not to thwart Hermes but to honor the lucky finds he bestows. Some herms were later replaced with wooden posts used as primitive bulletin boards; it may be that the word trivia(literally, three roads) derives from the frequently inconsequential nature of these postings.

Crossroads are extremely charged spaces. Here choices are made, fears and facts overlap, and the alien first shows its face: strange people, foreign tongues, exotic and delightful goods and information. Crossroads create what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal zones”: ambiguous but potent spaces of transformation and threat that lie at the edge of cultural maps. Here the self finds itself beyond the limits of its own horizon. “Through Hermes,” the mythographer Karl Kerenyi writes, “every house became an opening and a point of departure to the paths that come from far off and lead away into the distance.”* As Norman O. Brown points out in his study Hermes the Thief, the liminal quality of the crossroads also derives from the more mundane traffic of trade. In archaic times, the exchange of goods often took place at crossroads and village borders; these swaps were fraught with ambiguity, for they blurred the distinction between gift, barter, magic, and theft. As the commercial networks of the Greek city-states developed, this economic border zone eventually shifted from the wild edges of the village into the more organized markets at the heart of the new urban centers. The outside was swallowed within. Hermes became agoraios, “he of the agora,” the patron saint of merchants, middlemen, and the service industry, while the god’s epithet “tricky” came to mean “good for securing profit.”

Certainly Hermes would approve of the Internet, a mercurial network of far flung messages that functions as a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Accessed through the domestic threshold of home computers, the Net opens up a technological liminal zone that swamps the self with new paths of possibility. Indeed, the mythic attraction of the Net turns on some of the very same qualities associated with the youthful trickster: speed, profit, innovative interconnection, the overturning of established orders. Of course, the information superhighway is also “mythic” in the more modern and critical sense of the term: a strategic distortion, a mirage, a social lie. The utopian rhetoric of the Internet paves over a host of troubling issues: the hidden machinations of the new corporate media powers, the potentially atomizing effects of the terminal screen on social and psychological life, and the bedeviling issue of access, as communication technologies hardwire the widening global gap between rich and poor. But Hermes prepares us for such dangers, because the merchant of messages traffics with deception: He lies and steals, and his magic wand closes human eyes forever, drawing us into the deep sleep of forgetting. Hermes embodies the mythos of the information age not just because he is the lord of communication, but because he is also a mastermind of techne, the Greek word that means the art of craft. Brown points out that in Homer’s tongue, the word for “trickiness” is identical to the one for “technical skill”—such as the skill that Hephaestus displays when he forges Achilles’ magic shield. Hermes thus unveils an image of technology, not only as useful handmaiden, but as trickster. For all its everyday efficacy, technology stands on shifting ground, giving us at once more and less than its spectacular powers first suggest. Brown insists that Hermes’ trickery is not merely a rational device, but an expression of magical power. The god’s magic is ambiguous, because we cannot clearly distinguish the clever ruse from the savvy manipulation of some unseen natural fact. With such Hermetic ambiguity in mind, we might say that technology too is a spell and a trick, a device that crafts the real by exploiting the hidden laws of nature and human perception alike.

The Divine Engineer

Hermes the messenger helps us glimpse the powerful archetypal connections between magic, tricks, and technology. But the god does not bloom into a genuine Promethean technomage until he heads south, across the wine-dark sea, to Egypt. Here, in the centuries before the birth of Jesus, the religious imagination of the Hellenistic world crossbred Hermes with the Egyptian scribal god Thoth to create one of the great matinee idols of esoteric lore: Hermes Trismegistus. A thoroughly fabricated figure, the “Thrice-Great” Hermes was nonetheless considered to be a historical person well into the Age of Reason, an error which had considerable consequences, as we shall see. For Hermes Trismegistus does not just capture the ancient world’s technological enthusiasm; he also comesdown to us as one of the leading lights of the Western mystical tradition, a tradition whose psychospiritual impulses and alchemical images will haunt this book as they have haunted Western dreams.

To appreciate Trismegistus, this golden, hybrid god-man, we need to take a snapshot of Egypt in the age of antiquity. In particular, we need to turn our historical imaginations to the great cosmopolis of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great at the mouth of the Nile. With its sophisticated arts and sciences, enormous ethnic and religious diversity, and deeply polyglot culture, Alexandria resonates with our contemporary urban culture like no other city of the ancient world. It is a sister city across time. Under the relatively enlightened despotism of the Ptolemys, a Macedonian dynasty that began ruling Egypt in the fourth century B.C.E., the city of Alexandria became the scientific and technological capital of the Hellenistic world. Ptolemy II oversaw the construction of the massive Pharos lighthouse, the redigging of the ancient Suez Canal, and the establishment of a university whose famous library attempted to collect and systematize the whole of human knowledge for the first time in history. With the king’s agents scattered across the known world digging up scrolls on every possible subject, the library eventually contained half a million volumes. According to Galen, one of the Ptolemys was such an information maniac that he would simply confiscate any books found on docked ships in the harbor, keep the ones the library needed, and compensate their hapless owners with copies on cheap papyrus. He even took out an interlibrary loan from Athens, borrowing the works of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus and then forfeiting his deposit rather than return the originals.

Athens may have been the home of the poets and philosophers, but during its heyday, Alexandria was home to the tinkerers. Ctesibius built singing statues, pumps, and the world’s first keyboard instrument, while Philo of Byzantium constructed war machines and automated “magic theaters.” And in the first century following the birth of Jesus, when the Ubrary had long declined and Roman rule could barely constrain the city’s religious and political upheavals. Heron hit the scene. Known as mechanikos, the Machine Man, Heron invented the world’s first steam engine, developed some sophisticated surveying tools, and crafted handy gizmos like a self-trimming oil lamp. Technically speaking. Heron’s clever inventions were particularly notable for their incorporation of the sorts of self-regulating feedback control systems that form the bedrock of cybernetics; like today’s toilets, his “Inexhaustible Goblet” regulated its own level with a floating mechanism. But what really stirred Heron’s soul were novelties: pneumatic gadgets, automata, and magic theaters, one of which rolled itself before the audience on its own power, cranked through a miniature three-dimensional performance, and then made its own exit. Another staged a Dionysian mystery rite with Apollonian precision: Flames leapt, thunder crashed, and miniature female Bacchantes whirled madly around the wine god on a pulley-driven turntable.