Technopaganism, Revisited.

To wit, is the human condition that of existential projection upon what exists before us? As sociologist Emile Durkheim famously explored, we surround ourselves with ‘transitional objects’ - things we ascribe value to in context to the experiences we have with them. Ergo, the religion of technology is practiced through ritual use of technological devices, and the worship of ‘self’ such technologies seek to foster. Our resultant divination of technological objects thus interlinks with their ability to create simulations so sharp, we forget we are merely interacting with metaphors. As such, the average millennial may be moved closer to tears through losing their iPhone, than watching Bambi’s mother die…

Through recalling themes explored by Erik Davis in Wired magazine back in 1995, this reflection suggests that some of the most compelling digital-age developments revealed themselves through efforts to manipulate the ‘human’. Extended furthest, it may be provoked that our communications industry stands as an evolved form of ‘witchcraft’; utilising cognitive priming and seeding illusory patterns in its continued efforts to manipulate the masses.

So; ‘magic’ – to define the umbrella concept - is the “manipulation of the universe according to the will of magicians”. To believe in magic, one is suggested to hold an active, erotic, and performative imagination; the very same psychological disposition science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke used in espousing that new technology is “indistinguishable from magic”. Thus, where pagans historically were denounced by the bourgeoisie as counter-cultural anarchists, obsessed with seizing control of their fates; innovators within the digital-age appear to have inherited this mantle. Inflecting the ‘technopagan’ ideal outlined by Davis, the mystical power perceived of air, earth, fire, and water within mediaeval times appears to have given way to the assumed might of silicon, plastic, wire and glass.

To counterpoint the manipulable, ‘persistent phenomena’ are understood to exist; defined as events that have, and will continue to be present over time. As humans, we are tethered to the inevitability of death upon birth, for example. At the juncture between the ‘manipulable’ and the ‘persistent’, enterprises such as Dead Social have arisen: an end-of-life planning tool that releases videos upon your passing to convey your last words as you specifically wanted them said, and secondarily enabling you to identify an executor of your posthumous digital (read: social media) estate. Sincerely, I tip my hat to any enterprise that parlays with the potential of a 100% customer base.

Dead Social is ultimately illustrative of how digital-age etiquette dares to threaten the fiefdom of traditional structures; in this case, the established roles of churches and crematoriums as ‘grieving centres’. Whilst the emergence of celebrity death-hoaxing and the thematically-related practice of ‘performative sympathy’ on social media platforms may be offered as further evidence, the concept of ‘funeral poverty’ (e.g. those who claim to be unable to afford a funeral) may provide a more tangible example. Research suggests that an increasing proportion of families are deciding to live-stream funeral ceremonies to mourners beyond their inner circles, thus lightening the financial burden tethered to such events through digital means. All of these examples grasp for human connections through common bases of grief and mortality; explicitly grafting empathetic value onto the assumed weak ties between the human and our digital inputs/outputs. Distinct connections are therefore established between flesh and fantasy; mathematics and mythology.

Developing this notion further, ‘empathy’ can be specifically defined as the understanding of other people through the common code of human emotions. Through this lens, the ‘digital experience’ therefore seeks to become a comfort blanket for humans to collectively snuggle beneath – offering technology-infused practices that package the minutiae of everyday life into concepts palatable enough for us not to immediately reject them.

One could therefore argue we are socially conditioned to embrace technological devices through the nature of their many ‘handy’ functions: the connection of individuals through speech, text, or visual image via smartphones is simply a mechanised manifestation of human desires to exist as ‘social beings’, for example. Put differently, the ubiquity achieved by the smartphone may well be aligned to broader ambitions to outsource a range of internal human processes.

Within the procedural memory banks of the human brain (where our motor skills reside), neuroscientists are at present understood able to isolate eighteen distinct electrical wave patterns that can be directly mapped against eighteen specific physical functions. Under the assumed accuracy of digital reproduction, the potential to record and recreate electrical motor signals leads to an intriguing space. Where the irrationalities of human consciousness often render the concept of constructing ‘genuine’ artificial intelligence a far-fetched dream, the potential to download a mechanical process via the electro-muscular impulses involved – Rory McIlroy’s golf swing, or Roger Federer’s backhand, for example - appears a notably less threatening prospect to humans than that of synthetic sentience.

Picked apart, the aforementioned concept agitates perceptions of the human brain as a bio-mechanism that predominantly guides our actions in tandem with our personal senses of perception. To invert this through proposing a logic of external (read: digital) stimuli prompting one’s own muscles to ‘rise up’ and ‘talk down’ to our brains, we arrive at the “Pretender Project”, as led by innovation studio Unit9.

Reputedly adopting witchcraft as a guiding principle, Unit9’s research seeks to utilise distinct electrical impulses to seize control of living tissue, ultimately to produce boldly motion outputs. Think puppeteering on a ‘Being John Malkovich’ or ‘Avatar’ scale – a successful Pretender Project operator wields ‘living meat’ as a quasi-prosthetic device, in essence bypassing the will of a host body. Within this scenario of ‘word made flesh’ and ‘flesh made word’ – in both cases, via digital code - the moral panic aligned to control assumed lost to our digital creations recalls numerous science fiction “master vs. slave” narratives; namely the everlasting struggle for dominance between the ‘physical’ and ‘intellectual’.

One final theme emerges, via enduring legacy of the London 2012 Paralympics. Perceptions of disability athletes foremost as individuals “dealt a tough hand in life” are understood to have started to be replaced by appreciation of para-athletes as the elite sportspeople they are; granted, sportspeople who at times exhibit alternative approaches to core human athletic endeavours. In the same way smartphones seek to harness the wider human communication instinct, society appeared to require re-connection with base understandings of what a major professional televised sporting event is – via Channel4’s blanket coverage of the event - to begin to progressively comprehend the achievements of para-athletes.

It is no secret that technology plays a crucial role in disability sport; prosthetics and other digital-infused technologies are relied upon for ‘hygiene’ human functions and fundamental athlete safety within a number of disciplines, rather than simply being adopted in overt pursuit of record-breaking excellence. Yet where technology may philosophically be proposed to actually ‘create’ time within the sphere of competitive sport, the symbiosis between technological improvement and athletic achievement cannot be ignored.

Prosthetic technologies foremost work alongside the human body to ‘conjure the ghosts’ of understood human functions, rather than fundamentally creating ‘new’ abilities. Skeuomorphic in the truest sense of the term, such human/machine alliances are thus as much collaborative as they are innovative; yet as narratives surrounding pre-murder trial Oscar Pistorius recalled, distinct unease arises wherever humans encounter the unfamiliar. The technology Pistorius utilised to replicate human function – his running blades representing the ‘conjured ghost’ of lower legs - arguably became more totemic than the former Olympian himself.  

Ultimately, I implore you to look beyond the shimmering bodywork and acknowledge the human chassis upholding our digital-age experience.  Akin to indecipherable phenomena being presumed as ‘acts of God’, the digital is fuelled primarily by our thoughts, and thought threatens to deceive to the point of ‘agenticity’ – wherein powers of agency are ascribed to the intangible. Rather than sacralise the ‘new’, I rather seek to uncover the witches and wizards of the digital age: if consumer is reputedly ‘king’ and content is claimed ‘queen’, power contrarily appears to sit with those able to manipulate the ideas and information flows that surround us all.

Digital-age mythologies follow rules from Bibles written in binary, primarily authored by those most proficient at convincing investors of potential profits. Through the manufactured experiences of virtual reality – exalted as THE thing for 2016 by many - those with ability to manipulate brain and body are likely to make greatest gains through our collective Achilles heel: emotions. How far can they push here before the human in us refuses to cooperate? Or as we continue to wilfully indulge in such experiences, perhaps we truly are predisposed by the human condition to suspend rationality and believe in a little magic…