TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  The Dutch media activist Geert Lovink calls the initial years of the Net’s mass popularity Dream Time: “a short period of collective dreaming, passionate debates, gatherings, and quick money to be made.”12 Unfortunately, such periods do not last long before they succumb to the tug of more prosaic historical forces, and especially to the powerful undertow of money and power. In different ways, this has been the sad story of communication utopias from the telegraph to radio to television. Creative possibilities and novel social forms are winnowed and routinized; technologies are packaged for consumers rather than hacked; commercial interests and the state alike colonize the new communications space as a “natural” extension of their domains.

  While the Internet may have already replicated this admittedly simplistic scheme, the jury is still out. Since the printed book, few technologies have come along that have had a better potential for engendering a genuinely creative and democratic environment of debate, knowledge amplification, alternative visions, new forms of community, and novel comminglings with the world offline. I fear that as the Internet becomes dominated by the microbeasts of twenty-first-century power, then the efforts of global citizens to create a viable and humane technological culture, and to maintain our pinkies on the guidance system of spaceship earth, will be severely impaired. Many argue that we must now even further integrate the Net into the global economy, but it seems to me that we must continue to dream the Net as well, and to do so in as public a manner as possible. We cannot pretend to resuscitate Lovink’s Dream Time, a period of naive and newborn utopian glee that is long gone. But perhaps we can tool the Net into some urban remix of the aboriginal dreamtime: a virtual ecology of mind, an electronic agora, a collective metamap that supplements rather than replaces the real.

  The Net, after all, is still under construction, and therein lies its strength. Rather than frustrating utopian possibilities, the Internet’s perpetual imperfections, its leaky pipes and exposed wires, may serve to keep the medium’s wilder, more alchemical, and more socially innovative possibilities alive. The gaps and ruptures that the technology’s endless mutations create hopefully will help frustrate consumer culture’s predictable imperative to transform cyberspace into a mall. The endless procession of bugs, viruses, and incompatible protocols may also keep the lines noisy enough to prevent us from being mesmerized by whatever ersatz wonderlands appear, and to remind us that utopia does not lie beyond the magic mirror, but in the virtual images we carry inside our potential, and increasingly collective, selves.

  And Knowledge Shall Be Increased

  In the 1990s, angels, it seemed, were everywhere. All across America, ordinary people reported lifesaving heavenly interventions and profound inward encounters with mysterious beings of light. A veritable angel industry emerged, with seraphim pins, self-help manuals, lavishly illustrated Pre-Raphaelite daybooks, cards and calendars, and the hit CBS series Touched by an Angel. Though the angel remained a powerful and uncanny figure, many of these examples were little more than chubby tykes and anorexic New Age sylphs. One looked in vain for the blazing hulks of Blake, the sublime intelligences of Pseudo-Dionysus, or the dazzling forms of the Shiite Sufis. Though mystics and ceremonial mages describe the encounter with one’s Holy Guardian Angel as a seriously spine-chilling experience, the sorts of intercessors invoked on Oprah or the Weekly World News too often seemed content to make sure the airbags worked.

  Still, it would be a failure of the imagination to chalk up this return of Thrones and Dominions to the economic tightening of the Bible Belt or to Christian envy at all the press that ETs were garnering. Something else was afoot. Angelos means messenger in Greek, and angels have traditionally been considered luminescent agents of the Logos, figures of order, communication, and knowledge. Manifesting the helpful side of Hermes, angels mediate between an inaccessible but omniscient godhead and the earthly spheres where humans lumber along in the dark. It’s for this reason that so many magicians and Kabbalists have burned the midnight oil attempting to contact these incandescent bureaucrats; like John Dee, they sought “the company and information of the Angels of God.” So perhaps it is no accident that these mediators return in our datapocalyptic days, for they form blazing icons of the only faith that many people now hold: that information and communication will somehow save us.

  Indeed, Langdon Winner was more correct than he knew when he described the “almost religious conviction” society now has in the efficacy and goodness of information machines. At root, the popular and even utopian hopes invested in information technology, and especially in the Internet, derive from a profound faith in the power and value of human communication, its ability to reach across borders, touch minds, inspire intelligence, and both expand and strengthen the boundaries of self and community. Communication is an enormously complex and tangled affair, of course, full of tricks and noise, and our contemporary ideology of efficient and productive information exchange often ignores this rich and troubling ambiguity. But even if communication has become a rather one-dimensional fetish, our passion for it runs deep.

  The American pragmatist John Dewey gave voice to this passion when he wrote that “of all affairs communication is the most wonderful. That the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales.”13 On the surface, Dewey’s is an eminently secular American sentiment, at one with libraries, town halls, and freedom of the press, all of which help construct the democratic ideal of a public space of voices that enables communities to cohere and individuals to represent themselves. But while this conception of communication remains a secular ideology, part and parcel of our pluralistic world of clamorous democracy and hypermedia, its wondrous ability to bring minds into mutual connection invests it with a spiritual power. Communication continues to attract us partly because it carries within it the seeds of communion: of overcoming loneliness and alienation, and of drawing us together into collective bodies based on compassion, intelligence, and mutual respect. Symbolically speaking, this promise of communication draws much of its energy from the very religious tradition that free-speech advocates and other communication liberals now so often confront across the picket lines: Christianity.

  Dewey’s contrast between communication and the miracle of transubstantiation conceals this deeper sympathy. Transubstantiation is the Catholic doctrine that holds that by participating in the Eucharist, the ritual consumption of wine and bread that forms the interactive heart of the Mass, we experience holy communion with the body of Christ. Protestants rejected this mystical belief in literal communion, arguing that the Eucharist is a symbolic act. But all Christians resonate with the narrative root of the ritual: the last supper, when Jesus broke bread and shared a cup of wine with his friends and disciples the night before he died. Despite the agony and betrayal implied in the scene (or perhaps because of it), Jesus’ odd invitation to share in his body and blood remains a powerful symbol of the communion of beings. When the early Christians instituted the Eucharist, the holy meal was more than a mystical invocation or a simple memorial act; it was also a potluck feast, a deeply human celebration of community identity, and thus the very image of the participation and sharing that Dewey identifies as the fruit of communication.

  In sharp contrast to the liberal and secular aims of pluralism, however, Christians have been so convinced of the value of their particular feast that they have regularly insisted that every human being must dig in or be damned. Indeed, despite the rift between the Eastern and the Roman Church, and the nearly infinite splinterings of Protestantism, Christianity remains, along with Islam, the religion with the most global and totalizing aspirations. More Christians now walk the earth than followers of any other religious faith, and the religion continues to expand, especially in areas outside the Near Eastern and European climes that nursed it. Historically speaking, Christianity owes much of this global reach to violence: its savage intolerance of pagans, Jews, and infidels within the borders of Christendom
, and its collusion with colonial power beyond those borders, where the conquest of other cultures generally meant their forced conversion as well. But any reckoning of the religion’s phenomenal success must also take Christianity’s intense communicative power into account. Ever since the first evangelists wandered about the Roman Empire announcing the kerygma, the “good news” of God’s redemptive activity through Christ, priests and missionaries have devoted themselves to proselytizing and preaching the gospel, in all its multifaceted forms, with a fervor unmatched in the history of religion. Though all but the most isolated humans have probably gotten the message by now, evangelism remains a powerful religious calling for many Christians, especially Protestants. Evangelical activity has taken many contradictory forms throughout the complex history of Christianity, but it also must be seen as part of a corporate communications project: the global broadcast of the gospel.

  And according to the New Testament, this broadcast began with a bang. Before the resurrected Christ took to the skies, he told his disciples that the Holy Ghost would soon arrive and baptize them, giving them the power to preach the gospel “unto the uttermost part of the earth.” Ten days after Christ’s ascension, the disciples gathered for the harvest feast of Pentecost:

  And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.14

  There were around 120 disciples at this point, all feasting together “with one accord.” But when the Holy Spirit arrives, it shatters this merely human harmony with a ferocious noise, the sound of a turbulent storm. The disciples are touched with supernatural tongues, tongues that are both visual (like fire) and verbal. The Spirit seizes their vocal cords and begins spontaneously channeling information about the works of God to a multinational audience. More magically still, these listeners hear the Spirit speak in their own language, as if the ancient curse of Babel has temporarily been lifted, or at least something like Star Trek’s universal translator has kicked in. Pentecost is a communications mystery: a chaos of noise comes bearing the ecstatic tongues of the Spirit, which transmit the Word to a global public in all frequencies of human speech.

  Such immediate intensity cannot be sustained indefinitely, of course, and so the Holy Ghost, or rather the men behind it, soon took up the writing machine to amplify the gospel’s broadcast power. Despite the romantic picture of early Christianity as an unmediated culture of oral spontaneity, Christians were concerned with reading, writing, and citing texts from the beginning. For one thing, the earliest Christians were believing Jews, and they wanted to write themselves into the Jewish messianic tradition by demonstrating on a line-by-line basis how Christ fulfilled scriptural prophecies of a coming king; evidence suggests that some Christians compiled relevant samples of Hebrew texts into handy notebooks for use during preaching and debate. Later, the Gospels would employ a variety of literary devices to structure and stage the conversion of their readers. From the moment that Saint Paul began cranking out epistles to the far-flung congregations of the first century, letters that would be declaimed before the community and that would eventually be committed to the bound book, Christians exploited the technology of the Word as a vehicle for the living Logos.

  By the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had ensconced the Bible inside an immense exegetical and liturgical apparatus, restricting its access to priests, monks, and scholars schooled in Latin. But when the Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century took on the medieval Church, they attempted to recover the spirit of early Christianity by radically reimagining the role of scripture. To restore a more direct connection between the Word and the souls of ordinary men and women, they translated the Bible into vernacular languages. The sacredness of Latin was overturned; unlike the scriptures of Jews and Muslims, whose holy tongues remain in essence untranslatable, the Protestant word was so intensely immediate it could transcend the distortion and error introduced by translation—a perfect expression of the globalizing myth of Pentecost. Over the centuries, many Protestants also came to emphasize the value of internalizing scripture, of developing a personal relationship to the text.

  As every student of the writing machine knows, the Protestants probably could not have pulled off their Reformation without the newfangled printing press, which Luther himself called “God’s highest act of grace.” The printing press blasted the Word in all directions at once, forever fracturing the unity of Christendom while also allowing sects to regulate the internal lives of believers through standardized materials like the Book of Common Prayer. Even in 1455, Johannes Gutenberg already recognized the evangelical power of his invention: “Let us break the seal which seals up the holy things and give wings to Truth in order that she may win every soul that comes into the world by her word, no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied, but multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine.”15 Whether or not Gutenberg was thinking of the mighty wind of Pentecost here, he clearly wants to imply that the supernatural hand of the Holy Spirit guided his machine. After all, by transcending the imperfect labor of human scribes, the printing press cheaply and tirelessly multiplied the Word, and thereby accelerated and intensified the process of evangelizing the planet. Indeed, one suspects that Pentecost’s primal scene of ecstatic communication continues to subliminally spur the utopian enthusiasm and universal rhetoric of the information age. It certainly influenced McLuhan’s Playboy vision, which held that computer networks would allow us to bypass language in favor of “a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family.”16 In a crude sense, the binary code is the closest we’ve yet come to something like a universal tongue.

  In any case, the Pentecostal fire most certainly inspired modern Pentecostalism, perhaps the fastest-growing and most media-savvy Christian religious movement today. Like the disciples at their harvest feast, Pentecostals combine an evangelical urge to convert everybody in sight with an ecstatic embrace of the more mystical gifts of the spirit: healing, prophesying, and especially “speaking in tongues,” the spontaneous eruption of that incomprehensible otherworldly lingo known as glossolalia. In many ways, Pentecostals are the epitome of Harold Bloom’s gnostic “American Religion”: They embrace the sanctified self within, the self that walks with Jesus and knows the Spirit in all its transhistorical immediacy.

  The spark of modern Pentecostalism first touched down in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901, but its most sustained outbreak took place in Los Angeles a few years later, when a black Holiness preacher named William Seymour began a revival so intense that its participants believed that apostolic times had come again, and that history had dissolved into biblical spirit. From there Pentecostalism spread rapidly across the globe, even though the movement was roundly criticized by more staid and mainline believers. Today Pentecostals and other charismatic Christians form roughly a quarter of the global Christian community, with the worldwide numbers of Pentecostals and Charismatics exceeding five hundred million. The enthusiastic movement, increasingly flush with a growing prosperity gospel, continues to spread like wildfire across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where it long ago transformed the religious landscape.

  Along with fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, with whom they are too often identified, Pentecostals are resolutely antimodernist. In contrast to liberal Christians and critical scholars, they reject the idea that the Bible is a human and historical document; instead, they attempt to read it as an error-free manual of litera
l truth. But like the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose rise to power was facilitated by the clandestine cassette-tape distribution of the exiled cleric’s fiery speeches, Pentecostal evangelists have also shown that antimodern messages and modern media can be a match made in heaven. Indeed, both Pentecostals and fundamentalists have embraced electronic media with an unparalleled intensity and panache. The mediagenic Pentecostal flapper Aimee Semple McPherson took to the LA airwaves in the 1920s, drowning out other stations’s frequencies and telling concerned FCC regulators that “you cannot expect the Almighty to abide by your wavelength nonsense.” Though loads of sober and mainstream Christian programs appeared on radio and television over the ensuing decades, Pentecostals and fundamentalists dominated the broadcast spectrum by the 1970s, when televangelists took the idiot box by storm.

  Though televangelists benefited from the deregulation of the airwaves, their media success had deeper roots. Evangelicals understood the spectacular and infectious language of TV, and they exploited its immediacy and gaudy sensationalism with a primitivist professionalism. Focusing on the intense emotions, healing powers, and biblical word-jazz of the preacher, as well as showing the spirit working through the live audience, these “electronic churches” staged media events that transformed home viewers from spectators into participants. With their calls for immediate conversion, not to mention their pledge drives and twenty-four-hour prayer hotlines, televangelists turned the television into an “interactive” medium, and they garnered millions of check-writing viewers as a result. The Texas preacher Robert Tilton even claimed he could cure his viewers’ ills by placing his healing hand on the live television camera and passing spiritual forces directly to the surface of the home TV tube. And though the scandals surrounding Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker brought the house of cards crashing down in the late 1980s, slicker outfits like Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, which broadcasts its 700 Club newsmagazine across the globe, are still going strong. Christian evangelists have diversified their media as well, moving into cartoons, comic books, movie distribution networks, shortwave and AM radio talk shows, rap music, fax circles, email prayer networks, and the Internet.