"For make no mistake: the combined forces of capital, technical innovation, and desire are continuing to drive us toward an apotheosis of technical mediation. Today the accelerating perceptual technologies of media are on a collision course with the scientific understanding of how the human nervous system produces the real-time matrix we experience as ordinary space-time. As we amplify our knowledge of the neural basis of consciousness, we will see artists, marketers, and ideologues of all stripes attempt to shape the immediate contents of consciousness with ever finer and more crafty techniques. One fears that the day is not so distant where we will find ourselves waltzing with Tom Cruise through the invasive personalized ads of Minority Report. The digital universe is no longer “in there:” it is everywhere. So though today’s special effects-driven entertainments, computer games, and theme park rides continue to draw us ever deeper into virtual realities, the real action is in the “meatspace” that still surrounds us. Already, the convergence of wireless technology, cognitive science, GPS, and surveillance technologies are creating, or at least suggesting, a new form of information totality, a sentient landscape that turns us all into animists again.
The intensification of mediation does not stop with the tools conventionally referred to as “media.” Genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and the explosion of new materials also suggest that matter itself is finalizing its transformation into a programmable medium, a plastic vehicle of design and experiment and control. It is extremely difficult to imagine where this revolutionary transformation will lead, especially since the logic that drives so much of this development is clearly “unsustainable,” which in this context is just a polite term for suicidal. And so our poor beleaguered earth and its dying biota have become the final frontier of the human design process. Though it is presumptuous to assume we are facing apocalypse, the intensification of media, technology, and globalization may look a hell of a lot like the end of history.
Somehow, though, the novelty of media tech no longer packs its former punch. The collapse of the dot-com bubble put the visionaries back in their padded rooms, and this “return to the real” was cemented by 9/11. Utopian euphoria and posthuman giddiness are out; bottom lines and familiar brands are in. Instead of greedy boundary dissolution, we have seen, in American politics at least, the restoration of anxiously defended boundaries: nation, intellectual property, the Christian religion, and the sober but otherwise sleepwalking self. Even academics and intellectuals, formerly taken by all manner of discursive diseases, have staged a sort of Revenge of the Enlightenment, fomenting a new distrust of the more irrational, surreal, and visionary dimensions of the contemporary project.
This loss of technocultural euphoria, and especially the enthusiasm surrounding the Internet, was thoroughly predictable."
- 'Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information' by Erik Davis
