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We place no reliance
On virgin or pigeon;
Our Method is Science,
Our Aim is Religion.
Aleister Crowley, from the journal "Equinox"
People jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.
William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive
Information is more basic than matter and energy.
Atoms, electrons, quarks consist of bits --
Binary units of information
Like those processed in computer software
And in the brain.
The behavior of these bits, and thus of the universe,
Is governed by a single programming rule.
Edward Fredkin A UNIVERSE OF BITS AND BYTES
Major historical accomplishments of the 20th century included the personalization and popularization of Quantum Physics, an acceptance of self-reference and circular causality in systems of mathematics and psychology, and the resulting development of cybernetic society.
This philosophic achievement, which has dominated the culture of the 20th century, was based on a discovery by nuclear and quantum physicists around 1900, that visible-tangible realities are written in a digital assembly language we could accurately call "basic."
It turns out that we inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits which cluster together in geometrically-logical, temporary configurations.
The solid Newtonian Universe rested upon such immutable General-Motors concepts as mass, force, momentum, and inertia, cast into a Manichaean drama involving equal reactions of good vs. evil, gravity vs. levity, entropy vs. evolution and coerced by such pious Bank-of-England notions as conservation of energy. This dependable, static, predictable, universe suddenly, in the minds of Planck/Heisenberg became digitized, transformed into shimmering quantum screens of electronic probabilities.
Up here in 1988, we are learning to experience what Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg could only dream of. The universe, according to their cyberdelic equations, is best described as a digital information process with sub-programs and temporary ROM states, megas called galaxies, maxis called stars, minis called planets, micros called organisms, and nanos known as molecules, atoms, particles. All of these programs are perpetually in states of evolution, i.e., continually "running."
It seems to follow that the great intellectual challenge of the 20th century was to make this universe "user friendly," to prepare individual human beings to decode, digitize, store, process and reflect the sub-programs which make up his/her own personal realities. NOBODY KNEW WHAT THESE GUYS WERE TALKING ABOUT
The chain of events that elevated us to this new genetic status, HOMO SAPIENS CYBERNETICUS, began around the turn of the century.
Physicists, we recall, are traditionally assigned the task of sorting out the nature of reality. So it was the quantum philosophers who figured out that units of energy/matter were sub-atomic bits of programmed information that zoom around in clouds of ever-changing, if/then, start/stop, off/on, 0/1, yin/yang probabilities in clusters of pixels, up-and-down recurring stairways of paradox.
When they started out, no one understood what these guys were talking about. They expressed their unsettling theories in complex equations written on blackboards with chalk. Believe it or not, these great physicists thought and communicated with a neolithic tool -- chalk-marks on the wall of the cave. The irony was this: Einstein and his brilliant colleagues could not experience or operate or communicate at a quantum-electronic level.
Imagine if Max Planck pottering around in his mathematical chalk-board had access to a video-arcade game! He'd see right away that the blips on Centipede and the zaps of Space Invaders could represent the movement of the very particles that he tried to describe in the dusty symbols of his blackboard. A WILD AND SCARY HALLUCINOGENIQUE
Now let us reflect on the head-bursting adjustment required here. The relativistic universe described by Einstein and the nuclear physicists IS alien and terrifying. Quantum physics is quite literally a wild, confusing psyberdelic trip. It postulates an Alice-in-Wonderland, Sartrean universe in which everything is changing. As Heisenberg implied: nothing is certain except uncertainty. Matter is energy. Energy and matter are temporary states of info-bits, frozen at various forms of acceleration.
This digital universe is not user-friendly when approached with a Newtonian mind. We are just now beginning to write a manual of operations for the brain and the universe, both of which, it turns out, are digital galaxies with amazing similarities.
People living in the solid, mechanical world of 1901 simply could not understand or experience a quantum universe. Dear sweet old Einstein, who couldn't accept his own unsettling equations, was denounced as evil and immoral by Catholic bishops and sober theologians who sensed how unsettling and revolutionary these new ideas could be. Ethical relativity is still the mortal sin of religious fundamentalists. THE CYBERPUNK AS MODERN ALCHEMIST
The baby boom generation has grown up in an electronic world of TV and personal computing screens. The cyberpunks offer metaphors, rituals, life styles for dealing with the universe of information. More and more of us are becoming electro-shamans, modern alchemists.
Alchemists of the Middle Ages described the construction of magical appliances for viewing future events, or speaking to friends distant or dead. Writings of Paracelsus describe a mirror of ELECTRUM MAGICUM with telegenic properties, and crystal scrying was in its heyday.
Today, digital alchemists have at their command tools of a precision and power unimagined by their predecessors. Computer screens ARE magical mirrors, presenting alternate realities at varying degrees of abstraction on command (invocation). Aleister Crowley defined magick as "the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with our will," and to this end the computer is the universal level of Archimedes.
The parallels between the culture of the alchemists and that of cyberpunk computer adepts are inescapable. Both employ knowledge of an occult arcanum unknown to the population at large, with secret symbols and words of power. The "secret symbols" comprise the languages of computers and mathematics, and the "words of power" instruct computer operating systems to complete Herculean tasks. Knowing the precise code name of a digital program permits it to be conjured into existence, transcending the labor of muscular or mechanical search or manufacture.
Rites of initiation or apprenticeship are common to both. "Psychic feats" of telepathy and action-at-a-distance are achieved by selection of the menu option. CLASSICAL MAGICKAL CORRESPONDENCES
Alchemists of the Middle Ages believed quite correctly that their cosmos was composed of four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Although today our periodic table sports more than 100 chemical elements, the four universal elements still can be identified as the constituents of some processes in the external reality, and within the inner psychological world of humankind.
Each of the four elements is an archetype and a metaphor, a convenient and appropriate name for a universally identified quality. The four are echoed in the organization of both the four suits and the four "court cards" of each suit of the Tarot, inherited from the Egyptians and its symbolism preserved in ordinary Western playing cards. The four also correspond to the four principal tools of the classical practitioner of ceremonial magick.
The wand of the magician represents the phallic male creative force, fire. The cup stands for the female receptive force, and, obviously enough, is associated with water. the sword is the incisive intellect, moving and severing the air, the abstraction in which it moves. Finally, the pantacle (disk) is the grounding in earth (magnetic material), the stored algorithms. (We use Crowley's spelling of pentacle, which communicates the sense of "all and everything," advisedly.)
These classical instruments of magick exist in modern cyber technology: The mouse or pen of the digitizing tablet is the wand, controlling the fire of the CRT display and harnessing the creative force of the programmer. It is used in all invocations and ritual as a tool of command. Spinning disk drives are the pantacles, inscribed with complex symbols, earthen tablets to receive the input of "air," the crackling dynamic ethereal intellectual electricity of the processor chip circuitry programming results. The RAM chips are, literally, the buffers ("buffer pools"), the water, the passive element capable of only receiving impressions and re-transmitting, reflecting.
Iconic visual programming languages are a Tarot, the pictorial summation of all possibilities, activated for the purpose of divination by juxtaposition and mutual influence. A periodic table of possibilities, the Western form of the Eastern I Ching. Traditional word-oriented programming languages, FORTRAN, COBOL, and the rest, are a degenerate form of these universal systems, grimoires of profit-oriented corporations.
Detailed database logs of the activity of operating systems from the Akashic records on a microscale. At a macroscopic level, this is the "world net" knowledge base, the "knoesphere," the world-wide online hypertext network of information soon to be realized by the storage capacity of CD ROM and the data transmission capability of optical fiber. William Gibson's cyberspace matrix.
Banishing rituals debug programs, and friendly djinn are invoked for compiling, searching, and other mundane tasks. When the magic circle is broken (segmentation violation), the system collapses. Personal transmutation (the ecstasy of the "ultimate hack") is a veiled goal of both systems. The satori of harmonious human-computer communication resulting from the infinite regress into meta-levels of reflection of self is the reward for immaculate conceptualization and execution of ideas.
The universality of 0 and 1 throughout magic and religion: yin and yang, yoni and lingam, cup and wand, are manifested today in digital signals, the two bits underlying the implementation of all digital programs in the world, in our brains and in our operating systems. Stretching it a bit, even the monad, symbol of change and the Tao, visually resembles a superimposed 0 and 1 when its curving central line is stretched through the action of centrifugal force from the ever-increasing speed of the monad's rotation. CYBER RELIGION OF THE BABY BOOMERS
By the year 2000, Aleister Crowley, William Gibson, and Edward Fredkin could well replace Benjamin Spock as a Baby Boom navigator. Why? Because, by then the concerns of the baby boom generation will be digital. (Or, to use the old paradigms, philosophic-spiritual.)
During their childhood they were Mouseketeers. In their teens the Cybers went on an adolescent spiritual binge unequalled since the Children's Crusade. In their revolt against the factory culture they re-invented and updated their tribal-pagan roots and experimented with Hinduism, Haight-Ashbury Buddhism, American Indianism, Magic, Witchcraft, Ann Arbor Voo Doo, Esalen Yoga, Computerized I Ching Taoism, 3-D Reincarnation, Fluid Druidism. St. Stephen Jobs to the Ashram!
Born-again Paganism! Pan-Dionysius on audio-visual cassettes. Mick Jagger had them sympathizing with the devil. The Beatles had them floating upstream on the Ganges. Jimi Hendrix taught them how to be a voodoo child. Is there one pre-Christian or third world metaphor for divinity that some rock group has not yet celebrated on an album cover?
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