Erik Davis's book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information runs on an intriguing idea: how the push for ever faster, better technological solutions derives from spiritual passions.

Davis writes with enthusiasm, makes copious historical references and uses new words to describe old things. He doesn't spend much time on any one subject, but the survey of technological communications, historic figures and spiritual movements is impressive. The book's 400 pages comprise an accomplished feat of making connections-through centuries of time, hemispheres in space, even between gaps among subatomic particles-that suggests a theory of the history of technology, a theory Davis might say he "reverse-engineered" from studying the historical record, if he wrote his own book review. But I am writing this one, and I think his use of technical terminology-the new words for old things-is clever but detracts from his big point about spirituality.

It's fun when he calls Ben Franklin an "electrogeek" or books "storage devices," but I feel a little sorry for St. Augustine, whose religious conversion upon reading a random passage in Paul's Epistles is summarized as follows: "The chicken scratch of Sumerian bureaucrats had blossomed into an oracular delivery mechanism for the Word of God, one powerful enough to trigger the speck of essence within-and to prove that humble infotech may, in time, boot up the sacred self." Still, with this fault-finding, Davis is a writer after my heart, because he also thinks to mention that Augustine's conversion experience appears in his Confessions, "often considered to be the first true autobiography." 

I am accustomed to the technological workspace, having lived and worked in California's Silicon Valley for 12 years. I worked for an internet start-up (that went under), the world's largest database company and the company that made the first educational software (earning Computer Curriculum Corporation a mention in Tracy Kidder's ground-breaking book The Soul of a New Machine). This means I have a big technical vocabulary and I know what it means to work with idea hamsters (some of the world's best and brightest inventors) prairie-dogging in cube farms (one head, and then two and three quickly pop up over the top of cubicle partitions to exchange bits of information or gossip, looking like a bunch of prairie dogs popping out of their burrows for a look-see). What I am not accustomed to is thinking about the mystical impulses, magical dreams and apocalyptic visions that drive the ongoing technological revolution. And so with curiosity and high expectations for this sacred subject, I read.

The index is illustrative of the range of topics:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 77
E-meter. See Electropychometer
Emotions, 145, 148
Empathy, 340
Encryption. See Codes
Engrams, 165, 166, 167, 169
ENIAC computer, 96, 166
Enneads (Plotinus), 108
Eno, Brian, 386
Enquire (hypertext system), 237
Entropy, 103, 104, 110, 141-2, 339
Environmentalism, 153-4
Esalen Institute, 180-1, 183, 189, 191
Escape Velocity (Dery), 140, 179-80
Esotericism, 91, 97
Est, 187, 198
Ether, 57

Do you feel that jumping around? Davis might say that's the consequence of a hypertext system, one way to describe his book. His erudition across such a spectrum is his strength, as is his ability to make such material coherent.

This is the 2004 updated edition, with a new afterword. Biblioteca Pública librarian Robin Velte likes to remind me that "the universal appeal of any one book hovers at about zero," so don't forget about the other 50,000 books in the collection if this one isn't for you. It is for me, with the exception of the distracting wordplay in following the long march of communication technology-from the alphabet to the internet-and the mystical outlook that kept step through time. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate that the technical mindset is not independent of religious sensibilities. Davis successfully makes a case that spiritual ideas have driven technological advances. I will look elsewhere for more depth about the spiritual side and to learn more on the consequences of information technologies, and then I might be able to answer (satisfactorily, for myself) the next question: Is progress a myth?