Mending fractured focus with 90s Technopaganism: transcription as attention yoga
I've been listening to, and transcribing, the most excellent, heady and oddly nostalgic Technopagans at the End of History talks, led by Terence McKenna and Mark Pesce at the Esalen Institute, California, USA in August 1998.
It's a total blast – before social media, let alone talk of banning teenagers from it; even before the parabolic acceleration of Dotcom boom.
This is a glimpse of the glorious dawn of this strange day of digital revolution that we're now living amid the ruins of.
While I've listened to McKenna for years, this is the first time I've really analysed his “rap” in any great depth. I initially encountered an .mp3 library of his talks through a blog post from comic book writer / tech gadfly Warren Ellis, in the early 2000s.
At the time, McKenna was the smartest, coolest, most adventurous person I'd ever heard of. I understood none of it, but this almost made it better – there were worlds of potential experience here, and this guy was a knowledgeable, if mercurial and tricky, guide.
Later, I found the sonorous nasal drone of his voice helped me sleep during a period of insomnia, likely caused by overstimulation, taking meaningless shit too seriously, and not exercising enough. Truly, his talks are medicine for all ailments.
What do they mean by “Technopagan”, anyway?
As far as I can tell, in the context of this seminar, it's a cool title.
They reference a 1995 Wired magazine article by Erik Davis, that Davis subsequently expanded into his wonderful extended riff Techgnosis. Davis' article details some great rituals that captured the exuberance of the time.
In these talks, there isn't so much what I'd directly understand as “Pagan”, to my current understanding as a body of technique, practice, ideology as such – no explicit reference to gods, folk, spirits, ancestors, and so on, though there is a masterful ontological mic drop, with the “logos of the Gaian Mind”.
[Correction – actually, in Part 4, they get into this, in some depth – Pesce talks about how this is a working title, and also the assumption of godforms as “a loci for accretion of a personality around a particular point”; McKenna talks about DMT creatures as akin to faerylore, but perhaps also fractal elements of some sort of transpersonal self. It's good stuff, and they're both eloquent as hell.]
These sessions traverse a freewheeling sprawl of then-cutting-edge concerns: nascent digital technologies (some vaporware, others lost to time), psychedelic compounds and experiences, nanotechnology, the psychological impact of constant context changing, cool books, heaps more.
It features lots on VR, especially fascinating for me, at this point – when this was the big transformative technology that would usher in the new age of human potential.
Even then, though, they were delicately expanding definitions, qualifying expectations. Then, as now, the most enthusiastic advocates of the possibilities of VR are usually those who haven't spent much time together in it, much less trying to make it work. Pesce had, and deftly leads this conversation.
Over the weekend-long seminar, the frequency of presentation of big ideas blows away most anything on offer in today's low-density information buffet, too – it manhandles vapid TED talkers and podcast parasociety alike with heavy psychedelic riffage. It's a most curious message in a bottle, from a time before.
Eating the Dessert of the Real
Most of all, for me, it has reminded me of when this tech was fun, wild, liberatory. The rules hadn't been so firmly set; it was human-scaled; the higher educational institutions were still largely benign and people were still doing great work in them.
It hadn't descended into what many experience as the tech world of today: a world of surveillance capitalism, zero-to-one monopolism, the hellscape of offshored callcentres and dubious “helpdesks”, zero hour contracts, and bland doctrinal management by utterly uninspiring, largely incompetent people.
When it all seemed, for a moment, that the information revolution would erase all differences, national boundaries would dissolve, and we'd all live in peace, harmony and endless light...
The challenges of transcription
In terms of transcribing this – working from the auto captioning, and reformatting and correcting this, through the 10 or so hours of the recordings from the weekend.
They're great speakers, and the content is compelling. But the work is hard. This is the biggest insight so far – how much my brain has changed, how weak my focus has become.
As a former journalist, before the profession devolved to its current parlous state, I used to be able to sit, transcribe and type, for hours on end. Day after day. Seeking the truth, or whatever. It was more of a trade than an art, or craft.
So – as a challenge, this transcription, logging an information artifact from a lost time – is revealing unexpected outcomes.
Most of all, it is a powerful and worthwhile exercise in rebuilding atrophied muscles – and sharpening the essential ability to just lock the fuck in and focus on a single, simple task, for hours upon hours straight, until it's done.
I anticipate writing more on these talks, too – there's forgotten gold here. A way forward is in the past.