I first discovered Erik Davis, and his somewhat "out there" academic work via his podcast Expanding Mind around 2019. From there I started his newest book, and PhD thesis, High Weirdness, and ultimately ordered his earlier work, TechGnosis. As someone interested in understanding and documenting the weirdness of the past four to five years and the hyper-speed jump into artificial intelligence society has taken in the past year, I felt a bit disappointed when I cracked TechGnosis to find it was written and published way back in 1998. I mean, what's he going to talk about, MySpace, Hacky Sacks, Netscape, blogs? Back then, Amazon was just a book retailer for %#$!'s sake...
 |
| A Mystery Portal |
What the hypothetical caveman, Jeff, did was simply attempt to organize his natural world into a more manageable place, and make things easier and simpler. But, it didn't stop there. At a cosomologically rapid pace, letters turned into words, which turned into books, which turned into holy scripture. Numbers, turned into arithmetic, which turned into equations, which turned into algorithms that turned into Google. With the power of documentation, and increasingly mobile and convenient forms of publication, each generation came up with an enhancement that built on the previous generations' novel technologies. One of my favorite historical anecdotes from TechGnosis is the story of the Ptolemys, the descendants of Alexander the Great, who ruled Alexandria of Egypt from roughly 300 BC to 50 AD. They commissioned the Great Library of Alexandria, which is often believed to be one of the first attempts at a comprehensive depository of all knowledge. One of Ptolomys, Davis writes, was so into obtaining and cataloguing data he actually seized any ship sailing into port and forcibly confiscated all scrolls and writings the crew had on them, returning them only after scribes were able to copy them down. So, think about that before you get too upset about Mark Zuckerberg mining your personal information.
If you've studied philosophy, history or any similar humanities subjects, this is all pretty well-established stuff. Humanity in its ever-expanding technical prowess conquered the natural world with science and machines, and now we have time to invent even more neat stuff because we're not preoccupied with finding food and avoiding snakes. We've even passed the point where we started asking ourselves why, with all this modern knowledge, there is still poverty, gross inequality, war, crime addiction etc? And why, in times like these, does it actually seem to be getting worse, not better? As Davis and multiple well-know philosophers have already pointed out, technology and knowledge never means "progress," only change. We create this handy stuff to make our lives easier and to get farther away from the cold, scary wilderness of nature and the superstitions and myths of the past, but it always comes back. Technology may start as a way to organize and control the world around us, but it always comes back around as a portal from which the weird, mystical ideas of the past re-emerge, and send us looking toward the natural untamed realm for answers.
Davis provides ample historical evidence for his ideas in the first chapter "Imaging Technologies". Although he includes numerous examples, I was particularly interested in his descriptions from the Ptolemys' Alexandria, the Egyptian metropolis, just prior to it's swallowing by the Roman Empire. It was a port-of-call on the mouth of the Nile connected by land, river and sea to all of the growing regions and city states of Europe, Africa and Asia. It exploded in growth around this time attracting a myriad of immigrants from countless ancient cultures. It was a multi-lingual, pan-religious, cosmopolitan city, where money was made, arts and culture were developed, science was advanced and people with different ideas both mingled and clashed. The cacophony of Alexandria is very similar to major cities in 2023. In spite of the technological explosion that was happening at that time relative to earlier periods -with ever more grandiose buildings, complex machines (2) and countless other advancements ostensibly invented to make living easier and to make resources more abundant- people still turned toward the mystical and spiritual. Newer cults, ecclesiastical traditions and full-blown religions, including Christianity, were seeping out of every cultural crack that Alexandria and its engineers opened on their quest for new knowledge and new gadgets.
Without spoiling too much more of TechGonsis, I'll close by saying that I love Erik Davis' writing style. He makes fun of himself a bit in his forward to the 2015 re-print of his 1998 book by mentioning some of his dated 1990's lingo. But as a child of the 90's myself, I find it all too rad. In spite of it's weighty subject-matter, Davis' writing is accessible to both academic and layperson. In fact, rather than highlighting, Post-it noting and jotting down notes on every other page, I found it more enjoyable to just plow through it like a spooky Stephen King novel or one of those neat historical docu-drama series on Netflix. If you're into the subject matter enough to really nerd out, go ahead and re-read it with more purpose and attention.
TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information was published by North Atlantic Books in 1998.
No comments:
Post a Comment