Escape Velocity by Mark Dery Page A

cyberspace is inhabited by artificial intelligence (AI) programs that have evolved into something rich and strange: a pantheon of voodoo deities known as the loa. In a technopagan variation on the scenario imagined by De Landa, the interaction of autonomous software programs has given rise to artificial entities that assume the appearances and attributes of voodoo gods. "In all the signs your kind have stored against the night," explains an AI in Mona Lisa Overdrive, "the paradigms of voudou proved most appropriate."''^ In Count Zero, the Finn, a dealer in exotic, often contraband technologies, elaborates:
    The last seven, eight years, there's been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. . . . Thrones and dominions . . . Yeah, there's things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see?

    56 Mark Dery
    Sure, it's just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it's a whole universe."'
    Even now, some glimpse ghosts in the machine. In his essay "Techgnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information," Erik Davis vs^rites, "Far beyond Palo Alto and MIT, in the margins and on the nets, phantasms hover over the technologically mediated information processing that increasingly constitutes our experience."''^ Information, he asserts, "crackles wdth energy, drawing to itself mythologies, metaphysics, hints of arcane magic.""^
    For real-life technopagans, Gibson's voodoo electronics is more than science fiction. Maxwell X. Delysid, an active TOPYite who "accepts the Internet as a spiritual tool" and is investigating "what magick can be done wdth it," read Count Zero and was galvanized by the notion of voodoo spirits lurking in the Net. ^'[Count Zero] blew my mind," he writes, in an E-mail interview.
    I began to think, 'Here we have this worldwide network set up, just like [Gibson's] cyberspace, and there very well could be loa living in the Internet >now<. What would they be like? Would they be Haitian (as in the book) or would they be more a product of the [American] culture that CREATED the Net? What would their religion be? What would their purpose be? Would they even WANT us to know that they existed? I haven't found any, as such, yet."'*
    Faint echoes of this notion are audible in popular culture: In BBS Callers Digest, a columnist describes the staticky squall emitted by a user's computer when it connects to a BBS-the sound of digital data being converted into analog waves by the user's modem so that it can be piped over the phone lines-as "the high electronic scream of BBS angels.""^ Stewart Brand asserts that "when you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel," by which he means that participants in electronic conferences "communicate as these disembodied intelligences of great intimacy."''^ And John Perry Barlow believes that humankind's age-old

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    desire to inhabit the Spiritual" will be fulfilled in cyberculture. A convocation of disembodied minds who appear to each other on a BBS as screenfuls of typed conversation is "the flesh made word," he puns.
    The growing tendency to conceive of computer-mediated interaction in spiritual as well as spatial terms revives the Teilhard de Chardinian dream of reconciling metaphysics and materialism in a science "tinged with mysticism and charged with faith."''^ It is paralleled, among techno-pagans and New Age technophiles, by the practice of couching metaphysical convictions in scientific terms, and of seeking plug-in solutions to spiritual needs.
    New Age discourse in particular is woven from scientific-sounding theories of auras, etheric energies, vibrational fields, biomagnetism, tachyon energy, and "biological electrons" ("pure, bio-available energy" supposed to exist in light)."^ In the wake of seventies New Age classics such as Fritjof Capra's The Too of Physics and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu-Li