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
Showing posts with label Vinge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vinge. Show all posts
4.17.2008
Rewriting Reality
Yesterday I finished my classes for the semester, and despite the gorgeous weather drifting into the stuffy wooden room through the blue stain-glass windows, the students in my short story class were somehow excited to continue discussing the functions of literature. Debating Salman Rushdie's use of both magical realist elements and the English language in his collection "East, West" as a move towards a broader global perspective, one of my classmates asked why is any of this important to talk about, he's just a writer trying to make some money. Just a writer? Both my teacher and I had to bite our tongues, certainly one does not write in order to make money (just ask any aspiring author and many acclaimed ones). Something that we've been discussing all semester, through the writings of Poe, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, and Rushdie, is the way in which literature can present the expectations and conventions both of literature and of life itself back to the reader, reaching for ever larger perspectives on what it means to write, to inhabit a culture, to create reality. While not explicitly addressed in class I have been debating with my classmates over what I see as being one of the most important functions of fiction: that it can create reality, if even at the very least by suggesting new and other ways of being and perceiving the world and ourselves. If there's anything I've gotten out of this semester it is the recognition that writing has the power and responsibility to shape reality.
Of course, this has also meant that I have been entirely exasperated by the current trend in American literature, which for the past fifty years has been dominated by a "quotidian realism," that is, by snarky loosers sarcastically bemoaning the inconsequentiality of their everyday lives while trying to find moments of pale truth in the arms of their ex-wives, addictions, and academic pretensions. The biggest difficulty I see in this approach to literature is that it only confirms what is base and common about real life, while utterly refusing to allow any grander emotions or events room to occur. Personally I think that while art can be a mirror held up to reality, I also agree with Bertolt Brecht that art can be a hammer with which to shape it. My biggest philosophical influences here would be Robert Anton Wilson's quote that "reality is what you can get away with," and the Hashashin mystic Hassan ibn Sabbā's apocryphal assertion that "nothing is true; everything is permitted." While realism may claim to reflect everyday life, we forget that all it does is reflect literary trends and arch/stereotypes. No story is "true" outside of being a story, and consequently, one does not have to be bound by any proscriptions against that which is not typically real or true. Take Borges' work for example, in which fictional worlds ultimately overpower conventional reality, showing that it itself is nothing but a fiction of language.
According to the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliant discussion of the fantastic as a literary genre, the supernatural, or even just the hyper-real and magically real, can function in narratives to express those things that might otherwise be inexpressible, whether cultural taboos or a Daoist ineffability of reality itself. Certainly psychoanalysis has taken the modern place of saying the unsayable, so that one could today write about rather taboo subjects in a realist style, but it still does not address the more imaginative aspects of what might be possible in the world. Not that one has to include magically real elements to do this, but this function of imagination is the place at which myth and folktales function. Italo Calvino suggests the way the earliest storytellers took the elements of life around them, caves, hunting, tigers, reproduction, etc. and recombined them in all possible ways, creating both a boundary on what had been seen and done before, and the possibility of other things that hadn't and either could be desired or feared. In myth, dreams are born, and the ability for culture to advance. This process is still continuing today. The human imagination in stories has more recently created both the internet (Vernor Vinge's "True Names") and the modern totalitarian state (Orwell's "1984"). If these aren't everyday enough examples for you, consider the now ubiquitous and almost bromidic myth of the American Dream. Thousands of people believe that they can raise themselves from rags to riches, and many actually do, precisely because in the late 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. happened to write a particular kind of dime novel in which that was possible. Maybe it was possible before that, but due to his stories it seems to many to be much more possible now. I know that my own life was intimately shaped by reading certain kinds of heroic fiction as a child (what always impressed me about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series was not a desire to actually ride dragons, but the utter integrity of her characters in the face of societal pressure and change). I can only think of the current generation of children, who in reading the "Harry Potter" series may grow up with an increased sense of the possibility of true magic. Who, on the other hand, wants to grow up to be one of the bitter anti-heroes of a tepid realism, who himself is only a a second-order shadow of the much more interesting and articulate underdog, Henry Miller?
This post is of course not meant to be an exhaustive essay on the topic of rewriting reality, it is more along the lines of a tentative aesthetic statement or a whispered call to action. I'll only briefly point people to Grant Morrison's idea of art as a hypersigil, or to Paulo Coelho's idea of the Personal Legend. Why was his book "The Alchemist" on bestseller lists for the past year? Because he is telling people quite simply that they can create and live out their own stories. And if even just one reader believes him, then he has done his job as a writer. Never doubt that you too can be living in the greatest story ever told.
Of course, this has also meant that I have been entirely exasperated by the current trend in American literature, which for the past fifty years has been dominated by a "quotidian realism," that is, by snarky loosers sarcastically bemoaning the inconsequentiality of their everyday lives while trying to find moments of pale truth in the arms of their ex-wives, addictions, and academic pretensions. The biggest difficulty I see in this approach to literature is that it only confirms what is base and common about real life, while utterly refusing to allow any grander emotions or events room to occur. Personally I think that while art can be a mirror held up to reality, I also agree with Bertolt Brecht that art can be a hammer with which to shape it. My biggest philosophical influences here would be Robert Anton Wilson's quote that "reality is what you can get away with," and the Hashashin mystic Hassan ibn Sabbā's apocryphal assertion that "nothing is true; everything is permitted." While realism may claim to reflect everyday life, we forget that all it does is reflect literary trends and arch/stereotypes. No story is "true" outside of being a story, and consequently, one does not have to be bound by any proscriptions against that which is not typically real or true. Take Borges' work for example, in which fictional worlds ultimately overpower conventional reality, showing that it itself is nothing but a fiction of language.
According to the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliant discussion of the fantastic as a literary genre, the supernatural, or even just the hyper-real and magically real, can function in narratives to express those things that might otherwise be inexpressible, whether cultural taboos or a Daoist ineffability of reality itself. Certainly psychoanalysis has taken the modern place of saying the unsayable, so that one could today write about rather taboo subjects in a realist style, but it still does not address the more imaginative aspects of what might be possible in the world. Not that one has to include magically real elements to do this, but this function of imagination is the place at which myth and folktales function. Italo Calvino suggests the way the earliest storytellers took the elements of life around them, caves, hunting, tigers, reproduction, etc. and recombined them in all possible ways, creating both a boundary on what had been seen and done before, and the possibility of other things that hadn't and either could be desired or feared. In myth, dreams are born, and the ability for culture to advance. This process is still continuing today. The human imagination in stories has more recently created both the internet (Vernor Vinge's "True Names") and the modern totalitarian state (Orwell's "1984"). If these aren't everyday enough examples for you, consider the now ubiquitous and almost bromidic myth of the American Dream. Thousands of people believe that they can raise themselves from rags to riches, and many actually do, precisely because in the late 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. happened to write a particular kind of dime novel in which that was possible. Maybe it was possible before that, but due to his stories it seems to many to be much more possible now. I know that my own life was intimately shaped by reading certain kinds of heroic fiction as a child (what always impressed me about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series was not a desire to actually ride dragons, but the utter integrity of her characters in the face of societal pressure and change). I can only think of the current generation of children, who in reading the "Harry Potter" series may grow up with an increased sense of the possibility of true magic. Who, on the other hand, wants to grow up to be one of the bitter anti-heroes of a tepid realism, who himself is only a a second-order shadow of the much more interesting and articulate underdog, Henry Miller?
This post is of course not meant to be an exhaustive essay on the topic of rewriting reality, it is more along the lines of a tentative aesthetic statement or a whispered call to action. I'll only briefly point people to Grant Morrison's idea of art as a hypersigil, or to Paulo Coelho's idea of the Personal Legend. Why was his book "The Alchemist" on bestseller lists for the past year? Because he is telling people quite simply that they can create and live out their own stories. And if even just one reader believes him, then he has done his job as a writer. Never doubt that you too can be living in the greatest story ever told.
2.11.2005
be careful what you wish for, it might already be coming true
With all the recent talk on futurestance, I thought it would probably be appropriate for someone to suggest that it if you bring change into the world without the clearest of intentions and idea what the effects could be, startling and sometimes rather unpleasant things might happen. But they also might have happened in some way regardless if you had done nothing.
Time’s a slippery beast, I don’t claim to know what’s up with it. Half the time it doesn’t even seem to exist. Is what I’m doing now just the forward ripple from something that is happening later, or is it the cause of that event? Or is the water just a little too choppy from all the waves to really see what’s going on? As a writer this concerns me, for there is an interesting history of storytelling either causing or predicting real events in the world.
Perhaps the most obvious example is the Bible, but I can’t do justice to that, so I’ll stick to a more recent example, George Orwell’s "1984", that well-loved tale of the well-feared horrors of the totalitarian state. Double-think, constant surveillance and warfare the rewriting of all history. As both policeman and anarchist soldier, Orwell probably had a good understanding of what government could do wrong and a reason for wanting to warn people against that with his chilling tale. Perhaps he even caught a glance of where the future could be heading and just had to say it. Either that or many, many powerful people have decided his book was a manual for world-domination and have proceeded to implement his control-driven concepts one after one. Just what did Orwell intend by writing this in the first place? Or if it’s just ripples in the sea of possibility did it really make a difference?
This is suspiciously beginning to sound like the age-old debate of free will. Do we create change, or does change create us? Even in an acausal reality it certainly feels like my actions have some sort of effect on the world, at least on the small scale of my daily actions. I am nice to people and they are nice in return, I take out the trash and it doesn’t pile up. But what about larger trends? Most people seem to think they are rather helpless in face of say, the government, or global warming. But these states too seem to have come about by people making small decisions that have swelled over time, or the singular acts of those insightful enough to catch the wave at the right moment and steer the next events in a particular way. Perhaps state control was inevitable, but Orwell was still pivotal in defining just how it would come about. As was Vernor Vinge’s "True Names" in defining the internet, neither cause or prediction but just a clearer picture of what was already happening.
Just what is magic anyway? It certainly seems to presuppose some amount of control and direction in the outcome of events. But it often feels more like pushing the world just so as a particular peak of opportunity rolls by. The right kind and amount of force at the right time, and then change happens as we intended it. At least as long as we had enough knowledge of the force and foresight of the times to speak or act true, and not send the world spinning off into some twisted nightmare version of what we wanted. If you’ve ever tried spinning a staff you’ll understand what I mean the first time you whack yourself in the head. But with some idea of how it works and what to expect things seem to work out. A good interpretation of reality goes a long way.
This was also posted as my first article over at Key23 where there has also been some incredible disscusions about the nature of reality and transendence that all seem to be leading up to something...
Time’s a slippery beast, I don’t claim to know what’s up with it. Half the time it doesn’t even seem to exist. Is what I’m doing now just the forward ripple from something that is happening later, or is it the cause of that event? Or is the water just a little too choppy from all the waves to really see what’s going on? As a writer this concerns me, for there is an interesting history of storytelling either causing or predicting real events in the world.
Perhaps the most obvious example is the Bible, but I can’t do justice to that, so I’ll stick to a more recent example, George Orwell’s "1984", that well-loved tale of the well-feared horrors of the totalitarian state. Double-think, constant surveillance and warfare the rewriting of all history. As both policeman and anarchist soldier, Orwell probably had a good understanding of what government could do wrong and a reason for wanting to warn people against that with his chilling tale. Perhaps he even caught a glance of where the future could be heading and just had to say it. Either that or many, many powerful people have decided his book was a manual for world-domination and have proceeded to implement his control-driven concepts one after one. Just what did Orwell intend by writing this in the first place? Or if it’s just ripples in the sea of possibility did it really make a difference?
This is suspiciously beginning to sound like the age-old debate of free will. Do we create change, or does change create us? Even in an acausal reality it certainly feels like my actions have some sort of effect on the world, at least on the small scale of my daily actions. I am nice to people and they are nice in return, I take out the trash and it doesn’t pile up. But what about larger trends? Most people seem to think they are rather helpless in face of say, the government, or global warming. But these states too seem to have come about by people making small decisions that have swelled over time, or the singular acts of those insightful enough to catch the wave at the right moment and steer the next events in a particular way. Perhaps state control was inevitable, but Orwell was still pivotal in defining just how it would come about. As was Vernor Vinge’s "True Names" in defining the internet, neither cause or prediction but just a clearer picture of what was already happening.
Just what is magic anyway? It certainly seems to presuppose some amount of control and direction in the outcome of events. But it often feels more like pushing the world just so as a particular peak of opportunity rolls by. The right kind and amount of force at the right time, and then change happens as we intended it. At least as long as we had enough knowledge of the force and foresight of the times to speak or act true, and not send the world spinning off into some twisted nightmare version of what we wanted. If you’ve ever tried spinning a staff you’ll understand what I mean the first time you whack yourself in the head. But with some idea of how it works and what to expect things seem to work out. A good interpretation of reality goes a long way.
This was also posted as my first article over at Key23 where there has also been some incredible disscusions about the nature of reality and transendence that all seem to be leading up to something...
1.16.2005
Wired as Word as World
So all this buzz about hypertext and the noosphere over at Vortex Egg reminds me of the Myst video games. In its story, a race of people called the D'Ni had the power of writing worlds through an elaborate description of its every detail, even down to the workings of its physics; that could then be travelled to. This sounds an awfully lot like the internet, especially in light of how Metachor describes it as a self-organization towards collective consciousness. I imagine if we could write such a detailed world-book ourselves such a thing might be possible, and the net's stygmergic and collective nature lends itself to that purpose (interpretation). As more knowledge becomes linked through the web the limits of our collective understanding of existence expands. The biggest issue then would be providing greater access to it and a really damn effective organization for it. It's not the collective consciouss if we're not all conscious of it. I would kind of picture the inner workings of it like a vast multilayered correspondance chart, much like that found in magical texts (like Crowely's "777"), but each person would only see the nearer level links in their particular field of query.
The other interesting thing about the Myst games, was that though the linking world books were written in words, the games themselves were played out in a virtual world of symbols and sounds that had to be interpreted in order to procede. This is very similar to Vinge's portrayal of the Other Plane in "True Names," as well as many other sci-fi depictions of cyberspace, as a virtual space moved and manipulated within (assumably in a multi-dimensional way) by the user's avatar. As noted before, Vinge clothes this space in terms of elaborate and magical symbol-complexes that while appearing as actual rooms and objects also symbolic of the underlying processing of code that is their function. The article on transmogrification Metachor dug up points to this as well, saying that the Web weaves word and image together in such a dynamic way that "Cyberspace becomes visualized data, and meaning arrives in spatial as well as in verbal expressions." It then goes on to compare this to religious ritual and iconography: "While the sacred Word lives primarily in the hearts and mouths of believers, the transmission of the Word over generations takes place through the rituals and the artistic images adopted by the community of the faithful. Since the medieval period, for example, the Catholic Church surrounds its word-based rituals with music, paintings, architecture, gesture, and incense. Such communal art is deemed essential to the transmission of the Word as conceived primarily through spoken and written scriptures. The word on the page is passed along in a vessel of images, fragrances, songs, and kinesthetic pressed flesh. Elements like water, salt, and wine contribute to the communication. Truth is transmitted not only through spoken and written words but also through a participatory community that re-enacts its truths through ritual." In other words the knowledge is being passed along by an actual experiencing of the thing it is representative of. Word is transmitted (taught) by linking it to its phenomena. Prior to the advent of such common virtual reality necessary to implement a full scale symbolic search-space such a thing could appear in two dimensions as a collage of images that roll up behind the linked words, and offer a higher level interpretation to the word data being presented.
And since its computers, then the words are all just a higher level interpretation of numerical processes, and correspondances would have to be me made between the numbers and the words and the things as well, such as in numerological approaches to knowledge. Then with numbers for the lowest level agents instead of words we write worlds out of code, and find ourselves back in the matrix again.
To play the fool, I will point out that this whole process of words and symbols and representation in the net is remarkabley similair to being alive and interpreting and transmitting meaning from our everyday experiences. Until the net breaks through into some other world of omniscient existence it is only a mirror for the veil of our beliefs.
The other interesting thing about the Myst games, was that though the linking world books were written in words, the games themselves were played out in a virtual world of symbols and sounds that had to be interpreted in order to procede. This is very similar to Vinge's portrayal of the Other Plane in "True Names," as well as many other sci-fi depictions of cyberspace, as a virtual space moved and manipulated within (assumably in a multi-dimensional way) by the user's avatar. As noted before, Vinge clothes this space in terms of elaborate and magical symbol-complexes that while appearing as actual rooms and objects also symbolic of the underlying processing of code that is their function. The article on transmogrification Metachor dug up points to this as well, saying that the Web weaves word and image together in such a dynamic way that "Cyberspace becomes visualized data, and meaning arrives in spatial as well as in verbal expressions." It then goes on to compare this to religious ritual and iconography: "While the sacred Word lives primarily in the hearts and mouths of believers, the transmission of the Word over generations takes place through the rituals and the artistic images adopted by the community of the faithful. Since the medieval period, for example, the Catholic Church surrounds its word-based rituals with music, paintings, architecture, gesture, and incense. Such communal art is deemed essential to the transmission of the Word as conceived primarily through spoken and written scriptures. The word on the page is passed along in a vessel of images, fragrances, songs, and kinesthetic pressed flesh. Elements like water, salt, and wine contribute to the communication. Truth is transmitted not only through spoken and written words but also through a participatory community that re-enacts its truths through ritual." In other words the knowledge is being passed along by an actual experiencing of the thing it is representative of. Word is transmitted (taught) by linking it to its phenomena. Prior to the advent of such common virtual reality necessary to implement a full scale symbolic search-space such a thing could appear in two dimensions as a collage of images that roll up behind the linked words, and offer a higher level interpretation to the word data being presented.
And since its computers, then the words are all just a higher level interpretation of numerical processes, and correspondances would have to be me made between the numbers and the words and the things as well, such as in numerological approaches to knowledge. Then with numbers for the lowest level agents instead of words we write worlds out of code, and find ourselves back in the matrix again.
To play the fool, I will point out that this whole process of words and symbols and representation in the net is remarkabley similair to being alive and interpreting and transmitting meaning from our everyday experiences. Until the net breaks through into some other world of omniscient existence it is only a mirror for the veil of our beliefs.
1.13.2005
true names and the opening of the collective conscious
Yesterday I read Vernor Vinge's "True Names," and was inspired into finally using this blog account. This short story is perhaps one of the the key science fiction tales in shaping the vision and direction technology has taken over the last several decades as the first accredited depiction of cyberspace. Though that term didn't come about until later, from another sci-fi author, William Gibson, Vinge's "the Other Plane" essentially sets the foundation for the technological interface of humanity's information flows that we know of as the internet. It was a pretty good prophecy, as far as that goes. The interesting thing though was Vinge's choice to encode the story in terms of magick, the technological processes spelled out in terms of interpreting symbols and its most knowledgable users as warlocks. Which in a sense they are, the times not yet gone when working the complex code capable to craft a program, or even use a computer, seems to some a magical act. I personally know next to nothing about programming languages, but then again, I've been known to believe in magick.
The term 'true name' comes from magical traditions where it is believed that knowledge is power, and one of the surest ways to get knowledge of something was to have a name for it. A name being not only a definition but a contagious and associative link with the thing. The common words we use to refer to things are nothing more than a rudimentary label, whereas the true name of that thing is akin to a complete understanding of its entire being. If such a thing were possible. In Vinge's story this amounted to knowing the users real name and thus where their body was jacked in; you could do anything in the Other Plane just as long as no one could actually kill you. Though you could say that about the real world too.
There is an oft-quoted zen saying that claims a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself, as words are not the things they name but only reference pointers to them. All the concepts we have for objects, processess, and beings are nothing more than pointers, convenient fictions created to allow us to be able to make reference of discrete parts of the vast and oftentimes incomprehesible world around us. And as language is a function of communication, these symbolic tags are used mainly to represent our own disjointed experiences of the world in terms that others might understand. Which is in its essence the heart of story telling, creating symbol-complexes in which others can recognize experiences in their own lives and of life in general. In this light, one could say that any belief, any understanding of the world based on words, is just a story and contains no more truth than the teller (and listener) is willing to interpret into it; meaning belonging solely in the mind of the beholder and being not so much truth as comprhension in the pattern of one's own story. That being said, the truths of every great religion, culture and science are not truths at all but really convincing fictions. Even the belief that we have individual bodies interacting with other discrete beings is only a story for the flow of subatomic wavicles, the current quantum tale on the subject.
We have been telling ourselves stories since the dawn of history, in an attempt to give explanation and meaning to a world that proffered neither. And now we have reached a point where we are so wrapped up in the stories that we have forgotten they are just that, and go about in our beliefs as if they are the worlds they represent. Which, as language based creatures, for most intents and purposes they are. Our realities are fostered by our descriptions of it, the magical act being to change your description changes your reality. Now more than ever though, we can see that our stories, like the lower level words, are not static things; and it is through the interaction of different stories inside the larger discoursive flow of information that has allowed for all the breakthroughs of understanding that gave rise to the technologies we have today. Call them memes, themes, or belief constructs, but when ideas cross they either agree or conflict. And if they conflict either a synthesis occurs and both stories are broadened, or one steam rolls the other into oblivion and becomes the predominant belief structure; such is the case with the major religions, whose stories seems hopelessly out of date yet retain some amount of staying power by virtue of being really big. Regardless, the really groundbreaking changes have occured in our society when the stories have been allowed to influence each other and adapt accordingly, thus broadening our collective understanding of existence. Which is where the internet comes back in as a continually evolving matrix of humanity's stories, and thus the roots of all knowledge. A virtual Indra's Net or Tower of Babel, if you will, comparable to current stories of the Noosphere or global brain in which each person is a neuron or symbol processor. Another fitting metaphor is Borges's Aleph, a point which contains all other points, delightfully illustrated in "True Names" when Erythrina and Mr. Slippery become privy to the total flow of information on the Other Plane and essentially learn humanity's true name by experiencing it all at once.
One of the more magical properties of storytelling, as is expemplified by Vinge's "True Names," is that of prophecy. Stories are not only metaphors for life as we experience it, but projections of what life might be like, as we have the ablity to project our patterns ahead of us to understand what is likely to happen. Such subjunctive imagination is responsible for everything from the flight of airplanes to moment to moment survival, and at best allows anything we can think of to become real. In the realm of stories the most portentious visions of the future open up whole realms of possibility not previously imagined, allowing the future of today to become the past of tomorrow. Once we have a description of what a desired world might look like it is that much easier to find the steps necessary to bring it into being.
Which is precisely the intention of this blog, the collection and connection of stories that point towards a broader understanding of our experience in and manipulation of the world on a collective level.
The use of the term 'true names' is meant to be somewhat ironic, for as the Hashhashin sage Hasan-I-Sabbah reputedly said, "Nothing is true, everything is permissable," though a perhaps more fitting quote is the magical axiom "Everything is true in one sense, false in one sense, and meaningless in a third." I do not claim that any of the stories here-after told, or any of the connections I'll draw between them contain any explicit element of truth outside the meaning I and the rest of humanity have given them. As this is the case I do not expect people to believe what I say, since I don't myself, and would rather encourage them to comment with their own interpretations as that will only further the collective understanding of these stories and hence ourselves.
All that being said, welcome to True Names.
The term 'true name' comes from magical traditions where it is believed that knowledge is power, and one of the surest ways to get knowledge of something was to have a name for it. A name being not only a definition but a contagious and associative link with the thing. The common words we use to refer to things are nothing more than a rudimentary label, whereas the true name of that thing is akin to a complete understanding of its entire being. If such a thing were possible. In Vinge's story this amounted to knowing the users real name and thus where their body was jacked in; you could do anything in the Other Plane just as long as no one could actually kill you. Though you could say that about the real world too.
There is an oft-quoted zen saying that claims a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself, as words are not the things they name but only reference pointers to them. All the concepts we have for objects, processess, and beings are nothing more than pointers, convenient fictions created to allow us to be able to make reference of discrete parts of the vast and oftentimes incomprehesible world around us. And as language is a function of communication, these symbolic tags are used mainly to represent our own disjointed experiences of the world in terms that others might understand. Which is in its essence the heart of story telling, creating symbol-complexes in which others can recognize experiences in their own lives and of life in general. In this light, one could say that any belief, any understanding of the world based on words, is just a story and contains no more truth than the teller (and listener) is willing to interpret into it; meaning belonging solely in the mind of the beholder and being not so much truth as comprhension in the pattern of one's own story. That being said, the truths of every great religion, culture and science are not truths at all but really convincing fictions. Even the belief that we have individual bodies interacting with other discrete beings is only a story for the flow of subatomic wavicles, the current quantum tale on the subject.
We have been telling ourselves stories since the dawn of history, in an attempt to give explanation and meaning to a world that proffered neither. And now we have reached a point where we are so wrapped up in the stories that we have forgotten they are just that, and go about in our beliefs as if they are the worlds they represent. Which, as language based creatures, for most intents and purposes they are. Our realities are fostered by our descriptions of it, the magical act being to change your description changes your reality. Now more than ever though, we can see that our stories, like the lower level words, are not static things; and it is through the interaction of different stories inside the larger discoursive flow of information that has allowed for all the breakthroughs of understanding that gave rise to the technologies we have today. Call them memes, themes, or belief constructs, but when ideas cross they either agree or conflict. And if they conflict either a synthesis occurs and both stories are broadened, or one steam rolls the other into oblivion and becomes the predominant belief structure; such is the case with the major religions, whose stories seems hopelessly out of date yet retain some amount of staying power by virtue of being really big. Regardless, the really groundbreaking changes have occured in our society when the stories have been allowed to influence each other and adapt accordingly, thus broadening our collective understanding of existence. Which is where the internet comes back in as a continually evolving matrix of humanity's stories, and thus the roots of all knowledge. A virtual Indra's Net or Tower of Babel, if you will, comparable to current stories of the Noosphere or global brain in which each person is a neuron or symbol processor. Another fitting metaphor is Borges's Aleph, a point which contains all other points, delightfully illustrated in "True Names" when Erythrina and Mr. Slippery become privy to the total flow of information on the Other Plane and essentially learn humanity's true name by experiencing it all at once.
One of the more magical properties of storytelling, as is expemplified by Vinge's "True Names," is that of prophecy. Stories are not only metaphors for life as we experience it, but projections of what life might be like, as we have the ablity to project our patterns ahead of us to understand what is likely to happen. Such subjunctive imagination is responsible for everything from the flight of airplanes to moment to moment survival, and at best allows anything we can think of to become real. In the realm of stories the most portentious visions of the future open up whole realms of possibility not previously imagined, allowing the future of today to become the past of tomorrow. Once we have a description of what a desired world might look like it is that much easier to find the steps necessary to bring it into being.
Which is precisely the intention of this blog, the collection and connection of stories that point towards a broader understanding of our experience in and manipulation of the world on a collective level.
The use of the term 'true names' is meant to be somewhat ironic, for as the Hashhashin sage Hasan-I-Sabbah reputedly said, "Nothing is true, everything is permissable," though a perhaps more fitting quote is the magical axiom "Everything is true in one sense, false in one sense, and meaningless in a third." I do not claim that any of the stories here-after told, or any of the connections I'll draw between them contain any explicit element of truth outside the meaning I and the rest of humanity have given them. As this is the case I do not expect people to believe what I say, since I don't myself, and would rather encourage them to comment with their own interpretations as that will only further the collective understanding of these stories and hence ourselves.
All that being said, welcome to True Names.
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