by Erik Davis
The network path does not swerve from psychology, from natural and human history, from cognitive science, anthropology, or nanotechnology. Science and engineering are not enemies—how could they be? The disenchanted investigation of empirical and psychological phenomena, the canny cocreation of an evolving world, the death of (our conceptions about) God—all of these are stations, or rather nodes, of the path. The network path only blossoms when we accept that we will not transcend the sometimes agonizing disjunctions between our various structures of belief and practice. We will not simply sew up the conflicts between faith and skepticism, the stones and the stories, the incandescence of the absolute and the mundane absurdity of an everyday life growing more bizarre and frightful by the minute. Instead, these tensions and conflicts become dynamic and creative forces, calling us to face others with an openness that does not seek to control or assimilate them to whatever point of view we happen to hold. By replacing the need for a common ground with an acceptance and even celebration of our common groundlessness, the network path might creatively integrate these gaps and lacunae without always trying to fill them in. You can no more banish the noise on this network than you can banish the void from a cup—nor would you want to. You just attend to the chaos that comes until something unexpected blooms: a dilation in the mind, a dawning in the heart, and a shared breathing with beings so deep it reaches down to sinew.
How can I speak of such things in this cynical day and age, when the market is god and the enormity of the world’s ills seems matched only by our incapacity to deal with them? Unmoored from folkways, grasping after figments, addicted to the novelty and compulsions of a hyperactive society, we drift in overdrive through the mounting wreckage. Amidst all the distracting noise and fury, the hoary old questions of the human condition—Who am I? Why am I here? How do I face others? How do I face the grave?—sound distant and muffled, like fuzzy conundrums we have learned to set aside for more pragmatic and profitable queries. Waking up is hard to do when we rush about like sleepwalkers on speed. I suspect that unless we find clearings within our little corners of space-time, such questions will never arise in all their implacable awe. Media machines will no more deliver these pregnant voids than the purchase of a sports utility vehicle will unfurl one of those open roads they show on the idiot box. Such clearings lie off-road, off the grid, offline. They are beyond instrumentality. They are the holes in the net.
On the other hand, the fact that technology has already catalyzed so much soul-searching suggests how mischievous and sprightly a role it plays in the mutual unfolding of ourselves and the world. As I announced at the outset, technology is a trickster. We blame technologies for things that arise from our social structures and skewed priorities; we expect magic satisfactions from machines that they simply cannot provide; and we remain consistently hoodwinked by their unintended consequences. Technologies have their own increasingly alien agenda, and human concerns will survive and prosper only when we learn to treat them, not as slaves or simple extensions of ourselves, but as unknown constructs with whom we must make creative alliances and wary pacts. This is particularly the case with information machines. Whatever social, ecological, or spiritual renewal we might hope for in the new century, it will blossom in the context of communicating technologies that already gird the earth with intelligence and virtual light. Prometheus is hell-bent in the cockpit, but Hermes has snuck into Mission Control, and the matrix is ablaze with entangling tongues.
Afterword (2004)
Terence McKenna, the cultural theorist who affixed his swirling psychedelic thumbprint on the technocultural debate throughout the 1990s, used to argue that time is a struggle between habit and novelty. Novelty, he defined somewhat nebulously, was the density of connection or complexity of a system; the more complex a system is, the more novelty it engenders. McKenna saw the universe as a kind of “novelty-conserving engine”: novelty is produced, gets set in historical concrete, and becomes the basis of further transformation. We spiral up. Multicellular life eventually becomes the basis for the Indian railway system or the Human Genome Project or Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. But the process is not perpetual. In McKenna’s scenario, the fluctuating wave of novelty that is human history ultimately reaches a limit point, a “singularity” in the words of more mainstream futurists like Ray Kurzweil. At that point, the human design process—which includes culture, technology, and the manipulation of matter—achieves a sort of infinite velocity: everything becomes linked with everything else, or matter becomes mind, or something like that. For McKenna, this transcendental object radiates its influence into the past like a tractor beam, so that the increasing rate of change and the sense of liminal confusion so many of us feel is actually a sign that the rug is already being wrenched from beneath our feet.
I do not take McKenna’s millennialist myth literally, at least most of the time. But it certainly embodied the secret thrill of the 1990s, when an upsurge of technocultural mutation remade America and, to some extent, the world. It is a mistake to reduce this phase of technoculture to a “bubble,” that economic metaphor that now dominates—in the insidious way of economic metaphors—our cultural memory of the time. That decade was more than a shell game of smirking geeks and IPO pyramid schemes: it was an epochal convergence of new media, global flows of information, and an innovative, boundary-dissolving multi-culture of hacking, sampling, and hybrid experimentation—a culture just beginning to lick its posthuman lips. As the human design process plunged into the virtual space of computers, the space of possibility itself expanded. New worlds, from online multiplayer computer games to CAD simulations to mathematical domains of chaos and complexity, grew on silicon. The rhetoric of science fiction entered mainstream discourse, academic theory, business strategy, and popular culture. The economy itself came to resemble a vast “possibility machine,” as investors placed bets on possible futures hovering in the convergent etherspace defined by new software, new hardware, and the fruitful properties that emerge—in that most nineties of verbs—from ever more complex and intensified networks of money, algorithms, and human desire.
TechGnosis was written on the crest of this wave of novelty. Rather than make canny investments (silly me!), I used the highs and heights afforded by this uplift to ask certain questions: how is technology changing—dare we say it—the soul? How do media machines—those chattering products of scientific rationality and its quest for efficiency and profit—mold our visions and twilight drifts, our nightmares and secret gods? How does it feel to find ourselves ghosts in a dreaming machine?
In approaching these questions, I didn’t buy the idea that the past cannot help orient us in our unprecedented and deeply confusing world. Indeed, the very vertigo of our moment compels a search for roots, which partly explains the continual appeal, at this late date, of nationalism, traditionalism, and the “eternal verities” of religion—not to mention those curious subcultures that fetishistically resurrect Civil War battles and big band couture. But there are many traditions in the world, many religions, many hidden nations. Instead of taking the traditionalist approach, and digging for solid bulwarks against the sea-change at our doors, I wanted my underground history to deepen, indeed complexify, our conundrum. That’s partly why it’s a thorny, associative, almost ridiculously dense text. I wanted to simulate a hypertext, to throw up as many ideas, images, gods, and stories as possible, hoping that, like shards of a broken mirror, they might offer us glittering but necessarily fragmented reflections of our deepening posthuman condition.
For make no mistake: the combined forces of capital, technical innovation, and desire are continuing to drive us toward an apotheosis of technical mediation. Today the accelerating perceptual technologies of media are on a collision course with the scientific understanding of how the human nervous system produces the real-time matrix we experience as ordinary space-time. As we amplify our knowledge of the neural basis of consciousness, we will see artists, marketers, and ideologues of all stripes at
tempt to shape the immediate contents of consciousness with ever finer and more crafty techniques. One fears that the day is not so distant where we will find ourselves waltzing with Tom Cruise through the invasive personalized ads of Minority Report. The digital universe is no longer “in there:” it is everywhere. So though today’s special effects-driven entertainments, computer games, and theme park rides continue to draw us ever deeper into virtual realities, the real action is in the “meatspace” that still surrounds us. Already, the convergence of wireless technology, cognitive science, GPS, and surveillance technologies are creating, or at least suggesting, a new form of information totality, a sentient landscape that turns us all into animists again.
The intensification of mediation does not stop with the tools conventionally referred to as “media.” Genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and the explosion of new materials also suggest that matter itself is finalizing its transformation into a programmable medium, a plastic vehicle of design and experiment and control. It is extremely difficult to imagine where this revolutionary transformation will lead, especially since the logic that drives so much of this development is clearly “unsustainable,” which in this context is just a polite term for suicidal. And so our poor beleaguered earth and its dying biota have become the final frontier of the human design process. Though it is presumptuous to assume we are facing apocalypse, the intensification of media, technology, and globalization may look a hell of a lot like the end of history.
Somehow, though, the novelty of media tech no longer packs its former punch. The collapse of the dot-com bubble put the visionaries back in their padded rooms, and this “return to the real” was cemented by 9/11. Utopian euphoria and posthuman giddiness are out; bottom lines and familiar brands are in. Instead of greedy boundary dissolution, we have seen, in American politics at least, the restoration of anxiously defended boundaries: nation, intellectual property, the Christian religion, and the sober but otherwise sleepwalking self. Even academics and intellectuals, formerly taken by all manner of discursive diseases, have staged a sort of Revenge of the Enlightenment, fomenting a new distrust of the more irrational, surreal, and visionary dimensions of the contemporary project.
This loss of technocultural euphoria, and especially the enthusiasm surrounding the Internet, was thoroughly predictable. One of my goals in TechGnosis was to show how, over and over again, technical innovations in modern communications technology open up a temporary crack in social reality. This smooth, undefined space blooms for a spell with all manner of dreams and utopias, some infused with profound mythic imaginings and spiritual wants. This crack gradually gets filled with business as usual; dreamspace becomes marketspace. The Internet and digital media have followed this timeworn pattern.
But in our contemporary case, dreamspace has also become, well, something of a nightmare. Even creepy developments like brain fingerprinting and psychoactive neural implants can’t hold a candle to more tangible terrors: melting ice caps, the collapse of the fuel economy, dirty nukes, John Ashcroft’s mitts on your secret shames. The “attention economy” of the 1990s hasn’t disappeared—it has simply mutated into a fear economy. Rather than deflate the space of possibility that defined much of the previous decade, the fear economy instead infuses that space with dread. Possibility is now linked to fear. That’s the logic of terrorism, of course, but it has also been the logic of America’s anti-terrorism. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, you could not turn on the radio or open up a newspaper without encountering some pundit or professional body articulating, in sometimes juicy technical detail, how a madman or a troop of jihad jockeys might unleash mayhem by exploiting weaknesses in everything from viral DNA to sewer systems to air traffic control. While this explosion of techno-thriller plot points was motivated by actual threats, it cannot be said to have been entirely rational. America continued to plumb the space of possibility, but shifted its focus from utopia to Dis, from the boom to ka-boom!
This darkside futurism almost immediately became an instrument of statecraft, as America’s triumphant neo-conservatives sought to manufacture consensus through fear. Paranoid futurism also helped justify the Bush doctrine, inspiring the preemptive logic that drew the United States into Iraq. This logic did not rely on rational debate or, as has become perfectly clear, on truth. Instead, it relied, in its public face anyway, on the manipulation of imaginative possibility. That is, though terrible things have always hovered in possibility space, those terrors became so imaginable, the threat so “real,” as to justify a new order of American power and control, one that violently nips many other possibilities in the bud. Following the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration continued to play the game domestically, as if Americans had forgotten the lesson of the boy who cried “wolf.” How many times did the FBI warn Americans of heightened threat, color-coded like M&Ms, only to ask that we go about our daily business? It was a classic crazy-making double-bind—“perception management” designed to make us cross-eyed. In the occult terms that underlie more of our modern media than we suppose, it was pure sorcery. Sorcerers derive their power, at least in part, from the rhetorical manipulation of images and emotions that compose the nightside of the psyche, and the Bush administration brought the shamanic stagecraft to an entirely new level of soul disturbance.
The sense of psychic dislocation that followed 9/11 also reflected the intensely religious forces suddenly unleashed on the world stage. On the surface level, we experienced the religious dimension of the conflict as a disjunction: the secular democratic West faced an intolerant Islam whose most extreme imaginings—the fragrant houris jumping the bones of martyrs in heaven, for example—struck many as totally delusional. But beneath the secular surface, the Bush administration was running its own scriptural scenarios. Most concrete were the tactical alliances made between Israeli hawks and fundamentalist Christians, who believe that the continued presence of Jews in biblical Israel is a necessary precondition for the glorious end of the world. More pervasive than this specifically apocalyptic agenda was the government’s indirect message—in turn nakedly delivered from pulpits across the land—that the conflict in the Middle East was a kind of crusade, that the enemy was not just Saddam or Osama but, in the immortal words of the Pentagon intelligence officer Lieutenant General William Boykin, “a guy called Satan.” The rest of us looked on in horror as the children of Abraham staged a spiritual war between two different Great Satans.
The soul disturbance of America was also deepened by Bush’s expansion of the secret or “shadow” government. As the administration placed more of its plans and doings beyond public accountability, a cavernous crevice opened up between the surface level of media theater and the literally unseen forces working behind the scenes: oil buddies, guilds of torturers, Biblical literalists with apocalyptic bets on a Zionist Israel. These two levels always characterize political power to some degree, but the Bush regime widened the gap into a chasm. As they did so, a growing sense of unreality began to pervade the middle ground of consensus reality. The attempt to understand “what’s really going on” moved into an almost dreamlike space of projection, pulsing with archetypes and fantasies, as ever more baroque networks of conspiracy and subterfuge—both real and imagined, and sometimes both—took root in the gap. Nor did it help that one of our main research tools—the Internet—is a veritable conspiracy machine, hyperlinking fact, rumor, delusion, and deliberate distortion. Surfing for truth, one found oneself spinning toward the abyss of paranoia: Manchurian candidates, genetically engineered psychoactive “vaccines,” and all manner of mischief about dummy planes and burning towers. If you devote a day or two perusing the more rigorous and cogent online critiques of the official account of 9/11, I suspect you will come away, at the very least, a bit rattled. As General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the congressional 9/11 panel in 2004, “We fought many phantoms that day.”
Even though most of these conspiratorial phantoms are false, even delusional, th
ey are nonetheless part of today’s political imagination. They animate its margins and shadows, the way that pornography secretly animates fashion ads and MTV; when the secret shadows grow, they grow as well. That’s why many progressive paranoids almost breathed a sigh of relief when the seal for John Poindexter’s secretive Information Awareness Office peeped through the veils of the Pentagon. There it was on our Web browsers: a pyramid topped with a massive Masonic eye, blazing like some scatter-beam ray gun from Sirius onto our poor passive planet. The fact that this evil genius icon cloaked little more than DARPA vaporware did not undermine its power as an almost pagan symbol of spectral control. At the time, many drew connections between the IAO and the horrible Patriot Act; while false on a literal level, these connections were true on an imaginal one. The fact that Poindexter’s dream agency was devoted to Total Information Awareness was almost too perfect, because the shift toward shadow politics has only been magnified by the tightening loop of information technology and consciousness. Even before 9/11, the rapid intensification of global monitoring and surveillance technologies had already engineered a new sense of self; on some deep instinctive level, we now know that we are always being watched.
So instead of Marshall McLuhan’s global village, we get the global panopticon. But even McLuhan believed that an electronic culture of global citizenship would face some tremendous growing pains—and that is how we must see the current crisis if we are not to succumb to it: as very narrow straits with a wider world beyond. In a bit of sci-fi that seems more prophetic now than when I first quoted it in TechGnosis, McLuhan wrote that, with the coming of planetary electronic culture, “we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.”1 Paranoid politics and the Gaian mind are two sides of the same coin, spinning like our planet through the cosmos, everything still possible because everything’s still moving.
