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Technology is special to me because it has enabled me to connect with people even in relatively limited ways like linking up to another DS to play Mario kart

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My dad messages me pictures of the countryside everyday and I respond with photos of the city, receiving and sending those messages gives us both a continued connection, like making a coffee in the morning it’s just part of my day but it also allows me to see a slice of life I’m not currently experiencing

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Ai creation of image for the word: spirituality

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Drag is social technology, and somehow I am in love with this "tool" for more than 10 years already.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Felipe Petik Pasqualotto (@marinadragzilla)

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Tech can be used as a way to connect with others when you're unable to. For example, during the pandemic, my youth church held their activities and meetings on zoom. It also allows people from around the world to actively participate.

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My iPad allows me to engage with my art, hobbies and friends - my portable workstation. In terms of art, tech has opened up my abilities and allowed me to gain inspiration from many different people that I otherwise wouldn't have known about.

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This is my original home page, created in 1994. If you want more goodies, they're at my professional home page, here.

Outside the Light-Cone

Welcome to my space within the Noosphere. Within it you'll find most of my written works, rituals, lectures, papers, and so forth, along with some of the gems I've found on my tour through Indra's Net.

Confused? Here's an extensive interview with me that may help you to understand where I'm coming from.
And here's another, long interview about my spiritual beliefs and practices.

Here one of my friends has taken a a morph of my face a bit too far. But it is rather funny...

Here's my vitae in PDF.

I run a mailing list - Yeschaton - which keeps track of cutting-edge trends in the sciences.
Here's a link to the Yeschaton website. (Kudos to James Kent & TRiP)

Enjoy!

Mark Domenic Amadeo Tripp Pesce
mpesce@hyperreal.org

McBurners
An essay about the future of Burning Man

For the first time in nine years, I skipped Burning Man in 2003. What I gained from that decision was an unexpected clarity of vision - about myself, the event, and its future. On Thursday 4 September 2003 I gave a brief spoken-word rant at Invisible College. That rant, in essay form, was sent out as a public letter to the entire Burning Man community the following evening.

It's time for us to rethink, revisit and revise all of our dearly-held beliefs about Burning Man. That's my opinion, anyway. Let's start up a discussion, and together, define where we want to be heading. We're in the driver's seat - and it's long past time we put the petal to the metal...

Comments? Critiques? Email me.

"Crazy Noise"
Performed at the Invisible College
21 August 2003

A twenty-five minute spoken-word piece - with background music by the 21st Century Collective - wherein I tell stories of two of my crazy friends, two weeks of crazy times on Friendster, and what this all has to do with life...

This is a 30MB MP3 file (160Kbps encoding), so be careful when you click on the link. You may want to save it to your hard disk first, then play it back at your leisure.

If you're on a dial-up connection, you may want this low-quality (32Kbps encoding) version...

Unbomb
Video Artwork

On 21 August 2003, the UN HQ in Baghdad was bombed by unknown assailants. A CBS cameraman was in the room as it happened, and kept shooting through all the horror and chaos. This video was later posted on truthout.org. That evening, as I watched it, I heard the strains of Tomaso Albioni's "Adagio" running through my mind. I set this piece - sans its soundtrack - to Albioni's music. The effect, people have told me, is both chilling and strangely beautiful. It reminds me of the fragments of film that William Gibson wrote about inPattern Recognition.

This film is now available on YouTube. Click here to watch it.

"Year of Jubilee"
Performed at Mindstates Jamaica
6 October 2002

This is a piece of experimental fiction, in which I attempt to present an insider's view of the last few moments before the Eschaton. The astute reader will note how much lifted from Homer & Joyce's "Ulysses".

For those of you who wish to hear the piece, as I read it aloud, here's a link to an MP3 file (8.6MB).

Tales of Un-DARE-ing Do

Delivered at the
Students for a Sensible Drug Policy / Marijuana Policy Project
Joint Conference
9 November 2002

Our nation's drug laws are worse than draconian - they're a disgrace. This nation, which prides itself on freedom of speech, hasn't yet grasped the connection between freedom of speech and freedom of thought. But that connection will be made, sooner or later. That's when it will become frighteningly obvious that the battleground of the 21st century is for control of what you think, and how you're allowed to think it.

In this talk I take a very public stand, a "coming out," wherein I do say that I do use certain drugs which are currently deemed illegal. It is important that the twenty or thirty million Americans who believe as I do step forward, together, and show the country that we're responsible, reasonable, and utterly firm in our resolve to be true to what we believe. If we do that, the drug laws and the culture of fear they've engendered will fade away like morning mist.

Bios and Logos

Delivered at MINDSTATES Jamaica
3 October 2002

A quarter of a century ago, Terence & Dennis McKenna published The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching, a revolutionary book which attempted to provide a physical framework for the understanding of time, based upon both Terence McKenna's studies of Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality, and his intuitions of a resonant theory of time, reflected in the ancient Chinese oracular system.

Although the book was reguarded as a high point in psychedelic thinking, it has been ignored through most of the years that have followed. Most people thought the premise too ridiculous even to refute. I've always felt that the McKennas' argument held a grain of truth, and this talk - delivered at a conference about the state of psychedelic culture, circa 2002 - is my own exploration of the ideas contained within The Invisible Landscape.

Where once the Eschaton seemed a concept fit only for psychotics, today respected scientists talk about the Singularity as a matter of course. These ideas are, in essence, identical, and a framework of cultural anthropology can be employed to bring both words into a common discourse about how the physical processes of the universe have become increasingly lingusitically pliable, and point toward a thorough transformation of reality.

Becoming Transhuman
A Feature-length film about the Impending End of Everything

Produced for the MINDSTATES II Conference in Berkeley, California, "Becoming Transhuman" uses appropriated sound and video images (artistic fair use, in multiple and flagrant violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to create a new work which expresses itself in three parts, corresponding to the natural trinity of Affirming, Denying & Resolving. Who are we? Where are we going? What will we become? There are no easy answers to these questions, but "Becoming Transhuman" represents my own deeply-held beliefs on the future of humanity. To watch the video, you'll need to have a BitTorrent client installed. Click here to get one.

To get the torrent file of Becoming Transhuman , click here.

If you'd like to read the narration which accompanies film, here's the PDF file. It requires Adobe Acrobat.

Xbox
1,000,000,000,000 Operations per Second

Here's a brief article written for WIRED magazine (May 2001) about Microsoft's forthcoming video gaming console, the Xbox, which uses a new graphics chip designed by silicon upstart nVidia, and which claims a trillion operations per second. Here's a peek behind the hype...

The Playful World:
How Technology is Transforming our Imagination
Ballantine Books, Now Available!

From the Introduction:

"When a child enters the world, it knows nearly nothing of the universe beyond itself. With mouth, then eyes, and finally, hands, it reaches out to discover the character of the surrounding world. Over the course of time, that child will discover its Mother - the source of life - and, sometime later, its Father. But in the first days after birth, the child will be presented with rattles, mobiles, mirrors and noisy stuffed animals that will become its constant companions. Our children, in nearly every imaginable situation, are accompanied by toys...

"Just as the creative world of children has become manipulable, programmable and mutable, the entire fabric of the material world seems poised on the edge of a similar transformation. That, at essence, is the theme of this book, because where our children are already going, we look to follow."

The Playful World is a "web-enhanced" book. Just drop by, www.playfulworld.com, to find a depth of additional resources such as research materials, links, articles and additional essays by the author.

I made a short promotional film for the Ballantine sales department, which gives some background on The Playful World. If you'd like to play it, click here. (If you have ISDN, DSL or faster, try clicking here.)

You can order the book from Amazon, Borders or Barnes & Noble. Just click on your favorite store!

Keynote address for Toys and the Playful World
Women in Toys
14 February 2001

This talk was delivered to a professional organization of executives and designers working in the toy industry - most of whom were women. During the talk I did my best to project how today's interactive toys could become the foundation for a much more expressive world of interactive play.

Lecture series at Technopagans at the End of History
Esalen with Terence McKenna

Recorded in August 1998, the full 9 hours of lectures have been encoded to MP3 format. If you listen all the way through to the end (or just jump to tape 12) you can hear me claim that the Internet doesn't really exist.

Early in 2001, the Gene Expression Markup Langauge, or GEML was introduced to the world. It provides a standard for geneticists - and their supercomputers - to talk about gene sequences. The hope is that this can speed progress in identifying the constituent genes within our geneome, and serve as a "living" language.

A brief article about the release of Sony's ground-breaking Playstation2 video game console, which is really more like a living-room supercomputer.

One of my students at USC - recently graduated - went to work on the production set of CBS's "Big Brother" television show. He told me an amazing story of how much work it takes to create a panopticon for television, and spoke of the incredible work by the show's senior story producer, Robert Caplain. I went to visit them at CBS' Studio City lot, and spent a very interesting day watching the people who create "Big Brother".

One of my own ideas - freely ripped off from Bucky Fuller - is the creation of a real-time Earth visualization and comprehensive planning tool. I've created an early version of this, known as WebEarth. With the introduction of cheap graphics supercomputers, such as Sony's Playstation2, we can transform the globe on every teacher's desk into a globally accessible and tangibly sensible source of information about the world around us. These are the HTML slides used in the talk.

If this idea intrigues you, participate in the ongoing discussion at Cafe Utne.
There is some chance that this will become a real project - so if you're interested, please do contact me.

"Now You're An American"

presented at
Computer and Video Games Come of Age
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
11 February 2000

"Computer and Video Games Come of Age" featured a wide range of speakers from the videogame industry, talking about the various aspects of their artforms. A gathering of the elite to talk about the need for a more methodical approach to th common craft. I gave the closing talk, a short-form rant about some of the future possibilities for games - both hopeful and cynical.

Welcom e to the Firehose

A Feed Daily Report

NAPSTER is about the most important technology to show up on the network desktop since the World Wide Web. It also spells doom for most carefully held copyrights. This is a Feed Daily from 10 February 2000 in which I discuss the esoteric importance of this singular app.

The Trigger Principle

A Feed Special Report

A "review" of Quake 3 Arena, one of the most realistic - and bloodiest video games ever created.

The Magic Mirror:
Science Fiction as a Software Development Platform

Paper delivered at the inaugural conference for MIT's Comparitive Media Studies program. Explores the evolving relationship between science fiction (particularly cyberpunk) and the "big" projects of software development in the late 20th century.

"Jericho"

A talk delivered at Brown University's "Virtual Y2K" conference, in December 1999, reflecting on the implications of meme theory and communications technology. Dedicated to my friend Doug Rushkoff.

Thinking Small

An article for FEED magazine on Nanotechnology. Summarizes recent work in the field, and talks quite honestly about the "gray goo" problem.

Information vs. Meaning

Keynote address at SCOPE1: Information vs. Meaning

This talk - among the most significant (in my own opinion) - that I have ever done, encapsulates, in poetic language, my feeling about the present arrow of technological development, and the implications for human ontology.

Planetization

A short and rather dense talk about the eschaton, the Omega, and Teilhard, delivered at PARADOX II, at Arcosanti, on 25 September 1999. I spent most of the panel where I delivered the talk, hidden behind the ".com" issue of TIME magazine.

The Future of Magic

I spent Yuletide 1998 on the big island of Hawai'i; it was a transformative experience, which, in many ways, set the stage for everything that will follow in the next few years. After the trip - and its associated revelations - I composed a number of essays, collectively known as "The Future of Magic". They all have common themes, but each speaks with a different voice.

From "Low Earth Orbit":

I am an Eschatologist. By this, I mean to say that I study the way the Earth is coming to an end, a final culmination and consummation of the grand experiment of life. The meteorologist studies the weather, but the eschatologist studies which way the wind is blowing. The Grand Catastrophe, the twin bookend to the Big Bang, is coming. I argue that its coming rapidly, certainly within the lifetime of most of the people alive on Earth today. This scares my friends, because they think that an End is equivalent to Death. But birth is the eschatological event of conception, and, seen in this light, an end does not have to be a nullifying event; it could, just as easily, be an unconditional liberation.

The Next Twenty Years

Here's a RealVideo webcast of a talk I gave -"The Archer" - at The Next Twenty Years lecture series, in Seattle, Washington, on 27 August 1998. The panelists included venture capitalist Ann Winblad - who had some very interesting things to say about the future of business, and Dr. Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnology pioneer and one of my personal heroes. During the Q & A period that followed our 10-minute talks, the audience made some pretty interesting statements.

Click here to view the 28.8 Kbps presentation, or
Click here to view the 56 Kbps presentation.

Circle Round
(The Glory of the Middle Pillar)

Paper on theology and media prepared for the Science and the Spiritual Quest program of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union, University of California.

"We, who eat our heroes, who cast about like crack-fiends for the slanderous tales of those we have never met, astride the threshold of another way of being, half the Oedipal wreck of passion, but closer still to the Omega of Infinite Compassion - stand divided, connected, and overwhelmed by forces unleashed but only dimly understood.
"What hath God wrought?"

For the 10th Annual The Ends of the Earth
Digital Be-In

"The cell is the universe within, and Mother Gaia the universe without. And who among us can draw the line that separates these two? We breathe, we grow, and spread our vitality up to the very edges of the stars, both within our self-created world of ones and nones, and outside, to the smiling eyes of all the ones who you will touch, and remain part of, forever."

When The Three Were One

Multimedia Lecture Series, University of California

If ever I got information from somewhere else (the "channel Channel"?), this was the time. The place: The Pacific Film Archive at the University of California. It's not quite a poem, but not quite prose, either. Here's an introduction that you might want to read before you dive in.

(Dissolving Descartes)

Capstone Address to the IEEE Visualization Conference in Phoenix, on 24 October 1997. From the abstract:

Johannes Kepler had a devil of a time trying to discern the laws of planetary motion from the observed movements of the heavenly bodies. He spent months - perhaps years, trying to divine the circles which could contain their motions. From Pythagoras to Kepler, our visualization of the "perfect" forms of circle and sphere constrained the development of science far more than they aided it; when Kepler discovered the ellipsoid- and Newton wrote an equation to describe it - they laid down the fundamental mechanism of scientific discovery, in it an endless two-step of visualization and codification.
What we observe becomes scientific law; what we can see becomes true. The old proverb goes, "Seeing is believing," but somewhere along the way "seeing" has become confused with "visualizing", leading researchers in directions conditioned more by preconceived notions of underlying reality than any foundation of phenomena.

"The birth of language in the Paleolithic era - simultaneous with and incontestably linked to the birth of consciousness - created stresses upon the human organism which had never before been encountered. This speed-up, an exteriorization of thought which placed the internal self into the minds of the community of the newly conscious, led directly to an ingression of imagination; simulation begins as mythology."
"The gate between the historical self and post-historical post-humanity, the passage between a particular island of factuality and the absolute subjective, is ritual. Now we enter our closets and bend ourselves to the dictates of fashion and gender, language and culture. Soon, we cast magic circles in sacred groves, speak the Word, and bend the World to our ends. The ego can not survive this burst of power, any more than the animal survived the flash of consciousness; what follows us we can now hear, but we can not speak of it."

Delivered at the Discourse@Networks2000 Lecture Series
Stanford Department of the Humanities, Graduate Program in Epistemology

"There is no more ground beneath our feet; semantic singularity has taken the entire universe of meaning, and, in an in-folding worthy of a galactic black hole, compressed it into a cloud of energy, yielding nothing but the light bulb's steady and eternal yes. Everything is true. Everything is permissible. And this no longer just the mutterings of the alchemist, but the ontological dwell-state which post-Industrial civilization careens ever nearer towards, an attractor with its own peculiar form, a teleological arc in fractal form which as it unwinds bringsmens infinitely closer to manus, the event horizon that ultimate meeting of logos and techne, the word and the world."

"The Metaphysic of Technology is the being of doing."

The March 1997 issue of the Journal is a special issue on the theme of the "Metaphysics of Technology". This short essay - a clarification of some of the points covered in Ignition, disusses the relationship between being (Ontos) and doing (Techne).

A FEED Report

A first person report of the politics inside VRML. Learn the bloody truth of the birth of an Internet standard. The forces of commerce and community come into conflict where ever a new medium comes into being - but at what cost to the Consortium?

Ignition was delivered at World Movers, in January 1997, a ZD-sponsored conference all about VRML. I was asked to give the capstone address, which I did. It was a big turning point in my life; I realized that VRML had been created three years before (21 net-years) and so the talk reflected my position as the proud parent sending my child (VRML) off into an uncertain world, but with the best words of wisdom I could supply.

Many folks feel this is the best talk I've given, and one of the best they've ever heard. I'm touched.

Launch VRML Presentation

Also,Avoiding Babylon, another talk I delivered at the conference.

In this addresss - delivered with Tony Parisi - I discuss the implications of the emergent social qualities of cyberspace, particularly in light of Michel Foucault's studies of the natural functioning of social institutions.

Presentation for 5CyberConf

The Noosphere, predicted by Teilhard de Chardin three generations ago, and long sought as the philosopher's stone of the information age, can now be said to exist. The phenomena which accompanied the formation of this super-human body are in themselves singular, and put together define a shape which is utterly unambiguous in its form - even though that form can not be seen in its entirety. Somehow it had not occurred to us that all of our connecting might produce phenomena beyond the expected - that our mediations might surprise ourselves with a display of great novelty. We now live in the midst of that novelty; what do we know of it?

This work - my major "academic" effort for 1996 - presents a partial inventory of some of the effects associated with the noosphere, and addresses questions questions raided in my earlier work, Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology in Cyberspace.

Microsoft PowerPoint slides (3.5 MB, zipped) from the presentation are also available.

Three Panels in Two Days:
An Initiation

Panel Presentations from SIGGRAPH '96

This year I was invited to participate in three panels at SIGGRAPH '96. I decided to give one longer talk in three parts, and structured it into the three "degrees" associated with Masonic or Craft initiations. The First Degree, "Sit Down and Shut Up", was delivered atVRML: Prelude and Future; the Second Degree, "Earth's Mothers", was delivered atThe Soul of the Machine: The Search for Spirituality in Cyberspace, and the Three Degree, "Open Invitation", was given atPerception, Cognition and Interface.
These talks originiated out of a life-changing experience which is described in the First Degree.

Text of my speech given at the Fifth International World Wide Web Conference in Paris on 8 May 1996.

The rapid growth and acceptance of VRML as the interface technology of the 21st century has engendered maturing of VRML and the VRML community. In these threee talks, delivered over the end of November and the middle of December, I outline the history of VRML, and try to chart a path for our collective future, as a community, under the guidance of a VRML consortium.

1. Connective, Collective, Corrective: The Future of VRML
Talk given at VR World Fall 1995, in Boston.

2. The Web VRevolution - Microsoft PowerPoint Slides ONLY!!
Talk given on Developer's Day at the Fourth International Conference on the World Wide Web, in Boston.

3. Root, Trunk, Branch, Crown: Growing VRML
Capstone address to the First International VRML Symposium, held in San Diego. Here's thePowerPoint slides of the talk.

4. A Yule Story (a thinly veiled allegory) Yuletide posting to www-vrml which seeks to illustrate the present situation dramatically, using "A Crhistmas Carol" as a springboard.

There's also my column on ZDNet.
Lecture at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival 1995 Symposium, "Interfacing Realities". It's concerning the birth of a discourse on sacred art in holosthetic media.
If, as Picasso suggests, great artists steal, we'll need a body of work which articulates the sacred. This work attempts to identify the qualities that underly the sacred aesthetic elecronic.

Paper delivered at the Australian Information Superhighway Conference at Darling Harbour in Sydney, Australia, 16 - 18 November 1995. A careful look at the convergence of virtual and physical Earth-mapping technologies, with an eye to how VRML can be used to "hack the planet".
This paper establishes a theme in my own work which will be a major focus of my efforts through 1996; that is, the creation and maintainence of a global infrastructure for global imaging and global imagining. Using T_Vision as a starting point, what can we do to bring the planet to the desktop?

International Symposium on Electronic Art
1995 Keynote Address:
Ontos, Eros, Noos, Logos

A summing up of my philosphical and technical work over the last four years, including an examination of the history of electric mediation, perceptual cybernetics and what I see as the emergence of asacred art as evidenced by such projects asOSMOSE. It caused a bit of a stir when it was delivered; the combination of strict rationalism and blatant mysticism was more than many people were prepared to accept. It's an intersection of several sets of ideas; Deleuze, McLuhan, de Chardin, Manturana and Varela, and esoteric Witchcraft.
This piece is companion to Opening The Third Ear: Humanity at the VERGE of Communion, which I delivered on the same date one year before.

The
Virtual Reality
Modeling Language

Performance given on 21 September 1994 at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, as part of the Bay Area Virtual Reality Special Interest Gruop (VERGE). This performance is divided into three main areas, identified by elements:

Water: Little Neurons with Big Ideas

Earth: Where in the World is Cyberspace?

Air: Childhood's End

Paper presented at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web, in Geneva, Switzerland, 25-27 May 1994.

This work describes a visualization tool for WWW, "Labyrinth", which uses WWW and a newly defined protocol, Cyberspace Protocol (CP) to visualize and maintain a uniform definition of objects, scene arragement, and spatio-location, which is consistent across all of Internet. Several technologies have been invented to handle the scaling problems associated with widely-shared spaces, including a distributed server methodology for resolving spatial requests. A new languague, Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) is introduced as a first-pass proposal for WWW visualization needs.

HTML version can be viewed with a WWW viewer such as Mosaic or lynx. Also available are RTF (rich text format, which can be read by almost ANY word processor, save to local disk) and text-only versions.

VOCE (pronounced vo-chay') is Italian, meaning voice. VOCE is a non-commercial movement spreading across the United States and Europe. It is an environment of consciousness in which individuals share their creative process. These activities are in the shamanic tradition of performance, celebration, and listening. This organically expanding community of creative people is committed to the nurturing of the individual voice and self-esteem - personal healing through creative community.
VOCE is evolving as a spontaneous international "membership by consciousness". Artists, writers, entrepreneurs, healers, and others are converging via word-of-mouth toward a common ground, all taking part in growing a collective "tree of voices" - and fun.

VOCE has been evolving as performance workshops where individuals go through a simple process of introspection and expression. Traditional and modern composing techiques are used to open the individual voice, access self-knowledge, and sing the "inner song".

The VOCE core focus is to bring its empowering processes to neglected parts of our communities: hospitals, prisons, schools. Recent workshops have begun with South Central LA teens, helping these youths to discover their own song.

The VOCE network has neither a commercial agenda nor leadership. Rather, all those involved are actively taking responsibity for what needs to be done to spread its benefits. All have a chance to give and take charge. VOCE continues to branch out on its own across the river of imagination. It is a common ground waiting for your interest, your ideas, your story, your initiative.

For more information call (213) 221-VOCE, or send us mail.

WORLDSONG Project

Collaboration between myself, Paul Godwin and Phil Harrington, to develop a software package which enables world-wide audio conference spaces to be created and spatio-located. Dr. Martens is a 3D audio expert now working at Headspace. We'll be developping interfaces which will allow people to put their ears "inside" Internet, so that they can hear sound, spatio-located to their position on the planet. We hope to lead several VOCE events within this aural space, which we believe will be quite magical events. Indeed, we believe it will be possible to hear and participate in the "song of the world."

Contact Mark Pesce, Paul Godwin or Phil Harrington for more information.

Artwork by Dimensional Graphics

Virtual Reality, especially in its evocation as cyberspace, the realm of holosthetic communication, is the nuclear weapon of the human mind. This paper proposes a framework for understanding the effects of immersion within holosthetic media, a framework which can be summed up in the following phrase: The creation of a world necessarily implies the creation of a world view.

This work was presented at the Third International Conference on Cyberspace, at the University of Texas at Austin, on 14 May 1993. It caused a bit of a stir at the conference, and led to an open discussion of vivogenics. This edition has a new prologue, written in April 1994, for its publication in_SPEED_: An Electronic Journal of Technology, Media, and Society.

This is one of the works that I am most happy with.

A poem I wrote at Winter Solstice 1993, concerning the self-awareness of Internet. Section 4, "Shape", really needs to be performed live with a chorus of VOCE chanting as accompaniment, to get the full effect. Call this poem an early, hermetic statement about the Worldsong.

Short piece written for Unshaved Truths.
Really ought to be subtitled, " Or How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Cerwiddwen."

My first published piece, professionally, appearing in FringeWare Review #2.

Freedom in Cyberspace and why it's important and how we might find it. In this I argue that crypography is the defense industry of the 21st century, and, by inference, that the cypherpunks should be considered the heroes that they are. It was my research into telepathology, discussed at length in "Final Amputation", that led me to write this piece.

The abstract (unaccepted) for this year's CyberConf. Oh well. A brief discussion of the underpinnings of Cyberspace Protcol.

"Distributed Behaviors in Distributed Simulations", a talk I gave at the VR Systems Conference in New York City in October of 1993.

Abstract (accepted) for the Home-Oriented Informatics Conference, discussing the technical and social requirements for systems which broaden the political base.

Text of a presentation given at the Bay Area Virtual Reality Special Interest Group, VERGE, about "teledildonics", that is, VR and sex. I illustrated the point to come to some interesting conclusions, which I discussed, in more detail, in "Final Amputation".

First article in WiReD, "VR Hurts", about the dangers of Head-mounted Displays...

Second article in WiReD, "Sharing Cyberspace", a product review of the VRex VR-1000 3D projection display technology. For the "Street Cred" column.

Third article in WiReD, "SimSwim", about the CyberFin Dolphin Swim Simulator, the finest example of VR I've yet seen.

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This is my original home page, created in 1994. If you want more goodies, they're at my professional home page, here. Outside the Light-Cone Welcome to my space within the Noosphere. Within it you'll find most of my written works, rituals, lectures, papers, and so forth, along with some of the gems I've found on my tour through Indra's Net.

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We are the originators of the 'rest as resistance' and 'rest as reparations' frameworks, and create sacred spaces where the liberatory, restorative, and disruptive power of rest can take hold.

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It is no light thing to listen to the dead, but it is surprisingly easy - in the right circumstances.

Some of the most powerful magic is the simplest, and the Dumb Supper has an elegant simplicity that underlies its immense capacity to help us through the veil between the worlds.

Dumb Supper is a ritual of Samhain, the time of the rapid dying of the light, when the veil between the worlds becomes tissue-thin.

The supper itself is of pork - sacred to Cerridwen, Goddess of the Underworld - and apples. Apples have ever been associated with Goddess.

In addition, you will need a bell of some kind. I favour Tibetan timsha, but any bell will work.

Prepare the pork as you please - though simple preparations will definitely help keep your mind on the task at hand, for you are cooking food that the dead will consume. Those who can eat no more.

The phrase 'hungry ghosts' is not just a metaphor, for in the afterworld, there is no sensation as we know it. No sight or sound or touch or smell or taste.

Once the pork is prepared, cast your circle as you would for your Samhain celebrations.

Then begin the ritual by sitting in the silence of your circle. Let the silence fill you and cradle you. Relax into the silence.

With the silence complete, ring the bell three times, slowly and deliberately. Let the reverberations of the bell completely fade before striking it again.

Each toll of the bell brings the dead closer. You'll feel their presence drawing closer from the moment of the first ring.

As the final toll fades into complete silence, bring out the pork and apples.

Smell them. Take in their wonderful scent. Remember that you are smelling them as if for the first time. As if you have not smelled anything so wonderful in a very long time.

As you feel yourself nearly overwhelmed with desire for this meal, begin eating.

Eat in complete silence.

Linger on each bite. Enjoy the tender tart sweetness of the apple. Let the juices and fats of the pork course through your mouth. Savour the texture of the meat.

As you do, you will come to feel that you are not alone in these sensations. You have prepared the way for other souls - who can no longer feel - to come close enough to the veil to feel through you. You are the channel for these sensations.

As this occurs to you, other thoughts will occur, and these will not be wholly your own. You will reflect on the being of not-being, of what it means to no longer be. You will experience the delight of feeling, and gratitude toward the person who offered this delight.

The dead bring gifts. In silence you will hear them as they tell you of things the living can not know - but must.

If you are quiet you will hear the dead.

If you are wise, you will heed their words.

The meal finished, spend a moment enjoying the feeling of fullness. There is delight and gratitude in a sensation so simple, something too easily forgotten.

Silently thank the dead for their gifts.

Toll the bell once more to dismiss the dead. As the reverberation fades you will feel the veil between the worlds become a fact of existence.

Write down any lingering messages from the dead in a magical workbook, the better to preserve and savour those gifts of the dead.

The Dumb Supper is complete. Carry on within your ritual space.

You are free to speak again. But you may not want to.

My own recently departed make an appearance during my Dumb Supper. Whether that's memory or eternity is not for me to know.

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Listening to the Dead with the Dumb Supper Ritual

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It is no light thing to listen to the dead, but it is surprisingly easy - in the right circumstances. Some of the most powerful magic is the simplest, and the Dumb Supper has an elegant simplicity that underlies its immense capacity to help us through the veil between the worlds.

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The crypto world, with its numerous and rapidly expanding communities, can be very difficult to navigate, let alone understand. For all their insistence on rehabilitating the Homo Oeconomicus through perpetual contracting and economic transactions, many of these communities are full of their own ritualistic practices and quasi-religious celebrations, which would keep many anthropologists busy.

We have, thus, decided to turn to one such anthropologist, Inês Faria, to talk about her ethnographic work among various crypto communities over the years. Inês has authored a number of insightful papers, where she draws on theories of religion, myth, faith, and ritual, to add to our understanding of what makes crypto communities tick - and the role that blockhain plays in, as she and her co-authors put it, "re-invigorating enchantment and material romanticism towards finance and technology."
~ Evgeny Morozov You have co-authored an Could you give some concrete examples of how some of these phenomena manifest themselves in the crypto world and comment on the role they are playing? If some of them are, as you argue, a form of modern re-enchantment, what do you think is driving it? What could the study of the crypto-community tell us about the role of religion, magic, and ritual in today's world? interesting article (based on an ethnographic study), which documents the 'quasi-religious romanticism of the crypto-community towards blockchain technologies.' Apparently, one does find plenty of myth, faith, charisma, and ritual in this world. Various (prominent) members of this community have been anointed as 'Bitcoin Jesus', surely in explicit recognition of their proselytizing. In that co-authored paper, you also emphasize the significance of the myth of Satoshi Nakomoto to the broader quasi-religious resonance enjoyed by the founding of Bitcoin. What is the right way to read that legend? What exactly made you compare it to the legend of King Arthur? How much do you think the peculiar actions of Satoshi - complete anonymity, refusal to come out publicly, the decision to leave the huge stack of initial bitcoins unspent, etc. - have contributed to the mystique that propelled the initial crypto-community?
In the article, we ( me, Sandra Faustino, and Rafael Marques) give some examples of such manifestations explored with a bit more depth, but, briefly, some of these examples are cyclical celebrations, such as the Bitcoin Halving and the Bitcoin Pizza Day, but also moments of gathering, which include meetings and networking events with the function of consolidating and expanding the crypto-community.

One of the examples we give in the article is Bitcoin Wednesday in Amsterdam. At the time (2016/17), there was already collective awe regarding cryptocurrencies and blockchain, which, at these events, was almost palpable. At this specific one, Andreas Antonopoulos, a so-called Bitcoin evangelist, was speaking - there was clearly a reverential tone and a mix of curiosity and admiration surrounding this character. We listened to his talk, and it was pretty much a pitch - a pitch that was taking advantage of the speaker's own charisma, and of the mysticism surrounding the hyped Bitcoin and blockchain software - which people wanted to understand and bet on, depositing faith in its power to bypass financial intermediaries and make them obsolete. The latter of which was a central argument in Antonopoulos's talk.

Technical mastery has long been part of religious or spiritual awe, as well as a means to create or strengthen power relations - we can see this, for instance, in the prows of Trobrianders' canoes explored by Alfred Gell, or even in the architectural and decorative features of some churches. Bitcoin and all the aura surrounding its creation had this same characteristic, creating a strong appeal to novelty, to change, to technological prowess, and to its power to heal social, economic, and political ailments. An appeal that often attracted people coming from different (and often conflicting) economic and political positioning.

This enhanced the romantic view of the technology, making it very appealing - as a tool, as a medium for radical change, or as a vehicle for speculation and rapid money-making. We played a bit with this appeal, and the idea of re-enchantment, while thinking that this is really driven by various factors: the post-crisis situation, of course; but also, as other authors have also observed, the need for something that allows for a redemption of financial institutions and financialized gambling practices.
As an anthropologist, you have succeeded in uncovering layers of meaning inside objects and practices that might look mundane to the crypto-community itself. Thus, for example, you have emphasized the cultural and social role played by the whitepapers. What other kind of 'work' - besides just explaining some technical processes - do these whitepapers do for the crypto-community? In what ways are they similar to 'sacred texts', as you allude to in the co-authored paper?
I don't think there is a right or a wrong way to read that legend, or the parallel we establish with the legend of King Arthur. We read it in a particular way - that also points to why we established this parallel - as a legend concerning a 'noble altruist', who brings a solution to a problem by resorting to mysterious tools, and is seen as a savior from crisis and the despotic centralization of power.

The legend of King Arthur resonates with the idea of a prowess that people do not really understand, but whose results they can experience, and projects the expectation of making things right into a character. As with Satoshi, there is mystery around King Arthur, and the romantic tales told about this character are often romanticized and more mythical than historical. However, the historical events that led to the growth of this legend were very real: the anxieties about Saxon invasions and a hero who fought them off and gave people hope.

The idea of Satoshi as a noble altruist proposing a solution to bypass centralized power speaks to systemic anxieties as well: about centralized finance and power in the post-2008 crisis period, resonating with people coming from various ideological stands. This is done through the creation of a strong narrative around the decentralization capabilities of Bitcoin and blockchain, and the consequent liberation from financial intermediaries associated with the financial crisis.
You situate blockchain technology's growing appeal to the lay public against the background of growing suspicion of the financial industry that got bailed out after the 2008 financial crisis. While the financial system did take some proactive measures to improve its image via all sorts of ethical discourses and its commitment to vague projects like 'stakeholder capitalism', the crypto community (if we are allowed this generalization) doesn't seem to buy this ethical turn, hoping to instead install new regimes of 'algorithmic' truth and authority by means of the blockchain. Could you expand a little bit on these dynamics? You've done extensive ethnographic work among various blockchain communities - perhaps, you could reflect on the attitudes towards traditional finance, and the 2008 crisis in particular - that you observed there?
Satoshi's uninterested position, anonymity, and unspent bitcoins feed an imaginary of altruism and pure technical genius that seems to allow for a moralization of this character as good, and an identification of some projects' morals with that capacity to make things right. So, as a form of reasoning and faith this is not new, but it appears so when applied to a particular technology and the crypto-community.

I believe whitepapers are important elements in every project, and carefully prepared. The Bitcoin whitepaper was a primordial one and is particularly technical, while nevertheless laying the basis for all that came after that - there is a lot more work done by these whitepapers besides being technical resources.

From a more pragmatic point of view, the whitepaper seemed to us more or less like the life sign of a project, and the teams and projects we encountered considered them as such as well: you need to have one, and it has to be good. They are also the places and scripts where each projects' moral matrixes and ideological stands are imprinted, and key pieces in the dissemination of projects' potential and future actions. Finally, and importantly, they are also their business card. By explaining the more black-boxed technical aspects embedded in the execution plan of the project's narrative, they show technical originality and attract investment.

With the intensification of mainstream financial institutions' presence, there was a tendency for more technocratic approaches to prevail, much in line with the improvement of functional dimensions, and less with the development of platforms with any clear public discourse regarding financialization, capitalism, or the financial crisis itself.
There is some strange fascination with nationhood in the broader crypto community, which explains, perhaps, why we see so much blockchain and crypto-activity in the Pacific and the Caribbean, with many smaller island nation states getting into the crypto action (the most emblematic of such efforts is, of course, the recent Cryptoland video, which went viral). You've studied one of the earliest efforts in virtual nationhood - a project called Bitnation. Could you say more about what it was, what kind of agenda it pursued and with what motivation, and why it eventually ran out of steam? What kind of assumptions about governance, sovereignty, and nationhood underpin the thinking of the people behind the project? Could you say a bit more also about the ideological/intellectual influences on the founders of the project?
I observed various - often overlapping and ambiguous - positionings and attitudes towards the financial practices that underlay the 2008 crisis and the rescue politics that followed. Many of these, mixed with other, more personal, organizational, and ideological motivations, played a role in the development of the cases I observed and followed throughout my research. If, on the one hand, Bitcoin appeared as a clean slate possibility in an environment of increasing awareness about financial and financialization practices - as we can see in the genesis block - with many announcing that mainstream financial institutions' incumbency days were over, on the other hand, the real functioning of the cryptocurrency attracted a much more diverse crowd with various interests.
While a lot of recent discussions about the governance mechanisms of blockchain-based projects focus on tokenization, your work goes a few steps further in linking tokens to novel forms of reputation creation and assessment. What do you think is novel about such token-enabled reputation systems? And how can we situate them in a broader historical and political context, e.g. by viewing them, say, through a Foucaldian perspective?
Within this variety of more or less pragmatic uses of crypto were openly politicized projects, seeking alternatives to the financial status quo, but also financial institutions' innovation labs, where a myriad of processes of experimentation took place. These labs were not striving for radical change, but looking to profit from the software's possibilities for improving digital organizational tools and bureaucratic streamlining - including trading and settlement, digital identification, or payment services, among others. However, the boundaries between mainstream finance and more radical blockchain projects seem less permeable in theory than they were in practice.

Overall there seemed to be a certain belief in the corrective power of blockchain technology. This was felt from the part of financial institutions and projects seeking alternatives to mainstream finance through more decentralized proposals - many authors came across similar, and now widespread, narratives where the emphasis is on how the technical and security features of the system would allow for better financial supervision and secure financial operations. It was also felt from the part of the many crypto projects that developed, and that see in blockchain and cryptocurrencies, spaces to create economies where they thought human bias and corruption could be avoided through algorithmic mediation and management.
Related to this, one of your other articles discusses Pangea, the libertarian DAO-like entity with its own cryptocurrency, the Pangea Arbitration Token (XPAT). In the article, you make a passing but very interesting remark, comparing Pangea's decentralized reputation-oriented tokenized system to China's centralized social credit system: both treat reputation as a resource for articulating ambitious visions for socio-economic order. Are we now past the point of no return, with reputation being the raw material out of which future governance mechanisms will be built? Why do you think the libertarian-leading part of the crypto-community is so excited about tapping into reputation mechanisms for governance purposes?
With the passing of time, however, and with the intensification of mainstream financial institutions' presence in experimentation and investment circles, there seemed to be a tendency for increasingly more technocratic approaches to prevail, much in line with the improvement of functional dimensions, and less with the development of more politicized, or radical, platforms with any clear public discourse regarding financialization, capitalism, or the financial crisis itself.
What I found very illuminating about your work is the way in which you deploy the concepts of plasticity/rigidity to show that while the digital world is, in theory, very plastic, the reputation-based layer that is emerging out of blockchains/smart contracts recreates rigidity in it. This striving for rigidity is not very surprising though, for the broader dialectic of stability/disruption is probably inscribed in the capitalist system itself. It's just a bit hard to reconcile this insistence on 'governing by reputation' with the anarchist part of crypto-anarchism, the broader ideology that informs some of the projects that you've studied. How did your informants reconcile this need to put people in rigid reputations systems with their general anarchistic outlook?
The Bitnation and Pangea project proposed an anarcho-capitalist/Austrian economics-inspired market platform (a DAO) for digital jurisdictions and corresponding services. All services are private and digital nations can be freely created. The motivation for this was the project's founders' disappointment with democracy and the role of nation states, including conflict or borders, for instance.
You have also carried out some work on the other side of the fence, so to say, studying how traditional institutions - central banks and regulators - navigate this new crypto domain. Writing about the Dutch case, you emphasize the importance that the country's officials attach to the idea of the 'regulatory sandbox'. Could you expand on the assumptions made by the officials you studied about the inevitability of the blockchain/cryptocurrencies as a new force to contend with? What kind of imaginaries shape their imagination about the future?
Underneath the Pangea platform is a monetized reputation system where people are graded according to 'good' behavior in specific actions mediated by smart contracts. The monetization is carried out through the evaluation of users by a bot - Lucy - that converts good behavior points into platform tokens (the project's whitepaper explains this with a lot more technical detail). The functioning of the platform is connected to a prevalent idea in the crypto community that monies can be created on blockchains, and that changing money, and how and by whom it is issued, can change a/the world.
When reading your article about the Dutch blockchain ecosystem, I was struck by the absence of formal democratic processes or citizen participation in setting the broader policy on crypto. There are, of course, all these meetings between officials and entrepreneurs, many of them taking place informally. Yet one also gets a feeling that the officials do treat crypto as something that is here to stay and that needs to be harnessed and deployed for the purposes of making the Netherlands more attractive to crypto-entrepreneurs. In your ethnographic work, have you noticed any efforts by the bureaucrats that you studied to actually engage the public beyond the crypto community, e.g. by getting their views, say, on the immense energy costs of crypto or any of its other controversial aspects? Likewise, have you noticed those that work inside these crypto-communities expressing some doubts or concerns about the potential political and democratic consequences of their economic activities?
The Bitnation and Pangea project assumes decentralized and competition-based social organization is better than existing forms of governance. The platform intends to ensure stateless control through the algorithmically managed, monetized reputation system that works as a soft inclusion/exclusion mechanism and incentive scheme. This is an almost literal encoding of Hayek's private money theories, added to Austrian economics' wider views of society (Mises, Rothbard, Friedman) and intersecting with the decentralization promises of blockchain technology.

Within the very open functioning of the project's wider organization, crosscut by the so-called 'crypto winter' of 2018 and lack of the expected success in the ICO, the project reconfigured, and the seemingly lively community of followers faded away.
You have kept a close eye on the crypto-community since the mid-2010s. Do you see many changes in terms of their ideological outlook and political beliefs? Are anti-systemic attitudes more or less prevalent today?
Broadly speaking, without a solid community that trusts it and needs it, no project or new money proposal seems to prevail easily. Bitnation and Pangea appear as attempts to provoke an economic, relational, and transactional change without a consolidated community that wants such changes. This sheds light into how projects, monies, and proposals for transformation are better planned with and for particular places and society, and not marketed as solutions for its problems afterwards.
Inês Faria is a researcher at the CSG-SOCIUS/ISEG, University of Lisbon. Since 2016 she has been developing research about the uses of blockchain technology as part of the project Finance Beyond Fact and Fiction. Currently, Inês continues working on the relations between technology and society regarding the areas of finance and economy, but also of healthcare, in European and sub-Saharan African contexts.
I believe that the novelty with these kinds of reputation systems, when compared to other numbering or measurement practices, is the fact that they purportedly intend to replace more fluid, or flexible, means of relational trust ties and social reputation, and add a fixed, quantified, and monetized feature to these components of human social relations. This, I believe, constitutes a novel process of fixed valuation that rewards what programmers, or project founders, consider 'good' or 'bad' human and behavioral traits. This happens in a system where people would voluntarily enroll in constant collective surveillance.

If there are already numerous works concerned with governing by numbers, valuation, rankings, and reactivity, these kinds of reputational currencies and public and fixed reputation scores bring about new concerns. Under narratives where freedom and voluntarism are emphasized, algorithmically mediated reputation systems in a DAO appear as a sort of distributed panopticon - where one is always visible, partly scrutinizable, and rewarded for behaving according to the norm, and encoding, of what is considered to be 'good'. This is a form of technological determinism and a perilous sorting mechanism that fixes and makes rigid the plasticity of social lives.

So indeed, within similar sorting reputation systems, individuals become voluntary subjects of particular ideological power structures under new forms of social norm capillarity. These have the power to affect peoples' lives dramatically if not deconstructed and spoken about.

Bringing attention to these is, in my view, warranted, as quantified incentive and reputational and scoring mechanisms based on our data are increasingly ubiquitous in our digital lives and interactions, but also very real in our economic and socio-political lives - see, for instance, targeted ads, credit scoring and profiling, social media and politics, the social media echo chambers, or political pilots for social credit systems - and affect and influence how people interact with one another and the world.

I think there was already a tendency for this at a wider level, with maximizing shareholder value governance models, financial capitalism at large, and people profiling and credit ratings. The digital ubiquity of market interactions in peoples' everyday lives expanded this. I do not think we are past the point of no return, and I believe being sensitive to the problems of reputation systems in general, and monetized and openly exclusionary ones in particular, is one of the reasons why we are not past a point of no return - I believe there is much more going on beyond these, and people always find ways to do/not to do things and to circumvent limitations.

However, from a political and more institutionalized point of view, I believe these reputation systems to be more problematic. I suppose that libertarian-leaning crypto communities find them attractive because they appear as an easy fix to market-based decentralized governance, fitting a laissez-faire and monetizing discourse, without really doing so in practice, since whoever programs the reputation system and idealizes the platform has a considerable degree of power.

Algorithmically mediated reputation systems in a DAO appear as a sort of distributed panopticon - where one is always visible, partly scrutinizable, and rewarded for behaving according to what is considered to be 'good'.

I think there are various possible answers to this... I believe the reasoning of projects proposing reputation systems differs from one project to another, even within a crypto-anarchist spectrum. However, concerning the people I have spoken to, there was not much effort or tension in this reconciliation, at least from a more public discourse point of view, since, again, the reputation was sort of remitted to a more technical level of planning and executing things. The more anarchist part was projected onto the wider narrative of the project concerning the voluntary basis of participation, and, for the case of Bitnation/Pangea, the possibility of tailoring specific functioning rules, acquiring services, and interacting online with smart-contract mediation. For this case, the market/capitalist part of this anarchism fit the monetized reputation system embedded in the jurisdiction market. In this sense, the rigidity of it all seemed to be an attempt to replace much more malleable social reputation and trust dynamics.

Both industry players and the financial supervisor had similar positionings and imaginaries regarding an eventual inevitability of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a new force - likely because of their co-dependence in making markets. This was, at the time, of doubt, caution, and interest. My research interlocutors in different institutions were dealing with the technology as they did with others - creating and taking part in experimentation and 'innovation' hubs; testing and assessing utility; getting on board and connecting with others, including, importantly, startups, so they would not fall behind if a technology went mainstream. The supervisor did the same, with interest in the technology for monetary and supervision/regulatory purposes. The regulatory sandboxes appear as a safe experimentation space, a supervised one, and this collaborative ethos served various purposes, including collaboration itself, but also a quest for legitimization at two levels.

The first was legitimizing blockchain technology within a crypto universe permeated by money laundering, informal and illegal commerce, and those with whom finance 'should not be seen'. But the second was legitimizing fintech projects using blockchain technology - the idea of having the regulator on board was important, as were narratives about transparency and security, but also about cautiousness regarding the technology.

I believe the kinds of imaginaries here were related to added value philosophies (related to maximizing shareholder value corporate governance), digitization, and tech interoperability. In this sense, I think they were pragmatic and technocratic imaginaries, more than revolutionary proposals. The imagination about the future was one about innovating, collaborating, creating ecosystems and competitiveness (as a jurisdiction and between companies), but maintaining the status quo, under a different narrative.

At the time of my research in the Netherlands, these efforts to create the Dutch blockchain ecosystem were in the early days and were efforts that seemed definitely much more business, or infrastructure, oriented than focused on any kind of participatory approach to their definition. There were, however, some unrelated events, sessions, talks, and a couple of projects I came across that were concerned with proposing a more participatory approach to crypto, which later on partnered with municipalities for instance.

I did come across people in the crypto community with more critical approaches - and concerns about sustainability after the hype, money laundering, and energy costs - but most were not connected to major financial actors and were more related to independent projects. Within the more entrepreneurial side, there seemed to be a dominant technology 'pitch' discourse, as a lot of smaller and bigger projects were appearing at the time. For these, in general, most concerns were not about the consequences of the technology on political, democratic, or economic activities at large, but mostly on how to put it forward and become competitive in the area. The consequences were generally analyzed as part of the more technocratic approach, within innovation labs, startups, or the regulatory sandbox environment. From the part of the financial supervisor, there was, of course, a concern about systemic risk.

I believe the anti-systemic attitudes were stronger in the beginning. At this point, you can see some more subversive projects in other struggles, for instance for implementation, or survival. There seems to be a need for a softening of political discourses and anti-systemic attitudes in order for projects to function and be funded, comply with regulatory frameworks, and be able to operate in actual jurisdictions. I observed that radical discourses tend to fade and become more entrepreneurial-like, in order for the projects to continue. This is not always the case but it is often so. I also came across smaller, more participatory projects, which took the form of pilots circumscribed to particular urban territories.

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Inês Faria on Crypto as Ritual and Religion

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The crypto world, with its numerous and rapidly expanding communities, can be very difficult to navigate, let alone understand. For all their insistence on rehabilitating the Homo Oeconomicus through perpetual contracting and economic transactions, many of these communities are full of their own ritualistic practices and quasi-religious celebrations, which would keep many anthropologists busy.

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Post-truth is the international word of the year for 20161 as announced by the Oxford Dictionary, which annually picks a word that reflects the ethos of our current times. According to its definition, post-truth relates to circumstances in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping publi…

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Finding the Afrofuture in Foresight - Ingrid LaFleur | GFAC Live! February 23

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Considering the afrofuture exists between myth and logic, LaFleur has more questions than answers. How could elder and ancestral wisdom inform foresight methodologies and practices? What are the lessons embedded in our ancestral memory that we are ignoring as we conjure our futures? How can afrofuture thinking help bring forth the symbiocene?

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"Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space. If we are about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to do is plant the divine in it."
-Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce is in all ways Wired. Intensely animated and severely caffeinated, with a shaved scalp and thick black glasses, he looks every bit the hip Bay Area technonerd. Having worked in communications for more than a decade, Pesce read William Gibson's breathtaking description of cyberspace as a call to arms, and he's spent the last handful of years bringing Neuromancer's consensual hallucination to life - concocting network technologies, inventing virtual reality gadgets, tweaking the World Wide Web. Long driven to hypermedia environments, the MIT dropout 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. Pagans come in many flavors - goddess-worshippers, ceremonial magicians, witches, Radical Fairies. Though hard figures are difficult to find, estimates generally peg their numbers in the US at 100,000 to 300,000. They are almost exclusively white folks drawn from bohemian and middle-class enclaves.

A startling number of Pagans work and play in technical fields, as sysops, computer programmers, and network engineers. On the surface, technopagans like Pesce embody quite a contradiction: they are Dionysian nature worshippers who embrace the Apollonian artifice of logical machines. But Pagans are also magic users, and they know that the Western magical tradition has more to give a Wired world than the occasional product name or the background material for yet another hack-and-slash game. Magic is the science of the imagination, the art of engineering consciousness and discovering the virtual forces that connect the body-mind with the physical world. And technopagans suspect that these occult Old Ways can provide some handy tools and tactics in our dizzying digital environment of intelligent agents, visual databases, and online MUDs and MOOs.

"Both cyberspace and magical space are purely manifest in the imagination," Pesce says as he sips java at a crêperie in San Francisco's Mission district. "Both spaces are entirely constructed by your thoughts and beliefs."

In a sense, humanity has always lived within imaginative interfaces - at least from the moment the first Paleolithic grunt looked at a mountain or a beast and saw a god peering back. Over the millennia, alchemists, Kabbalists, and esoteric Christians developed a rich storehouse of mental tools, visual dataspaces, and virtual maps. It's no accident that these "hermetic" arts are named for Hermes, the Greek trickster god of messages and information. One clearly relevant hermetic technique is the art of memory, first used by ancient orators and rediscovered by magicians and Jesuits during the Renaissance. In this mnemonic technique, you construct a clearly defined building within your imagination and then place information behind an array of colorful symbolic icons - by then "walking through" your interior world, you can recover a storehouse of knowledge.

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus gives perhaps the most famous hermetic maxim: "As above, so below." According to this ancient Egyptian notion, the cosmos is a vast and resonating web of living symbolic correspondences between humans and earth and heaven. And as Pesce points out, this maxim also points to a dynamite way to manipulate data space. "You can manipulate a whole bunch of things with one symbol, dragging in a whole idea space with one icon. It's like a nice compression algorithm."

Besides whatever technical inspiration they can draw from magical lore, technopagans are driven by an even more basic desire: to 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. Because the issues of interface design, network psychology, and virtual reality are so open-ended and novel, the people who hack this conceptual edge often sound as much like science fiction acidheads as they do sober programmers. In this vague realm of gurus and visionaries, technopagan ideas about "myth" and "magic" often signify dangerously murky waters.

But Pesce is no snake-vapor salesperson or glib New Ager. Sure, he spends his time practicing kundalini yoga, boning up on Aleister Crowley's Thelemic magic, and 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. VRML has been endorsed by Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Digital, NEC, and other Net behemoths, and Pesce's collaborator, Tony Parisi at Intervista Software, will soon release a 3-D graphical Web browser called WorldView, which will add a crucial spatial dimension to the Web's tangled 2-D hyperspace of home pages, links, and endless URLs. As Pesce's technomagical children, WorldView and VRML may well end up catalyzing the next phase of online mutation: the construction of a true, straight-out-of-Neuromancer cyberspace on the Internet.

WorldView first popped out of the ether four years ago, when Pesce was sitting around pondering a technical conundrum: How do you know what's where in cyberspace? "In the physical world, if you want to know what's behind you, you just turn around and look," he explains. "In the virtual reality of cyberspace, you'd do the same thing. But what is the computing equipment involved in the network actually doing? How do I distribute that perceptualization so that all the components create it together and no one part is totally dominant?"

Then Pesce was struck with a vision. In his mind's eye, he saw a web, and each part of the web reflected every other part. Like any good wirehead, he began to code his numinous flash into a software algorithm so his vision could come to life. "It turns out that the appropriate methodology is very close to the computer equivalent of holography, in which every part is a fragment that represents the greater whole." Using a kind of a six-degrees-of-separation principle, Pesce invented a spatial cyberspace protocol for the Net.

It was only later that someone told him about the mythical net of Indra. According to Chinese Buddhist sages, the great Hindu god Indra holds in his possession a net stretching into infinity in all directions. A magnificent jewel is lodged in each eye of the net, and each jewel reflects the infinity of other jewels. "It's weird to have a mystical experience that's more a software algorithm than anything else," Pesce says with a grin. "But Friedrich Kekulé figured out the benzene ring when he dreamed of a snake eating its tail."

Of course, Pesce was blown away when he first saw Mosaic, NCSA's powerful World Wide Web browser. "I entered an epiphany I haven't exited yet." He saw the Web as the first emergent property of the Internet. "It's displaying all the requisite qualities - it came on very suddenly, it happened everywhere simultaneously, and it's self-organizing. I call that the Web eating the Net." Driven by the dream of an online data-storage system that's easy for humans to grok, Pesce created VRML, a "virtual reality markup language" that adds another dimension to the Web's HTML, or hypertext markup language. Bringing in Rendermorphics Ltd.'s powerful but relatively undemanding Reality Lab rendering software, Pesce and fellow magician Parisi created WorldView, which hooks onto VRML the way Mosaic interfaces with HTML. As in virtual reality, WorldView gives you the ability to wander and poke about a graphic Web site from many angles.

Pesce now spreads the word of cyberspace in conference halls and boardrooms across the land. His evangelical zeal is no accident - raised a hard-core Catholic, and infected briefly with the mighty Pentecostal Christian meme in his early 20s, Pesce has long known the gnostic fire of passionate belief. But after moving to San Francisco from New England, the contradictions between Christian fundamentalism and his homosexuality became overwhelming. At the same time, odd synchronicities kept popping up in ways that Pesce could not explain rationally. Walking down the street one day, he just stopped in his tracks. "I thought, OK, I'm going to stop fighting it. I'm a witch."

For Pesce, the Craft is nothing less than applied cybernetics. "It's understanding how the information flow works in human beings and in the world around them, and then learning enough about that flow that you can start to move in it, and move it as well." Now he's trying to move that flow online. "Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space; everything is flat and gray. If we are about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to do is plant the divine in it."

And so, a few days before Halloween, a small crowd of multimedia students, business folk, and Net neophytes wander into Joe's Digital Diner, a technoculture performance space located in San Francisco's Mission district. The audience has come to learn about the World Wide Web, but what they're going to get is CyberSamhain, Mark Pesce's digitally enhanced version of the ancient Celtic celebration of the dead known to the rest of us as Halloween. Of all of Paganism's seasonal festivals, Samhain (pronounced "saw-when") is the ripest time for magic. As most Pagans will tell you, it's the time when the veils between the worlds of the living and the dead are thinnest. For Pesce, Samhain is the perfect time to ritually bless WorldView as a passageway between the meat world and the electronic shadow land of the Net.

Owen Rowley, a buzz-cut fortysomething with a skull-print tie and devilish red goatee, sits before a PC, picking though a Virtual Tarot CD-ROM. Rowley's an elder in Pesce's Silver Star witchcraft coven and a former systems administrator at Autodesk. He hands out business cards to the audience as people take in the room's curious array of pumpkins, swords, and fetish-laded computer monitors. Rowley's cards read: Get Out of HELL Free. "Never know when they might come in handy," Rowley says with a wink and a grin.

To outsiders (or "mundanes," as Pagans call them), the ritual world of Pagandom can seem like a strange combination of fairy-tale poetry, high-school theatrics, and a New Age Renaissance Faire. And tonight's crowd does appear puzzled. Are these guys serious? Are they crazy? Is this art? Pagans are ultimately quite serious, but most practice their religion with a disarming humor and a willingly childlike sense of play; tonight's technopagans are no different. The ritual drummer for the evening, a wiry, freelance PC maven, walked up to me holding the read-write arm of a 20-meg hard disk. "An ancient tool of sorcery," he said in the same goofball tone you hear at comic-book conventions and college chemistry labs. Then he showed me a real magic tool, a beautiful piece of live wood he obtained from a tree shaman in Britain and which he called a "psychic screwdriver."

With the audience temporarily shuttled next door for a World Wide Web demo, Pesce gathers the crew of mostly gay men into a circle. (As Rowley says, "in the San Francisco queer community, Paganism is the default religion.") In his black sports coat, slacks, and red Converse sneakers, Pesce seems an unlikely mage. Then Rowley calls for a toast and whips out a Viking horn brimming with homemade full-moon mead.

"May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace," proclaims a tall sysop in a robe before sipping the heady honey wine.

"Plant the Net in the Earth," says a freelance programmer, passing the horn to his left.

"And to Dr. Strange, who started it all," Rowley says, toasting the Marvel Comics character before chuckling and draining the brew.

As the crowd shuffles back into the room, Pesce nervously scratches his head. "It's time to take the training wheels off my wand," he tells me as he prepares to cast this circle.

At once temple and laboratory, Pagan circles make room for magic and the gods in the midst of mundane space time. Using a combination of ceremonial performance, ritual objects, and imagination, Pagans carve out these tightly bounded zones in both physical and psychic space. Pagan rituals vary quite a bit, but the stage is often set by invoking the four elements that the ancients believed composed all matter. Often symbolized by colored candles or statues, these four "Watchtowers" stand like imaginary sentinels in the four cardinal directions of the circle.

But tonight's Watchtowers are four 486 PCs networked through an Ethernet and linked to a SPARCstation with an Internet connection. Pesce is attempting to link old and new, and his setup points out the degree to which our society has replaced air, earth, fire, and water with silicon, plastic, wire, and glass. The four monitors face into the circle, glowing patiently in the subdued light. Each machine is running WorldView, and each screen shows a different angle on a virtual space that a crony of Pesce's concocted with 3D Studio. The ritual circle mirrors the one that Pesce will create in the room: an ornate altar stands on a silver pentagram splayed like a magic carpet over the digital abyss; four multicolored polyhedrons representing the elements hover around the circle; a fifth element, a spiked and metallic "chaos sphere," floats about like some ominous foe from Doom.

WorldView is an x-y-z-based coordinate system, and Pesce has planted this cozy virtual world at its very heart: coordinates 0,0,0. As Pesce explains to the crowd, the circle is navigable independently on each PC, and simultaneously available on the World Wide Web to anyone using WorldView. More standard Web browsers linked to the CyberSamhain site would also turn up the usual pages of text and images - in this case, invocations and various digital fetishes downloaded and hyperlinked by a handful of online Pagans scattered around the world.

Wearing a top hat, a bearded network administrator named James leads the crowd through mantras and grounding exercises. A storyteller tells a tale. Then, in walks the evening's priestess, a Russian-born artist and exotic dancer named Marina Berlin. She's buck-naked, her body painted with snakes and suns and flying eyes. "Back to the '60s" whispers a silver-haired man to my left. Stepping lightly, Berlin traces a circle along the ground as she clangs two piercing Tibetan bells together 13 times.

With a loud, sonorous voice, Pesce races around the circle, formally casting and calling those resonant archetypes known as the gods. "Welcome Maiden, Mother, Crone," he bellows in the sing-song rhymes common to Pagan chants. "To the North that is Your throne, / For we have set Your altar there, / Come to circle; now be here!"

How much Pagans believe in the lusty wine-swilling gods of yore is a complex question. Most Pagans embrace these entities with a combination of conviction and levity, superstition, psychology, and hard-core materialism. Some think the gods are as real as rocks, some remain skeptical atheists, some think the beings have no more or less actuality than Captain Kirk. Tonight's technopagans aren't taking anything too seriously, and after the spirits are assembled, Pesce announces the "the sacred bullshit hour" and hands the wand to his friend and mentor Rowley.

"Witchcraft evolved into the art of advertising," Rowley begins. "In ancient times, they didn't have TV - the venue was the ritual occurrence. Eight times a year, people would go to the top of the hill, to the festival spot, and there would be a party. They'd drink, dance in rings, and sing rhyming couplets." Today's Pagans attempt to recover that deep seasonal rhythm in the midst of a society that yokes all phenomenon to the manipulative control of man. "It's about harmonizing with the tides of time, the emergent patterns of nature. It's about learning how to surf."

Samhain's lesson is the inevitability of death in a world of flux, and so Rowley leads the assembled crowd through the Scapegoat Dance, a Celtic version of "London Bridge." A roomful of geeks, technoyuppies, and multimedia converts circle around in the monitor glow, chanting and laughing and passing beneath a cloth that Rowley and Pesce dangle over their heads like the Reaper's scythe.

As a longtime participant-observer in the Pagan community, I join in with pleasure. Trudging along, grasping some stranger's sweaty shoulder, I'm reminded of those gung-ho futurists who claim that technology will free us from the body, from nature, even from death. I realize how unbalanced such desires are. From our first to final breath, we are woven into a world without which we are nothing, and our glittering electronic nets are not separate from that ancient webwork.

In 1985, when National Public Radio reporter and witch Margot Adler was revising Drawing Down the Moon, her great social history of American Paganism, she surveyed the Pagan community and discovered that an "amazingly" high percentage of folks drew their paychecks from technical fields and from the computer industry. Respondents gave many reasons for this curious affinity - everything from "computers are elementals in disguise" to the simple fact that the computer industry provided jobs for the kind of smart, iconoclastic, and experimental folk that Paganism attracts. Pagans like to do things - to make mead, to publish zines, to wield swords during gatherings of the Society for Creative Anachronism. And many like to hack code.

But if you dig deep enough, you find more intimate correspondences between computer culture and Paganism's religion of the imagination. One link is science fiction and fantasy fandom, a world whose role playing, nerd humor, and mythic enthusiasm has bred many a Pagan. The Church of All Worlds, one of the more eclectic and long-lasting Pagan groups (and the first to start using the word pagan), began in 1961 when some undergrad libertarians got jazzed by the Martian religion described in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Today, you can find occult books at science fiction conferences and Klingon rituals at Pagan gatherings.

Science fiction and fantasy also make up the archetypal hacker canon. Since at least the '60s, countless code freaks and techies have enthusiastically participated in science fiction and fantasy fandom - it's even leaked into their jokes and jargon (the "wizards" and "demons" of Unix are only one example). When these early hackers started building virtual worlds, it's no accident they copped these realms from their favorite genres. Like software programs, the worlds of science fiction and fantasy "run" on stock elements and internally consistent rules. One of the first digital playgrounds was MIT's early Space Wars, a rocket-ship shoot-'em-up. But the Stanford AI lab's Adventure game lagged not far behind. A text-based analog of Dungeons & Dragons that anticipated today's MUDs, Adventure shows how comfortably a magical metaphor of caverns, swords, and spells fit the program's nested levels of coded puzzles.

Magic and Pagan gods fill the literature of cyberspace as well. Count Zero, the second of William Gibson's canonical trilogy, follows the fragmentation of Neuromancer's sentient artificial intelligence into the polytheistic pantheon of the Afro-Haitian loa - gods that Gibson said entered his own text with a certain serendipitous panache. "I was writing the second book and wasn't getting off on it," he told me a few years ago. "I just picked up a National Geographic and read something about voodoo, and thought, What the hell, I'll just throw these things in and see what happens. Afterward, when I read up on voodoo more, I felt I'd been really lucky. The African religious impulse lends itself to a computer world much more than anything in the West. You cut deals with your favorite deity - it's like those religions already are dealing with artificial intelligences." One book Gibson read reproduced many Haitian veves, complex magical glyphs drawn with white flour on the ritual floor. "Those things look just like printed circuits," he mused.

Gibson's synchronicity makes a lot of sense to one online Pagan I know, a longtime LambdaMOOer who named herself "legba" after one of these loa. The West African trickster Legba was carried across the Atlantic by Yoruban slaves, and along with the rest of his spiritual kin, was fused with Catholic saints and other African spirits to create the pantheons of New World religions like Cuba's Santería, Brazil's Candomblé, and Haiti's Vodun (Voodoo). Like the Greek god Hermes, Legba rules messages and gateways and tricks, and as the lord of the crossroads, he is invoked at the onset of countless rituals that continue to be performed from São Paulo to Montreal. As legba (who doesn't capitalize her handle out of respect for the loa) told me, "I chose that name because it seemed appropriate for what MOOing allows - a way to be between the worlds, with language the means of interaction. Words shape everything there, and are, at the same time, little bits of light, pure ideas, packets in no-space transferring everywhere with incredible speed. If you regard magic in the literal sense of influencing the universe according to the will of the magician, then simply being on the MOO is magic. The Net is pure Legba space."

Whether drawn from science fiction, spirituality, or TV, metaphors make cyberspace. Though Vernor Vinge's True Names has received far less attention than Neuromancer, the novella explores the implications of cyberspace metaphors in one of the great visions of online VR. Rather than Gibson's dazzling Cartesian videogame, Vinge imagined cyberspace as a low-bandwidth world of sprites, castles, and swamps that, like today's MUDs, required the imaginative participation of the users. Anticipating crypto-anarchist obsessions, the novella's heroic covens elude state control through encryption spells that cloak their doings and their "true names."

Some of Vinge's sorcerers argue that the magical imagery of covens and spells is just a more convenient way to manipulate encrypted dataspace than the rational and atomistic language of clients, files, and communications protocols. Regardless of magic's efficacy, Vinge realized that its metaphors work curiously well. And as legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke said in his 1962 Profiles of the Future, "new technology is indistinguishable from magic."

But convenience and superstition alone do not explain the powerful resonance between hermetic magic and communications technology, a resonance that we find in history, not just in science fiction (see "Cryptomancy through the Ages," page 132). Even if magic is only a metaphor, then we must remember how metaphoric computers have become. Interfaces and online avatars are working metaphors, while visualization techniques use hypothetical models and colorful imagery to squeeze information from raw data. And what is simulation but a metaphor so sharp we forget it's not a metaphor?

Then there are the images we project onto our computers. Already, many users treat their desktops as pesky, if powerful, sprites. As online agents, smart networks, and intelligent gizmos permeate the space of our everyday lives, these anthropomorphic habits will leave the Turing test in the dust. Some industry observers worry that all this popular response to computers mystifies our essentially dumb machines. But it's too late. As computers blanket the world like digital kudzo, we surround ourselves with an animated webwork of complex, powerful, and unseen forces that even the "experts" can't totally comprehend. Our technological environment may soon appear to be as strangely sentient as the caves, lakes, and forests in which the first magicians glimpsed the gods.

The alchemists, healers, and astrological astronomers of old did their science in the context of sacred imagination, a context that was stripped away by the Enlightenment's emphasis on detached rationalism. Today, in the silicon crucible of computer culture, digital denizens are once again building bridges between logic and fantasy, math and myth, the inner and the outer worlds. Technopagans, for all their New Age kitsch and bohemian brouhaha, are taking the spiritual potential of this postmodern fusion seriously. As VR designer Brenda Laurel put it in an in e-mail interview, "Pagan spirituality on the Net combines the decentralizing force that characterizes the current stage in human development, the revitalizing power of spiritual practice, and the evolutionary potential of technology. Revitalizing our use of technology through spiritual practice is an excellent way to create more of those evolutionary contexts and to unleash the alchemical power of it all."

These days, the Internet has replaced zines as the clearinghouse of contemporary heresy, and magicians are just one more thread in the Net's rainbow fringe of anarchists, Extropians, conspiracy theorists, X-Files fans, and right-wing kooks. Combing through esoteric mailing lists and Usenet groups like alt.magick.chaos and soc.religion.eastern, I kept encountering someone called Tyagi Nagasiva and his voluminous, sharp, and contentious posts on everything from Sufism to Satanism. Tyagi posted so much to alt.magick.chaos that Simon, one of the group's founders, created alt.magick.tyagi to divert the flow. He has edited a FAQ, compiled the Mage's Guide to the Internet, and helped construct Divination Web, an occult MUD. Given his e-mail address - tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com- it almost seemed as if the guy lived online, like some oracular Unix demon or digital jinni.

After I initiated an online exchange, Tyagi agreed to an interview. "You could come here to the House of Kaos, or we could meet somewhere else if you're more comfortable with that," he e-mailed me. Visions of haunted shacks and dank, moldering basements danced in my head. I pictured Tyagi as a hefty and grizzled hermit with a scruffy beard and vaguely menacing eyes.

But the 33-year-old man who greeted me in the doorway of a modest San Jose tract home was friendly, thin, and clean-shaven. Homemade monk's robes cloaked his tall frame, and the gaze from his black eyes was intense and unwavering. He gave me a welcoming hug, and then ushered me into his room.

It was like walking into a surrealist temple. Brightly colored paper covered the walls, which were pinned with raptor feathers and collages of Hindu posters and fantasy illustrations. Cards from the Secret Dakini Oracle were strung along the edge of the ceiling, along with hexagrams from the I Ching. To the north sits his altar. Along with the usual candles, herbs, and incense holders, Tyagi has added a bamboo flute, a water pipe stuffed with plants, and one of Jack Chick's Christian comic-book tracts. The altar is dedicated to Kali, the dark and devouring Hindu goddess of destruction whose statue Tyagi occasionally anoints with his lover's menstrual blood. Other figures include a Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey Mouse and a rainbow-haired troll. On the window sill lies the tail of Vlad the Impaler, a deceased cat. Near the altar sits a beat-up Apple II with a trackball that resembles a swirling blue crystal ball.

On one wall, Tyagi has posted the words Charity, Poverty, and Silence. They are reminders of monastic vows Tyagi took, vows with traditional names but his own, carefully worked out meanings. (Tyagi is an adopted name that means "one who renounces.")

"I just stopped grabbing after things," he said. "I made certain limitations and assertions on how I wanted to live and be in the world." His job as a security guard gives him just enough cash for rent, food, and dial-up time.

"For a long time, I had the desire to find the truth at all costs, or die trying," Tyagi said in a measured and quiet voice. After reading and deeply researching philosophy, mysticism, and the occult, Tyagi began cobbling together his own mythic structures, divination systems, and rituals - an eclectic spirituality well suited to the Net's culture of complex interconnection. Like many technopagans, Tyagi paid his dues behind the eight-sided die, exploring role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu. He also delved heavily into chaos magic, a rather novel development on the occult fringe that's well represented on the Net. Rather than work with traditional occult systems, chaos magicians either construct their own rules or throw them out altogether, spontaneously enacting rituals that break through fixed mental categories and evoke unknown - and often terrifying - entities and experiences.

"Using popular media is an important aspect of chaos magic," Tyagi says as he scratches the furry neck of Eris, the Doggess of Discord. "Instead of rejecting media like many Pagans, we use them as magical tools." He points out that Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, the chaotic magical organization that surrounds the industrial band Psychick TV, would practice divination with televisions tuned to display snow. "Most Pagans would get online and say, Let's get together somewhere and do a ritual. Chaos magicians would say, Let's do the ritual online."

After compiling his original Mage's Guide to the Internet - an exhaustive directory of mailing lists, ftp sites, newsgroups, and MOOs - Tyagi hooked up with Moonchilde, also known as Joseph Traub, a god of an online MUSH devoted to Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, and created an occult MUD called Divination Web (telnet bill.math.uconn.edu 9393). Originally, DivWeb presented a virtual geography of spiritual systems: a great Kabbalistic Tree of Life stood in the center of a wheel whose various spokes mapped out different astrological signs and psychological states and linked up to other realms - Celtic, shamanic, Satanic. Down one path lay an amusement park devoted to religious heresy; another direction would send you down the river of the Egyptian afterlife. But Tyagi found the layout too structured, and now you just log into the Void.

These days, Tyagi cruises the Net from four to six hours a day during the week. "Being online is part of my practice. It's kind of a hermit-like existence, like going into a cave. I'm not really connected to people. I'm just sending out messages and receiving them back."

But for MOO-oriented magicians like Tyagi, the Net is more than a place of disembodied information. "Cyberspace is a different dimension of interaction. There's a window between the person who's typing and the person who finds himself in cyberspace," Tyagi explains. "If you're familiar enough with the tool, you can project yourself into that realm. For me, I start to associate myself with the words that I'm typing. It's less like I'm putting letters onto a screen and more like there's a description of an experience and I'm having it. It's a wonderful new experiment in terms of magic and the occult, and it connects with a lot of experiments that have happened in the past."

Like some MUD users, Tyagi finds that after logging heavy time in these online realms, he interacts with the offline world as if it were an object-oriented database. "Within the physical world, there are certain subsets that are MUDs - like a book. A book is a kind of MUD - you can get into it and move around. It's a place to wander. So MUDs become a powerful metaphor to see in a personal sense how we interact with different messages. Real life is the fusion of the various MUDs. It's where all of them intersect."

For the Druids and hermetic scholars of old, the world was alive with intelligent messages: every star and stone was a signature; every beast and tree spoke its being. The cosmos was a living book where humans wandered as both readers and writers. The wise ones just read deeper, uncovering both mystical correspondences and the hands-on knowledge of experimental science.

To the thousands of network denizens who live inside MUDs and MOOs like DivWeb or LambdaMOO, this worldview is not as musty and quaint as it might seem to the rest of us. As text-based virtual worlds, MUDs are entirely constructed with language: the surface descriptions of objects, rooms, and bodies; the active script of speech and gesture; and the powerful hidden spells of programming code. Many MOOs are even devoted to specific fictional worlds, turning the works of Anne McCaffrey or J. R. R. Tolkien into living books.

For many VR designers and Net visionaries, MOOs are already fossils - primitive, low-bandwidth inklings of the great, simulated, sensory overloads of the future. But hard-core MOOers know how substantial and enchanting - not to mention addictive - their textual worlds can become, especially when they're fired up with active imagination, eroticism, and performative speech.

All those elements are important in the conjurer's art, but to explore just how much MOOs had to do with magic, I sought out my old friend legba, a longtime Pagan with a serious MOO habit. Because her usual haunt, LambdaMOO, had such heavy lag time, legba suggested we meet in Dhalgren MOO, a more intimate joint whose eerie imagery is lifted from Samuel Delaney's post-apocalyptic science fiction masterpiece.

That's how I wind up here on Dhalgren's riverbank. Across the water, the wounded city of Bellona flickers as flames consume its rotten dock front. I step onto a steel suspension bridge, edging past smashed toll booths and a few abandoned cars, then pass through cracked city streets on my way to legba's Crossroads. An old traffic light swings precariously. Along the desolate row of abandoned storefronts, I see the old Grocery Store, legba's abode. Through the large and grimy plate glass window I can see an old sign that reads: Eggs, $15.95/dozen. The foreboding metal security grate is locked.

Legba pages me from wherever she currently is: "The next fun thing is figuring out how to get into the grocery store."

Knowing legba's sense of humor, I smash the window and scramble through the frame into the derelict shop. Dozens of flickering candles scatter shadows on the yellowing walls. I smell cheese and apples, and a sweet smoke that might be sage.

Legba hugs me. "Welcome!" I step back to take a look. Legba always wears borrowed bodies, and I never know what form or gender they'll be. Now I see an assemblage: part human, part machine, part hallucination. Her mouth is lush, almost overripe against bone-white skin, and her smile reveals a row of iridescent, serrated teeth. She's wearing a long black dress with one strap slipping off a bony, white shoulder. Folded across her narrow back is one long, black wing.

I'm still totally formless here, so legba urges me to describe my virtual flesh. I become an alien anthropologist, a tall, spindly Zeta Reticuli with enormous black eyes and a vaguely quizzical demeanor. I don a long purple robe and dangle a diamond vajra pedant around my scrawny neck. Gender neutral.

Legba offers me some canned peaches. Pulling out a laser drill, I cut through the can, sniff the contents, and then suck the peaches down in a flash through a silver straw.

Once again, I'm struck at how powerfully MOOs fuse writing and performance. Stretching forth a long, bony finger, I gently touch legba's shoulder. She shivers.

"Do we bring our bodies into cyberspace?"

Legba does.

She doesn't differentiate much anymore.

"How is this possible?" I ask. "Imagination? Astral plane? The word made flesh?"

"It's more like flesh made word," legba says. "Here your nerves are uttered. There's a sense of skin on bone, of gaze and touch, of presence. It's like those ancient spaces, yes, but without the separations between earth and heaven, man and angel."

Like many of the truly creative Pagans I've met, legba is solitary, working without a coven or close ties to Paganism's boisterous community. Despite her online presence and her interest in Ifá, the West African system of divination, legba's a pretty traditional witch; she completed a Craft apprenticeship with Pagans in Ann Arbor and studied folklore and mythology in Ireland. "But I was sort of born this way," she says. "There was this voice that

I always heard and followed. I got the name for it, for her, through reading the right thing at the right time. This was the mid- to late '70s, and it was admittedly in the air again.

I went to Ireland looking for the goddess and became an atheist. Then she started looking out through my eyes. For me, it's about knowing, seeing, being inside the sentience of existence, and walking in the connections."

These connections remind me of the Crossroads legba has built here and on LambdaMOO. She nods. "For me, simultaneously being in VR and in RL [real life] is the crossroads." Of course, the Crossroads is also the mythic abode of Legba, her namesake. "Legba's the gateway," she explains. "The way between worlds, the trickster, the phallus, and the maze. He's words and their meanings, and limericks and puns, and elephant jokes and -"

She pauses. "Do you remember the AI in Count Zero who made those Cornell Boxes?" she asks. "The AI built incredible shadow boxes, assemblages of the scraps and bits and detritus of humanity, at random, but with a machine's intentionality." She catches her breath. "VR is that shadowbox. And Legba is," she pauses, "that AI's intentionality."

But then she shrugs, shyly, refusing to make any questionable claims about online gods. "I'm just an atheist anarchist who does what they tell me to do," she says, referring to what she calls the "contemporary holograms" of the gods. "It works is all."

I asked her when she first realized that MOOs "worked." She told me about the time her friend Bakunin showed her how to crawl inside a dishwasher, sit through the wash-and-rinse cycle, and come out all clean. She realized that in these virtual object-oriented spaces, things actually change their properties. "It's like alchemy," she said.

"The other experience was the first time I desired somebody, really desired them, without scent or body or touch or any of the usual clues, and they didn't even know what gender I was for sure. The usual markers become meaningless."

Like many MOOers, legba enjoys swapping genders and bodies and exploring net.sex. "Gender-fucking and morphing can be intensely magical. It's a very, very easy way of shapechanging. One of the characteristics of shamans in many cultures is that they're between genders, or doubly gendered. But more than that, morphing and net.sex can have an intensely and unsettling effect on the psyche, one that enables the ecstatic state from which Pagan magic is done."

I reach out and gingerly poke one of her sharp teeth. "The electricity of nerves," I say. "The power of language."

She grins and closes her teeth on my finger, knife-point sharp, pressing just a little, but not enough to break the skin.

"It's more than the power of language," legba responds. "It's embodiment, squishy and dizzying, all in hard and yielding words and the slippery spaces between them. It's like fucking in language."

"But," I say, "jabbering in this textual realm is a far cry from what a lot of Pagans do - slamming a drum and dancing nude around a bonfire with horns on their heads."

She grins, well aware of the paradox. As she explains, our culture already tries to rise above what Paganism finds most important (nature, earth, bodies, mother), and at first the disembodied freedom of cyberspace seems to lob us even further into artificial orbit.

"But the MOO isn't really like a parallel universe or an alternate space," legba says. "It's another aspect of the real world. The false dichotomy is to think that cyberspace and our RL bodies are really separate. That the 'astral' is somewhere else, refined and better."

I hear a call from the mother ship. "I must take my leave now."

Legba grins as well and hugs me goodbye.

I try to smile, but it's difficult because Gray aliens have such small mouths. So I bow, rub my vajra pendant, and wave. For the moment, my encounter with technopaganism is done. I've glimpsed no visions on my PowerBook, no demons on the MOO, and I have a tough time believing that the World Wide Web is the living mind of the Gaian Goddess. But even as I recall the phone lines, dial-up fees, and clacking keyboards that prop up my online experience, I can't erase the eerie sense that even now some ancient page of prophecy, penned in a crabbed and shaky hand, is being fulfilled in silicon. And then I hit @quit, and disappear into thin electronic air.

Cryptomancy through the Ages

Vernor Vinge is not the first to link spells with encrypted codes. The first books of modern cryptography were penned back in the 15th century by Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Würzberg. Though Trithemius was a monk, he was also a hard-core magician, and his Steganographia and Polygraphiae were simultaneously works of encryption and theurgy - the art of invoking gods and spirits. Trithemius's simple transpositional schemes were designed to control demonic entities who formed a kind of astral Internet, allowing the mage to communicate messages at a distance and to know everything that was going on in the world. Trithemius was no pagan witch - in fact, he encouraged the Church to burn them. Historians still can't decide whether Trithemius was disguising his magic as cryptography or vice versa, but the National Security Agency finds his works important enough to display them at its museum in Washington, DC.

The Renaissance magician John Dee was a secret agent for the British Crown (code named 007), and may have used his occult writings to pass on military information about the Spanish Armada during the late 16th century. Dee was also a mathematician, a geographer, an antiquarian, and the court astrologer for Queen Elizabeth.

With the largest library in England, Dee fulfilled a common hermetic pattern of information addiction and intellectual eclecticism, his interests ranging from Euclid to alchemy to mechanical birds. Using an elaborate system of theurgic magic, Dee also sought "the company and information of the Angels of God." As faithful messengers of light mediating God's omniscience, angels might be the original intelligent agents - immaterial, rational, without human emotion.

Dee's occult partner Edward Kelly would stare into the crystal surface of a "shew-stone" as Dee used his decidedly unnatural language of Enochian Calls to download data from the creatures Kelly glimpsed there. Lacking good cryptography, Dee spent much of his time interrogating the creatures to make sure they were who they claimed and not evil demons in disguise.

The Goddess in Every Woman's Machine

by Paulina Borsook
Technopaganism is the grand exception to the 85-percent-male,15-percent-female demographics of the online world.

It is one virtual community where rough parity - both in number and in power - exists between the sexes.

For starters, in the goddess-based versions of technopaganism, every incarnation of the divine can be symbolized by female personae: here there are brainiacs and artists and powermongers, in addition to the more traditional archetypes of sexpot and baby-maker and provider of harvests. Unlike the great world religions - Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism - in goddess-based spiritual practice, women can express their latent sense of potency without feeling they have to be crypto-male.

It's the fundamentals of technopaganism that have created this woman-friendly technoland. Laura Cooksey, who has a degree in computer science from the University of Kentucky and works as a programmer for the US Department of the Navy in Arlington, Virginia, says that paganism appealed to her because it "has always placed more emphasis on the female aspects of deity. There are female archetypes and role models you can relate to."

It's not that guys aren't welcome - both as fellow devotees, and, at the spiritual level, in male representations of deity. But within technopaganism there is a level playing field for women that is unimaginable on other spiritual paths where the Most-Holy-and-Potent are male. Happily enough, in paganism, says Alison Harlow, a database designer from Santa Cruz, "sexuality is sacred."

Harlow first discovered computers in 1958, when she was starved for English-language books after eloping to Latin America. She stumbled across that classic of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner's The Human Use of Human Beings. She went on to receive a master's in mathematics from Columbia University, then launched her career with IBM in 1962. She now makes her living designing health risk-assessment databases, has helped found a Neo-Pagan community in the Santa Cruz mountains, and was prominently featured in Margot Adler's seminal book on Paganism.

Susan Shaw, who does PC tech-support for Xerox Corporation in Rochester, New York, says that in the technopagan rivulets on the Net, "women almost seem to be top dog"; what's more, she adds, the level of civility is higher. This may be both a cause and effect of female-principle-honoring technopaganism. This is a practice which endorses the politeness that has been encouraged in women; men are drawn to this female world view in part because they cherish politesse. And if there are flames, as one Bay Area technopagan says, "there are equal-opportunity flame wars."

In fact, Shaw says, "men in technopaganism have to be comfortable with women in leadership roles and with serious and focused intellectual contact with women. If they're just cruising, they drop out fast."

Pagan Emma Bull, whose 1991 novel Bone Dance was nominated for both Nebula and Hugo awards says, "On the Net, you are androgynous unless you claim otherwise. Any sexuality is what you yourself have placed there - there's no gender in information-processing, and information doesn't have sex." Bull does point out, though, that the more ceremonial-magic Pagan groups tend to be more male-dominated, more hierarchical, and more "into who has juju and who doesn't."

However gender roles stack up, the bottom line for women is that technopaganism is empowering. So argues Kit Howard, who designs databases for a Midwestern pharmaceutical company; she is co-founder of the TechnoDruids Guild, an electronic support and advocacy group for the Druid community, and Chief Information Officer of ÁrnDraíocht Féin, one of the largest Druid organizations in the Pagan community. "You don't have to be stupidly feminist, and you don't need to displace men," she says. "Technopaganism creates a self-selection, where women are more activist, and men are more sympathetic."

In order to make it in the male-dominated world of technology, women often have to be the biggest logical-positivists on the block, outdoing any of the guys in syllogistic thinking and no-nonsense tough-mindedness. Technopaganism allows them to reclaim their femmie sides.

What's more, Harlow suggests, if a woman is "very left-brain, she may have to work harder" to reconnect with spiritual and intuitive sides. And if you're a woman who functions well in traditionally male societies, it can be tremendously comforting to find a path where you can explore female aspects of the universe, both physical and metaphysical, without that being considered wimpy or ineffectual.

With technopaganism, a woman technologist gets to be the girl and gets to be powerful, all at the same time.
San Francisco writer Paulina Borsook loris@well.sf.ca.us last appeared in Wired with "beverly.hills_com." She made heavy use of three different tarot decks in college.

Pagan and Occult Resources

The Mage's Guide to the Internet (MaGI) is available at ftp.portal.com/pub/ss/OMNet/magi.

The Dark Side of the Net is a list of gothic, wiccan, pagan, vampire, occult, and various other dark resources available on the Internet: http://www.cascade.net/dark.html.

World Wide Web sites:http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~feorag/paganlink/plhome.html and http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sk4p/occult.html.

FTP sites:

ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/religion/neopagan and ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/magick

Usenet newsgroups:

alt.pagan and alt.magick.

FAQs on Egyptian gods, Golden Dawn, Kabbalah, Magick Fiction, Necronomicon, and Tarot can be found at the ftp site ftp.portal.com/pub/ss/Usenet/FAQs .

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"Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space. If we are about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to do is plant the divine in it." -Mark Pesce Mark Pesce is in all ways Wired. Intensely animated and severely caffeinated, with a shaved scalp and thick black glasses, he looks every bit the hip Bay Area technonerd.

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is an inventor, writer, entrepreneur, educator and broadcaster.

In 1994 Pesce co-invented , a 3D interface to the World Wide Web. Pesce has written six books, including VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace and The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination , which used toys such as Furby and Sony's PlayStation to explore our interactive future.

As an educator, Pesce founded graduate programs in interactive media at both the University of Southern California's world-famous Cinema School and the Australian Film, Radio and Television School . Pesce currently holds appointments as Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney's Digital Cultures Program , and Honorary Adjunct in the University of Technology, Sydney's new Animal Logic Academy.

For seven years, Pesce was a panelist and judge on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's hit series The New Inventors , celebrating Australia's newest inventions and inventors

In 2014, Pesce was appointed as a columnist for the IT publication The Register , reaching a global audience with provocative articles on the dilemmas of the connected world.

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About Mark Pesce - The Next Billion Seconds

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is an inventor, writer, entrepreneur, educator and broadcaster. In 1994 Pesce co-invented , a 3D interface to the World Wide Web. Pesce has written six books, including VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace and The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination , which used toys such as Furby and Sony's PlayStation to explore our interactive future.

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...Into the dialectic | a corner for the curious

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Stewart Brand, founder of the legendary Whole Earth Review and author of â€˜The Media Labâ€™, outlined a history of personal computing which showed a strong relationship between the pioneering forces of technology and the counter-culture of the sixties. Both endeavours shared the goal of giving â€˜power to the peopleâ€™ and of â€˜augmenting the possibilities of the individualâ€™. While it is true that the internet was originally a U.S. Department of Defence project, one has to admit that the internet shares this strong link with the counter-cultural movement. One of the elements of this social movement was a spiritual revival, due on the one hand to the import of eastern religions and practices, and probably also to the discovery and broader use of mind-altering drugs. The special characteristics of the internet, where anyone can be a publisher at moderate cost, insures that many alternative spiritual forces are finding a home on the internet and are using it to further their spiritual aims. The link between the counter-culture, spiritual interests, and cyberspace, can be seen in the prominence of individuals such as John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor. Barlow has a major in comparative religion and is the former lyricist of the Grateful Dead;

Kapor, former CEO of Lotus, is a former teacher of Transcendental Meditation and still a practising Buddhist. Both are leaders of the movement for civil rights in cyberspace (through their leadership of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and combine their humanitarian activism and their spiritual concerns in a hopeful vision of the possibilities of cyberspace. Howard Rheingold, the influential author of the book about â€˜Virtual Communitiesâ€™ and long-time former editor of the Whole Earth Review, is another example of the California counter-culture, which has now matured in cyberspace.

Certainly, the internet is also used by traditional spiritual forces. The Christian fundamentalists, the Jewish Hasidim, and the Islam are present. The Catholic Church is following suit, and the various schools of Buddhism are particularly active. The latter have a very active â€˜Cyber-Sanghaâ€™ (community), but most traditional schools would use the internet as an auxiliary tool, as a simple addition to their physical activities.

Some spiritual movements which share the positive spiritual interpretation outlined above are taking a much more active role in cyberspace. Very prominently active are the techno-pagans. It might surprise some observers that a pre-christian nature religion may find the internet of interest, but this is actually very much the case. Pagans are of course an urban phenomenon, precisely amongst the social classes that are natural users of the internet. They use the internet not only as a self-organising tool, but as a new space that has to be sacralised. For example, Mark Pesce, the creator of the Virtual Reality Modelling Language, has created a Zero Circle on the internet, which involved a shamanic ritual. Every 3D-object will have to position itself against this spiritual â€˜Axis Mundiâ€™ or â€˜Center of the Worldâ€™. Similarly, Tibetan monks from the Namgyal Institute in Ithaca, NY have consecrated cyberspace on February 8th. From a spiritual view such rituals are very important as they create sacred spaces where the divine forces can be present. Marc Pesce argues that cyberspace will contain a lot of â€˜pathogenicâ€™ spaces detrimental to our mental well-being, and that â€˜vivogenicâ€™ spaces have to be created as a counter force. Among the active techno-pagans there are quite a few experimenting with cyber-rituals and collective meditation using the internet as a focal point. This has led to a lively debate on specialised mailing lists such as Techspirit-L about the topic of â€˜Does Prana Travel the Wiresâ€™. The debate centers about the fact of the transmission of spiritual energy. Does it need physical presence to transmit itself, or, as it concerns immaterial energy anyway, can it be transmitted through the â€˜wiresâ€™? Some clearly believe that cyberspace can be used for bona fide spiritual practices, such as for example Alexander Besher, author of the science-fiction book â€˜RIMâ€™, who argues for the creation of Spiritual Spaces throughout cyberspace, through the practice of Feng Shui, the Chinese Taoist art of creating â€˜rightâ€™ spaces and buildings. It should also be noted that one can now witness the creation of specific cyber-religions. Though many are indeed â€˜tongue-in-cheekâ€™, a few initiatives are serious attempts to create a new kind of virtual spiritual community. Also, the book of Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia, has outlined the fusion of the internet and the psychedelic and House music communities into a kind of spiritualised youth culture which aims at spiritual awareness through the combined use of ecstatic techno-music, hallucinogenic substances, and communication in a collective mental realm, i.e. cyberspace. Terence McKenna and the ever-present Timothy Leary are very much popular in these circles. McKenna in particular has written very cogently argued books about the need for a new alliance between technology and nature, what he calls the â€˜Archaic Revivalâ€™.

From the above, we can indeed conclude that there is an active spiritual life in cyberspace, and that there is indeed a specific cyber-spirituality being developed. While every medium has indeed influenced human cultural practice, including religion and spirituality (cfr. TV preachers), it is surprising that the internet creates new types of social movements which take their very identity from cyberspace. So, while we donâ€™t have radio-fascism and TV-feminism, we do notice movements like cyber-feminism, cyber-marxism, and specific cyber-spiritual movements. This is a further confirmation of the fact that the internet is not just a medium, but a real â€˜spaceâ€™, a digital environment for the life of the mind.
pt VII: Some Further Parallels

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pt VI: Sacralising Cyberspace | ...Into the dialectic

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Some Thoughts on the Relationship between Technology and Spirituality, by Michel Bauwens Stewart Brand, founder of the legendary Whole Earth Review and author of â€˜The Media Labâ€™, outlined a history of personal computing which showed a strong relationship between the pioneering forces of technology and the counter-culture of the sixties.

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A case study interested in the way that carbon credits are constructed as fact or as fiction, how they are objects of dispute due to difficulties of establishing credible and verifiable emission...

This case study considered evolutions in the field of financial regulation and supervision in the period following the 2008 financial crisis.

This case study concerned new startups emerging in the blockchain scene.

Through netnography and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Milan (Italy), Novi Sad (Serbia) and Arbúcies (Spain).

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A case study interested in the way that carbon credits are constructed as fact or as fiction, how they are objects of dispute due to difficulties of establishing credible and verifiable emission... This case study considered evolutions in the field of financial regulation and supervision in the period following the 2008 financial crisis.

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View of Spirituality and technology: Exploring the relationship | First Monday

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In a society that is entangled with AI, what role do young people have in developing its future? How will they choose to live with AI and how might they change it?

We encounter AI in so many aspects of our lives, whether it is determining our social media feeds, finishing our emails or tracking our search history to sell to advertisers. But what agency do we have to question the amount of control AI exerts over our experiences? How well placed are we to challenge the real world consequences, injustices and harms that AI systems can impose, particularly as they disproportionately impact marginalised communities?. For so long, decision making in AI has been laid in the hands of powerful people and corporations, but what would happen if that power was redistributed into the hands of the next generation?

Through a series of workshops developed by Feminist Internet and the Goethe-Institut, participants from across Europe envisioned collectively new futures for AI; futures that place agency in the hands of young people, reimagining the purpose of AI and who it is created to serve. Working through an intersectional feminist lens, alongside a group of subject experts, participants produced a film and a paper that both propose creative solutions to problems within AI and provide tools for future decision-makers.

Co-Authors:

Alex Karantanas, Alexia Achilleos, Alice Thwaite, Ama Ogwo, Andras Cséfalvay, Andrew Mallinson, Angela Madzar, Anna Henschel, Arda Awais, Beth Seeboo, Cami Rincon, Charlotte Webb, Daniela Dicks, Ekaterina Stambolieva, Elena Falomo, Ellie Foreman, Emilija Gagrčin, Emily Roderick, Esther Marie Christensen, Felipe Petik Pasqualotto, Finn Weaver, Frederik Lyngsøe, Gil Sherman, Gillian Arnold, Hassan Hafsa, Imogen Malpas, Irina Buzu, Jeannette Neustadt, Kristi Cunga, Lucas LaRochelle, Maanushi Goel, Mariam Kauser, Maria Than, Martin List Syberg, Martin Skrodzki, Myrto Aristidou, Nicole Zisman, Nika Bakhsoliani, Orfeas Menis - Mastromichalakis, Petar Popovski, Ron Salaj, Ruth Marshall-Johnson, Sabrina Faramarzi, Savena Surana, Sinem Görücü, Tajwar Aziz, Tiz Creel, Victoria Young, Violeta Mezeklieva, Vincenzo Ottino, Yifan He.

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With more and more people identifying as non-religious, secular congregations are finding ways to help us live better, together - but is this even a new thing? *originally written between June 2017 to December 2017. Audio trailer https://soundcloud.com/sabrina-faramarzi/finding-community-in-a-godless-world/s-10VTO
It's just gone 11am on a bright Sunday morning in June, and I'm in a hall in central London, with 300 strangers singing Stevie Wonder's 'Very Superstitious' at the top of my lungs. No, this is not an intoxicated continuation from the night before, nor a sober morning rave. Everyone has arrived, bright eyed and bushy tailed for a session at the Sunday Assembly.

Housed in Conway Hall, a striking old building in Holborn, central London, the Sunday Assembly describes itself as 'a secular congregation that celebrates life'. It is, essentially, a non-religious service with a format that emulates a Christian Sunday service. However, instead of singing hymns, they sing pop songs. Instead of listening to sermons, they listen to talks from speakers who are life coaches, artists and human rights workers. Instead of reading passages from the Bible, they hear from poets and spoken word artists. Instead of listening to a priest, they listen to Sanderson Jones - a comedian and the co-founder of Sunday Assembly (albeit with an appearance unlike how I'd imagined Jesus to look - tall and bearded, with long hair and a throaty laugh). Instead of worshipping a God, they worship at the altar of David Bowie. The only thing that has not been modified is the donation buckets, which do their rounds in much the same way.
A crisis of faith
Sunday Assembly is the first secular congregation of its kind sweeping predominantly across the UK, the US and Australia, with an increasing presence in other countries too. Founded five years ago, it currently has 70 outlets in eight countries and is designed to help bring back the sense of community that once flourished when being religiously affiliated was more widespread. But is this really a new phenomenon? If religion has historically helped people make sense of their lives, is there really a more effective secular alternative?

It can be argued that nothing has mobilised humanity into civilisation quite like religion has. Religion has motivated people to build huge cathedrals, to take on arduous pilgrimages and, most importantly, to create the things that organise societies today such as government and law, literacy and morality, the family structure, marriage and the arts.

In April 2016 an article in National Geographic magazine declared ' the world's newest major religion is no religion'. In it, it stated that "around the world, when asked about their feelings on religion, more and more people are responding with a 'meh'." Though Christianity is still the world's largest religious group, by 2060, the total number of religiously unaffiliated people (atheists, agnostics, or those who don't identify with any religion in particular) is expected to rise to 1.2 billion.

I set out to explore why becoming religiously unaffiliated in the West has become so much of a big deal for some people, and what (if anything) is replacing it. What does this mass migration away from organised religion mean? Could be that it just doesn't feel relevant to people anymore, or has just become out of touch with the trials and tribulations of modern life?

Recent reports from a number of research outlets have shown a clear indication of the growing popularity for the religious unaffiliated. Pew Research Center, a global think tank on people's changing attitudes, has driven a huge amount of its research focus into the state of religious values in the US, UK and Australia. It has found that non-religion is now the fastest-growing 'religious' group in these countries, and have aptly nicknamed them 'the Nones' (to refer to those who tick 'None' on diversity forms). Currently, nearly half (48%) of American people refer to themselves as atheist or agnostic, 53% of the British public also do, and this rises to 62% in Australia. At a forum event on the Future of World Religions, researcher Alan Cooperman, talks about the " secularising West and the rapidly growing rest ", showcasing that this phenomenon is somewhat contained to those countries.

Yet also across those countries, not only is secularism on the rise, but so too are levels of loneliness, depression and suicide. In June 2014, the Office for National Statistics named Britain the loneliest capital of Europe ,and this year, Fortune magazine declared that " chronic loneliness is a modern day epidemic ".

Loneliness is defined as 'perceived social isolation'. It is also the understanding that humans are inherently social beings, and evolutionary studies show that forming bonds were key to our survival. In addition, it is now estimated that 1 in 6 people experience a common mental health problem. I wondered whether this cocktail of collective issues had any effect in the creation of secular communities and congregations like Sunday Assembly.

Josh Bullock, a sociologist and academic researcher, has just finished a PhD on secular congregations. He spent 4 years studying, observing and interviewing people of the Sunday Assembly. He puts its popularity down to the combination of more and more people living and moving to cities as opposed to smaller towns, an increasingly secular population, and the widespread use of the internet that has seen many communities move online, diminishing the physical proximity people spend with others IRL.

"I think the Sunday Assembly has come around at just the right time," he says. "The message is about community, which wouldn't have worked in the 90's or even the noughties because the narrative coming out from New Atheist's such as Richard Dawkins was saying that religion is evil. I think we've moved past that way of thinking now to what the non-religious can do instead."

In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari defines religion as "a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order".
The post-Christian memory
If we think about religion as a system of norms and values but remove the belief in the 'superhuman order', all we are left with is organised community. This is what the Sunday Assembly does. In a world that is becoming increasingly secular, they have recognised the importance of community, and one that offers the ultimate solution to a first world problem - that people must feel like individuals, but also feel that they belong to something bigger than themselves.

In an online article on Zocalo Magazine, contributor Richard Flory, a researcher at the USC Centre for Religion, discusses how religion strengthens community in three ways. The first is about spiritual and psychological support. "Since religion deals in "ultimate" matters, it helps people make sense of their lives, as well as their role in their families and in their communities." The second is about grouping together of 'like-types', bonded by shared values or beliefs which allows them to identify with one another. The last one explains that religious communities take responsibility for those less advantaged.

By using these three principles, we can understand the Sunday Assembly as a secular congregation that mimics religion, specifically borrowing from Christian rituals. Bullock calls this 'the post-Christian memory'. Though much of the media coverage about the Sunday Assembly has called it an 'atheist church', Bullock thinks it is not entirely secular. "What the Sunday Assembly does is essentially borrow from the Christian memory. So they're taking these rituals which have worked for thousands of years, and then secularising them. Thus, it's becoming post-Christian."

Specifically, he says, it mirrors a certain type of Christianity - the happy clappy Evangelical type which is big on music and singing. This contributes to the Sunday Assembly's overwhelmingly positive approach. "They still have a moment of reflection where they bow their head, they sit in lines, they stand up to sing....if you didn't know what it was, you'd be forgiven for saying you thought it was a church service."

Nearly everyone that Bullock interviewed were people from small towns who had moved to London. They were people that missed the sense of community that they had growing up which is tougher to find in a metropolitan city comprised of nearly nine million people. "There is almost like a romanticism to it, a nostalgia going back to what they enjoyed, drinking tea on a Sunday and going to the pub."

The grouping together of like-types was a particularly interesting point of research for Bullock. "You'd have to be blind not to notice the demographics," he says. "They have the slogan that they are inclusive and open to all which might be the case, but looking around it's not that diverse and they don't reflect the wider london they situate in."

To describe the demographics, Bullock put together a profile he calls 'Jane'. Jane is a Waitrose shopper, a Magic FM listener, a Guardian reader. "Jane is the sociological ideal type that represents the majority of the people who I've met and spoken to at the Sunday Assembly," he says. "In terms of her ethnicity she's white, she's British, she's middle class, she's from a Christian religious background but now no longer believes, and she has somewhat humanist values."

The Sunday Assembly congregation usually has more female attendees than male, but this isn't usually the case in a lot of religious groups. "There's definitely a paradox in that mainly all studies I know show that men are more non religious than women," he says, which is why his profile type is a woman.

Bullock has pinned it down to four things which help to decipher the reasoning behind the Sunday Assembly's homogenous demographic. The first, he explains is that the congregation reflects the preachers - Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, both ex-comedians who hold a celebrity-like status at the Sunday Assembly. Both are white, middle class and in their mid 30's. The second, is how people hear about it. "They're not hearing about it from posters in the job centre, they're hearing about it on TimeOut or Radio4," he says. "Of course once you hear about it you tell your friends, you know 'birds of a feather flock together', and your friends will probably be like you."

The third is that most people who used to attend church are white, which plays into the post-Christian memory. But Bullock thinks that it is also down to the song choice - and nostalgia plays a key part. "If you have all these people going and they start singing Drake, they're probably going to leave because they're gonna find it boring," he says. "But give them a bit of Queen and it's the best thing ever, it's reliving good memories for them."

The content of the assembly is also quite intellectual. Bullock likens some of it to TED talks, therefore attracting academic types. "Lot's of them are like 'oh this is really great we've learnt something today', but then on the other hand if you're not that way inclined you're not gonna take much from it."

One of the biggest indicators is the time commitment. "Even meeting on a Sunday morning is quite a luxury, only certain people have that free time, others work," he says. "If you do everything - the tea and chats after, then lunch, then the pub, it's giving up a whole free day."

The Sunday Assembly has created community (and communities) using the strength of religion, in this case the lack of. The Sunday Assembly is not necessarily a cult, nor merely just a community meetup. Each assembly, across each of its outlets, follows the same format. It begins with singing, an introduction to the theme from its host, a performance from a poet, a guest speaker, more singing, community notices, a moment of reflection (two minutes of silence and head-bowing), passing round the donation buckets, a speech from a member of the congregation always titled "(insert name) Is Trying Their Best", finished up with more singing, tea and cake, then lunch followed by a trip to a nearby pub. Each session has a different theme and its songs are curated accordingly (Davy Jones' 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner' for the 'Home' themed session), and people are always greeted at the door with a rambunctious high five from a dedicated volunteer.

Though the Conway Hall setup is both theatrical and impressive, it doesn't quite err on the side of concert. "Part of the charm of Sunday Assembly is that things do go wrong," Bullock says. "Sometimes the power doesn't work, people will mess their speeches up, others will sing the wrong words."
People of Sunday Assembly
But what exactly compels people to turn up in the first place? "When I was in Holland attending one of the assemblies, somebody there told me: 'you don't go to the Sunday Assembly if you're happy, you go there because you've got an itch that needs scratching'."

I attended the Sunday Assembly every fortnight from the beginning of June 2017 until the end of November 2017. I attended one on imposter syndrome, one on 'Home', another on how to perceive gender, how to think like a toddler, how to say 'yes to life'. Though it is a fortnightly event, over time I grew a deep respect for the regulars who consistently get up early on a Sunday to attend.

I met Andy Maclean the second time I went to Sunday Assembly. I didn't find him, rather, he found me. He sat himself down beside me and opened up the conversation with such ease that I assumed he was a seasoned Sunday Assembly goer. "I've actually only been coming here less than a year," he said. "It's good fun, and something to do on a Sunday".

He's never been religious, but enjoys attending the Sunday Assembly. "I like their mission of trying to live a full life," he says. "I personally struggle a lot with self doubt, and I think just coming to a place like Sunday Assembly is one layer of just reminding yourself of what's possible".

Maclean is 42 years old and works in foreign exchange for Investec. Hailing from New Zealand, it's understandable that he draws his energy and sense of community and belonging from friends and organisations, as his own family is so far away. But I quickly get the impression he is what you could call a 'joiner'. "In many ways coming to Sunday Assembly is more appealing to me, it's much more social, much more about connection and I assume probably gives me some stability." His affiliation and involvement in various community groups seems to have no end - The Sunday Assembly, Yes Tribe, Escape the City. His recent work at the latter has found him starting up his own community - a paddling school called ' LittlePaddle '.

Maclean's had a tough time. He left his job after eight years at Investec in 2014 and spent some time away travelling alone. He returned to Investec earlier this year, after a three-year doing many different things to help him get back on track, because back in April 2012, Maclean's wife committed suicide.

"The end of 2011, was a really crazy time for me, for us," he says. "I no doubt took my eye off the relationship." Him and his wife had been married just over a year and Maclean felt that they were rushing the relationship, already talking about having kids and finding a home to buy. He decided they would take a trip together just after Christmas of 2011. Maclean had just finished his MBA and just wanted a chance to relax, but the trip turned out to be a disaster.

"I was just getting pissed all the time, not paying attention to her," he said. "Then from there it just sort of spiralled really. In her dying letter she accused me of sabotaging the relationship, and I think there's some truth to that."

That winter had been a hard time for Maclean and his wife, and he decided that rather than having kids they should address the problems in their marriage, but she didn't feel the same way. "It just wasn't going well, and I thought well, what to do about this? I decided let's just take a break, let's just have a bit of time out from each other and see where we land. That hit her really hard."

It was in February 2012 when they decided to have some space from one another, and two months later she was dead. Neither him, nor her family or her friends had seen it coming, but it was particularly poignant for Maclean because during that time, he had been working with the Samaritans receiving training on how to look out for signs of suicide. "It's a really hard pill to swallow when the most important person in your life has committed suicide, and you've just trained in the training that helps people in this situation."

Since then Maclean's battled with depression and alcoholism. "I live alone, have done ever since my wife died and haven't really adapted to a form of home life, but I'm sure it'll happen with time." He is still single, though he finds comfort in his work and his communities.

For Bullock, one of the key things that stood out from his research on the Sunday Assembly was that everyone he spoke to was dealing with some kind of emotional crises at the time. "On first glance they all look happy, everyone's singing and dancing, but deep down a lot of them are fundamentally unhappy with some aspect of their lives," he says. He thinks that they find attending the Sunday Assembly therapeutic and see it as a vehicle to live better - without necessarily being a radical act. "They seek comfort but they can't attend a church because it would be hypocritical to their beliefs."

Bullock thinks of the Sunday Assembly as a kind of halfway house. "It is fulfilling the needs of people who are seeking the emotional benefits that come with being part of a community," he says. "But it's not an atheist thing so there's no real deviance or stigma to it."

Though his concept of the post-Christian memory applies to the Sunday Assembly's format and majority demographics, there are many like Maclean who attend having never been Christian, or even just religious. "It might be strange for some who have negative aversions to religion and attend the Sunday Assembly because it might bring up bad memories for them," he says. Of the non-religious Sunday Assembly attendees that I spoke to, many of them said they felt this discomfort triggered specifically by things like the donation buckets, but Bullock thinks this doesn't quite cover it.

"There's a very particular kind of social capital which operates in congregations different to any other groupings. Need a job? Someone in the congregation will help you. It's that kind of support," he says. "So for the people who've never had religion, they might've seen their friends go to church when they were growing up and now want a sense of that kind of belonging by attending the Sunday Assembly."

However the retention of people is something that the Conway Hall branch of Sunday Assembly particularly struggle with. Each time I attended, though there was always a core group, it seemed like half the room were always there for the first time, maybe curious about the novelty of the idea.

According to Bullock, it takes about a year to truly embed yourself in the community. "I think it's the people who attend alone that end up being more involved, the people who 'graduate'," he says. He thinks that although the Sunday ritual is key, it's really the smaller hobby and interest-based groups where people belonging. There is a choir group, a knitting group, theatre group, vinyl group, reading group, poetry group, naturists group, wild swimming group.
Community clubs
These clubs are also another indicator of Bullock's 'Jane' profile. Because they are run by the attendees themselves (though they do receive a little help from the core organisation team), all the groups reflect typically middle-class activities. "You won't have a football group of lads who just wanna go to the pub and watch the game together," he says. "That has the ability to ostracise some people because if you're not middle class and you go there and realise these are all people doing very different things to you, you're not gonna stick around."

Claire Ferraro is one of these Sunday Assembly 'graduates'. I met her at the Article Club, where a small group of Sunday Assembly attendees gather in the mezzanine of the Royal National Theatre in Southbank, London to discuss their thoughts on previously agreed texts, then of course adjourn to the pub. Ferraro has recently taken ownership of the Article Club and has relaunched it after her predecessor. Each club is run by the people of Sunday Assembly and there is no stipend or remuneration.

She has been attending the Sunday Assembly for nearly three years now. Ferraro grew up in Buckinghamshire, and moved to London five years ago. "London is inevitably this kind of place where you feel like you have lots of friends but they're all dotted around," she says. "I often see individuals but I rarely see a group together, and I think I was really missing that sense of being in a group."

It took Ferraro, like many, a few months of dipping in and out to start to really feel involved in the Sunday Assembly. "It's been a slow burn. I like the big assembly and the tea and chats after, but it felt quite transient and you'd see different people every week every time," she says. "I definitely feel a greater sense of connection as a consequence of getting more involved in the community groups."

Ferraro also plays the saxophone in the Sunday Assembly band, admittedly one of the most importants cogs in the machine of the congregation. "Personally the best bit about Sunday Assembly is the band and the songs, that sense of community you get singing next to somebody you've never met before."

Unlike Maclean, Ferraro plays into Bullock's idea of the post-Christian memory. She comes from a Catholic background, and at university was part of the Christian union as well as also having dipped her toes in Evangelical Christianity. "I think because I wanted a community and I was new at university, it felt comforting to be part of something I was familiar with," she says. "It was only after a few months that I realised my worldview and my ethical stance was quite different in contrast to the people I was surrounding myself with."

"I think ever since I've stopped going to church I've been looking for something to fill that gap, and that's what Sunday Assembly has done for me." Ferraro explains that for her, attending the Sunday Assembly has given her structure to her weekend and month. She also admits that if it wasn't for Sunday Assembly, she probably would've left London a long time ago.

Because she came from a Catholic background, Ferraro was a little nervous telling her parents that she started attending the Sunday Assembly. "It was a bit scary, it was almost like coming out! But I think they were just happy I had found something to belong to."

Ferraro is 31 years old and has worked and trained as a doctor, but recently left her job to take leave from London to Bristol and become a GP. She already feels a sense of home in Bristol as she recently went to attend the Sunday Assembly there as a way to suss out if she'd have a community when she eventually moves over.

But for all that it gives her, Ferraro would like to see Sunday Assembly do more. "As a doctor I come across so many different types of people and I would love to see the Sunday Assembly become more diverse and attract people from different backgrounds." She also thinks it could benefit from aligning itself to a more historical school of thought. "It's not a new idea to generate a community without religion. I think there would be benefits to describing the Sunday Assembly in a way that understands that it's part of a long history that goes before five years ago," she says. "I would like to learn more about humanism and I think that Sunday Assembly would be quite a good forum to learn about it. We're already humanist without labelling it as that."

For Bullock, part of the bind that religion has is about the group suffering and the memory of it. "It's like we've been through this together, this is your history, which the Sunday Assembly doesn't have. They're gonna need to build new rituals to make it binding, to make it stick."

However the Sunday Assembly seems to keep a fair distance from humanist thought and principles. "They're like Liam and Noel Gallagher, they like each other deep down, there's love there but they don't wanna work with each other right now," he says. "When you're at the assembly they'll never mention humanism though they are humanist in their principles. They just don't talk about it."
To thine own self be true
One of the attempts to create an equivalent of a doctrine for the Sunday Assembly, is something Bullock mentions they call 'secular spirituality'. "I do wonder if it's something that they're going to ramp up as something that would create a bind," he says. "Like we're spiritual but not religious, come and join if you feel the same."

It is hard not to notice the grand building that Sunday Assembly central London is housed in. During the assembly, a beam that frames the ceiling of the stage is emblazoned with the words: 'TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE'. I began to wonder about the significance of the space, and what Conway Hall really is about.

After some initial research, I spent one Wednesday afternoon perusing Conway Hall. First opened in 1929 as South Place Chapel, it is now known by Conway Hall after Moncure Daniel Conway, an anti-slavery, feminist and freethought advocate. It is owned by the Conway Hall Ethical Society and thought to be the not only the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, but the only remaining one in the UK. I learn that Conway Hall is the home for secular humanism, and I go on a mission to learn both what humanism is, and what exactly is an ethical society. In a piece on the Sunday Assembly, Guardian journalist Andrew Brown calls Conway Hall " a temple of atheism in central London ".

I started this mission in the library of Conway Hall. Though small, its collection has items that date back beyond the 1600's, showing that humanist thought has been around a long time. The library is the largest and most comprehensive humanist resource of its kind. Walking around Conway Hall has the same feeling that you get walking around an empty church - it posses the same sense of formality whilst oozing with history, simultaneously echoing the footsteps of every person that has walked these halls before. I find it quite fitting that the Sunday Assembly is hosted there, and want to get to the root of how they found themselves here - and what, if any, are their links with humanism. I became curious about humanism, wondering whether the Sunday Assembly is a modern version of the humanist thought, disguised as church, or actually built from the post-Christian memory. If Sunday Assembly is the church, is humanism is the ideology that it stems from?

I returned to Conway Hall on Monday morning to meet Jim Walsh, its current CEO. From him, I learnt that, at its core, humanism is a philosophy and a way of life that is ethical and compassionate to our fellow humans, without the cause or need for a belief in the supernatural (phenomena), and most importantly, in an afterlife. Humanism reframes moral outlook by putting human beings at the centre of it, and doesn't use the idea of an afterlife as free reign to act recklessly in this one.

When I asked Walsh how he would explain humanism, he directs me to the writings of Harold Blackham, where he states that 'humanism is about the world, not about the word'.

"I take directive in that. So if someone asks me alright Jim, are you a humanist I would say yes. But what does it mean to be a humanist?" he says. "It means to realise that you have this one life, and to live it ethically, across all the strata of the world from culture to politics and science."

Walsh has been the CEO of Conway Hall for six years. Like the Sunday Assembly, Conway Hall Ethical Society operates as an independent charity. When he started in 2011 he wanted to create a clear role and purpose for Conway Hall. "Our objective is to advance the study and education of humanist ethical principles. Everything we do in this building is for that goal." I find irony in the fact that the Sunday Assembly does no such thing yet they are housed there.

Walsh works with the organisation Humanists UK to host a teacher conference every year. In the UK, there is no standardised form of religious education. This means that in every school across the country, religious education is being taught differently, and 'religious literacy' has become an issue of consternation with some suggesting that schools are breaking the law if they don't provide it. With rising pressures in schools and non-traditional subjects being axed, it's easy to see why secularism has been left on the back foot.

"Teachers across the UK aren't confident in terms of how to teach secularism and what it might mean," he says. "So what we do every year is we bring them in, tell them what humanism is and give them the actual teacher training resources. Then hopefully they can begin to feel comfortable about incorporating humanism into their teaching".

Is it possible that one of the reasons why the Sunday Assembly has become so popular is because it has made the humanist ideology relevant for people in the modern age? Walsh understands this struggle.

"When I interview people for jobs to work here, a classic question I always have to ask is, right: 'tell me the difference between - a humanist, a secularist, and someone who works for an ethical society or is a member of an ethical society," he says. "At that moment, you always see them squirm, because that's not easy. So I can understand why teachers kind of shy away from it."

It seems that many people are confused about the values, belief systems and lifestyles that sit under the umbrella of secularism. This is why Walsh's work at Conway Hall is so key - to educate people about the myriad of ways, forms and formats of secularism. People of faith turn to religion to help them make sense of the 'ultimate matters' of life (such as death, marriage, purpose, love), but with more people are identifying as non-religious, it makes sense to help those without belief find a space where they can also do the same.

"There is no doctrine to humanism. There isn't a list of commandments that you know if you sign up to these ten things that will make you a humanist," he says. "Humanism is about learning to think for yourself," he says.

Walsh is pleased that the Sunday Assembly chose Conway Hall as their home. It initially begun in a church in Islington, North London, but they soon had to move on. "It can be seen as just a dry hire, they just use the space and get on with it," he says. "But what I do with them and other secular groups is that I help market their cause". At a recent assembly where the theme was 'Gendered Intelligence', Walsh worked with the Sunday Assembly to turn the toilets in the building gender neutral. "We want to make sure we're also a safe space for LGBT communities too". It seems that by hosting the Sunday Assembly, it helps Conway Hall also stay relevant and close to the everyday issues of a changing society. But according to Walsh, this has always been the case in one way or another.

"I think there is a great affinity for anyone on the outside of society 'norms' to have an affinity with humanism," he says. "Because humanists are also on the outside of society's norms in terms of religion, and also how religion at times, and in different ways, has persecuted those who are on the outside means that there will always be a friendly welcome from a humanist organisation."
"We're like atheists, but with ethics"
For now at least, Conway Hall has become a fitting home for the Sunday Assembly, hosted in a place that has historically been a safe space for those critical of thought, identity and faith. "The Sunday Assembly is great at what it does and I want to support it. If it grows out of Conway Hall, then I'm fine with that," Walsh says. "A lot of organisations have had their birth here and then got larger and gone on to do great things in the world."

I was curious to learn more about humanism, to meet humanists, and to understand how they put their humanist ideology into practice in their day to day lives. On a balmy Friday evening in August, I made my way to Islington Assembly Hall in London for the drinks reception of the International Humanist Conference 2017. During the day there was a meetup of Young Humanists, and I ended up chatting to a couple of them over drinks. This is where I met Hannah Timson, a 23 year old theology student who is also the newly appointed president of Humanist Students. The conversation flowed from how Jeremy Corbyn's new cult-like celebrity status is a form of populism, to how the legalisation of weed in Colorado, US has created a healthy economy that is bursting with young people.

"I bet you came to this to learn about humanism, but humanists talk about everything but humanism!" Hannah says. And she was right - I spent the rest of the weekend at the conference learning about everything but humanism.

The next day the delegation isn't quite so young. Saturday was the official conference day, with the theme for this year being Populism, Extremism and threats to Humanism. It was held at The Royal Society in central London and the conference delegation was overwhelming white, male and barely under 35 years of age.

Over the course of the day I met humanists working to provide secular pastoral support in prisons; humanists advocating for religious freedom across the world; humanists working to make humanist marriage ceremonies legal.

I learnt that Humanism, though encompassing a variety of purposes, differs greatly in its main purpose across the international sphere. Humanist Scotland deals with ceremonies, Humanists UK with religious education, as well as a number of other humanist branches across the world primarily working to provide safety and legal counsel to those imprisoned for not having a faith. They are distinctly different jobs.

I later joined the delegation dinner held at Kingsway Hall Hotel, and spend most of it sat opposite Gordon MacRae, the Chief Executive of Humanist Scotland. He enlightened me about humanism in Scotland - how normal it is, how widespread, how big their celebrant network is, how humanist weddings are legal in Scotland. He later connected me with a couple of celebrants in Scotland to attend humanist ceremonies.

I asked him how he would define humanists and he says "we're like atheists, but with ethics."
Be more Wendy
We talked at length about humanism, and I bring up Sunday Assembly - but MacRae knows all about it. "The thing is, us humanists get together and discuss all manner of things but it's very insular - we're just talking to each other," he says. "I wish Humanists UK had thought of doing something like Sunday Assembly years ago."

I travelled to Exeter University to find out how humanism translates to young people, given that, on average, 20% more people in the under 30 bracket now identity as non-religious. It was Fresher's week and I joined Timson and the Humanist Students crew at their stand in the Grand Hall for the Fresher's fair to see how they recruit new students to humanism.

Exeter Humanist Students Society describes itself as a group that 'celebrates human reason and rational thinking for atheist, agnostic and non-religious students'. Their stall was a small table wedged between the Evangelical Christian society and the Muslim society. For something that describes itself as definitively not a religion, it certainly looked badly placed there. I quickly realised this is part of the humanist struggle - nobody actually really knows what it is. Most students who came over were intrigued, though confused humanism with religious naturalism. However others came with heavier matters, and it's clear that Humanist Students also provide a secondary kind of support offering.

"One of the guys who came up to us at Fresher's Fair, hasn't even told his family that he doesn't believe in God anymore," Timson tells me. "That must be a bloody difficult if everything every day is about religion, to do all the rituals and not have any heart in it. For me that's what's important, that's why I do it, that's why I shout about humanism."

As they're packing up, her partner at the Fresher's stall Luke, fiddles with a £10 note. He looks at me and says "I'm really annoyed they put Jane Austen on it." I gear up for the anticipated sexist statement. "It's not because she's a woman - I think it's really great she's on there - but because they removed Charles Darwin, the only atheist person on all our currency". It's moments like this where I realise that faith really is so embedded in our society, and that to 'borrow' from Christian memory makes sense.

After the fair, we head off to a local Wetherspoon, George's Meeting House, which fittingly, used to be an old church. As we walk there Timson tells me all about the churches of Exeter and the next morning, I make a point of visiting Exeter Cathedral.

Timson is an incredibly articulate, intelligent girl who posses a maturity beyond her years. Though born and bred in Hackney, London, she always felt that her interests were a little incongruous to the environment she grew up in. She sings opera, loves the theatre, and is a big fan of fairytales and children's stories. It seems she's always been comfortable being a misfit, and being around misfits.

"I am drawn to very socially awkward people, not because I'm socially awkward, but I've always been kind of an outsider," she says. "You find that the sort of people are attracted to humanism are somewhat misfits because they've been sidelined by society."

Being one of the few females in a community is also something that Timson has been very familiar with. "Growing up I was the only female scout. I did not want to sit and make peace corners with the Guides, I wanted to climb trees! I wanted to make a difference." I ask her how does she feel being the only female on the Humanists Students team.

"When I look at humanism and the reason that most people are older, and male, is that the language is too academic," she says. "Women generally tend to be more social and emotional beings, which I think is why humanism perhaps needs to take a different direction in order to incorporate different kinds of people. I don't really wanna be the only woman, but humanism right now is very objective, it's abstract. It's not getting together to have food and chat."

Timson thinks this is why humanism has a tough time recruiting people, and why things like the Sunday Assembly are so popular. She feels that people don't join humanism because they shy away from some of the most important day to day conversations. There are humanist social gatherings - something she mentions is the Think & Drink, and humanist brunches, but it doesn't quite have the same level of stickiness. "It doesn't bring people together as a community and you don't really get to know each other at a deeper level." I joined Timson and the Humanists Students Society for their annual atheist pub quiz, and aside from a few atheist themed questions, the experience is not at all 'sticky'.

Coming from an Evangelical Christian background, I asked her what she thinks of Sunday Assembly, and their appropriation of this format. "The issue I have with a lot of the churches particularly these big Evangelical ones [or those that mimic it] is that it's theatre," she says. "Theatre is designed to manipulate you and make you feel a certain way. It allows people to be transported to a place where they can suspend disbelief in something."

When Hannah was 17 years old, she was picked to spend a summer in the US amongst the religious Amish community as part of the Channel 4 documentary, Living with the Amish. "The opportunity came probably at the best time it could've come to be honest," she says. "I just applied for it on Facebook. I think I'm pretty sure they were looking for somebody who was quite religious, and at the time I was a very Evangelical happy clappy Christian, played in the worship band, went to church five times a week."

Before then, she'd been off track for about a year and was starting to doubt her faith. She recalls the story of how her mother had been praying to God to find something for her that would not only keep her busy all summer, but also restore her faith.

"I find it quite funny because the experience actually made me lose my faith," she says. "I knew I hadn't been well, but I thought I was just being lazy." She was later diagnosed with an autoimmune thyroid condition which initially her doctor thought had been depression. "I just kind of spaced out of life for a little bit."

Timson knew she'd completely lost her faith around six months after she returned from her Amish experience. "It took me going there to see that the entire thing was insane, that it didn't match up with my worldview, and yet I had grown up believing this."

A lot of the filming for the documentary had to be done in secret, and Timson still regularly hosts events (titled Amish to Atheist) where she talks about how her Amish experience pushed her to lose her faith. "It was one of those experiences that was sort of half like a dream. I'm still friends with one of the guys who was there with me and we regularly meet up to remind each other that it actually happened!"

During my time with her, Timson references fairytales several times, and I asked her why they interest her so much. "You can learn a lot about human behaviour and the way that we observe the universe through fairytales," she says. She tells me about an essay she wrote recently, one that she clearly has thought deeply about. Her favourite quote is 'to die would be an awfully big adventure', which is said by Peter in the story of Peter Pan.

But Hannah's interest in the story of Peter Pan very much aligns with her philosophy as a humanist. Her essay was actually focused on being more like Wendy, not Peter. "Peter is the eternal child, whereas Wendy chooses to leave Neverland to grow up, and she has children and she dies," she says. "Christianity, I would say idolises the little boy that is Peter Pan, and so my essay was all about the relationship between genesis and the story of Peter Pan. It made a lot of sense to me because Peter is like Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, never escaping never getting out, constantly stuck in a rut of we are, this is perfection, life is perfect, we will never die, I will never grow up. But humanism, humanism grows up."
Rituals and ceremony
A few weeks after I last see her, she decides to get the quote tattooed on her arm.

Later on in the summer, I travelled to Scotland to join a couple of humanist celebrants. Humanist ceremonies are very popular in Scotland, and Humanists Scotland has its own branch outside of Humanists UK. I tried to attend a humanist funeral, but for obvious reasons it wasn't deemed appropriate. I instead joined a humanist wedding and a humanist naming ceremony, the latter the equivalent of a Christian christening/baptism.

The motto of the Humanist Society Scotland (HSS) is to "celebrate the one life we have". There are over a hundred HSS registered celebrants in Scotland alone. Not every celebrant in Scotland is female, and not all of them are called Caroline, but these are the two that I met.

I wrestled through the Fringe crowds to the Macdonald Holyrood Hotel to attend the humanist wedding of Lorna and Richie Symms. It was hosted by Caroline Pearson, a raven-haired lady in her 50's.

Though Scotland is one of the few places where you can have a legal humanist wedding, the Richie's wedding ceremony was not. For practical reasons they had to get married in a registry office a year earlier on the day, but this was the ceremony they had been waiting for. Both previously married, divorced and with children, the ceremony included a traditional Scottish handfasting to represent the blending of families. All vows were written by themselves and it was a small, intimate and joyful event that felt completely personal.

Pearson is registered celebrant for all three types of humanist ceremonies (wedding, funeral, naming), but she tends to do more funerals and weddings than naming ceremonies. "I love my funeral work, it's just such a privilege to work with families during that time," she says. "Perversely, they're actually very similar to a wedding in some ways because it's all about love and drawing on people's memories."

All humanist ceremonies are designed by the participants themselves, aided by the celebrant. There aren't many protocols that one has to follow like most religious ceremonies, and this means that each humanist ceremony can be quite different, and completely customised for its participants.

Pearson used to work as a photographer, and from covering a few humanist weddings she decided this was something she wanted to do. She didn't identify as a humanist until her 30's, but she grew up Catholic which instilled in her the importance of formal celebrations. "Rituals help people make sense of the journey we're on," she says. "People are designed to love each other and they should have an opportunity to celebrate that whether they have faith or not."

I asked Pearson what it means to her to be a humanist. "Humanism is about something to believe in. As opposed to just atheism, it's a catalogue of things that are rather than things that aren't."

Pearson tells about all manner of the types of ceremonies she's done before. One story she tells is about a little boy who loved stones, so for his naming ceremony each person wrote their name on stones which he collected in a jar as a memento for the event. Another was a same-sex marriage which was combined with naming ceremonies for the children of each person coming together as one family. "People can also rename themselves later in life and have a naming ceremony for that," she says. "Whether it's to shake off past baggage or because they're changing their gender identity, there are myriad ways that people can make their humanist ceremony mean something for them."

Same-sex ceremonies are a particular favourite for Pearson to facilitate. "Some of what a same-sex marriage is acknowledgement and saying we've waited til the law changed and now we're doing this," she says. "Those are particularly joyful because you know they've struggled to get to that point and for me it's always that bit more poignant."

"My favourite thing about what I do is people coming out from a humanist ceremony and saying wow, that was so cool, so different, and really personal," she says. "I think that's what we humanist celebrants do really well, but I would also like to see the church up it's game so that people of faith can have something of similar quality."

The next day I travelled by train from Edinburgh to Uphall, where I met Caroline Lambie, a tall, slim, fast-talking woman in her 30's. It's early Sunday afternoon and she's driving me to the naming ceremony of Emily, a nine-month old baby from parents Caroline and Barry Rust. The naming ceremony was held in the function room of The Club in Broxburn. Like Pearson, Lambie is a trained celebrant in all three types of ceremonies but her favourite is to faciliate naming ceremonies.

The function room was kitted out like a formal dinner except adorned in pale pink, with dressed chairs, round tables, balloons, confetti and little square chocolates printed with Emily's picture and date of birth on. There was even a bouncy castle in the corner to keep the other children entertained. Around 30 people turned up to the ceremony, dressed in their best clothes. Emily, the baby, is kitted out in a long white dress, not unlike one you'd see a baby wearing at their Christening in a church.

"It's about having that extra something, an opportunity to celebrate a new life," she tells me. It's clear that Lambie just loves working with children. She briefed me on the family, and told me that the ceremony was initiated by the mother. The father didn't see much point to it, and it was clear looking around the room that everyone was a bit nervous.

The whole ceremony lasts for half an hour. Lambie begins with an introduction, explaining herself, Humanists Scotland and what humanism is. Lambie had worked with the parents to pick a piece of literature that could be read out for the ceremony. Lambie usually has a stack of options to choose from, and this one is a popular choice. She does a reading of Dr Seuss's ' Oh the Places You'll Go!', a very fitting selection to start off Emily's life.

In humanist naming ceremonies, instead of choosing Godparents they choose Guideparents. Lambie uses paint to get the child and the Guideparents to stamp their handprints on coloured paper. This forms part of their certificate, binding their role to guide the child through her life.

The ceremony ends with a well wishing, read aloud by all members of the family and attendees of the celebration. "Lots of people, because they haven't been to naming ceremonies, are a bit unsure of how to act," Lambie told me. But by the end, the mood has lifted and everyone has relaxed and it has brought an occasion to the birth of a child which might not have otherwise been formally celebrated.

On Remembrance Sunday, a ceremony for the fallen soldiers is taking place in Fitzrovia Chapel in central London. The ceremony has been organise by Defence Humanists, the military group of Humanists UK.

Andy Wasley is one of these members. "You don't have to believe in God or an afterlife to understand that it's important to remember the sacrifice that people have made for the freedoms that we enjoy," he says. "I think some people have an impression of a humanist Remembrance ceremony as being something wildly out there, or different from religious Remembrance services, but actually at its core it's the same, it's about gathering together and sharing our thoughts about what it means to live in a society that is sustained by people who are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to sustain it."

Wasley is 35 years old and lives in London, but is originally from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He has been serving in the RAF as a Reserves Officer since he was 19 years old, but has recently started working as a freelance travel photographer in his spare time. He found humanism through Defence Humanists UK back in 2013, and hasn't looked back since.

"It's always a privilege and a special opportunity for those of us who don't have religious beliefs to gather and to share in each other's company," he says. "For me it's a comfort to know that I can go to a ceremony that speaks my values where I don't have to bow my head in prayer."

Wasley has spent several years of his life in the past suffering quite badly from depression, and it was one of the reasons that saw him leave his Christian faith. "I found the idea of relying upon an invisible friend who never put a hand on my shoulder, never hugged me or comforted me was empty and made me feel more helpless I think than going through CBT. I realised that my recovery came from within me, it came from identifying patterns of thoughts that I could interrupt, and prayer did not help to interrupt those thoughts. If anything I think it might have reinforced them because it externalized my problems and felt like I could rely upon something else to deal with them. It was that that killed religious belief dead for me. I had any need for it."

Aside from having a genetic predisposition to depression, Wasley's had a tormented relationship with his mother. "I beat depression through good science and incredible support from a good therapist, not from a vicar or a prayer. It's been awhile since I've gone without belief now, and I am definitely happier for it."

Whilst serving an eight month stint in the Middle East with the RAF, Wasley met a man who, not only later became a good friend of his, but was the general secretary of Defence Humanists. "That was the kind of the gateway to humanism for me. It felt like coming home."

I asked him if he has ever been religious. "There was a time when I thought that I was inclined to become a vicar," he says. "I met a Catholic chaplain a few months ago who said he still thought I had a calling, which I reject completely of course."

Wasley met his husband Tom back in 2011 through the online dating website OKCupid. He had actually signed up to the site to research its marketing methodologies when he received his first message. It was from Tom. "We met up, I tried to teach him radar theory which surprisingly didn't deter him, and that was that. It was pretty clear from when we first met that this was going to be our journey."

On the 3rd of September 2016, Andy and Tom celebrated their love with a humanist wedding ceremony held at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire. "It was funny and uplifting and full of love," he says. "As with all humanist ceremonies we had a chance to write it ourselves, which was fantastic because it meant that it was 100% our values and our ceremony."

Where religions use their books, humanists look to literature. Andy & Tom's wedding ceremony design included readings from the poem The Owl & the Pussycat by Edward Lear, and the essay "On Friendship" by Michel de Montaigne. "Montaigne is my favourite writer and so we had a excerpt from his essay on friendship, in which he expressed his love for his friend Etienne de Barci with the phrase 'if you press me to say why I loved him so much, I feel I can give no answer other than because it was him, because it was me', which to me captures my relationship with Tom perfectly. It just is. I don't think if we'd gone to a church we'd ever have a chance to make it that personal."

Though his husband Tom doesn't identify as a humanist, he believes Tom has innately humanist values - and that he is not the only one. "I invited many family and friends to our humanist wedding, and I would say for most of them there it was the natural setting for them. So I think even people who don't identify with humanism share those values."

Wasley used to do some work with Stonewall, the LGBT equality charity, and though there were others working in the charity that both had faith and identified as LGBT, he just can't subscribe to that view. "Religions have caused colossal damage to people like me. Not just gay people but also trans people, women, people of different races all over the world through the centuries," he says. "I concede that there are religious people of minorities, sexual minorities or gender minorities who for whom religion squares perfectly with their worldview, but personally I find it very hard."
Retreat to the future
The options for a religious ceremony are quite limited if you are having a same sex wedding. "If you're a Catholic, you're not going to have a same sex wedding in your church. If you're from a traditional Orthodox Jewish background, you're not going to have a gay wedding in your synagogue. But you can have a humanist wedding anywhere, so I think that's a great attraction for people, because it's a ceremony that doesn't judge you," he says. "It's a ceremony that is still very much about who you are, but it doesn't need the blessing of an authority for whom your very existence might be troubling."

If humanists do conferences, Sunday Assembly does retreats. I travelled to Stretford Public Hall in Manchester to participate in the Sunday Assembly's Retreat to the Future. Like many old buildings, it has an air of grandeur and a stillness that sets the scene. Their church is the town hall.

The weekend covers a whole host of exercises that begin to outline a person's strengths and achievements, and is designed to help attendees kickstart a project that they have always wanted to do. It is a retreat for those privileged enough to reach the top tier of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, to 'self-actualise'. It is an in depth look at each individual's crisis through peer-to-peer therapy groups, and in true Sunday Assembly style, the sessions are broken up with lots of Bon Jovi and Bowie. I have never done so much sober singing in my entire life.

At the end of the first day I sat with Sanderson Jones, the co-founder, facilitator and resident preacher of Sunday Assembly. "If you go and think about what makes up the secular congregation, it's fucking bonkers all the different parts. It's so sophisticated and there's so much to learn," he says. "We often speak about the translation work, about how to translate all these wisdom traditions into something which everyone can do."

Sanderson explains the Sunday Assembly as just one way of doing congregation. "Because there aren't that many other secular congregations out there, people think 'oh yeah they all have to sing pop songs' and it's like no, this is just a particular type of congregation." He describes the Sunday Assembly as the Starbucks of coffee shops. They are a type of secular congregation, not the format itself.

He tells me about the TEDx talk he did recently in Brighton on a concept he created that he named 'lifefulness'. The theme of the conference was utopias, and I wondered whether the Sunday Assembly is working so well now because the demographic of its congregation may think of their future as dystopian, rather than utopian.

"Lifefulness is to congregation as mindfulness is to meditation," Sanderson explains to me. "In 1979 John Kabat-Zinn adapted Buddhist Vipassana meditation in a way that made it secular, inclusive and evidence based. He called this mindfulness. In 2013 Pippa Evans and I launched Sunday Assembly and started adapting the congregational community in a way that made secular, inclusive and evidence based. That's lifefulness."

Sanderson is committed to the idea of 'lifefulness' spreading further and wider than the Sunday Assembly. It is essentially an intellectualised form of the Sunday Assembly's motto of learning to live a full life. Though Sunday Assembly has no doctrine, it is the crystallising of the 'secular spirituality' that Bullock had mentioned to me before. The Sunday Assembly are trying to find a bind that solidifies their philosophy into a single, simple idea.

I asked him whether he thinks the Sunday Assembly is a reappropriation of humanist principles. "A humanist view of the world is a key part of my motivation. But I want to use that in a way that as many people as possible can be in the room at the same time," he says. "I am a humanist with a small 'h'." It's clear that Sanderson thinks humanism is inaccessible, and maybe he's right.

The Sunday Assembly's retreats are currently touring different cities around the world, and they will continue to do so in the near future. It is comparable to the work of Christian missionaries, except instead of spreading the message of Jesus, Sanderson spreads the message of 'lifefulness'. I'm not sure if I quite retreated to my future by the end of the weekend, but it made me think about Sunday Assembly's future. If 'lifefulness' is more accessible than humanist ideology, will it create a bind for them in the future?

Bullock's not so sure. "Currently you've got a group of people who are all similar ages, they have the same names, so many James's and Kate's and they've all grown up with varying degrees of religion,"he says. "They have similar life experiences, a lot of them went to university. So the bind right now is when they're in a room together, they can talk to each other because they reflect each other."

Bullock tells me that the Sunday Assembly are soon making their way into the Religious Education GCSE curriculum in the UK. "They're described as a source of wisdom for non religious people," he says. This is certainly a step forward in educating people about the branches of secularism, and may be a more effective way than Conway Hall's humanist teacher conferences. But Bullock insists that the post-Christian memory is the strongest bind, and without that they might struggle to stay relevant for a newer, younger, more non-religious generation. "Like I said it's people who've had a degree of Christianity in their lives before and are missing this. There won't be the common story that everybody went to church and now they don't."

Even if the Sunday Assembly is going to be discussed in schools, Bullock thinks that might not quite cut it. "I wonder if the kids of the next generation won't wanna go because it's something mum and dad did on a sunday, I don't wanna go to that. It's a bit naff."

He thinks the Sunday Assembly may go down the route into ritual making, ceremony hosting, or secular chaplaincy, but for now it's successful at getting people in the doors. "I think that the religion or lack of religion is still a draw in the template," he says. "Because what it does, what religion used to do so well and what it also does well, is it has answers for existential questions."

For all the benefits the Sunday Assembly provides for its attendees, Bullock would like to see it do more in the future. "They do lots of these community cleanup projects, food banks, helped out for Grenfell Tower aid and stuff like that, but I'd like them to help the people in society that need it most," he says. "Not just middle class types who are having existential crisis."

Even if some people are not religious, our way of looking at the world has been framed by religion. In his book, Religion for Atheists, philosopher Alain de Botton says "the real issue is not whether God exists or not, but where to take the argument once one decides that he evidently doesn't." Humanism, and Sunday Assembly are such efforts in moving along the narrative of the non-religious.

For now, the Sunday Assembly is the non-committal humanist congregation for the Millennial age. Will there be more secular congregations like the Sunday Assembly in the future? I'm not sure, but it's clear to some degree that this is a step forward in building community and rituals for a growing non-religious population.

And, for whatever it's worth, getting up early on a Sunday morning no longer seems too much of an effort after all.

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With more and more people identifying as non-religious, secular congregations are finding ways to help us live better, together - but is this even a new thing? *originally written between June 2017 to December 2017.

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Extracto del 'La desaparición de los rituales', último libro de Byung-Chul Han en España, donde advierte de lo que ahora sucede: la pérdida de los ritos y de los juegos

Los ritos son acciones simbólicas. Transmiten y representan aquellos valores y órdenes que mantienen cohesionada una comunidad. Generan una comunidad sin comunicación, mientras que lo que predomina hoy es una comunicación sin comunidad. De los rituales es constitutiva la percepción simbólica. El símbolo, palabra que viene del griego symbolon, significaba originalmente un signo de reconocimiento o una contraseña entre gente hospitalaria ( tessera hospitalis). Uno de los huéspedes rompe una tablilla de arcilla, se queda con una mitad y entrega la otra mitad al otro en señal de hospitalidad.

De este modo, el símbolo sirve para reconocerse. Esta es una forma peculiar de repetición: Reconocer no es volver a ver una cosa. Una serie de encuentros no son un reconocimiento, sino que reconocer significa: reconocer algo como lo que ya se conoce. Lo que constituye propiamente el proceso de "instalación en un hogar" -utilizo aquí una expresión de Hegel- es que todo reconocimiento se ha desprendido de la contingencia de la primera presentación y se ha elevado al ideal. Esto lo sabemos todos. En el reconocimiento ocurre siempre que se conoce más propiamente de lo que fue posible en el momentáneo desconcierto del primer encuentro. El reconocer capta la permanencia en lo fugitivo.

Al ser una forma de reconocimiento, la percepción simbólica percibe lo duradero. De este modo el mundo es liberado de su contingencia y se le otorga una permanencia. El mundo sufre hoy una fuerte carestía de lo simbólico. Los datos y las informaciones carecen de toda fuerza simbólica, y por eso no permiten ningún reconocimiento. En el vacío simbólico se pierden aquellas imágenes y metáforas generadoras de sentido y fundadoras de comunidad que dan estabilidad a la vida. Disminuye la experiencia de la duración. Y aumenta radicalmente la contingencia.

Los rituales se pueden definir como técnicas simbólicas de instalación en un hogar. Transforman el "estar en el mundo" en un "estar en casa". Hacen del mundo un lugar fiable. Son en el tiempo lo que una vivienda es en el espacio. Hacen habitable el tiempo. Es más, hacen que se pueda celebrar el tiempo igual que se festeja la instalación en una casa. Ordenan el tiempo, lo acondicionan. En su novela Ciudadela, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describe los rituales como técnicas temporales de instalación en un hogar: Al tiempo le falta hoy un armazón firme. No es una casa, sino un flujo inconsistente. Se desintegra en la mera sucesión de un presente puntual. Se precipita sin interrupción. Nada le ofrece asidero. El tiempo que se precipita sin interrupción no es habitable.

Los rituales dan estabilidad a la vida. Parafraseando las palabras de Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, se puede decir que los rituales son en la vida lo que en el espacio son las cosas. Para Hannah Arendt es la durabilidad de las cosas lo que las hace "independientes de la existencia del hombre". Las cosas tienen "la misión de estabilizar la vida humana". Su objetividad consiste en que brindan a la desgarradora mutación de la vida natural.

Las cosas son polos estáticos estabilizadores de la vida. Esa misma función cumplen los rituales. Estabilizan la vida gracias a su mismidad, a su repetición. Hacen que la vida sea duradera. La actual presión para producir priva a las cosas de su durabilidad. Destruye intencionadamente la duración para producir más y para obligar a consumir más. Demorarse en algo, sin embargo, presupone cosas que duran. No es posible demorarse en algo si nos limitamos a gastar y a consumir las cosas. Y esa misma presión para producir desestabiliza la vida eliminando lo duradero que hay en ella. De este modo destruye la durabilidad de la vida, por mucho que la vida se prolongue.

Los ritos transforman el 'estar en el mundo' en un 'estar en casa'. Hacen del mundo un lugar fiable

El smartphone no es una cosa en la acepción que Hannah Arendt da al término. Carece justamente de esa mismidad que da estabilidad a la vida. Y tampoco es especialmente duradero. Se distingue de cosas tales como una mesa, que yo tengo ante mí en su mismidad. Sus contenidos mediáticos, que acaparan continuamente nuestra atención, son cualquier cosa menos idénticos a sí mismos. Su trepidante alternancia no permite demorarse en ellos. El desasosiego inherente al aparato lo convierte en un trasto. Además nos hace adictos y nos obliga a echar mano de él, mientras que de una cosa no deberíamos sentir que nos mete presión. Son las formas rituales las que, como la cortesía, posibilitan no solo un bello trato entre personas, sino también un pulcro y respetuoso manejo de las cosas.

En el marco ritual las cosas no se consumen ni se gastan, sino que se usan. Por eso pueden llegar a hacerse antiguas. Por el contrario, bajo la presión para producir nosotros nos comportamos con las cosas, es más, con el mundo, consumiendo en lugar de usando. En contrapartida, ellas nos desgastan. Un consumo sin escrúpulos hace que estemos rodeados de un desvanecimiento que desestabiliza la vida. Las prácticas rituales se encargan de que tengamos un trato pulcro y sintonicemos bien no solo con las otras personas, sino también con las cosas.

Hoy consumimos no solo las cosas, sino también las emociones de las que ellas se revisten. No se puede consumir indefinidamente las cosas, pero sí las emociones. Así es como nos abren un nuevo e infinito campo de consumo. Revestir de emociones la mercancía y -lo que guarda relación con ello- su estetización están sometidos a la presión para producir.

Su función es incrementar el consumo y la producción. Así es como lo económico coloniza lo estético. Las emociones son más efímeras que las cosas. Por eso no dan estabilidad a la vida. Además, cuando se consumen emociones uno no está referido a las cosas, sino a sí mismo. Se busca la autenticidad emocional. Así es como el consumo de la emoción intensifica la referencia narcisista a sí mismo. A causa de ello cada vez se pierde más la referencia al mundo, que las cosas tendrían que proporcionar.

A este paso pronto habrá 'smartphones' veganos. El neoliberalismo explota la moral de muchas maneras

También los valores sirven hoy como objeto del consumo individual. Se convierten en mercancías. Valores como la justicia, la humanidad o la sostenibilidad son desguazados económicamente para aprovecharlos: "Salvar el mundo bebiendo té", dice el eslogan de una empresa de comercio justo. Cambiar el mundo consumiendo: eso sería el final de la revolución. También los zapatos o la ropa deberían ser veganos. A este paso pronto habrá smartphones veganos. El neoliberalismo explota la moral de muchas maneras. Los valores morales se consumen como signos de distinción. Son apuntados a la cuenta del ego, lo cual hace que aumente la autovaloración.

Incrementan la autoestima narcisista. A través de los valores uno no entra en relación con la comunidad, sino que solo se refiere a su propio ego. Con el símbolo, la tessera hospitalis, los hospitalarios sellan su alianza. La palabra symbolon pertenece al mismo campo semántico que "relación", "totalidad" y "salvación". Según el mito que Aristófanes relata en el diálogo platónico El banquete, el hombre era originalmente un ser esférico con dos rostros y cuatro piernas. Como era demasiado arrogante, Zeus lo partió en dos mitades para debilitarlo. Desde entonces el hombre es un symbolon que añora su otra mitad, una totalidad que lo sane y lo salve. Juntar se dice en griego symbállein. Los rituales son también una praxis simbólica, una praxis de symbállein, en la medida en que juntan a los hombres y engendran una alianza, una totalidad, una comunidad. Lo simbólico como un medio en el que se genera y por el que se transmite la comunidad está hoy, con todo claridad, desapareciendo.

Conforme a los criterios de

The Trust Project

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antoine marie jean-baptiste roger de saint-exupéry

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"Los ritos transforman el 'estar en el mundo' en un 'estar en casa'. Hacen del mundo un lugar fiable"

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Extracto del 'La desaparición de los rituales', último libro de Byung-Chul Han en España, donde advierte de lo que ahora sucede: la pérdida de los ritos y de los juegos Los ritos son acciones simbólicas. Transmiten y representan aquellos valores y órdenes que mantienen cohesionada una comunidad.

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Download your deck. Bring them to your next brainstorm or team meeting to start a conversation about questions of scale, of what usage really means, and how equity and access play a role in the technology we create. Perhaps the cards will help you expose a potential negative outcome that can be avoided, like a feature that could be abused or alienate people. The cards are also designed to help reveal opportunities to increase the positive aspects of technology, like ways to create more inclusive products or connect people in more meaningful ways. Either way, let us know how you use them. We would love to hear about your experience and the dialogue that results!

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The Tarot Cards of Tech | The power of predicting impact | Artefact

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The Tarot Cards of Tech are a creative tool to help designers and technologists think about the outcomes of their products and services.

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Llevamos más de 18 años trabajando con compañías y líderes que creen que es posible una nueva forma de hacer empresa.

Generamos espacios de sentido y confianza para ayudar a las empresas a tomar decisiones valientes en momentos de incertidumbre.

Creemos en las empresas como agentes de cambio capaces de crear un impacto positivo para la sociedad, la economía y el planeta.

Nos servimos del diseño por su poder transformador y de creación y de las humanidades para entender con fundamento las necesidades y el devenir de la sociedad.

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Soulsight. Design Strategy · Shaping the human side of change

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Impulsamos a los CEOs y líderes del cambio a tomar decisiones de negocio que generen impacto desde el diseño estratégico y las humanidades. Somos una consultora de estrategia e innovación. Llevamos más de 18 años trabajando con compañías y líderes que creen que es posible una nueva forma de hacer empresa.

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One would be hard-pressed to find a form of modern rationalism more extreme than capitalism. The laws of supply and demand and the commodification of goods like health and education strip away the mystery and sense of sacredness that were once a vital part of human life. Capitalism, Marx observed, tears asunder "all fixed, fast-frozen relations" and "drowns the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor...in the icy water of egotistical calculation." It wrings out of human life every drop of awe and magic and leaves in their place a hardened world of material interests and accumulation. Or so the story goes. Eugene McCarraher's new book, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, offers a different rendering of our modern age-one in which the mysteries and sacraments of religion were transferred to the way we perceive market forces and economic development. The new world that capitalism created, McCarraher argues, is characterized not by disenchantment but by a "migration of the holy" to the realm of production and consumption, profit and price, trade and economic tribulation. Capitalism, in other words, is the new religion, a system full of enchanted superstitions and unfounded beliefs and beholden to its own clerisy of economists and managers, its own iconography of advertising and public relations, and its own political theology-a view of history and politics that is premised on the inevitability of the capitalist system spreading across the world. McCarraher spoke with The Nation about capitalism's past and present, the lost radicalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Bernie Sanders's candidacy, and the rise of a new generation of socialists. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
-Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: What is the disenchanted view of capitalism that your book rejects? And why have we assumed this view of capitalism to be true for so long?

Eugene McCarraher: The "disenchantment of the world," as Max Weber called it (he borrowed the phrase from Friedrich Schiller), is one of the basic assumptions of modern cultural and intellectual life. It marks the belief that a hallmark of modernity is the loss of belief in enchantment-those mysterious, immeasurable forces that rule over, pervade, and animate the universe. During the Middle Ages, Catholic Christianity exemplified this enchanted understanding of reality in its sacramental rituals and imagination. According to Weber, Calvinist theology and capitalist enterprise gradually demolished this enchanted sacramental perspective, reducing matter to an inert and inanimate substance. The capitalist quest for profit not only relaxed medieval strictures against avarice and usury; it mandated that material reality had to be stripped of all spiritual significance.

It's a compelling story, one that unites Wall Street banksters, Silicon Valley tech bros, the socialists at Jacobin, and probably most readers of The Nation. It's so compelling that it convinces even religious intellectuals: In his monumental A Secular Age (2007), the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor pretty much retold this conventional tale-even though there's the twist of a possible re-enchantment at the end. And it certainly has a convincing superficial plausibility. Set aside the fact that religious belief has declined in the capitalist world over the last two centuries; one finds this to be the case in everyday life. Except perhaps for evangelical Protestants, businesspeople don't say prayers at board meetings; they don't consult soothsayers about the next quarter or base their investment decisions on horoscopes. Even if they believe in these things, none of it enters into their calculations.

EM: You can see the glimmerings of a very different story even among the most secular and "disenchanted" critics of capitalism. Weber thought that the old spirits of enchantment hadn't simply hobbled off into oblivion; they'd morphed into the laws of the market. And as you can read in Marx's 1844 manuscripts, the Grundrisse, and the chapter on commodity fetishism in Capital, he perceived the persistence of enchantment in the allegedly secular mechanics of capitalism. Marx saw that money had become a divinity, the creator and legitimator of moral reality in capitalist civilization. In Capital, commodity fetishism becomes the capitalist surrogate for Catholic sacramentality: Where sacrament directs divine grace through material objects or religious rituals, commodity fetishism conducts the power of money through a pecuniary alchemy of objects. So one way to read modern history is as a story of capitalist enchantment and a theology of money, as it were.

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That history is the subject of my book. Its subtitle is derived from Walter Benjamin's "Capitalism as Religion" (1921), one of the starkest and most succinct Marxist accounts of capitalist enchantment, and I want to examine how capitalism is a new, perverse form of enchantment, a misdirection of our desires for a sacramental way of being in the world. This perverse sacramentality is on display throughout capitalist civilization-in management theory, in industrial design, in advertising, in economics.

To be honest, I'm not sure that economics even is a science, however "dismal," as Thomas Carlyle once dubbed it. Indeed, I think that John Ruskin was closer to the mark in Unto This Last (1862) when he compared what was then called "political economy" to "alchemy, astrology, [and] witchcraft." As a Christian, I reject the two assumptions found in conventional economics: scarcity (to the contrary, God has created a world of abundance) and rational, self-seeking, utility-maximizing humanism (a competitive conception of human nature that I believe traduces our creation in the image and likeness of God). I think that one of the most important intellectual missions of our time is the construction of an economics with very different assumptions about the nature of humanity and the world.

DSJ: How does this conception of economics relate to your understanding of what neoliberalism is?

EM: With its ideal of converting everything into a market, neoliberalism represents the zenith-or rather the nadir-of capitalist enchantment. As I argue in the book, in neoliberalism you have a thoroughly marketized conception of the human person-"the entrepreneurial self," in Philip Mirowski's words.

You can see the cosmology of neoliberal enchantment most clearly in the work of Friedrich Hayek, one of the most duplicitous figures in modern intellectual history. And you can see its literary apotheosis in Ayn Rand, who really and firmly believed that money is the measure of all things. For Hayek, the market is a kind of Logos, whose decrees are created and registered in the numerical glossary of money. In Hayek's view, we must bow and genuflect to its inscrutable wisdom-Quinn Slobodian was right to characterize this view as a "negative theology." For her part, Rand asserted that capitalism was religious in character. "A new faith is needed," she once insisted, "a definite, positive set of new values and a new interpretation of life."

DSJ: Let's switch gears a bit. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, there has been considerable scholarly interest in political economy, and specifically the history of political economy, as a way of explaining growing inequality. The most notable book here would be Thomas Piketty's Capitalism in the 21st Century. Given your argument, would you say the return to political economy is only telling us half the story about the causes of the economic crisis and growing inequality?

Yes, it's only telling part of the story-but I'll add the immediate caveat that the study of political economy remains indispensable. There's a tendency among religious critics of capitalism to focus their ire on consumerism, which becomes nothing more than a moral failing for which frugality becomes the healing virtue. Well, not to get into it here, but I think that thrift is a pseudo-virtue at best and that, as a host of historians could tell you, consumerism is not really about gratifying people's needs and desires so much as it's about increasing the volume of profit and production. Capitalism needs people to be dissatisfied. So nattering on about consumerism is a way of not getting serious about capitalism. Besides, a lot of anti-consumerist invective strikes me as little more than tiresome moralism, and it also underwrites an equally boring objection to materialism. I wish that people were, in fact, more materialistic in the sense that they should cultivate and exhibit more appreciation for the joys of the material world.

EM: I certainly agree that a far more equitable distribution of wealth would go a long way toward making figures such as Trump much less attractive. But I want to make two observations here. One is that I don't like the way the word "populism" is being used these days. To people like Yascha Mounk, "populism" is the bray of the rabble against their neoliberal betters. What they're really railing against is how the technocratic and managerial elites have profited handsomely from "disruption," "innovation," etc. We have to remember that, as Michael Kazin could remind us, there have been right and left versions of populism, and that populism hasn't always been bound up with racism and xenophobia.

I'd also like to say that, while we should certainly have a more just distribution of wealth, we should ask ourselves what we mean by "wealth" in the first place. One of the many problems in conventional economic thinking is that "wealth" is simply the sum total of all the goods and services we produce every year-the gross domestic product. It's a purely quantitative concept. There's no concern for whether or not those good and services are good for us, or the conditions in which they were produced, or the ecological impact of the production technology or the modes of consumption. (The concept of externalities is just a way to avoid the problem.) Ruskin makes a distinction between wealth and what he calls "illth." The distinction is qualitative: Wealth and illth are relationships between a good and the character of the person. As much as we need Piketty's kind of political economy, we need to transform it in a way that makes moral discussion central and not ancillary to the discipline. Again, economics itself is in need of a major intellectual overhaul-this one ethical as well as ontological.

All of which is to say that I think the moral and spiritual crisis is real and that it's far deeper than we often realize. I agree with David Graeber: We may well be approaching the end of the capitalist epoch, but we're not at all sure that what's coming after will be any better. We may be living in the sort of dreary liminal period that Wolfgang Streeck describes-an ongoing apocalypse in which capitalism is languishing, but since there's apparently no coherent opposition, it manages to lurch onward from one crisis to the next without finally collapsing. We really do need a "new civilizational paradigm," in Naomi Klein's words, one in which the world-and especially the human beings who reside in it and are a part of it-isn't seen as nothing more than columns of integers on a balance sheet. This is why I argue in the book that the tradition of Romantic anti-capitalism contains one of the most humane and generous treasuries of possibilities.

DSJ: This brings us to the question of what you seem to be offering as a solution-a left Romanticism. Can you explain what you mean by this and how it relates to the other major theme of your book, namely what you describe as the need for a sacramental worldview?

EM: We usually think of Romanticism as a literary and artistic movement that flourished from the late 18th into the mid-19th century. I follow Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre in seeing Romanticism as an element of modern culture, one that extends into the present day, whose representatives invoked premodern, precapitalist values and institutions against the hegemony of pecuniary and instrumental rationality. Unlike Marx, who beckoned to what he called the poetry of the future, Romantics invoke the poetry of the past-classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, peasant and artisanal communities. While some Romantics really did want to return to the past, most did not; they wanted to preserve what they thought of value in premodern societies and recast them in modern form. For this reason, many Romantics affirm the scientific and democratic legacies of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and they occupy positions all across the spectrum of the left, from William Morris (who unashamedly referred to Ruskin as "my teacher") all the way through to Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown.

At the same time, while certainly not all Romantics were religious (Percy Shelley and Morris, to cite two), Romanticism has often been a brand of religious sensibility, the heir to and the modern form of the sacramental imagination of medieval Christianity. Some of the most renowned passages of Romantic poetry, for instance, point to a reality that transcends and suffuses the visible world: Blake's "Heaven in a Wild Flower," Wordsworth's "sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused." "Imagination" was the name the Romantics gave to this modern sacramental sensibility, and they meant by it not "fantasy" but rather a capacity for vision, the ability to "see" what's really all around us. That's what "visionary" properly means, and it fulfilled rather than canceled out rationality.

Left Romanticism has taken a number of political forms. One is a socialist/social democratic iteration, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ruskin's preface to Unto This Last is an early sketch of what became the welfare state, and many early Labour Party members, as well as many of the rank and file of the trade union movement, avowed that much of their attraction to socialism stemmed from reading inexpensive copies of Unto This Last. In the Anglophone world, figures such as R.H. Tawney (in his guild socialist phase, at least) and Social Gospelers such as George Herron and Vida Dutton Scudder were also followers of Ruskin and William Morris.

Left Romanticism also took form in the many Arts and Crafts communities that emerged in Britain and the United States around the same time, and it also appeared among anarchists. One of the abiding concerns of left Romantics has been the recovery of artisanal skill and aesthetic prowess from their destruction by mechanization (now called automation). There was also among left Romantics a challenge to conventional understandings of progress. Both capitalists and many of their left antagonists have often shared a Promethean concept of "progress" as endless economic growth. Left Romantics favor more qualitative standards of growth, smaller-scale and more ecologically sensible technics, and direct workers' control. So the divide isn't, as Christopher Lasch had it a generation ago, between "progress and its critics"; rather, it's a conflict between two concepts of progress.

EM: Much of the Green New Deal certainly dovetails with left Romantic concerns about economic justice and ecological sensitivity. That said, I would join in-though less acerbically-with left criticisms of the Green New Deal that it doesn't go far enough to confront the capitalist imperatives that drive unlimited growth and ecological despoliation. Also, a more ambitious Green New Deal would reflect the distinction between wealth and illth that I mentioned earlier. I'm really concerned, for instance, about the enthusiasm many on the left are displaying for automation, even for "fully automated luxury communism." I'm fearful that left technophiliacs are outsourcing their political imaginations to Silicon Valley; the thinking seems to be that Elon Musk and others will achieve all the technological breakthroughs, and socialism will be all about taking the technology away from them.

EM: The problem with Christian socialism is that it has meant all sorts of things over the last century and a half, from tepid, reformist paternalism to the guild socialism of Anglican radicals to little more than Christians signing on to the agendas of the extant socialist or social democratic parties. Besides, many younger people will, for various reasons, be uncomfortable with Christian socialism, given that "Christian" now has so many unsavory historical and contemporary associations-persecution, imperialism, obscurantism, evangelical homophobia. And so I'm not sure that "Christian socialism" is a useful term-I don't endorse it in my book-and that's why I prefer the more capacious and messier "left Romanticism."

The critique I would make of Sanders's "socialism" is left Romantic: that it's not socialism and that it falls short of a new civilizational paradigm in which human beings and the rest of nature aren't reduced to the terms of instrumental rationality. I'm not the first person to point out that what Sanders supports is a "green" social democracy-a large and generous welfare state and more tightly regulated capitalism, with greater attention paid than ever to ecological concerns. I certainly don't oppose any of that, which is why I'm a Sanders supporter. But as I argued previously, we have to address the more fundamental property relations of capitalism if we're really going to achieve justice and save the planet from further damage.

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One would be hard-pressed to find a form of modern rationalism more extreme than capitalism. The laws of supply and demand and the commodification of goods like health and education strip away the mystery and sense of sacredness that were once a vital part of human life.

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Religion does not always embrace the views of science, but it hasn't been shy about adopting science's most marketable product - technology. Particularly in the history of Christianity, technology has been a means of spreading the "good news" to every part of the globe, beginning with the first book ever mass produced by a movable-type printing press - the Gutenberg Bible.

In the modern era, technology has become all the more ubiquitous in people's modes of worship. In the early 20th century, especially in the United States, radio took evangelical sermons out of the sacred space of the church and placed them right in people's living rooms. Television took that concept even further, and a whole generation of celebrity televangelists was born - Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Jerry Falwell, to name a few.

Billy Graham, probably the most iconic of all mid-century evangelists, made his career by understanding the power of mass-communication technology. First, he recognized the power of the microphone, which, although already in existence for a century, was perfected in the late 1940s. For the first time, masses of people in baseball stadiums and other large outdoor venues could be addressed in a way that included all the subtleties of human speech, without echo or reverberation. On top of that, microphone production was cheap, allowing virtually every gathering place to benefit from amplified speech. Graham took his show on the road in the form of Billy Graham Crusades, where thousands of people gathered (1.1 million at one event in South Korea) to hear his inspiring Christian message. By the time of television, his reputation was already set, and he was immediately offered the opportunity to broadcast. This combination of multitudinous crowds and TV broadcast would set the standard for many televised megachurches to come.

In the past couple of decades, the internet has been the technological game-changer in spirituality, just as it has been in so many other aspects of our culture. Now, a would-be spiritual teacher does not have to gather an audience and secure a TV contract before broadcasting his or her message. YouTube allows anyone to upload videos and create stations for their own content. Some spiritual teachers like Matt Kahn and Teal Swan, have created their following entirely through this medium, while others, like Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti, have dramatically increased their audiences. Other social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, have proven another effective way to reach spiritual seekers.

One difference clearly separates the internet spirituality of the 21st century from TV and radio evangelism of the 20th century: Dominant and traditional forms of spirituality no longer get all of the air time. This has allowed spiritual seekers to roam widely and with ease, gathering spiritual information from a variety of sources, instead of simply receiving the same old bromides from their traditional religions. Eastern philosophies and other "alternative" forms of spirituality, which are now highly popular on YouTube, had cultural presence in the last half of the 20th century, but they had remained marginalized, part of the hippy counterculture of the '60s and the maligned "new age" spirituality of the late '80s.

The internet's open forum for spiritual discussion has had a number of effects on the way people practice spirituality. First of all, it appears to have diminished devotion to traditional spiritual paths. In other words, with so many choices, people are less likely to simply choose their family's and culture's traditional preferences, and it has increased the likelihood of dabbling in many traditions instead of just one. This trend includes increased willingness to choose atheism or agnosticism, stances once so taboo that people were unlikely to identify as such due to social stigma. Those that do not believe in a god have found a united voice by connecting digitally to those with a similarly skeptical mind. Self-identification as agnostic or atheist has skyrocketed since the introduction of the internet in the 1990s, becoming the top spiritual identification in the U.K. and the second-most likely in North America, Australia, and Europe.

Not everybody is abandoning the spiritual ship, though, even if they no longer feel bound by dogma. The label "spiritual but not religious," a label born out of the phenomenon of internet dating services, has become increasingly popular as well. Just as access to Wikipedia and the rest of the Information Superhighway makes everyone feel like an instant expert, the internet can make everyone their own guru, too. By shedding attachment to a singular religion while they surf from one spiritual perspective to the next, they also reject the authoritarian nature of traditional religious leadership, relying instead on their own powers of discernment as they blaze their own paths suited to their own desires and interests.

Dogma is far from dead in the internet age, however. In fact, the most extreme forms of dogma are thriving in cyberspace, perhaps wielding more influence than they have in decades. Just as the internet has been a perfect breeding ground for the darkest elements of the political "alt-right," it has emboldened and empowered the more extreme elements of religion, too. Perhaps partly in reaction against the spiritual permissiveness of the Information Age, people of a more-fundamentalist bent find each other and connect. In this spiritual echo chamber, they find their own dogmas, along with their worst fears about the spiritual decay of society, constantly repeated and reconfirmed. On the more extreme sites, violence in defense of one's dogma is encouraged and supported by the internet community, as has been the case with Christian anti-abortion and Islamic jihadist terrorist groups.

Nonetheless, many spiritual practitioners see the internet and technology as a force for good, a tool that can unite humanity spiritually in a way that will make a better world ... someday. New age guru Deepak Chopra sees the internet as an extension of the human mind and consciousness, and believes it to be a harbinger of a great leap in human spiritual development.

In an interview for Mashable, Chopra commented: "They [conversations] are the extensions of our mind. Right now, you and I are influencing each other's neural networks because of our conversation, through the flow of info and energy. And when this info is put on a social network, it influences the minds, and therefore, the neural networks of everyone participating. So unbeknownst to us, society is moving in the direction of a planetary mind through the social networks." Recent developments in the Standing Rock Indian Reservation oil-pipeline controversy serve to support Chopra's point, while also painting a picture of the future of the intersection between spirituality and technology.

After months of protest, both native and non-native spiritual leaders called for a mass, interdenominational "global synchronized prayer" in support of the cause. Notice spread like wildfire over email and social media within a matter of hours. On the same day, at 10 a.m. on December 4, 2016, an estimated 72,000 people from more than 40 countries connected online and participated in the focused prayer. At 3:30 a.m. the same day, the United States Army Corps of Engineers rejected the permits needed to finish the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Whether the prayers actually caused the desired result remains a matter of personal belief, but the power of technology to effect a spiritual cause and to create a spiritually powerful event was undoubtedly evident.

Spirituality will likely be present alongside technology for a long time, perhaps because technology makes the need for spirituality even greater. Albert Einstein famously once said, "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." At its worst, spirituality can polarize people, encouraging bigotry and fear. At its best, it cultivates virtue and love for one's fellow humans.

Ironically, the information technology that is defining this era has similar tendencies - it can polarize and isolate people, or it can connect and empower people. So, perhaps it is up to us to use both, in tandem, to bring out the best of what we as humans can be.
This article was originally published in the Spring 2017 issue of Brain World Magazine.
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The images from Charlottesville, Virginia, of white supremacists marching with Nazi banners reminded us, as if we needed it, that the swastika remains a potent symbol of racist hate.

In Germany, where neo-Nazis also march, it's illegal to display the swastika, and citizens there initiate private or neighborhood efforts to remove it from graffiti and other street art.

But attempts to eradicate the swastika can sometimes misfire, as happened recently in Quebec. Corey Fleischer, known by the Instagram handle erasinghate, was stopped by police when he tried to blot out swastikas embossed on salvaged anchors on public display in the small St. Lawrence River community of Pointes-des-Cascades.

Plaques suggested that the anchors were from the Third Reich, but a Radio Canada correspondent reported that they were made by the English company W.L. Byers before the Nazis came to power. The company used the swastika as a symbol of good luck, a common practice in the early 20th century.

Fleischer remained unmoved by this historical explanation. As he told CityNews: "The swastika is no longer a sign of peace. It's a sign attached to a party that literally almost wiped out an entire culture."

I come across this obsession with swastikas time and time again. In my university courses on German cultural history, students are repelled yet fascinated by the horror it symbolizes. When I ask whether the swastika should be banned in North America the way it is in Germany, some say yes, whereas others point to its innocent use in other cultures.

The debate is similar to the dispute between Pointes-des-Cascades and Corey Fleischer. Should the 25 years it was a symbol of Nazi racism outweigh its millennia-long use as a talisman of good fortune?

A diverse and ancient history

The swastika wasn't always an odious symbol of hate. Far from it. The word svastika is Sanskrit in origin and means "conducive to well-being."

As a symbol, the swastika's power resides in its simplicity and balance. Graphic designer Steven Heller notes that "the swastika's geometric purity allows for legibility at any size or distance, and when on its axis, the whirling square gives the illusion of movement."

Its form, according to Heller, is "sublime," so it's no wonder that it has found a place in so many cultures.

In Buddhism, the swastika is thought to represent the footprints of the Buddha. It takes on a liturgical function in Jainism, and in Hinduism the clockwise symbol (the swastika as we know it, with the arms pointing right) and the counterclockwise symbol, the sauvistika, pair up to portray opposites such as light and darkness.

In Mesopotamia it was used on coins, and the Navajo nation wove it into blankets. It has been found on ancient pottery in Africa and Asia. It was sometimes used as a single element, but often it was repeated as a series of interlocking swastikas to form a border on a garment or in architecture, as was common in Roman times.

It made an appearance in Germanic and Viking cultures, and you can find it in medieval churches and religious vestments across Europe.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the swastika became well-established in Western culture as a good luck symbol, similar to a four-leaf clover or a horseshoe.

Companies used it as logo; it adorned birth announcements and greeting cards. American Boy Scouts could get a swastika badge, and the Girls' Club published a magazine called The Swastika. Finland, Latvia and the United States have all used it as a military insignia.

In Canada, a mining community in northern Ontario was named Swastika, just as you might name a town New Hope or Bounty. Windsor, Nova Scotia., and Fernie, British Columbia, both had hockey teams called the Swastikas. In 1931, Newfoundland issued a $1 stamp commemorating important moments in transatlantic aviation; each corner had a swastika.

The late 19th century saw the newly formed German empire caught up in an era of unrestrained nationalism. Some nationalists sought to prove German racial superiority, subscribing to a now discredited idea that an ancient Aryan race-the original Indo-Europeans-were their ancestors. Evidence was needed to connect the Germans with the Aryans.

Nazis appropriated the symbol

The swastika provided the necessary link.

In the early 1870s, when German businessman and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann thought he had discovered the ancient Greek city of Troy, more than 1,800 instances of the swastika were unearthed. Since the swastika was also present among the archaeological remains of the Germanic tribes, it didn't take long for nationalists to jump to the conclusion that the Germans and the Greeks were both descendants of the Aryans.

And if you believe that Germans form a separate "race" superior to other ethnic groups around it, it becomes easier to claim that you need to keep that "race" pure. In that context, anti-Semitism followed.

The Thule Society, an anti-Semitic organization promoting the superiority of German Volk (folk in English), was founded at the end of the First World War. It used a stylized swastika as its logo. The society sponsored the fledgling Nazi party, and in a bid for greater public profile, the party created a banner that incorporated the swastika as we know it today.

Hitler was convinced that a potent symbol would rally the masses to his xenophobic cause. With a black swastika (called the Hakenkreuz in German, or hooked cross) rotated 45 degrees on a white circle set against a red background, the Nazi banner modernized the ancient symbol while evoking the colors of the recently defeated German empire.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler took sole credit for the design and attempted to give it meaning: "In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man." Tortured symbolism aside, the swastika banner did what it was supposed to do -it gave visual identity to the Nazi movement.

When the Nazis assumed power in 1933, they sought to unite the country behind their racist Aryan ideology, and the use of their symbol infiltrated all aspects of German life.

You can still see it sometimes, including in mosaic ceiling tiles at Hitler's Haus der Kunst in Munich. The banner became the official flag of the country in 1935, and although it wasn't everywhere as Hollywood might have you believe, it was very much present.

The way forward

Steven Heller subtitles his book, The Swastika, with a simple but pertinent question: Symbol Beyond Redemption? In those cultures where it's been used for centuries in religious practices or in the decorative arts, this question is unnecessary. The symbol doesn't carry any negative connotations there.

But objects like the swastika do not have any inherent meaning; the symbolism is constructed by the people who use them. In our Western society, the swastika is tainted. The Nazi movement's violent crimes against humanity gave the Hakenkreuz a meaning that can't be concealed or erased.

In places like Pointes-des-Cascades, where pre-Nazi swastikas exist, extra care must be taken to contextualize their presence. But in all other instances the symbol really must be shunned.

Its hate-filled racist intentions are clear. It wasn't an innocent symbol for the Nazis, nor is it for latter-day neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

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The images from Charlottesville, Virginia, of white supremacists marching with Nazi banners reminded us, as if we needed it, that the swastika remains a potent symbol of racist hate. In Germany, where neo-Nazis also march, it's illegal to display the swastika, and citizens there initiate private or neighborhood efforts to remove it from graffiti and other street art.

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