Escape Velocity (10 page)

Again, the street finds its own uses for things. As Davis puts it, "The cyberpunk ethos has a spiritual dimension." He calls technopagan practices such as TV magick "poaching," a term borrowed from critical theory. The cultural critic Constance Penley defines poaching as the unsanctioned, idiosyncratic interpretation of books, TV shows, and other cultural "texts"-"an impertinent 'raid' on the literary 'preserve' that takes away only those things that seem useful or pleasurable to the reader."'^^ Technopagans poach on cyberculture, suggests Davis, making off" with technologies and scientific concepts that are then incorporated into a "resacralized," reen-chanted worldview. In Davis's eyes, such poaching "produces a very pragmatic spirituality that involves the immediate experience of life . . . which lends itself much more richly to computers and computer culture [than most belief systems]."

Like cyberpunk's outlaw hacking and punk robotics, technopagan and New Age poaching have obvious political connotations. They act out a subconscious resentment engendered by science's unquestioned cultural authority and give voice to the desire to democratize that endeavor-to make the stitching together of cultural explanations of the nature of the universe a more communal enterprise. "In its embattled attempts to practice a science pirated and reappropriated from the experts," writes the cultural

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critic Andrew Ross, "the New Age community feeds off the popular desire for more democratic control of information and resources"-a pronouncement that holds equally true for technopagan poaching.'^^

Technopaganism conspires with recent philosophical challenges to scientific authority on the basis that, while supposedly objective, it often aids and abets cultural bias or political ideology. Much of this enterprise has been carried out by feminists, multiculturalists, and poststructuralists under the rubric of what has been called "social constructionism," which states that science, like all cultural phenomena, is socially determined-blinkered by the biases of the society that produced it and dedicated, consciously or not, to the validation of that worldview. In a consummate irony, this critique unwittingly allies itself with "creationism" and other fundamentalist Christian critiques of science as a "secular humanist" conspiracy bent on usurping religion's power to mcike sense of the world around us.

At the same time, technopaganism is concomitant with science's own demolition of traditional notions of universal truth and objective reality, a process hastened along by Godel's incompleteness theorem, a cornerstone of modern mathematics that the mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy defines as the assertion that "there exist meaningful mathematical statements that are neither provable nor disprovable, now or ever . , , because the very nature of logic renders them incapable of resolution.'"^^ The philosophical implications of Godel's theorem are "devastating," according to Hardy. The mathematician and cyberpunk novelist Rudy Rucker, who delights in such bombshells, asserts, "Godel has shown that the fundamental logical notion of'truth' has no rational definition."'^' What's worse, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, a precept of quantum mechanics, leads to the inescapable conclusion that the very act of observation affects the state of the phenomenon observed, an axiom that plays havoc with the notion of objective truth. "The age of absolutes, if it ever really existed, is now most definitely and permanently passe," concludes the mathematician John L. Casti. "Einstein's work buried once and for all the concepts of absolute space and time, while Heisenberg shot down the belief in absolutely precise measurement. Godel, of course, stamped paid to the quaint and curious ideas of absolute proof and truth.'" ^^

Philosophical upheavals such as these, from within and without the scientific community, have radically revised the rationalist/materialist world-

view, giving w^ay to a quantum reality in w^hich physics often borders on metaphysics. Technopagans place their faith in the liquid indeterminacy of such a reality, hopeful that it might at least accommodate, and one day even validate, their cosmology

Ironically, technopaganism simultaneously embodies the pervasive anxiety engendered by a reality rendered increasingly incoherent by science and ever more alienating by technology. In an essay on "Cyber-Superstition," Bruce Sterling considers our relationship to the computer as a "Magic Machine":

Computers are fearsome creations, redolent of mystery and power. Even to software engineers and hardware designers, computers are, in some deep and basic sense, hopelessly baffling. . . . Machines that perform millions of operations per second are simply far too complex for any human brain to fully comprehend.'^^

Furthermore, notes Gary Chapman, a former executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, these unfathomable, mercurial devices have hidden themselves in everything from household appliances to heavy machinery and are rapidly assuming control of the technosphere:

Embedded microprocessors that help run everything from cars to coffee makers to airliners are even more widespread than personal computers, but they are largely invisible to the casual viewer. Many people probably have a vague idea that there is a computer under the hood of the newer model automobiles, and that it helps run the engine. But how the computer does this, where it is, and how it can malfunction are typically mysteries for most people. . . . The automobile is no longer a 'natural' thing, that is, something that exhibits properties that can be grasped by a person with a reasonable exposure to physics, but is now a kind of 'supernatural' thing, since its operation is governed by invisible changes, embodied in software.'^'*

In a world increasingly dependent on digital technologies, the esoteric knowledge and arcane terminology associated with computer

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science confers on it an almost religious status. To the laity, it seems that the death of God has merely made way for a theology of technology. Tellingly, magico-religious metaphors have swirled around computers almost since their invention. Room-sized, vacuum tube-powered monsters such as ENIAC (the first programmable electronic computer, officially operable in 1946) provided the mythic image of the computer as an intimidating, inscrutable deity, attended by white-smocked priests who bore a disquieting resemblance to the "machine-tickling aphids" Samuel Butler feared humans might one day become, as he cautioned in his novel Erewhon. Firmly fixed in the mass imagination through any number of SF films and Star Trek episodes, the archetype of the cyber-god is rendered most memorably in the apocryphal story recounted by the mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth:

[President] Eisenhower went into a room full of computers. And he put the question to these machines, "Is there a God?" And they all start up, and the lights flash, and the wheels turn, and after a while a voice says, ''Now there is."'^^

Campbell, who had recently purchased a desktop computer, noted that as "an authority on gods" he was inclined to identify the machine with "an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy."'^^

Writing on the eve of the PC revolution, the computer scientist and artificial intelligence enthusiast Christopher Evans presents a mirror image of Campbell's reading of the computer as an arrogant, angry tin god. In The Micro Millennium, Evans reflects at length on the "ultra-intelligent machines" he speculates will spring from the computer's brow. Like the more benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful deities of myth and religion, machines such as these, possessed of "theoretically limitless powers," wfll deliver us from evil. "Even the most optimistic fan of human beings will admit that our world is in a most dangerously muddled state, and Man, unaided, is unlikely to be able to do much to improve it," writes Evans, "[rjhe temptation to turn to the computer for assistance will be overwhelming."'^^ He concludes, "[r|here . . . remains the real chance that computers will be seen as deities, and if they evolve into Ultra-Intelligent Machines, there may even be an element of truth in the belief."'^^

66 Mark Dery

Of course, if computers are gods, those who intercede between them and mere mortals must be priests. In fact, there is a long-standing folklore of computer programmers as priests. In Tracy Kidder's chronicle of the birth of a microcomputer, The Soul of a New Machine, a programmer recalls the thrill of learning the "assembly language" that enabled him to control the computer's operations: "I could . . . talk right to the machine. It was . . . great for me to learn that priestly language. I could talk to God."'^^ Steven Levy's Hackers teems with religious and occult metaphors-obsessive programmers are "technological monks," members of a "devout religious order," or, to their detractors in the MIT math department, "witches." Intriguingly, occult references outnumber priestly ones in hacker slang: The New Hacker's Dictionary gives definitions for "deep magic," "heavy wizardy," "voodoo programming," "cargo cult programming," and "casting the runes."

Moreover, it is a received truth in cyberculture that the computer has, in large degree, collapsed the traditional distance between word and deed. In an on-line roundtable devoted to outlaw computer hacking, Robert Horvitz, the Washington correspondent for the Whole Earth Review, notes.

There's a traditional distinction between words-expressions of opinions, beliefs, and information-and deeds. You can shout "Revolution!" from the rooftops all you want, and the post office will obligingly deliver your recipes for nitroglycerin. But acting on that information exposes you to criminal prosecution. The philosophical problem posed by [outlaw] hacking is that computer programs transcend this distinction: They are pure language that dictates action when read by the device being addressed. . . . Actions result automatically from the machine reading the word.''*^

There is an irresistible tendency, in the face of such a seemingly supernatural medium, to wrap it in occult metaphors. Thus, Village Voice writer Julian Dibbell concludes that, in virtual environments, the computer operates on what amounts to

the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that

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doesn't so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably. . . . They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment . . . knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.'""

It is somehow fitting that technopaganism, with its emphasis on counterbalancing the power of the computer priests, should invert such metaphors. In a world where programming is seen as cybernetic cabalism, conjuration can be understood as magickal programming. "Programs are the 'ritual' for invoking the appropriate action," analogizes Farrell McGovern, a technopagan participating in the "Cybermage" topic. By the same logic, he argues, a magickal ritual is a program:

[0]nce you have "compiled" and "run" your ritual once, you really don't need to again, since that energy pattern is now in your head. . . . You just invoke the magickal headspace that the original "source" ritual created! This is how I do magick.'"*^

To Rodney Orpheus, the ease with which such metaphors are turned upside down underscores his belief that there's nothing oxymoronic about the term technopagan in end-of-the-century cyberculture. "People say, 'Pagans sit in the forest, worshiping nature; what are you doing drinking Diet Coke in front of a Macintosh?'" says Orpheus, who in addition to being a card-carrying Crowleyite is a hacker and mind machine aficionado. "But when you use a computer, you're using your imagination to manipulate the computer's reality. Well, that's exactly what sorcery is all about-changing the plastic quality of nature on a nuts-and-bolts level. And that's why magickal techniques dating back hundreds of years are totally valid in a cyberpunk age."

Orpheus's rhetoric is bounded by unacknowledged limits. Philosophical challenges to the scientific worldview notwithstanding, many of us are still sufficiently constrained by it to have difficulty accepting Orpheus's faith in the powers of mind over matter. Certainly, postmodern critiques, together

with the paradigm-shattering breakthroughs of modern science (relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory), have jimmied open the scientific vv^orld-view w^ide enough to admit ideas that would previously have seemed counterintuitive, even "irrational." But that opening does not accommodate technopagan claims of channeling energy over telephone lines or discerning visions of things to come in "the mantric vibrations of the myriad dots" on a snowy TV screen.

Likewise, Dibbell's eyebrow-raising declaration that the computer reduces the "tidy division of the world into the symbolic and the real" to a philosophical mirage merits closer scrutiny.^^^ Few would deny Dibbell's premise, a cornerstone of corporate futurology and postmodernism alike, that our interactions with the world around us take place, more and more, in electronically mediated spaces (videoconferences, BBS discussion groups, and the like). Nor would many debate the notion that transnational corporate power is increasingly dependent on, and exercised in, cyberspace. Nor, finally, would anyone deny that word (programming language) and deed (information processing) become one in the computer, a symbol-manipulating machine operated by strings of arbitrary symbols. Then, too, language's ability to act on the virtual world inside the computer via operating code is echoed in computer-mediated human interaction, where description is indistinguishable from action. For example, sexually harassing messages on electronic bulletin boards are experienced by some on-line recipients as "verbal," even "physical" assaults, no less hurtful than the same actions in RL ("Real Life").

In his argument that the computer collapses the difference between the actual and the virtual, Dibbell reaches for occult metaphors, implying in the process that the computer also does away with distinctions between magick and technology. Ironically, ritual magick offers a highly instructive metaphor for the divorce between the symbolic and the real-between cyberspace, where digital incantations ''make things happen, directly and ineluctably," and the embodied world outside. As Joseph Campbell notes, "When a magician wants to work magic, he puts a circle around himself, and it is within this bounded circle, this hermetically sealed-oflf area, that powers can be brought into play that are lost outside the circle."'''^

Thus, while the physical workings of the computer inarguably convert symbols into deeds, and while the disembodied sociology of BBSs

may treat descriptions as actions, the most significant exchange of symbols in cyberspace-the global, often computer-assisted traffic in currency, junk bonds, information, and other immaterial commodities-(Accentuates rather than eliminates the "division of the world into the symbolic and the real," Breathless evocations of cyberspace as a "hermetically sealed-off area" where wishes are commands forget the world outside the magic circle-an ever more polarized two-tiered society "with an upper tier of high-wage skilled workers and an increasing 'underclass' of low-paid labor" and the unemployed, according to a special commission headed by former Labor Secretary John T. Dunlop.'"*^ "Ours is a culture in which the symbolic economy, the traffic in information' and abstract value (credit, junk bonds, etc.) has accelerated beyond the economy of material goods," writes Stuart Ewen, a critic of consumer culture.

It operates more and more apart from it, as if an autonomous realm, though we have by no means conquered scarcity. . . . The stock market skyrockets while the material life of the economy is in shambles. . , . The health-care crisis, poverty and unemployment ... are all ominous symbols of a worsening disintegration of the social fabric on a material level.'^^

Secretary of Labor Robert Reich worries that the warp-drive acceleration of technological progress will exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, this inequity. In his New York Times Op-Ed piece, "The Fracturing of the Middle Class," he writes, "While the information highway promises to speed some people to desirable destinations, it may leave others stranded in the technological version of inner-city ghettos.'"'*^

Dibbell's argument and my rebuttal reiterate, once again, the binary opposition whose fault line runs through this chapter: that of the political versus the transcendental-what Todd Gitlin identifies as the "Change the World!" versus the "Change Consciousness, Change Life!" dichotomy. On one hand sits the thesis that cyberspace is a sociocultural, perhaps even spiritual "empowerment zone"-a magical social space where the breach between thought and deed is healed and technopagans and other on-line communitarians can conjure virtual "societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital" (Dibbell).'"*^ On the

Other, there is the antithesis that those who place their faith in the magical possibilities of computer-generated worlds are abandoning all hope of political change in the world "mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital" at a time when their contributions are desperately needed.

Technopagan visions of cyberspace as a magickal circle, of BBSs as "the new temples of the information age" (Dibbell), or of the Internet as a "spiritual tool" (Delysid) can be seen as empowering-a colonization of cyberspace and the technosphere by a subculture marginalized by the scientific world-view. Then again, such beliefs could be seen as evidence of the triumph of what Neil Postman calls "Technopoly," which he defines as "a state of culture" that is also "a state of mind," characterized by

the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs.' "^^

Technopagans are inclined to argue that technology is fast literaliz-ing magickal powers and may one day render this war of metaphors moot. In the WELL topic "Techgnosis: Computers as Magic," the aeronautical engineer and high-tech entrepreneur William Mook offered a cogent, lyrical version of this argument:

Computers basically take symbolic strings and produce other symbolic strings. As such, they aren't too magical in the root meaning of the word. But, when attached to something that changes the world in a significant way, through robotic action, then computers are magical by definition.

A computer might recognize the verbal symbol, "Ford Taurus." It might then match it against a tag with CNC files to run a robotic factory which in turn manufactures and assembles an automobile according to the specs of a Ford Taurus. So one

symbolic string is matched with a significantly large symbolic string which when executed by the appropriate hardware modifies the world in accordance with the original string. This is precisely what magic always was, the affecting [of] the world through symbolic acts that are interpreted by agents within the world to achieve the desired effects.

Ultimately, we'll have smart smoke powered by sunlight, eating the air, water and soil. It will be present everywhere and always listening for the words that invoke its power to produce goods and services in response to human need. At this point, the equation between technology and magic will be almost complete, but we will not hold it in awe, because awe is not something the magic will require.'^^

Mook's sublime evocation of a world inhabited by demiurgic demons "everyv^here and always listening for the words" that will summon them into action sounds like a poetic rendering of the postscarcity technological Utopia imagined by the nanotechnologist K. Eric Drexler.

In Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, Drexler foretells a future fabricated by nanomachines-se\(-rep\ica.ting, computerized microassemblers, smaller than a millionth of a meter, that would stack atoms at eye-blurring speed to build complex objects in the twinkling of an eye. He envisions a rocket engine "grown" by invisible assemblers in an industrial vat, spaceships fashioned from the raw materials of "soil, air and sunlight." Nanomachines, writes Drexler, "will be able to make virtually anything from common materials without labor, replacing smoking factories with systems as clean as forests. They will transform technology and the economy at their roots, opening a new world of possibilities."'^'

But whether or not this alchemist's dream come true will be realized within our lifetimes (or ever), we can at least say that, in a late-twentieth-century culture whose worldview is supposedly structured by science, the technosphere has become an ironic repository of teleological visions and transcendentalist myths-all of them testimony to the abiding influence of sixties counterculture on nineties cyberdelia. The mystical raptures and apocalyptic premonitions of the sixties endure in the mille-

narian prophecies of techno-hippies, technopagans. New Age disciples of human potential, and visionary technologists.

Throughout cyberculture, and especially in cyberspace, we encounter the capitalist goddess of progress, the angels and alien saviors of the New Age, and the animistic spirits of paganism, calling to mind Robert Pirsig's proclamation, in the New Age classic Zen and the Art ojMotorcycle Maintenance, that "the Godhead resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower."'" Whether Pirsig's Godhead, Maxwell Delysid's loa, or Tony Lane's electrical familiars are taken literally, as manifestations of the numinous, or metaphorically, as mythic beings that once resided in nature and now inhabit the technosphere, is a matter of individual conviction. But in either case, it seems that reports of the death of God were greatly exaggerated.

Joseph Campbell assumed as much when he told a short parable about peering inside his PC. Campbell, who held that the major religions were all but obsolete and that modern myths were needed, was dazzled by the dizzy mandala of the computer's microcircuitry. "Have you ever looked inside one of those things?" he asked an interviewer. "You can't believe it. It's a whole hierarchy of angels-all on slats."'" The Sacred, it seems, is alive and well inside the machine.

METAL MACHINE MUSIC

C J b e r p u n k Meets the Black Leather S j nth-Rockers

Billy Idol, Cyberpunk™. © Gene Kirklana

"Cyberpunk" began as a literary subgenre-an ear-catching coinage borrowed from Bruce Bethke's 1983 story of the same name and applied, in a 1984 Washington Post article by the critic and editor Gardner Dozois, to the "bizarre, hard-edged, high-tech" SF emerging in the eighties. Soon, the term tore loose from its moorings and floated into the mainstream. In their 1991 nonfiction whodunit, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Katie Hafner and John Markoff used it to describe "young people for whom computers and computer networks are an obsession, and who have carried their obsession beyond what computer professionals consider ethical and lawmakers consider acceptable."^

Pulled in every direction by journalists, SF manifesto-makers, postmodern theorists, netsurfers, and fans, "cyberpunk" has been stretched into strange new shapes. My use of the neologism, in a 1989 cover story for Keyboard magazine, as a label for electro-industrial rock with a grungy, sci-fi edge serves as a prism to refract some of cyberculture's recurrent themes: the convergence of human and machine; the supersession of sensory experience by digital simulation; the subcultural "misuse" of high technology in the service of perverse sensibilities or subversive ideologies; and a profound ambivalence, handed down from the sixties, toward computers as engines of liberation and tools of social control, reweavers of the social fabric shredded by industrial modernism and instruments of an even greater atomization.

To Lewis Shiner, one of the genre's founding fathers, the use of the term to describe "guys in black leather who use synthesizers . . . and digital sampling" betokens the co-optation of what began as the literary equivalent

of a terrorist faction.^ It is emblematic, he contends, of the mainstreaming of cyberpunk, a trend he laments in his 1991 New York Times editorial, "Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk":