It’s the same with all these authors—are they all falling into the same pit on purpose?

After my deep dive into as much McLuhan as I could lay a finger on, I started digging into the larger Media Ecology scene in 2018. Soon I began charting constellations of intellectuals and writers out of the reoccurring references to their each other across books; the sort of study analogized by hyperlinks on the web.

Out of what I’ve read, I’ll say now that popular books in the ’90s about “cyberspace”—the world behind your screen—had its capstone with Erik Davis’ TechGnosis, most recently updated and reissued in 2015. It’s a wonderful, encyclopedic book—and the reason it so disastrously crashes and burns in the final chapter is very instructive.

Davis references and builds upon the works by nearly all the other ‘90s authors I’ve read; their works are referenced or quoted at length. They are Mark Dery, Doug Rushkoff, Sherry Turkle, Howard Rheingold, Kenneth Gergen, Pierre Lévy, Arthur Kroker, Jaron Lanier, and Neil Postman (I’ve had the pleasure of recording conversations with both Rheingold and Rushkoff as well). You should read them all, but if you have to read one, read Davis.

I finally did. I have neglected reading more than a few dozen pages into TechGnosis until this weekend. I’ve always held this smug suspicion, enforced by the title, that I didn’t really have to read it. I already knew what was in it.

Well, I was right. Groan if you’d like. Anyway, here’s why I must recommend it to anyone and everyone interested in the contemporary discussions about the effects of tech:

First, it’s an excellent history of the long trajectory of humans trying to make sense of an ever-more complex world. The common patterns of metamorphosis, of human transformation along with their sense-making of our changing environment, occur over and over enough to give the reader an appreciation for just how complex reality is.

Second, it carries the inner world-building of gnosticism and the mediated world-building of cyberspace to the dead-end conclusion which discourse in the contemporary humanities have brought us today. That is, by understanding the book, you will learn a great deal about the contemporary intellectual milieu of critical theory and post-humanism. Understanding these ideas inside and out is essential for anyone trying to make sense of where the universities have gotten themselves. As it stands today, such discussions all-too-readily fall into overblown intrigues of conspiratorial and political nonsense.

The book is a fun read. I’ll particularly highlight Davis’ neat synopsis of the history of world-building, which has always been essential to my understanding of McLuhan’s studies of our environment as art. Davis starts with the origin of Conan the Barbarian, creation of Robert E. Howard:

But Howard’s visceral tales probably would have passed from popular memory were it not for the tremendously popular and vastly different work of J. R. R. Tolkien, a mild-mannered Oxford medievalist and staunch Roman Catholic whose The Lord of the Rings takes place inside one of the most completely realized worlds in the history of fantastic literature. Tolkien fleshed out his imaginary land of Middle-Earth with its own songs, folklore, and languages; a rigorous social ecology of elves, orcs, humans, and hobbits; and an exquisitely crafted topography. Tolkien’s work proved the point he himself made in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” A great author of fantasy “makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside…”

Tolkien died in 1973, the same year that two Midwesterners named Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson forged the next link in the chain mail of the technopagan imaginary… the duo decided to revamp a medieval combat game by introducing fantasy elements that owed as much to Conan the Barbarian as to Frodo the hobbit. The resulting hybrid was the notorious Dungeons & Dragons, better known to its devotees as D&D…

But if the images in these games do not encode virtues and vices, then what do they allegorize? Steven Levy gives us a hint in Hackers: “In a sense, Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself—the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you’d be traveling in when you hacked in assembly code.” Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at MIT, also explained that Adventure fans “found an affinity between the aesthetics of building a large complex program, with its treelike structure, its subprograms and sub-subprograms, and working one’s way through a highly structured, constructed world of mazes and magic and secret, hidden rooms.” Adventure is not an allegorical machine; it’s an allegory of the machine.

Angus Fletcher defines allegory as “a fundamental process of encoding our speech,” and computers are nothing if not hierarchies of encoded language. At the bottom of this digital dungeon lie the physical circuits whose pulses of energy embody the basic binary code. Because the “machine language” that commands this code is hellish to hack, computer scientists long ago invented control jargons like assembly language and higher-order programming codes such as MS-DOS, Java, and C++. These latter tongues come relatively close to natural languages like English; a few well-placed words can command gobs of machine code. At the top level of this stack of lingo lies the sunlit world of the user interface, which in the case of Adventure was just a screen full of text and a simple parser that interpreted the actions that players typed in. The user interface is the level most of us non-initiates manipulate, often without a thought of the briar patch lurking below.

This is a concise, multi-planer analogy of the headspace of computer content, as world, with the origins of today’s favourite pastime. My coworkers and friends and drinking partners are all into D&D. So, likely, are yours if you’re in my age bracket or younger. It’s everywhere. I’d only throw in two more planes to flesh it out. The first would be the military history of world building during the cold war, where game theory was developed for strategizing. The second, more familiar, would be the plane of Convergence Culture as elaborated by MIT’s Henry Jenkins. This 2008 book laid out the marketing strategies for corporations to build multimedia fan-culture universes of the superhero and science fantasy sort ubiquitous today. Taken all together, these layers reveal the psychology of world building—other worlds, that is—with which electronic technology has seduced our imagination.

This brings us to our third reason you should read TechGnosis: it’s failure at the end plants the seeds for actual progress in our collective adventures in cyberspace.

My work on this site, you know, is about “Full Stack Media Ecology.” Going down the stack, to the ground of the technology, to pop back out into what simulation theorists call “base reality,” where our bodies are, existing and interfacing with other warm bodies. When each of us learned how the “magic of movies” was made, and understood what happened “behind the scenes,” movies changed for us. They became grounded in our world, instead of floating pocket-universes, complete in themselves, figures without  ground.

The very technology which allows us to coat the surface of “screens” with immersive fantasy worlds might have only taken-hold with perspective painting in the 1500s, but the past century has taken it to extreme, dizzying proportions.

Davis alludes to exactly this when he describes a character in a Philip K. Dick novel emerging from a computer simulation, back into his space ship where he had been wired into it, Matrix style. Thereafter the character is brought, like the astronaut Dave Bowman near the end of 2001, even higher to a realm transcending our mortal plain.

In a sense, Morley enters a different order of the virtual, one that exists above the technologies of simulation. This is the virtual that has always been with us, that needs no gadgets to intercede in our lives, that arises from the “arbitrary postulates” of our cultural software even as it transcends them. [emphasis mine]

We see here another plane of meaning being slid into the multi-planer assembly of world-building quoted above. Analogous to the worlds in the computer, or in roleplaying games, or fiction franchise, Davis brings up Dick’s gnosticism to represent perennial speculations about what lays beyond our human lives here on earth, in the time we have allotted. Most of TechGnosis entails illuminating discussions about religion, cult beliefs, and generally-gnostic theorizing about where it is, beyond our lives here, that our ultimate home is.

That’s all beyond me to say—but what I am making it my business, what this website is about, is the “order” of life within our “technologies of simulation.” That’s what McLuhan was doing too. There is no gnostic “escape hatch” from embodied reality, but we can at least get to the hull of the ship! That is, the ground of the same planet earth we share with nine other billion other humans.

But there is a common error of omission which has completely sabotaged this project of escape to the ground-floor of reality—at least so far as our popular knowledge is concerned.

The problem with the narrative that these writers tell is that, while some reference Steven Levy’s 1984 book Hackers, they all neglect the book’s denouement, where the Free Software Foundation is created to enshrine, in law, a cognitive pathway down the computer stack and out of the headspace of content all these books are analyzing.  Levy, renowned for writing the book on Hacker culture, literally made “the last hacker” the hero of the whole tale!

Worse still is that Sherry Turkle actually interviews the founder, named only as Richard, in her first book on computer culture, The Second Self. Not only does she neglect to ever follow up, she consequently reassigning his achievements to the likes of Microsoft! The constant erasure of Free Software from narratives about computers is far from the only crime against history wrought by popular books. But it’s likely the worst—its story is perpetually being erased by its conflation with the so-called “open source” movement, conjured up a decade later. The story of Free Software’s mission to save end users, you and me, from our computers is endlessly diluted by “open source” focus on programmers and software companies.

Second only to cultural confusion between Free Software and “open source” is the erasure of Gary Kildall and his many accomplishments in creating the American computer industry. He is a titan, and there should be more biopics about him than there are about Steve Jobs, if we had a just world.

These omissions, specifically, deny us the most essential of substances in our culture today: accurate lore. They are crimes against world building.

Between the technological plane of cyberspace and the theological planes of heaven and hell and the realms of gods is our world. This one. We are doing world building in cyberspace. And endless religions are being conjured up or synthetically formulated from the substance of the great faiths we’ve inherited. But what about history? Specifically, the history surrounding the world-building activities that our technology is replacing our world with?

Like everyone else, Davis draws on the rhizome metaphor of Deleuze & Guittari, the subject of schizoanalytics. It’s often given a feminist gloss owing the origins of academic discussions on the nature of embodiment finding a home in those departments in the ’80s—but I’ve never been able to see how that’s flattering to women. Having personal agency and being in control of your life is masculine, and bad, goes the argument. I guess it means you can control others, and men are always in control, I guess? How about we men stop trying to dominate women, but that also men and women take control over their computers? How about that? My Cheating at Peekaboo Against a Bad-Faith Adversary goes much deeper into this, if you’re interested.

That’s where TechGnosis—and all the other popularizers of the story of cyberspace I’ve mentioned—leave us hanging. We are left with the story of collective global consciousness crashing us into the dirt. It is as a gnarly root of ginger—sprouting madly underground in any-which direction—that the metamorphosis of individuals apparently ends in this electric environment. You’re born, you start reading and watching things in books and on screens, you try to make sense of the infinitely generated content, and then you go mad. Or, rather, we all go mad together, as the end of TechGnosis suggests:

By replacing the need for a common ground with an acceptance and even celebration of our common groundlessness, the network path might creatively integrate these gaps and lacunae without always trying to fill them in.

Okay, you do that. I’ve got a better idea.

How about, instead of trying to sort the firehouse of media content by playing the glass bead game, we enter into the world we actually live in, as embodied creatures, with its limited number of places to go and people to know? How about we build the perceptual container around that fire-hose, which is an understanding of the material substrate which we pretend “contains” it? How about we take the excellent histories which Davis and Turkle and all the rest have produced about our world, and augment them with what has been left out? The truly revolutionary stuff? How about we all learn how computers work?

That’s what I’m focusing on. I don’t want to play the glass bead game. I want to become again what Philip K. Dick, half a century ago, wanted to remain.

Faced with the failure of all totalizing and redemptive schemes, Dick came down to nothing more than the drive to remain human in an often inhuman world. In contrast to the exhausted skepticism of the postmoderns or the juvenile glee of the posthumans, Dick never abandoned his commitment to the “authentic human,” which he tentatively described as the viable and elastic being that can “bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.” Perhaps the greatest strength of Dick’s wildly inventive, choppy, and comicly bleak narratives lies in his intimately rendered portrait of human beings, and especially of the jerry-built and fiercely creative measures that we hack together when metaphysical and technological solutions to our psychological and social ills collapse at our feet. Though Dick’s fiction shares some gnostic SF notions with L. Ron Hubbard’s writings, Dick’s characters are the absolute opposite of the superheroes of Scientology; they are bumbling Joes (and a few Janes), struggling with moral ambiguity, poverty, drugs, invasive institutions, credit agency robots, and shattered headspaces. They live in worlds where commodities have supplanted community, where androids dream, and where God lurks in a spray can. The most divine communications in such a world aren’t carried in a pink blast of otherworldly gnosis, but in that most telepathic of human emotions: empathy.