Cyber Tribes of the Global Village
by Paul Mitchell
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 62
Spring/Summer 1998/1999

Introduction

At the frontiers of cybertechnology there are tribes of the global village with names such as "techgnostics" and "extropians", seeking through technology a personal and or global salvation. Paul Mitchell talks to San Francisco-based writer Erik Davis about what's happening at this crossroads of the information superhighway.

Paul Mitchell
Paul Mitchell is Associate Editor of Zadok Perspectives and editor of the e-zine www.shootthemessenger.com.au in which a version of this article first appeared.

ERIK DAVIS STANDS AT the crossroads of the information superhighway, holding a map of the spiritual history of humanity and thumbing a lift. But he is most interested in the present, the frontier where cyber-culture meets spirituality. He sees links in our cultural moment between second and third century Gnosticism and what he calls a "new Gnosticism", or "techgnosticism", present in those dreams cyber-practitioners have of a humanity free of its physical moorings.

Davis's on-line essays (http://www.levity.com/figment/index.html) take the form of correspondence from some border war raging between earth-bound humanity and its longing for transcendence; a longing expressed in technological developments but haunted by religious phantasms.

It is to these issues that Davis has devoted his recent book, Techgnosis: magic, spirit and religion in a technological age (Harmony Books, 1998). The title implies parallels between ancient Gnosticism and the dualism of certain technophiles, though Davis himself avoids these labels. "I'm neither a 'new Gnostic' or a 'new anti-Gnostic'," he says. "But I see the debate about Gnosticism within techno-culture as a kind of mirror of a lot of the issues we face . . . In my work, I tie together the 'new Gnostic' quality prevalent in how we think about the world with the history of Gnosticism . . . and the Gnostic dream."

Davis sees techno-culture's Gnostic threads as a useful way of using ancient myths to understand present cultural transformation, yet he parts company with the 'techgnostics' on the value of physicality. He sees as retrogressive their fear of embodiment and their unwillingness to see the new world of cyberspace within the context of our material existence. "In order to navigate the next century," he says, without Star Trek undertones, "we absolutely must begin with our experience of radical embeddedness and embodiment in this physical matrix."

But these criticisms of 'techgnostics' are neither those of a monotheist (he has in the past described himself as a "long-time participant-observer in the Pagan community") nor, clearly, a Luddite. Information is the rocket via which techgnostics would launch themselves into virtual heaven. Trouble is, Davis says, it's a rocket without any fuel. He sees a paradox in the 'techgnostic' hope of uploading the self to a computerised realm or 'techno-sphere'. How, he asks, can an emergent property of a system of neuro-connections be placed on-line?

Davis believes we live in strange days indeed when such a possibility propels individuals to start thinking in transcendental terms. "Information is a kind of new cosmological actor that has entered onto the stage", he says-though it doesn't share matter or energy's objective reality, he adds-"and the more you believe in the reality of that actor the more you are able to reconceive the world in terms of transcendentalism, with all its flavours of overcoming this dying animal to which we're attached."

"One of the worrisome aspects of this cultural moment," he concludes, "is not just that we're being dominated by valueless information flows, but that we are losing even the ability to think of a category of thought like wisdom. It becomes almost like a fairytale word."

This emerging 'collective wisdom' of some sections of the cyber community, that says new technologies can not only solve humanity's problems but eventually make the body redundant is, for Davis, nothing less than a religious faith. "The virtualisation of the economy is an instance of this kind of techno-Utopian view," he says, noting the lack of attention mainstream economists give to ecological considerations as part of their assessment of the value or health of a particular economy. But, he says, the process is amplified by new technology, most notably the 24-hour-a-day virtual markets, with money generated by "little blips of light shuttling between computer systems across the globe".

"If you place the postmodern information economy alongside a recent study that said seven out of ten biologists now believe we are in the midst of mass extinctions that rival the death of the dinosaurs, you get a sense that 'Gnostic information power' is alive in whatever allows us to believe these blips of light can have value that will outlast concern for the physical biosphere."

'Techgnostics' are unlikely to agree on this relationship between the degradation of the biosphere and the new technologies they proselytise. They are also unlikely to see their search for a digitised nirvana in the same stream as humanity's perennial religious search. But Davis cites 'extropians' as a clear example of the religious dimensions of techno-utopians.

To: Part 2