Techgnosis

[droqen]

Regarding Erik Davis'
"Techgnosis"

[droqen]

Speed reading first pass—wtf dis book about?

[droqen]

"myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information"

[droqen]

introduction, crossed wires

p10 "The analog world sticks to the grooves of the soul—warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more cost than corporeality. The analog soul runs on the analogies between things; the digital spirit divides the world between clay and information."

p12 "Technology is a trickster. . . shows us how intelligence fares in an unpredictable and chaotic world; he beckons us through the open doors of innovation and traps us in the prison of unintended consequences."

[droqen]

I. imagining technologies

p15 "modernity is partly defined by the enormous conceptual barrier erected between nature and culture."

p15,16 "The Great Divide [the aforementioned barrier] . . . disenchants the world, enthroning man as the sole active agent of the cosmos. . . . technology is simply a tool, a passive extension of man. . . . it simply acts upon, but does not change, the world of nature."

p23 "Hermes' trickery is not merely a rational device, but an expression of magical power. . . . we might say that technology too is a spell and a trick, a device that crafts the real by exploiting the hidden laws of nature and human perception alike."

p25 ". . . most of [mechanikos Heron's] magical machines . . . eroded the cultural authority of the very rational know-how that stimulated their design in the first place. . . . [playing some part in, according to L. Sprague de Camp's The Ancient Engineers,] ""the great wave of supernaturalism that finally killed Roman science.""

p25,26 "we too live in such a time when an impersonal mechanized environment and a rising tide of ecstatic technologies are helping to erode the authority of reason and spark a resurgence of supernatural desires and apocalyptic fears."

p29 "the magical idea that engineering will create [a more peaceful, virtuous, and wondrous] world is an ominous and tricky dream, though . . . a mighty difficult dream to shake."

[droqen]

II. the alchemical fire

this chapter starts with electricity.
the previous chapter claimed "Writing is a machine," which does not bother me much, and is worth remembering.

but i do not care much to mull on the meanings and interpretations of the secrets of electricity. natural secrets are what they are.

p81 "the telephone is the ultimate animist technology. We associate sentient life with what communicates, and here was an inert thing full of voices. As the emperor of Brazil exclaimed when he first heard the gadget, "My God, it talks!""

p91 "Spiritual or not, we are beings of vibrating sensation, floating in an infinite sea of pulsing waves that roll and resonate between the synapse and the farthest star."

i was not blown away by the (recent?) discovery that birds can literally VISUALLY see the earth's electromagnetic field. we are, yes, surrounded by things that we cannot see or sense which come from nearby or far away, and yet which affect our world, which reflect an invisible reality, and which might even affect us in unknown ways. i do not study these things, but i know that they are there, and there are always more. it's not even beautiful anymore. it simply is. i am enjoying the utter mundanity of the possible connectedness of all things. why not?

[droqen]

III. the gnostic infonaut

p102 "today many people confuse information and meaning . . . Our society has come to place an enormous value on information even though information itself can tell us nothing about value. . , . Communicating information is not simply a matter of cramming data into an envelope and sending it off; information is also something constructed by the receiver."

p103 "At the heart of information theory, then, is probability, which is the measure of the likelihood of one specific result . . . out of an open-ended field of possible messages [interpretations; received reconstructions]"

p122 "As with all archetypes, the mythic patterns associated with gnosis are ambiguous, multivalent, and contradictory. . . .

Techgnosis is the esoteric side of the postwar world's new "information self," . . ."

hmm. taking a break from this book, may return later. i think it's losing me? i just need to get back to life stuff :)