Having hurtled through "Gravity's Rainbow" earlier in the summer, I decided to continue my roll of large-scale fiction and tackle another tome that's been on my list for half a decade, Infinite Jest, a task made easier by knowing that countless others are also slogging through David Foster Wallace's masterpiece. I am currently at the halfway point, some 550 pages in, and since that's beyond the Infinite Summer reading schedule I won't say anything specific about the novel's plot and instead focus on its extreme length. One might wonder, in an age of increasingly brief and fast communications, when narratives over 140 characters are considered too long for our casual attentions, why anyone would read, let alone write, a novel as thick and dense as a dictionary, despite the quote that "the enormous novel of technical, scientific, or historical knowledge [has] become the highest credential for male writers." Besides smarmy erudition, what purpose could such massive stories serve?
Personally I have always been partial to these sprawling and epic books, perhaps due to reading Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy as a child, followed by an unabridged copy of "Les Misérables" in middle school, and have recently come to feel that what Tomes (as I distinguish them as a literary form) do is allow an author to create and represent a fully realized world or reality, far beyond the ability of lesser fictions. Certainly the novel as a form was originally invented (at the end of the 19th Century) in order to represent reality as it is, ie: Realism, though it never quite did this. Even contemporary realist novels fall into the same problems of being able to present only selected facets of reality (and hence are more artificial than realist), relying on current cultural assumptions to convey what there isn't room to say about how worlds work, and preferring to deploy the quotidian and inconsequential as the most available sign of "real life," while completely neglecting to address other, larger, and just as necessary (if not more so) aspects of human existence, as if reality only happened in small towns, bars, or foreign countries. Some examples: historical/global change (Pynchon and Neal Stephenson's more tome-like works), a person's lifetime (Eliade's "The Forbidden Forest," Ellison's "The Invisible Man," Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"), Familial generations (Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"), the fantastic/mythic ("Lord of the Rings" and other fantasy series, serving as an escape (in Tolkien's sense) from being too close to events so that we can see them on a larger perspective), or the worlds hidden and horrendous that lurk just behind the ones in which we live (Delaney's "Dhalgren," Bolaño's "2666). As Roberto Bolaño suggested, though I can't find the source, the quest and the apocalypse are the two most prominent themes in American literature, and I would argue in stories in general since long before stories were written down. And it seems preposterous that one could even think to tackle these themes, much less represent a real world, in anything less than 800 or so pages. The novel on the other hand can only capture a subset, most predominately the individual (person or location). Short stories best communicate a series of events or Poe's unified effect, and flash fictions the immediacy of an event. The tome meanwhile can convey all these at once, while at the same time placing the character in a local, national, and global milieu to which they have to respond, in a world that is not just fully articulated but is itself changing alongside (and at best reflective of) the character/s. What the shorter forms dangerously lack is the ability to remind us that we live in such a total world, with all a worlds' problems, peoples, beliefs, circumstances, etc, beyond the immediacy of our easily distractable and entertainment-starved attentions. One could argue that the briefer our narratives become the less they are able to represent to us humanity and its deepest struggles on that necessary ultimate level, leaving us to forget the past beyond our last twitter or status update. If the written word has a future it is in striving to keep representing reality as it really and vastly is: all-encompassing.
So how does Infinite Jest work as a tome? It clearly encompasses a lot, but this far in I don't think it encompasses enough. The world represented is on one hand a futuristic satire of the West, where the Americas are one country, years are subsidized by corporations, and everyone is still as hung up on pleasure as they were last century. But at the same time the actual action (if there is any) is set in a tennis academy and halfway house in Boston that already feel outdated, presumably late 1990's era, leaving the represented world feeling somewhat contradictory and slapdash, as if these disparate ideas were thrown together to satisfy DFW's theme of Entertainment rather than because they formed a cohesive, realistic whole, like most other tomes I've read manage. Secondly, though the novel takes place over a period of ten years, most of the action takes place in a period of several months, the last of which is told first, so that the reader is not given that epic sense of broad-scale changes taking place over large swathes of time (we only get these events in flashbacks), but instead a flattening of event-ness, where the action focuses solely on the minutiae of everyday life, so that it reads that nothing of narrative importance is happening at all (except for in what up to this point seems a series of subplots). Third, due to this focus on the quotidian unjuxtaposed with the epic or kairotic, told from the POV of multiple quotidian characters, I am hard pressed to believe that any of these narratives add up to something. Though supposedly they do. Though I have a sinking suspicion I already figured out what in the first hundred pages. Lastly, and most relevant to Infinite Jest's infinite length is the banal, unmusical, longwindednes of its language. DFW broke the primary rule of engaging storytelling and chose to tell descriptions instead of show events occurring, which is frightfully slow to plow through in search of the moving bits. Whole pages are spent describing the structural integrity of a roof for instance, or sentences will repeat information just given a sentence before, as if DFW thought the reader too stupid or distracted to remember what he just said, most of this description seeming to serve no other purpose than to showcase the erudition of the author and/or the hyper-intelligent main protagonist (though all the other characters speak this way too). Not even to mention the colloquial use of the word "like," which is not nearly as funny or enduring as Pynchon's use of "that," for instance. And then there are the endnotes, almost a hundred pages worth, which I respect for their contribution to Ergodic literature, though in this case these notes are often even more irrelevant details, could have just been included in the text, sound faux-academic like some of the more ghastly footnotes in Danielewski's "House of Leaves," or can't even be left unread/add another perspective like the extra chapters in Cortazar's "Hopscotch," because IJ's endnotes contain actual information about what's going on in the story, often more useful information than is ever presented in the main body of the text, which just comes off as unadoringly postmodern. In fact, it seems that the first half of the book is DFW's attempt at creating this world (with how this world was created being the payoff?), while he never seems capable of just letting the created world do its thing, as if he was afraid that if he stopped tinkering the whole thing would fall apart.
One thing Infinite Jest does well is that all its diverse characters/ruminations do in fact relate to the main theme of Entertainment (though admittedly a Western upper/middle class view of entertainment). This is particularly poignant in the Marathe/ Steeply dialogues, which are my favorite sections so far and could have been a much more streamlined philosophical document or cultural critique. I could care less about privileged tennis prodigies, and only find the AA digressions interesting due to knowing people in the program (though these bits are deeply informed, they are told in an ironic/hopeless manner almost counter to the kind of spiritual prescience and egolessness necessary it seems to really tackle the issue of addiction without mocking it, which leaves me thinking its no wonder DFW erased his own map last year if this was his worldview, or a worldview he was motivated enough to write over a thousand pages on). Nevertheless, I am still curious to see what happens, to see how and if it all ties together, and hope that my perspectives on the tome's style and discontinuities are proven wrong. If not then at least I will have the satisfaction, as an ardent reader, of having gotten through it, a satisfaction like that of mountain climbers who have reached the summit of a particularly challenging peak. As a tome, at least Infinite Jest is a challenging peak, and not just another narrative molehill.
Showing posts with label Stephenson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephenson. Show all posts
4.21.2009
Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language
Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language
As the renowned science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously quipped: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is certainly true that advanced technologies, such as the intricate logic boards of computers, may seem magical because we do not know how they work, but as Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, also suggests, “powerful new technologies are magical because they function as magic, opening up novel and protean spaces of possibility within social reality” (180-1).
One of the most important contemporary examples of these magical “spaces of possibility” is cyberspace – a metaphor for the visualization of complex information structures and exchanges endemic to computer networks (191) – which arose from the cyberpunk fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson beginning in the mid-‘80s, when such technologies were descending from the realm of literature and fantasy to the actuality of home computer systems. Perhaps anticipating that the technological spaces they described might seem like magic, these cyberpunk authors employed the terminology of the occult as a metaphor for how computer and information systems work. As we will see, this use of magical terminology is entirely apt, as it not only allowed the conceptualization necessary for the creation of our current information technologies, but also articulated one of the primary concerns of our age: that language – the symbolic exchange of information which magic, computers, and literature have in common – has the power to cause real effects in the real world.
True Names and the Magical Metaphor
The occult theorist Aleister Crowley (though undoubtedly one of the most infamous charlatans of modern history) offers in his Magick in Theory and Practice what is considered the best definition of actual magic: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will… by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object” (xii-i), and gives as an example the publication of a book as a magical way of conveying information to people at a distance. This definition seems contrary to what most people might think of when they hear the term magic, which is either the hocus-pocus of stage magicians or the sword-and-sorcery tropes of fantasy literature and video games. In short we are generally aware of the imagery or the metaphor, but not that magic is primarily a tool (albeit a symbolic one) for getting things done. Erik Davis suggests that by “using language, costumes, gestures, song, and stagecraft, magicians applied techne to the social imagination, actively tweaking the images, desires, and stories that partly structure the collective psyche… which in turn impacted the construction of native reality as a whole” (173).
In his short story True Names – which offered the first fictional representation of that virtual “space of possibility” later called cyberspace (239) – Vernor Vinge uses magical terms drawn explicitly from early computer games in order to describe his information technologies. Cyberspace is called the “Other World” or “Other Plane” and is accessed through “Portals,” hackers are called “warlocks,” and a group or network of hackers is called a “coven” (243-4). The process of navigating through this visualization of information also reads like a fantasy adventure; the hackers have to manipulate symbols, face tests and elementals, and “trade spells and counterspells” (essentially passwords) (254). The story itself critiques and explains this use of jargon and imagery. While the news networks “made it clear there was nothing supernatural about… the Other Plane, that the magical jargon was at best a romantic convenience and at worst obscurantism,” and the world governments refuse “to indulge in the foolish imaginings of fantasy,” the warlock-hackers themselves suggest that “sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols… more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment” (252, 271).
According to Davis in Techgnosis, this metaphor is effective because “the allegorical and hieroglyphic language of magic works well with the fact that the Other Plane exists simultaneously on two levels of reality” (215). Shamans, Gnostics, and other practical magicians have historically manipulated symbolic representations of information about reality (planetary sigils and runes, angelic or demonic gatekeepers, etc.) in order to concretely effect the world around them, similar to the way that hypertext or the icons of the World Wide Web “function as symbols, inscriptions, and operational buttons; they are both a writing and a reality” (201). Computer programming languages are likewise such symbolic representations that can create realities and make things happen. As the warlock programmer Mr. Slippery puts it in True Names: “even a poor writer… can evoke complete internal imagery with a few dozen words of description. The difference now is that the imagery has interactive significance, just as sensations in the real world do” (252). For an example of computer technology demonstrating Crowley’s definition of magic, one only has to look at the AI the Mailman using its hacking skills to nearly blow up the entire planet, a kind of ‘cyber-magic’ terrorism that the United States government currently states is a very real and dangerous threat to national security.
This issue of security and the danger inherent in both magic and information technologies is made clear in the title of Vinge’s True Names. The power of names is an ancient occult concept summed up in the introduction to the story: “the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for… once an enemy… learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful” (241). Vinge himself believed that “the ‘true names’ of fantasy were like object ID numbers in a large database,” somewhat like modern passwords and IP addresses (16). Early computer scientists, such as Timothy C. May, explicitly used the ideas inherent in this metaphor of magical true names when dealing with issues of “anonymous interaction, reputation-based systems, digital pseudonyms, digital signatures, data havens, and public-key encryption” that were necessary to securely transform the fictional cyberspace into the actual Internet of today (35-6). As Davis suggests in Techgnosis, Vinge was eerily prophetic: “over a decade after his story appeared, the federal government and digital librarians became embroiled in similar debates [as those in the story] over encryption standards, privacy, and online security” (217). One of Vinge’s predictions however is yet to play itself out, the issue of controlling and interacting with self-aware computer systems like the Mailman, called Artificial Intelligences.
Neuromancer and the Spirits in the Machine
William Gibson’s Neuromancer brought the term cyberspace, and the idea of virtual “spaces of possibility,” more fully into the public consciousness, while at the same time abandoning many of the obvious magical metaphors of True Names. Unlike Mr. Slippery, who accesses the Other World Portal through “a certain amount of self-denial – or at least self-hypnosis” reminiscent of shamanic trance states (Vinge 250), Gibson’s cyber-cowboy Case “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix,” which is imagined as “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void” (5).
Despite the more technological and even gritty, noir descriptions that permeate the novel, Neuromancer still refers to occult language and concepts when discussing the relationship of man to Artificial Intelligence programs, which are still sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. As the Turing Registry agents warn Case about his dealings with the AI Wintermute, “For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible” (163). Even the AIs’ creators have an uneasy, occult relationship with the beings; Ashpool calls Wintermute “a name… to conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely,” while Lady 3Jane believes the AIs are “ghosts in the corporate cores” (185, 229). The AI Neuromancer itself echoes a prominent magical axiom, “to call up a demon you must learn its name” (243).
Artificial Intelligences act as the traditional dues ex machina, the god or ghost in the machine, patterns of information that act as if they are intelligent and cause real effects in the world. As Erik Davis suggests, this issue of self-aware digital agents raises the same questions that magicians and ritualists encounter when summoning gods, angels, or demons: how do we know that AIs are sentient beings and not just simulations (197)? Many occult manuals, such as Bill Whitcomb’s The Magician’s Companion, warn: “any concepts, forces, or objects which manifest as entities should be treated as real beings;” just because they can be viewed as patterns of energy or objectified aspects of human personality doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous to treat them as only non-living (15). The warlocks in True Names likewise treat the were-robot DON.MAC “as though he were a real person. Usually it was easier to behave that way toward simulators” (Vinge 295). Though it may not be possible to know if spirits or self-aware programs are really sentient or real, Crowley suggests, “it is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow” (Davis 183).
For the time being, Artificial Intelligences still remain on the pages of sci-fi novels (though there are certainly many computer scientists working to make them a reality), but the perils highlighted in Neuromancer of dealing with runaway patterns of information are still applicable to our contemporary world. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick worried that our technological environment is becoming increasingly alive; as Davis points out in Techgnosis: “the Internet has already become home to a variety of autonomous and rather parasitic programs – including viruses, Trojan horses, spiders, worms, smartshoppers, and bots” (187). Just because a computer virus, like the recent Conificker Worm, is only made of ones and zeroes, doesn’t mean it can’t wipe out your entire operating system (unless of course you have the correct magical spells of protection, ie: anti-virus software). It is also worth noting that due to the cryptographic near-anonymity of Internet interactions, it is possible to treat other human computer users as merely patterns of information instead of intelligent beings. The flip side of Neuromancer’s artificially aware entities may be a process of technological de-humanization, such as Case’s divorce from the “meat” in favor of mediated virtual experiences (for us, TV, video games, etc.) that reduce us to being passive nodes or routers in a global network of information exchanges, which seem to have more of a life of their own than we do.
Snow Crash and the Power of the Word
In the world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, “information is power” (379). We can see the beginnings of this concept in True Names, when the warlock Erythrina suggests that hackers “probably understand the System better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power” (Vinge 268). In Snow Crash however, this equation drives every level of society, from the global media network owned by L. Bob Rife, to the hacker Hiro Protagonist’s job selling potentially useful scraps of information to the Central Intelligence Corporation. This is also a world very much like our own (or at least only a few steps ahead), full of advertisements, strip malls, corporate-controlled politics, and a virtual network “space of possibility” called the Metaverse.
In the story, people access the Metaverse through “audiovisual body” software simulations called avatars (33), a term originally indicating the incarnations of Hindu deities, but popularized to such a degree by Stephenson’s novel that it now applies to any representation of a self in a digital world (Davis, 223). Descriptions in Snow Crash of the Metaverse, which is “subject to development,” the construction of “buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality” (23), could easily apply to contemporary virtual realities and MMOs, massively multiplayer online worlds such as Second Life. Even information tools in the novel, like the CIC software Earth, which tracks spatial information of “maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance” (99), are now almost fully realized in programs like Google Earth.
If the techno-socio-economic world portrayed in Snow Crash seems viably realistic, then so to is the novel’s depiction of magic. Stephenson does not rely on fantasy tropes as a metaphor for information technologies, but instead presents magic as a historically researched plot element, modernizing the ancient concept that language – the symbolic exchange of information – causes real effects in the real world. The central conflict in Snow Crash is the resurrection of an ancient Sumerian nam-shub, described as a neurolinguistic virus, essentially “speech with magical force “(197), which Rife wants to use to gain greater control over people’s minds. This concept of language as “both a story and an incantation… a self-fulfilling fiction” is explicated in the novel through several chapters of researched information, and relies on the Sumerian concept of me: linguistic units that functioned as “algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to society” (202, 240).
Stephenson is quick to draw a connection between the concept of me and the functioning of computer technology. He suggests, “The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is a form of speech – the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub,” but also that “the belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature” (197, 256). As Davis points out in Techgnosis, language is perhaps the earliest and most pervasive human technology, and the supernatural or performative power of names haunts the majority of early linguistic cultures and religious traditions (23-5). It is not just a coincidence that we use the same word “spell” to describe both the construction of words and the performance of magic. Contemporary scientific studies echo Stephenson’s position that learning new information forms neurolinguistic pathways in the deep structure of the brain (117); language effectively creates our perception of reality.
As we see in Snow Crash, the issue inherent in such operational or performative language is in who controls its use: “someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visible symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem” (369). In our contemporary world, like in the novel, this is done through advertisements, viral marketing campaigns, the three-ring binders that allow franchises to operate, and any and all media and information technologies. We have even come up with an equivalent to the Sumerian me: memes, a term coined by the scientist Richard Dawkins that refers to a unit of cultural information virally transmitted between people through speech. As Hiro explains in Snow Crash, “we are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head” (373). Information does not have to be self-aware like AIs in order to be dangerous! On a much broader scale, whole social, political, and economic realities can be magically constructed from a single linguistic document. As the Metaverse “is just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere” (23), so to is the United States of America a “space of possibility” constructed from the language of the Declaration of Independence.
One can easily see the problems that arise when we passively relinquish our operational relationship with information to vast media conglomerates and religious or political ideologues like those in Snow Crash, or those in our own world. As Nietzsche expresses it, quoted in one of the articles that prefaces True Names, “The master’s right of naming goes so far that it is accurate to say that language itself is the expression of the power of the masters” (43) On the other hand, those of us fortunate enough to be literate can, like Hiro Protagonist, write our own codes and stories that present equally valid linguistic realities. Vernor Vinge claims that, “up until the personal computer came along, Orwell’s vision [in 1984] of technology as the enabler of tyranny was the mainstream view. But in the 1980s… people with PCs began to realize that computers might bring the end of tyranny” (22). Ultimately, the true magic espoused in the fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson is not merely their envisioning of technological “spaces of possibility,” but their insistence on inhabiting those spaces with neuromancers, literally magicians of the mind, willing to confront the dangers and complexities of informational systems, in a manner that upholds our human freedom to linguistically construct the worlds that are our future.
Works Cited
Crowley, Aleister. “Magick in Theory and Practice.” Dover Publications, Inc. New
York: 1976
Davis, Erik. “Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information.” Three
Rivers Press. New York: 1998
Gibson, William. “Neuromancer.” Ace Books. New York: 1984
Stephenson, Neal. “Snow Crash.” Bantam Books. New York: 2000
Vinge, Vernor. “True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier.” Ed. James
Frankel. Tor Books. New York: 2001
Whitcomb, Bill. “The Magician’s Companion: a Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to
Magical and Religious Symbolism.” Llewellyn Publications. St. Paul: 1993
As the renowned science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously quipped: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is certainly true that advanced technologies, such as the intricate logic boards of computers, may seem magical because we do not know how they work, but as Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, also suggests, “powerful new technologies are magical because they function as magic, opening up novel and protean spaces of possibility within social reality” (180-1).
One of the most important contemporary examples of these magical “spaces of possibility” is cyberspace – a metaphor for the visualization of complex information structures and exchanges endemic to computer networks (191) – which arose from the cyberpunk fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson beginning in the mid-‘80s, when such technologies were descending from the realm of literature and fantasy to the actuality of home computer systems. Perhaps anticipating that the technological spaces they described might seem like magic, these cyberpunk authors employed the terminology of the occult as a metaphor for how computer and information systems work. As we will see, this use of magical terminology is entirely apt, as it not only allowed the conceptualization necessary for the creation of our current information technologies, but also articulated one of the primary concerns of our age: that language – the symbolic exchange of information which magic, computers, and literature have in common – has the power to cause real effects in the real world.
True Names and the Magical Metaphor
The occult theorist Aleister Crowley (though undoubtedly one of the most infamous charlatans of modern history) offers in his Magick in Theory and Practice what is considered the best definition of actual magic: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will… by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object” (xii-i), and gives as an example the publication of a book as a magical way of conveying information to people at a distance. This definition seems contrary to what most people might think of when they hear the term magic, which is either the hocus-pocus of stage magicians or the sword-and-sorcery tropes of fantasy literature and video games. In short we are generally aware of the imagery or the metaphor, but not that magic is primarily a tool (albeit a symbolic one) for getting things done. Erik Davis suggests that by “using language, costumes, gestures, song, and stagecraft, magicians applied techne to the social imagination, actively tweaking the images, desires, and stories that partly structure the collective psyche… which in turn impacted the construction of native reality as a whole” (173).
In his short story True Names – which offered the first fictional representation of that virtual “space of possibility” later called cyberspace (239) – Vernor Vinge uses magical terms drawn explicitly from early computer games in order to describe his information technologies. Cyberspace is called the “Other World” or “Other Plane” and is accessed through “Portals,” hackers are called “warlocks,” and a group or network of hackers is called a “coven” (243-4). The process of navigating through this visualization of information also reads like a fantasy adventure; the hackers have to manipulate symbols, face tests and elementals, and “trade spells and counterspells” (essentially passwords) (254). The story itself critiques and explains this use of jargon and imagery. While the news networks “made it clear there was nothing supernatural about… the Other Plane, that the magical jargon was at best a romantic convenience and at worst obscurantism,” and the world governments refuse “to indulge in the foolish imaginings of fantasy,” the warlock-hackers themselves suggest that “sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols… more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment” (252, 271).
According to Davis in Techgnosis, this metaphor is effective because “the allegorical and hieroglyphic language of magic works well with the fact that the Other Plane exists simultaneously on two levels of reality” (215). Shamans, Gnostics, and other practical magicians have historically manipulated symbolic representations of information about reality (planetary sigils and runes, angelic or demonic gatekeepers, etc.) in order to concretely effect the world around them, similar to the way that hypertext or the icons of the World Wide Web “function as symbols, inscriptions, and operational buttons; they are both a writing and a reality” (201). Computer programming languages are likewise such symbolic representations that can create realities and make things happen. As the warlock programmer Mr. Slippery puts it in True Names: “even a poor writer… can evoke complete internal imagery with a few dozen words of description. The difference now is that the imagery has interactive significance, just as sensations in the real world do” (252). For an example of computer technology demonstrating Crowley’s definition of magic, one only has to look at the AI the Mailman using its hacking skills to nearly blow up the entire planet, a kind of ‘cyber-magic’ terrorism that the United States government currently states is a very real and dangerous threat to national security.
This issue of security and the danger inherent in both magic and information technologies is made clear in the title of Vinge’s True Names. The power of names is an ancient occult concept summed up in the introduction to the story: “the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for… once an enemy… learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful” (241). Vinge himself believed that “the ‘true names’ of fantasy were like object ID numbers in a large database,” somewhat like modern passwords and IP addresses (16). Early computer scientists, such as Timothy C. May, explicitly used the ideas inherent in this metaphor of magical true names when dealing with issues of “anonymous interaction, reputation-based systems, digital pseudonyms, digital signatures, data havens, and public-key encryption” that were necessary to securely transform the fictional cyberspace into the actual Internet of today (35-6). As Davis suggests in Techgnosis, Vinge was eerily prophetic: “over a decade after his story appeared, the federal government and digital librarians became embroiled in similar debates [as those in the story] over encryption standards, privacy, and online security” (217). One of Vinge’s predictions however is yet to play itself out, the issue of controlling and interacting with self-aware computer systems like the Mailman, called Artificial Intelligences.
Neuromancer and the Spirits in the Machine
William Gibson’s Neuromancer brought the term cyberspace, and the idea of virtual “spaces of possibility,” more fully into the public consciousness, while at the same time abandoning many of the obvious magical metaphors of True Names. Unlike Mr. Slippery, who accesses the Other World Portal through “a certain amount of self-denial – or at least self-hypnosis” reminiscent of shamanic trance states (Vinge 250), Gibson’s cyber-cowboy Case “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix,” which is imagined as “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void” (5).
Despite the more technological and even gritty, noir descriptions that permeate the novel, Neuromancer still refers to occult language and concepts when discussing the relationship of man to Artificial Intelligence programs, which are still sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. As the Turing Registry agents warn Case about his dealings with the AI Wintermute, “For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible” (163). Even the AIs’ creators have an uneasy, occult relationship with the beings; Ashpool calls Wintermute “a name… to conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely,” while Lady 3Jane believes the AIs are “ghosts in the corporate cores” (185, 229). The AI Neuromancer itself echoes a prominent magical axiom, “to call up a demon you must learn its name” (243).
Artificial Intelligences act as the traditional dues ex machina, the god or ghost in the machine, patterns of information that act as if they are intelligent and cause real effects in the world. As Erik Davis suggests, this issue of self-aware digital agents raises the same questions that magicians and ritualists encounter when summoning gods, angels, or demons: how do we know that AIs are sentient beings and not just simulations (197)? Many occult manuals, such as Bill Whitcomb’s The Magician’s Companion, warn: “any concepts, forces, or objects which manifest as entities should be treated as real beings;” just because they can be viewed as patterns of energy or objectified aspects of human personality doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous to treat them as only non-living (15). The warlocks in True Names likewise treat the were-robot DON.MAC “as though he were a real person. Usually it was easier to behave that way toward simulators” (Vinge 295). Though it may not be possible to know if spirits or self-aware programs are really sentient or real, Crowley suggests, “it is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow” (Davis 183).
For the time being, Artificial Intelligences still remain on the pages of sci-fi novels (though there are certainly many computer scientists working to make them a reality), but the perils highlighted in Neuromancer of dealing with runaway patterns of information are still applicable to our contemporary world. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick worried that our technological environment is becoming increasingly alive; as Davis points out in Techgnosis: “the Internet has already become home to a variety of autonomous and rather parasitic programs – including viruses, Trojan horses, spiders, worms, smartshoppers, and bots” (187). Just because a computer virus, like the recent Conificker Worm, is only made of ones and zeroes, doesn’t mean it can’t wipe out your entire operating system (unless of course you have the correct magical spells of protection, ie: anti-virus software). It is also worth noting that due to the cryptographic near-anonymity of Internet interactions, it is possible to treat other human computer users as merely patterns of information instead of intelligent beings. The flip side of Neuromancer’s artificially aware entities may be a process of technological de-humanization, such as Case’s divorce from the “meat” in favor of mediated virtual experiences (for us, TV, video games, etc.) that reduce us to being passive nodes or routers in a global network of information exchanges, which seem to have more of a life of their own than we do.
Snow Crash and the Power of the Word
In the world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, “information is power” (379). We can see the beginnings of this concept in True Names, when the warlock Erythrina suggests that hackers “probably understand the System better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power” (Vinge 268). In Snow Crash however, this equation drives every level of society, from the global media network owned by L. Bob Rife, to the hacker Hiro Protagonist’s job selling potentially useful scraps of information to the Central Intelligence Corporation. This is also a world very much like our own (or at least only a few steps ahead), full of advertisements, strip malls, corporate-controlled politics, and a virtual network “space of possibility” called the Metaverse.
In the story, people access the Metaverse through “audiovisual body” software simulations called avatars (33), a term originally indicating the incarnations of Hindu deities, but popularized to such a degree by Stephenson’s novel that it now applies to any representation of a self in a digital world (Davis, 223). Descriptions in Snow Crash of the Metaverse, which is “subject to development,” the construction of “buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality” (23), could easily apply to contemporary virtual realities and MMOs, massively multiplayer online worlds such as Second Life. Even information tools in the novel, like the CIC software Earth, which tracks spatial information of “maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance” (99), are now almost fully realized in programs like Google Earth.
If the techno-socio-economic world portrayed in Snow Crash seems viably realistic, then so to is the novel’s depiction of magic. Stephenson does not rely on fantasy tropes as a metaphor for information technologies, but instead presents magic as a historically researched plot element, modernizing the ancient concept that language – the symbolic exchange of information – causes real effects in the real world. The central conflict in Snow Crash is the resurrection of an ancient Sumerian nam-shub, described as a neurolinguistic virus, essentially “speech with magical force “(197), which Rife wants to use to gain greater control over people’s minds. This concept of language as “both a story and an incantation… a self-fulfilling fiction” is explicated in the novel through several chapters of researched information, and relies on the Sumerian concept of me: linguistic units that functioned as “algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to society” (202, 240).
Stephenson is quick to draw a connection between the concept of me and the functioning of computer technology. He suggests, “The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is a form of speech – the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub,” but also that “the belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature” (197, 256). As Davis points out in Techgnosis, language is perhaps the earliest and most pervasive human technology, and the supernatural or performative power of names haunts the majority of early linguistic cultures and religious traditions (23-5). It is not just a coincidence that we use the same word “spell” to describe both the construction of words and the performance of magic. Contemporary scientific studies echo Stephenson’s position that learning new information forms neurolinguistic pathways in the deep structure of the brain (117); language effectively creates our perception of reality.
As we see in Snow Crash, the issue inherent in such operational or performative language is in who controls its use: “someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visible symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem” (369). In our contemporary world, like in the novel, this is done through advertisements, viral marketing campaigns, the three-ring binders that allow franchises to operate, and any and all media and information technologies. We have even come up with an equivalent to the Sumerian me: memes, a term coined by the scientist Richard Dawkins that refers to a unit of cultural information virally transmitted between people through speech. As Hiro explains in Snow Crash, “we are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head” (373). Information does not have to be self-aware like AIs in order to be dangerous! On a much broader scale, whole social, political, and economic realities can be magically constructed from a single linguistic document. As the Metaverse “is just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere” (23), so to is the United States of America a “space of possibility” constructed from the language of the Declaration of Independence.
One can easily see the problems that arise when we passively relinquish our operational relationship with information to vast media conglomerates and religious or political ideologues like those in Snow Crash, or those in our own world. As Nietzsche expresses it, quoted in one of the articles that prefaces True Names, “The master’s right of naming goes so far that it is accurate to say that language itself is the expression of the power of the masters” (43) On the other hand, those of us fortunate enough to be literate can, like Hiro Protagonist, write our own codes and stories that present equally valid linguistic realities. Vernor Vinge claims that, “up until the personal computer came along, Orwell’s vision [in 1984] of technology as the enabler of tyranny was the mainstream view. But in the 1980s… people with PCs began to realize that computers might bring the end of tyranny” (22). Ultimately, the true magic espoused in the fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson is not merely their envisioning of technological “spaces of possibility,” but their insistence on inhabiting those spaces with neuromancers, literally magicians of the mind, willing to confront the dangers and complexities of informational systems, in a manner that upholds our human freedom to linguistically construct the worlds that are our future.
Works Cited
Crowley, Aleister. “Magick in Theory and Practice.” Dover Publications, Inc. New
York: 1976
Davis, Erik. “Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information.” Three
Rivers Press. New York: 1998
Gibson, William. “Neuromancer.” Ace Books. New York: 1984
Stephenson, Neal. “Snow Crash.” Bantam Books. New York: 2000
Vinge, Vernor. “True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier.” Ed. James
Frankel. Tor Books. New York: 2001
Whitcomb, Bill. “The Magician’s Companion: a Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to
Magical and Religious Symbolism.” Llewellyn Publications. St. Paul: 1993
5.08.2008
The New Steam Age
It's sometimes strange living in the world of the internet where cultural trends like Steampunk are almost ubiquitous, but then in talking to friends who've never heard of it here in the often small-town Pittsburgh realize that Steampunk is still somewhat of an underground phenomena. Of course, thanks to this article on Steampunk in The New York Times, and a new Steampunk Anthology [both via Boing Boing], the whimsical neo-Victorian aesthetic of this sub-sub-genre may be coming to more public spotlight.
I first became aware of the term Steampunk in relation to Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a somewhat sci-fi styled series of novels set in 17-18th Century Europe. As opposed to the term Cyberpunk, which designated a genre of similarly-themed but slightly futuristic works, Steampunk began being used for works set in historical periods that nonetheless focused on the advent of technology, adventure, etc. Apparently such authors as Jules Verne with "Around the World in Eighty Days" and H.G. Wells with "The Time Machine" could be considered the grandfather's of Steampunk fiction. Personally I was always considered the "Little Nemo in Slumberland" comics of Winsor McCay, with their airships and Victorian sensibilities, to be another foreshadowing of this aesthetic (though perhaps the aesthetic yet to come of "Dreampunk"). From a slim genre of writing, Steampunk quickly became a fashion statement full of vests and petticoats and a DIY tinkering model full of brass plating and clockwork, and is slowly taking over other mediums such as music, video games, and film (at least according to the New York Times article and depending on how one wants to slice your sub-cultural definition). One of the biggest challenges apparently is that still being a rapidly growing sub-culture there is no exact definition of what makes something Steampunk. Similarly there are many artists who are currently drawing from this Victorian aesthetic, from Burlesque shows to fashion designers, without being aware that they might fall under a sub-cultural umbrella. Either way, what appeals to me in all this is Steampunk's sense of whimsy and elegance, the appeal to DIY ethics and a sense of adventure somewhat lost in the post-post modern world.
I first became aware of the term Steampunk in relation to Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a somewhat sci-fi styled series of novels set in 17-18th Century Europe. As opposed to the term Cyberpunk, which designated a genre of similarly-themed but slightly futuristic works, Steampunk began being used for works set in historical periods that nonetheless focused on the advent of technology, adventure, etc. Apparently such authors as Jules Verne with "Around the World in Eighty Days" and H.G. Wells with "The Time Machine" could be considered the grandfather's of Steampunk fiction. Personally I was always considered the "Little Nemo in Slumberland" comics of Winsor McCay, with their airships and Victorian sensibilities, to be another foreshadowing of this aesthetic (though perhaps the aesthetic yet to come of "Dreampunk"). From a slim genre of writing, Steampunk quickly became a fashion statement full of vests and petticoats and a DIY tinkering model full of brass plating and clockwork, and is slowly taking over other mediums such as music, video games, and film (at least according to the New York Times article and depending on how one wants to slice your sub-cultural definition). One of the biggest challenges apparently is that still being a rapidly growing sub-culture there is no exact definition of what makes something Steampunk. Similarly there are many artists who are currently drawing from this Victorian aesthetic, from Burlesque shows to fashion designers, without being aware that they might fall under a sub-cultural umbrella. Either way, what appeals to me in all this is Steampunk's sense of whimsy and elegance, the appeal to DIY ethics and a sense of adventure somewhat lost in the post-post modern world.
1.25.2005
signal from noise: raising babel from the seas of the da'atha-sphere
Last night I was practicing my nightly asanas, letting myself dissolve into breathing, when a startling noise like the end of the world erupted through the ordered peace of the room, piercing my consciousness straight to the core. After a panicked moment when I felt all of reality had turned on its head I realized it was only the fire alarm, set off by the candles I was burning. My heart beating in my throat and sleep now an impossibility, I sat down and started reading Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" in order to calm down, but soon found myself drawn into his world of viral information and interconnected knowledge. There amidst ninja hackers and religious franchises I stumbled upon a chapter that detailed some things that have been creeping around my head, ideas of myth as tales of social organization and information processing. In particular, Stephenson talks about the Sumerian myths, interpreting the stories of Enkil fertilizing the river valleys as the creation of communication (as he is the water god, and Sumerian society wrote on clay from the river banks created from his heart-waters (sperm, as original information carrier). But then another sentence broke through, much closer to the research I have done, after Asherah, the Sumerian ophidian (snake) mother goddess is compared to Eve, "Eve, as I recall, is responsible for getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Which is to say, it's not just a fruit- it's data."
In Hebrew, Da'ath is knowledge, and is the "hidden" 11th sphere of the Tree of Life, the abyss seperating the lower spheres from the supernal triad and not located in any one place on the tree of life as it is the space between the spheres. A quick jaunt through the Net revealed that Da'ath is linked to the Tree of Knowledge, that when Adam and Eve ate the malus malum (bad apple) from the Tree their universal consciousness was reduced to the limited ego perspective of duality (good vs evil, light vs dark, self vs other). By sampling a specific bit of data their perspectives became limited from the whole of knowing to a simple binary mentality. This is represented in the tree of life as a fall from the non-local connection of Kether to the singular being of malkuth, and as googlism so aptly put it, da'ath is the hole left behind when malkuth fell out of the garden of Eden. And so knowledge was reduced from the "appreciation for interconnected details" (wikipedia) of indra's net, in which all the hanging jewels (things, data, fruit, sephiroth) are reflection of all others, to a gaping abyss literally between oneself and the rest of the world. And so in one fell bite the order of the world is reduced to an incomprehensible chaos and a new order has to be formed (there are some interpretations of this myth that claim that God intended this in order to reorder his relationship to the world and be more intimately known in it).
Now, the idea of a choas that becomes ordered (or reordered) is rooted in many mythologies (the Sumerian again, with Enkil's slaying of Tiamat and reshaping the world from her body). Chaos is often represented by a serpent or ocean mother, who is the matrix, the prima materia from which all form arises. (see my article on the matrix for more information). According to information theory (and to paraphrase metachor), chaos is an increased state of entropy that allows messages to occur non-linearaly, in an ordered complexity that is essentially a measure of our inability to match signals we recieve from our experiences of the world with the frameworks we view it through, much like the choas I experienced before I realized the fire alarm was just that, and not a herald of armegedon. The form (signal) of fire alarm rose from the chaos of unprecedented noise. Or like this article, pasted together from the buzzing noise of opinions and subjective references that makes up our collective discourse.
Chaos is also considered as an abyss or void, and is akin to the space between things when the world is viewed as self and other. It is only by the distance between that one is able to interpret a relation to another object, and meaning (knowledge) is only the interpretation of that relation to one's self. In magical traditions, the adept has to across the abyss, or chapel perilous, in order to find understanding, a relationship to the jewel (data) hanging at the other side of the abyss. Picture yourself in a vast darkness with a thousand jewels hanging all around. You start walking to one, and as you move a colored trail is laid down in the dark to mark your path to whatever object you approach. You find a jewel, a book maybe, or a tree, and head towards another. At the same time others are moving through this abyss, making their own paths, so that soon there is a web of trails marked out between the jewels, establishing them in relation to each other. Not the infinitely reflecting web of indra's net, but a subjective web of referances ordering the objects, signals, in relation to the observer, much like the pheremone trails left by ants so others in their nest can find food (the idea of which is called stygmergy), but built from the chaos, the noise, itself (the medium is the message). So now we have replaced the complex chaos-matrix with a framework ordered to our own experiences, and constantly evolving as new knowledge is linked together. As knowledge expanded and the links were passed down from generation to generation, new technologies sprang up to represent this web of knowledge, culminating in what is now the internet, the datasphere or da'atha-sphere.
I propose that this da'atha-sphere is synonymous to the tree of knowledge, which runs perpindicular to the tree of life (line conscioussness vs. point conscioussness), and forms the web on which the spheres are hung in relation to each other. But it is also synonymous with the tower of babel (literally "gate to god) as an edifice to our push towards the godhead of interconnected conscioussness. In the myth, which also plays a large part in Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a tower is built with "the heavens in its roof," only to be abandoned when god causes its builders to speak in seperate tongues, so that they can not communicate where they all spoke the same language before and can not finish construction of the tower. No communion with the godhead, better luck next time. But next time is now, thanks to the translitartive powers of the internet, and a new tower is being built, this time spread out over the entire globe (knowledge stored serialy instead of hierarchichly). What does this mean? What strange and unexpected collective signal will emerge from the chaotic white noise of infinite bits of data swirling across the earth like a blizzard in some great infopocalyptic vision?
That remains to be seen. Any expectation of the singularity, like magical attention and quantum subjectivity, presupposes a result. What you look for you will find. If we look at this through the order of our established beliefs, we will only find them reflected back on us, though that might be what we are going for in the first place. If we want to see god in the collection of human knowledge, then we will see god.
Whether it is or not is an entriely different story.
In Hebrew, Da'ath is knowledge, and is the "hidden" 11th sphere of the Tree of Life, the abyss seperating the lower spheres from the supernal triad and not located in any one place on the tree of life as it is the space between the spheres. A quick jaunt through the Net revealed that Da'ath is linked to the Tree of Knowledge, that when Adam and Eve ate the malus malum (bad apple) from the Tree their universal consciousness was reduced to the limited ego perspective of duality (good vs evil, light vs dark, self vs other). By sampling a specific bit of data their perspectives became limited from the whole of knowing to a simple binary mentality. This is represented in the tree of life as a fall from the non-local connection of Kether to the singular being of malkuth, and as googlism so aptly put it, da'ath is the hole left behind when malkuth fell out of the garden of Eden. And so knowledge was reduced from the "appreciation for interconnected details" (wikipedia) of indra's net, in which all the hanging jewels (things, data, fruit, sephiroth) are reflection of all others, to a gaping abyss literally between oneself and the rest of the world. And so in one fell bite the order of the world is reduced to an incomprehensible chaos and a new order has to be formed (there are some interpretations of this myth that claim that God intended this in order to reorder his relationship to the world and be more intimately known in it).
Now, the idea of a choas that becomes ordered (or reordered) is rooted in many mythologies (the Sumerian again, with Enkil's slaying of Tiamat and reshaping the world from her body). Chaos is often represented by a serpent or ocean mother, who is the matrix, the prima materia from which all form arises. (see my article on the matrix for more information). According to information theory (and to paraphrase metachor), chaos is an increased state of entropy that allows messages to occur non-linearaly, in an ordered complexity that is essentially a measure of our inability to match signals we recieve from our experiences of the world with the frameworks we view it through, much like the choas I experienced before I realized the fire alarm was just that, and not a herald of armegedon. The form (signal) of fire alarm rose from the chaos of unprecedented noise. Or like this article, pasted together from the buzzing noise of opinions and subjective references that makes up our collective discourse.
Chaos is also considered as an abyss or void, and is akin to the space between things when the world is viewed as self and other. It is only by the distance between that one is able to interpret a relation to another object, and meaning (knowledge) is only the interpretation of that relation to one's self. In magical traditions, the adept has to across the abyss, or chapel perilous, in order to find understanding, a relationship to the jewel (data) hanging at the other side of the abyss. Picture yourself in a vast darkness with a thousand jewels hanging all around. You start walking to one, and as you move a colored trail is laid down in the dark to mark your path to whatever object you approach. You find a jewel, a book maybe, or a tree, and head towards another. At the same time others are moving through this abyss, making their own paths, so that soon there is a web of trails marked out between the jewels, establishing them in relation to each other. Not the infinitely reflecting web of indra's net, but a subjective web of referances ordering the objects, signals, in relation to the observer, much like the pheremone trails left by ants so others in their nest can find food (the idea of which is called stygmergy), but built from the chaos, the noise, itself (the medium is the message). So now we have replaced the complex chaos-matrix with a framework ordered to our own experiences, and constantly evolving as new knowledge is linked together. As knowledge expanded and the links were passed down from generation to generation, new technologies sprang up to represent this web of knowledge, culminating in what is now the internet, the datasphere or da'atha-sphere.
I propose that this da'atha-sphere is synonymous to the tree of knowledge, which runs perpindicular to the tree of life (line conscioussness vs. point conscioussness), and forms the web on which the spheres are hung in relation to each other. But it is also synonymous with the tower of babel (literally "gate to god) as an edifice to our push towards the godhead of interconnected conscioussness. In the myth, which also plays a large part in Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a tower is built with "the heavens in its roof," only to be abandoned when god causes its builders to speak in seperate tongues, so that they can not communicate where they all spoke the same language before and can not finish construction of the tower. No communion with the godhead, better luck next time. But next time is now, thanks to the translitartive powers of the internet, and a new tower is being built, this time spread out over the entire globe (knowledge stored serialy instead of hierarchichly). What does this mean? What strange and unexpected collective signal will emerge from the chaotic white noise of infinite bits of data swirling across the earth like a blizzard in some great infopocalyptic vision?
That remains to be seen. Any expectation of the singularity, like magical attention and quantum subjectivity, presupposes a result. What you look for you will find. If we look at this through the order of our established beliefs, we will only find them reflected back on us, though that might be what we are going for in the first place. If we want to see god in the collection of human knowledge, then we will see god.
Whether it is or not is an entriely different story.
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