Notes On The Datapocalypse (Technognosis)

Ibn Maghreb

If we are to fully understand the peculiar moment in which believers have found themselves in, then it is time to understand the gnostic and spiritual tenents underlying technosupremacism and scientism which are animating the AI moment. Marshall McLuhan is one of those like-minded travellers who though outside the shade of Islam shared a keen and refreshingly blunt insight into the technodystopia that we have come to inhabit. Marshall attacks the tehcno-order with a ferocity and zeal and no doubt many Muslims would come to share his assessments as the manipulation of text, voice, image, video is nothing less than Dajjalic at this current time.

There is an interesting book by the name of Technognosis (Davis E. Techgnosis. North Atlantic Books; 2015.) that is worth reading. I have attached a chapter titled Datapocalyse below in full. I do not think it could be done justice with a twitter thread - it deserves to be read on its own and the chapter should give the reader cause to finish the rest of his book.

And God Knows Best

When asked whether he was an optimist or a pessimist, Marshall McLuhan would invariably respond that he was an apocalypticist. This characteristically snappy comeback not only reminds us of McLuhan’s devout Catholicism, but gives a hint as to why the man was so loath to take explicit moral or political stances regarding the electronic society he helped bring to public consciousness. To the consternation of his many critics, McLuhan placed himself in the position of a media seer who divined the technological “signs of the times” at an ironic and fatalistic remove from the secular stage of social action and historical conflict. But McLuhan was not so much a technological determinist as a technological exegete; he read the mediascape through the filters of his own erudite imagination, allowing analogies as much as analysis to lead him forward. This method allowed McLuhan to give intellectual voice to a hunch much deeper than the sociopolitical discourse of most media theorists: the hunch that human being and human civilization are undergoing a tumultuous transformation, one so total and irrevocable it can barely be divined.

For the true apocalypticist, the sense that history is about to turn a corner conjures up a psychological stance far more complex than optimism or pessimism, because the apocalyptic turn partly derives its power from the commingling and even confusion of salvation and doom. Even the old school visions of the biblical apocalypticists were deeply polarized, split between rapture and plague, the New Jerusalem and the Antichrist, the coming of the Messiah and the final trip to the pit. McLuhan’s schizophrenia on this account could be extreme. On the one hand, he could proclaim, as he did to Playboy in 1969, that computer networks hold out the promise of creating “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 and peace.” Invoking Dante’s belief that humans will live as broken fragments until we are “unified into an inclusive consciousness,” McLuhan brought it all down to brass tacks: “In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”1

But at nearly the same time, McLuhan was capable of nursing vastly darker views about the new technoculture.

In a letter to the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, McLuhan flip-flopped on his Playboy vision in about the starkest terms imaginable:

Electric information environments being utterly ethereal foster the illusion of the world as spiritual substance. It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body [of Christ], a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this world is a very great electric engineer

Here McLuhan condemns electronic media, not only for encouraging a denial of the material world (by which he means the gnostic heresy of Docetism), but for producing a demonic simulacrum of the very mystical body he invoked in Playboy. In the letter to Maritain, he also hints that certain powers and principalities are actually engineering this satanic state of affairs, suspicions nurtured by McLuhan’s dabbling interest in Catholic conspiracy theories about cabals of gnostic Illuminati scheming to manhandle the course of history.

McLuhan was hardly alone in his apocalyptic hunches, then or now. Many today feel a sense of vertigo growing at the heart of things, an almost subliminal rumbling along the fault lines of the real. The fringe-watcher Art Bell, who famously broadcast news of the weird on his enormously popular talk radio show, called it the quickening. Bell’s term is apt, because the mere acceleration of technological and socioeconomic change today is enough to lend a surreal and terrifying edge to the social mutations that mark our everyday lives. New technologies are transforming war, commerce, science, reproduction, labor, culture, love, and death at a speed that boggles the best of minds. As global flows of information, products, peoples, and simulacra gush into our immediate lifeworlds, they chip away at our sense of standing on solid ground, of being rooted in a particular time and place. The French philosopher Paul Virilio, a curiously postmodern Catholic, argues that the sheer velocity of information, images, and technological metamorphosis is actually dissolving our sense of historical time. Though we long ago accustomed ourselves to the manic rhythms of modern life, it seems as if we have been captured by an even deeper and more violent undertow in the tides of time, a ferocious rip that threatens to pull us out to sea.

Of course, our generation would hardly be the first to feel the rumblings of some tectonic shift in the bedrock of history. In fact, it’s tough to find a time during the last couple of millennia when some people somewhere didn’t think that the last days were upon them. Given the right social or psychological conditions, the right degree of utopian passion or violent upheaval, and the intense sense of imminence that characterizes apocalyptic time will emerge. Though countless culminating dates have come and gone with nary a hoofbeat or a trumpet call, eschatological prophets refuse to stop second- guessing the calendar. Toss in a major odometer click like 2000, and mirages of Armageddon and the Golden Age are guaranteed to pop up on the horizon.

Perhaps the West has written itself into a narrative trap and cannot escape its old grandiose fairy tale of fulfillment and annihilation, a story that, like all good stories, both demands and staves off its own end. Though the cosmic sense of an ending can be seen as a peculiar pathology of the historical religions, the eschatological imagination long ago leaked into secular myths of history and scientific progress. As we will see in this chapter, technologies are shot through with myths that frame the story of time, myths of utopia and cataclysm alike. So it should not be surprising that many of the stories circulating about the “information revolution” feed off the patterns of eschatological thought, nor that technological images of salvation and doom keep hitting the screens of the social imagination like movie trailers for the ultimate summer blockbuster. Indeed, you need only scratch the surface of technoculture to discover the infectious intuition that, whether angel or Antichrist or AI supermind, something mutant this way comes.

Even the most tough-minded engineers looked toward the year 2000 with dread, though their fears came to nothing. Countless computer systems across the globe, especially the “legacy systems” that form the primitive strata of many commercial, banking, and governmental institutions, store the given year as a two-digit numeral. Many feared they would misread 2000 as 1900, unleashing unpredictable and potentially catastrophic errors in the process. Fears about the Y2K glitch fomented scores of survivalist fears and paranoid rumors, stories that remind us how tightly we are lashed to time, or rather to the often arbitrary frameworks we use to categorize and control its always imminent flux. The fact that the West’s historical odometer was set by Christian bureaucrats with ten fingers doesn’t mean that the clock’s not ticking.

Though Y2K came and went without disaster, as did 2012, I predict that the end times will keep beckoning. To understand this perpetual return, 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. From where I stand, we should no more ignore these ominous signs and wonders than we should interpret them as literal forebodings of a certain fate. As Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult proved, apocalyptic intimations can be insanely dangerous, but they can also serve as dreamtexts for the zeitgeist. 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. We live on the brink in a time of accelerating noise and fury, of newly minted nightmares and invisible architectures of luminous code that just might help save the day. The sense of an ending ruptures the false complacency of the everyday, and allows us to glimpse our global turbulence, if only for a blink of an eye, under the implacable sign of the absolute.