Introduction: Crossed Wires



I. Imagining Technologies

the technological unconscious - Hermes - the writing machine - Plato -
Torah - early Christianity - Hermes Trismegistus - the Corpus Hermeticum -
alchemy - magic into science


II. The Alchemical Fire

the electromagnetic imaginary - lightning rods - Mesmer -
animal magnetism - bioenergy - Reich - Morse - the celestial telegraph - Bell and Watson -
electric doppelgängers - Tesla - cosmic frequencies


III. The Gnostic Infonaut

Nag Hammadi - 1940s technology - Shannon - information theory -
the cult of information - Maxwell's demon - entropy - Wiener - cybernetics - Gnosticism -
the Hymn of the Pearl - heresy


IV. TechGnosis, American Style

the American religion - Freemasonry and engineering - American techno-utopianism -
the frontier - John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" -
Extropians - cyborg dreams


V. The Spiritual Cyborg

man as machine - Gurdjieff - L. Ron Hubbard - Scientology -
countercultural technophiles - psychedelics - New Age technology - Charles Tart -
John Lilly - Timothy Leary


VI. A Most Enchanting Machine

hippie computing - Community Memory - the Well -
Mondo 2000 - magic - social engineering - advertising - postmodern tribes -
technopagans - technological animism


VII. Cyberspace: The Virtual Craft

Antonin Artaud - cyberspace - Mark Pesce - Vodou - the art of memory -
Tim Berners-Lee - Bruno - computer games - Dungeons & Dragons - Adventure -
Dante - "True Names" - MUD metamorphosis


VIII. The Alien Call

disinformation and paranoia - Roswell - "The Saucers Speak" - New Age channeling -
Starseed transmissions - Heaven's Gate - Baudrillard and apocalyptic simulation -
Star Trek's holodeck - the multiverse of the Internet


IX. Datapocalypse

the sense of an ending - Y2K - Joachim of Fiore -
the religion of technology - the third wave - communication - Pentecost -
SnowCrash - televangelism - Philip K. Dick - VALIS


X. Third Mind from the Sun

Tielhard de Chardin - the noosphere - artificial life - surveillance -
the Mark of the Beast - globalization - social Darwinism


XI. The Path is a Network

the net of Indra - mindfulness - Leibniz and the monadology -
cyberfeminism - Sadie Plant - postmodernism -
the Glass Bead Game - "netaphysics"



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E-mail Erik Davis at erik@techgnosis.com