EDP cultures group 4

"We must do better than simply snicker about the irrationality of apocalyptic thought, which is no more sensible and no less interesting or convulsive than gambling or good poetry. The really compelling question is how we grapple with the apocalyptic feelings and figments that already crackle through the world.  Even more potent is their ability to shatter the illusory sense that the world today is simply muddling on as it always has. This is not the case." The idea I focused on was if an apocalypse is actually going to happen and how people would actually feel about it.  Davis says that we shouldn't discard the idea of Doomsday because in doing this we get too comfortable with our daily living and don't really think deeply about the actual current problems in the world that are leading us in this direction.  Thus, this meme sums up the idea that Davis is talking about.

Davis transitions from the analysis of cults and conspiracies to apocalyptic theories in chapter 9. Davis dives into multiple instances where groups of people thought their last days were coming sooner rather than later.On page 270, he discusses Y2K and the paranoia that stemmed from switching centuries. One event that I was reminded of while reading this chapter was the paranoia around the world ending in December of 2012. There was a lot of paranoia that because the Mayan  Calendar seemed to end at this date, and had predicted events before. This interpretation gained mainstream attention, which isn't rare for apocalyptic theories . However, this case is especially interesting because our Christian-normative American society wouldn't suggest that the masses believe in the Mayan calendar. It makes me wonder if there is just a draw to societal hysteria or if it is that easy and profitable to play with people's fear of death. I would love to see Davis' links to this matt...

The question I posed was "Is information and the World Wide Web going to bring the second coming?"  I then pasted:  the last chapter of Revelations "Perhaps the manic enthusiasm for info, for producing, packaging and transmitting, and consuming scattered fragments of a coded world, is partly motivated by an unconscious desire for a totalizing revelation, an incandescent apocalypse of knowledge." (Davis 277) McLuhan's quote: "a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony." (Davis 253) VALIS WORLD WIDE WEB into the Lazarus corporation text mixing desk.  One phrase that stood out was, "I fell packaging, transmitting, and consuming scattered fragments which are described in this scroll."  I think this really gets at the idea of decoding and working with information in order to transcend or t...

One of the formative questions I developed while reading this chapter concerned how the history of apocalyptic theory developed. Once I cut up a section of the beginning of the chapter, which explained the perspective of Marshall McLuhan on this subject, I cam across what I thought was like an answer and that even seemed like something McLuhan himself would tout. McLuhan has previously stated that "schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy," and many of his concerns on the impact of technology contend that new technologies of information fragment our thoughts from their natural state. McLuhan comes across as a person who says one thing but means something entirely different, so I made this meme to sum up the seemingly contradictory nature of his philosophy.

For my meme, I focused on the concept of a technological "sign of the times". I felt that this was best encapsulated presently through the Zuckerberg conversations currently going on. I threw a question out into the universe: what does the current state of technology say about our future? My answer was formatted into this meme: I think this really speaks to the power of Facebook as a platform and the questions we will have to answer involving the internet. Is Facebook a news source or not? Is it a media corporation or not? Because things evolved so rapidly when it comes to tech and the internet, we have to remedy some of the harder questions we didn't know existed when Facebook was created.

Between both the chapters, I resonated most with chapter 8. Chapter 8 talked a lot about paranoia and conspiracy theories that feed the general paranoia. This chapter was especially relevant to my past blogs about the current data scare revolving around social networks collecting data even when we are not using said social networks. For example, I've seen more people putting stickers over their laptop webcams. This makes me think of the "Big Brother is always watching"conspiracy theories that has generated many sci-fi plots and even the reality TV show Big Brother. I want to focus on the show because I love reality TV. The show takes about 20 people and sticks them in a house where they will not leave until their own eviction, and last person to be evicted by their fellow roommates  wins 500,000 dollars. Despite being watched by millions, people lie and make strategies  to win the money.I think Big Brother especially encompasses our simultaneous  fear and enticement with ...

Chapter VII “cyberspace: the virtual craft” in Davis’ TechGnosis , plays with the idea of virtual reality and how cyberspace and the World Wide Web provide a place in which humans can return to their wired way of processing information.   This process has to do with a more physical field of understanding rather than the disconnected way of numbers and algorithms that the human mind was not programmed to fully understand.   By making information a 3d space, which Mark Pesce began to work with through VRML, humans can and maybe to a more efficient degree navigate the internet and the web of information as if it were a map or an actual physical space making it easier to literally explore a world of data.   This whole idea of navigating and essentially strapping into a web and then physically exploring information is fascinating.   I think an explorative web of knowledge, which the World Wide Web embodies, makes and with more advancement will make abstract information ...

Erik Davis applies numerous references and passages from many metaphysical and philosophical texts, such as  Dante's Inferno  or  Steganographia , as metaphors and allegories describing how virtual realms have changed human experience. Davis particularly emphasizes the metaphysical and technologically-obsessed patterns of behavior that have emerged from cultures surrounding online computer games and other developing forms of what is essentially virtual reality. Drawing upon his many previous statements regarding the numbing effects that technology has upon the senses, online interactivity seems to somewhat numb the conscious mind by creating a vivid layout of thoughts as a digital, multi-dimensional layout of a world. The process of exploring thought through digital means is a form of escape that can be numbing your sensory perceptions of reality, something illustrated by the structure of J.R.R. Tolkien's widely famous novel  The Lord of the Rings...

After reading chapter 7, I really wanted to touch on Davis’s reference to avatars. I believe that Bitmojis are a perfect example of our desire to portray ourselves ideally in the digital world. I have so many friends who will make their Bitmoji skinnier, taller, or more desirable. Furthermore, Bitmoji technology has evolved so much in the past few years that users can simply snap a photo of themselves and utilize technology to derive a Bitmoji. There are emotionally charged stickers you can use to portray your emotions visually instead of linguistically. There is a version of each of us that literally lives inside the message apps on our phones. Davis’s portions on conspiracy theories also really hit close to home for me. I have always been interested in conspiracies, not so much as a believer but as a fascinated third party observer. My best friend is an avid conspiracy theorist and I really relate specifically to the DIA conspiracies, so I devoured the portions on paranoia. Th...

Chapter 7 mainly talks about the idea of video games and how they act as an online world that is created by phantasms and imagination, yet this world can seem so realistic for players that get really into it.  The most interesting part of this chapter was when Davis talked about how these games slowly transformed from single-player, text-based, hack-n-slash games to multi-player RPGs.  Once networking was a thing in video games, avatars were slowly created and people began to have their digital version of themselves in these games.  Players get so into their "virtual doppelgangers" that they start to lose track of reality and they begin to crush on other "virtual identities" in the world.  Even I had this experience when I was in 5th grade and started playing the MMORPG Runescape with my friends.  I remember my friends and I would meet girl characters in this game and thought that maybe one day they could actually become our "Runescape Girlfriends" in this...

In terms of Davis’s chapter 6, I wanted to look into the term ‘personal computer’ and analyze some of the (now iconic) brand identity that accompanied the release of the PC. My area of study is communication and brand management so names are incredibly important to me. Davis describes the instance in 1972, when Brand first coined the term for Esquire (172). Imagining a time where communications about innovative technology regarding computers, including the simplest of categorical names we know today, were solely on paper fascinated me. The fact that you never hear ‘personal computer’ as a whole anymore fascinated me even more. It brought me back to a time when my parents had a large desktop monitor and laptops were a true commodity. We would ask our parents if we could “get on the computer” instead of “can I borrow your laptop?”. But there really is magic in a name. Alliteration and assonance are a huge help when it comes to the consumer. The soft sound of a ‘p’ is far more alluring t...

I think that Davis’s chapter “a most enchanting machine” in TechGnosis really touches on the more magical side of technology.   This mystical aspect goes against the intuitive nature of technology which aims at objective reality and finding answers to the more unknown.   Davis begins by writing about the role of psychedelics in shaping the counterculture that generated the computer.   Psychedelics as a means to transcend the body, alter and understand consciousness, and creatively shape the information surrounding oneself aligns with many of the original interests of the cyber community.   As cyberspace offers this potential to create a community and network of information and furthermore a space in which one can shape and use that information to truly find a better self-understanding, I begin to understand more why John Perry Barlow hoped for the internet to remain untouched by tyranny or control.   I also begin to better understand the magic potential of...

While reading Chapter 6 of Techgnosis, I became more familiar with concept of mystifying technology. In the previous chapters of 4 and 5, I grew increasingly curious about the idea detaching from oneself to explore other planes. Because LSD is heavily associated with counterculture, I can see why Davis goes into the chapter 6 topic of communication networks being a counterculture within themselves and computers "literally being psychedelic" because they manifest the mind. This chapter was the most chronological so far. I found that interesting because Davis really outlines the digital countercultures to set up the concept of Corporate cyberdelia. I do agree with the loose metaphor of LSD being put in the water with computers "turning everyone" and dosing the population. Even within my lifetime,  there has been a shift in how computers dose the population,With the invention of things like smartwatches, some of us even have little computers on our wrist that we wear....

My map is a topographic elevation of the mind. Topographic maps use circles to symbolize hills or mountains. I took this symbolism and used the two idea of "Mind and the Machine" and "Cosmic Database" as the highest elevations of the geologic mind. Cosmic Database is the highest elevated because there are the most contour lines closely leading up  to it. Also, the cosmic database is the highest level of information. Once the mind unlocks this database, they are distant from their programmed mind and dive into reprogramming their own mind.  The first line leading into this is the genetic code because I felt that while I was reading this that once one could could communicate with the double helix, they've unlocked the cosmic database. Secondly, I put galactic information because of the analogy that DNA derives from the stars and communicating with DNA will transcend us into a "post-terrestrial" plane. Outside of that, I put transcendence because tra...

The map above demonstrates the flow of concepts and ideas through the unconscious to the collective conscious in  TechGnosis  chapters four and five.  Each layer of dirt represents a varying level of consciousness, where the concepts lie within the soil is there dynamic location of consciousness.   Libertarianism and its ideals is a deep flowing well that has seeped in to the collective conscious but begins with the subconscious desires surrounding The American Religion.  The longing for a utopia through the means of technology is a mountain growing high and through the collective conscious.  It appears that this seems to be a common goal among many people on earth, and it is an idea Davis highlights repeatedly.  At the base of the Technotopia mountain lies the conflicting notions of extropy and entropy.  I think that extropy is at the base of Technotopia because it's ideals act as one of the means towards paradise and continuity for human b...

I opted for a topographic representation of Davis' chapters 4-5 because I felt that elevation could best represent the theme of human consciousness. The level areas represent unconsciousness, a complete and total lack of intellectual spike. Slightly more elevated areas represent the subconscious, as activity in the brain is present but not pronounced. From there comes consciousness, where humans live out most of their lives. The peaks of the mountains represent collective conscious, a difficult if not totally impossible stance to attain. Unconscious morphs into conscious which morphs into collective conscious, so layers are not actually layers but instead all bleed together. Ways of thinking and technology followed a similar pattern of exponential growth throughout chapters 4 and 5. The thinner the layers, the more time has passed. These bottom layers require more time to develop, whereas upper layers are concepts that are more recent or, perhaps, even futuristic. How long a con...

Chapters four and five delve into the mixture of spirituality, psychology and philosophy that have developed as a result technology’s increasingly prominent role in human society. I attempted to arrange the web of ideas and concepts presented in the reading into a more linear visual representation. In reality, the stage of Extropian thought marks the ending of the first chapter, indicating the chain of events that occurred as a result of combining American values of libertarianism and exploration with emerging realms of information, rationalization and empiricism. In the second chapter, man’s understanding of his own machinery escalated into separate categories of reactionary thought. Once man was thought of as a predictable series of mechanical processes, which could be shown by the consistent behavior of information consumption found online, people reacted to such a seemingly cynical perception of humanity by emphasizing the necessity of escape, and ultimately, transcendence. D...

This chapter mainly talks about the idea of transcendence, where humans should be able to exist in a state beyond our current physical state but we're still trying to find the right tools that would make this possible, if it even is possible.  I labeled unconscious as the deepest layer where we probably won't be able to get to, subconscious as the middle layer where we can get to but it's not very easy, conscious as top layers where we constantly are living on, and collective conscious as the top layer where everyone lives on.  Extropy, cyborgs, a utopian society, etc. are all ideas that we are able to think about, yet doesn't necessarily mean we'll experience it.  Religion, cyberspace, self-divinization and entropy are all ideas we currently think about and can experience.  Realism, spiritualism, libertarianism, materialism are all concepts that most people in society heard of before and can accept the fact that others can believe in them.

"The Codex and the Canon Consciousness" http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/other/journals/kraftpub/Christianity/Canon Chapter 1 offers an interesting commentary on the nature of Christian doctrine that was apparent from its inception. The true effects and impact that invention of written communication sometimes goes unnoticed. In theory, writing created the ability for individuals to communicate more complex thoughts to each other through a systematic series of symbols, and to extent, this was true. However, writing also gave way to the inner voice that many people held in their minds that was opened when thought had to be processed internally and visually rather than through external and oral senses. The idea that writing was invented to replace primitive aspects of oral communication seems contradictory since the advent of writing lead to reading, which in turn relied upon the newly unheard voice within the mind. The creation of writing as a form of visual communicati...

I used a web to show the progress of the mind as time and technology go on. I started at the nucleus with man making tools, which spurred the entirety of all other events, including writing, science, and poetry/philosophy. Knowledge then increased exponentially, as books, spirituality and electricity became commonplace. As time continues linearly, knowledge begins to expand in a rapid outward motion. Each bubble sprouts at least one subsequent bubble.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1THJjVlnKxT1B83P4R6JMgng7s_muLWmfQLaSjSPI3O8/edit?usp=sharing

The schism between Manichaeist schools of thought, such as Gnosticism, and Augustinian forms, such as modern American Christianity, is a slim but fundamental difference. When examining the attitudes of the two schools of thought, especially the stances they have regarding nature, creation, the world, transcendence and liberation, the conflict between the two seems unwarranted since, at first glance, a Gnostic and a Christian seemingly believe in enlightenment in some form that can help individuals escape a world of pain and sin. Yet traditional Christianity seems to frame the world as a ruinous wasteland caused by man's ignorance and poor choices. As a result, transcendence becomes a game of reconciliation with God where the individual has a never-ending spiritual struggle. Gnosticism, however, alters this line of thinking by shifting the blame on state of the world as well as the source of confusion and pain towards the creator. Although such ideas were initially proposed by extre...

I used the atom metaphor that our group used last class and applied it to the chapter 3, which was about information. The nucleus is both information and noise because one cannot exist without the other. Information can not be distributed without noise, and noise is the interference that is inevitable with any message that is delivered. Whether that noise is an actual sound, physiological,  cultural, etc., noise skews all information. In the inner ring, I have put the information self because we ingest information that becomes a part of one's self, spirit, and mind. Power and control are also in this ring because  information's primary purpose has been power and control. Information is constantly used as leverage or to get a collective to believe something; which becomes power. For example, the collective belief that America provides opportunity allows America to have power on a global scale.  On the outer ring, I have placed machine learning, systems, good and evil, ...

In Chapter III of  TechGnosis  "the gnostic infonaut", Davis highlights the libertarian ideologies of the second century Gnostics and how their views are reflective of the age of information and everchanging technologies.  I think that this chapter really focuses on the mystical side of the crossroads between humanity and technology.  It begins to lay the foundations for the Gnosis portion of  TechGnosis.   Davis begins by discussing the discovery of the Gnostic texts and defines gnosis as, “a mystical influx of self-knowledge with strong Platonic overtones” (77).   The discovery of the texts especially post World War II really ties in to the idea of old, buried (literally and metaphorically) technologies and information resurfacing or finding its way back in to the loop of modern day relevance.   This chapter points to the relevance surrounding the Gnostic ideals and the fluctuations of the modern age.   Davis first establishes Claude Sh...