TechGnosis

‘is there a word for’ search that includes academic coinings and framings
acknowledgements are a knowledge lineage for books as a whole, citations are micro-lineage
written at y2k so that contextualises focus on mysticism
‘arbitrary but incontestable line’
‘Social structures the world over are melting down and mutating, making way for a global McVillage, a Gaian brain, and a whole heap of chaos”
technoscience as the emperor without clothes
metaphor is weak as the youth are indoctrinated YOUNG on tech now digital natives
“costume of Progress”
“post perestroika capitalism” need to search some history uh oh
“Boundaries dissolve, and we drift into the no-man’s zones between synthetic and organic life, between actual and virtual environments, between local communities and global flows of goods, information, labour and capital.”
“networked minds engineering a more fluid and invented sense of self, the boundaries of our identities are mutating as well” - emergent minds, becoming one, ego death, everything is connected
“the velocity and mutability of the times invokes a certain supernatural quality”
from perspective of late 90s and spreading New Age + mysticism + alternative medicine + Eastern influence on Western spirituality and culture
deep ecology as nature mysticism?
at this time sci-fi and fantasy converging on the supernatural, paranormal, paganism, eg ttrpgs, witch media, x-files, battlestar galactica’s religious themes
“people inhabiting all frequencies of the socioeconomic spectrum are intentionally reaching for some of the oldest navigational tools known to humankind: sacred ritual and metaphysical speculation, spiritual regimen and natural spell”
are we then headed into another age of tech mysticism? Following tech’s meddling in elections and internet mediation of lives through pandemic, now AI boom and misinformation, think this is the environment for many to rely more on these spiritual tools again? Trump’s second term and US-religisoty and US-internet-centrism
many many small examples I’ve witnessed in zillenials on eg Tumblr and TikTok
“prepackaged answers”
“meaningful frameworks for their lives, worldviews that actually deepen their willingness and ability to face the strangeness of our days.”
drawn to the “guttering flames of the premodern mind” - but do we still HAVE the premodern mind in moments unmediated or is it just so pervasive now
obsession with technology, especially technologies of communication - but aren’t all of our digital technologies technologies of communication?
there is a narrative that science and tech ‘disenchants’ the world, “forcing the ancestral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular game plans of economic development, sceptical inquiry, and material progress. ” but this isn’t the reality
mystical impulses disguised, sublimated, or shrouded in pop culture concepts
consider black mirror
industrial societies, mechanisation, “myth of the machine,” (Lewis Mumford)
“a myth that insists on the authority of technical and scientific elites, and in the intrinsic value of efficiency, control, unrestrained technological development, and economic expansion.”
formed by Christian myths - “the biblical call to conquer nature”, Protestant work ethic, call for New Jerusalem - “engineered utopia”
90s “myth of information, of electric minds and boundless databases”
“computer forecasts”
“immersive media dreams”
“planetary blip-culture woven together with global telecommunication nets.”
“the process of encoding thought and experience into a vehicle of expression [has always] influenced the changing nature of the self”
information technology enforces control over cultural narratives
“Thee moment we invent a significant new device for communication […] we partially reconstruct the self and its world,”
“technocultural hybrids” - crafted things, animated by “encoding and transmission of mind and meaning”
form and content - imposed limitations on transmission and communication
as a new interface, the infrastructure becomes part of the self
new foundation for “the social construction of reality”
reality prior constructed by social belief systems increasingly rationalised by religious institutions
each new medium of spiritual communication has become part of the message
boundaries between tech and self shift, ‘technomystical’
get past the ‘oversaturated surface of the information age’ data noise to discover its forms and archetypes
angels + aliens + digital avatars
“Once dissolved in your mindstream, TechGnosis will become a resonating hypertext, one whose links leap between machines and dreams, information and spirit, the dustbin of history and the alembics of the soul.” - all good books will do this !! any text you engage with fully becomes hypertext, any media you engage with fully hypermedia
“TechGnosis ranges rather promiscuously across the disciplinary boundaries that usually chop up the world of thought,”
“On the one hand, we’ll see that technologies can serve as the vehicles for spells, ghosts, and animist intuitions. On the other, they can provide launching pads for transcendence,”
spirit and soul as peaks and valleys or digital and analog. precise Vs expansive, variable Vs discrete.
(do we have to recreate binaries though? room for the in-between?)
“The analog world sticks to the grooves of soul—warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeality. ”
will discuss how “the discovery of electricity sparked animist ideas and occult experiences”
“spiritual counterculture of the 1960s created a liberatory and even magical relationship to media and technology, a psychedelic mode of mind-tweaking ”
datapocalypse, UFOs, Gaian minds, New World Orders, techno-utopias
skeptic voices may appear but more interested in ‘spiritual imagination’s and how it mutates with tech
“technologies of communication are always, at least potentially, technologies of the sacred, simply because the ideas and experiences of the sacred have always informed human communication.”
the ambiguity of ‘information’ allows old institutions to return ‘in secular guise’
“information expands beyond it’s reductive sense as a quantitative measure of meaning”
“groups and individuals also find room to resist and recast the dominant technological narratives of war and commerce,” ⤴️
“inject their fractured postmodern lives with digitally remastered forms of community, imagination, and cosmic connection.” ⤴️
“the computer has definitely become an idol” ⤴️
“almost as thirsty for sacrifice as the holy spirit of money itself.” ⤴️
“Since the empire of global capitalism is wagering the future of the planet on technology, we are right to distrust any myths that obscure the enormous costs of the path we’ve taken.” ⤴️
“crying in and for the wilderness” ⤴️
“the spiritual losses we have accrued in our haste to measure, exploit, and commodify the world are already beyond reckoning.” ⤴️
“we have cut ourselves off from the richness of the soul and from the deeply nourishing net works of family, community, and the local land.” ⤴️
“as both the doomsdays of the neo-Luddites and the gleaming Tomorrowlands of the techno- utopians prove, technology embodies an image of the soul, or rather a host of images: redemptive, demonic, magical, transcendent, hypnotic, alive.” ⤴️
“the question of technology, for that question has always been fringed with phantasms.” ⤴️
“Technology is neither a devil nor an angel. But neither is it simply a “tool,” a neutral extension of some rock- solid human nature. Technology is a trickster, and it has been so since the first culture hero taught the human tribe how to spin wool before he pulled it over our eyes. The trickster shows how intelligence fares in an unpredictable and chaotic world; he beckons us through the open doors of innovation and traps us in the prison of unintended consequences.” ⤴️
“the trickster’s spirit—mischievous, riddling, and thoroughly cross-wired” ⤴️
“Attempting to come to grips with the more cosmic and incorporeal dimensions of our networked world, a variety of techno-utopians, New Agers, and cybertheo rists have crafted different visions of Gaian minds and global brains. But they all owe a debt to Teilhard, whose sweeping vision of planetary consciousness can still leave one wondering if he did not indeed possess a prophetic eye.” ⤴️
“Teilhard argued the opposite: Humanity, including its art, gadgets, and religions, was part and parcel of the planet’s evolu tionary game plan.” ⤴️
“Though maintaining a measure of dualism between mind and body, Teilhard rejected the bitterness of Manichean myth and proclaimed “the spiritual value of matter.”” ⤴️
“evolution as the progressive unfolding of biochemical complexity, a process that, in turn, generated ever-greater orga nizations of consciousness.” ⤴️
“consciousness simultaneously grew into ever more novel and complex archi tectures of mind,” ⤴️
“the subjective dimension of the human brain” ⤴️
“for Teilhard, the emergence of the human psyche and its collective networks of culture and civilization were more than serendipitous froth on the surface of Darwin’s random soup.” ⤴️
“a planet that Teilhard saw, in a prescient intuition of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, as a “superorganism.”” ⤴️
“Huxley argued that “It is only through social evolution that the world-stuff can now realize radically new possibilities.” ⤴️
“groups and individuals also find room to resist and recast the dominant technological narratives of war and commerce,” ⤴️
“inject their fractured postmodern lives with digitally remastered forms of community, imagination, and cosmic connection.” ⤴️
“the computer has definitely become an idol” ⤴️
“almost as thirsty for sacrifice as the holy spirit of money itself.” ⤴️
“Since the empire of global capitalism is wagering the future of the planet on tech nology, we are right to distrust any myths that obscure the enor mous costs of the path we’ve taken.” ⤴️
“crying in and for the wilderness” ⤴️
“the spiritual losses we have accrued in our haste to measure, exploit, and commodify the world are already beyond reckoning.” ⤴️
“we have cut ourselves off from the richness of the soul and from the deeply nourishing net works of family, community, and the local land.” ⤴️
“as both the doomsdays of the neo-Luddites and the gleaming Tomorrowlands of the techno- utopians prove, technology embodies an image of the soul, or rather a host of images: redemptive, demonic, magical, transcendent, hypnotic, alive.” ⤴️
“the question of technology, for that question has always been fringed with phantasms.” ⤴️
“Technology is neither a devil nor an angel. But neither is it simply a “tool,” a neutral extension of some rock- solid human nature. Technology is a trickster, and it has been so since the first culture hero taught the human tribe how to spin wool before he pulled it over our eyes. The trickster shows how intelligence fares in an unpredictable and chaotic world; he beckons us through the open doors of innovation and traps us in the prison of unintended consequences.” ⤴️
“the trickster’s spirit—mischievous, riddling, and thoroughly cross-wired” ⤴️
“Attempting to come to grips with the more cosmic and incorporeal dimensions of our networked world, a variety of techno-utopians, New Agers, and cybertheo rists have crafted different visions of Gaian minds and global brains. But they all owe a debt to Teilhard, whose sweeping vision of planetary consciousness can still leave one wondering if he did not indeed possess a prophetic eye.” ⤴️
“Teilhard argued the opposite: Humanity, including its art, gadgets, and religions, was part and parcel of the planet’s evolutionary game plan.” ⤴️
“Though maintaining a measure of dualism between mind and body, Teilhard rejected the bitterness of Manichean myth and proclaimed “the spiritual value of matter.”” ⤴️
“evolution as the progressive unfolding of biochemical complexity, a process that, in turn, generated ever-greater organizations of consciousness.” ⤴️
“consciousness simultaneously grew into ever more novel and complex architectures of mind,” ⤴️
“the subjective dimension of the human brain” ⤴️
“for Teilhard, the emergence of the human psyche and its collective networks of culture and civilization were more than serendipitous froth on the surface of Darwin’s random soup.” ⤴️
“a planet that Teilhard saw, in a prescient intuition of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, as a “superorganism.”” ⤴️
“Huxley argued that “It is only through social evolution that the world-stuff can now realize radically new possibilities.” ⤴️
tbc