Computers can be as sacred as we are, because they can embody our communication with each other and with the entities – the divine parts of ourselves – that we invoke in that space.
Predictor: Pesce, Mark
Prediction, in context:For a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Erik Davis covers pagans and the Internet culture, interviewing Mark Pesce, the creator of VRML and a technopagan from San Francisco. Davis writes: ”Long driven to hypermedia environments, the MIT dropout [Mark Pesce] has now designed a way to ‘perceptualize the Internet’ by transforming the Web into a three-dimensional realm navigable by our budding virtual bodies. Pesce is also a technopagan, a participant in 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. Several decades old, Paganism is an anarchic, earthy, celebratory spiritual movement that attempts to reboot the magic, myths, and gods of Europe’s pre-Christian people … ‘Both cyberspace and magical space are purely manifest in the imagination,’ Pesce says … Technopagans … honor technology as part of the circle of human life, a life that for Pagans is already divine. Pagans refuse to draw sharp boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and their religion is a frank celebration of the total flux of experience: sex, death, comic books, compilers. Even the goofier rites of technopaganism (and there are plenty) represent a passionate attempt to influence the course of our digital future – and human evolution. ‘Computers are simply mirrors,’ Pesce says. ‘There’s nothing in them that we didn’t put there. If computers are viewed as evil and dehumanizing, then we made them that way. I think computers can be as sacred as we are, because they can embody our communication with each other and with the entities – the divine parts of ourselves – that we invoke in that space.’ If you hang around the San Francisco Bay area or the Internet fringe for long, you’ll hear loads of loopy talk about computers and consciousness … But Pesce is no snake-vapor salesperson or glib New Ager. [He has been] tapping away at his book ‘Understanding Media: The End of Man,’ which argues that magic will play a key role in combating the virulent information memes and pathological virtual worlds that will plague the coming cyberworld. But he’s also the creator of VRML, a technical standard for creating navigable, hyperlinked 3-D spaces on the World Wide Web.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Technopagans: May the Astral Plane be Reborn in Cyberspace
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/technopagans_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney