TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Given the collapse of so many overtly totalitarian regimes on the planet, fears of the dawning surveillance society are seen by some as little more than phantasms that stand at the gates of a new mode of collective interdependence, paranoid projections our anxious egos cast as they shuffle, willingly or not, into the global village. But these ominous specters also signify very real possibilities—and actualities. Every phase of human development has its dark side, but the midnight face of technological globalization is as black as pitch. Given the amount of globalist cheerleading we hear from politicians, marketeers, and the media, there is a pressing need for critical, skeptical, and suspicious voices in the global debate, though such voices must transcend the easy pessimism of many Neo-Luddites, with their Rousseauist fatalism and fear of change. Indeed, the social critics of the twenty-first century might need to renew their own messianic and prophetic pact with the angels, recalling that, like Jacob, we are called to wrestle with these agents of the possible, not to emulate them.

  Whether or not we feel that globalization is a “natural” phase of human evolution, the phenomenon is real, and we will need more than a hermeneutics of suspicion to nurture the productive and humane opportunities of these turbulent times. In a speech made at Harvard in 1995, Václav Havel described his quest for a deeper dimension of global political engagement. Acknowledging the emergence of a single planetary civilization, Havel pointed out that this civilization still amounts to a thin technological epidermis stretching over an immense variety of cultures, peoples, religious perspectives, and traditions, all rooted in very different historical experiences and geographic climes. Based on his own globe-trotting experiences, Havel argued that this diverse and often hidden human “underside” of the global village is now gaining a second wind, especially as the promises of secular modernity collapse. Even as the strip malls of global civilization spread, “Ancient traditions are reviving, different religions and cultures are awakening to new ways of being, seeking new room to exist, and struggling with growing fervor to realize what is unique to them and what makes them different from others.” For perfectly understandable reasons, quite a number of these countries and cultures are rejecting many of the Euro-American political and social values that, to varying degrees, accompany globalization. Some of the fiercest opponents of McWorld resort to violent struggle, often deploying technologies—radar, computers, lasers, nerve gas, Twitter—that owe their existence to the very civilization whose paradigm lies in their crosshairs.

  Given all the tensions pulling beneath Gaia’s new fiber-optic skin, Havel argues that we need to adopt a basic code of ethics and mutual coexistence, a strongly pluralistic perspective that will allow a genuinely open and multicultural society to flourish. But if we think that this code lies in commodity culture or market discipline or Western legal concepts, Havel warns, then we might as well pack it in. An ethics capable of reorienting the world within its new global framework cannot be another “universal idea” churned out by the rationalist West; nor can it be programmed through social engineering; nor can it be crafted and disseminated like Coca-Cola ads or condoms. Speaking with a candor, humility, and personal authority altogether foreign to today’s politicians, Havel called on humans to plunge much deeper into the spiritual dimension that undergirds all of our diverse cultural histories:

  We must come to understand the deep mutual connection or kinship between the various forms of our spirituality. We must recollect our original spiritual and moral substance, which grew out of the same essential experience of humanity. I believe that this is the only way to achieve a genuine renewal of our sense of responsibility for ourselves and for the world. And at the same time, it is the only way to achieve a deeper understanding among cultures that will enable them to work together in a truly ecumenical way to create a new order for the world.15

  Havel is not asking anyone to abandon the noble features of the modern mindframe and return to tribal idols, absolute truths, or the consoling fairy tales we once told ourselves to keep the dark at bay. Instead, Havel is gesturing toward a “post-religious” spirituality, one that can thrive in a pluralistic third millennium alongside science and technology and all that pesky capital. Wisely, he does not tell us anything about where this spirituality would come from or what it would look like. Instead, he simply asks a question:

  Don’t we find somewhere in the foundations of most religions and cultures, though they may take a thousand and one distinct forms, common elements such as respect for what transcends us, whether we mean the mystery of Being, or a moral order that stands above us; certain imperatives that come to us from heaven, or from nature, or from our own hearts; a belief that our deeds will live after us; respect for our neighbors, for our families, for certain natural authorities; respect for human dignity and for nature; a sense of solidarity and benevolence towards guests who come with good intentions?16

  This is not exactly the kind of stuff you expect from a man like Havel—a chain-smoking politician, an avant-garde humanist, and a hard-core Frank Zappa fan. But like countless people across the world, Havel’s gut told him that we are at a crossroads, and that we will need the full range of human capacities to confront the catastrophes looming just around the bend.

  Meet the Beast

  In the mid-1990s, an amazing technological artifact started making the rounds of the electronic art shows and media exhibitions that now pop up from Helsinki to Buenos Aires. Created by the Berlin design group Art+Com, T_Vision brought the idea of a “virtual world” onto a new level of graphic realization. Here’s the setup: you stand before a large screen on which hovers a fat, photo-realistic image of planet earth—an image seamlessly woven together from a twenty-gigabyte database of aerial shots, topographical information, and high-resolution satellite images. With a large plastic “earthtracker,” you can rotate this virtual Terra like a basketball, in any direction you choose. Or you can use the “space mouse” to plunge toward a specific landmass, zooming continuously down into a shifting patchwork of increasingly localized high-resolution images. Spinning the earth, you feel like a god; plunging toward its surface, like a falling angel.

  T_Vision provides a visceral experience of what Fredric Jameson would identify as the postmodern version of the technological sublime. As we saw in earlier chapters, we got our first big rush of the technological sublime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when grand canals, electrical grids, continental railroads, and the great bridges and dams could trigger an almost terrifying sense of grandeur and awe. But these monuments of industrial prowess no longer move us much; China’s massive Three Gorges Dam now strikes us as an ecological disaster, a devastating act of nationalistic hubris. We are no longer enchanted by production, but by the reproduction of images and information. Our icon is not the dam, but the screen, behind which lies an immense global matrix of databases, images, real-time information feeds, and communication networks—a matrix that is, quite literally, impossible to represent.

  Because human brains cannot satisfactorily compass this hyperspace of collective information, it takes on the uncanny aura of the sublime, an aura that, in turn, enchants the screens and gadgets with which we attempt to interface with the new information environment. As Jameson writes,

  The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of … capital itself.17

  William Gibson’s image of cyberspace dazzled so many because it suggested that individual “minds and imaginations” could navigate a virtual representation of these decentered networks and flows. The exalted grandeur of Gibson’s image disguises its dark ironies, though one of Neuromancer’s Rastafarian characters sums them up in a word: “Babylon.” Like Jameson, Gibson suggests that we may be approaching the apogee of technological
alienation, a point that is sublime only because it is terrifying.

  Though T_Vision does not explicitly represent the global networks of capital and communication, it does give us a hint of how the Gaian mind might start to interface with our minds. As some cyberthinkers argue, we will only begin to master the overwhelming confusion of networked information environments when we learn to build virtual architectures that can map the myriad data flows that currently define information space. With T_Vision partly in mind, Mark Pesce argues that the handiest and most appropriate memory palace we might employ for this purpose is, of course, the globe itself. With Teilhardian optimism, Pesce argues that by transforming the planet into the ultimate virtual database, we will bolster our awareness of the interdependent bonds that define the global community. Such an image would help us, for example, to “see” the environmental devastation that currently threatens to knock the biosphere out of whack, and to lobby global agencies and track the perpetrators with a newfound sense of urgency and commitment. On a more ethical, if not mystical, level, such an image might also hardwire the realization that the world and the people in it are cut of one cloth, and that all of us must learn to get along within the finite framework of spaceship earth. Al Gore must have been nursing a similar hunch when he pushed for Earth-Span, a satellite system that would continuously beam high-resolution photos of the turning earth to websites and cable stations around the world. In this triumphant symbolic paradox, the abstract grid of media space, which is perhaps the most artificial and disembodied of human artifacts, would thus allow Gaia to reassert herself as the ultimate field and limit of the real.

  The photographs of the planet that graced the early covers of The Whole Earth Catalog remind us that this utopian hope is not altogether new. Captured by NASA astronauts, images of the “big blue marble” floating against the inky abyss of space became ubiquitous pop icons in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and were embraced by many environmentalists and peaceniks as salvational images of ecological unity and human community. But as the deep ecologist and critic Michael Zimmerman writes, “The technical accomplishments required to build the spacecraft from which to take those photos … were made possible by the same objectifying attitude that discloses earth as a stockpile of raw materials for enhancing human power.”18 When Heidegger saw NASA’s first images of earth on television in 1966, he proclaimed that “the uprooting of man has already taken place.… This is no longer the earth on which man lives.”19 In other words, we cannot hope to discover a deeper sense of being and connection through a technological system that engages the earth as an object to be dominated and used, whether as a mass media image, a mine of materials, or a visual database. For some, T_Vision conjures up a Heideggerian wave of ontological nausea; the godlike blast of power and omniscience one tastes with the act of spinning a real-time image of the earth seems about as Faustian as multimedia gets these days.

  Even more disturbing is the degree to which T_Vision draws its visual power from an essentially military model of surveillance, an abstract system of power, vision, and information control that Foucault would have traced back to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. As Foucault described it, the panopticon, a prison building whose peculiar architecture allowed guards to constantly observe prisoners in their cells, created an abstract space of surveillance that enabled authorities to control people, not through physical force, but by constantly reminding them that they were under observation—a fact that the prisoners themselves would then psychologically internalize. T_Vision globalizes this Black Iron Prison, or, more accurately, it presents a crude video game reflection of the planetary panopticon that already exists. With the dominance of GPS, the growing numbers of commercial spy satellites, and our heedless devotion to information retrieval by any means necessary, it is clear that the eye in the sky will only sharpen its focus as we spin further into the twenty-first century. We indeed may bring light to the hidden things of darkness, but that only begs the question of who holds the light.

  One defense of T_Vision and its descendants like Google Earth is simply that, given the reality of spy satellites and the privatization of military surveillance, we might as well make the world’s flows of information as open and democratic as possible. As one component of the politics of the “open society,” this vision holds that social activists, environmentalists, and ordinary people will be empowered by, in essence, spying back. Perhaps this is the most realistic conclusion, but it remains a deeply disturbing one for many, because it acknowledges the extent to which privacy has become a thing of the past as we pass into a world of interlinked databases, James Bond spycraft, ubiquitous cameras, and tracking devices for felons, children, and enfeebled parents. Already the rituals of popular television reflect this profound mutation in social space, as the private tragedies and tribulations of ordinary people are laid bare for all to see in the voyeuristic spectacles of reality TV. We may yet find ourselves wired into a Borg-like collective beehive of information and image, an essentially totalitarian apparatus of perpetual surveillance without, as yet, a totalitarian command center.

  Teilhard also believed that human history was marching toward a vast collective society, one in which individuals would begin to resonate and fuse with the lives, emotions, and desires of their fellows. He even came to the rather disturbing conclusion that the various totalitarian regimes that slouched their way across the battlefields of the twentieth century were actually “in line with the essential ‘trend’ of cosmic evolution.” In fact, Teilhard held that our only real hope lay in the absolute triumph of holistic collectivization. “If we are to avoid total anarchy … we can do no other than plunge resolutely forward, even though something in us perish, into the melting-pot of socialization.”20 Assuring his readers that they will learn to love this potentially creepy state of affairs, Teilhard proclaimed that true union actually differentiates us and that our plunge toward planetary convergence “must have the effect of increasing the variety of choice and the wealth of spontaneity.”21

  Though such promises strangely resemble the corporate hype that now sugar-coats the rapacious growth of transnational capitalism, Teilhard is really speaking as a hard-core mystical Catholic, with a profound faith in the collective body of awakened souls and the essentially open and evolutionary character of the universe. But the Christian imagination is a coat of many colors, and some of its patches take on far darker and more violent hues. Some Christians, especially those with a brute Protestant conviction in the rock-solid inerrancy of the biblical word, would concur with Teilhard that our headlong flight toward planetization is part of a master plan. But they would strongly disagree about the major actors involved. Knowing that you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, they would reach for John of Patmos’s Book of Revelation: “I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”22

  Meet Mr. Antichrist, the vassal of the dragonlord Satan. Though John’s description resembles some Pixar monster movie morph, most fundamentalist prophecy buffs believe that this beast is actually a man, a supernaturally gifted orator who blasphemes the Lord, restores a number of ancient empires through political unification, and establishes power “over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.” The Antichrist is not alone, however, and soon after the beast comes up from his dip, John sees another creature sprouting out of the earth, a monster who wears the horns of a lamb and speaks like a dragon. This is the false prophet who will seduce “all that dwell upon the earth” into worshiping the Antichrist, apparently by dazzling us with “great wonders” that include fire that falls from heaven and various other sham show-biz miracles. But then things get really weird: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark on their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”23 As anybody with a dec
ent collection of heavy metal CDs can tell you, the number of the beast is 666.

  Levelheaded scholars would remind us that all this daemonic imagery poured out of John’s skull at the end of the first century, when the addle-brained Roman emperor Domitian started hounding Christians again after decades of relative conviviality. The above passages almost certainly reflect the Christian horror of institutionalized Caesar worship, and their antiglobalist sentiments probably stem from the young cult’s almost anarchistic rejection of Rome’s arrogantly universal state. Using the number-crunching techniques favored by esoteric biblical exegetes, most scholars conclude that the beast himself was probably Nero. But as we saw in the last chapter, the allegorical outlines of John’s apocalyptic spectacle are so large and vibrant that they can fit almost any era—most certainly including the information age. The evangelical community first started getting worked up about computers in the early 1970s, when the striped, computer-friendly bar codes of the now ubiquitous UPC (Universal Product Code) symbols started popping up on salable goods. These weird sigils were interpreted by many as forerunners of the mark of the beast, and some Christians feared that we would soon be forced to have them etched into our flesh. Later scares along similar lines included reports that a Belgian computer called The Beast was being programmed with the name of every living earthling; that Procter & Gamble’s man-in-the-moon logo proved that the corporation was in cahoots with the Church of Satan; that Saturday morning kid shows were witchcraft propaganda; and that the numerological value of “computer” is 666.