TechGnosis

September 28, 1998
In the new millennium, will we drop our messy bodies and upload our minds--and souls--into tidy android containers? Why not, argues Davis, a Wired contributor whose hip, erudite first book argues for the survival of a kind of gnostic mysticism in the age of information technology, carried over from the specifically Christian movement of late antiquity. Davis marshals an impressive, even exhausting, amount of evidence from Eastern and Western literature, history, philosophy, scripture and popular culture to support his sometimes opaque position on the matter of technology's impact on human spirituality and vice versa. In wave after wave of hybrid vocabulary ("mythinformation," "netaphysician," "cyberdelia," etc.), he offers a dizzying implosion of simulated hypertext, leaping from an authentic Gnostic poem to a '60s rock concert to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook to the latest cultic catastrophe. This deluge of information and theory manages to be quite entertaining ("Already in Homer, Hermes is a multitasking character"), but, ultimately, readers may be unsure whether to applaud Davis's conclusion that the phallic vector of technological development has been supplanted by a womblike matrix. But it's not always the destination that matters, and readers who hang on will find that surfing Davis's datastream makes for an exhilarating ride.