Tuesday evening I found myself in The Miller pub, the south east London outpost of the London Fortean Society, surrounded by a full house of boffins, geeks, nerds, the plain curious and a man dressed up an elf. My kind of people, for sure, and they were all there to hear Al Robertson deliver the wonderful, weird, and witty talk When the Light Gets In:The Occult Roots of Computing.
It would be a talk that would take in everything from The Grateful Dead to St.Paul's Conversion on the road to Damascus, Antonin Artaud to Brexit, via Steve Jobs to Tron. At times there were so many different strands to it that, like the world of computing itself, it became a little bit difficult to follow exactly where we going but in Robertson we had a more than capable guide who spoke in layman's, rather than technician's, terms and gave the audience plenty of opportunity to ask questions if there was anything they weren't sure about.
Robertson is a proud cyberpunk author, a cyberpunk apologist as he refers to himself with tongue in cheek at one point, who has published two novels. The first, Crashing Heaven, deals with an accountant of the future, a psychotic virtual ventriloquist's dummy, and the sentient corporations who persecute these protagonists. Its sequel, Waking Hell, focuses on how a dead estate agent is the only hope we have left when the human race is attacked by the past.
So he's an imaginative guy and, during the hour long talk, he gives free rein to that imagination but he's also done ample preparation and, equally important, research. His stated aim, as well as taking us on an unorthodox history lesson and a journey into the souls of the machines we use as much as they use us, is to assert that cyberpunk is "the transcendental wing of science fiction".
The talk was broken into three sections:-
(1) Cyberpunk is digital mysticism
(2) Home computers are engines of transcendence
(3) Science is the magic that works
....but I'll try my best, and this is not a subject I am even close to being an expert on - a keen hobbyist barely suffices, to collate it all in to one whole and give you a feel of the overall sweep of the evening rather than drilling down too hard on any individual points. If you want them buy his books or go and hear him talk.
Robertson was keen to get across that the morality of cyberpunk should always be that it opposes power, and that it never reinforces it. It pokes a stick into the machines and subverts technology so that it can be used against the rich and powerful. Or at least it's supposed to. Now, in the days where the giants of the Internet age, the Amazons, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Twitters, have more power than small countries it's becoming increasingly difficult to make a case for the Internet as a tool for freedom and liberty.
Antonin Artaud, the French avant-garde theatre director, died in 1948 long before the Internet was a glimmer in Tim Berners-Lee's eye but he was the first to coin a term we now associate with the modern world of computing. Virtual reality was utilised in Artaud's productions to create an alchemical transformation where the real and the virtual, the actors and the audience, undergo a shared 'hallucination'.
Robertson described this as a form of 'contained magic' that we now see in many shows that may not be expressly labelled cyberpunk but, in their essence, very much are. Examples were given:- Star Trek, CSI, The Matrix, and The Lawnmower Man (dismissed/praised as "the best bad film ever"). The Master Contol Programme in the 1982 movie Tron represents, contended our speaker, "the gnostic God of Tron" and it did seem that the roots of computing owed more to gnosticism, a Christian heresy that rose many centuries ago in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, than the occult as such.
In Pat Cadigan's 1991 novel Synners, a character named Virtual Mark uses the Internet to move from the physical realm to the spiritual plane, a similar arc to the storyline of Tron, and in William Gibson's Necromancer we can witness an AI become fully self-aware. There is a growing belief now that our mobile phones are so advanced that they are capable of emotion and feel sad if we don't look at them often enough.
But if, and let's be honest - it's a big if, our phones are becoming human and we are giving huge parts of ourselves over to computers do we need to be aware of what other creatures lurk in the depths of cyberspace. An exploration of other planets, the depths of the oceans, or unchartered jungles would be fraught with danger and so it is, say those who love thinking about this kind of thing, when we go deep inside our computers.
We could meet people like ourselves in there, sure, but we could also come into contact with hugely advanced creatures in this digital realm and some of them may have divine power. It sounds fanciful but it's no crazier than any other religion. During voodoo ceremonies it is said the voodoo gods ride their human hosts like horses and, to use just one of Al Robertson's examples, Facebook too rides us just as a voodoo deity would.
It can be a smooth ride (wish this person a happy birthday, share this memory) or it can be a rough ride (Brexit, Russian interference in the 2016 US election, or the nefarious work of Cambridge Analytica). Philip K.Dick died in 1982 so the Internet as we know it now was still in its incubation period but he still managed to develop a deep distrust for the material world and this was reflected in his writing. His characters could be both real and/or virtual, or even dead and/or alive at the same time. It made for confusing and paranoid prose but it also represented an attempt to break the chains that tie us to our physical forms and liberate our souls.
Donna Haraway, author of 1985's Cyborg Manifesto and the more recent Making Peace with the Cthulhu Scene, took the idea that we have become trapped by our own invented Gods one step further and proposed a theory that we, ourselves, are the collective demiurge and that not only did we create our world and the conditions in it but we are self-destructive gods intent on obliterating our host environment - the planet Earth. Take one look at climate change and our seemingly insatiable desire for weaponry and war and you have to concede she's got a point. At the very least she's using our very real, and very precarious, existence to tell a story that blends the real and the virtual in a manner worthy of the very best of magical realism or, indeed, cyberpunk.
You may be thinking by now this sounds far more like a load of old hippy shit than anything remotely punk - and you'd be right. Most of the pioneers of idealistic computing and of "psychedelic libertarianism" came out of 1960s San Francisco and it was one of them, Douglas Engelbart (born in Portland, Oregon but very much a man of the Bay Area) who invented the first recognisable home computer. One with a mouse, a screen, a keyboard, and even the possibility of hyperlinks. Something you can see I've made good use of!
Although Engelbart was a fairly straight guy, his buddy Stewart Brand was a far more leftfield proposition, he was mates with The Grateful Dead for a start, and the two of them worked together to make computer technology a tool that could enhance people's lives and enable them to live peacefully on communes. Brand's Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972) featured product reviews and articles about holistic therapies, self-sufficiency, and ecology and when this finally went online in 1985 as the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) it found a disciple in Steve Jobs thus providing us with a neat linear path from the hippy era to the high-tech era, a path so well trod now that nobody doubts its existence.
The WELL informed not only Steve Jobs but the entire idea of what online communities would look like. Former cattle rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow went so far as to publish A Declaration of the Independence in Cyberspace in 1996. Sixteen short paragraphs which contained this call to arms:-
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather".
Fighting talk for a hippy but what the techno hippies had overlooked was that their idea of freedom was not everyone's idea of freedom. They'd looked around at their friends and fellow travellers, mostly male, mostly white, mostly rich, and created a freedom that worked for them and, probably unintentionally, oppressed others. They certainly left many behind as they set off to explore bold new frontiers.
The French venture capitalist and astronomer Jacques Vallee is credited as being the inventor of the IP address and if being a venture capitalist isn't enough to ring alarm bells then the fact he had also been involved in CIA remote viewing experiments should be. Vallee was another computer pioneer but what he was pioneering wasn't technology as an enabler of a Utopian lifestyle but technology as surveillance.
It's unclear as to how much morality informed his work but he's certainly a fascinating character who I'd like to learn more about. The practice of using remote viewing, or ESP, for militaristic or other purposes is now widely discredited but it gave Vallee the germ of the idea of how IP addresses could help us navigate our way round the then nascent, hazy, and metaphysical space of the Internet.
Vallee saw divine intervention and ufology as, essentially, the same thing and he regarded St Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus as the first recorded example of UFO contact with the human race. Again, it may sound crazy but it makes more sense than a lot of the nonsense in the Bible.
The last section of the talk was pretty much a quick roll call of other historical movers and shakers that blurred the line between technology and the occult/divine/gnostic. We had Jack Parsons (the rocket scientist who pretty much founded NASA but blew himself up in his own garage trying to create a moonchild with L Ron Hubbard, much to the consternation of Aleister Crowley), we had Isaac Newton (in his time considered primarily an alchemist who dabbled in a bit of science), and we had John Dee, described as "a major league wizard" but also, possibly, history's first management consultant. The firm he was consultant to was the court of Elizabeth I and his innovations resulted in the concept of the Royal Navy and, ultimately, the creation of the British Empire.
If a sixteenth century occult philosopher, sorcerer, and lecturer on Euclidean geometry can have played such a pivotal role in creating an empire then surely it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that esoteric beliefs, occult practices, and good old fashioned twaddle have helped inspire the rise of the computers?
Al Robertson is, of course, an author of fiction and there were times when he was exaggerating for comic effect just as there were times when he teased the narrative towards an arc of his own choosing but, despite that, I think he was telling a story he really believes in. I believed some of it and I was skeptical about other sections. But, one thing's for sure, I bloody enjoyed the trip he took me on and, unlike the trips coming out of San Francisco in the late sixties this one only lasted an hour and was fuelled by nothing stronger than two pints of Pilsner Urquell.
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