Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  Rushkoff’s belief that the planet is becoming sentient has its roots in the futurist Jerome Clayton Glenn’s contention that the Earth will soon have as many human inhabitants as there are neurons in the human brain. At this juncture, he speculates, humanity will somehow form a collective consciousness, causing the planet to “wake up.” Overlaying this notion with a New Age McLuhanism, Rushkoff sees the wiring of the world, through digital communications networks, as “the final stage in the development of Gaia.”73

  Precisely how the fiber-optic interconnection of the number of humans equivalent to the number of neurons in the human brain will give birth to a planetary consciousness is left to the reader’s imagination. Perhaps it has something to do with the chaos theory Rushkoff often uses as an anchor for his airier musings. Manuel De Landa, a postmodern philosopher whose ruminations have taken him to the far fringes of chaos theory and computer science, has observed that what chaos theorists call singularities–the transition points “where order spontaneously emerges out of chaos”—catalyze curiously lifelike behavior in nonliving matter: so-called “chemical clocks,” in which billions of molecules oscillate in synchrony, or amoeba colonies, in which cells “cooperate” to form an organism.74

  Extrapolating from these natural processes, in which “previously disconnected elements” reach a critical point where they suddenly “‘cooperate’ to form a higher-level entity,” De Landa conjectures that the out-of-control growth of the decentralized, nonlinear Internet could result in the emergence of a global artificial intelligence.75 “Past a certain threshold of connectivity,” he writes, “the membrane which computer networks are creating over the surface of the planet begins to ‘come to life.’ Independent software [programs] will soon begin to constitute even more complex computational societies in which [programs] trade with one another, bid and compete for resources, seed and spawn processes spontaneously, and so on.”76 Singularities have given rise to processes of self-organization in the biosphere, he reasons; why not in the computational ecosystem of the Internet? Quoting the computer scientists M. S. Miller and K. Eric Drexler, he concludes, “These systems ‘can encourage the development of intelligent [software programs], but there is also a sense in which the systems themselves will become intelligent.’”77

  * * *

  Indebted though it is to ideas of recent vintage such as chaos theory or the Gaia hypothesis, the techno-transcendentalism of Rushkoff’s cyberians owes much to sixties counterculture–specifically, to the scientific humanism mythologized by SF writers such as Arthur C. Clarke.

  Although it was published in 1953, Clarke’s SF classic Childhood’s End was a reference point for sixties counterculture, as evidenced in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Noting the novel among the “strange, prophetic books on Kesey’s shelf,” Wolfe links the conviction shared by Kesey and his Merry Pranksters-that they were hurtling toward “that scary void beyond catastrophe, where all, supposedly, will be possible”–to Clarke’s evocation of “the Total Breakthrough generation” that becomes “part of the Over-mind . . . leaving the last remnants of matter behind.”78

  2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose screenplay was cowritten by Clarke and the director Stanley Kubrick, takes up the theme of posthuman apotheosis. At once a psychedelic and a technological epiphany, the film evoked a journey to the center of the mind even as it realized the cosmic promise inherent in John F. Kennedy’s proclamation that America would head for the “New Frontier,” space. Passing through the hallucinogenic, light-streaked “Stargate Corridor” of the “voyage beyond the infinite” at the movie’s end, the astronaut protagonist arrives at the place where odysseys into inner and outer space meet-the realm of the numinous, where he transcends humanity altogether, metamorphosing into a godlike “Star-Child.”

  Childhood’s End and, after it, 2001 presage the cyberdelic posthuman-ism that crops up in Cyberia, where the magic mushroom-gobbling philosopher Terence McKenna asserts that evolution is poised to break free of “the chrysalis of matter . . . and then look back on a cast-off mode of being as it rises into a higher dimension.”79

  More profoundly, the cyberians’ visions of escape velocity derive from the teleologies of two thinkers whose ideas percolated into sixties counterculture: Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin’s contributions to the emerging mythos of techno-transcendentalism were, at points, strikingly congruent. McLuhan’s concept of a “global village” borne of communications technologies evolved, over time, into a vision of the “[p]sychic communal integration” of all humankind, “made possible at last by the electronic media.”80 This global cosmic consciousness is not unlike the evolutionary epiphany foretold by Teilhard de Chardin, who proclaimed the coming of an “ultra-humanity” destined to converge in an “Omega Point”—a “cosmic Christ” who is the “consummation of the evolutionary process.”81 McLuhan, a devout Roman Catholic, once observed that the psychic convergence facilitated by electronic media

  could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man. . . . I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will. . . himself. . . become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey.82

  Likewise, Teilhard de Chardin, a theologian and paleontologist who predicted the reintegration of science and religion, maintained that

  [w]e are today witnessing a truly explosive growth of technology and research, bringing an increasing mastery, both theoretical and practical, of the secrets and sources of cosmic energy at every level and in every form; and, correlative with this, the rapid heightening of what I have called the psychic temperature of the Earth. . . . We see a human tide bearing us upward with all the force of a contracting star; not a spreading tide, as we might suppose, but one that is rising: the ineluctable growth on our horizon of a true state of “ultra-humanity.”83

  The McLuhan quote is from his 1969 Playboy interview and the Teilhard de Chardin excerpt is from an essay written in 1950, but their refrains resound throughout cyberdelia. According to the New York Times Magazine, Louis Rossetto, the editor and publisher of Wired, believes that “society is organized by a ‘hive-mind consensus’ that allows humanity to evolve into ever higher forms, perhaps even fulfilling McLuhan’s prophecy to ‘make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness.’”84 Wired’s executive editor, Kevin Kelly, who has described his first visit to the Internet as “a religious experience,” calls the net and systems like it “exo-nervous systems, things that connect us up beyond-literally, phys-ically-beyond our bodies.”85 He believes that when “enough of us get together this way, we will have created a new life form. It’s evolutionary; it’s what the human mind was destined to do.”86

  Similarly, Jody Radzik, identified in a Rolling Stone feature on smart drugs and rave culture as “one of the [rave] crowd’s resident gurus,” believes that “‘[t]he planet is waking up. . . . Humans are the brain cells. The axons of the nerve cells are the telephone lines.’”87 R. U. Sirius hitches Radzik’s ideas to McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin’s rhetoric of transcendental liftoff. “I think we’re going through a process of information linkup toward the building of a global nervous system, a global brain,” he says, “which many people have seen as the inevitable first step toward getting off the planet.”

  It seems only fitting that John Perry Barlow embraces this all-pervasive paradigm. Barlow stands squarely at the junction, in cyberdelic culture, of the sixties and the nineties: A former “poet and SDS mischief-maker” who according to the New York Times “helped lead the psychedelic revolution at Wesleyan University,” he i
s a Grateful Dead lyricist, frequent Mondo 2000 contributor, and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned with the civil liberties of computer users.88 A self-described “techno-crank,” he is also, like Rushkoff, Sirius, and Radzik, an unrepentant techno-transcendentalist.

  “I’ll cut right to the chase with you,” he told me, in a phone interview. “I think that we-humanity-are engaged in a great work which is and has been, since that moment when we started abstracting reality into information and put cave paintings up in Lascaux, hardwiring collective consciousness. Not the collective unconscious, which is presumably pretty well wired already, but creating the collective organism of the human mind in one coherent simultaneous thing. I don’t know why we want to do that but it seems to me that everything we’re up to points in that direction. I think about Teilhard de Chardin a lot, [who] used to talk about something called the noosphere, which was the combined field of all [human consciousness], and how that became stronger and stronger as civilization progressed and how what God wanted was to have someone to talk to on its own level and that was what humanity was in the process of creating. That comes as close as I can to describing what I think is going on.

  “Have you ever read [the anthropologist and New Age philosopher] Gregory Bateson? A fruitful way of looking at this is the Batesonian model of mind, which simply stated says that you can’t tell me where my mind leaves off and yours takes up. There’s simply no boundary condition anywhere and there never has been. There’s a coterminous nature of human minds to begin with; it’s just a matter of making the tacit connections explicit.”

  In Cyberia, ideas related to Barlow’s are accompanied by eschatological visions of humankind being drawn inexorably toward “the chaos attractor at the end of time,” a teleological endpoint whose arrival will catalyze “the coming hyperdimensional shift into a timeless, nonper-sonalized reality.” Although much of Rushkoff’s cosmic curtain closer is borrowed from the millenarian musings of Terence McKenna, variations on this myth are all around us in SF movies and pop songs about technologically superior alien saviors (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Byrds’ “Mr. Spaceman,” David Bowie’s “Starman”). As the critic Hugh Ruppersberg points out, many of these fables rest “on the premise that advanced technology breeds not only miraculous wonders but moral redemption as well.”89

  In like fashion, Rushkoff relocates the Spiritual in the realm of the technological. He accepts on faith the notion that technologies such as psychedelic drugs “are part of the continuing evolution of the human species toward greater intelligence, empathy, and awareness.”90 Conceding the new, digital mysticism’s unfortunate “inability to tackle everyday, real-world strife,” he is nonetheless confident that its upgrade of sixties beliefs is preparing the way for humankind’s “great leap into hyperspace.”91

  This is techno-transcendentalism’s version of born-again Christianity’s “rapture,” in which true believers are lifted out of the mundane, into the parting clouds. Like so many other millenarian prophecies before it, the cyberdelic vision of a techno-mystical apotheosis in the there and then diverts public discourse from the political and socioeconomic inequities of the here and now.

  Cyberia provides ample evidence of this dynamic. Rushkoff thrills to cyberian video art in which Gulf War bombing runs are merely another special effect, collaged together with “virtual reality scenes, and even old sitcoms.” A Mondo groupie who drops acid before undergoing an abortion is applauded for her “unflinching commitment to experiencing and understanding her passage through time.” Homeless “mole people” alleged to dwell in the “forgotten tunnels of New York’s subway system” are romanticized as an example of the “cyberian ideal” of insurgent subcultures hidden in the cracks of the power structure. And a homeless man dragging a cardboard box isn’t foraging for shelter, he’s engaged in “social hacking.”92

  Naïve, self-serving pronouncements such as these are commonplaces among cyberians. Their siren song of nineties technophilia and sixties transcendentalism seduces the public imagination with the promise of an end-of-the-century deus ex machina at a time when realistic solutions are urgently needed. The cyberians’ otherworldly trapdoor assumes various guises, among them the wiring of the human race into a collective consciousness; the technopagan ability to dream up a “designer reality” through a judicious application of the knowledge that “we have chosen our reality arbitrarily”; and the “chaos attractor at the end of time.”

  In truth, cyberdelic rhetoric represents what Walter Kirn has called “an eruption of high-tech millenarianism-a fin de siècle schizoid break induced by sitting too long at the screen.”93 Ironically, Kirn is something of a mentor to Rushkoff, who thanks him in Cyberia’s acknowledgments. Rushkoff and his fellow cyberians would do well to heed Kirn’s admonition that

  [w]hat the [cyberians] appear fated to learn from their ventures into pure electronic consciousness is that ultimate detachment is not the same as freedom, escape is no substitute for liberation and rapture isn’t happiness. The sound-and-light show at the end of time, longed for by these turned-on nerds, seems bound to disappoint.94

  Deus ex Machina: Technopaganism

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  –Arthur C. Clarke, SF novelist and science writer95

  When magic becomes scientific fact we refer to it as medicine or astronomy.

  -Anton LaVey, occultist96

  Technopaganism permeates cyberdelia. And while it informs the techno-transcendentalism of Mondo 2000 and Rushkoff’s cyberians, it has other stories to tell, beyond dreams of a designer reality or escape velocity.

  Technopaganism can be simply if superficially defined as the convergence of neopaganism (the umbrella term for a host of contemporary polytheistic nature religions) and the New Age with digital technology and fringe computer culture.97 Erik Davis, a critic of cyberculture and “longtime participant-observer in the Pagan community,” defines technopagans as “a small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism.”98 He estimates their numbers at roughly one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand in the United States, made up “almost exclusively” of bohemian or middle-class whites.

  Psychologically, technopaganism represents an attempt to come to existential terms with the philosophical changes wrought by twentieth-century science. Philosophically, it bespeaks a popular desire to contest the scientific authorities whose “objective” consensus is the final, irrefutable verdict, in our culture, on what is true and what is not, despite the fact that most of us must accept such pronouncements on faith. Finally, it evidences a widespread yearning to find a place for the sacred in our ever more secular, technological society.

  From the Enlightenment to the present, instrumental reason, armed with the scientific method, has systematically dismantled much of the spiritual worldview, replacing it with the cosmology of science. With rationalism and materialism encroaching on all sides, those who feel impoverished by the withering away of the Spiritual have adopted the strategy, consciously or not, of legitimating spiritual beliefs in scientific terms.

  Technopaganism is a manifestation of this strategy, although it is many other things, too. Like the other cyberdelic subcultures discussed in this chapter, technopaganism straddles nineties cyberculture and sixties counterculture. Both neopaganism and the nascent New Age entered the mainstream in the sixties through the counterculture’s flirtation with Eastern mysticism and the occult–astrology, the tarot, witchcraft, and magick. (Practitioners of ceremonial magick use the archaic spelling in order to distinguish their rituals from stage magic.)

  Technopaganism crystalizes most dramatically in the use of the personal computer in neopagan rituals or magical practices. More prosaically, it bubbles up in the UseNet newsgroup Alt. Pagan and on special-interest BBSs given over to neopagan and New Age concerns, such as De
us ex Machina in Glendale, Arizona; the Quill and Inkpot BBS: Ritual Magick Online! in Passaic, New Jersey; Modem Magick in El Cajon, California; the Sacred Grove in Seattle; the Crystal Cave in Colorado Springs; the Magick Lantern in Denver; and Jersey City’s BaphoNet (a pun on Baphomet, the satanic goat who presides over the witches’ Sabbath).

  Many of these systems employ echomail, a technology that links discussion groups on widely dispersed BBSs into a communal conference. BBSs, reports Julian Dibbell in Spin, “are showing signs of becoming the new temples of the information age.”99 He notes,

  Throughout history, spirituality has been a site-specific affair. . . . So what’s become of the sacred in a time when instantaneous communication makes a joke of the very notion of geography? It turns node-specific, that’s what. Nodes are the electronic network’s version of places-any spot where two or more lines of communication intersect.100

  A verse from the New Testament springs to mind: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20).

  Technopaganism is embodied, too, in Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY, with a long o), a loosely knit organization that has evolved since its founding in 1981 from a fan club for the technopagan band Psychic TV into a cultish anticult. TOPY incorporates William S. Burroughs’s ideas about social control and guerrilla information war, the hermetic teachings of the English occultists Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, and, most important, the complementary notions that magick is a technology and technology is magick. According to “Lurker Below (ashton),” a technopagan posting an electronic message in one of the WELL’s discussion groups, “Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth . . . [is] dedicated [to] thee establishment ov a functional system ov magick and a modern pagan philosophy without recourse to mystification, gods, or demons”; it relies, instead, on “thee implicit powers ov thee human brain” in its explorations of “neuro-mancy, cybershamanism, information theory, or magick.”101 (The idiosyncratic spellings are a TOPY convention.)