TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Such a paranoid style of reading the commodity symbolism and technological systems of contemporary society certainly qualifies as unintended eschatological camp, but these visionary suspicions nonetheless pack a certain imaginative punch. Paranoid prophecy can generate vibrant examples of what William Irwin Thompson calls epistemological cartoons—superficially garish myths that allegorize more subtle and significant realities. For with their apocalyptic imaginations, Christian prophecy buffs draw attention to many of the technological transformations of society that the rest of us generally ignore, hazily accept, or embrace with enthusiasm. In their 1990s exposé The Mark of the Beast: Your Money, Computers, and the End of the World, the evangelical brother team Peter and Paul Lalonde argue that a variety of cutting-edge technologies—debit cards, smart cards, smart roads, biometrics, databanks, microchip tracking implants—suggest a definite programmatic shift toward the world order of the Antichrist, a world order in which all movement, buying, and selling will be tracked and controlled. Unlike more hysterical purveyors of what they call “mark-of-the-beast malarkey,” the authors, who also hosted the cable show This Week in Bible Prophecy, stick to solid information sources like Card Technology Today. More important, they place their factoids within a sociopolitical context not so far removed from the analyses promulgated by pessimistic social critics. Peter and Paul call it the “last days system”—a world in which cash disappears, information technology foments invisible and diabolical concentrations of power and wealth, and the vagaries of digital identity allow and justify invasive forms of electronic social control and the insidious spread of surveillance devices.

  By using the apocalyptic imagination to interrogate the infrastructure of the information age, the Lalondes and their ilk do more than give voice to the powerlessness, anxiety, and fear that many postmodern citizens feel. Their prophetic paranoia also punctures the blasé belief that the current technological metamorphosis of everyday social reality is simply business as usual. Through their wild eyes, we glimpse how readily we have handed over little freedoms in the name of safety, efficiency, and convenience—and how little choice in the matter we actually have. With every electronic transaction, we are projecting our identities into a labyrinth of interlinked databases stuffed with financial, medical, legal, and travel information. From debit-card swipes to identity authentication to electronic ticketing to automatic toll roads, we now leave bread crumbs of bits along every trail we take.

  Even if the Lalondes’ image of a bat-winged Big Brother seems over the top, their concerns about our beastly virtual economy are not. With the collapse of the Soviet empire and the dismantling of the old totalitarian states, the capitalist world of global trade, consumer media, and international finance was poised to dominate “all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.” The idea that smart cards are a tool of the Antichrist, or that European Union bureaucrats are restoring imperial Rome, is simply a popular allegory of this capitalist imperium. Clearly, conspiracy theories that claim to describe some secret, invisible, and deeply unwholesome cabal lurking behind the rhetoric of the New World Order are basically delusions. But they are often oracular delusions, dream communiqués from the historical subconscious. The “occult” qualities of the current shift in global power have little to do with the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, or the secret rites performed in the Bohemian Grove. With the meltdown of the nation-state and the virtualization of the economy, power now transcends the visible space of representative democracy. It disappears in broad daylight, a vanishing that is aided by the bewitchments of a media industry dominated by fewer and fewer major corporations, and which devotes much of its time, consciously or not, to what Noam Chomsky calls “the manufacturing of consent.”

  The dark vision of the last days system puts a markedly different mythic spin on globalization than the Gaian mind does, and its lineaments are worth keeping in mind as the machineries of capitalism extend their extracting claws into every fold and crevice of the planet: the deep sea floor, the Communist fortress of China, the genes of rain forest plants and peoples. For now, it is clear that profit, and not cosmic evolution, is the driving spirit of planetization—its major metaphor, its omnipotent and universal truth. As the techno-logic of the market increasingly infects all spheres of human existence, from politics to education to the family, it achieves an unparalleled domination. Boundaries of time and space that once kept the demands of the market at bay are dissolving into an enveloping sea of silicon, as information technology extends the competitive empire of work into the nooks and crannies of our personal lives. The message of those arcadian TV spots showing folks hanging out on tropical beaches with their laptops and cell phones is simple and tyrannical: we are only free and fulfilled when we remain on the grid, on schedule, on call. According to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Foucault’s disciplinary panopticon has already been superseded by a more invasive and perpetually morphing mode of coercion. “The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit.… Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”24

  While making millions richer, the worldwide economic polarization that electronic capital has helped produce may prove calamitous for humanity as a whole. In societies across the globe, the widening gap between rich and poor has taken on an intensity so neofeudal in flavor that a few gloomy prophets have dubbed our future the New Dark Ages. Social critics direct our attention to the darkening landscape of refugee populations, institutional breakdown, failed states, and the gangster capitalism in Russia. In developed nations, hard-won labor conditions and social safety nets are being undermined in the name of efficiency and profit, while developing countries are witnessing the explosion of industrial shantytowns so foul they make the grinding poverty of village life almost seem like Club Med. For all the hearty entrepreneurs who can bootstrap themselves and “surf the chaos,” the hard-core beneficiaries of globalization remain the electronic elect that Arthur Kroker calls the “virtual class”: an oligarchic transnational elite with so little connection to local cultures, real workers, or immediate ecosystems that they might as well live in orbit—or at least a gated, privately patrolled, and totally wired citadel. You don’t need to be a science-fiction writer or a futurist in a sour mood to picture how chilling this volatile, undemocratic, and profoundly unbalanced condition might become.

  Of course, it’s easy to get bent out of shape by the ominous image of the New World Order, of brain lords and cyborg drones, not to mention the already cliché bogeyman of the global multinational corporation. Many pragmatists claim that global trade agreements like GATT, NAFTA, and the Maastricht Treaty promise nothing more harrowing than the McWorld described by social theorist Benjamin R. Barber: a plastic purgatory of global chain stores, fast food, cable TV, choked freeways, billboards, blue jeans, mobile phones, and computers. Given the genocidal horrors that marked the twentieth century, one suspects there are worse planetary fates than finding ourselves inside a global mall of rootless cosmopolitans more keyed on consumption than conflict. Over a century ago, when industrial capitalism waxed triumphant and Western gunboats kept the restless natives in check, a contributor to Cosmopolitan magazine wrote that

  Today the inhabitants of this planet are rapidly approximating to the state of a homogenous people, all of whose social, political, and commercial interests are identical. Owing to the unlimited facilities of intercommunication, they are almost as closely united as the members of a family; and you might travel round the globe, and find little in the life, manners and even personal appearance of the inhabitants to remind you that you were remote from your own birthplace.25

  Needless to say, this family of commerce was white, urban, and Western under the skin, its global sway dependent on the extraordinary violence and racism of colonialism. But the key McWord here is homogenous, a term verily prophetic of the flattening effect that today’s globa
l shopping center introduces into the myriad lifeworlds of humankind. What thrilled the Cosmo writer, the possibility of traveling everywhere without ever leaving home, rightly strikes many of us with horror, because that everywhere increasingly feels like nowhere, an immense labyrinth of chain stores, strip malls, and airport lobbies.

  Whether or not the planet itself can handle globalization is another question. Any serious observer must find herself questioning the sustainability of our extractive, industrial, and agricultural practices, our levels of consumption, and our myopic insults to the biosphere. All the cool commodities in the world cannot compensate for a future that promises a massive extinction of plants and creatures, the devastating loss of topsoil and rain forest, a cornucopia of pesticide-laden monocrops and lab-engineered Frankenfoods, and the climatic instabilities of global warming. And while globalization may thrust some social groups and regions into relative affluence, such prosperity could prove to be an ecological time bomb if the exuberant consumption patterns of the West are simply replicated on a global scale. Of course, globalization has also been accompanied by a growing awareness of the biophysical limits that hamstring spaceship earth. People across the world are opening their eyes to the larger circle of life that humans can neither escape nor afford to ignore. Unfortunately, international eco-conferences seem so far incapable of mustering the will for substantive stewardship, even as global regulatory agencies ditch or evade progressive environmental standards in the name of trade. The global economy has also created an even more propitious climate for rapacious multinationals and corrupt local officials to accelerate their plunder, precisely because they operate on an international scale that’s nearly impossible to regulate or police. While some believe that breakthrough technologies will swoop in like Superman to save the day, many of the “soft path” technological solutions to ecological problems that already exist remain unexploited because of corporate resistance and political inertia.

  One irony in the rise of ecological thought is that its organic models and holistic metaphors are also used to justify the unfettered excesses of the global market and its technological engines. In the 1990s, many technolibertarians and proponents of the “new economy” espoused a kind of “market animism” that took shape along neo-Darwinian lines. Exploiting the language of systems theory and emergent properties discussed earlier, these enthusiasts envision a self-organizing and infinitely expanding economy built on feedback loops, symbiotic technologies, decentralized control, organic information flows, and, of course, the absence of “artificial” intervention by states and regulatory mechanisms. As John Perry Barlow forcefully put it in a post to the Nettime mailing list:

  Nature is itself a free market system. A rain forest is an unplanned economy, as is a coral reef. The difference between an economy that sorts the information and energy in photons and one that sorts the information and energy in dollars is a slight one in my mind. Economy is ecology.26

  The British critic Richard Barbrook calls this kind of rhetoric “mystical positivism,” because its appeal to cosmic forces is couched in scientific terms. Barbrook points out that hymns to the coral reef economy not only obfuscate the manipulative power of financial elites, but ignore the immensely productive role that states, regulatory agencies, and other rationalized public institutions can and do play in the information economy. Nor can nature be blamed for the rapid and decisive spread of neoliberal market economies through the post–Cold War world, as if global capital was a jungle finally reclaiming the archaic, bloody temples of the nation-state. Many countries whose economies are now splayed before the hungry eyes of global investors got that way through the perfectly artificial politics of debt; once in thrall to international agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the governments of many developing countries have been basically forced to accept neoliberal market policies that, in many cases, line the pockets of the international banking community rather than address the immediate social, political, and ecological needs of the country in question.

  But perhaps the market animists are right. Perhaps the global economy is in some sense alive, and the undeniable creativity, resiliency, and profit-making power of the market are evidence of the emergent properties of neo-biological evolution. After all, interest has always been a kind of artificial life; even Thomas Aquinas, who lived at a time when usury was considered a sin, recognized that “a kind of birth takes place when money grows from [other] money.” Of course, Aquinas did not embrace the dynamic disequilibrium of modernity’s socioeconomic transformations, which would have struck him as perverse. He believed that the self-multiplying power of money “is especially contrary to Nature, because it is in accordance with Nature that money should increase from natural goods and not from money itself.”27

  Obviously we cannot and should not return to the static cosmology of the Middle Ages, but we still might ask ourselves what sort of monsters are breeding in our midst. Take, for example, the volatile and increasingly virtual global financial markets, whose jangling nervous system consists of metastasizing information networks whose combined traffic probably dwarfs the bitstreams of the Internet. Over three trillion dollars circulate through foreign exchange markets every diurnal spin, and a very small percentage of this frantic activity represents actual cash transactions; the rest of it zips through an abstract digital hyperspace of volatile feedback loops whose instability and interdependence make them both profitable and potentially catastrophic. Money has gone gnostic, detaching itself from the fleshy vehicle of material goods and production to become a metaphysical chaos of pure information. This is great news if you can run with the bulls, but when the economies of entire nations can be deconstructed in a matter of days, it is increasingly unclear what all this activity has to do with building a better world. As the old animists of the bush would remind us, the fact that the environment is alive doesn’t mean that it’s always got our best interests at heart.

  Or as Deleuze put it in the early 1990s: “We are [now] taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.”28 One particularly scary sidebar to this report is the postmodern return of social Darwinism, the noxious nineteenth-century philosophy that used the idea of the “survival of the fittest” to justify the robber barons and appalling working conditions of the industrial revolution. Nowadays, “selfish genes” and the amoral search for “fitness” are invoked to justify the social policies (or lack thereof) of technocapitalist evolution. Some libertarians and market animists believe that, once freed from progressive pieties and the illusions of social engineering, the market itself will act as an enormous selection mechanism, naturally sifting innovative humans from the unambitious ones, the superbrights from the slothful, the transhuman from the luckless and all-too-human.

  That such a sad doctrine could return to the wired world only indicates how desperately we need to revivify the social imagination, a revival that may very well demand a rekindling of some basic “religious” convictions about the purpose of life and the value of individual souls. When Huxley argued over half a century ago that the mechanism of evolution had passed into human society, he did so not because he thought we should start emulating the slow and sloppy excess of natural selection, with its drunken symbiosis and wayward violence. Instead, we could and should attempt to redeem that process: “As far as the mechanism of evolution ceases to be blind and automatic and becomes conscious … it becomes possible to introduce faith, courage, love of truth, goodness—in a word moral purpose—into evolution. It becomes possible, but the possibility has been and is often unrealized.”29

  Teilhard also saw man’s awakening to the reality of evolutionary processes as the opportunity for a profound social transformation. Though committed to a deterministic vision of natural evolution, one so expansive that it included the second coming of Jesus Christ as well as multicellular organisms and TV sets, Teilhard never abandoned the ethical foundations without which mysticism so easily coagulates into cos
mic cant. As Teilhard proclaimed toward the close of The Phenomenon of Man,

  The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual regeneration of the earth.30

  For the mystical paleontologist, the merciless Darwinian picture of evolution as a selfish, purposeless, and amoral process could never tell the whole story, precisely because it left out the inner spirit of humans and things, the breath and breadth of mind and soul that fills, and fulfills, creation.

  XI

  The Path Is a Network

  Mahayana legend has it that after Shakyamuni Buddha achieved his insight into the nature of things, he whipped off a phone book–sized scripture known as the Flower Garland Sutra. Easily the most cosmic and psychedelic of the writings attributed to Buddha, the Flower Garland Sutra features droves of enlightened beings, with sci-fi names like Matrix of Radiance and Space Eye, endlessly expounding the dharma in myriad buddhaworlds festooned with garlands of gems and flowers as numberless as the pores on an infinite Buddha’s skin. The sutra also unfolds perhaps the greatest vision of the network found in any religious text. According to the Hua-yen philosophers who obsessed over the sutra in seventh- and eighth-century China, the text’s immense cosmological vision is contained in the image of the Net of Indra. Here is Francis Cook’s description: