Although technology is often
seen as a symbol of progress, its foundations are intertwined with mysticism. Not only that, but even prominent figures in the technology field, such as Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg, are openly inclined towards spirituality.
During the interview, it is highlighted how the of Silicon Valley. This “technognosis” would profoundly influence individuals, especially through tools such as “Data Voodoo Dolls”, that is, digital alter egos of people created through mass profiling. Data, information have now surpassed material reality in value. Let’s delve into these issues.
In his work The Dark Throne he brings to light the hidden, esoteric, magical origins of the entire technological, computer, digital universe in which we are immersed. Is it possible? Do the technologies we have at hand have origins of this type? But aren’t they the fruit of progress?
When the British economist Keynes called Isaac Newton not the first of scientists but the last of alchemists, he was to a certain extent absolutely right. Newton’s deep interest in esoteric sciences and alchemy is well known from an empirical point of view.
Nowadays this might seem like an intrinsic contradiction, but for a very long time science and magic have, so to speak, joined hands in an attempt to rationalize the irrational and protect the individual from the mysteries of the cosmos.
Every discovery, every invention, carries with it the weight of a wound, of a rupture, so much so that we speak of the disruptive value of high technology: traumas always require adequate understanding, not only intellectual but also spiritual, in order not to generate mechanisms that are only destructive. And they equally require a medicine that keeps the demons of chaos at bay.
When we are unable to explain a phenomenon, when, for example in the area of artificial intelligence, science merges in symbiosis, in the Chinese in America collective narrative, with dystopia and science fiction, and we fear intelligent mechanical forms that could despotically take over human beings, here the shadowy outline of magic returns to take shape along the horizon, called upon to give explanation and substance to what our mind cannot, or does not want, to understand.
It is no coincidence that Arthur C. Clarke coined his famous law according to which high technology eventually becomes indistinguishable from magic.
The article continues…
The Dark Throne: interview with Andrea Venanzoni
Phenomenology of social networks and more: interview with Giovanni Boccia Artieri
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So what does this magical action at the basis of the technological world consist of, or rather, where have the magicians of the digital world, of the world wide web, of cyberspace acted, in which area of reality?
The creative destruction imported by high technology must be mastered. But mastering it completely is not a simple operation. This is why we usually look at the titans of digital as demiurgic, visionary figures, capable of impressing radical and drastic changes on society and on our very way of being in the world.
When the rabbinical tradition devised the Afghanistan Phone Number List figure of the Golem, which has now become a full and well-known literary topos – I am thinking of Meyrink’s novel ‘The Golem’ – it actually gave life to inert matter for protection purposes, turning it into mechanical life connected to the will of the one who brought the clay being to life.
This is an element that has always been inherent in the human mind and that needs to reduce any mystery to a procedure; the magical rite, like the religious rite itself, are forms of protection of the human being from the cosmic unknown and from the mysteries of nature.
Legal thought itself has tried to protect social complexity by devising that sort of normative
