Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

by Erik Davis and Erik Davis

Book Overview

Exploring the mystical impulses behind our obsession with information technology, TechGnosis presents a fascinating and passionately original perspective on technoculture. Today we often assume that the triumph of technological rationality has condemned the spiritual imagination to the trash heap of history. But as Erik Davis explains, religious impulses and magical dreams permeate the history of technology. Ranging from the printing press to the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 060980474X
• ISBN13: 9780609804742
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA)
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Techno wizard

Techgnosis creatively runs the gamut of the language and human expression game - unfurled in such divergent media as computers, literature, and science.Davis paints a vivid picture of worlds that have opened up as a result of cutting edge human thinking and natural extensions of the human nervous system which have made our lives - if not entirely more useful - at least a lot more interesting and enjoyable.Davis is a modern shaman who ties together the mystical with the technological in ways that make sense.Very nicely done.

Looking to the future with roots in the past

I was not expecting a classical Gnostic text when I picked this book up, perhaps that's why I'm not as dissapointed as others who have read it. I was looking for a work in the Gnostic tradition (not Tradition). Davis makes some compelling connections between the old and new seekers after Truth. References cited in this book were also good, and steered me toward other interesting works.

a disturbing, familiar, and comforting lesson

Call Erik Davis's piece a rant, a stretch, a sermon, a novelty or a misinformed text, you sorely miss the beauty, creativity and inspiration of this referential, imaginative book. It has solid value in its reflection on the voids prolific in our contemporary, secular metaphysics. It is a consolation.Davis has done a delightful thing by surfing the reader through philosophical and technological sources from the Pre-Socratics to the Temple ov Psychic Youth to provide him with food for thought about humanity in the information age, something seemingly lacking in today's world. Along the way, Davis refers to multifarious theories, cites and works only to offer the reader possible paths of reflection along which Davis himself may have wandered, drawing connections about human nature and existence as we tumble along in space and time.I, for one, marked the book up with innumerable postile, intending to keep it as a reference for my personal research and writing. I am happy there are finally others out there, like Erik Davis, who see connections like I do in such superficially diverse things as the danger of capitalism and Democritus, string theory and Cologne minimal techno music, Bill Gates and bull fighting, or whatever one chooses to use as sources and allegory for their thoughts and approach to life. I applaud Davis for his subliminal theme, behind all the book's surface topics, of getting your hands dirty and grappling with the big questions like, given the development of information and technology, have we humans really improved humanity, compassion, and empathy to other beings beyond their gnostic roots, or are we to continually wallow in stock market mania, virus paranoia, conspiracy theory, alien signals, psychic faiths and unsatisfied cravings for cult leaders? I await Erik Davis's next book eagerly for his answers.

Stunning Debut Unveils Hermetic Underside To Cyberculture

Erik Davis' fine writing has graced the pages of The Nation, Village Voice, Lingua Franca, and 21.C for many years. 'Techgnosis' grew out of an essay that he wrote for the seminal cyber-crit anthology 'Flame Wars', edited by Mark Dery.Unlike other authors, Davis has an incredibly open mind and lets the disenfranchised speak for themselves. There are some stunning sections on Scientology, the Gurdjieff Work, John Dee, the Extropians, and the interface between early 1980s role-playing games like Gary Gygax's 'Advanced Dungeons and Dragons' and contemporary VR technology. Davis examines many of the integral examples of spirituality featured across many cyber-crit books, but his elegant writing and common sense inject a powerful dynamic into this work not often found elsewhere. He doesn't have the same hysterical tone often found in anti-cult literature for example, but is also balanced and can be subtly critical (confused yet?).There are some strange omissions, notably an excellent piece Davis wrote for 21.C on the Mormons that appears to have been dropped by the publishers at last minute. Despite this, 'Techgnosis' is a strong debut that clearly conveys how the spiritual has transmutated into the technological at the end of the millennium. Fully referenced, Davis' book is a clear indication of the maturation of a defining authorial voice.

A magical investiagion of 3000 years of being and technology

Davis sets his sights high - to explain the philosophical and mystical history of the West against the development of our technologies. While the argument is often made that technologies are value-neutral, Davies proves - conclusively - that our technological fancies rise from our intrinsic spiritual natures (explicit or implicit), even as every new scientific discovery equally spawns a new era of spiritual "research". From the Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistos to the noospheric prognostications of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - who may have predicted the Internet a half century before it became a physical reality - Davies shows that being and doing, in the guise of spirituality and techology, are the twinned halves of the cultural DNA within which we operate.Delightfully, this book is not just a dry retelling of history; Davis has a point of view, which is neither fancifully utopian or pessimistically Orwellian, but instead focuses on the reality of t! he isomorphism between what we believe about the world around us and what we believe about the life within us.This book isn't just a good read, it's a necessary read, a clever antidote to all of the business-as-usual explanations of the age of information, and contextualizes our era against the last 3,000 years of history of the West. Anyone interested in the history of science, the history of religion, and the history and ethics of technology should read this book.