Escape Velocity (8 page)

Naive, 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 siecle schizoid break induced by sitting too long at the screen."^^ Ironically, Kirn is something of a mentor to Rushkoff, who thanks him in CybeMs 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.^"*

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Deus ex Machino: Technopaganism

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-Arthur C. Clarke, SF novelist and science writer'^^

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

—Anton LaVey, occultisf^

Technopaganism permeates cyberdelia. And while it informs the techno-transcendentalism of Mondo 2000 and RushkofFs 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.*^^ 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."^^ 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 impov-

erished 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 Deus 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."^^ 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.'°^

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

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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."'^' (The idiosyncratic spellings are a TOPY convention.)

Technopaganism also surfaces in the electro-bacchanalian urges that animate raves, where conventions are momentarily suspended in the social centrifuge whipped up by sweaty, seething dancers; punishingly loud, unrelentingly rhythmic "house" or "techno" electronic dance music; and the drug ecstasy, widely regarded as an aphrodisiac. Cultured in the British techno-hippie musical genre known as "acid house" in the summer of 1989 (dubbed the second "Summer of Love" by British journalists), the rave scene soon spread to California. In San Francisco, the traditions represented by Haight-Ashbury and Silicon Valley were intermixed by the rave phenomenon, creating what the Psychic TV frontman Genesis P-Orridge calls "hyperdelic" culture. Its sound track, says P-Orridge, is high-tech

trance music, where people shake and spin until they reach a state of hyperventilation and psychedelic alpha-wave experience. . . . They get completely tranced-out. . . from that primal and physical excess. So there's this whole pagan energizing thing going on as a result of this free-form dancing to this high-tech shamanism.'°2

On their record Boss Drum (1992), the English techno-trance/ cyberpop duo the Shamen fashion an archaic futurism from rapped vocals, fizzing synthesizers, hyperactive drum machine, and the ruminations of Terence McKenna, whose eschatological humor goes over big with

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those whose neurons have been permanently cross-wired by psychoactive substances. In the song "Re: Evolution," which features his overdubbed remarks as its vocal track, McKenna offers an illuminating reading of rave culture:

The emphasis in . . . rave culture on physiologically compatible rhythms is really the rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound, [the realization] that sound-especially percussive sound-can actually change neurological states. Large groups of people getting together in the presence of this kind of music are creating a telepathic community ... an end-of-the-millennium culture that is actually summing up Western civilization and pointing us in an entirely different direction. We're going to arrive in the third millennium in the middle of an archaic revival, which will mean ... a new art, a new social vision, a new relationship to nature and to ego.

Many raves feature "chill-out" rooms where revelers exhausted by the "psychedelic alpha-wave experience" can relax, cocooned in the gauzy, billowing synthesizers of "ambient" electronic instrumental music. Much of this music exudes a technopagan aura: Ritual Ground (1993), by Solitaire, features moody instrumentals-waves of shimmering synthesizer washing over didgeridoo and ethnic percussion-with names like "Runes" and "In the Forest of Ancient Light"; Mystery School (1994) by the Ambient Temple of Imagination features a booklet covered with flying saucers, illustrations from the Crowley Thoth tarot deck, and songs whose titles-"Magickal Child," "Thelema"-refer to Crowley's teachings. The liner notes, which include references to magick, shamanism, and alchemy, end with the somewhat Star Trekian prediction that "humanity is destined to join the interdimensional Galactic Federation as our planet evolves to a higher level ofbeing."'^^

Technopaganism leaves its stamp on cyber-rock and "industrial" music, too. Cyberpunx (1989), by Rodney Orpheus's band the Cassandra Complex, is technopagan cyber-rock. On one hand, Orpheus conjures Crowley's goatish sexuality, saturnalian revelry, and prankish sacrilege (he is, in fact, a member of a Crowleyite occult order). On the other, he evokes

the human-machine interface and video game violence of cyberpunk fiction. The cover of Cyberpunx features a computer graphic depicting a Top Gun hotshot in a futuristic cockpit, his eyes hidden by the insect carapace of a virtual reality helmet; a nearby screen displays a suffering Christ crowned w^ith thorns.

The songs on Man-Amplified (1992) by the industrial band Clock DVA consist of minimalist blipmusic soldered together from "mechanical noises and machine language" and wielded to visions of "technogeist," the spokesman Adi New^ton's term for the anticipated moment w^hen the computer becomes "a parapsychological instrument for the direct projection of thoughts and emotions."'^'* In a sense, argues New^ton, "[ojccult technology is already w^ith us. The computer is really a 20th century oracle vv^e employ to forecast the future. . . . Science . . . has alw^ays [sought] to simulate the occult, gain control over nature. . . . [SJcience is now discovering what the mystics already knew."'^^

Technopaganism haunts the mainstream, as well, in the computer game Myst, which takes place in what the New York Times reporter Edward Rothstein characterizes as "a world in which ordinary objects are the magical products of an advanced technology"-a dreamscape where "archaic machines" make surreal sense in a "pastoral paradise."'^^ Myst transports users to an island lush with photorealistic forests (the tree bark was digitally scanned) and lulled by the murmur of wind, water, and atmospheric music. Wandering through exquisitely detailed computer-graphic scenes-a cluster of Greek columns, a planetarium, a wood-paneled library, a spaceship out of a late-night rocket opera, all of them eerily empty-Myst players search for clues to solve a somewhat metaphysical mystery.

Writing in the Village Voice, Erik Davis calls Myst "a metafiction that blends technology and magic, tips its hat to Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Umberto Eco."'^^ Ironically, the CD-ROM game was created by two churchgoing Christians whose father is a preacher, a fact that leads Davis to make much of the game's spiritual themes and symbolism, specifically the pivotal role played by magical books. Even so, he argues, the technology that made the game possible invites a Faustian interpretation. To Davis, the computer-graphic sorcery that enabled the creators to conjure worlds within worlds inside a computer is "a clearly demiurgic magic that heretically usurps God's role as creator.'"^^

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What all of these examples-Dibbell's nodes, TOPY's "cybersha-manism," P-Orridge's "hyperdelic" raves, Newton's vision of the computer as "a 20th-century oracle," Myst's seamless union of mysticism and technology-have in common is the technopagan tendency to relocate the sacred in the technosphere, to populate cyberspace w^ith superhuman agencies. The voodoo cyber-cosmology of William Gibson's novels is a case in point. Neuromancer, Gibson's first, stars an outlaw^ hacker named Case who interfaces neurologic ally with cyberspace, plugging his nervous system into the global virtual reality where data is stored in the form of palpable illusions. The title is of course a pun on necromancer, a sorcerer who raises the dead; Case engages in the cyberpunk equivalent of such conjurations, effectively leaving his body to roam the otherworldly realm of cyberspace, with the computer-generated ghost of a dead hacker as his guide. As Norman Spinrad perceptively notes. Case is a near-future

magician whose wizardry consists of directly interfacing. . . with . . . the computer sphere, manipulating it imagistically (and being manipulated by it) much as more traditional shamans interact imagistically with more traditional mythic realms via drugs or trance states.'°^

In Gibson's second and third novels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, cyberspace is inhabited by artificial intelligence (AI) programs that have evolved into something rich and strange: a pantheon of voodoo deities known as the loa. In a technopagan variation on the scenario imagined by De Landa, the interaction of autonomous software programs has given rise to artificial entities that assume the appearances and attributes of voodoo gods. "In all the signs your kind have stored against the night," explains an AI in Mona Lisa Overdrive, "the paradigms of voudou proved most appropriate."''^ In Count Zero, the Finn, a dealer in exotic, often contraband technologies, elaborates:

The last seven, eight years, there's been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. . . . Thrones and dominions . . . Yeah, there's things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see?