Recipes for Fun & Disaster

gregory ^tm In the course of researching your book, it seems like you and I have attended many of the same kinds of events—raves, Burning Man, rainbow gatherings, all that sort of thing. Can you offer insights into the pattern of ritual at such happenings that make them seem greater than a mere description of lights, drums, drugs, and people?

Erik: As an anthropologist would say, raves are a combination of a certain kind of mindset, with people agreeing to the over-idea that "in this kind of space and time, certain things might happen." This is the basis for all magical ritual, in that all participants agree that something really extraordinary is possible and then operate from that premise. Start with that idea, then throw in powerful rhythms, dancing, and the concurrent boundary dissolving qualities that come into play with ritual dance, along with psychedelic drugs or mind-altering substances, then you're going to create a synthesis whereby something magical can actually arise.

gregory ^tm Recipe for fun and disaster!

Do you see a lot of people happily giving up their rights in realtime for the promised land of life in the land of the mind, which will be much better than anything we could enjoy in real life anyway?

Erik: I think that's an increasing situation within information culture. You see increasing numbers of people identifying themselves with their virtual presence of the information self, as opposed to the embodied experience of real life. The networks of realtime are just as interesting as the networks of net life—but they're also becoming more constrained and more confusing and difficult, to some degree. There seems to be so little opportunity for real transformation in real life, that it's so much easier to just project our dreams and desires into this incorporeal space.

And that's one of the things that I see is a gnostic way of looking at reality—one of the hallmarks of gnosticism is that it contained within it a kind of radical dualism between the world of matter and the world of spirit. The goal was to get out, to escape.

And I do believe that there's a strong escapist element within cyberculture ranging from the hardcore AI [Artificial Intelligence] people who dream of uploading their consciousness into the global information grid, to the much more generic way in which people increasingly invest their energies or eroticisms into this media. That doesn't mean that the media doesn't have great possibilities and that it can't change the ways in which we interface with the real world in a positive manner. We can feedback our embodied spaces into our information spaces and vice-versa, and that is happening to some degree.

But I think that to truly allow that aspect of information space to develop we have to pull ourselves away from this almost disembodied exultation of the world of information, as if expressing ourselves in this world is more real, as in the case of how everybody is desiring to express themselves within the machine will somehow make them more real. The greater presence within the machine, the more our experience dissolves into a pattern of pure information and noise. It's not a place that presents human beings in a way that our bodies, interpersonal relationships, our relationships to nature, our relationships to social structures and institutions are of any import.

And yet we still desire to be there, with our homepages and our desire to be

net-dot-personalities or our basic desire—at least for most postmoderns—to become engulfed within the world of the celebrity. Celebrities have managed to transcend their entire lives into the realm of the mediasphere, they've become these sorts of demigod figures that are partly human and partly something else, and I think a lot of people really want that energy. But it's precisely that desire that pulls us away from the really hard questions that we need to be asking as we face the 21st century.

The Posthuman's Alchemical Dream

gregory ^tm In "The Path is a Network," you talk about how there's a need to have some kind of debate about the technologies that are coming forth. What is it that you see is most scary that is coming on the horizon with our technology?

Erik: That the process of commodification, which is one of the underlying mechanisms of our capitalist system, will penetrate into every last conceivable space and time associated with human life, from our genetic code to our dreams to our eroticism. To some degree that's already happened, because the technologies of today *are* technologies of the mind, and they have incredible reach into our psyches. They have the ability to penetrate and rewrite and constrain our realities almost totally, and they're so enormous that I'm very scared about what kind of humans we're becoming.

In some sense we're becoming posthuman, but our ideas of what it means to be human are changing so drastically that we haven't really any time to think about it and steer ourselves in a meaningful direction. At the moment, we're on our way to posthuman, but we are becoming posthuman without any kind of really meaningful discussion of how immensely we're plugged into all these different kinds of technologies and scientific ideas. Just think about the idea of Richard Dawkin's selfish gene—if I live with that notion at the forefront of my consciousness, that I am just a meat-machine for DNA, my experience of life is going to be radically different than it would've been had I just thought I was the master of the planet. This idea could radically transform my day-to-day life, since while it's very interesting to read about or think about, it's another notion entirely to have to live with. That's just a hint for the posthuman.

I think we have a lot of possibilities for the posthuman, some of which are radically interesting and offer us a great deal more than being incubators for DNA. And part of the alchemical dream is that we do have the possibility to transform ourselves or transform who we are—not just individually, but as a species. But I'm also very afraid of the other kinds of posthumans who are coming down the pike, and it's really the tremendous chaos that's unleashed as these new technologies are released to the world. Just look at the kind of chaos that the global economy has created in terms of how our previous worldview was just pulled out from under us. I don't believe there's any way out of it—I don't believe there's any way to go back.

Therefore, the only thing you can really do is to go into these mutations with as much consciousness and awareness as is possible. The reason I end with the image of the Net is that it's become such an important archetype for us these days; on a communications level, the Net is obvious. The brain is a network. The economy is a network. So we're really drawn to this quality of the network. So I think there's both an archetypal and a religious quality to the notion of the network.

We're all immensely connected, so ultimately the world can only be conceived as an immense sea of interdependence. Our desire to pull ourselves out of that and organize ourselves within our own little lives with our own little plan is such a small part of the picture. We're so fully connected and that if we realize how fully connected we are, physically, culturally, historically, economically, spiritually, psychically—if we can really experience what it means to be in a network cosmic—then we will respond with the qualities of hopefulness and compassion that will help avoid the really dark possibilities that lie on the horizon.