by Erik Davis
Even the most tough-minded engineers looked toward the year 2000 with dread, though their fears came to nothing. Countless computer systems across the globe, especially the “legacy systems” that form the primitive strata of many commercial, banking, and governmental institutions, store the given year as a two-digit numeral. Many feared they would misread 2000 as 1900, unleashing unpredictable and potentially catastrophic errors in the process. Fears about the Y2K glitch fomented scores of survivalist fears and paranoid rumors, stories that remind us how tightly we are lashed to time, or rather to the often arbitrary frameworks we use to categorize and control its always imminent flux. The fact that the West’s historical odometer was set by Christian bureaucrats with ten fingers doesn’t mean that the clock’s not ticking.
Though Y2K came and went without disaster, as did 2012, I predict that the end times will keep beckoning. To understand this perpetual return, we must do better than simply snicker about the irrationality of apocalyptic thought, which is no more sensible and no less interesting or convulsive than gambling or good poetry. The really compelling question is how we grapple with the apocalyptic feelings and figments that already crackle through the world. From where I stand, we should no more ignore these ominous signs and wonders than we should interpret them as literal forebodings of a certain fate. As Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult proved, apocalyptic intimations can be insanely dangerous, but they can also serve as dreamtexts for the zeitgeist. Even more potent is their ability to shatter the illusory sense that the world today is simply muddling on as it always has. This is not the case. We live on the brink in a time of accelerating noise and fury, of newly minted nightmares and invisible architectures of luminous code that just might help save the day. The sense of an ending ruptures the false complacency of the everyday, and allows us to glimpse our global turbulence, if only for a blink of an eye, under the implacable sign of the absolute.
Eschatechnology
In the twelfth century, Joachim of Fiore returned from a tour of the Holy Lands and decided to don the robes of a Cistercian monk. Joachim soon tired of administrative duties and fled the order, retreating to the mountains to take up a fugitive life as a contemplative. By the end of his life, Joachim’s popular and visionary works of biblical exegesis, as well as the occasional blasts of illumination he received from on high, won him the mantle of prophet in his own time. But though some popes praised his writings, and Dante stuck him in Paradise, other theological heavyweights were spooked by the revolutionary import of his work and wrote him off as a raging heretic. As far as Catholics are concerned, the jury is still out.
Joachim’s questionable theological taste was his obsession with the Book of Revelation, the big-budget apocalypse that ends the Christian Bible. The scripture itself was written at the end of the first century CE, when the first generation of Christians eagerly expected the imminent and literal return of their messiah. The young cult was undergoing a wave of Roman persecution, and when the Christian prophet John wound up imprisoned on the isle of Patmos, he felt compelled to pen an apocalypse, a vision of the final days. Along with depicting horrendous waves of plagues, battles, and tribulations, John’s text centered on a glorious king who would wrestle the Antichrist, stomp out the beastly empires of the world, and set up shop in a redeemed but earthly kingdom known as the New Jerusalem. Centuries later, when the Christian Bible was finally fixed in canonical stone, the Book of Revelation made it in by the skin of its teeth. Already it was something of a thorn in the side of Rome, which was forced to square the book’s embattled vision of a future messianic kingdom with the Church’s own existence as an established institutional power in a patently unredeemed world. To solve this discrepancy, Saint Augustine declared that John’s apocalypse was a purely symbolic allegory, and that the millennial Kingdom of God was already present on earth in the body of the Church.
As a divinely inspired reader, Joachim was not interested in squeezing such pale allegories from Revelation, but in coaxing the spirit of prophecy from the hard rind of the letter. Mystically musing on the hidden allegorical correspondences between the Old and New Testaments, Joachim finally came up, he believed, with the keys to history. Laying the Christian Trinity along a linear time line, Joachim declared history to be the progressive realization of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The earliest age of the Father was characterized by the rule of law and the fear of God, while the second age, kick-started by Jesus and signified by the shift from the Old to New Testaments, was the Age of the Son, a time of faith and filial devotion to the gospel and the Church. But Joachim heard a third era knocking on the door: a new age of the Holy Spirit. With its coming, the edifice of the worldly Church, with its institutional sacraments and scriptural law, would give way to a free eruption of love, joy, and wisdom that would endure until the Last Judgment. Joachim’s millennial utopia would see “spiritual knowledge” directly revealed into the hearts of all men, a kind of universally distributed, charismatic gnosis that would fulfill Moses’s lament in Numbers 11:29: “Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!”
Joachim’s prophecies were revolutionary in import. They suggested that the world and the people in it were destined to radically improve; more dangerously, they sparked the desire to accelerate the arrival of the third age through social change and individual spiritual growth. With Joachim’s third age in mind, the Holy Spirit became the religious poster child for any number of perfectionists, visionaries, cranks, and radical monks, including the Franciscans, the Beghards, the antinomian Free Spirit cult, and later the more anarchist Protestant revolts. But the speculative waves from Joachim’s work surged beyond theology. By casting history as a self-transcending process, Joachim prepared the way for thoroughly modern ideas about progress, political revolution, and social development. As Norman Cohn writes in his classic book The Pursuit of the Millennium, “the long-term, indirect influence of Joachim’s speculations can be traced right down to the present day, and most clearly in certain ‘philosophies of history’ of which the Church emphatically disapproves.”3 Joachim helped foster the evolutionary notions of history honed by Hegel and the positivist Auguste Comte, who saw history as an ascent from the theological to the metaphysical to the scientific. Even Marx and Engels, atheists and historical materialists who snippily referred to presocialist utopias as “duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem,” could not escape the millennialist shadow of Joachim’s three ages. They believed human social history began with agrarian or primitive communism, passed through the heinous machineries of capitalism, and finally came to rest in a triumphant communism, a classless heaven on earth in which the state withers away, alienation is banished, and the proletariat is free. By the time that the Russian and Chinese revolutions came around, Marxism had become a thoroughly messianic movement—even if ideologically it remained utterly hostile to the transcendent aspirations of religion.
Communism was not the twentieth century’s only encounter with Joachim’s “pattern of threes.” Along with Hitler’s insanely millennialist Third Reich, Joachim’s age of the Spirit also pops up in the heart of postwar visions of the information age. In his best-selling and influential book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler proclaimed that we were on the edge of an imminent and astounding phase-shift toward a postagrarian, postindustrial society based on freedom, individualism, decentralization, and mutant machines. Toffler’s prophecies were grounded and perceptive enough to be reckoned with, but their speculative breadth was also intoxicating enough to lend an expectant and even prophetic tone to the growing rhetoric of the “information revolution.” Prominent surfers on the third wave later included Wired magazine, the short-lived 1994 Republican Revolution sparked by Newt Gingrich, and the high-octane business books and seminars of George Gilder, Tom Peters, and any number of technocapitalist gurus and visionaries.
Though the revolutionary rhetoric of digital technocapitalism has been attacked for its hubris, myopia, and
blind insensitivity to the corporeal problems of the world, it also signifies a truth with considerable consequences: the scientific and technological development that has characterized Western culture for centuries is infused with millennialist fervor. As the historian David Noble shows in his revelatory book The Religion of Technology, Joachim’s drive to perfect history fed directly into the medieval world’s changing notions of technology, as monasteries began incorporating the once lowly “mechanical arts” into their otherworldly labor. Besides embodying man’s God-given rational superiority to the rest of nature, technology enabled him to dominate and transform the fallen world. Following the Renaissance, the West committed itself to what Michael Grosso calls “the slow apocalypse of progress,” as science and technology took on the task of regenerating the earth and revealing its secrets. In Noble’s words, technology became eschatology, with the result that the technomania of our contemporary world “remains suffused with religious belief.”4
Consciously or not, much of this exuberance is linked to the final reel of the Book of Revelation, when, after a series of baroque calamities, the New Jerusalem finally descends from heaven. Alongside Plato’s philosophical Republic, the New Jerusalem is the theological prototype of utopia: an adamantine urban jewel of spiritual design and revolutionary moral import. Though the river of life percolates along its golden streets, and fruit trees bloom with genetically engineered reliability, the Heavenly City’s layout and materials are anything but natural. Radiant and transparent, the burg has no need of sun or moon because “the glory of God is its light.” Moreover, its touchdown is accompanied by a total cosmic transformation, the emergence of “a new heaven and a new earth.”
Despite twentieth-century thrill rides like Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Bhopal, evangelical proponents of science and technocapitalist progress continue to spout perfectionist promises about the new earth that lies just around the corner. Nanotechnology proselytizers declare that molecular machines will soon give us unimaginable creative power over material reality, while some DNA researchers suggest that the decoding of the human genome will allow us to perfect the species, if not conquer death itself. Growing numbers of scientists and mathematicians discuss the coming Singularity, that point on the near horizon when the rapid developments in artificial intelligence, robotics, microchip power, and biotechnologies will converge, producing an unimaginable change of state that will erase the logic of human history and render all prognostications mute.
Though reproductive technologies and genetic engineering may well end up influencing the shape of the future far more intensely than computers alone, the machineries of information and communication continue to carry many of today’s headiest eschatechnological fantasies. As we saw in chapter 2, communications technology has carried a millennialist charge since media started tapping into electricity, the symbolic material of illumination both sacred and profane. We already heard the American congressman F. O. J. Smith’s claim that, by “annihilating space,” the telegraph would cause “a revolution unsurpassed in moral grandeur by any discovery that has been made in the arts and sciences.”5 The evangelist and technological prophet Alonzo Jackman was similarly enthused when he proclaimed in 1846 that the electrical 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.”6
These speculations introduce a number of startlingly familiar motifs into the techno-utopian rhetoric of new communications technologies: moral revolution, the global village, the apocalyptic collapse of time and space, even the hygiene of purely virtual contact. Bell’s telephone brought a more democratic factor into the equation; in 1880, the august Scientific American anticipated “nothing less than a new organization of society—a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community.”7 When the French Bishop of Aix consecrated an electrical plant to God’s work, the writing was on the wall: electricity not only signified the sublime and spectacular, but would do the work of building a millennial kingdom of light. These electrical dreams leaked into the electromagnetic spectrum as well; Tesla wrote that the wireless would be “very efficient in enlightening the masses, particularly in still uncivilized countries and less accessible regions, and that it [would] add materially to general safety, comfort, and convenience, and maintenance of peaceful relations.”8
It does not take a Joachim to see where all this is heading. In recent decades we have been saturated with the rhetoric of “mythinformation,” which the social critic Langdon Winner defines as “the almost religious conviction” that a widespread adoption of computers, communications networks, and electronic databases will automatically produce a better world for humanity. With the growth and interbreeding of the Internet, wireless networks, global media outlets, online learning, and the myriad otherworlds of the computer, the communications utopia arises yet again. With astounding predictability, we tell ourselves (and are told) that the digital age is an evolutionary leap forward for humanity, one that will help empower the individual, restore community, aid the infirm, overcome prejudice, turbocharge democracy, make us smarter and richer, and maybe even spark world peace. “Something is happening,” promises an IBM TV spot, as a montage of the world’s myriad peoples zeroes in on a wise old African man. “Just plug in, and the world is yours.”
In his cornerstone essay for the influential collection Cyberspace: First Steps, the architecture professor Michael Benedikt points out that the cultural myth of cyberspace owes much of its resonance to the image of the Heavenly City. Like the New Jerusalem, cyberspace promises weightlessness, radiance, palaces within palaces, the transcendence of nature, and the Pleroma of all cultured things. Benedikt goes so far as to offer an informational vision of fleshless redemption, suggesting that the “realm of pure information” may
decontaminate 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.9
Benedikt acknowledges that his visions of cyberspace remain pipe dreams. On the other hand, he makes the equally valid point that the power and persistence of such ancient “mental geographies” and salvational myths ensure that, for all the silicon snake oil and corrosive applications that accompany digital communications, cyberspace will continue to retain a degree of “mytho-logic.”
In the next section, we will look more closely at the religious and apocalyptic myths that inform our fascination with communication and its technologies. But the euphoria of the information age also emerges from the sense of rupture that powerful new media introduce into society. As I have suggested throughout this book, different forms of communication—oracular performance, writing, print, television, email—shape social and individual consciousness along specific lines, creating unique networks of perceptions, experiences, and interpersonal possibilities that help shape the social construction of reality. From this it follows that when a culture’s technical structures of communication mutate quickly and significantly, both social and individual “reality” are in for a bit of a ride. To borrow an image from the Kabbalah, powerful new media “break the vessels,” opening up novel and unmapped regions of the real. The social imagination leaps into the breach, unleashing a torrent of speculation, at once cultural, metaphysical, technical, and financial. These speculations inevitably take on a utopian and feverish edge. As David Porush writes, “As technology manipulates and alters human nature, and human nature adapts itself to the new technosphere, new versions of utopia arise, which in turn promote new technologies, which in turn change the context for defining human nature, and so on.”10 However much we aspire to embody the rationalism of our machines, we cannot escape this feedback loop between techne and d
ream.
Amplifying these feedback loops with abandon, the Internet has certainly broken the vessels. Once beefed up with the World Wide Web, the Net became the most enchanting medium of recent memory, and seems destined to give Gutenberg’s printing press a run for the money as a major technocultural mutagen. Those fortunate enough to get online can, as at no other time in history, resonate with like minds across the planet, mine rich veins of unexpected information and images, and respond to the frazzled chaos of life with constructive communication, dynamic relationships, and a plethora of points of view. As the EFF’s Mike Godwin puts it, the Internet “is the first medium that combines all the powers to reach a large audience that you see in broadcasting and newspapers with all the intimacy and multidirectional flow of information that you see in telephone calls. It is both intimate and powerful.”11
This conjunction of power and intimacy explains much of the utopian enthusiasm that first greeted the medium in the early to mid-1990s. Without sacrificing the intimate scale we cherish as individuals, the Net allowed us to reconnect with a much larger world, to occupy, at least potentially, a place of noncoercive communicative power. Both the popularity of the personal home page and the rhetoric of virtual community expressed the desire to overcome the alienation of modern life by plugging some portion of the self into a network technology. Symbolically if not actually, the Net thus provided a fragmented and malleable halfway home for the postmodern self to get back on its feet. Millions were also attracted to the Net’s literally free exchange of ideas, expertise, and creative labor. Even if users were forced to sift through piles of chaff, this gift economy existed outside the market. The virtual trade in knowledge, skills, and experience not only added novelty and happenstance to online life; it also engendered a kind of public space that blocked, for a time, the mighty waves of commodification and marketing that have soaked nearly every pocket of contemporary life with the trace of lucre. Even the first Internet entrepreneurs—ISPs, hardware manufacturers, publishers, consultants—made their money around or beneath the Net, not on it.
