TechGnosis Quotes

“The funny thing about games and fictions is that they have a weird way of bleeding into reality. Whatever else it is, the world that humans experience is animated with narratives, rituals, and roles that organize psychological experience, social relations, and our imaginative grasp of the material cosmos. The world, then, is in many ways a webwork of fictions, or, better yet, of stories. The contemporary urge to “gamify” our social and technological interactions is, in this sense, simply an extension of the existing games of subculture, of folklore, even of belief. This is the secret truth of the history of religions: not that religions are “nothing more” than fictions, crafted out of sociobiological need or wielded by evil priests to control ignorant populations, but that human reality possesses an inherently fictional or fantastic dimension whose “game engine” can — and will — be organized along variously visionary, banal, and sinister lines. Part of our obsession with counterfactual genres like sci-fi or fantasy is not that they offer escape from reality — most of these genres are glum or dystopian a lot of the time anyway — but because, in reflecting the “as if” character of the world, they are actually realer than they appear.”
― Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information

“I am attempting to understand the often unconscious metaphysics of information culture by looking at it through the archetypal lens of religious and esoteric myth.”
― Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

“you need to crack open the mundane casing of ordinary technologies and trace their archetypal wiring. Then you might find yourself, if only for a moment, tapping into the electromagnetic unheimlich. The spirits speak: in the information age, you are never at home.”
― Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

“On the one hand, there is a booming industry surrounding yoga, self-help, and spiritual tourism, while on the other, traditional religions seem polarized between fanaticisms of all types and vapid, consumerist banalities of the “I’m spiritual, but not religious” sort. The continued, tired debates of science on one side and religion on the other serve to muddy the waters even more.”
― Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information