ecstaticist

And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. - Bono, prophetically referring to the thousands of songs on my iPod.

Social networking technologies inherent in many of the more popular Internet services like Google, Amazon, Flikr, Delicious, Technorati and others are beginning to form the infrastructure for the emergence of a new form of flash religion.

Religious texts are typically a compilation of wisdoms, prejudices and other dictums designed to simulate a comprehensive whole that guides us. They tell us how to Be. Nothing new there. Modernity replaces the religious text with scientific papers, opinion pieces and political rhetoric. Post-modernity replaces those with consumer narratives: operationalise your life with a spectrum of semiotically linked purchases that identify, adorn and enable participation in the ritual of Being.

In all previous forms, the religious text was rooted in authority. The scientist. The editor. The commentator, critic or analyst. These priests occupied priviledged posts on the econet (the communications grid that enables the knowledge of how to be to be disseminated). The mass deferred to the few, and largely governed themselves accordingly. Individual dissent was generated off-line and, once popularized, absorbed through a process of operationalised and marketed deviance. In other words, it was brought into the mainstream as a gutted and re-valued commodity.

Now we live in a time where communications technologies are allowing us all to speak with each other simultaneously. Clealy this din is incomprehensible without some form of filtering. We began with buddy lists and favourites. We collected things in folders and drives. We hoarded our markers and bits of wisdom on our PC and hoped we were getting “the best” of it.

Then comes the burgeoning grid that is the underpinnings of a new collectivism. The omnipresence of “your stuff” via portability, distributed systems, personalisation on the web. Our spirits now occupy the Internet on countless servers. We are the new ghosts in the machine. Our Identity is now ecstatic and “out there” over the wires and the air, and we reach for it continually through handheld devices.

Ecstacy is a reversed and positively-valued form of alienation where we no longer lament our lost essence, but seek to escape our essential selves to become something better; something defined by our choral invovement in a narrative of perfection, fulfillments and belonging. We think we have become that perfect being, and thus achieve ecstacy, but the cycle always begins again with the new fall lineup. The Amazon Wishlist is our most fervent prayer.

Paul Virilio once said the newly networked human was a crippled being, belimed by the stationary technologies that were supposed to enable, embolden and make free. Now we walk free, or should I say float free, buoyed along like a beacon of Identity, logged in via radio waves, sailing through life on an electromagnetic wind. We move through archaic physical space but remain exactly where we are at all times, located precisely in relation to everyone else on the placeless ‘Net.

So, what are our new religious texts? The Recommendation. The Review. The Feedback. These are the new scripture and psalm. The Peer Review. Five stars. 78 percent positive. All these passages show us the shining path. They help us to not make a “mistake,” which is the new form of Sin. The algorithms that drive Google, which largely bases its rankings on the number of links to a page, are the new hermeneutical pry bars. Mass acceptance is the new Mass. Each search a Haj.

The key insight in all of this is that we are simply talking to ourselves. The largest encyclopedia in the world now is the Wikipedia, which is maintained by us. The biggest tent revival prayer meeting in the world is the sum total of every review of every item ever purchased, every article ever read, and every song ever listened to. It is a choral soliloquy.

What does all this mean? It means we now find out how to be by asking ourselves. Its The Reformation all over again.

As an aside, the reason the average person has not been an authority in the past is because the average person is not honest. There is no rigour in the average person’s estimation of how to be, or how they are being. The average person’s opinion has been, and remains, constructed from a shallow sublimation of desires and needs - and the accounts thereof are often conditioned by a deep desire to have not made a mistake. Particularly when a lot of time has been invested or a lot of money spent on a way to be. People typically continue to be as they are, and each mistake is recast into a story of how it was not a mistake or someone elses’ mistake. Of course, this is not to say that authorities are any more honest or self-aware, but to remain in authority one must be able to at least marginally sustain a flock.

Two ways to go forward.

The first way sees us collectively move into a universal state of limited consciousness. We become that cloud depicted on so many network diagrams. We blow with the wind - an organism called the Internet that traverses the face of life propelled by a massive feedback loop. The sky perpetually rains with Google bombs and viral outbreaks. Positive links, negative links - none of it matters. All that matters is that there be a tipping point for a datum of meaning. That God peek out from the rating grids and star meters. That Moses come down from the mountain of information and briefly come into focus.

In this state it matters not whether the meaning is good, the way pure and true, for the system creates its own value. We look into the mirror and we see ourselves in divine aparition, robed in the pillowy whiteness of #FFFFFF and bejeweled by those colorful letters that spell goooooogle ever more richly and fabulously depending on how much meaning is generated.

The other way sees the ‘Net as the catalyst that breaks the spell. The chances for this are slim. It would involve becoming something more - and something less - than we are and have been through this long, long journey; this Grail quest that can never be completed because it is always completed.

We would need to awaken to the mystery that, in fact, we ride with ourselves, the solution and the end our constant travelling companion, always unseen before our noses, always buying into the lie that it was the saviour who carried us through those times when we look back and see only one set of footprints. It will require an awakening to ourselves.

Hiedegger, in Die Frage nach der Technik, maintained that “where the danger lies, there also lies the saving power.” We are frighteningly close to seeing our own image in the mirror behind the Altar of the ‘Net. If we catch a glimpse, will we still find the story compelling? Will it still help show us how to be? Will it be the moment of awakening to the religious impulse as a whole? Will it be the sudden, collective flash of insight that shows that religion is of us, from us and strictly about us? Will this be liberating or terrifying?

Will the Medium become a Message of awakening, or will it become a Message of Erasure and of Nihilism. Will we go forward and never look back, or will we shy away and try to forget, praying for the return of the shadows on the wall of the cave.

No page with that title exists. You can create an article with this title or put up a request for it.

This is what Wikipedia tells you in the absence of an entry, of meaning, of a way to Be.

See? It really is a new and personal relationship with God.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 at 5:39 am and is filed under SocPol. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.