I've been meaning to read Eric Davis's classic account of the religious and mystical roots hidden in our modern attitudes towards technology for a long time. Fortunately, it did not disappoint. Though the book is plainly over-written in a sense (Davis calls it, "almost ridiculously dense" in his afterword -- a hypertext of a text) and lacks anything like a simple thesis, it's unfailingly engaging throughout. I got to learn about Gurdjieff, the Extropians, Hermes Trismegistus, and, of course, the Gnostics, among many other cult-like groups. Davis' main point is that these "fringe" beliefs have always been tied up with and reflective of society's relationship to its technology, and that they remain deeply ingrained in our experience of technology today. Consider, for example, our constant faith in progress and the techno-capitalist utopia we are always being promised, and see if it is at bottom any different from John's New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. Or, ask yourself if the stark dualism and paranoid society of control we immediately relate to in the Matrix movies is anything but an update of the Gnostic myth that we have been imprisoned in this material world by a conspiracy of archons who have hidden our true spiritual nature from us. The goal of the book is not really to trace the provenance of these ideas with academic rigor, but just to point out connections and correspondences that can shed some light on the psychology of our relationship to current our technology in general, and to the internet in particular. Today, almost our whole sense of self and world is mediated through various information technologies, so perhaps it's inevitable that when we go looking for our selves, we find their refracted and reflected images in the nature of those very technologies.
