Techgnosis by Erik DavisLeadtext: The following extract is from Erik Davis''s afterword to Techgnosis.Terence McKenna, the cultural theorist who affixed his swirling psychedelic thumb-print on the technocultural debate throughout the 1990s, used to argue that time is a struggle between habit and novelty. Novelty, he defined somewhat nebulously, was the density of connection or complexity of a system; the more complex a system is, the more novelty it engenders. McKenna saw the universe as a kind of "novelty-conserving engine:" novelty is produced, gets set in historical concrete, and become the basis of further transformation. We spiral up. Multicellular life eventually becomes the basis for the Indian railway system or the Human Genome Project or Peter Jackson''s Lord of the Rings. But the process is not perpetual. In McKenna''s scenario, the fluctuating wave of novelty that is human history ultimately reaches a limit point, a "singularity" in the words of more mainstream futurists like Ray Kurzweil.

At that point, the human design process - which includes culture, technology, and the manipulation of matter - achieves a sort of infinite velocity: everything becomes linked with everything else, or matter becomes mind, or something like that. For McKenna, this transcendental object radiates its influence into the past like a tractor beam, so that the increasing rate of change and the sense of liminal confusion so many of us feel is actually a sign that the rug is already being wrenched from beneath our feet.I do not take McKenna''s millennialist myth literally, at least most of the time. But it certainly embodied the secret thrill of the 1990s, when an upsurge of technocultural mutation remade America and, to some extent, the world. It is a mistake to reduce this phase of technoculture to a "bubble", that economic metaphor that now dominates - in the insidious way of economic metaphors - our cultural memory of the time. That decade was more than a shell game of smirking geeks and IPO pyramid schemes: it was an epochal convergence of new media, global flows of information, and an innovative, boundary-dissolving multiculture of hacking, sampling, and hybrid experimentation - a culture just beginning to lick its posthuman lips. As the human design process plunged into the virtual space of computers, the space of possibility itself expanded. New worlds, from online multiplayer computer games to CAD simulations to mathematical domains of chaos and complexity, grew on silicon.

The rhetoric of science fiction entered mainstream discourse, academic theory, business strategy and popular culture. The economy itself came to resemble a vast "possibility machine", as investors placed bets on possible futures hovering in the convergent etherspace defined by new software, new hardware, and the fruitful properties that emerge - in that most ''90s of verbs - from ever more complex and intensified networks of money, algorithms and human desire.Techgnosis was written on the crest of this wave of novelty. Rather than make canny investments (silly me!), I used the highs and heights afforded by this uplift to ask certain questions: how is technology changing - dare we say it - the soul? How do media machines - those chattering products of scientific rationality and its quest for efficiency and profit - mold our visions and twilight drifts, our nightmares and secret gods? How does it feel to find ourselves ghosts in a dreaming machine?In approaching these questions, I didn''t buy the idea that the past cannot help orient us in our unprecedented and deeply confusing world. Indeed, the very vertigo of our moment compels a search for roots, which partly explains the continual appeal, at this late date, of nationalism, traditionalism, and the "eternal verities" of religion - not to mention those curious subcultures that fetishistically resurrect Civil War battles and big band couture. But there are many traditions in the world, many religions, many hidden nations. Instead of taking the traditionalist approach, and digging for solid bulwarks against the sea-change at our doors, I wanted my underground history to deepen, indeed complexify, our conundrum. That''s partly why it''s a thorny, associative, almost ridiculously dense text.

I wanted to simulate a hypertext, to throw up as many ideas, images, gods and stories as possible, hoping that, like shards of a broken mirror, they might offer us glittering but necessarily fragmented reflections of our deepening posthuman condition.For make no mistake: the combined forces of capital, technical innovation, and desire are continuing to drive us toward an apotheosis of technical mediation. Today, the accelerating perceptual technologies of media are on a collision course with the scientific understanding of how the human nervous system produces the real-time matrix we experience as ordinary space-time. As we amplify our knowledge of the neural basis of consciousness, we will see artists, marketers and ideologues of all stripes attempt to shape the immediate contents of consciousness with ever finer and more crafty techniques. One fears that the day is not so distant where we will find ourselves waltzing with Tom Cruise through the invasive personalized ads of Minority Report. The digital universe is no longer "in there:" it is everywhere. So though today''s special effects-driven entertainments, computer games, and theme park rides continue to draw us ever deeper into virtual realities, the real action is in the "meatspace" that still surrounds us. Already, the convergence of wireless technology, cognitive science, GPS, and surveillance technologies are creating, or at least suggesting, a new form of information totality, a sentient landscape that turns us all into animists again.

The intensification of mediation does not stop with the tools conventionally referred to as "media." Genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and the explosion of new materials also suggest that matter itself is finalizing its transformation into a programmable medium, a plastic vehicle of design and experiment and control. It is extremely difficult to imagine where this revolutionary transformation will lead, especially since the logic that drives so much of this development is clearly "unsustainable," which in this context is just a polite term for suicidal. And so our poor beleaguered earth and its dying biota have become the final frontier of the human design process. Though it is presumptuous to assume we are facing apocalypse, the intensification of media, technology, and globalization may look a hell of a lot like the end of history. Somehow, though, the novelty of media tech no longer packs its former punch. The collapse of the dot.com bubble put the visionaries back in their padded rooms, and this "return to the real" was cemented by 9/11.

Utopian euphoria and posthuman giddiness are out; bottom lines and familiar brands are in. Instead of greedy boundary dissolution, we have seen, in American politics at least, the restoration of anxiously defended boundaries: nation, intellectual property, the Christian religion, and the sober but otherwise sleepwalking self. Even academics and intellectuals, formerly taken by all manner of French discursive diseases, have staged a sort of Revenge of the Enlightenment, fomenting a new distrust of the more irrational, surreal, and visionary dimensions of the contemporary project. This loss of technocultural euphoria, and especially the enthusiasm surrounding the Internet, was thoroughly predictable. One of my goals in Techgnosis was to show how, over and over again, technical innovations in modern communications technology open up a temporary crack in social reality. This smooth, undefined space blooms for a spell with all manner of dreams and utopias, some infused with profound mythic imaginings and spiritual wants. This crack gradually gets filled with business as usual; dreamspace becomes marketspace. The Internet and digital media have followed this time-worn pattern.

But in our contemporary case, dreamspace has also become, well, something of a nightmare. Even creepy developments like brain fingerprinting and psychoactive neural implants can''t hold a candle to more tangible terrors: melting ice caps, the collapse of the fuel economy, dirty nukes, John Ashcroft''s mutts on your secret shames. The "attention economy" of the 1990s hasn''t disappeared - it has simply mutated into a fear economy. Rather than deflate the space of possibility that defined much of the previous decade, the fear economy instead infuses that space with dread. Possibility is now linked to fear. That''s the logic of terrorism of course, but it has also been the logic of America''s anti-terrorism. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, you could not turn on the radio or open up a newspaper without encountering some pundit or professional body articulating, in sometimes juicy technical detail, how a madman or a troop of jihad jockeys might unleash mayhem by exploiting weaknesses everything from viral DNA to sewer systems to air traffic control. While this explosion of techno-thriller plot points was motivated by actual threats, it cannot be said to have been entirely rational.

American continued to plumb the space of possibility, but shifted its focus from utopia to Dis, from the boom to ka-boom!This darkside futurism also almost immediately become an instrument of statecraft, as America''s triumphant neo-conservatives sought to manufacture consensus through fear. Paranoid futurism also helped justify the Bush doctrine, inspiring the pre-emptive logic that drew the U.S. into Iraq. This logic did not rely on rational debate or, as has become perfectly clear, on truth. Instead, it relied, in its public face anyway, on the manipulation of imaginative possibility. That is, though terrible things have always hovered in possibility space, those terrors became so imaginable, the threat so "real," as to ju.