TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Such metaphors infected the computer underground of hackers as well. When young digital pranksters started “breaking into” unauthorized computer systems through network dial-ups, they were in many ways simply playing Adventure online. Naturally, such hackers also took on colorful, sardonic nicknames, many plucked from sword and sorcery. Enterprising young men like Erik Bloodaxe, Black Majik, Kerrang Khan, the Marauder, and Knight Lightning would band together in underground groups like the Legion of Doom, the Knights of Shadow, and the Imperial Warlords. In his book The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling notes that the relatively notorious Atlanta hacker Urvile was also a fanatic Dungeon Master who “barely made the distinction” between fantasy games and cyberspace; the Secret Service agents who seized Urvile’s personal notes found role-playing scenarios mixed helter-skelter into hand-scrawled records of his intrusions into actual computer systems.

  The plot of True Names also concerns a conflict between agents of the state and the Other Plane’s freewheeling information brokers, a conflict that Vinge stages in terms of cryptography. Vinge’s hackers do not use the U.S. government’s encryption schemes, but those that had leaked out of academia “over NSA’s petulant objections.” Vinge was prophetic: over a decade after his story appeared, the federal government and digital libertarians became embroiled in similar debates over encryption standards, privacy, and online security, and such conflicts have only intensified since. For their part, the feds stirred up the usual bogeymen (terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles) to ensure that the NSA and other state agencies would have backdoor access into any computer system or bit of email that intrigued them. In response, a loose network of online advocates, businesspeople, and scruffy “cypherpunks” raised a mighty stink, while powerful home-brewed encryption software slipped into the Net.

  Though magic metaphors and secret codes operate according to very different rules, they are hardly historical strangers. Take the incantations of the Steganographia, a trailblazing cryptographic text written by the enigmatic Johannes Trithemius of Würzberg. Born in 1462, Trithemius was a prodigious scholar and humanist who took over the monastery of Sponheim at the precocious age of twenty-three. Displaying the infomania of so many hermeticists, Trithemius transformed the monastery’s paltry store of forty-eight books into a library of nearly two thousand volumes. His collection of occult texts alone made it one of the greatest libraries in all of Germany. The man was also heavily into creating secret codes; a copy of his Polygraphia, an innovative if primitive book of secret writing, is housed today in the NSA museum near Washington, DC.

  Far more curious is the Steganographia, which was apparently revealed to Trithemius in a dream. Though the first two books of this popular and influential work appear to be compendiums of spells, they have long since been recognized as systems for encoding messages; the mysterious name that heads each section simply indicates which decipherment key to employ. In the third book, however, Trithemius unveils what seems to be a complex system of astrological magic, one that exploits the sorts of numerological incantations and esoteric alphabets used by sorcerers and Kabbalists to interface with astral intelligences. Trithemius also describes how images of various cosmic forces can be etched into wax in order to capture and manipulate their powers. Apparently, the abbot’s goal was nothing less than long-distance communication through the ether; he claimed his wax images and spells would create an astral network that, with the aid of Saturn’s angel Orifiel, would allow the delivery of mental messages within the UPS-worthy window of twenty-four hours. Moreover, Trithemius’s code was also a means of acquiring universal knowledge, of knowing “everything that is happening in the world.” Though the third book of the Steganographia was recently discovered to be nothing more than an elaborate cryptogram, this revelation does not entirely banish the shadows that hover around the abbot’s code. For why would Trithemius disguise his cryptography as black magic when black magic could (and did) get him into such serious trouble?

  For the adventurous mathematical and occult minds of the Renaissance, astral programming was by no means limited to the archons of the Zodiac. Using an elaborate and highly coded system of theurgic magic, the Elizabethan court astrologer John Dee also sought “the company and information of the Angels of God.” As faithful messengers of light mediating God’s omniscience, angels were the original intelligent agents—immaterial, rational, stripped of human emotion. Contact with them could open the gates to the invisible cosmos of knowledge, those abstract Neoplatonic spheres that, in Dee’s mind, were suggested by mathematics and occult lore alike. Dee made his acquaintance with the angels through a rogue named Edward Kelley, who claimed to see the entities in the surface of a “shew-stone.” Dee and Kelley communicated with their daemonic companions through a confusing but linguistically consistent angelic language known as Enochian, but Dee still had no way of knowing whether his online buddies were angels or evil demons in disguise. To pierce this virtual ambiguity, which all of us may come to know far too well, the pious Dee spent much of his online time trying to establish the authentic identity of the angelic bots he encountered.

  Scholars of the occult continue to debate the psychological status of Dee’s experiences, with some suggesting that he was simply being conned by Kelley. No matter. From the perspective of the digital dreamtime that now surrounds us, Dee’s Enochian Calls—like Trithemius’s astral encryptions, Vinge’s Other Plane, Adventure’s digital allegory, and Bruno’s mechanical memory—provide a compelling snapshot of the strange interzones that erupt when dreams and phantoms invade information space. Whether we want them there or not, magic metaphors seem to arise almost spontaneously when we attempt to interface with the “mental space” of information and to map its “true” interdimensional structure. But what happens when you also get real people moving around inside such consensual hallucinations? To answer that question, we must return to that marvel of engineering that Will Crowther worked on when he was not spelunking or hacking Adventure: networked computers.

  Dungeons & Digizens

  In 1979, the same year that Vinge wrote True Names, two students at Britain’s University of Essex named Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle built a network gaming system that allowed different people on different computers to occupy the same database at the same time. They called their text-based world the Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD for short, and it transported players logged into the university network into an Adventure-like gamespace known simply as “the Land.” As with Adventure, the computer screen served as an evocative textual window onto a world full of spells, treasures, and neomedieval combat. After reading the description of your immediate surroundings (and any objects you might pick up, buy, or steal), you would type the direction you wanted to go, and the screen text would change, providing you a description of your new location. But you would also encounter some rather spunky dwarves and warriors as well, characters animated by real human beings hunched over keyboards somewhere on the Essex network. When two characters crossed paths, they read each other’s descriptions, after which they might strike up a keyboard-clattering chat or start swinging battle-axes over loot. And thus it was that Trubshaw and Bartle brought role-playing games online, giving birth to the cyberspace doppelgänger eventually known as the avatar: digital doubles that embody the user’s point of view and that also represent him or her to the other denizens of the digital environs.

  Despite the lag times and the loss of D&D’s oral storytelling, role-playing games and networked computers proved to be a match made in purgatory. Bartle exported MUD code across the world, and over the next few years, other codesmiths hacked together similar programming systems with similar greasy-kid-stuff names like MUCK, MUSH, and MOO. These early MUDs were devoted to variations on the sword-and-sorcery theme. Pouring countless hours into the simple but compelling tasks of avoiding death and delivering it, the bloodthirsty undergraduate geeks that made up the bulk of MUDders would gradually accumulate the wealth and experience points that allowed them to climb up th
e social hierarchy of the MUD. Near the top rung hovered the coveted status of wizard, at which point the MUD gave players some direct control over the MUD database itself. In some systems, the “wiz” was trumped by the “gods”: demiurgic sysops who wrote and administered the world and could change its basic features and rules at will.

  MUDs thus functioned as toy cosmologies, their graded levels of personal power mimicking both the ladders of the corporate world and the hierarchical degrees of Freemasonry, where novices ascended through esoteric grades that granted them increasing spiritual powers. Many MUDs also took place within fictional worlds poached from fantasy and science fiction, material like Star Trek, Tolkien, or Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern. Literalizing the medieval perception that the world is a book, these so-called “theme MUDs” redeployed the characters, social conditions, and geographies of genre fiction into an interactive virtual milieu. As with the cosmologies that once saturated premodern societies from end to end, theme MUDs allowed role players to express their individual creativity within the framework of a shared mythos.

  Still, with their compulsive drive toward violence, treasure, and increased power, crude “hack-and-slash” games dominated the world of MUDs until 1989, when a Carnegie-Mellon grad named James Aspnes changed the nature of the game. Aspnes’s TinyMUD jettisoned strict ranks, ceased logging experience points and killing off characters, and, most notably, allowed players to participate directly in the ongoing construction of the MUDspace themselves. Though not designed to overthrow role-playing games, TinyMUDs nonetheless began attracting netheads, many of them female, who had little interest in skewering trolls. With an egalitarian do-it-yourself creativity programmed into the environment itself, TinyMUDs went social, players became inhabitants, and close-minded contests of mayhem gave way to the open-ended games of life: camaraderie, sex, gossip, debate, and factional politics, most of which tended to revolve around the rules and regulations of the MUD itself.

  Though these new worlds distanced themselves from their hack-and-slash ancestors, the tropes of magic continued to come in handy, simply because they fit the weird rules of social reality that define life in a MUD: shape-shifting, teleporting, telepathic communication at a distance, and especially the power of words to shape the world. On MUDs, language is performative—uploading the message that you are squeezing a chicken is the same thing as squeezing a chicken. More technically savvy MUDders also manipulate the hidden programming language that runs the world, fashioning golem-like bots, or doubles of themselves, or roving independent eyes. As Julian Dibbell noted in a Village Voice article about a virtual rape on the MUD LambdaMOO, MUD language invokes the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: “The commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably.”41 Or as one Pagan MUDder told the author, “If you regard magic in the literal sense of influencing the universe according to the will of the magician, then simply being on the [MUD] is magic.”

  Nonetheless, “social MUDs” rang the death knell for traditional sword-and-sorcery imagery. In anarchic romper rooms like LambdaMOO and PostModern Culture MOO, users stitched together their avatars from comic books, fashion magazines, or rock lyrics, while the rooms that people built were collages of media references, Lego sets, and conceptual art. Without any shared purpose or mythos, social MUDs became almost as fragmented, heterodox, and ordinary as life on the street—or at least life in a university dorm. This development was not universally appreciated. For many combat MUDders, removing the possibility that your character could die deflated the driving force of MUD life, replacing it with the idle banter of a parlor game or the chat rooms popular in other regions of the Internet. Their argument goes to the heart of avatar ontology: do we identify with our online selves because they are as liberated as we want to be, or because they are as constrained as we really are? For old school MUDders, the distinction between being IC (in character) and OOC (out of character) was also vital, if not always crystal clear. But social MUDs in many ways erased or merged these two categories, creating strange new possibilities for online identity and interaction.

  As Thanatos fled the scene, Eros moved in to take its place. Many social MUDs became hotbeds of romance, and swordplay was replaced with the gropes and thrusts of netsex, the early online world’s moist and potent blend of phone sex and raunchy pen pal letters. Nonetheless, this virtual carnality continued to percolate with the occult energy of the phantasm. After all, the Neoplatonic cosmology of the premodern West in many ways “ran” on Eros, in the broad sense of life force and beauty as well as sexual attraction. Eros provided the magnetic lines of energy’ that alchemists and hermetic magicians tapped to align themselves with cosmic forces and to cast spells on people. Such enchantments have not quit us, however much we have left the hermetic worldview in the dust. For people in the throes of a crush or a sexual obsession, the Other takes on a daemonic intensity that can drive us from all reason, sending us off on adventures that are more often than not fueled by incessant dreams and figments of desire. Just as the arresting phantasms of pornography took the Net by storm, so too had the phenomenon of the lustful crush found itself strangely amplified by the disembodied electro-erotic banter in MUDs and online chat rooms. Deprived of visual cues and immersed in the ambiguities of textual self-description, virtual lovers often found themselves in a seductive Rorschach blot of mutual projection and tantric play.

  MUDs also awakened a broader range of imaginal desires by allowing people to construct and experiment with new identities within a genuine social space. As Sherry Turkle put it, “When we step through the screen into virtual communities, we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the looking glass.”42 Gender switching was only the most obvious example of the fluidity of the self in MUDspace, where the relatively fixed identities that structure our everyday lives melted into a fluctuating and protean play of masks, characters, and personae. Many MUDders possessed more than one character, or “morphed” into different characters during the course of a single session: a werewolf, a paramecium, a Japanese schoolgirl named Keiko. In MUDs, people did not just traffic with phantasms—they became them.

  This flurry of self-experimentation took place at a time when, for many different reasons, human identity seemed up for grabs, a creative crisis that has only intensified today. The visible bouquet of sexual possibilities and body modifications throws our stable images of flesh and gender into doubt, even as advances in biochemistry, genetics, and psychopharmacology argue that many of the elements of personality that we take for granted are nothing more than symphonies of neurochemicals and hardwired genetic habits. Identity is literally fragmenting; cases of multiple personality disorder have risen exponentially since the early 1980s, along with reported incidents of near-death experiences, spirit encounters, and UFO abductions. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, many influential postmodern theorists continue to attack the notion of an authentic or essential self, arguing that identity is actually a multiplicity, a variable “social construct” hammered together by a host of changing cultural and historical forces. For the most part these arguments are rather esoteric, but our excessively mediated technological environment could well be mainlining the postmodern identity crisis to the masses. Turkle cites the psychologist Kenneth Gergen, who describes the “saturated self” that emerges now that communications technologies allow us to “colonize each other’s brains.” We begin to feel like routers or switches in vast networks of images, voices, and information, as if the boundaries of the self are dissolving into amorphous systems of data flow. Like the “subject” dissected by postmodern theorists, the online self is constantly under construction.

  But as the neomedieval origins of the online avatar suggest, the postmodern virtual self may come with a premodern twist. The “morphs” that people inhabited on MUDs, for example, recall not only the digital graphics engines that gave us Terminator 2’s melting cop, but the
pagan transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Many MUDders and other online changelings would chime in with the wizard Tuan mac Cairill’s cheer in the Irish tale The Voyage of Bran: “A hawk today, a boar yesterday, / Wonderful instability!” This is the song of the shaman, whose archetypal popularity in contemporary spiritual culture cannot be chalked up simply to colonizing New Age romanticism. The shaman changes shape, interbreeds with animals and inhuman cosmic forces, and even scrambles gender roles through cross-dressing and other tricks. Moreover, the shaman leaves his or her body to enter an immense and incorporeal soul-space teeming with images, information, and entities, many of them hostile and deceptive. Of course, the shaman also returns from the bowels of the earth with medicine to heal the tribe, whereas we return from a night of online gaming or netlust with aching eyes, sore wrists, and often a vaguely hollow feeling of spent life force.

  The psychological, social, and even spiritual fallout from the widespread adoption of avatars remains a complex question. Are these masks shadow selves, wish-fulfillment figures, energy vampires, or disposable video game tokens? How do we relate to them and with them? What is their ontology? In this regard, the fact that digital doubles are called avatars seems more than happenstance. The Hindu religious term was first used by the Lucasfilm creative designer Chip Morningstar to describe the crude cartoon figures that players used to move around Habitat, an extremely popular multiuser graphical virtual world developed in Japan by Fujitsu. The term’s popularity spread after Neal Stephenson used it in his hit science-fiction novel Snow Crash to describe the home-brewed digital getups and off-the-shelf costumes that people don in the online virtual world he called the Metaverse, a crowded and cacophonous strip mall vastly more believable than Gibson’s cool geometric grids. Avatar literally means descent, and in Hindu lore, it denotes the various incarnations a god may take in this world—some Hindus believe that both Rama and Buddha are avatars of the creator god Vishnu. Avatars possess a dual identity. On the one hand, they are separate from the godhead, receiving only a portion of its spirit. On the other hand, avatars are also indivisible from the godhead, because the gods remain in constant communication with everything they touch. While replicating this ambiguous overlap of identity and separation, today’s digizens have also turned the scheme on its head. We now disincarnate into fleshless “godlike” forms, though it remains to be seen whether this projection can be considered an ascent or a descent, a climb through Purgatorio or a plunge into Inferno. For hardcore Hindu mystics, cyberspace might seem like nothing more than a fresh layer of maya, the veil of illusion that cloaks and distorts our perception of reality. In their burning eyes, the pocket universes we’re building out of protocols and pixel dust might seem like dreams within a dream, a labyrinth of distracting desires leading ever farther from the Source.