TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Perhaps the most curious property of Mondo’s digital Kool-Aid was how deeply it saturated the groundwater of Silicon Valley. R. U. Sirius reported that a “large portion” of Mondo’s audience were successful businesspeople in the information industry, while a brochure for potential advertisers boasted that eighty percent of readers were computerfolk with a median income of sixty-five thousand dollars. Mondo’s millennialist buzz and info-overloaded layout eventually made their way into the far more mainstream San Francisco magazine Wired (whose editorial vision was shaped in part by Kevin Kelly, another member of the Whole Earth gang). Though Wired shaved off Mondo’s hairier kinks and replaced its anarchist rants with corporate libertarianism, the “Rolling Stone of the Information Age” rode into town on Mondo’s fractal wave of cyberdelia, gadget fetishism, and sincere devotion to the fiercely creative edges of the digital community.

  The computer industry’s infatuation with the “New Edge” represented by Mondo and Wired also signifies a strange mutation in the halls of infotech’s corporate culture. The British authors Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron identify this new face of information capitalism as “the California ideology,” an economic and political vision that “promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.”5 While many Silicon Valley firms and start-ups are straitlaced operations, others consciously design a wacky, freewheeling environment that encourages their employees to pour every ounce of their creative juices into new products and research—a trend that goes back at least to Xerox PARC in the 1970s, which serviced its brilliant Menlo Park researchers with beanbags and Frisbees.

  By taking controlled sips of California’s creative anarchy, its “go with the flow” Beat Taoism, the computer industry discovered new philosophies of management and productivity that were appropriate to the increasingly chaotic global market their products were helping to produce. Such philosophies are by no means limited to the computer industry, of course. Faced with information overload, a spin-cycle marketplace, and the broiling seas of deregulation, businesspeople across the globe are now learning to “surf”—a supremely Californian image based on loosening top-down control and resiliently responding to the unpredictable flux of capital, data, and shifting demand. Management gurus speak an increasingly New Age lingo of “thriving on chaos,” generating “dynamic synergy,” and cultivating the Tao of the Dow. In Out of Control, his manifesto of cybernetic technocapitalist evolution, Wired editor Kevin Kelly even quotes Lao Tzu, whose wisdom could “be a motto for a gung ho twenty-first-century Silicon Valley start-up.”6

  In 1968, Marshall McLuhan prophesied that “the computer is the LSD of the business world.”7 But in today’s Silicon Valley, computers plus LSD sometimes seems like the formula for success. For years, Apple bought Grateful Dead tickets for employees at the end of the year, and the popularity of the annual Burning Man festival among the movers and shakers of Google and other tech giants is well-known. In a GQ article, Walter Kirn reports on the industry’s “no sweat attitude toward chemical recreation,” noting that Intel and other major corporations apparently give employees plenty of advance warning for the urine tests they are required to take. Moreover, most psychedelics cannot be traced in such screenings—almost an argument-by-design for their use as R&D enhancers. Kirn points out that Silicon Valley’s corporate heads didn’t just come to accommodate the fact that many of their most brilliant employees liked to gobble weird drugs—they also realized that “weirdness can be an export commodity.”8 Experienced and intelligent trippers are often characterized by a fluid sense of perception, a willingness to tinker with cognitive structures, and a sensitivity to what Bateson called “the pattern that connects”—just the kind of mental gymnastics that come in handy when you’re crafting the giddy complexities of information space.

  Corporate cyberdelia is only one indication of the integration of certain countercultural techniques of ecstasy into the fabric of West Coast information society. One of the great paranoid rumors of the 1960s was that the freaks were going to pour LSD into the water supply; it may turn out that digital devices and media machines wind up dosing the population, infusing an undeniably psychedelic mode of cognition into the culture at large. Modems pry open Huxley’s mental “reducing valve” and let in the networked Mind at Large, while digital effects creators routinely reproduce the kaleidoscopic mandalas that wallpaper the acidhead’s inner eye. Techno and its various electronic offshoots generate sonic psychedelia with the precision of an EEG, while the hyperfast editing and explosive computer graphics of Hollywood blockbusters and TV toy ads reach a hallucinogenic pitch that would leave Wavy Gravy slack-jawed. Computers and electronic media are turning everyone on, and cyberspace is shaping up as the virtual, mutable landscape of the melting collective mind. The liberating energies of ecstasy, defined as the explosive expansion of the self outside its quotidian boundaries and lionized by the ideologues of the sixties counterculture, are now a technological fact.

  According to Jacques Ellul, this technological ecstasy should neither surprise nor please us. In one of his sour and foreboding prophecies, made way back in 1954, Ellul wrote:

  We must conclude that it is far from accidental that ecstatic phenomena have developed to the greatest degree in the most technicized societies. And it is to be expected that these phenomena will continue to increase. This indicates nothing less than the subjection of mankind’s new religious life to technique.… Ecstasy is subject to the world of technique and is its servant.9

  Like Eliade, Ellul recognized the link between technique and ecstasy, but the Frenchman saw this symbiosis operating on a society-wide basis, with mass technology catalyzing dangerous and hyperkinetic mass emotions that swamped the stillness and sobriety of the moral individual’s inner life. For Ellul, the freak embrace of consciousness technology was not a spiritual resistance to the dominant society, but a complete capitulation to it. In this sense, the reemergence of so many motifs of the sixties counterculture within the rhetoric of information culture follows a distressingly predictable logic, as the System simply extends its technological tendrils ever deeper into the soul.

  Ellul’s critique is ultimately theological, and one senses a powerful odor of fire and brimstone wafting through his depiction of the autonomous and increasingly ferocious force of technique. Indeed, in The Technological Society, Ellul contrasts our fragmented, harried days with the social homogeneity and coherence of the theocratic Middle Ages, which, he claims, rejected technical development with “the moral judgment which Christians passed on all human activities.”10 It must be said that Ellul got his history of invention wrong; as the historian David Noble has convincingly shown, medieval monasteries spawned the perfectionist project of technology in the first place. Monasteries also exuberantly adopted one of the most psychologically constraining mechanisms of control found in the premodern world—the clock. But what’s important here is that, beneath his penetrating political attacks on the inhuman engines of enterprise and control, Ellul shares orthodox Christianity’s rather pessimistic assessment of humanity’s Luciferic tendency to deny our fundamental foolishness and to rebel restlessly against the divine order by constantly trying to manipulate the world.

  Throughout The Technological Society, as well as the doomy plaints of many later technology critics, one hears echoes of the tale of Faust, the hubristic wizard of folktales and high literature who signed on Mephisto’s dotted line in exchange for knowledge, power, and worldly command. These echoes of magic are not anachronisms. As the lore of Hermes Trismegistus reminds us, technology operates as easily in a magical universe as a rational one; indeed, from the perspective of cultural narratives and political power, technology often functions as magic. In the next section, we will see that magic is one valid way of understanding the workings of propaganda, advertising, and mass media, those modern machineries of perceptual manipulation that often explicitly deploy the rhetoric of enchantment. In this sense, the liberatory
and ecstatic techniques of the sixties counterculture should not be seen as an anomalous eruption of occult superstition into postwar society, but as a particularly vibrant battle in the twentieth century’s immense war of social sorcery.

  Social Imagineering

  More than a century ago, when European anthropologists first started tracking down the dwellers of the jungles and outbacks of earth, they did not believe, as many white folks do today, that the magic and medicine of shamans and witch doctors might heal Western souls from the ravages of technology and modern science. Early anthropologists had no interest in guzzling brews or trying their hand at ancient ritual techniques; they were there, pen in hand, to classify, record, and analyze. Because their enterprise was self-consciously “scientific,” field researchers and anthropological theorists were particularly obsessed with delineating the distinctions and, to a lesser extent, the continuities between native magic and modern science. According to the influential theories of old school British thinkers like Sir Edward Tylor and Sir James Frazer, the magical practices that witch doctors wielded within animist societies functioned as proto- or pseudosciences. In this view, magic was not so much religious mumbo jumbo as the most stunted, larval stage of the empirical understanding of nature. By establishing this evolutionary link, anthropologists also constructed a universal narrative of intellectual progress that placed European civilization at the head of the pack. It was also, in many ways, true: both traditional magic and modern science are concerned with empirically understanding and manipulating natural forces and hidden universal laws.

  But by framing magic as nothing more than an ignorant pit stop along the glorious march toward objective rationality, early anthropologists tended to overlook the positive aspects of what gets lost in the transition from magic to science. And what gets lost is the resonating worldview that organically bound the perceptions and procedures of the magician to a holistic webwork of cosmic, animal, and ancestral forces. This worldview is the “anthropological matrix” we discussed in chapter 1: a living field of cultural practices and narratives that are inextricably woven into the world of objects and natural laws, and that therefore can never be entirely reduced to an underlying objective reality. One might argue that the early Western practitioners of the “human sciences” were themselves somewhat ignorant, for they believed that scientific procedures enabled them to transcend the anthropological matrix of their own cultures.

  As the social and ecological psychiatrists of their societies, shamans and native healers did not separate magic as empirical science from magic as virtual theater, a theater where the magic-worker maintained the anthropological matrix by performing it into existence. So while magicians operated on the material level of stone, flame, and herb, they also aimed their beams at the human imagination, that primordial faculty of the mind that weaves its webs among perception, memory, and dream. Using language, costumes, gestures, song, and stagecraft, magicians applied techne to the social imagination, actively tweaking the images, desires, and stories that partly structure the collective psyche. Through this creative manipulation of phantasms, magicians conjured up perceptions, habits, and states of consciousness, which in turn impacted the construction of native reality as a whole. Not necromancy, but neuromancy.

  If Latour is right, and the West never left the anthropological matrix, then what are the differences between the worlds that magicians and scientists construct? In his book Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality, the anthropologist Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah argues for the existence of “multiple orderings of reality”: different cultural frameworks of knowledge and experience that build, in essence, different kinds of worlds. Tambiah compares and contrasts two basic frameworks found in human culture, one based on causality and the other on participation. Causality boils down to the pragmatic rationalism of science: the detached individual ego divides and fragments the welter of the world according to objective and explanatory schemes based on neutrality and instrumental action. In contrast, the world of participation plunges the individual into a collective sea that erodes the barrier between human agency and the surrounding environment. In this world, which I am associating with the magical paradigm, language and ritual do not objectively delineate the world but help bring it into being; objects are organized according to symbolic resemblances and the rhetoric of dream rather than the dry and objective classifications that pack scientific texts or corporate reports.

  All cultures and societies display different mixtures of these two orientations. The world of participation dominates archaic and oral cultures, while moderns inhabit an everyday world defined by the technoscientific logic of causality. But though our cosmology is scientific, our cultures, psyches, and collective rituals are not. The technological civilization that now blankets the globe is actually seething with myriad forms of participation: massive sports events, global pop music, multiplayer computer games, fashion fads, Twitterstorms. In fact, media technology may actually be amplifying the collective resonance that lies at the psychic heart of participation.

  This was Marshall McLuhan’s view, anyway. McLuhan was convinced that electronic media were eroding the logical, linear, and sequential worldview that dominated the modern West. He believed that this “causal” worldview was itself the product of technology, especially alphanumeric characters, the printing press, and the techniques of Renaissance perspective drawing. But with the spread of new media technologies like the phonograph, radio, and television, the older paradigm of literacy and logic was breaking down. With its new bias toward image, orality, and simultaneous participation, the electronic environment was conjuring up the collective psyche of earlier oral cultures. “Civilization is entirely the product of phonetic literacy,” he wrote, “and as it dissolves with the electronic revolution, we rediscover a tribal, integral awareness that manifests itself in a complete shift in our sensory lives.”11 McLuhan described the emerging electronic society as “a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again.”12

  McLuhan often went overboard with his rhetorical bravura and sweeping sound bites, but methodical scholars like Walter Ong have given more detailed and rigorous shape to McLuhan’s vision of the “electric retribalization of the West.” In his landmark book Orality and Literacy, Ong argues that electronic media are leading us into a time of “secondary orality,” an era that, despite important differences, bears some striking similarities to the cultural logic of oral societies. In particular, Ong draws attention to the new power of participatory mystique, group identification, repetitive formulas, and the ethos of “living in the moment.”

  Given that human societies are mixtures of participation and causality, McLuhan’s vision should probably be tempered with the notion that electronic media are simply shifting the relative balance between these two worlds, orality and literacy, participation and causality. In fact, it is the conscious combination of these two different modes that leads to some of the most important forms of modern technological magic. Television advertising, for example, uses seductive phantasms, participatory mystique, and repetitive mantras like “Just Do It” to impress Pavlovian buying habits into the minds of consumers, whose imaginations and desires have themselves been “scientifically” mapped through focus groups, market surveys, and neuro-economics. The faddish fascination with subliminal advertising in the 1970s only masked a deeper recognition: that advertisers don’t want to inform us about new products, but to capture our attention and manipulate our imaginations. As the cultural theorist Raymond Williams writes, advertising is “a highly organized and professional system of magical inducements and satisfactions, functionally very similar to magical systems in simpler societies, but rather strangely coexistent with a highly developed scientific technology.”13

  Williams’s analysis is spot-on, but the coexistence of magic and scientific technology should not strike us as particularly strange. After all, magic has always deployed the tools of media to work its wonders on the human
mind. Williams’s observations only seem odd if you accept the rather naive belief that advanced technologies should automatically engender skeptical reason in their users. The ancient arts of persuasion can hardly be expected to disappear at the very moment that the science of social engineering, which we now call marketing and “perception management,” is sharpening and multiplying its techniques. As William A. Covino argues, advertising is only one example of the “arresting magic” of modern institutions, a sorcery of psychological control that he defines as the imposition of binding symbolic restraints on the many by the few. Arresting magic is utilized by autocratic teachers and governments, “and is practiced in some measure by the ostensible detractors of magic, voices of science who attempt to constitute official knowledge.”14

  The strongest example of arresting magic is the mass media, which many social critics have vociferously attacked for its technological and industrial domination of our psychic, aesthetic, and imaginal lives. The situationist Guy Debord bitterly deplored what he famously called the “society of the spectacle,” a “permanent opium war” waged against society by the lords of capitalism, who seek to channel human dreams and desires into the passive consumption of mediated images and commodity fetishes. Ellul analyzed the society of the spectacle in terms of propaganda, while Theodor Adorno and other members of the so-called Frankfurt School critiqued what they called the “culture industry,” an essentially economic apparatus that they believed destroyed the spiritual imagination, the organic social functions of popular culture, and the critical role of art. Though Adorno mourned the Enlightenment’s reduction of the world to a dead object of instrumental control, he held out no hope for the restorative power of the magical imagination in the modern world. In fact, in his withering attacks on popular astrology, he argued that the occult had been thoroughly co-opted by commodity culture and the arresting magic of authoritarian institutions.