Free Escape Velocity by Mark Dery Page A

polytheistic nature religions) and the New^ Age with digital technology and fringe computer culture.*^^ Erik Davis, a critic of cyberculture and "longtime participant-observer in the Pagan community," defines technopagans as "a small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism."^^ He estimates their numbers at roughly one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand in the United States, made up "almost exclusively" of bohemian or middle-class whites.
    Psychologically, technopaganism represents an attempt to come to existential terms with the philosophical changes wrought by twentieth-century science. Philosophically, it bespeaks a popular desire to contest the scientific authorities whose "objective" consensus is the final, irrefutable verdict, in our culture, on what is true and what is not, despite the fact that most of us must accept such pronouncements on faith. Finally, it evidences a widespread yearning to find a place for the sacred in our ever more secular, technological society.
    From the Enlightenment to the present, instrumental reason, armed with the scientific method, has systematically dismantled much of the spiritual worldview, replacing it with the cosmology of science. With rationalism and materialism encroaching on all sides, those who feel impov-

    erished by the withering away of the Spiritual have adopted the strategy, consciously or not, of legitimating spiritual beliefs in scientific terms.
    Technopaganism is a manifestation of this strategy, although it is many other things, too. Like the other cyberdelic subcultures discussed in this chapter, technopaganism straddles nineties cyberculture and sixties counterculture. Both neopaganism and the nascent New Age entered the mainstream in the sixties through the counterculture's flirtation with Eastern mysticism and the occult-astrology, the tarot, witchcraft, and magick. (Practitioners of ceremonial magick use the archaic spelling in order to distinguish their rituals from stage magic.)
    Technopaganism crystalizes most dramatically in the use of the personal computer in neopagan rituals or magical practices. More prosaically, it bubbles up in the UseNet newsgroup Alt.Pagan and on special-interest BBSs given over to neopagan and New Age concerns, such as Deus ex Machina in Glendale, Arizona; the Quill and Inkpot BBS: Ritual Magick Online! in Passaic, New Jersey; Modem Magick in El Cajon, California; the Sacred Grove in Seattle; the Crystal Cave in Colorado Springs; the Magick Lantern in Denver; and Jersey City's BaphoNet (a pun on Baphomet, the Satanic goat who presides over the witches' Sabbath).
    Many of these systems employ echomail, a technology that links discussion groups on widely dispersed BBSs into a communal conference. BBSs, reports Julian Dibbell in Spin, "are showing signs of becoming the new temples of the information age."^^ He notes.
    Throughout history, spirituality has been a site-specific affair. ... So what's become of the sacred in a time when instantaneous communication makes a joke of the very notion of geography? It turns node-specific, that's what. Nodes are the electronic network's version of places-any spot where two or more lines of communication intersect.'°^
    A verse from the New Testament springs to mind: "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20).
    Technopaganism is embodied, too, in Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY, with a long o), a loosely knit organization that has evolved

    52 Mark Dery
    since its founding in 1981 from a fan club for the technopagan band Psychic TV into a cultish anticult. TOPY incorporates William S. Burroughs's ideas about social control and guerrilla information war, the hermetic teachings of the English occultists Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, and, most important, the complementary notions that magick is a technology and