From "Introduction: Crossed Wires" This book is written in the shadow of the millennium, that arbitrary but incontestable line that the Western imagination has drawn in the sands of time. It is also written in the conviction that one hardly needs to be decked out in a Biblical sandwich-board or wired to the gills with the latest cyborg gear to feel the glittering void of possibility and threat growing at the heart of our profoundly technologized society. Even as many of us spend our days, in that now universal Californiaism, surfing the datastream, we can hardly ignore the deeper, more powerful and more ominous undertows that tug beneath the froth of our lives and labors. You know the scene. Social structures the world over are melting down and mutating, making way for a global McVillage, a Gaian brain, and a whole heap of cultural chaos. The emperor of technoscience has achieved dominion, though his clothes are growing more threadbare by the moment, the once noble costume of Progress barely concealing far more naked ambitions. Across the globe, ferocious post-perestroika capitalism yanks the rug out from under the nation-state, while the planet spits up signs and symptoms of serious distress. Boundaries dissolve, as 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, labor and capital.

With pills modifying personality, machines modifying bodies, and synthetic pleasures and networked minds engineering a more fluid and invented sense of self, the boundaries of our identities are mutating as well. The horizon melts into a limitless question mark, and like the cartographers of old, we glimpse yawning monstrosities and mind-forged utopias beyond the edge of our paltry and provisional maps. Regardless of how secular our ultramodern condition appears, the velocity and mutability of the times invokes a certain supernatural quality that must be seen, at least in part, through the lenses of religious thought and the fantastic storehouse of the archetypal imagination. Inside the United States, within whose high-tech bosom I quite self-consciously write, the spirit has definitely made a comeback -- if it could be said to have ever left this giddy, gold-rush land, where most people believe in the Lord and his coming kingdom, and more than you'd guess believe in UFOs. Today God has become one of Time's favorite cover-boys, and a Black Muslim numerologist can lead the most imaginative march on the nation's capital since the yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon. Self-help maestros and corporate consultants promulgate New Age therapies, as strains of Buddhism both scientific and technicolor seep through the intelligentsia, and half the guests on Oprah pop up wearing angel pins. The recent surge of interest in alternative medicine has injected non-Western and ad hoc spiritual practices into the mainstream, while deep ecologists turn up the boil on the nature mysticism long simmering in the American soul. This rich confusion is even more evident in our brash popular culture, where science-fiction films, digital environments, and urban tribes are reconfiguring old archetypes and imaginings within a vivid comic-book frame.

From the X-Files to occult computer games, from Xena the Warrior Princess to Magic: the Gathering playing cards, the pagan and the paranormal have colonized the twilight zones of pop media. These signs are not just evidence of a media culture exploiting the crude power of the irrational. They reflect the fact that people inhabiting all frequencies of the socio-economic spectrum are intentionally reaching.