TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Loopy speculations about virtual reality and networked consciousness are cocktail-party chatter for West Coast cyberculture, but Pesce is the sort to put his notions into ritual practice. He and an ad hoc crew of sysops and programmers decided to give VRML a magical send-off with CyberSamhain, a technopagan ritual held in San Francisco just as the Internet was beginning to explode in the mass mind. In general, Pagan ceremonies set the stage by establishing a ritual circle through a combination of performance and creative visualization. At once laboratory and temple, these circles stand “between the worlds,” carving out room for magic and the gods in the midst of mundane space-time. After casting the circle, Pagans often invoke the powers that animate the four elements of ancient lore: earth, air, water, and fire. Sometimes symbolized by colored candles or statues, these four “Watchtowers” are imagined to stand like sentinels in the cardinal directions of the circle. For CyberSamhain, the Watchtowers were symbolized by four 486 PCs networked through an Ethernet and linked to a SPARC station hooked to the Internet. Each monitor screen became a window into a three-dimensional ritual space, a VRML world whose pentagrams and colored polyhedrons mirrored the actual room’s magic circle. The astral plane had been reconfigured in cyberspace.

  Needless to say, CyberSamhain baffled many of the multimedia mavens and Silicon Valley operatives who had been invited to the rite. But Pesce’s desire to enchant cyberspace with images was prompted by more than obscure technopagan dreams. These practical considerations attempted to address a problem that besets everyone attempting to manage the information glut of the online world. Pesce figured that as the World Wide Web continued to explode (or, perhaps more accurately, implode), the Web’s array of search engines, domain names, and haphazard links would reach a point of chaotic breakdown. By using VRML to create virtual environments that could spatially organize online data, Pesce hoped to enable humans to exploit the navigation skills they had honed over hundreds of thousands of years. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson had already suggested the organizational power of cyberspace’s visual map:

  Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so that you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed.4

  Pesce was not alone in his intuition that Gibson’s cyberspace fiction concealed a deeper truth about the potential power of visualizing and mapping digital data. In The Axemaker’s Gift, a study of the entwined history of technology and consciousness, James Burke and Robert Ornstein argue that, from the very beginnings of human culture, “axemakers” have produced technologies that put selection pressures on the human brain, pressures that encouraged our minds to develop logical and analytic procedures that gradually alienated us from the matrix of nature. Acknowledging the devastating social and ecological costs of this great divide, the authors wind up their study arguing that the computer—the ultimate ax—may actually “take us back to what we were, mentally, before the axemaker’s first gift changed the way our minds got developed and selected.”5 They hope that the icons, associative links, virtual spaces, and parallel processing of multimedia computing may resurrect the “arational thinking” of earlier days, a mode of consciousness based on intuition, imaginative leaps, and fuzzy rules-of-hand. “When much of the routine drudge-work of the mind is automated, the spatial, intuitive, ‘navigational’ talents may well be much better adapted to accessing knowledge that is structured more like the natural world rather than being reduced to alphanumeric codes.”6

  Given its anarchic and constantly mutating complexity, the Internet lends itself to such cartographic desire about as easily as the Everglades or the traffic flows of central Tokyo. But considering the intuitive handiness of three-dimensional images, it’s a good bet that Internet developers (and the marketeers salivating over their shoulders) will not cease their labors until people can slip into polygon costumes and cruise through some portion of data space the way we now stroll through a theme park, bookstore, or mall. In fact, many of the worlds we’ll have the opportunity to jack into will more than likely resemble some unholy combination of theme park, bookstore, and mall. The banal fate of our culture may be to simulate the astral realms inside our machines, and then blanket them with Planet Hollywoods, Donkey Kong miniature-golf courses, and Lexis-Nexis fast-food data franchises.

  Mark Pesce, Jaron Lanier, and other cyberhumanists share the hope that there will be room in this world for people to discover their own potential for creative magic, for socially improvising the language of soul. After all, if the Net does indeed unfold into a honeycomb of pop-up worlds, online exploration may encourage mythic thinking just by its very nature. We may become more and more like Gibson’s cyberspace jockey Case, who the science-fiction writer Norman Spinrad describes as a

  magician whose wizardry consists of directly interfacing … with … the computersphere, manipulating it imagistically (and being manipulated by it) much as more traditional shamans interact imagistically with more traditional mythic realms via drugs or trance states.7

  Though we can’t deny the enormous differences between our data-surfing selves and our premodern forebears, we shouldn’t write off the archaic and occult metaphors that cluster around new technologies as being totally inconsequential to digital experience. If multimedia and networked computers are indeed inculcating the “arational” thinking that Burke and Ornstein describe, then such metaphors, lifted from folklore or science-fiction novels, are actually helping to map the infosphere. Such online mythologies will never dominate our view of cyberspace, of course, but they will never disappear either. The digital world that lies before us is a hybrid one, a crossroads of codes and masks, algorithms and archetypes, science and simulacra.

  The mythology of the Internet is also a symptom of the digital animism that is creeping into the technocultural border zones of the scientific paradigm. As we discussed at the end of the last chapter, various bots, spiders, and intelligent agents already inhabit the Internet, and these programs will more than likely be increasingly perceived, in the popular imagination as well as the scientific fringe, as autonomous entities. This move toward digital life inevitably registers on the mythic plane. Discussing the angels, demons, and Bosch-like mutant morphs that animate so many video games and online computer worlds, Wertheim notes that “the population of soul-space is almost infinitely varied and mutable.” That is, once the soul has made itself at home, that home inevitably fills up with fantastic critters. Wertheim compares today’s digital populations to those that inhabit the colossal medieval soul-space found in Dante’s Commedia. “From the dazzling six-winged ‘thrones’ who guard the set of God, to the six-bat-winged three-faced horror of Satan himself encased in ice at the center of hell, soul-space has always teemed with life on a cosmic scale.”8

  Gibson also recognized that the living fictions of the premodern imagination would inevitably populate the “vastness unutterable” of information space. As an old-time hacker in one of his novels admits:

  Yeah, there’s things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see? Sure, it’s just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows, it’s a whole universe.9

  While the dominant mystical images of the Internet today stress its unity as a global electronic “mind,” Gibson cannily suggests that the dynamics of polytheism may be a more appropriate religious metaphor for the chaos of the new environment. At the end of Neuromancer, the artificial intelligence Wintermute achieves cybernetic godhead, but in Count Zero, the next novel in the series, we learn that this totalizing information entity fractured into various subroutines that somehow took on the behavior and personality of the gods, or loa, of Vodou—the Haitian spin on New World African religion. For Gibson, Vodou is not a figure of superstition but of technological savvy. Count Zero’s V
odou priest compares the religion’s possession rites to “street tech,” explaining that the loa’s “program” slots into the hardware of the human dancer—a nifty revision of the traditional Haitian metaphor of a horse and rider. As Gibson said in an interview, “The African religious impulse lends itself to a computer world much more than anything in the West. You cut deals with your favorite deity—it’s like those religions already are dealing with artificial intelligences.”10

  By linking software programs and the gods who possess the dancing bodies of Vodou devotees, Gibson is not just playing cyberpunk games with Haitian religion. He’s also suggesting something about the nature of the digital agents that may come to infest the digital domain. On a rational level, we will know that such computer programs are devoid of any animating substance; similarly, we might describe the loa as nothing more than culturally determined disassociative trance states catalyzed by Vodou’s ritual technology. But as anyone who has attended a possession ritual can tell you, these entities quickly take on a life of their own. The skeptical question that we may find ourselves asking the AIs and software agents of the future—“How do I know if you are a sentient being and not just a simulacrum?”—could similarly be addressed to Vodou’s wise and mischievous entities. And the answer might very well be that it doesn’t really matter; by the time you reach the point of asking, “they” are already loosed into your world.

  In the New World, most African-based religions—Vodou, Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé—derive from the Yoruban religious culture that still thrives in present-day Nigeria. As Ed Morales writes in the Village Voice, “Yoruban religion is perhaps the most powerful aspect of African culture that survives, and actually thrives, in late-twentieth-century postindustrial society.”11 One of the reasons behind this apparent paradox is that, for all its deeply spiritual import, the “African religious impulse” remains an eminently pragmatic drive thoroughly in tune with the push and pull of everyday life. In his novel, Gibson calls Vodou “a street religion”—a phrase that significantly echoes his most famous maxim: “the street finds its uses for things.” For Gibson, the twists and turns that new technologies will take can never be programmed in advance, because the more marginal, crafty, and subversive elements of society (“the street”) will always appropriate and reconfigure machines in new and unexpected ways. With his fanciful if rather pulpy image of technological Vodou, Gibson suggests that religious forces also possess such an unpredictable and volatile power when faced with new technologies.

  In seeking to give mythological heft to his polytheistic intuitions, Gibson was psychologically savvy in fictionalizing such a pragmatic and syncretic practice as Vodou, even if the bulk of Haitians are precisely the sorts of folks who run the risk of being structurally banished from the emerging information society. But if the author had wanted to scrounge up a premodern image of cyberspace itself—that is, of an information space constructed from virtual phantasms and data architectures—he could have poked through the dusty attic of Western consciousness, where, after digging around a bit, he eventually would have come across a most curious and ancient psychic technology: the art of memory.

  The Palaces of Data

  Imagine arriving at your local shopping center. Park the car, slip in through the whooshing automatic doors, and start exploring the place, picturing the stores and escalators and displays of goodies as clearly and distinctly as possible. Then imagine that this structure you’ve carved out of mindstuff is actually a database. Stick a mental Post-It note on the most striking objects you pass, associating each thing—a purple pair of Reeboks, a popcorn maker, a stuffed unicorn—with some bit of pertinent minutia. Perhaps you organize your data by venue: business contacts at Brooks Brothers, mental snapshots of your travels in the multiethnic food court, lovers’ birthdays and phone numbers in Victoria’s Secret. But in any case, you should inscribe this virtual mall in your imagination so vividly that you can move through it as surely as you pad around your own home. And by mentally “clicking” on each storefront and commodity, you can also recover the information you stored there.

  This, in a cheap American nutshell, is the ars memoria: the ancient mnemonic technique of building architectural databases inside your skull. A few Roman writers gave compelling technical descriptions of these “memory palaces,” considering them a vital and practical aspect of the art of rhetoric (the rhetorical term topic derives from topoi, the “place” where one might lodge an argument or idea). Memory palaces could be based on real spaces or imaginary ones; some believed the best palaces combined the two modes, so that simulations of actual buildings were infused with impossible properties. Though it’s tough to believe this rather baroque system worked very well, the prodigious memories of the classical world suggest otherwise. Seneca, we are told, could hear a list of two thousand names and spit them back in order, while Simplicius, a buddy of Augustine, got a kick out of reciting Virgil’s Aeneid off the top of his head—backward.

  We are as chipmunks to these mighty elephants of recall. Having externalized our memories, we squirrel facts away in written texts, iPhones, and the cloud rather than swallow them whole. And yet with the immense honeycomb of cyberspace—the supreme amputation of memory—we spiral around again to the vision of memory as a space of information, a three-dimensional realm that’s “outside” ourselves while simultaneously tucked “inside” an exploratory space that resembles the mind. From this perspective, Saint Augustine’s paean to memory in the Confessions suggests not only the realms of the artificial memory but also the evanescent grids of Gibson’s cyberspace: “Behold the plains, and caves, and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things.” Augustine calls this an “inner place, which is as yet no place,” piled high with images, information, emotions, and experiences. “Over all these do I run, I fly,” he writes, sounding like one of Gibson’s console cowboys. “I dive on this side and that, as far as I can, and there is no end.”12

  The closest that many of today’s online spelunkers come to these endless associational flights of recall is surfing the World Wide Web—a technology that was invented because of an irritating quirk of one man’s memory. As a visiting scholar at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee had to master the European physics laboratory’s labyrinthine information system, but he wasn’t particularly hot at recalling what he terms “random connections.” So he whipped up a personal memory substitute called Enquire, basically a hypertext system that allowed him to drop words into documents that acted as specific links to other documents. To share the system with other researchers on the network, Berners-Lee cranked out and distributed the expanded protocols for what he came to call the World Wide Web. The rest, as they say, is history. In a 1997 Time interview that took place at MIT’s computer science lab, Berners-Lee describes the intuitive, neural structure of the Web’s hypertext by referring to his cup of coffee. “If instead of coffee I’d brought in lilac,” he says to the interviewer, “you’d have a strong association between the laboratory for computer science and lilac. You could walk by a lilac bush and be brought back to the laboratory.”13 The icons and hyperlinks of the Web thus simulate the associational habits of memory, habits that lend the imagination its intuitive capacity for leaps and analogies.

  This is not to say that Augustine would confuse a few hours of Web grazing with the rich and penetrating introspection that he believed brought one closer to God. On the other hand, if he had been an adept of the ars memoria, he would also have regarded the art as a perfectly pragmatic intellectual tool, a techne that transforms the imagination into a psychic file cabinet as functional as any desktop metaphor. In fact, the orator Cicero’s technical specs for memory palaces seem almost tailor-made for code jockeys toiling over corporate websites:

  One must employ a large number of places which must be well-lighted, clearly set out in order, at moderate intervals apart; and images which are active, sharply defined, unusual, and which have the power of speedily encountering and pen
etrating the psyche.14

  Using the media metaphors of his day, Cicero wrote that “we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.”15 For Cicero, these “images,” or simulacra, functioned similarly to the icons of today’s Web—compressed but memorable graphics that open up a store of data and that supplement, without replacing, the more abstract inscriptions of text. Though simple icons like anchors and swords were apparently employed, the anonymous author of Rhetorica ad Herennium insisted that the mnemonic emblems must be “active” and “striking”—gorgeous or ugly as hell, fantastically garbed or dripping with blood.

  No wonder Aristotle warned his readers that memory palaces could leak into the dreams of their creators—adepts of the art were trafficking with the fierce phantasms of the unconscious. Though the classical rhetoricians seem to have deployed these simulacra for purely instrumental purposes, the ars memoria eventually took on a more spiritual and occult import. Medieval theologians employed the art to “remember heaven and hell,” lodging the Church’s innumerable array of vices and virtues within Byzantine psychic architectures, probably not unlike Dante’s poetic maps of the afterworld. Though intellectual heavyweights like the Jesuits continued to use the mnemonic art well into the seventeenth century, modern thinkers stopped using such loosely associational networks as they invented more rational ways to organize fields of knowledge—part and parcel of their wholesale rejection of the productions of the imagination.