Erik Davis > Quotes

“The funny thing about games and fictions is that they have a weird way of bleeding into reality. Whatever else it is, the world that humans experience is animated with narratives, rituals, and roles that organize psychological experience, social relations, and our imaginative grasp of the material cosmos. The world, then, is in many ways a webwork of fictions, or, better yet, of stories. The contemporary urge to “gamify” our social and technological interactions is, in this sense, simply an extension of the existing games of subculture, of folklore, even of belief. This is the secret truth of the history of religions: not that religions are “nothing more” than fictions, crafted out of sociobiological need or wielded by evil priests to control ignorant populations, but that human reality possesses an inherently fictional or fantastic dimension whose “game engine” can — and will — be organized along variously visionary, banal, and sinister lines. Part of our obsession with counterfactual genres like sci-fi or fantasy is not that they offer escape from reality — most of these genres are glum or dystopian a lot of the time anyway — but because, in reflecting the “as if” character of the world, they are actually realer than they appear.”
― Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information

“It would be nice to begin the journey with who we are. But "who we are" is a house of mirrors, a tangled knot, a great and terrible Oz that in the final analysis may consist of nothing more than, well, nothing. The self, I am afraid, may be more of an onion than a fruit, and "who we are" is the skin we shed.”
― Erik Davis

“By refusing randomness and unpredictability, conspiracy theories and paranoid reality tunnels reify the hubris of systematic rationality as such. “Maybe all systems—that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about—are manifestations of paranoia.” As an “antidote” to such paranoia, Dick called for an injection of surprise into life—a cultivation, as it were, of noise on the line. “We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies

“The transitive shift from observer to participant, from gaze to encounter, requires both active engagement and a passive willingness to allow the phenomenon to reveal itself in its own terms. This visionary leap opens a dimension of experience, of ontological possibility, that is simultaneously a kind of abyss. In finding a “Thou” where before there was an “it”—as Martin Buber would describe it—the psychonaut suddenly faces all manner of risks: terror, madness, delusion, or what Terence ironically called “death by astonishment.” But to not take the chance, for some anyway, falls short of the mark.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“I am attempting to understand the often unconscious metaphysics of information culture by looking at it through the archetypal lens of religious and esoteric myth.”
― Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

“The technological audacity of the Apollo program, with it's largely symbolic payload, was also sinking into the trivialisation that Guy Debord had identified the decade before as the underside of media spectacle. When Commander Alan Shepard strapped a six iron to a lunar excavation tool and whacked two golf balls across the Fra Mauro Highlands, he became, for a spell, nothing more than a tourist, that agent of commodification whose freedom of movement, as Debord had written, is "nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“you need to crack open the mundane casing of ordinary technologies and trace their archetypal wiring. Then you might find yourself, if only for a moment, tapping into the electromagnetic unheimlich. The spirits speak: in the information age, you are never at home.”
― Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

“One important consequence of this approach is that the meaning or full activity of a drug can only be worked out and constructed in practice. A drug's effects, in this view, aren't discovered, but nor are they purely invented. Instead, they are enacted.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“In an entry from late 1979, Dick writes Heuristics is right on. The closer you get to reality the closer you get to (and to seeing) process. Q isn't “what is (esse)?” but “What does?” […] replace each “is” with “does” and ontology vanishes. All you have is a perpetually perturbed reality field! With a self-producing vortex.12”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“Psychosis, it seemed to some, was in the air. One unhappy host played Phil a copy of Marshall McLuhan's 1968 LP The Medium is the Massage, an audio collage inspired by the resonating global echo chamber that McLuhan believed formed a new electronic form of “acoustic space.” When the recording began, Dick clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, “Turn it off! Turn it off! It sounds like the inside of my head when I go mad and have to go the hospital.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies

“Binswanger's vision of this pathological but visceral gestalt deeply influenced Dick's construction of the various idios kosmoi in his works.65”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“Psychokinesis”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“So the next time you peer into the open window of a Web browser, you might ask yourself: where does "the network" end? Does it cease with the virtual worlds, images, and minds of the Internet, or with the silicon-electronic matrix of computing devices, or with the electrical grid that powers the show with energies extracted from waterflow and toxic atom? Perhaps the network extends further—to the Jacquard looms and American war machines that loosened the historical dynamic that eventually stuck a magic toxic tablet in your hands, to the billionfold packet-switching meshwork of human neurons that shape and submit to information space, to the capital flows that animate the quick hands of young Filipinas who wire up semiconductors for dollars a day. As you contemplate these widening networks, they may alter the granularity and elasticity of the self that senses them, as well as changing the resilience and tenderness of the threads binding that self to the mutant edge of matter and history. I suspect there is no end to such links, and that this immanent infinity, with its impossible ethical call, makes up the real World Wide Web.”
― Erik Davis

“On the one hand, there is a booming industry surrounding yoga, self-help, and spiritual tourism, while on the other, traditional religions seem polarized between fanaticisms of all types and vapid, consumerist banalities of the “I’m spiritual, but not religious” sort. The continued, tired debates of science on one side and religion on the other serve to muddy the waters even more.”
― Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information

“suggestion: anomaly is a characteristic of the real. Whatever”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“Delve far enough into Metal, and you’ll find environmentalists.”
― Erik Davis

“If technology is the soul of the modern age, information is its spirit.”
― Erik Davis