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| From Contract Professional, March 1999 On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a God . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, by Erik Davis (Harmony Books, $25). REVIEWING TECHGNOSIS is, from what I'm told of LSD, like trying to describe an acid trip. Insights that at first struck me as profound seem either nutty or pedestrian as I try to recount them, and I can't pinpoint why. Does the rhythm of Erik Davis's prose lull readers into a state of hypnosis? Is his thinking, which plays out in a steady series of dissolves from Plato to Madame Blavatsky to Hermes Trismegistus to Marshall McLuhan, too lateral for its own good? Or could the book's stated purpose—to "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"—simply be too ethereal to withstand the journey back to reality? To this old linear brain, an effective argument still needs to unfold in a sequential fashion, with logic and evidence and all that. So I may not be the best person to resonate with Davis's hypertext. That said, TechGnosis contains at least the germs of some intriguing ideas about the interplay between information technology and the realm of religion and spirituality. And because Contract Professional is a full-service magazine, equally concerned with your career and your soul, I shall share some of those thoughts with you. Script and Scripture In the beginning was the word. As Davis points out, the earliest forms of written language were based on pictograms, representations of animals and other natural objects. Ancient pagan religions were based on the veneration of animals and other natural objects. Coincidence? Davis thinks not. The form taken by religious expression may be closely bound to a culture's information technology, of which writing is an early example. Davis goes so far as to cite a theory set forth by the literary scholar David Porush that the abstract monotheistic religion adopted by the Jews was made possible by the Hebrew alphabet. Because that script is phonetic—based on speech sounds—it is removed from the spirit-infested natural world and lends itself to abstract expression. I don't know if this hypothesis stands up to scrutiny. Just how abstract was old Yahweh, anyway, and why did paganism thrive in Rome and other places that had phonetic alphabets? But it is clear that the written word has been instrumental to the preservation and spread of religion. Later information technologies have been intimately connected with religion as well. This is especially true, Davis feels, in the case of "gnostic" religions, loosely defined as those that have secret lore attached to them and that, like mysticism, aim at some form of enlightenment. Undeniably, programmers are drawn to sword and sorcerer-type games, where magic and mystery abound. And the affinity often goes beyond make-believe: Davis contends that the ranks of modern pagans are drawn disproportionately from the computer industry, a claim that is corroborated on pagan Web sites. Why the affinity between computer science and mysticism? Davis brings forth two analogies. One, articulated by a certain magician and Webmaster, is an analogy between programming and ritual: Ritual is "the principal technology for programming the human organism." The other analogy, a recurring theme in TechGnosis, equates information—the stuff of computing and communication—with the concept of the spirit. Each is seen as a pure essence that exists irrespective of the particular vessel that holds it. Information, like the human spirit, is immaculate, antiseptic. Accordingly, the ability to store and transmit it has long fired the religious imagination. In 1846, for example, the evangelist Alonzo Jackman held that the electric telegraph would allow "all the inhabitants of the earth [to] be brought into one intellectual neighborhood and be at the same time perfectly freed from those contaminations which might under other circumstances be received." The 20th century has inspired even more ambitious fancies. The Jesuit scholar Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was of the opinion that all human minds would one day meld into a "noosphere," a collective consciousness that would finally cause Christ to "blaze out like a flash of lightning." And from the way many people write about cyberspace, you would think we were halfway there. Davis quotes Cyberspace: First Steps, in which University of Texas architecture professor Michael Benedikt likens popular conceptions of the Internet to the New Jerusalem. This "realm of pure information," Benedikt writes, may "decontaminat[e] the natural and urban landscapes, redeeming them, saving them...from all the inefficiencies, pollutions (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things—from paper to brains—across, over, and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth." Immortal You How far are you prepared to go to enter this new kingdom? Are you willing to, say, have the top of your head sliced off and the contents of your brain uploaded onto a computer? Creating just such a new, immortal you is the vision promoted by Carnegie Mellon University roboticist Hans Moravec. "This is how to become pure spirit," he has said. Would you still be yourself? That seems to depend on how you define "self," which in turn points to yet another possible convergence between technology and religion. Bulletin boards, on-line chat, and other manifestations of the Internet have already proved people's willingness to don new identities that depart radically from their real-world selves. Davis suggests that further gamboling and intertwining of minds in cyberspace could lead to an identity crisis of global proportions. What then? Well, maybe then we would have the enlightenment that Eastern religions—and the early Christian Gnostic sect—promise to those who abandon the ego, with its pains and infirmities, and seek to exist on a plane of pure knowledge. But don't pack your bags yet. TechGnosis, for all its erudition and imagination, does little more than tantalize. The book's 11 loosely connected, somewhat overlapping, more or less free-standing essays drift back and forth between the fringes of spirituality and the fringes of cyberspace without demonstrating any clear commonality between the two spheres at their core. Certainly, Davis proves that it is possible to talk about religion and technology in the same breath. But unless you are extraordinarily gullible, nothing he says will convince you that you—or we as a species—are headed toward some computer-aided Nirvana or that, if you were, it would be worth the journey. I, for one, shall plan my own itinerary. db |