Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural 0190949988, 9780190949983

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Introduction

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Introduction Simone Natale D. W. Pasulka

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords The introduction provides a framework for the book based on a fourfold categorization of the relationship between digital media and belief. The first category of beliefs is the implicit acceptance that digital devices and systems function and are generally reliable. The second category is the idea that digital media are “new,” qualitatively and structurally different from anything that has happened before. The third category is the belief that digital media will irremediably change human societies and cultures, bringing about path-breaking transformations in the political, social, and cultural spheres. The fourth and final category of “beliefs in bits” is the one with the most evident religious implications: the belief that digital technologies will lead to transcendence and affect life, defying death through singularity. While one might object that some of these categories refer to beliefs of a secular nature, the introduction shows that approaches to religion and the supernatural are essential to understand their nature and implications. Keywords:   media and the supernatural, digital media, new media, religion, belief, singularity

In 1966, MIT computer scientist and artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum presented the first “chatbot,” a computer program able to engage in written conversations with human users, called ELIZA. In the paper describing his creation, he predicted that the program would initially arouse wonder for its apparent intelligence, even if it actually provided only the illusion of it. Yet, he pointed out, “once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understandings, Page 1 of 16

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Introduction its magic crumbles away.”1 He believed, in other words, that the illusion was due to lack of knowledge about the program, and that consequently, once its actual functioning was revealed, the aura of magic would fade away. He soon found out that this was not the case: many, even those who knew well that ELIZA was nothing but a skillful “computer trick,” would fall into the illusion, engaging in personal conversations with the program and treating it as a real interlocutor. Magic, he discovered, does not easily “crumble away”: it is an integral part of how people use computer technologies.2 The early dream among computer scientists of making computers not only accessible to everybody but also understood by all users as rational machines devoid of any magical connotation dissolved in the late 1970s and 1980s with the rise of personal computers that made digital devices a part of everyday life for growing masses of people.3 As users interacted with computers performing increasingly complex tasks, it became clear that such interactions cannot be explained by pointing to the functioning of these machines alone: the meanings and beliefs that people attribute to them have to be equally considered.4 This book moves from the consideration that digital media—conceived of as technologies, artifacts, as well (p.2) as the systems of knowledge and values shaping our interaction with them—cannot be analyzed outside the system of beliefs and performative rituals that inform and prepare their use. The question of what we believe, and of how our systems of belief inform our experience and interactions, is inextricable from the question of how we perceive, employ, and actively shape digital media technologies and environments. How did we come to associate things such as mindreading and spirit communications with the functioning of digital technologies? Does the dignity accorded to the human and natural worlds within traditional religions translate to gadgets, avatars, or robots? How does the internet’s capacity to facilitate the proliferation of beliefs help blur the boundaries between what is considered fictional and factual? The chapters in this volume address these and similar questions, challenging and redefining established understandings of digital media and culture by employing the notions of belief, religion, and the supernatural. Situated at the theoretical interface between the fields of media studies and religious studies, the book aims to unveil the multiple ways in which new media intersect with belief in the supernatural. Recent scholarship has criticized rigid distinctions between “old” and “new” media and also between analog and digital media, pointing to the fact that our digital age cannot be understood by defining media according to age, or by isolating specific technologies that represent only part of a wider technological and social scenario.5 For this reason, this book relies on two different approaches that do not oppose but complement each other: a media archaeological approach that looks at the continuities and at the subtle relationships between earlier media histories and the contemporary landscape; Page 2 of 16

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Introduction and a perspective informed by digital media studies that takes into account the technical and social specificities of digital technologies.6 “Digital media” is defined as media employing computing technologies that process numerical data in order to provide users with information conveyed through computer screens, telephone screens, radio, movies, and other globally accessible media. Yet, although there is the perception that analog technologies are “old” and digital technologies are “new,” many of these chapters underline their continuous tradition of use as well as their inextricable present relationship. The supernatural has long been associated with religion and the miraculous. Within the European tradition, the term supernatural was first used in the late medieval era to describe events that deviated from ordinary, natural phenomena.7 The new term was used to refer to a wide range of mystical and religious phenomena such as apparitions, healings, or communications from angels or saints, as well as events that deviated from traditional religious frameworks but were nonetheless nonordinary, such as ghost sightings (p.3) or appearances of revenants. Medieval and early modern theologians, philosophers, and scientists enabled their systematization of the natural world with the help of mechanical instruments. Telescopes, microscopes, maps, clocks, and the astrolabe helped scholars acquire knowledge about the ordinary world that further separated it from the domain of the supernatural. Yet, ironically, these instruments occasionally acted as conduits for the supernatural. From rumors of clocks that stopped to warn of the death of a loved one to microscopes that revealed the components of the soul, technologies of science and communication were simultaneously instruments of enchantment and disenchantment.8 Especially with the introduction of electrical media in the nineteenth century, media technologies have entertained a close and complex relationship with beliefs in the supernatural. Since the publication of seminal works by Jeffrey Sconce and John Durham Peters, a growing scholarship in media studies has addressed the relationship of media technologies with supernatural beliefs and knowledge.9 Yet, given the magnitude of the body of literature addressing the role of the supernatural in the development of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century media technologies and practices, it is surprising how little effort has been made to question the connections between digital media and the supernatural. The main way in which this issue has been approached is by comparing the reception within spiritualism and psychical research of “new” media of the past—such as, for instance, telegraphy in the middle of the nineteenth century—with the reception of today’s “new” digital technologies.10 Less attention, however, has been given to the possibility of interrogating the specific ways through which beliefs in the supernatural interact with and are inserted into the reception of digital media. Focusing on the supernatural as a locus in which particular forms of imagination and modalities of interaction with digital media are constructed, and entering in dialog with the rising literature on the relationship between religion and digital culture,11 this volume aims to Page 3 of 16

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Introduction contribute to filling this gap. Many have noted that religion “cannot be analysed outside the forms and practices of mediation that define it,”12 but media cannot be analyzed outside the forms of belief and rituals that inform and prepare our interaction with them. Believing in Bits, in this sense, advances the idea that religious beliefs and practices are inextricably linked to the functioning of digital media.

How We Believe in Bits Scholars in media studies have taken up the idea that the present configuration of digital media is informed and made possible also by a system of (p.4) beliefs. John Durham Peters, for one, recently characterized Google as a “religious medium” that, like a storyteller, provides answers to “the perplexed of cyberspace.”13 From a different perspective, examining the cultural and material configurations that anticipated and made possible the emergence of cloud computing, Tung-Hui Hu argued that “the network is primarily the idea that ‘everything is connected,’ and, as such, is a product of a system of belief. Because reality can never match up to that system of belief, because, in fact, not everything is connected, the network exists primarily as a state of desire.”14 What does it mean, however, to believe in digital media, and how does this relate, if it relates at all, to religious forms and rituals? Any answer to this question should move through the consideration that belief is a complex concept associated with very diverse meanings, connotations, and practices. Within the field of religious studies, for example, belief is often not emphasized as important, while practices suggest religious value. While virtually all ways in which we use, interact with, and perceive digital media may invite some forms of belief and practice, it is necessary to distinguish between different ways through which this happens. Each of these “beliefs in bits” (to play with the book’s title) might appear secular in nature, but nevertheless, as we will see, bear deep implications into how religion is experienced and understood in contemporary societies. The first category of belief in digital technologies is of a pragmatic nature. Everyday life in modern societies is based on the implicit acceptance that technological artifacts and systems, such as cars, TV sets, or the internet, function and are generally reliable. Crucially, this implicit trust is not often accompanied by the full understanding of how these technical systems function: one might “know” that a car will bring one rapidly to one’s office, without “knowing” how this happens at a technical level. As scholars such as Anthony Giddens have observed, this belief in technical systems can be characterized as a secular faith and forms part of the broader system of beliefs enabling people to navigate life in contemporary societies.15 Such lack of knowledge in technological objects that are omnipresent in our daily life is particularly relevant to digital systems, whose actual functioning Page 4 of 16

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Introduction might be opaque even to the computer scientists and programmers who built them. This is a problem that is structural to computing technologies and software. While early computers were programmed by intervening directly on the hardware to adapt the machine to different tasks, the division between hardware and software meant that symbolic systems were developed to program computing machines. These systems, called programming languages, feature commands such as “begin,” “if . . . then,” “print,” as well as arbitrary sequences that are nonetheless intelligible to programmers, allowing them (p.5) to write code executing complex functions. Such commands, however, correspond to actual operations of the machine only after having been translated multiple times, in lower-level programming languages and finally into machine code, which is the set of instructions in binary numbers executed by the computer. Machine code is such a low level of abstraction that it is virtually incomprehensible to the programmer without the translation operated by specific software called compilers, which convert programming language into lower-level languages and machine code. Digital technologies, as a consequence, require a kind of pragmatic belief that is substantially different from the trust in technical systems to which we usually commit. The opacity of digital media cannot be reduced to the technical skills and knowledge of users: it is embedded in the functioning of computing technologies. This contributes to provide digital technologies with an aura of quasi-magical power that emerges in the use of concepts such as “mindreading” and “magic” to characterize the functioning of computer algorithms. It is also this opacity that has led entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and scientists such as Stephen Hawking to launch alarms about the potential dangers of AI: one of the scenarios they evoked is that humans might not be able to comprehend what is happening within AI systems, failing to notice malfunction and misbehaviors of intelligence machines.16 A second category of beliefs in digital technologies has to do with the particular status attributed to digital media in contemporary societies. This is the belief, shared by many, that digital media are qualitatively and structurally different from anything that has happened before. In its most evident form, it corresponds to the rhetoric of the “digital revolution” and to the characterization of digital media as “new.”17 Scholars in media studies have often criticized such ideas, pointing to the fact that the present configurations of digital media encompass many innovations but also include many points of continuity with previous evolutions of other technological forms.18 The distinction between old and new media, in fact, does not take into account that digital media have quite a long history, dating back at least to the emergence of electronic digital computer in the 1940s, and that media labeled as “old,” such as books, cinema, and television, are fully participating in digitization processes.19 This debate notwithstanding, ideas of novelty continue to characterize the ways in which digital technologies are presented to the public: think, for instance, of the way a Page 5 of 16

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Introduction company such as Apple capitalizes on this existing rhetoric to offer the launch of a new device as a revolutionary event, or at the symbolic appropriation of new media by political parties and movements such as the Pirate Parties in Scandinavia and Germany or the 5-Star Movement in Italy, which helped present these parties as carriers of novelty and change.20 But also at the (p.6) level of everyday use and perception, beliefs that digital media are new and revolutionary contribute to shaping our understanding of these technologies, as Simone Dotto’s chapter (Chapter 3) discusses through the example of sound recording. A third category of beliefs in digital technologies is the belief that digital media will irremediably change human societies and cultures, bringing about pathbreaking transformations in the political, social, and cultural spheres. Throughout history, technologies have often been presented to the public as triggers of change. For instance, the railway in the nineteenth century and television in the postwar period were characterized as veritable symbols for the coming of a new era.21 In media and cultural studies, this belief has often been described in terms of technological determinism—that is, the tendency to represent technology (in this case communication technologies) as the sole or predominant cause of social change.22 Technological determinism might have originated well before digitalization, but it has been revived in specific ways throughout the last three decades and especially since the emergence of the World Wide Web. Technological determinist narratives are shared by such diverse groups as hackers who posit digital technologies as liberating in both individual and political terms and Silicon Valley corporate managers who embrace the so-called Californian ideology, committing to enthusiastic belief in technology-driven progress.23 Overall, they contribute to create the sense that digital technologies are changing humans at an anthropological level. The fourth and final category of “beliefs in bits” is the one with the most evident religious implications. It is the belief that digital technologies will change biological life by enabling the existence of human–machine hybrids, creating artificial life, and defying death. Since the earliest stages in the history of electronic computing and AI in the late 1940s and early 1950s, pioneers of computer science such as Alan Turing and Claude Shannon reflected on questions that are infused with philosophical and existential consequences: Is it possible to create a machine that thinks? What are the implications of the fact that machines outperform humans in operations that we consider of an intelligent nature, such as calculating integrals or playing chess? Many researchers in the field, including Turing and Shannon, professed that the quest for machine intelligence did not have much to do with producing conscience or life. In the “imitation game” proposed by Turing to establish if a machine can think, for instance, he did not define “thinking” in absolute terms, but he proposed instead an empirical experiment (now called the Turing Test) to Page 6 of 16

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Introduction establish if a machine could appear to us as thinking.24 In Turing’s design, a human judge engages in a conversation with an agent through a typewriter (today, most commonly a chatroom) and has to establish (p.7) if the conversation partner is a computer or a human. As computer programs were developed to conduct the test, deception became a common strategy: it became evident to programmers that there were strategies to exploit the fallibility of judges.25 Thus the Turing Test was, basically, an exploration of the question if a computer could trick us into thinking that it was intelligent—and thus alive, inasmuch as we consider intelligent beings to be such. Yet, as shown by Anthony Enns in Chapter 2, the spiritual ramifications of this question did not escape Turing himself, and up to the present day it has proved extremely difficult, if not impossible, to separate strictly technical issues from the philosophical, ethical, and even metaphysical questions raised by research into AI, robotics, and cybernetics. Advances in computer power and, more importantly, in software have recently led technologists to forecast scenarios such as singularity, a future when machine intelligence will surpass humans and even defy their comprehension, leading to radical transformation not only of computing but of humanity as well.26 Among the most startling predictions related to this claim is the idea that in the future it might be possible to upload the content of a human mind into a computer, enabling a form of nonbiological and yet human life made literally out of bits. Perhaps the most interesting example of this is that the young billionaire Dmitri Itskov secured the blessing of the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, to bless the entrepreneurs’ efforts to accomplish this feat by the year 2045. Potentially, according to them, the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama will be within a nonbiological platform.

The Place of Religion These beliefs and imaginaries are crucial to our understanding of the relationship between digital media and religion and are related in many ways to how digital technologies are used and imagined in supernatural terms. For each of them we can identify, as summarized in Table I.1, specific ways through which our beliefs in digital technologies connect to the religious sphere. Table I.1. Believing in Bits: Four Categories of Beliefs in Digital Technologies Belief

Secular Expressions

Religious Expressions

Pragmatic beliefs in the functioning of digital technical systems

Human–machine interactions, interface

Animistic design, magic in technology

Beliefs that digital media are qualitatively and structurally different

Digital revolution, novelty of new media

Religious renaissance triggered by digital media

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Introduction Belief

Secular Expressions

Religious Expressions

Beliefs that digital technologies will change humanity

Technological determinism, hacker culture, “Californian ideology”

New, digital-based religious forms and practices

Beliefs that digital technologies will defy death

Post-humanism, singularity, synthetic genetics

Digital transcendence

Pragmatic beliefs not only allow people to rely on their everyday interactions with digital technologies and systems but also shape such interactions and the complex of meanings that are associated to them. Social anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai and Alfred Gell have taught us that not only humans but also artifacts can be regarded as social agents.27 People often attribute intentions to objects and machines: car owners, for instance, may attribute personality to their cars.28 With AI systems such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, where a computer program is trained to respond with a “human” voice, it is evident how this tendency to personify technologies has become even more pronounced.29 This stimulated designers to take up (p.8) animism—the belief that all objects, places, and creatures possess a spiritual essence—as a framework to explore the alternative models of interaction between humans and digital objects.30 In Chapter 12 Betti Marenko demonstrates how experiences such as “animist design” underpin the enchanting and incantatory potential of digital technologies. The experience of having algorithms predict our Google searches, interests, and shopping tastes has unsettling effects, and as it becomes more and more part of our common experience, it also produces the sense that we are living in a world permeated by magic. Thus, our “algorithmic imaginary,” to follow Taina Bucher’s recent proposal to describe in such terms how people experience and make sense of their interactions with algorithms in their everyday life, is shaped not only by technological, cultural, and social patterns but, inescapably, also by religious and spiritual ones.31 The belief that digital media are qualitatively “new” (i.e., they are different from anything that has appeared before in human societies) also has strong ramifications in the realm of religion.32 In fact, the development of digital media, and particularly of the Web, has awakened in believers of many confessions and faiths the sense that the digital revolution could be a spiritual revolution as well. Religious communities have shared the feeling that the contemporary age would bring about a technology-driven religious renaissance thanks to the possibility of dissemination, participation, and engagement guaranteed by the internet.33 (p.9) It is important to note that, in the same way that rhetoric about the novelty of technology characterized representations of technology well before the emergence of digital media, the sense of the religious potential for new Page 8 of 16

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Introduction technologies is not new to our age. It is sufficient to think, to give just one instance, of the missionary dream to disseminate more widely the spiritual faith that, as James Carey has shown in a now canonical essay for media history, accompanied the evolution of communication technologies such as the telegraph throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.34 However, the belief in the novelty of digital technologies and the rhetoric of the digital revolution has certainly profound implications for the way in which religion has been and is mediated and experienced in the Web or, as Joshua Mann reveals in Chapter 11, through digital technologies such as virtual reality. Interestingly, moreover, the very rhetoric of the digital revolution has strong religious connotations, as shown for instance by the characterizations of pioneers as prophets, the tendency to take up millennial and apocalyptic views, or the fact that the following of digital corporations such as Apple exhibits certain characteristics of a cult.35 It is not a coincidence, in this sense, that the internet has been saluted by some belief communities, as Paolo Apolito put it, as a celestial sign that promised to become “a powerful and unique resource for a new reenchantment of the world.”36 The belief that digital technologies will change humanity in an anthropological way, shaping wide-ranging cultural and social transformations, also bears many religious connotations. In the religious sphere, it corresponds to veritable changes in the experience and practice of religion, with the emergence of new religious forms, communities, and rituals that are enabled and in some cases even embedded within digital media. Examples of this include the online Tulpa communities (discussed by Christopher Laursen in Chapter 9); the dispersed groups of UFO collectives that frame their participation around digital resources and websites (see Chapter 10 by Rafael Antunes Almeida); and even the fakelore or fake religion that are the subject of Ken Chitwood’s analysis (Chapter 7). It is, however, the fourth category of beliefs, the belief that digital technologies will change biological life and even defy death, that has more complex and wideranging implications for the study and the understanding of the relationship between religion and digital media. Computer scientists such as Hans Moravec combined their practical achievements in AI and robotics with predictions about the future of computers as a “postbiological” or even “supernatural” era.37 Similarly, futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that digital immortality will be an imminent reality.38 This would at first appear to defy conventionally religious notions of immortality, yet the history of religions (p.10) suggests that their understanding of immortality is not new but ancient. Additionally, ancient forms of this belief were sophisticated in their analysis of the potential pitfalls and hazards of these developments. Look no further than the Greek myth of Eos and Tithonus. Tithonus, a mortal, fell in love with the immortal goddess Eos. Through her connections, she granted Tithonus immortality but forgot to give him eternal youth, which she had. He eventually became so old that she discarded him. Page 9 of 16

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Introduction Thus, the enthusiasm of contemporary immortality can and should be tempered by historical mythical and religious accounts.

Stranger Than Fiction One of the more interesting themes of the Star Wars (2018) movie Solo, which provides the backstory for the character Han Solo and other characters that become major players throughout the franchise, is the relationship between Han’s friend Lando and his AI robot L3-37. In one scene, the L3 confides to the female protagonist Qi’ra that she (the AI) has a relationship with Lando, who is the captain of the spacecraft the Millennium Falcon. L3 is his first officer. Qi’ra looks suspicious and asks, “How does that work?” L3 responds, “It works.” This relationship, characterized in the movie as deeply loving, respectful, and perhaps even sexual, is far different from the relationship that the astronaut David Bowman has with the computer HAL in the classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In 2001, HAL works for a covert government project that must extinguish any obstacle to its ultimate goal, which is to travel to the planet Jupiter. These obstacles unfortunately include Bowman’s colleagues, and Bowman himself, had he not outwitted the AI and saved his own life. As different as the relationships in these movies are, the AI is still characterized as sentient and fully engaged in relationship to its human interlocutors. The potential sexual aspect of Lando’s relationship with his female-voiced AI, in this sense, provides a powerful challenge to assumed human–digital boundaries and binaries. The contours of these engagements have become the topic for scholars of media studies as well as humanist studies of digital technologies. Far from being a matter of science fiction, contemporary experiences with digital technologies including social bots, robots, and personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri stretch not just the boundaries between humans and machine, but also the systems of beliefs and practices that foreground such boundaries. As Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim argue in their groundbreaking anthology Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, movies like Solo and 2001 are not (p.11) mere fantasies about how technology and humans interact or how humans use technologies; rather, they represent and inform how the techno-human industrial complex operates in specific, material ways.39 These new frameworks, interestingly, apply equally to new religious forms and systems of belief. With the advent of religions inspired by science fiction and movies, or fiction-based religions, definitions of religion have been transformed. Historical religious traditions, such as Hinduism and Judaism, bring to mind ideas such as gods, goddesses, rituals, books, and values, among other things. The significant anchor that authorizes these concepts is generally an ultimate reality like a god, or an ultimate concept like Brahman. Practitioners consider these to be incontrovertible realities. But what about religions that take fiction and movies to be the authorizing narratives of their practices, rituals, and Page 10 of 16

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Introduction beliefs?40 And is it a coincidence that these new religious movements occur within a digital space? In the academic study of religion there are many definitions of religion, ranging from a belief in spiritual, invisible realities and beings to the belief that an ultimate force or organizing principle governs all things. Conventional definitions of religion rely on the perceived reality of founding religious figures, such as Jesus or the Buddha, or the veracity of concepts such as karma or Sunyata (nothingness in Zen Buddhism). Yet, as scholars have pointed out, fiction- and digital-based religions suggest that these definitions are ripe for change and revision. The chapters in this volume offer specific examples of this change. The assumption of a rupture with tradition, and the appearance of brand-new media, is also found within the language of technology, which dates back to the Greeks’ mythical automata, which were mechanisms acting on their own’s will and often exhibiting humanlike behavior. There is a continuous tradition of religious language and frameworks applied to technological development. Surprisingly, this language and history has not abated; indeed; it appears to be increasing. Facebook and Amazon can read your mind, for example (so it is said; see Chapter 1), and the internet is either the Best of the Apocalypse or the potential new body of the next Dalai Lama. This is reflected in the movie Solo, where L3 dies the heroic death of a martyr but then her memory database is integrated into the Millennium Falcon. She is now like HAL, but a version that saves humans and does not kill them.

Notes:

(1.) Joseph Weizenbaum, “ELIZA: A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM 9, no. 1 (1966): 36–45. (2.) Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (New York: Freeman, 1976). See also Simone Natale, “If Software Is Narrative: Joseph Weizenbaum, Artificial Intelligence and the Biographies of ELIZA,” New Media and Society, published online before print (2018): pp. 1–17, doi: 10.1177/1461444818804980. (3.) For examples of how the myth of accessible and “transparent” computers was originally spelled out, see John McCarthy, “Information,” Scientific American

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Introduction 215 (1966): 64–72 and Anthony G. Oettinger, “The Uses of Computers in Science,” Scientific American 215 (1966): 160–172. (4.) Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995). (5.) Jonathan Sterne, “Analog,” in Digital Keywords, ed. Benjamin Peters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 31–44, and Simone Natale, “There Are No Old Media,” Journal of Communication 66, no. 4 (2016): 585–603. (6.) Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). (7.) C. S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). (8.) Jeremy Stolow, ed., Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). (9.) Sconce claimed that nineteenth-century spiritualism originally developed in connection with the telegraph, to which spiritualists referred in order to explain their communication with the spiritual world. In a similar vein, Peters noted the coincidence of the early progress of telegraphy and spiritualism, arguing that behind the obsession with occultism and psychical research for the establishment of a communication with the unknown lay broader cultural concerns about communicational relations. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) and John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago.: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also, among others, Richard J. Noakes, “Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World,” British Journal for the History of Science 32, no. 4 (1999): 421–459; Jeremy Stolow, “Salvation by Electricity,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept. The Future of the Religious Past, Vol. I, ed. Hent De Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 668–686; Anthony Enns, “Psychic Radio: Sound Technologies, Ether Bodies and Spiritual Vibrations,” The Senses and Society 3, no. 2 (2008): 137– 152; and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “Mind the Gap: Spiritualism and the Infrastructural Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 6 (2016): 25–31. (10.) William Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Markus Hahn and Erhard Schüttpelz, Trancemedien und neue

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Introduction Medien um 1900: Ein anderer Blick auf die Moderne (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009). (11.) See, among many others, Heidi Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (London: Routledge, 2010); Heidi Campbell, ed., Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (London: Routledge, 2013); and Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (London: Routledge, 2011). (12.) Birgit Mayer, “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies, and the Question of the Medium,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 19, no. 1 (2011): 23–39. (13.) John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Cloud: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 333. (14.) Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 10. (15.) See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990), 27–28. (16.) Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). (17.) On the rhetoric of the digital revolution see, among others, Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) and Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). On the characterization of digital media as “new” media, the key text is Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). (18.) Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Benjamin Peters, “And Lead Us Not into Thinking the New Is New: A Bibliographic Case for New Media History,” New Media & Society 11, no. 1–2 (2009): 13–30. For an overview of the debate about the relationship between “old” and “new” media, see Gabriele Balbi, “Old and New Media: Theorizing Their Relationships in Media Historiography,” in Theorien Des Medienwandels, ed. Susanne Kinnebrock, Christian Schwarzenegger, and Thomas Birkner (Köln: Halem, 2014), 231–249. (19.) Natale, “There Are No Old Media.” (20.) Kyle Mickalowski, Mark Mickelson, and Jaciel Keltgen, “Apple’s iPhone Launch: A Case Study in Effective Marketing,” Business Review 9, no. 2 (2008): 83–288; Gissur Erlingsson and Mikael Persson, “The Swedish Pirate Party and the 2009 European Parliament Election: Protest or Issue Voting?,” Politics 31, no. 3 (2011): 121–128; Simone Natale and Andrea Ballatore, “The Web Will Kill

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Introduction Them All: New Media, Digital Utopia, and Political Struggle in the Italian 5-Star Movement,” Media, Culture & Society 36, no. 1 (2014): 105–121. (21.) Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). (22.) Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). A key debate on technological determinism originated in Raymond Williams’s critique of Marshall McLuhan’s writings: see Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964) and Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974). (23.) On hackerism and technological determinism, see Tim Jordan, Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008), as well as Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (New York: New York University Press, 2010). On the Californian ideology see Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72. (24.) Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433–460. For an annotated collection of Turing’s works on the topic as well as of the main criticisms and reactions to his proposal, see Stuart Schieber, The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). (25.) Hector J. Levesque, Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI: Reflections on Natural and Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 47–49. (26.) Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Penguin, 2005). Jaron Lanier compares singularity with the belief in Rapture and the apocalypse in the American evangelical culture, noting that they share not only the belief in a dramatic transformation that will happen far in the future, but also the fact that they “can never be verified by the living.” Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (London: Penguin, 2011), 26. (27.) Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). (28.) Byron Reeves and Clifford Ivar Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1996).

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Introduction (29.) Andrea L. Guzman, “Making AI Safe for Humans: A Conversation with Siri,” in Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality, ed. Robert W. Gehl and Maria Bakardjieva (London: Routledge, 2017). (30.) Betti Marenko, “Neo-animism and Design: A New Paradigm in Object Theory,” Design and Culture 6, no. 2 (2014): 219–241. (31.) Taina Bucher, “The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithms,” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 1 (2016): 30–44. (32.) Reflecting on the relationship between digital media and religion, Gregory Price Grieve points to the existence of a “technological ideology” that reflects the belief and logic system that supports a given technology. He argues, in this sense, that “the dominant American ideology sees digital media as a positive and revolutionary technological development through which all the world’s problems can be creatively and innovatively solved.” Gregory Price Grieve, “Religion,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi A. Campbell (London: Routledge, 2013), 104–118. (33.) See, among others, Campbell, Digital Religion, and Paolo Apolito, Internet and the Madonna: Religious Visionary Experience on the Web (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). (34.) James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). (35.) Stephen O’Leary, “Utopian and Dystopian Possibilities of Networked Religion in the New Millennium,” in Religion and Cyberspace, ed. Morten T. Höjsgaard and Margit Warburg (London: Routledge, 2005), 38–49; Menahem Blondheim and Hananel Rosenberg, “Media Theology: New Communication Technologies as Religious Constructs, Metaphors, and Experiences,” New Media & Society 19, no. 1 (2017): 43–51; Russell W. Belk and Gülnur Tumbat, “The Cult of Macintosh,” Consumption Markets & Culture 8, no. 3 (2006): 205–217. (36.) Apolito, Internet and the Madonna, 5. (37.) Hans Moravec, Mind Children (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1. (38.) Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near. (39.) Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds., Dreamscapes of Modernity: Social Technical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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Introduction (40.) Markus Altena Davidson, “Fiction-Based Religions: Conceptualizing a New Category Against History-Based Religion and Fandom,” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 4 (2013): 378–395.

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Amazon Can Read Your Mind A Media Archaeology of the Algorithmic Imaginary Simone Natale

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords The chapter interrogates how notions and concepts of occult and supernatural meanings are applied to describing and discussing digital media, focusing on the case of applications of notions of mindreading to computer algorithms. It examines the concept of mindreading as a keyword whose definition and meaning wavered between different forms of knowledge, from parapsychology to cybernetics and computer science. Popularized by parapsychology, the concept of mindreading has been employed to describe algorithms that recognize feelings and mental states of humans, or that anticipate the behavior of users and consumers, providing them with tailored offers and services. Excavating the media archaeology of “mindreading computers” helps provides a viewpoint into the ways notions and narratives related to the supernatural enter the cultural imaginary of digital media and technologies. Keywords:   digital media, supernatural, algorithms, mindreading, predictions, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, media imaginary, algorithmic imaginary, media archaeology

Google works for us because it seems to read our minds—and, in a way, it does. SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN1 A sensational statement appears in an article from the popular American blog Gawker: “Amazon Can Read Your Mind.”2 But what do these words mean? Much to the disappointment of parapsychologists and science fiction writers, the Page 1 of 17

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind author does not intend to suggest that Amazon has supernatural powers. She refers, instead, to a system patented by Amazon called “anticipatory shipping.” This technology employs algorithms that analyze previous behaviors of customers in order to forecast how many items will be shipped to particular locations in a particular period—for instance, how many packages will be sent to the city of Oxford in the week preceding Christmas. The system provides a competitive advantage to Amazon: it enables the company to prepare in advance, deploying the right numbers of vehicles and underpaid workers to deliver last-minute Christmas presents to overworked Oxford professors. Like other algorithm-based technologies, it also provides tech companies with a quasi-magical aura. Their capacity to anticipate behaviors suggests that Google, Apple, Amazon, or Facebook not only embody the future but can see it—the modern clairvoyants of the digital age. In parapsychology, mindreading is defined as the ability to gain information about others’ thoughts through extrasensory perception. Yet the same concept is employed to characterize the functioning of digital technologies that anticipate human behaviors and mental states through the elaboration of physiological indexes, background information, and records of previous behaviors. In the (p. 20) field of computer science, technologies programmed to understand and react to people’s emotions and mental states are thus described as “mindreading computers.”3 Likewise, algorithms that allow one to anticipate the behavior of users and consumers, providing them with tailored offers and services—such as Amazon’s “anticipatory shipping,” or Google ads—are referred to as mindreading.4 How did mindreading, a concept associated with parapsychology and the occult, become a way to illustrate the functioning of computing technologies? By addressing this question, this chapter examines mindreading as a keyword whose definition and meaning wavered between different forms of knowledge, from parapsychology to cybernetics, and computer science. Excavating the media archaeology of mindreading computers, moreover, this chapter aims more broadly to interrogate how notions and concepts of occult and supernatural meanings are applied to describing different technologies, such as digital media. Media archaeology, which posits that the contemporary figuration of digital media is only understandable through an excavation into media history, provides a useful framework to achieve this goal.5 Concepts, words, and phrases such as “mindreading” have a complex history that goes beyond their mere etymology or the history of their uses. They are embedded within social and cultural encounters where their meanings and assonances are negotiated through a complex interplay of events, social actors, bodies of knowledge, and controversies.6 As search engines, databases, and Siri interfaces increasingly function in the language of their users,7 looking at the history of these concepts may help unveil how different bodies of knowledge, including beliefs in the occult and the supernatural, contribute to the construction of the complex imaginary through which we domesticate new technologies and make Page 2 of 17

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind them more familiar to us. “Mindreading computers” is more than a metaphor: it is a mode of perceiving and imagining computing technologies and, consequently, integrates them within our experience.8 As I will show, it was in the 1950s that research on artificial intelligence (AI) and cybernetics introduced the concept of mindreading in reference to computation. Yet our archaeological excavation into the history of mindreading should begin earlier than this, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the newly born and already controversial field of psychical research—what we call today parapsychology—developed two competing yet coexisting frameworks to approach and define this phenomenon. Examining the early controversies that established these discourses will help explain why the notion of mindreading currently describes phenomena and events that are apparently so different from each other.

(p.21) Inventing Mindreading—or the Interpretative Flexibility of a Concept At the end of the nineteenth century, mindreading was an established genre of stage performance. Hypnotizers and mindreaders demonstrated their skills before paying audiences in several European countries, interacting with the tradition of modern magic and stage spiritualism.9 These stage performances attracted the interest of researchers in fields such as psychology and psychical research, who tackled mindreading as a major subject of investigation. The United Kingdom–based Society for Psychical Research, for instance, set up several committees in the 1880s and 1890s to study phenomena of mindreading and thought transference.10 While explanations for the success of the mindreaders’ performances were manifold, two competing interpretative frameworks emerged to address this phenomenon. According to the first paradigm, which we might describe as extrasensorial, mindreading was performed through channels distinct from our five senses, such as electromagnetic waves that were produced and perceived by the human brain, enabling sensitive subjects to “read” others’ minds.11 For supporters of the second paradigm, based on the sensorial explanation, mindreaders were instead able to recognize indexical traces such as posture, body language, and visual expressions in order to make inferences about someone’s thoughts and feelings (Fig. 1.1).12

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind One might be tempted to posit a rigid distinction between these two frameworks, the former being irrational and pseudoscientific and the latter being rationalistic and scientific-based. However, looking at scientific attempts to study mindreading, as well as at stage performances and at the many popular texts on the topic that circulated in periodicals and books during the late Victorian age, it becomes clear that such rigid distinctions are not adequate to describe the actual debate on the topic.13 First, supporters of the extrasensorial explanation often professed to refuse the concept of supernatural, pointing out that brainwaves were all-butnatural phenomena yet to be

Figure 1.1. A sensorial interpretation of mindreading.

discovered, and that their inquiry was as rational as any

From George M. Beard, The Study of

14

other scientific investigation. Second, and more importantly,

the two frameworks were often presented alongside each other,

Muscle-Reading and Allied Nervous Phenomena in Europe and America (New York: The New Sydenham Society, 1882), frontispiece.

leaving a substantial openness regarding the interpretation of these phenomena. In stage performances, mindreaders profited from the fascination of inexplicable and supernatural phenomena but tended to tolerate different interpretations of the phenomena, inviting scientists to attend their shows and allowing spectators to decide whether to believe in supernatural or extrasensorial powers, or to adopt a more skeptical viewpoint.15 Likewise, scientific and popular texts discussing mindreading often (p.22) (p.23) mentioned and discussed both the sensorial and the extrasensorial interpretation.16 The Society for Psychical Research, for example, had been funded with the mission of examining “the nature and extent of any influence which may be exerted by one mind upon another, apart from any recognized mode of perception,” yet participants in the Society’s studies often pointed to and actively experimented with the possibility of sensorial explanations for mindreading phenomena.17

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind Thus, as the notion of mindreading was gaining ground in psychical research and in public performances at the end of the nineteenth century, the popularization of this concept was underpinned by the coexistence and often by the merging of sensorial and extrasensorial interpretations.18 The existence of different frameworks and meanings of understanding mindreading continued in the following decades, as mindreading was studied in the emerging field of parapsychology as the extrasensory faculty that penetrates the minds of others. Influential experiments on alleged psychic phenomena, including mindreading, were conducted in the 1930s by American psychologists William McDougall and Joseph B. Rhine at Duke University. These experiments posited the identification of the boundaries between sensory and extrasensory perception as the main goal of parapsychology and were instrumental in the establishment of a new framework for the study of mindreading within the paradigm of extrasensory perception (ESP) phenomena.19 At the same time, however, the concept of mindreading was also used more broadly to describe a body of techniques that create knowledge about a subject’s mental state. Rather than being narrowed within the boundaries of parapsychology and psychical research, the notion became available to describe technologies that predict human behaviors or interpret physiological data to produce knowledge about mental states, including lie detectors.20 To explain how the concept of mindreading is capable of describing things that are apparently so distant from each other, such as psychical powers and the functioning of lie detectors, it may be useful to employ a concept familiar to historians of technology: interpretative flexibility. According to the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) model, the development of a technology is a process through which technical innovations are adapted to social uses in ways that are not linear and that are extremely difficult to predict. In this sense, the social use of a technology is never a given but instead is constantly open to negotiation. Technologies—especially those that have been recently introduced— are therefore available to diverse interpretations, and ideas developed by different groups about what a technology is and how it can be employed become imaginative possibilities that concur to establish its potential meaning and applications.21 For instance, as the phonograph was invented (p.24) in the late nineteenth century, it was imagined that it could be used in very different ways, such as dictating notes, remembering the voices of loved ones after their death, and (at first, only secondarily) playing music.22 Such flexibility of interpretations characterized the early history of this technology, as alternative meanings and visions emerged to envision what sound recording was and how it could be used. What is interesting about this model is that it regards different interpretations not as forcefully competing with each other, but instead as contributing to creating an interpretational framework for the new technology. It is easy to see how this applies in the case of mindreading, in which apparently divergent Page 5 of 17

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind discourses coexisted, interacted, and even mingled with each other. The concept of mindreading was in fact used to describe not one but many things at the same time: (1) the ability to make inferences about mental states based on physiological traces; (2) a body of technologies performing this task; and (3) an extrasensorial power, studied and theorized by psychical researchers, enabling gifted human subjects to access others’ minds. Thus, the concept of mindreading could have, in different contexts, very different interpretations and meanings. The “interpretative flexibility” of mindreading, however, also resulted in the concept having multiple connotations that continued to be relevant even when a particular meaning was privileged. The aura of mystery surrounding supernatural and parapsychological phenomena did not cease to play a role even when the extrasensorial interpretation was explicitly refused. It was for this reason that mindreaders who performed on the stage in the late Victorian age hinted at the mysteries of the unknown in their shows even when they were publicly admitting the sensorial origins of their “powers.” No matter if rationalistic explanations was given, the performance of mindreading continued to stimulate the audience’s fascination for the occult and the unknown, thereby attracting audiences to their shows.23 A similar dynamic characterizes cases when technologies that allegedly or factually provided information about feelings and mental states were described as mindreading machines: the notion of mindreading, even if defined in sensorial terms, added a mysterious aura to technical artifacts. This is apparent, for instance, if one looks at patents registered during the first half of the twentieth century featuring technologies aimed at interpreting mind states or at detecting lies, such as a “Camera for recording eye movements” or an “Apparatus for obtaining criminal confessions and photographically recording them.”24 In the latter, for instance, illusory effects were included in the attempt to “impress the subject with their being of a supernatural character and to so work upon his imagination to enable an inquisitor operating (p.25) in conjunction with the recording system to obtain confessions and graphically record them.”25 While on the technical level a sensorial interpretation of mindreading was given, there was also a clear awareness of the aura of mystery, fear, and fascination surrounding supernatural phenomena—and how this could inform the reception of new technologies (Fig. 1.2).

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind It was in this context that researchers in novel fields such as cybernetics and AI came up with the idea that computers read minds. The use of the concept of mindreading contributed to the construction of an imaginary of computers as quasi-magical machines that has been shaping representations of digital media up to the present day.

Enter Computers, the Thinking Machine Originating in the middle of the twentieth century at the intersection of cybernetics and the newly born computer science, AI research aims at devising technical means and especially computer technologies that replicate or simulate human intelligence, in general or through specific

Figure 1.2. “Apparatus for obtaining

applications to domains such as language, vision, and problem

criminal confessions and photographically recording them,” U.S.

solving.26 In the 1950s, the interest surrounding the

Patent 1,749,090, issued March 3, 1933.

possibility of producing AI gained momentum among computer scientists and researchers in cybernetics.27 This interest was associated with the perception that a close link existed between computing and the human mind.28 While computer scientists borrowed terms from psychology to describe the operations of computers, psychology also borrowed notions and terms from computer science to describe the functioning of the human brain.29 The analogy between computers and minds also spread in popular literature and culture, with computers being represented as “thinking machines” in science fiction as well as in journalistic reports.30 It was in this context that operations performed by computers started to be associated to parapsychological phenomena such as mindreading. The first to talk about “mindreading computers” was most probably Claude Shannon, an American mathematician who is widely considered among the founders of both computer science and AI research. In the early 1950s Shannon’s colleague at Bell Labs, David Hagelbarger, created a game-playing machine called SEER Page 7 of 17

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind (acronym for SEquence Extrapolating Robot) that learned how to recognize and predict patterns of behaviors to outdo human opponents. In the paper presenting his creation, he pointed out that developing such capacities could benefit systems that needed to react to the changing needs and desires of large masses of users, such as the telephone industry.31 While the acronym SEER already pointed to the ostensibly clairvoyant faculty of the (p.26) machine, in 1952 Shannon challenged Hagelbarger by creating what he called a “mindreading machine” to compete against SEER. By unmasking the predictability of human behavior, Shannon’s mindreading machine presented the computer as a technology that was potentially capable of tricking and outperforming the human mind—a project that another mathematician and (p. 27) pioneer of computer science, Alan Turing, had explored two years earlier through the idea of the Turing test.32 As suggested by historian of AI Hamid R. Ekbia, “what makes AI distinct from other disciplines is that its practitioners ‘translate’ terms and concepts from one domain into another in a systematic way”—something that can explain, for instance, the persistent use of the mind as a metaphor for the computer.33 AI pioneers found that concepts such as “mindreading” or “seers” were adequate to describe a technological project and to popularize computers as quasi-magical machines. In fact, as Bernard Geoghegan aptly notes, the use of the mindreading metaphor by Shannon underpinned his and Hagelbarger’s attempt to make computers the center of a spectacular performance—a sport-like duel between the machines they had created. The struggle between SEER and the mindreading machine aimed first and foremost at the public’s imagination, rather than at scientific advancements in the field. The battle between the two machines was planned and performed to stimulate the imagination of vast audiences that were seeking to follow and comprehend the functioning and significance of computing technologies.34 In such context, mindreading emerged as a metaphor capable of conveying computers’ capacity to predict human behaviors but also, and perhaps more importantly, to confer upon the new medium the magical, ineffable aura of supernatural phenomena. According to historian of religion Egil Asprem, the popularization of scientific concepts can be understood as a process of “cognitive optimization,” attracting inferentially rich representations with the capacity to grab the attention of the public.35 Cognitive optimization makes concepts salient and memorable in ways comparable to popular religious concepts, “rendering concepts linguistically effective through metaphor, allegory, and conceptual adjustments.”36 With the development of computer-based technologies that predict and analyze human behaviors and states of mind, the notion of mindreading has become a form of conceptual adjustment to describe different tools. We have seen how mindreading enters into representations of the power of Google or Amazon algorithms, but the idea of mindreading computers is employed also in contexts such as affective computing, an area within computer sciences encompassing Page 8 of 17

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind the study and development of devices that recognize and interpret human feelings.37 Similarly, the application of computing to the analysis of data produced through diagnostic devices has been presented through the idea of mindreading, as scanning techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are used to provide information about feelings and states of mind—with the prospect of MRI-enhanced “nonconsensual mindreading” presented as threatening for privacy and civil rights.38 (p.28) Taina Bucher recently proposed the notion of “algorithmic imaginary” to describe how people experience and make sense of their interactions with algorithms in their everyday life.39 Algorithms are problem-solving devices in software and code, but, as David Beer aptly points out, they also “need to be understood as a part of the social world in order to understand the power they have to shape everyday life.”40 In fact, algorithms shape all kinds of cultural encounters, from the books we choose to buy to the films we decide to stream on Netflix, and the experience of having a website “predict” our interests or consuming patterns is familiar to many.41 In this context, the concept of mindreading makes the idea of computer algorithms insinuated into our thoughts more powerful and menacing. It introduced into the algorithmic imaginary, or in other words into the way we perceive and understand our daily interactions with present-day computing technologies, an element that defies technical explanation by hinting at supernatural and magical worlds. Technology’s opacity has always been one of the key conditions reinforcing its association with the supernatural and the fantastic. Our wonder before the shows of a stage magician is intrinsically connected to our failure to understand the technical means by which the magician performs her or his feats. No matter if we know that there is a trick; its technical opacity, with the aid of the mise-enscène on the theatrical stage, opens up the possibility for a thrilling experience grounded in our fascination for the supernatural and unknown.42 Similarly, the fact that the projector was hidden from the audience’s view in early film shows provided an opportunity for supernatural and magical interpretations of cinema’s illusory powers.43 Computing technologies bring the opacity of technology to a different level. In fact, as mentioned in the introduction, even computer scientists and programmers are unable to follow the stratifications of software and code that lead to the actual functioning of the machine. This is even more pronounced in the case of machine learning technologies that employ neural networks, which are widely used in contemporary AI applications devised by companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. Neural networks, in fact, function through complex statistical patterns whose internal functioning is often opaque. It is also for this reason that there is, as many have noted, an element of creepiness and wonder in how algorithms inform our everyday life.44

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind Asprem underlines that a common form of cognitive optimization is the substitution of complex micro-level causal explanations with individual agents whose role is characterized through the language of intentionality. For instance, popular works on molecular biology present genes as agents in the work of evolution, translating complex theories on the mechanical interplay (p.29) of regions of genomic sequence into the language of intuitive psychology. In a similar way, the idea that computers are reading minds posits computers as an intentional agency, disregarding the complex technicality through which algorithms function and preserving the opacity of computing technology.45 The use of concepts taken from the supernatural or the occult, such as mindreading, represents in this regard a pattern through which particular imaginative experiences of algorithms are created, moving from their intrinsic opacity to the opening of spheres of imagination that seem at first glance to have little to do with computers. Crucially, such patterns are embedded within our experience of digital technologies and therefore should be considered integral to the social nature of these technologies. As Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it in the quote at the opening of this chapter, “Google works for us because it seems to read our minds—and, in a way, it does.”46

Conclusion Employing a media archaeology approach, which posits that the contemporary figuration of digital media is only understandable through an excavation into media history, this chapter has delved into the history of conceptualizations of mindreading since the late nineteenth century to illuminate the circumstances by which this notion became available for describing and representing the functioning of computing technologies. I have argued that looking at such history helps us realize why mindreading is a notion able to describe such different phenomena and to adapt to such diverse contexts, from parapsychology to computer science. The interpretative flexibility of this concept, as sensorial and extrasensorial explanations coexisted and in certain cases even mingled with each other, allowed mindreading to define a broad range of events and technologies. Importantly, even when the idea of mindreading was employed to describe techniques and technologies that had apparently nothing to do with extrasensorial or supernatural faculties, the magical connotation was still present, informing the representation and the imaginary of “mindreading technologies” such as computers. While this chapter focuses on the case of mindreading, a similar dynamic characterizes the way in which other concepts with supernatural or religious connotations are employed to describe digital media. Hagelbarger’s choice to name his game-playing machine SEER, in this sense, suggests that an archaeological excavation of the idea of clairvoyance and prophecy could be as revealing—perhaps even more revealing—than the archaeological excavation of mindreading computers conducted here.47 In fact, we constantly use religious Page 10 of 17

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind and supernatural concepts to describe digital as well as nondigital (p.30) technologies; looking at how concepts wavered between different meanings helps unveil the origin and implications of such uses. Scholars in media history have approached the topic of the technological imaginary through a variety of theoretical and critical approaches. Whether called the “imaginaire,”48 “media fantasies,”49 or “technological visions,”50 this issue raises an array of problems and questions whose answers are complex and often problematic.51 How do particular forms of imaginary become entangled with specific technologies and techniques? What is the impact of the imagination in everyday interactions and experiences with technologies? Literature on the supernatural and the occult might provide a useful clue to approach such questions. Discussing the status of beliefs about extraordinary phenomena, Peter Lamont recently argued that these are regulated by a system of flexible choices between different interpretations. In other words, when we observe or experience something that defies explanation, such as the performance of a stage magician or a spiritualist séance, we oscillate between a range of potential interpretative frameworks to make sense of the event.52 Crucially, Lamont points out—thereby following the thread of explorations conducted by classical authors such as Goffman and Bateson53—that different and competing frameworks are not strictly alternative to each other, but may interact or coexist in complex and meaningful ways.54 This is something that can easily be observed also in many everyday acts, such as reading a newspaper. Readers can interpret a prediction about the future introduction of flying cars published in a newspaper as a potentially truthful forecast about future trends, a product of fiction, or perhaps even an ironical allusion to current political issues; they might also be uncertain between two or more of these explanations. Lamont’s approach to extraordinary phenomena is a useful tool for investigating the formation and the impact of technological imaginaries. Not unlike extraordinary phenomena, technologies are objects characterized by a substantial openness to different interpretations. Such openness provides the conditions for the emergence of forms of imagination and representation that inform in many ways our relationship with technology. As the case of mindreading shows, the same idea may not only describe different things but also conjure different imaginative possibilities. It might provide us a way to comprehend intuitively the functioning of a technology and at the same time enable a play of imagination that posits technology’s magical, supernatural character. It is in this sense that we should consider the somehow disconcerting claim according to which “Amazon can read your mind.”

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind Notes:

(1.) Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press), 52. (2.) Hazel Cills, “Amazon Can Read Your Mind,” Gawker, January 19, 2014, http:// gawker.com/amazon-can-read-your-mind-1504642063. (3.) Charles Day, “Mind-Reading Computers,” Computing in Science & Engineering 14, no. 4 (2012): 104. (4.) Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, 52. (5.) For an overview on media archaeology, see Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012); Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Simone Natale, “Understanding Media Archaeology,” Canadian Journal of Communication 37, no. 3 (2012): 523– 527. (6.) On the methods and theory of conceptual history, see Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). (7.) Benjamin Peters, Digital Keywords (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), xiv. (8.) On the domestication of new technologies and its relationship with narrative, imagination, and discourse see Simone Natale, “Unveiling the Biographies of Media: On the Role of Narratives, Anecdotes and Storytelling in the Construction of New Media’s Histories,” Communication Theory 26, no. 4 (2016): 431–49, doi:10.1111/comt.12099. (9.) Susan Zieger, “Miss X, Telepathy, and Affect at Fin de Siècle,” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 2 (2018): 347–364, doi:10.1017/ S1060150318000049. On supernatural beliefs and spectacular entertainments see also Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016). (10.) Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). (11.) This was, for instance, the “working hypothesis” initially reached by a committee set up in the 1880s by the American Society for Psychical Research (SPR) to investigate the phenomenon of “thought transference.” According to Page 12 of 17

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind their initial report, it might have been thought that “impressions from the mind of those about us are continually reaching our own minds by channels distinct from those of the senses, but that the forms of cerebral activity thus set up are so very feeble in comparison with those which depend, directly or indirectly, upon influences reaching us through the ordinary sensory mechanism.” Henry Pickering Bowditch (Chairman) et al., “Report of the Committee on ThoughtTransference,” in Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1 (1885–89): 111. (12.) See, for example, Joseph Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 308–309; George M. Beard, The Study of MuscleReading and Allied Nervous Phenomena in Europe and America (New York: The New Sydenham Society, 1882); W. F. Barrett, “Mind-Reading Versus MuscleReading,” Nature 24, no. 610 (1881): 212. (13.) On the dynamics of popularization for this debate, see Ilana Kushan, “Mind Reading: Literature in the Discourse of Early Victorian Phrenology and Mesmerism,” in Victorian Literary Mesmerism, ed. Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 1–37. (14.) “Admitting mind-reading to have been proved to exist as a phenomenon, there is nothing marvelous, mystical, or occult about this. It is simply a natural process going on under a natural law of which as yet we know but little.” William A. Hovey, Mind-Reading and Beyond (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1885), 191. (15.) Roger Luckhurst, “Passages in the Invention of the Psyche: Mind-Reading in London, 1881–84,” in Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 117–150. A similar openness towards different and also contrasting interpretations of events was typical of the stage performance of mesmerists and spiritualist mediums; see, on this, Natale, Supernatural Entertainments, 11, 65–81. (16.) Douglas Blackburn, Thought-Reading or Modern Mysteries Explained (London: Field and Tuer, 1884). (17.) Hovey, Mind-Reading and Beyond, 1. (18.) Peter Lamont has argued that the fluctuation between different interpretative frames is characteristic of the ways through which extraordinary phenomena are understood and interpreted. Peter Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs: A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind (19.) Joseph Banks Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1935). (20.) See Michael Pettit, The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Psychologist Joseph Jastrow employs the example of the automatograph, a recording device employed to detect involuntary movements, to illustrate how “sensorial” mind read operates: see Jastrow, Facts and Fable in Psychology, 310–312. (21.) Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit from Each Other,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas Parke Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 17–50. (22.) Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). (23.) Stuart Cumberland, a mindreader who rose to celebrity in late-nineteenthcentury London with his spectacular performances, publicly refused, for instance, supernaturalist accounts of his phenomena. Luckhurst, “Passages in the Invention of the Psyche,” 125. (24.) “Camera for recording eye movements,” U.S. Patent 2,229,721, issued January 28, 1941; “Apparatus for obtaining criminal confessions and photographically recording them,” U.S. Patent 1,749,090, issued March 3, 1933. (25.) “Apparatus for obtaining criminal confessions.” (26.) For a history of AI research, see Daniel Crevier, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1993). (27.) Hamid R. Ekbia, Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). (28.) Gerd Gigerenzer and Daniel G. Goldstein, “Mind as Computer: Birth of a Metaphor,” Creativity Research Journal 9, no. 2-3 (1996): 131–144, doi: 10.1080/10400419.1996.9651168. (29.) Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 2. (30.) C. Dianne Martin, “The Myth of the Awesome Thinking Machine,” Communications of the ACM 36, no. 4 (1993): 120–133, doi: 10.1145/255950.153587. On the imaginary of AI see Simone Natale and Andrea Page 14 of 17

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind Ballatore, “Imagining the Thinking Machine: Technological Myths and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, published online before print (2017): 1–16, doi: 10.1177/1354856517715164; Stefano Bory and Paolo Bory, “I nuovi immaginari dell’intelligenza artificiale,” Im@go: A Journal of the Social Imaginary 4, no. 6 (2016): 66–85, doi:10.7413/22818138047. (31.) David W. Hagelbarger, “SEER, a Sequence Extrapolating Robot,” IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers 1 (1956): 1–7, doi:10.1109/TEC. 1956.5219783. (32.) Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “Agents of History: Autonomous Agents and Crypto-Intelligence,” Interaction Studies 9, no. 3 (2008): 403–414, doi:10.1075/ is.9.3.03geo. Interestingly, in the paper “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” where he outlined the idea of the Turing Test, Turing is concerned by the possibility that humans may communicate telepathically, and suggests that everybody should be located in “telepathy-proof” rooms. Chris Bernhardt, Turing’s Vision: The Birth of Computer Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 157. For a reader of discussions of the Turing Test, including key writings by Alan Turing on the topic, see Stuart Schieber, ed., The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). (33.) Ekbia, Artificial Dreams, 5. For a closer examination of discursive shifts and analogies in AI research, see Natale and Ballatore, “Imagining the Thinking Machine,” 6–7. (34.) Geoghegan, “Agents of History.” (35.) Egil Asprem, “How Schrödinger’s Cat Became a Zombie,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 28, no. 2 (2016): 113–140, doi: 10.1163/15700682-12341373. (36.) Ibid., 118. For a similar perspective, see also Richard Dawkins’s concept of the meme: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). (37.) See, for instance, Rana El Kaliouby and Peter Robinson, “Mind Reading Machines: Automated Inference of Cognitive Mental States from Video,” 2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 1 (2004): 682– 688, doi:10.1109/ICSMC.2004.1398380, and Michael Kai Petersen, Carsten Stahlhut, Arkadiusz Stopczynski, Jakob Eg Larsen, and Lars Kai Hansen, “Smartphones Get Emotional: Mind Reading Images and Reconstructing the Neural Sources,” International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (2011): 578–587, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-24571-8_72. On

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind affective computing, see Rosalind W. Picard, Affective Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). (38.) See, for instance, Jan Stanley, “High-Tech ‘Mind Readers’ Are Latest Effort to Detect Lies,” ACLU, August 29, 2012, https://www.aclu.org/blog/high-techmind-readers-are-latest-effort-detect-lies. (39.) Taina Bucher, “The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithms,” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 1 (2016): 30–44, doi:10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086. (40.) David Beer, Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 65. (41.) Blake Hallinan and Ted Striphas, “Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture,” New Media & Society 18, no. 1 (2016): 117–137, doi:10.1177/1461444814538646. (42.) During, Modern Enchantments. (43.) Murray Leeder, The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Simone Natale, “The Cinema of Exposure: Spiritualist Exposés, Technology, and the Dispositif of Early Cinema,” Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2011): 101–117, doi:10.7202/1027444ar. (44.) See, among others, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). (45.) Asprem, “How Schrödinger’s Cat Became a Zombie,” 119–121. (46.) Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, 52. Emphasis mine. (47.) Hagelbarger, “SEER, a Sequence Extrapolating Robot.” (48.) Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). (49.) Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). (50.) Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, eds., Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technologies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). (51.) See, on this, Simone Natale and Gabriele Balbi, “Media and the Imaginary in History: The Role of the Fantastic in Different Stages of Media Change,” Media History 20, no. 2 (2014): 203–218, doi:10.1080/13688804.2014.898904.

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Amazon Can Read Your Mind (52.) Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs. (53.) See Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1974), and Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Psychiatric Research Reports 2 (1955): 39–51. (54.) Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs.

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Information Theory of the Soul

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Information Theory of the Soul Spiritualism, Technology, and Science Fiction Anthony Enns

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the similarities between the techno-fantasies promoted by the modern spiritualist movement and the claims made by contemporary scientists and engineers with regard to the uploading of human consciousness onto computers. It argues that these similarities help to explain why spiritualist concepts, such as the survival of the soul after death and the possibility of communication with disembodied spirits, appear so frequently in contemporary science fiction narratives, which often depict the survival of human personalities as virtual subjects in cyberspace. Instead of celebrating these spiritual possibilities, however, science fiction narratives often represent simulated experience as a loss of true identity and agency, which more closely resembles the arguments made by the opponents of spiritualism in the nineteenth century. Spiritualist concepts thus remain relevant today because they continue to serve as a common language for representing and critiquing the effects of new information technologies. Keywords:   artificial intelligence, cyberspace, digital immortality, information theory, mind uploading, science fiction, spiritualism, technology, virtual reality

The nineteenth-century religious movement known as modern spiritualism was based on a belief in the possibility of technological communication with the dead. This movement began in 1848, when the Fox sisters channeled spirits who answered questions using coded sequences of “raps,” and historians often point out that this practice was directly inspired by the contemporaneous invention of Page 1 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul electrical telegraphy, which similarly facilitated disembodied communication across vast distances by means of coded signals.1 The development of optical, writing, and sound technologies also inspired other spiritualist practices, such as spirit photography, spirit typewriting, and direct voice mediumship, suggesting that spiritualism was an imaginative extrapolation of the seemingly magical powers of new media technologies. Historians like Werner Sollors argue that spiritualism also represented an attempt to “sacralize, and find transcendental meaning in” these new technologies, thereby restoring a spiritually based sense of social unity that was being threatened by the forces of modernity.2 According to this argument, the decline of the movement in the early twentieth century can be attributed to the fact that these technologies no longer evoked the same kinds of fantasies after they became a normal part of everyday life. This argument is certainly compelling, but it is important to note that many of the movement’s central concepts later reappeared with even greater force at the end of the twentieth century. With the rise of digital technologies and new developments in brain science, for example, scientists and engineers began to predict the eventual (p.38) merging of consciousness with machines, which recalled the various mind–machine interfaces that spiritualist mediums used to transcend the limitations of the physical body. The development of networked environments also led to the formation of complex and self-sufficient digital universes populated by virtual avatars and artificial intelligences, which closely resembled the kinds of disembodied spirits encountered during spiritualist séances. The rise of modern computing thus inspired many of the same desires that surrounded the rise of new media technologies in the nineteenth century, such as the hope that these technologies would enable a kind of immortality by providing access to a virtual plane of existence populated by disembodied entities that would continue to interact with the living. Despite the widespread popularity of spiritualism, nineteenth-century scientists and physicians often dismissed this movement as fraudulent and potentially dangerous. Historians usually discuss the pathologization of spiritualism within the context of gender, as spiritualist mediums tended to be female and their trance states were often diagnosed as symptoms of hysteria.3 However, it is also important to note that spiritualism emerged at roughly the same time as neurology, and most neurologists diagnosed it as a physiological defect or aberration. For example, American phrenologist and speculative scientist James Stanley Grimes argued that the trance states of spiritualist mediums were caused by abnormalities in “the upper front part of the cerebrum.”4 American neurologist George Beard similarly described trance states as a “disease of the nervous system” that resulted in a loss of self-control and potentially even the dissolution of the self by transforming the medium into an automaton.5 The rejection of spiritualism among scientists was thus based on their belief in the physiological basis of consciousness. As American neurologist Frederic Marvin explained, spiritualism was “a disease of the brain and not of the mind,” and it Page 2 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul would otherwise be impossible to treat: “Were I obliged to prescribe for the mind as an entity, I should throw up my arms in despair; I should as soon think of prescribing for an apparition or of administering drugs to a shadow.”6 Like these late-nineteenth-century neurologists, late-twentieth-century critics similarly emphasized the importance of bodily presence at a time when the self or the soul was increasingly understood as pure information. The rise of modern computing thus inspired many of the same fears that surrounded the rise of new media technologies in the nineteenth century, such as the fear that disembodiment could potentially threaten the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject. This shows how spiritualist concepts have historically served a dual function, as they have been used to “sacralize” new technologies as well as to criticize the techno-fantasies that informed their production, promotion, and implementation. (p.39) The continued prevalence of spiritualist concepts in discussions of modern computing also helps to explain their frequent appearance in contemporary science fiction. While science fiction writers rarely describe the computer as a technology capable of facilitating communication with the dead, science fiction narratives often reinforce the idea of human identity as informational patterns by depicting the survival of human personalities as disembodied entities in cyberspace. Rather than celebrating the spiritual possibilities of new media technologies, however, these narratives more often represent simulated experience as a loss of true identity and agency. Like the opponents of spiritualism, therefore, science fiction writers similarly emphasize the importance of bodily presence as the foundation of individual autonomy. Spiritualism thus remains significant for both media and literary history because it continues to serve as a common language to describe and critique the effects of new technologies and their impact on human subjectivity.

Artificial Intelligence, Pattern-Identity, and the Technological Transmigration of the Soul One of the earliest examples of the persistence of spiritualist concepts in discussions of modern computing was English computer scientist Alan Turing’s famous test for artificial intelligence. Turing first described this test in his 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in which he suggested replacing the problem of whether or not machines are capable of conscious thought with the problem of whether or not machines are capable of imitating conscious thought in a convincing way. This hypothetical “imitation game” involved a human subject who was confined in a room with a teleprinter that allowed him to communicate with an unseen entity. After receiving answers to various questions, the subject was asked to determine whether this unseen entity was a human being or a machine. The “Turing Test” thus resembled a spiritualist séance, in which sitters similarly attempted to determine whether an invisible spirit was human by asking a series of questions. Like the spirits that allegedly manifested during these séances, an artificial intelligence was also described as Page 3 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul a disembodied entity that exists on an immaterial plane that can only be accessed through media technologies. And just as séance-goers often had difficulty determining whether the messages received from spirits could be considered evidence of a genuine presence, so too did scientists and engineers often have difficulty determining whether the responses received from machines could be considered evidence of genuine intelligence. These two phenomena were structurally similar, in other words, (p.40) because they posited that there was no essential difference between identity and information or between real intelligence and simulated intelligence, which effectively made humans indistinguishable from machines. In considering the various objections that might be given to refute his proposal, Turing claimed that one could think of intelligent machines as being endowed with a soul, and he added that this would “not be irreverently usurping [God’s] power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls He creates.”7 While Turing thus acknowledged that some readers might find his proposal disturbing—particularly those with strong religious beliefs—he attempted to console these readers by framing his argument in terms of a religious worldview, and he even suggested that a religious corollary for artificial intelligence could be found in the Christian notion of the “transmigration of souls.”8 The Turing Test thus illustrates the merging of spiritualist concepts and modern computing technology, which share the common premise that human personality can be identified and authenticated on the basis of information transmission rather than bodily presence. This idea was popularized in the 1950s by information theory and cybernetics, which were similarly based on the idea that there was no essential difference between human and machine communication. As American mathematician and founder of cybernetics Norbert Wiener explained in his 1954 book The Human Use of Human Beings, “the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel.”9 Like Turing, Wiener also considered the religious implications of this theory. In his 1964 book God and Golem, for example, he argued that “God’s supposed creation of man and the animals, the begetting of living beings according to their kind, and the possible reproduction of machines are all part of the same order of phenomena.”10 If humans and machines are interchangeable, in other words, then the creation of life is comparable to the creation of machines. And if machines are capable of creating other machines, then nonliving systems effectively possess the same creative power as God. Wiener also argued that these acts of creation could occur at a distance, as they only require the transmission of information: “The machine may generate the message, and the message may generate another machine.”11 The same principle applied to human beings, as human personalities could also be converted into information and transmitted through media channels: “It is Page 4 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul conceptually possible for a human being to be sent over a telegraph line.”12 The religious implications of these ideas were profound, as they not only blurred the boundaries between humans and machines but also conceived of the soul as an informational pattern that could be digitally (p.41) scanned, stored, and transmitted virtually anywhere regardless of the body’s location in time and space. The idea of the soul as an informational pattern soon led to utopian visions of bodily liberation. In his 1979 essay “Today’s Computers, Intelligent Machines and Our Future,” for example, Canadian roboticist Hans Moravec argued that the processing ability of computers is comparable to that of the human brain and that it is therefore possible to transfer human consciousness directly onto a computer hard drive. This would not only augment human intelligence, as it would allow people to communicate, react, and think a thousand times faster, but it would also allow people to be transmitted through media channels as “information packets,” which would provide a kind of disembodied immortality: The program can also be copied to a dormant information storage medium, such as magnetic tape. In case the machine you inhabit is fatally clobbered, a copy of this kind can be read into an unprogrammed computer, resulting in another you, minus the memories accumulated since the copy was made. By making frequent copies, the concept of personal death could be made virtually meaningless.13 Moravec expanded on this idea in his 1988 book Mind Children, which similarly predicted that it would soon be possible to create a digital copy of the mind using a “high-resolution brain scan.”14 Moravec thus concluded that “the essence of a person” is “the pattern and the process going on in [that person’s] head” rather than “the machinery supporting that process,” and this essence would be preserved as long as the pattern is preserved.15 He also predicted that computers would eventually enable the resurrection of “all the past inhabitants of the earth” by creating simulations of people who have already died.16 Like the spiritualists, in other words, Moravec conceived of human identity as an informational pattern that could be permanently preserved, together with the rest of humanity, in a virtual dataspace that was capable of being accessed by media technologies. In her 1991 essay “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow,” virtual reality pioneer Nicole Stenger enthusiastically endorsed Moravec’s claim that the downloading of human personalities would make everyone immortal, and she even evoked religious metaphors by describing these downloaded personalities as angels: “We will all become angels, and for eternity!”17 This idea also formed the basis of American physicist Frank Tipler’s 1994 book The Physics of Immortality, which similarly described human identity as an informational pattern that could be downloaded onto a computer18 and predicted (p.42) that future computers Page 5 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul would have enough power to simulate all of the past inhabitants of the Earth.19 Like Stenger, Tipler also framed these ideas within the context of an explicitly religious worldview: Aquinas (following Augustine) defined the soul to be “the form of activity of the body.” In Aristotelian language, the formal cause of an action is the abstract cause, as opposed to the material and efficient causes. For a computer, the program is the formal cause, while the material cause is the properties of the matter out of which the computer is made, and the efficient cause is the opening and closing of electric circuits. . . . Aquinas [also] thought the soul had two faculties: the agent intellect (intellectus agens) and the receptive intellect (intellectus possibilis), the former being the ability to acquire concepts, and the latter being the ability to retain and use the acquired concepts. Similar distinctions are made in computer theory: general rules concerning the processing of information coded in the central processor are analogous to the agent intellect; the programs coded in RAM or on a tape are analogues of the receptive intellect. . . . Furthermore, the word “information” comes from the Aristotle-Aquinas’ notion of “form”: we are “informed” if new forms are added to the receptive intellect. Even semantically, the information theory of the soul is the same as the Aristotle-Aquinas theory.20 Tipler thus explained the nature of the soul in media-technological terms, and the larger implication of this theory was that the concept of pattern-identity was a technically accurate description of the Christian notion of the soul and that the resurrection of the dead by computers was not a religious metaphor but rather a scientifically precise description of future events. This merging of spiritualism and modern computing reached its ultimate realization in the development of cyberspace—a virtual, networked environment where disembodied entities could meet and interact as pure information. In his introduction to the 1991 anthology Cyberspace: First Steps, American architectural theorist Michael Benedikt traced the dream of cyberspace back to the notion of “the Heavenly City, the new Jerusalem of the book of Revelation,”21 which was also an architectural utopia that only existed in the imagination: [T]he Heavenly City is doubly imaginary: once, in the conventional sense, because it is not actual, but once again because even if it became actual, because it is information, it could come into existence (p.43) only as a virtual reality, which is to say, fully, only “in the imagination.” The image of the Heavenly City, in fact, is . . . a religious vision of cyberspace.22 Benedikt thus identified the parallels between the spiritualists’ notion of the afterlife as a conceptual space where everything that is imagined is made manifest and cyberspace as an interactive and mutable space where users are Page 6 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul able to manifest their own fantasies. Australian science writer Margaret Wertheim’s 1999 book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace similarly argued that cyberspace represented a new version of heaven created by humans rather than God, which filled a spiritual void in modern life: “It is a repackaging of the old idea of Heaven, but in a secular, technologically sanctioned format.”23 Australian occult writer Nevill Drury’s 2002 essay “Magic and Cyberspace” also argued that cyberspace was inherently magical because of its ability to manifest the imagination, and “it comes as no surprise, then, that neopagans and occultists of all descriptions have been quick to embrace the Internet.”24 American religion scholar Hugh Urban’s 2015 essay “The Medium Is the Message in the Spacious Present” made a similar point with regard to the rise of late-twentieth-century “computer cults” like Heaven’s Gate, which “made elaborate use of the language of computers and cyberspace to articulate its religious ideas, describing the brain as the ‘hard-drive’ and the soul as the ‘software.’ ”25 The rhetoric surrounding cyberspace was thus rooted in spiritualist concepts, as it represented the ultimate merging of technology and religion. Critics often pointed out, however, that these religiously inflected technofantasies were quite dangerous. For example, Allucquere Rosanne Stone’s 1991 essay “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” argued that these ideas were not only politically irresponsible but fundamentally misguided: “No matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached. It may be off somewhere else—and that ‘somewhere else’ may be a privileged point of view— but consciousness remains firmly rooted in the physical.”26 Vivian Sobchack’s 1993 essay “New Age Mutant Ninja Hackers” similarly described the hype surrounding cyberspace as “a potentially dangerous and disturbingly miscalculated attempt to escape the material conditions and specific politics . . . that have an impact on the present social fragmentation of American culture, the body’s essential mortality, and the planet’s increasing fragility.”27 David F. Noble’s 1997 book The Religion of Technology recommended that “we disabuse ourselves of our inherited other-worldly propensities in order to embrace anew our one and only earthly existence,”28 and Erik Davis’s 1998 book Techgnosis similarly urged readers not to mistake “technological possibilities with social or spiritual ones.”29 Perhaps the most vocal critic of (p.44) these techno-fantasies was N. Katherine Hayles, whose 1999 book How We Became Posthuman called for a new understanding of “posthuman” or “cyborg” identity that was firmly grounded in the material world: [M]y dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibility of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.30 Page 7 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul Like the proponents of spiritualism in the late nineteenth century, therefore, late-twentieth-century cyber-enthusiasts were criticized for encouraging a solipsistic retreat from reality that could potentially result in the loss of autonomy and even the dissolution of the self, and opponents often insisted on the need to retain some notion of embodiment as a prerequisite for individual identity and agency.

Techno-Sorcery, Personality Simulators, and the Virtual Realm of the Dead Robert Geraci’s 2010 book Apocalyptic AI argued that the prevalence of spiritualist concepts in discussions of modern computing was primarily driven by science fiction writers, who sought to invest these new technologies with spiritual significance. According to Geraci, science fiction was particularly effective not only because it was popular among scientists and engineers but also because “it transmits religious ideas even to those people otherwise reluctant to accept them and condones them in the minds of those people who are already religiously faithful.”31 Science fiction thus “often borders on, or even crosses over the border of religion,” which “can affect how scientists practice.”32 Peter Pels’s 2013 essay “Amazing Stories: How Science Fiction Sacralizes the Secular” similarly argued that the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction “helped to create a popular imagination in which digital technology erases the distinctions between religion, magic, and science and/or technology.”33 Cyberpunk narratives thus “reinvented ‘religion’ to fit the secular experiences of modern people” in the same way that spiritualism “sacralized” new technologies in the nineteenth century.34 While it is true that these narratives often draw on religious themes and metaphors—particularly when describing the seemingly magical nature of technological (p.45) innovations—it is not necessarily true that they endorse spiritualist concepts. Just as critics often challenged the claims of cyber-enthusiasts, science fiction writers also frequently rejected the idea of the soul as an informational pattern and instead reaffirmed the value of embodied experience as the basis for the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject. One of the earliest literary representations of cyberspace can be found in Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella True Names, which depicts a future in which a brain– computer interface (known as the “portal”) provides a direct neural link to a global computer network. A group of computer hackers are then able to create a virtual fantasy world (known as the “other plane”), where they assume alternate identities as “warlocks” and cast “spells” using various computer programs. These hackers thus “live in a world as malleable as the human imagination,”35 yet the spells they cast in this virtual world also have the power to affect computer systems in the real world. At the beginning of the narrative one of these hackers, “Mr. Slippery,” is recruited by the FBI to track down another hacker, “the Mailman,” who is systematically taking control of the “other plane” and whose activities are starting to manifest in the real world as well. He is reportedly responsible for a revolution in Venezuela, for example, which was Page 8 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul designed to show that “controlling data and information services could be used to take permanent political control of a state.”36 Mr. Slippery then joins forces with another hacker, “Erythrina,” and they are given access to government mainframes that allow them to augment their intelligence and thereby increase the power of their “spells.” As their processing power increases, they determine that the Mailman has murdered another hacker, “DON.MAC,” and replaced him with a “personality simulator.” Erythrina also realizes that the Mailman is actually a renegade artificial intelligence that is planning to use “nuclear blackmail to bring the rest of the world into line.”37 The hackers eventually succeed in defeating the Mailman, and in the process Erythrina learns how to upload her consciousness into the “other plane” and become an immortal, disembodied entity. As she explains to Mr. Slippery: “I figured out how I could adapt the basic kernel to accept any input personality. The kernel is growing into a true Erythrina, who is also truly me. When this body dies . . . I will still be, and you can still talk to me.”38 At the end of the story, Mr. Slippery imagines her as an “angel” watching over the world from heaven, and he speculates that this might be the next stage in human evolution: “Every race must arrive at this point in its history. . . . Processors kept getting faster, memories larger. What now took a planet’s resources would someday be possessed by everyone.”39 Vinge’s novella thus conflates spiritualism and technology by conceiving of human identity as an informational pattern that could be downloaded onto a computer hard drive and by depicting cyberspace as a (p.46) virtual, networked environment inhabited by immortal, disembodied entities that are described in explicitly religious terms. Vinge’s novella caught the attention of artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, who wrote an afterword for the second edition in 1983 that praised Vinge for equating human and machine intelligence40—an idea that later became the foundation of Minsky’s 1986 book The Society of Mind.41 Geraci also noted that Vinge’s novella was required reading among students in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1980s, and he concluded that it must have had a tremendous influence on their work: “Students can be an impressionable community, so faculty advocacy of particular science fiction stories . . . could have a profound effect upon the way graduate students go about their future careers.”42 Virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce similarly claimed that many engineers, including himself, “dedicated their professional careers to realize Vinge’s vision,” as his novella inspired them “to revision their work, and refocus themselves toward the ends he described.”43 However, Pesce also recognized that the cultural transformations described in Vinge’s novella would “produce a revolution in the real world, a revolution he sees as necessarily catastrophic.”44 While the novella clearly predicts the development of a virtual environment, in which anonymous users create alternate identities that possess seemingly magical powers, it also illustrates the potential threat that this technology poses to the material environment due to the fact that the Page 9 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul hackers and the artificial intelligence are forced to access networked defense systems that bring the real world to the very brink of total destruction. Instead of endorsing Erythrina’s decision to download her consciousness, the technological transmigration of souls also seems to represent a potential threat to the future of humanity, which is precisely the concern that Mr. Slippery articulates in the closing passage. Instead of interpreting Vinge’s novella as a utopian vision of cyberspace that actively endorsed the spiritualist applications of computer research, it would be more accurate to interpret it as a warning of the dangers of neglecting the material environment or reducing consciousness to pure information, which could result in the end of the human race. It thus remains somewhat unclear why Vinge’s novella would have been required reading among artificial intelligence students, and it is even possible that it was assigned as an ethical critique of such research rather than an aspirational goal. The term “cyberspace” was coined by science fiction author William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, in which it is described as “a consensual hallucination” that is “experienced daily” by billions of people through computer simulations.45 In other words, cyberspace represents a kind of collective dream that is experienced through a technological interface, much like (p.47) the media-generated pseudo-realities that were accessed during spiritualist séances. The experience of traveling through cyberspace is also described as an out-ofbody experience, much like the trance states experienced by spiritualist mediums. Indeed, hackers are often described as liminal beings who exist on the threshold between two worlds, and some of them even express contempt for their physical bodies. The protagonist of the novel, for example, is a hacker named Case whose brain has been sabotaged by a previous employer such that he is unable to access cyberspace: “For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. . . . Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”46 At first glance, therefore, the novel’s representation of cyberspace would appear to reinforce the claims of cyber-enthusiasts, as it is described as a virtual environment in which people are able to escape the limitations of their physical bodies and achieve a kind of disembodied immortality as pure information. While in cyberspace Case also encounters numerous personality simulators copied from dead people. The “Dixie Flatline,” for example, is a dead hacker who continues to exist as a ROM personality and cannot tell whether he is a real human being.47 Later in the novel Case also encounters a copy of his dead girlfriend Linda, who has no memory of her death and genuinely believes that she is still alive.48 Cyberspace is also home to several artificial intelligences, which are repeatedly described as “ghosts,”49 and Case eventually discovers that one of them, known as “Neuromancer,” was responsible for creating the simulation of his girlfriend. By constructing a virtual environment and populating it with copies of dead people, Neuromancer effectively resurrects the dead, which is precisely the meaning of its name: “Neuro from the nerves, the Page 10 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend . . . I am the dead, and their land.”50 Like Moravec and Tipler, therefore, Gibson repeatedly describes cyberspace and the disembodied entities who inhabit it in explicitly spiritualist terms. Stone criticized Gibson’s novel because, like “the work of cyberspace researchers,” it “assumes that the human body is ‘meat’—obsolete, as soon as consciousness itself is uploaded into the network.”51 Geraci similarly criticized the novel because it “glorifies cyberspace and derides the ‘meatspace’ where everyone but the hackers resides.”52 While this is certainly how Case feels at the beginning of the novel, Gibson’s narrative does not necessarily endorse this view. At the end of the novel, for example, Neuromancer invites Case to stay in the virtual environment with his girlfriend: “If your woman is a ghost, she doesn’t know it. Neither will you.”53 Case thus has the choice of becoming a disembodied spirit himself—a choice that would presumably be appealing to a hacker who sees his physical body as a “prison”—yet he immediately (p.48) declines, choosing instead to remain embodied. When he realizes that he is nothing more than an informational pattern, the Dixie Flatline similarly chooses to abandon his virtual existence and asks Case to erase him.54 Linda is also depicted as nothing more than a mindless pawn, much like DON.MAC, who has no independent thoughts or feelings. Although the novel illustrates the radical transformations enabled by new media technologies and their ability to grant users a kind of disembodied immortality as pure information, it also emphasizes the idea that consciousness can never be entirely divorced from the body and that downloaded personalities are essentially counterfeit identities that lack any true sense of identity and agency. The idea that downloaded personalities would be granted an immortal, disembodied existence is also illustrated in Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City, in which virtual copies of human personalities have become commonplace and are even granted the same legal rights as physical humans, yet this novel similarly challenges the techno-fantasies of cyber-enthusiasts by suggesting that there might be something horrific about the experience of being copied. When the first copy is created in 2024, for example, it feels as if it has been “buried alive” and immediately insists on being deleted, much like the Dixie Flatline.55 The narrator also notes that copied personalities have a strong tendency to commit suicide. Instead of promoting the idea of technological transmigration and resurrection, therefore, Egan’s novel more often questions the privileging of pattern-identity over body-identity and suggests that human consciousness may actually be dependent on physical embodiment. The novel addresses this issue by contrasting two opposing positions with regard to copied personalities. The first position is articulated by Thomas Riemann, a corporate executive who downloads his personality before he dies so that it can continue to direct his company from cyberspace. Riemann chooses to download Page 11 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul his personality because he believes that copies are no different from living human beings: “The Copy would survive, it would live his life for him. This body was always destined to perish; he’d accepted that long ago. Death was the irreversible dissolution of the personality; this wasn’t death, it was a shedding of skin.”56 Riemann thus conceives of his personality as an informational pattern, and he sees his body as an empty shell that his personality is temporarily inhabiting. This position is also articulated by Paul Durham, a computer scientist who downloads his personality onto a computer hard drive in order to understand the experience of being a copy. Following this experiment, Durham becomes convinced that downloaded personalities are no different from living humans because they also possess (p.49) self-awareness.57 Riemann and Graham thus equate identity with the mind and see the body as nothing more than an earthly vessel. Because he perceives his self-awareness as continuous and fluid, Durham concludes that consciousness consists of information or “dust” that is scattered throughout time and space, which leads him to question whether it is even located within the computer hardware: The scattered events that formed my experience had an internal consistency every bit as real as the consistency in the actions of the computers. And perhaps the computers didn’t provide all of it. . . . What was I made of, when the processors weren’t describing me? Well . . . it’s a big universe. Plenty of dust to be me. . . . Plenty of events—nothing to do with your computers, maybe nothing to do with your planet or your epoch —out of which to construct ten seconds of experience.58 This speculation suggests to Durham that an entire virtual universe could exist indefinitely without hardware, which is precisely what he sets out to create. His virtual universe thus represents a merging of cyberspace and the spiritualist notion of the afterlife, as it is not only populated by immortal, disembodied entities, but it is also located on an invisible, immaterial plane of existence that is completely independent of the hardware on which it was originally stored. Riemann and Durham’s ideas thus reflect and reinforce the claims made by cyber-enthusiasts like Moravec and Tipler. However, many of the other characters reject the idea of pattern-identity. Francesca, for example, is on the verge of death yet still refuses to have herself copied: “I do believe that Copies are intelligent. I just wouldn’t say that they are . . . ‘the same person as’ the person they were based on. . . . I have my own sense—right now—of who I am . . . and it doesn’t include a Copy of me, run at some time in the indefinite future.”59 By affirming the boundaries of her own identity, Francesca thus conceives of her conscious self as an embodied whole. This position is also endorsed by Daniel Lebesgue, the author of a play titled Solipsist Nation, which tells the story of a copy “who ends up literally becoming an entire society and Page 12 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul culture himself.”60 Unlike Francesca, however, Lebesgue encourages copies to accept that they are no longer human, as the loss of physical embodiment results in the permeability of identity. David Hawthorne, a fan of Lebesgue’s work, attempts to embrace this idea by giving himself a new name after he is copied. His copy, who is named “Peer,” also speculates as to whether he is the same person: (p.50) A core remained; certain values, certain emotional responses, certain aesthetic sensibilities had survived these transitions unscathed. . . . Was that kernel of invariants—and the more-or-less unbroken thread of memory —enough? Had David Hawthorne, by another name, achieved the immortality he’d paid for? Or had he died somewhere along the way? There was no answer. The most that could be said, at any moment, was that someone existed who knew—or believed—that they’d once been David Hawthorne.61 At the end of the novel, Peer decides to transform himself into a million different entities, as he no longer considers himself a unitary identity: “What have I become, already? An endless series of people . . . linked together by the faintest thread of memory. Why keep them spread out in time? Why go on pretending that there’s one ‘real’ person, enduring through all those arbitrary changes?”62 Peer thus becomes the “solipsist nation” described in Lebesgue’s play: he is no longer an individual, but rather an entire society. Unlike Riemann and Durham, in other words, these characters argue that the concept of pattern-identity ultimately leads to the dissolution of the self. While these two positions remain in tension throughout most of the novel, the ending clearly endorses the latter position, as Durham eventually recognizes the differences between his original self and his copy. When he discovers that his virtual universe is on the brink of collapse, for example, he suffers a loss of faith and contemplates suicide. His colleague, Maria, urges him to continue by reconfiguring his personality: “You have the power to choose exactly who you are. . . . If you don’t want the weight of your past to crush you . . . then don’t let it!”63 When Durham follows her advice, modifying the data that make up his personality such that he wants to go on living, Maria wonders: “If he’d rebuilt himself . . . how much of the man she’d known remained? Had he granted himself transhuman resilience . . . or had he died. . . . Where was the line?”64 The novel thus repeatedly emphasizes the idea that copies are not the same as their originals because informational patterns are inherently unfixed, unbounded, and infinitely mutable. Hayles described Permutation City as “a book I love to hate because it challenges almost everything I thought I knew about materiality.”65 In particular, Page 13 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul it challenged her notion of the physical body as the material basis of consciousness and the guarantor of individual identity and agency. However, it is important to distinguish Egan’s position from the claims of cyber-enthusiasts like Moravec and Tipler. While Egan’s novel clearly depicts the downloading of human identity as an informational pattern, which is granted a kind of disembodied immortality in cyberspace—an idea that clearly recalls the spiritualist (p.51) notion of the afterlife—it also emphasizes that the kind of immortality provided by modern computing is highly questionable, as copied personalities are fundamentally different from their originals and cannot even be called human beings, which challenges Moravec and Tipler’s faith in the technological transmigration of the soul. Like the previous works discussed in this chapter, Permutation City similarly represents pattern-identity as a potential threat to the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject, and an examination of this recurring theme thus shows how science fiction narratives often function as a privileged site where the utopian claims of cyber-enthusiasts are both represented and critiqued.

Conclusion As historians often point out, the spiritualists’ efforts to communicate with spirits using media technologies reflected how these technologies were transforming the cultural understanding of consciousness and identity in the late nineteenth century. Just as these technologies facilitated communication across vast distances, which replaced physical interaction with the transmission of information, so too did spiritualist séances allegedly facilitate communication with disembodied spirits that inhabited a virtual realm as pure information. While the spiritualists’ belief in the possibility of technological communication with the dead gradually declined in the early twentieth century, many of their central concepts resurfaced in the late twentieth century following the rise of information theory, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence research, which made no distinction between human and machine communication. The spiritualists’ notion of the soul as an informational pattern was also embraced by computer scientists, who frequently promoted the utopian possibilities of modern computing technologies using religious images and metaphors. The conflation of technology and religion was also illustrated in late-twentieth-century science fiction narratives, in which cyberspace was often represented as a virtual environment inhabited by immortal, disembodied entities that could be accessed by means of media technologies. Spiritualism was thus much more than just a religious movement; it also represented a set of concepts that endowed new scientific and technological innovations with spiritual qualities. The ultimate purpose of these concepts was to integrate science and technology into a religious worldview, and it was therefore necessary for them to be general and flexible enough that they could be mobilized in a variety of different ways and in a wide range of different contexts. Instead of simply endorsing the claims of cyber-enthusiasts, however, Page 14 of 18

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Information Theory of the Soul critics and writers also employed spiritualist concepts to analyze and (p.52) critique the effects of new technologies. While the spiritualist movement may be largely forgotten, spiritualist concepts thus continue to function as a common language that can be used to promote or critique modern computing technologies as either the instruments of our salvation or the agents of our destruction.

Notes:

(1.) See Werner Sollors, “Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s Celestial Telegraph, or Indian Blessings to Gas-Lit American Drawing Rooms,” American Quarterly 35, no. 5 (1983): 459–480, Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone Film Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 12; John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 94; Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 28; Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 102; Jeremy Stolow, “Salvation by Electricity,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 668–686. (2.) Sollors, “Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s Celestial Telegraph,” 470. (3.) Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 121–153; Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 139–167. (4.) J. Stanley Grimes, The Mysteries of Human Nature Explained by a New System of Nervous Physiology (Buffalo: R. M. Wanzer, 1857), 401. (5.) George Beard, “The Psychology of Spiritualism,” North American Review 129, no. 272 (1879): 67–68. (6.) Frederic R. Marvin, The Philosophy of Spiritualism and the Pathology and Treatment of Mediomania (New York: Asa K. Butts, 1874), 35. (7.) Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (October 1950): 443. (8.) Ibid., 441.

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Information Theory of the Soul (9.) Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 26. (10.) Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 47. (11.) Ibid., 36. (12.) Ibid. (13.) Hans Moravec, “Today’s Computers, Intelligent Machines and Our Future,” Analog Science Fiction—Science Fact, 99, no. 2 (February 1979): 81. (14.) Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 110. (15.) Ibid., 117. (16.) Ibid., 124. (17.) Nicole Stenger, “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 52. (18.) Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Doubleday, 1994), xi. (19.) Ibid., 220. (20.) Ibid., 127–128. (21.) Michael Benedikt, “Introduction,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 14. (22.) Ibid., 15–16. (23.) Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (New York: Norton, 1999), 21. (24.) Nevill Drury, “Magic and Cyberspace: Fusing Technology and Magical Consciousness in the Modern World,” Esoterica 4 (2002): 96. (25.) Hugh Urban, “The Medium Is the Message in the Spacious Present: Channeling, Television, and the New Age,” in Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling, ed. Cathy Gutierrez (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 337. (26.) Allucquere Rosanne Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 111.

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Information Theory of the Soul (27.) Vivian Sobchack, “New Age Mutant Ninja Hackers: Reading Mondo 2000,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 92, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 576. (28.) David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 208. (29.) Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), 333. (30.) N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5. (31.) Robert M. Geraci, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 48. (32.) Ibid., 52. (33.) Peter Pels, “Amazing Stories: How Science Fiction Sacralizes the Secular,” in Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between, ed. Jeremy Stolow (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 213. (34.) Ibid., 214. (35.) Vernor Vinge, “True Names,” in True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, ed. James Frenkel (New York: Tor, 1981), 272. (36.) Ibid., 264. (37.) Ibid., 328. (38.) Ibid., 329. (39.) Ibid. (40.) Marvin Minsky, “Afterword,” in True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, ed. James Frenkel (New York: Tor, 2001), 331–352. (41.) Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). (42.) Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, 52. (43.) Mark Pesce, “True Magic,” in True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, ed. James Frenkel (New York: Tor, 2001), 228. (44.) Ibid., 234–235. (45.) William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 51.

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Information Theory of the Soul (46.) Ibid., 6. (47.) Ibid., 79. (48.) Ibid., 238. (49.) Ibid., 229. (50.) Ibid., 243–244. (51.) Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?,” 113. (52.) Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, 77. (53.) Gibson, Neuromancer, 244. (54.) Ibid., 106. (55.) Greg Egan, Permutation City (London: Gollancz, 2003), 39. (56.) Ibid., 211. (57.) Ibid., 41. (58.) Ibid., 122–123. (59.) Ibid, 77. (60.) Ibid., 115. (61.) Ibid., 118. (62.) Ibid., 297. (63.) Ibid., 308. (64.) Ibid., 309. (65.) N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 21. AE

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The Mediumship of the Digital

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

The Mediumship of the Digital Sound Recording, Supernatural Inquiry, and the Digital Afterlife of Phonography* Simone Dotto

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords Examining the use of sound recording in relation to the spiritualists’ practices and discourses, the chapter questions a widespread “metaphysical” understanding of phonography: the tendency to ascribe the indexical trace an evidentiary value. Through a brief historical overview, the first part highlights how, if used as a tool to explore the supernatural dimension, analog recording is evaluated more for its revelatory potential than for the transcriptive one. The second part addresses the problem of digital recording from a twofold perspective. On the one hand, it considers the analog-to-digital transition in contemporary electronic voice phenomena chasing practices; on the other one, it interprets the sonic hauntology music genre as a secularized version of the spiritualists’ inquiry, aimed at reviving phonography itself. The overall objective of the chapter is to demonstrate how the reliability of the same technologies may be differently perceived depending on the users’ shared beliefs. Keywords:   phonography, sound studies, analog–digital transition, sonic hauntology, media and the supernatural

Introduction Since digital technologies became widespread in mass media consumption and circulation, we have been repeatedly warned not to “believe in bits.” The divide between analog and digital media has been often addressed as an ontological dichotomy, contrasting the alleged “natural” qualities of the former to the Page 1 of 16

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The Mediumship of the Digital supposedly “artificial” essence of the latter. The main argument supporting this point of view relies on a specific understanding of the concept of “index” as a material trace of a past event: whereas an analog recording is inherently indexical (i.e., materially grounded to the reality it represents), the representations provided by digital technologies, as “realistic” as they may appear, bring no trace or physical linkage to their subject. Thus, for instance, a Polaroid photograph might be presented as strong, factual evidence, while indexical fidelity is often not expected in digital pictures.1 Similar claims have been raised not only for photography but for every recording technology, from film to sound. The present chapter will discuss this dichotomy in respect to sound recording, entering in dialog with a seminal essay on the topic, Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory by Eric W. Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters. Writing in 1997, in the wake of the (p.56) popularization of the compact disc (CD) as a technical support for recorded music, the authors mourned the “death” of phonography as a technology and a social practice. Arguing for a severe distinction between the two recording processes in accordance with their different relations to the physical realm, they suggested that each process can give way to different metaphysical beliefs or secularized religious behaviors. According to this theory the CD, because it operates through a symbolic and conventional logic, erases the possibility of the sort of “religious behaviour” surrounding the fidelity culture of analog media. With no trace inscribed in it, digital recording presents no substantial unity, no “incarnation” of any past event and, as a consequence, leaves the listener with no transcendence to be faithful to. While aiming to discuss and review this thesis, the objective of this chapter is not to question it on an ontological basis; rather, I will point out that the task of “defining phonography” strongly depends on what we expect (and believe) it should serve, and on the essential functions we ascribe to it. More specifically, if we investigate sound recording in relation to the spiritualists’ discourse and practices, as a technical tool to explore a supernatural dimension, the reliability of this technology will depend on totally different criteria. The first two sections will thus provide a detailed account of Rothenbuhler and Peters’s vision (to which I will refer to as “the metaphysical inquiry”) and a brief historical overview of spiritualists’ uses of analog recording (“the spiritualist inquiry”). These sections of the chapter will formulate an alternative epistemological account of phonography from the points of view of the spiritualists’ inquiry, and will underline its discontinuities to our general understanding of the sound recording technologies. The second part of the chapter, then, will address the problem of the digital. I will consider the transition from analog to digital recorders in relation to electronic voice phenomena (EVP) chasing practices, and propose an alternative reading of a music genre known as sonic hauntology. This will allow me to challenge the “death of phonography” thesis from another perspective: if interpreted as a secularized version of the spiritualists’ inquiry, I Page 2 of 16

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The Mediumship of the Digital will argue, the digital sampling of the analog records could indeed be seen as a method to bring phonography “back to life”—and make it speak again through the mediumship of the digital. The chapter stems from the assumption that investigating uses of analog and digital technologies in the context of supernatural explorations can make us more aware of the fact that general conceptions of media are limited and heavily affected by our shared system of (secularized but religiously inspired) beliefs— even when we present them as neutral and strictly technological issues. In this sense, the ultimate goal of this chapter is to verify if the spiritualists’ experiences could help us formulate a different account of how (p.57) sound recording operates, and consequently provide a different epistemological ground for the distinction between analog and digital media.

The Cult of Fidelity and the Metaphysical Inquiry To Rothenbuhler and Peters, phonography is a limited period in our relation to music, which came to an end with the introduction of the digital. Notwithstanding the material differences and arbitrary choices that inform their success or failure, all analog recording systems that followed over time shared at heart what was a fundamentally natural process: the inscription, acoustic or electrical, is always a direct response to a physical vibration. The two theorists acknowledge that social conventions did exist and matter, but within the scope of analog media “nature rules.” On the contrary, in the digital realm, nature is simply off the table. The way in which music will be recorded and listened to depends on a convention; mathematicians and engineers come out with codes and circuits to break down the waveforms of music; sound is represented with a numerical symbol instead of a physical trace. There is no necessary linkage with the physical world, no “nature’s pencil” here: “digital recording is a measurement of a phenomenon, so digital playback must be a reconstruction.”2 Crucially, the authors compare the audiophiles’ conception of analog fidelity with a proper religious behavior—that is, “a set of practices on earth, associated with ideas about the cosmos, that bring us into contact with the transcendent.”3 This kind of belief, they argue, can be only “founded logically on an indexical medium.”4 The cult of sound fidelity is then interpreted as some sort of secularized faith that requires proofs or, better said, evidences—a term worth emphasizing here in accordance with its visual meanings. The theorists make direct reference to the grooves visible on the surface of the vinyl record and the microscopic signs on the magnetic tape. Those visible traces are incontrovertible, materially inscribed witnesses that what we hear as sound can be traced back to some kind of aural reality. On this basis, Rothenbuhler and Peters validate faith in analog phonography and, by contrast, dismiss the reliability of its digital equivalents. Because they operate with symbols whose

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The Mediumship of the Digital relationship to their referent is only due to convention, CDs are “not nearly so well suited to religious attitudes as the phonograph.”5 As I will try to demonstrate in the following section, examining the spiritualists’ use and reception of sound recording provides a very different picture of the role of indexical traces.6 According to Rothenbuhler and Peters, the metaphysical implications bounded to analog recording technologies, such as the chance of hearing voices speaking from the otherworld, are to be (p.58) considered, if not legitimate, at least explainable as long as they are tied to the presence of the indexical trace. However, for spiritualists, communicating with the undead through phonography aims to verify if they still have something to say now: a matter of real-time communication, more than of rewitnessing an event as it occurred in the past. Consequently, unlike audiophiles, they do not ground their beliefs on the self-evidence of the indexical trace. They aim, instead, at deciphering the signs they may gather from a technologically mediated listening so that they can clearly hear them and trace them back to a perceptible referent. Their inquiries in the supernatural realm are still concerned with indexes (as signs or proofs of existence), but these indexes do not constitute an evident proof. Moreover, they are not given once and for all: on the contrary, they are “an inherently ephemeral, doubtful, and distant sign that hinges on a split temporality” that, nevertheless, “establishes a forceful presenttense connection with its receiver.”7 To prove these points, I will provide a brief excursus on some aspects of the history of the relationship between analog audio technologies and the supernatural, from Edison’s experiments to communicate with spirits to Konstantin Raudive and Friedrich Jürgenson’s chase of EVP.

The Inaudible Made Audible: Redefining Phonography in the Supernatural Inquiry Since their earliest days, audio technologies led a parallel existence in the supernatural realm. As historians have well documented, the inventor of the phonograph, Thomas Alva Edison, devoted the last years of his life to developing a technological device that would allow him to communicate with the dead.8 In his belief, every living being on earth comes as an aggregate of dead matter and swarms of myriads of life units. Since these are invisible only because they stand beyond the thresholds of human perception, he concluded that “if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated— whichever term you want to use—by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.”9 An October 1933 article in the magazine Modern Mechanix reported the “Menlo Park Magician’s” “secret experiments whereby he sought to lure spirits from beyond the grave and trap them with super-sensitive instruments.”10 These experiments, witnessed only by a selected spiritualists’ crew, were held in a dark room and involved a photoelectric cell. A “tiny pencil of light, coming from a Page 4 of 16

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The Mediumship of the Digital powerful lamp, bored through the darkness and struck the (p.59) active surface of this cell, where it was transformed instantly into a feeble electric current. Any object, no matter how thin, transparent or small, would cause a registration on the cell if it cut through the beam.”11 One aspect worth underlining is that none of these entities was to be considered an inherently aural phenomenon, a proper “voice”: the life units Edison was looking for could have manifested in any form, and therefore they could also have been detected by a light-sensitive system. Nonetheless, he still hoped to make them audible by using an amplifying apparatus he described as a “valve”: “in exactly the same way as a megaphone increases many times the volume and carrying power of the human voice, so with my ‘valve’, whatever original force is used it is increased enormously for purposes of the registration of the phenomena.”12 The “registration of the phenomena” was here understood as a multistage process: while the photoelectric cell served as a measuring instrument to detect the existence of the life units, the “valve” amplifying system would allow, in a second stage, their volume to be increased and would make them aurally perceptible. In this sense, the Menlo Park experiments can be interpreted as the electrified version of some spiritualist practices already in use in late nineteenth-century spiritualism. Steven Connor notes the existence of a “spirit trumpet” in Victorian society that “comes increasingly to cohere with the technological means of amplification.”13 Apparently, Edison’s intention was precisely to pave a scientific ground for occultists’ practices, providing spiritualists with new techniques for their investigations. The inventor of the phonograph was in fact not so much disappointed with their beliefs as he was with their methods: as he wrote in his Diary, one simply cannot reasonably expect “ ‘spirits’ to waste their time operating such cumbrous, unscientific media as tables, chairs and the Ouija board with its letters.”14 With his efforts to provide them with a scientific method and a technical tool altogether, Edison implicitly suggested that supernatural investigators should put their trust in the power of electricity.15 These early attempts to communicate with invisible entities through audio technologies anticipated EVP, a practice entailing the detection of spirits’ voices through electronic devices, which was to become popular with the work of Raudive and Jürgenson in the mid-twentieth century. The search for EVP is not limited to sound recording technologies: because of their supposedly “ethereal” nature, spirits have often been chased also on radiofrequencies by provoking a reaction between different kinds of transduction.16 One of the sketches Edison made for his apparatus already featured both a radio antenna and a microphone,17 a combination later to be reassessed by Raudive’s experiments, which aimed at making audible “these voices from (p.60) ‘beyond’ [that] also cry out for contact within us and we fail to hear.”18 The method proposed by Raudive was to explore the radio transmitter waves’ “typical ‘rushing sound’ (or ‘white noise’) [ . . . ] without interference from radio programs.”19 While radio acted as a receiver here, the tape recorder did not simply store or document the Page 5 of 16

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The Mediumship of the Digital voices gathered from the ethereal frequencies; it was in fact instrumental for conveying energy coming from the receiver and translating it into audible patterns. According to Raudive, “many things are inaudible to our unaided ears, but a sensitive radio or microphone receives these subtle vibrations and creates electromagnetic fields on tape which are transformed into sound waves and made audible.”20 Whatever message the spirits might have delivered through radio waves, it could only be listened to in a second moment, for “only afterwards, when the tape is being played back, can one hear how the voices stand out against the background of any incidental fragments of radiotransmissions.”21 In EVP the spirits do speak through voices, albeit being differently tuned from normal speech. To hear them, one could take advantage of the technical specificities of the magnetic tape, which significantly eases hands-on approaches to the recorded material. For these reasons, both Raudive and Jürgenson gave readers advice on how to play back their tapes at a slower speed than normal, depending on the voices they were trying to decrypt.22 As a measure to increase their audibility, Raudive also suggests identifying on the tape where the voices were captured and re-recording on a new tape for five times: “it is a procedure that makes it easier to analyze the voices phoneme by phoneme, and statements can be verified with greater certainty. It is for this reason that a recording of, for instance, ten minutes, may take ten hours to analyze and verify.”23 It has been noted that inquirers into the supernatural strategically took advantage of the technological equipment to increase their credibility, gradually shifting from a direct spirit–human transmission model (whereby the sensitive’s body often acted as a human receiver) to a technically mediated form of mediumship (whereby they can take the more detached position of an external observer or auditor).24 In this regard, Raudive’s repeated claims for the objectivity of his methods and the findings of his research can be read in continuity with Edison’s will to equip nineteenth-century spiritualists with some scientific legitimacy. Nevertheless, as stated in the Dead Media Archive website, “the type of ‘passivity’ required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives [ . . . ] must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies.”25 (p.61) In summary, the historical examples of supernatural inquiries examined here present different technologies at work, different ghost-chasing techniques, and distinct—albeit similar—ideas about how a supernatural entity should reveal itself. What they do have in common, however, is the expectations they invest in phonography: attempting to record something that we are not supposed to perceive essentially equates to ascribing the medium a revelatory task instead of a merely transcriptive one. In this respect, the main difference with the metaphysical inquiry outlined in Rothenbuhler and Peters’s work consists in how Page 6 of 16

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The Mediumship of the Digital the moment of playback is conceived: while for audiophiles it can be “believed” as long as it traces back to an aural reality that has previously been spoken, for the spiritualists this represents the pivotal moment in which an aural reality is finally brought to light. If for the former, as Rothenbuthler and Peters put it, “what further sustains the religious attitude is the faith that on the other side of the transcription device is something natural, mysterious, cosmic, and beyond human devices,”26 the latter believe instead that a cosmic, mysterious, (super)natural force existing beyond our senses will eventually manifest itself on this part of the device. The very definition of “playback” has to be revised: for the spiritualists and parapsychologists examined here, sound recording does not allow some kind of sound event to be “played back,” but rather some imperceptible event to be played as sound. The shared goal of these spiritualist experimentations with audio technologies could be roughly synthesized as “to make the inaudible audible.” How did this change with the advent of digital sound? As shown in the next section, the emergence of digital media affected the technological means, but not the EVP chasers’ faith in sound recording as a tool for supernatural inquiry.

The Analog-to-Digital Transition As the historical overview shows, there are different ways to make the inaudible audible. In Edison’s case, the life units had to be detected before they could address our senses, and the hearing was possible only as a result of a technical transformation. The very existence of the phenomenon first had to be established by a light-sensitive system; later, its very audibility came as an “output” of the amplifying effect of the “valve.” In Raudive and Jürgenson’s approach to EVP, the task of making the inaudible audible consisted in a subtler operation: as the white noise of radio transmissions is something we can already perceive with our own ears, the promise of the tape recorder was to make it intelligible, helping the listener to detect recognizable patterns and meaningful sentences out of an otherwise undistinguishable noise. For this (p.62) reason, once the voices had been converted from ethereal transmission to the magnetic fields of the tape recorder, the chance of properly interpreting them was mostly a matter of manipulation—that is, the task of speed-shifting, playing backwards, and re-impressing the magnetic tape in order to isolate the allegedly ghostly voices and decode their hidden messages. Judging from how distinctions between analog and digital sound have often focused on the issue of belief, one might think that the turn to the digital would result in a markedly different approach to supernatural inquiries. Yet, practitioners who are still involved today in the chase for EVP with digital devices assign a similar function to digital sound as did Edison and earlier EVP researchers to analog recording.

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The Mediumship of the Digital As a matter of fact, the official website of the Association TransCommunications recommends the digital recorder as the best possible choice to detect technospiritual unities: “experience has shown that digital voice recorders work best for EVP, as compared to cassette and disk recorders. Digital voice recorders, operating at relatively low sample rates, produce more EVP than at higher sample rates.”27 The sensitivity of the digital lies then in its ability to detect (sample) voices at a lower frequency, beyond the thresholds of human perception. Moreover, they present an additional advantage, as they allow the use of spectrographic software. As the EVP hunter Brian Schill explains, “once installed these programs allow you open the sound files so that you can hear and view the sound and the sound waves in real time.”28 The reference to “real time” is quite meaningful in this context. The parapsychologist is looking for “evidence” of a different kind from the one considered by Rothenbuhler and Peters: evidence that relies less on the “trace” (i.e., the sign of some sound event that had taken place sometime before) than on the “spectrum” of sound—that is, a graphical conversion and an analytical account (a scan) of all the frequencies occurring in our listening time, including the ones we fail to perceive. If a disembodied speaking voice hides somewhere in those graphic representations, it must be actively searched for before being aurally recognizable. In this sense, technical transformation is key to the application of digital recording to spiritualist inquiries, exactly as it was central in the case of analog sound. The translation from sound to data and data to images can be considered as a transitional phase in the process of making the inaudible audible. At the same time, the elaboration of these data represents a sort of laboratory for the technically enabled spiritualist. As Schill states, always referring to software, (p.63) [M]any of these programs allow you to manipulate the sound files so that you may speed them up, slow them down, reverse them, stretch the sounds, change pitch and tone in the recording, and manipulate the EVP recording in other ways [ . . . ] On occasion in some EVP recordings there have been sounds that appeared to be unintelligible noises, almost sounding like a mechanical defect with the recorder. However, when the EVP track was slowed down, stretched or even reversed there were clear and understandable messages within the sounds.29 Precisely because a simple accurate reproduction of a physical event could never be enough for the purposes of an inquiry in the supernatural realm, the EVP hunter may choose to intervene on the recording to make it properly audible—a practice resembling the manipulative techniques applied by Raudive and Jürgenson on the magnetic tape.

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The Mediumship of the Digital The same epistemological tenets we have just outlined here are discussed by Rothenbuhler and Peters in relation to early professional audio-editing software. The users would find themselves confronted with the possibility of translating something else (i.e., data) into sound or into graphical representations, and of “micromanipulating” these data through an interface in the shape of a sound wave. Both these technical features are interpreted by the authors of Defining Phonography as “distinctly ‘digital’ attitudes toward recorded sound.”30 Of course, they do know and acknowledge that the possibility of transforming sound into something else (e.g., electrical impulses) and of manipulating recorded material largely predates the advent of digital technologies—as well as I am aware that physically manipulating a tape is not quite the same operation as editing through a virtual interface. What seems to worry them most about the new technological realm, however, is the “nightmare of lost nature” spelled by “the manipulability characteristic of digital recording and playback.”31 Yet, whether they find themselves at work with digital or analog technologies, inquirers in the supernatural realm could not be satisfied with an “analog of the original sound.” From their perspective, there is always already “something else” hidden in sound that we did not hear before and that will be hopefully carved out and transformed in something we can finally listen to. In this sense, the EVPs are not given once and for all; rather, they come as a result of the whole detective/transformative/manipulative process. Unlike the metaphysical paradigm, the supernatural inquiry not only admits but indeed requires the intervention of a human hand.

(p.64) Listening to the Voice of Dead Media Electronic voices hide everywhere. In the aforementioned quotation, EVP hunter Brian Schill explained how he took advantage of digital software to handle what appeared to be noise due to a “mechanical defect with the recorder” and extracted “clear and understandable messages.” A secular version of this practice may be found in what is usually referred to as sonic hauntology, a musical sub-genre that heavily relies on (digital) samples of old recordings to achieve a “spectral” quality for its sound textures. By the end of the twentieth century, pioneering experimental musicians such as William Kirby (a.k.a. The Caretaker) and William Basinski began making music by sampling old vinyl recordings or by endlessly looping ancient magnetic tapes. The music these records originally featured did not interest them as much as the noises coming from the old analog records’ surface. Mark Fisher has borrowed the notion of “hauntology” from Derrida’s Specters of Marx to describe this tendency of using the “abstract soundscape of crackle, fizz and noise”32 as an integral part of their sound. In his interpretation, hauntological artists foreground what in recorded music usually gets repressed—that is, the material existence of the recording, “the grainy materiality of sound, sound as a medium in itself rather than a material carrier of Meaning.”33

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The Mediumship of the Digital In this regard, sonic hauntology provides an additional entry point to challenge the theory of the death of phonography in the wake of the digital, creating a context where old phonographic media are, in a way, “resurrected” by the agency of the digital itself. It is safe to say that most of the musical productions labeled as “hauntological” surfaced at a time, between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when digital recording had already outdone its analog ancestors both as a technical support for commercial dissemination and as means for the production of recorded music. By that time, because of their gradual descent into obsolescence and seemingly “announced death,” vinyl records and magnetic tapes ran the risk of being added to the Dead Media database proposed by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling.34 Following Rothenbuhler and Peters’s periodization, in fact, the advent of the CD and the popularization of digital software ratified the beginning of a “post-phonographic era of digital recording, storage, and playback.”35 Leaving aside the objections one could make against such a strictly linear conception of media evolution,36 the case of hauntological sound shows the possibility of a “spectral” survival of the analog. In fact, the old records’ white noise characterizing most of sonic hauntology was defined by Mark Katz in a different context as “the phonograph effect”: “the foreground crackling offers a sense of time, evoking the unspecified past of the vinyl age. [ . . . ] It was long deemed an unwanted addition (p.65) to the phonographic experience by both the industry and the listeners, but ironically became a valued and meaningful sound when digital technology finally eliminated it.”37 In this sense, the phonographic effect extensively used by hauntological artists represents an even worse sin against the metaphysical cult for analog phonography. Not only does digital recording mystify the physical nature of sound by offering an artificial substitute of the indexical trace, it also emulates the physicality of analog media themselves. How does, therefore, the digital operate once confronted with the materiality of “tangible” records? Let us take the case of the British rock musician Steven Wilson and the Ghosts on Magnetic Tapes album he released under the pseudonym of Bass Communion in 2004. Notwithstanding the title, the sonic source material sampled in the album came from different kinds of analog recordings. As Wilson recalled in an interview: I collected some source material from recordings of old 78 rpm records that I found in my parents’ attic. So I was playing these records and I couldn’t even play them at 78, I was having to play them at 45, so I couldn’t even play them at the right speed, so what I was getting off the record was hardly any of the music at all, it was almost all the surface noise and the crackles from the record because they were so old and so scratched, and those crackles and this kinda ghostly sound of the music coming through from underneath the crackle created something in my mind. It almost felt like the dead trying to communicate through the noise, which led me on to that whole concept of ghosts trying to communicate Page 10 of 16

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The Mediumship of the Digital with the living world through the medium of recorded music or recordings.38 Although he acknowledges being inspired by Raudive’s experiments, which he found in an EVP anthology CD entitled The Ghost Orchid (1999), Wilson did not simply compose his music by sampling the voices he found on tapes or by simulating the vinyl “noises and hisses” through digital software. Instead, he reenacted the whole process of unearthing spirits’ voices as a compositional practice. The recordings he employed as basic materials were not “haunted” in themselves. His “inquiry” began with some manipulation, aiming to extract unintended noises produced by vinyl records and magnetic tapes and to isolate them and make them part of the sonic texture. According to the official press release for the album, “Steven used modern computer technology to elongate the sounds and slow them down so that they sounded like subterraneous drones.”39 The musician provided a more detailed account on (p.66) how he digitally layered, filtered, processed, and manipulated the samples he took from his reworking of analog records, making clear that “hardly any of the sounds are things you can really relate back to that, but almost all the sounds on the record are various processed versions of those crackles.”40 Crucially, digital sampling of analog records is not necessarily limited to what they originally meant to record (i.e., their trace or inscription). While retracing sonic hauntology to the longstanding “spectral undercurrent” of phonography, Simon Reynolds establishes an analogy between musical recording and “what supernaturalists call ‘the residual ghost’,” meaning a kind of ghost that is “usually unaware of change in its surroundings and continues to play the same scene repeatedly.”41 For being tied to a fundamentally indexically driven understanding of sound recording (where the only ghost we are allowed to believe in is a human presence who has previously been captured and inscribed in another material form to be later played back), such an account fails to consider that the mediation of the technical support through which we are currently listening to these “phonographic revenants” is often a digital record.42 The samples employed by Wilson are better understood as ghosts from a “residual” medium—that is, a digital scan and a sonic rendition of obsolete recordings’ physical materiality.43 Following Wolfgang Ernst’s materialist understanding of sonic media: “the noise, the scratch of the wax cylinder, is the pure message of medium; in between, the human voice is literally incorporated. But what has continuously been preserved by analog recording technologies becomes quantified in the transfer to digital recording.”44 In our case, this quantification is extended to the entire sonic spectrum uttered by an old phonographic record when is played back, including unintended noises. Hauntological artists take advantage of this quantification to re-elaborate the sonic qualities embedded in the material existence of analog recording as source materials for making music. Just like it happens in the supernatural Page 11 of 16

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The Mediumship of the Digital inquiry, the white noise can be investigated in search of the voices hidden in the machine. The Ghosts on Magnetic Tape album, then, makes the inaudible audible in more than one sense: it foregrounds what it was previously considered an unwanted accident while listening to recorded music, as suggested by Katz, but it also makes the recordings’ physical materiality “sound” differently, by detecting implicit sonic patterns in it, manipulating them, and finally transfiguring them into music. Obsolete media, albeit considered dead, are still able to speak in the present, and to say something new. It follows, as mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, that the idea of a phonograph speaking “from the other side” can be interpreted in radically (p. 67) different ways. It is one thing to have the chance to hear the recorded voice of the deceased, but it is another to claim to have heard the undead speaking through recording. In a secularized fashion, digital sampling allows us to do the same with (un)dead media instead of (un)dead humans: thanks to the mediumship of digital recording, phonography speaks from the other side with its own, disembodied voice.

Conclusion: The Mediumship of the Digital Identifying the indexical trace as the defining character of the phonographic medium equates to limiting our understanding of sound recording as byproduct of a prior event. When Rothenbuhler and Peters state that “analog recording is, in essence, a trace of the phenomenon such that analog playback can be, in essence, a reproduction,”45 they implicitly exclude any substantial active mediation on the part of the technical medium. According to this theory, we are allowed to believe what we hear from a playback device as long as it is inherently connected to the otherness of a past time, or, “to speak theologically, its incarnation.”46 As a great body of work in sound studies had later pointed out, there is no original and no preexisting autonomous event outside of the overall reproduction process, and every recording is a necessarily partial and prospective representation of the “natural sound event.”47 On my part, I will stress that the “fidelity” interpretation fosters the idea of record listening as a surrogate of live listening, instead of thinking it as an event in its own right and with its own temporality. Whether we are observant audiophiles or not, we are still forced to evaluate every recording in exclusive relationship to its referent, to compare every mediated experience to its nonmediated counterpart. Put simply, we are asked to believe that our experience is, in a way, connected to the real thing. As I demonstrated through the example of supernatural inquiries, for the spiritualists there is no playback and no original/natural phenomenon: every meaningful sound they gather during their investigations comes as the result of a multistage process of detection, translation, and manipulation through audio technologies. As far as they are concerned, not only the digital ones but all of the recording technologies provide “a measurement of the phenomenon,” and all the Page 12 of 16

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The Mediumship of the Digital playback moments “must be a reconstruction.”48 Every tool can be suitable for spiritualist beliefs, as long as it operates under the thresholds of our sensorial perception—detecting, calculating, and transducing to sound mysterious ”forces” or “entities” we could not see or hear otherwise. The deployment of audio recording in a supernatural inquiry is aimed to construct an aural reality retrospectively, in absence of a self-evident, physically (p.68) manifest one. Insofar as a situated living presence is missing, spiritualist investigators who work with technical devices are encouraged to look closer at the physicality of sonic vibrations and to dig deeper into the materiality of technology, going beyond what they can hear and putting emphasis on (and faith in) the operational, processual nature of technological mediation. Their practices stem from the unspoken assumption that in sound recordings there is more to listen to than normally meets the ear. As the sonic hauntology case illustrates, the material existence of phonography itself can be revealed as an aural dimension that would have probably remained unnoticed if not for the “mediumship” of the digital. For those among us who are neither audiophiles nor spiritualists, notions such as “fidelity” and “revelation” can be thought of in relation to sound recording only in metaphorical terms. Nevertheless, the way in which we choose to conceive technological media informs our expectations and uses of them. Whether we believe in its existence or not, the task of finding “the ghost in the machine” could serve as a useful conceptual laboratory to better understand how these machines actually work.

Notes:

(*) This chapter is humbly dedicated to the memory of Mark Fisher. May his ghost haunt us forever. (1.) José Van Dijck, “Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory,” Visual Communication 7, no. 1 (2008): 57–76. (2.) Eric W. Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters, “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory,” The Musical Quarterly 81, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 250. (3.) Ibid., 253. (4.) Ibid., 246. (5.) Ibid., 253–4. (6.) Ibid., 260.

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The Mediumship of the Digital (7.) Kris Paulsen, “The Index and the Interface,” Representations 122, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 85. (8.) See, among others, Douglas Kahn, “Death in the Light of the Phonograph: Raymond Russel’s Locus Solus,” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 69–103. (9.) Thomas Alva Edison, The Diary and Sundry Observations, ed. Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 221. (10.) “Edison’s Own Secret Spirit Experiments,” Modern Mechanix (October 1933), 33. (11.) Ibid., 35. (12.) Edison, The Diary, 205. (13.) Steven Connor, “The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology and the ‘Direct Voice’,” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (Haundmills-London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999), 213. (14.) Edison, The Diary, 205. (15.) The use of electrical technologies to facilitate communications with the afterworld was attempted through other means before Edison’s experiments. See, for instance, Richard J. Noakes, “Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World,” British Journal for the History of Science 32, no. 4 (1999): 421–59. (16.) On the spiritualist’s use of radiofrequencies see also Anthony Enns, “Psychic Radio: Sound Technologies, Ether Bodies and Spiritual Vibrations,” The Senses and Society 3, no. 2 (2008): 137–52. (17.) Philippe Badouin, “Machine ‘Necrophoniques’: Thomas Edison et la voix des morts,” Syntone (19 September 2014), http://syntone.fr/machinesnecrophoniques-thomas-edison-et-la-voix-des-morts/. (18.) Kostantin Raudive, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication With the Dead (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1971), 87. (19.) Ibid., 87. (20.) Ibid., 27. (21.) Ibid., 88.

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The Mediumship of the Digital (22.) Friedrich Jürgenson, Sprechfunk mit Verstorbenen (Berlin: Broschiert, 1967), 28. (23.) Raudive, Breakthrough, 86. (24.) See Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media (State College: Pennsylvania University Press, 2016), 57–61. (25.) “Electronic Voice Phenomena,” Dead Media Archive, http:// cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/ Electronic_Voice_Phenomena. (26.) Rothenbuthler and Peters, “Defining Phonography,” 254. (27.) Tom and Lisa Butler, “Selecting an Audio Recorder,” Association TransCommunication (September 2016), http://atransc.org/recording-evp/. (28.) Brian Schill, Stalking Darkness: Surveillance and Investigation Techniques for Paranormal Investigators (New York: IRPF, 2008), 400. (29.) Ibid. (30.) Rothenbuhler and Peters, “Defining Phonography,” 247. (31.) Ibid., 252. (32.) Mark Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology,” Dance Cult 5, no. 2 (2013): 46. (33.) Ibid., 44. (34.) Bruce Sterling, “The Dead Media Manifesto” (1993), http:// www.deadmedia.org. (35.) Rothenbuhler and Peters, “Defining Phonography,” 243. (36.) Different conceptions of “old media” are at stake here. While Rothenbuhler and Peters forecasted the discarding of analog phonography in respect to technological change, sonic hauntologists tend to “resurrect” tapes and vinyl records as material artifacts. See Simone Natale, “There Are No Old Media,” Journal of Communication 66, no. 4 (2016): 585–603. (37.) Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 146. (38.) Quoted in Geoff Kieffer, “Chasing Ghosts in the Dark: A Interview with Steven Wilson Regarding Bass Communion,” Carbon Nation (2 October 2004), Page 15 of 16

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The Mediumship of the Digital https://web.archive.org/web/20080430021827/http://www.swhq.co.uk/ bass_communion_interview.cfm. (39.) Stephen Humphries, “Bass Communion: Ghosts on Magnetic Tape,” http:// stevenwilsonhq.com/sw/back-catalogue-bass-communions-ghosts-on-magnetictape-2/. (40.) Quoted in Kieffer, “Chasing Ghosts in the Dark.” (41.) Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 213. (42.) In the case of Ghosts on Magnetic Tape, a CD. (43.) I am referring here to the notion of “residual media” proposed by Charles R. Acland, ed., Residual Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). (44.) Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeography: Method and Machine Versus the History and Narrative of Media,” in Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013), 69. (45.) Rothenbuhler and Peters, “Defining Phonography,” 252. (46.) Ibid., 258. (47.) See, among others, Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 219; Rick Altman, “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 65– 86. (48.) Rothenbuhler and Peters, “Defining Phonography,” 250.

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I Play, Therefore I Believe

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

I Play, Therefore I Believe Religio and Faith in Digital Games Vincenzo Idone Cassone Mattia Thibault

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords Religious topics are increasingly common in video games, frequently addressing issues such as spirituality and transcendence. Yet this is only the surface of more complex phenomena, deeply tied to religious experience itself in interactive digital simulations. The aim of the chapter is to highlight the implications of the ties between religion and belief dynamics in video games. First, it focuses on different kinds of player–game belief relationships, which take the forms of agreements (symmetrical) and self-givings (asymmetrical). Then, it addresses the process of institution of belief: the necessity for players not only to pretend to believe in the digital world, but to experience the act of believing itself while playing. Lastly, it presents a series of case studies (Planescape Torment, Nier: Automata, The Talos Principle, and The Stanley Parable) to show different peculiar dynamics involved in the relationships between religio, belief, and the ludic experience. Keywords:   simulation, belief, agreement, self-giving, video games, religio, institution of belief, semiotics

Introduction Religious topics and themes are a constant presence in the history of games. They have become more and more common in games in general, and in digital games in the last decades. Key themes, such as spirituality and the relationships with transcendence, appear frequently in digital games, both mainstream and Page 1 of 16

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I Play, Therefore I Believe indie. The technological development of the medium and the possibility to simulate complex worlds merges with long-term processes of representation of supernatural and spirituality in the modern media. The presence of religion in games, however, should be considered only as part of a deeper and more complex process, in which the experience of religion and its cultural messages interact with technological and social innovation. The aim of this chapter is to highlight the interactions between belief and disbelief dynamics in digital games and to investigate their effects on the relationships between players and games. We will focus on how games establish a process of “suspension of disbelief” while at the same time advancing a symmetrical and collateral effect: that of “institution of belief.” This indicates the necessity for players to accept what they perceive and interact with not only as possible, but as the only possible existence within the (ludic) world. (p.74) Most games do not focus on this process, using it to a limited degree only in order to make the player trust the game interface and experience. However, other games put this process at the very heart of their experience, showing how the act of playing itself is an act of creation, establishment, and alteration of belief. We will use the Latin word religio to indicate the feelings and anthropological needs and customs that precede actual religions (which are social forms of organization) and make them possible, when not necessary, for the sociocultural organization. Following Benveniste’s etymology, religio is intended more as a subjective disposition to believe than as a set of existing norms and beliefs.1 This chapter focuses on the context of Abrahamic religions, mainly for two reasons: first, Western religions play a major role in the fictional representations and themes of digital games (both in Western and Eastern productions); second, the simulative nature of digital games is deeply linked to the traditional Abrahamic themes: religio, belief, and the idea of transcendence.

Institution of Belief The dimensions of player–game interaction in digital games involve belief in various degrees. To a certain extent all games depend on a minimum amount of trust in the system in order to give birth to the contract of the “magic circle,” a term coined by Joan Huizinga that indicates the semiotic separation between the reality of play and the reality outside play.2 However, some games exist that put these experiences and dynamics at the very core of their experience. Despite featuring more or less explicit reference to existing religion, the experience of the player while playing those games is, by itself, deeply rooted in religio, as the cultural and social realization of the process of “believing.” A key distinction can thus be traced between the traditional process labeled suspension of disbelief (common in fictional stories and narratives and extensively studied by literary studies and semiotics) and the collateral phenomenon, which we propose to call institution of belief.3 While the latter is more rarely investigated, it lies at the Page 2 of 16

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I Play, Therefore I Believe heart of both the interaction with digital worlds and the dynamics involving religion and faith. Suspension of disbelief, according to Coleridge and later critics, is the process of believing something surreal or fictional, suspending our critical faculties that would label these fictions as false and impossible. In media and fiction, suspension of disbelief makes the boundaries of our belief weaker, making it possible to temporarily put them on hold in order to fictionally accept possible new events, worlds, rules, and stories. Suspension of disbelief (p.75) is required to understand and appreciate utopian or dystopian narratives, parallel worlds, hypothetical scenarios, contradictory perspectives, or even non-sense in jokes, without needing to test or put into doubts our beliefs and knowledge of the world. Yet, as noted by Umberto Eco, fictional texts (written, pictorial, filmic, and ludic ones) do not simply ask the users to believe anything, nor to suspend any kind of knowledge or belief.4 On the contrary, they shape “possible worlds,” semiotic fictional planes of existence that can be related and compared in a more or less coherent way with our knowledge, experience, values, and belief (our “encyclopedia”). As a result, they act as lazy machines, asking us, as readers/users, to fill the voids in the plot and to expect/accept a limited degree of inconsistencies with our world/encyclopedia. And moreover, they may make the users reshape or alter their previous belief. This collateral phenomenon (institution of belief) can be observed in the traditional role of ancient myths and epic poems, in folktales and children’s stories, in historical novels, and, above all, in institutionalized religions and their profession/declaration of faith. Such texts stimulate us to select and accept, among a range of possible worlds we can imagine or interact with, a specific one, and to alter our understanding of the world based on it, instituting new individual or collective beliefs. As a result, all the other possible worlds are judged in relation to their coherence to our accepted reality. That is also what happens with perlocutory acts in rituals and religious traditions (“I believe in one God, almighty Father . . .”), through the acceptance and reiteration of specific gestures and performances that are assumed to be emblematic. As noted by Natale, the strict opposition between religious phenomena such as spiritualism and the worlds of fictions is overestimated, as shown by the strong links between the inception of movie media and Victorian spiritualism.5 Certain texts, and those related to religious topics especially, interact with the reader, shaping both disbelief and belief, as shown by Walsh-Pasulka in her study on the spiritual outcomes and reception of movies such as The Exorcist or The Passion.6 Through these braided structures of beliefs and disbelief, as observed by Juri Lotman and Boris Uspenski, communities give shape and boundaries to their knowledge and produce cultural self-representations.7

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I Play, Therefore I Believe In general, the vast majority of games make players suspend the apparent unbelievability of their world-building and storytelling. This allows players to participate emotionally in the game even if this presents scenarios and situations that they would not accept as realistic or possible in their everyday life. There are, however, games that embody peculiar ludic experiences, based on the process of institution of belief. The core of this games makes players put into doubt their beliefs, modify them, or create a new system of beliefs during the ludic experiences. These beliefs may be in relation to the (p.76) “reality” of the game (the truth behind the experience and the simulation, the boundaries of freedom, and the power of the game designer) or in relation to the nature of otherness in games (are other players, agents, or stories “real?”). The ludic experience itself become a paradigmatic setting for reflections on the nature of fiction and truth, for the experience of leap of faiths or to test our own convictions and perspectives. In this context, games approach the domain of rituals. While the frontiers among games, playfulness, and rituals are complex and articulated, Lévi-Strauss famously suggested that games and rituals imply opposed understanding of human agency and the acceptance of human rules: while games tend to create a setting for the exercise of freedom, in which different actions are accepted and permitted, rituals tend to select, among the countless possibilities for human action, specific acts, performances, and results, charging them with symbolic power and making them significant and necessary.8 In a similar way, the shift from suspension of disbelief to institution of belief in games make our ludic experience a unique event, different from all the previous ones, in which our actions are charged with special meaning and significance. This process, beside and beyond the explicit mention of religions in digital games, can be considered a key point for the overlapping of games and religions. Through the digital experiences players are able to reenact and experience doubt and faith, the dichotomy between autonomy and subjugation, the importance of leaps of faith, and the limits of our knowledge and experience (Fig. 4.1). (p.77)

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I Play, Therefore I Believe Play and Transcendence

Figure 4.1. Belief-based games between The twin dynamics of games and rituals. suspension of disbelief and institution of belief are, then, the first element of religio within digital games. In order to move from belief to faith, however, another element is needed: trust—and more specifically, trust toward a force that escapes our control. The idea of faith that we have described as a component of religio is something more than a simple adherence to some sort of credo, and it encompasses an abandonment toward the higher power whose existence we believe in. In other words, faith is a combination of belief and trust rooted in the idea of transcendence. The fact that digital games are actually able to portray and induce faith dynamics in their players, therefore, means that they can potentially propose to them a form of transcendence. In order to investigate the relationship between games and transcendence, we have to focus on the forms of agreement that players have to engage with when playing: at the base of every game there is an implicit pact or agreement. First, an agreement that takes place between the players and the game (the players agree to accept and respect the rules, the objectives and the fictitiousness of the narrative—Apter defines it a “paraludic attitude”);9 simultaneously, an agreement bonds the players themselves (who assume their responsibilities, communicate their playful intentions to one another, and agree to “play fair,” as noted by Bateson).10 These agreements are necessary to create a so-called magic circle. The institution of a magic circle seals the agreement between players and game, configuring the latter as a fictitious activity based on rules that will be confirmed by the very fact that the players respect and reproduce them. These agreements allow games to model trust. To make an agreement at least two different sides are always necessary—in our case players and game— negotiating in the attempt to find a balance between their wills. One can imagine, then, a spectrum built according to the negotiating power that each side is able to wield (Fig. 4.2). In the case of games we will have, on one side, play activities in which the players have complete power over the rules—such that they would even be able to make them up while playing. This is the “Calvinball” sort of games, typical of childhood play.11 On the other side, we will have games whose rules are absolute and nonnegotiable, up to the most minute detail. In a professional game of chess, players move within strict regulations that govern potential moves on the chessboard as well as the time available for each player’s turns. All forms of play can be organized between these two extremes, according to the power relationships between players and game. This spectrum is very similar to the distinction theorized by Caillois (p.78) around the concepts of paidia and ludus12: on the one hand, we have freer and more creative forms of play, and on the other more regulated and institutionalized Page 5 of 16

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I Play, Therefore I Believe games. It is in the tension between the two extremes that one might find the real essence of each game. Within this spectrum, moreover, we can postulate different positions according to the imbalance of power between the two parties. In particular, Juri Lotman, the founder of the semiotics of culture, proposed the positions of “agreement” and “self-giving” while describing the different semiotic dimensions and processes connecting humans with religious transcendence (see, again, Fig. 4.2).13 According to Lotman, sometimes narratives and folklore depict the relationship with supernatural powers as a negotiation between equals, in which humans and godly beings form an agreement. This is the case, for instance, of religious offerings in which the divinity is believed to be bound to deliver what is asked for, if the right offers are made, or of the many “deals with the devil” so common in medieval folk narratives. On the other side, Abrahamic religions propose an all-powerful deity, which means that any relationship with it is extremely unbalanced.14 In this case, all that believers can do is surrender to the transcendental power, give themselves completely to it, and have faith in it. This religious model is profoundly inscribed in our culture, and the fact that it can be successfully applied to the forms of games we have described (and specifically those that we have defined as pertaining to ludus) is one of the elements that makes the relationship between highly regulated games and religion so

Figure 4.2. Agreement continuum.

strong. Digital games, moreover, are even closer to the idea of self-giving than analog games. The control that the players have on the material aspects of (p.79) the latter are generally superior to what they can exert on digital games. The readers of a game book can easily go back and forth in the volume, keep bookmarks, and even try to reverse-engineer the story starting from an ending of their choice. A digital game player has far less control on when to save the game, or what portion of it to access.15 Changing the rules of an analog game can be a simple matter of negotiation between players, while doing the same with a digital game can require altering its programming. The relationship of the players with the information system of a digital game, then, is certainly interactive—both are needed for the game to happen—but also absolutely unbalanced.

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I Play, Therefore I Believe The experience of the players, furthermore, is mainly mediated by the information and instructions that they are given by the game itself, which can easily trick or misguide them. In order to play, the players must give themselves to the game, have faith in it, trust it and accepting what it offers. In this way, digital games replicate the dynamics that are typical of the processes of religio: the respect and adherence to a series of norms embedded in traditions, beliefs, and rituals.

Reality as We Know It Planescape Torment

One of the games in which these processes are evident is Planescape Torment (developed by Black Isle), a WRPG (Western role-playing game) published in 1999, based on an advanced Dungeons and Dragons role-playing system. The creators aimed to shape a fantasy game free of the traditional tropes (fights and adventures, dungeons, evil lords) and characters (elves, dwarfs, dragons, etc.) while at the same time pushing to the limits the digital role-play experience to reach new horizons of narrative depth, meaning, and experience. The universe of Planescape is composed by many “Planes of existence,” arranged in a set of concentric circles whose shape and physics greatly differ from our world. At the center of these Planes lies the city of Sigil, a crossroad that can be reached only through special portals that connect it to the multiverse. The universe of Planescape, much more than typical role-playing games’ fantasy religions, is based on the deep link between belief and reality, in a similar way to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods novel: the act of believing shapes the world, creates gods, and alters reality and life itself. The power attributed to divine or semidivine entities is the result of the collective faith and belief of their followers, who shape them and make them real; such as Dustmen, who believe in “True death,” a state beyond phenomenal life and death in which people abandon passions and dissolve into nothingness, or the Society of (p.80) Sensations, which believes that sensory experiences are the purest gift of life itself and need to be “collected” and shared to let individuals reach “fullness.” In Planescape Torment (PT from now), players embody the Nameless one, an individual who cannot die but instead loses his memories each time he suffers a fatal blow. The Nameless one wakes up in the Dustmen Mortuary and undertakes a journey to discover his true identity and understand why ghostly shadows chase him wherever he goes. During this journey, he will come to terms with the legacy of his previous incarnations (among them a guilty man, a ruthless plotter, and a madman), carving his own path and making explicit his beliefs and view of the world. As players progress through PT, they experience the main difference from traditional role-playing games. Those games generally ask the player to take part in quests and adventures, setting up a preexisting meaning and objectives Page 7 of 16

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I Play, Therefore I Believe that players are supposed to trust and abide by. In contrast, in PT the very game asks the players to give their own meaning and purpose to the story, by asking them to make clear their beliefs and their creed. Since in the world of Planescape, as mentioned, beliefs have real consequences, the players are able to experience the outcomes of their institution of belief, wavering between selfgiving and agreements. This process is depicted by a playful mise en abyme: one of the companions of the player is a githzerai, Dakkon, a former follower of the philosophy of the Teachings of Zerthimor who is now in a crisis of faith. Players may ask to become a disciple of Zerthimon by studying its sacred texts and progress through its stages by being judged by Dakkon. In this way, they can eventually find the very same contradiction that put their companion into crisis or, depending on their attitudes, even find a new interpretation of the sacred scriptures that leads to a sort of new enlightenment for both. Moreover, the path of the Nameless one to find his identity stimulates players to put into question the very meaning of the planes and the “possible worlds” of the game. For instance, the mighty witch Ravel Puzzlewear asks players to answer this question, which is a recurring enigma during the whole game: “What can change the nature of a man?” More than 15 answers are possible, but no solution is wrong. The witch is not asking a deadly riddle but wants players to share their beliefs with her. Other digital role-playing games allow players to act freely and embody whoever they want in a fictional setting, whose rules and boundaries need to be accepted, even in their strangeness, incoherencies, or vagueness (triggering the traditional process of suspension of disbelief). PT instead ask for a further step: the main character is a blank slate onto which numberless personalities, stories, and beliefs can be projected. But whatever the choice, (p.81) players must make their understanding of the world and their system of belief explicit. This contributes to make that fictional world more real, at least within the boundaries of the game. Nameless one can be a good-willed sage, a ruthless warrior, a plotter, a man burdened by regret, a naive one, or a crazy one. Each of the past fictional lives changes the perspective on the game, the relationships with the past, and the meaning of the journey. In this way, the whole system of beliefs developed by the player during the game make the fictional world exist. The final lines of the game highlight this whole journey: If there is anything I have learned in my travels across the Planes, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear—whatever you believe can change the nature of a man . . . I’ve seen belief move cities, make men stave off death, and turn an evil hag’s heart half-circle. This entire Fortress has been constructed from belief. Belief damned a woman, whose heart clung to the hope that another loved her when he did not. Once, it made a man seek immortality and

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I Play, Therefore I Believe achieve it. And it has made a posturing spirit think it is something more than a part of me. Nier: Automata and Nier: Gestalt

A similar process takes place in the game series Nier, through the recent Nier: Automata (developed by Platinum Games and published in 2016) and the previous title, Nier: Gestalt (developed by Cavia in 2010), both Japanese roleplaying games directed by Yoko Taro. In the Nier saga, the relationships between the player, the other characters, and the world are grounded on the dichotomy between experience/knowledge and belief/faith. The first Nier starts in 2049. At the beginning of a new ice age, people start being affected by a strange disease; humanity is swiftly dying. In the prologue, a father tries to run away with his daughter. Many centuries later, humanity somewhat survived the apocalypse but regressed to a state similar to a Middle Age fantasy setting. The members of the few villages of survivors are chased by strange groups of shadows (called shades) that surround them. The player embodies a human expert hunter who is trying to find a cure for his sick daughter. In the sequel, set many centuries later, humanity took shelter on the moon in order to save itself from a new enemy, machines: industrial robots that have gone rogue, acting unpredictably. By playing as 2B and 9S, members of an elite android force tasked to destroy machines, players are sent to the Earth in order to reclaim humankind’s home. (p.82) The world of Nier represents humans or simil-humans (such as androids or clones) in contexts in which traditional religions are extinct. Survivors are pragmatists, relying on few certainties and acting on the basis of what they believe is just and true. With inner and outer motivations, the players are tasked to battle against enemies in order to save people who are dear to them. However, the world of Nier does not deny the possibility of transcendence. On the contrary, it also seems to play with the subjective beliefs, criticizing the results of these beliefs and frustrating them in many of the multiple endings available for both games. For instance, in the original Nier, the main character can finally defeat the army of shades and kill their evil overlord, destroying it. But just when players think they have finally saved humankind, they discover that they have actually sentenced it to death. That is, the shades were the actual souls of real humans, whose bodies were destroyed by the previous apocalypse. In order to save themselves, scientists created some body clones (called gestalts), which souls were meant to use at a later time to reincarnate. However, these gestalts started to develop their own conscience and mind, making it impossible for the soul to merge with them, driving them to despair and making them mad. The main character of the game and all the other humans are, de facto, gestalts: artificial humans with minds but no souls. Unconsciously fearing that shades would take over, gestalts started to attack and kill them. In the “new game plus,” it is possible to replay the whole story while being able to understand the language of shades.16 Thus, players discover that none of their supposed enemies wanted to kill them but that, on the other side, the player had Page 9 of 16

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I Play, Therefore I Believe ruthlessly killed countless children, fathers, mothers, families, and so on. All in all, the Overlord at the end of the game is nothing but the father at the beginning of the prologue and the true soul of the main character’s body. Similarly, in Nier: Automata, the apparent knowledge and beliefs of players are shaken to their core while playing the game. As an android, 2B is regarded as a being with a mind, conscience, and self-perception, in contrast with machines, which can only simulate these things. During the last part of the game, androids discover that humans are already extinct; however, in order not to surrender to a purposeless life, androids created a mission for themselves, and mostly “a god worth dying for,” since the battle against machines is a vicious cycle in which androids continuously die and lose their memories. Eventually, players may discover that androids are not different from machines but are only slightly more evolved artificial beings. Machines are capable of thoughts and individuality themselves, as shown by Pascal, the head of a machine orphanage who teaches nonviolent, egalitarian principles to children automata. Crushed between a meaningless cause and a fake identity, (p.83) players need to provide motivations and aims for the androids, building up new systems of belief from the ruins of the previous ones. Depending on their choices, players can create different endings and new perspectives on this existential drama, eventually escaping the cycle of useless death and fights to provide hope and faith for those human doppelgängers in search of humanity. The Nier games stage a clash between the experience and perception of digitally constructed worlds and the implicit systems of knowledge and belief. These games put players in the avatar of human beings, making them fight against humanoid monsters or grotesque imitations of humans, enforcing the belief that they are fighting for the “good” or “human” side—that is, “us.” Consequently, as players we are encouraged to understand the feelings of the main character due to our shared humanity. While during the game some events may put this interpretation into doubt, players would easily ignore such hints as they rely on their experience and cultural expectations. Only at the end, through the plot twists, is there a complete reversal of the initial perspective. As a result, players are given the responsibility to provide new systems of value by playing on behalf of nonhuman, soulless individuals like the ones they believed they were fighting against. As such, the relationship between creators and creatures and the concept of humanity in Nier is not regulated by biology or transcendence; it is instead the result of a clumsy and uncertain trajectory regulated by belief and will.

Untrustworthy Games The relationship between digital games and belief is complex and entails different layers. For example, characters in a game may lie: it might be a surprising plot twist, but it is a well-recognized narrative mechanism. However,

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I Play, Therefore I Believe players tend to trust the game itself, believing that the instructions given by the game are trustworthy. Some games, therefore, use our trust and exploit it for comic or serious effects. The Portal series, for example, does this on several levels. At a first glance Portal (developed by Valve in 2007) and Portal 2 (2011) might seem simple puzzle games with a narrative layer: a nameless female character travels in a sort of immense laboratory where she must run a series of “tests”—the puzzles themselves. A feminine electronic voice guides her, instructing players on how to solve the different puzzles and providing feedback when these are successfully completed. As this is quite common in digital games, the players generally follow the instructions without questioning them. Nevertheless, while the character advances within the laboratory, the voice appears less and less trustworthy, until her real objective is revealed: the (p.84) voice pertains to the villain of the game, who will try in any way to make the main character fail. Portal, therefore, problematizes the players’ belief in the instructions given by the game, emphasizing the dynamics of self-giving (subordination toward the power of the game system) in which the players are entangled. This makes the players realize that, while playing, they tend to follow obediently the rules without questioning in any way the world in which they are immersed. The Talos Principle

The relationship between trust and religious belief is also deeply rooted in The Talos Principle, a game developed by Croteam and released in 2014. The philosophy of this game is rather similar to Portal’s: there is a series of puzzles to solve and a voice from the sky that gives instructions both to the players and to the character. Nevertheless, this game goes one step further and explicitly reveals the religious nature of these interactions. The setting of the game is immediately depicted as religious: the main character finds itself in a robot body in some ancient ruins while a thundering voice from the sky announces: “Behold, child, you are risen from the dust and you walk in my garden. Hear now my voice and know that I am your maker, and I am called ELOHIM. Seek me in my temple, if you are worthy.” After a couple of simple puzzles teaching the basics of the game, the voice speaks again: “All across this land I have created trials for you to overcome and in each I have placed a sigil. It is your purpose to seek these sigils, for thus you will serve the generations to come and attain eternal life.” There is no need to underline the quantity of religious themes present in these quotes, from Elohim—the Hebrew word for God—to the words “maker” or “temple” and, finally, the reference to eternal life as a final reward for completing all the game’s puzzles. The player is immediately confronted with a request of trust from Elohim, which is also a request of faith: Elohim is

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I Play, Therefore I Believe presented as the creator, or at least the master, of the digital world in which the players are moving. Nevertheless, players will find numerous hints that the world in which they are moving is a simulated one, quite literally a digital world. The hints are subtle at the start but become increasingly consistent as the game advances. Additionally, several terminals scattered around the game world let the players discuss with a “Milton Library Assistant” (MLA), an artificial intelligence agent who seems to suggest a rather different picture. The MLA tells a story where humanity on the brink of extinction created this digital space to enable the evolution of artificial life. The puzzles, therefore, are a way to test (p.85) the intelligence and independence of constantly renewed “child” programs, of which the main character is just the latest iteration. Elohim, nonetheless, will maintain that the terminals are full of devilish lies meant to dissuade its children from attaining eternal life. At the end of the game the players will face two options. They might choose to have faith in Elohim and join him, in which case they will fail the “independence check” required from the main character to be considered alive. The game will then reboot, with the players incarnating a new version of the “child” program. Otherwise, they might defy Elohim. After some more adventures, they will then “transcend” and the child program will awaken in an android body to inhabit a World devoid of humans. The players, therefore, are rewarded for not trusting the instructions of the game and for doubting the reality of the virtual world that was presented to them. However, the winning solution offered by the game is to trust another agent of the game, represented by the MLA, and the world in which the android finally escapes is still a virtual game world. This seems inescapable: How could a game propose a solution that is outside the game itself? How can it break the game agreement so much that the players will stop giving themselves to the game and lose completely their trust in its world? The Stanley Parable

There is, in fact, a game that goes that far: The Stanley Parable, developed by Galactic Café and Davey Wreden and released in 2013. The game starts off by telling the story of Stanley, an employee in a big company who spends his days in his office doing very repetitive tasks, such as pressing buttons on his PC when the screen tells him to. A narrating voice—again requesting trust and introducing an institution of belief—states that one day Stanley discovers he is alone in the building and wanders around, looking for answers. At that point, while the players move throughout the building, the narrating voice describes what Stanley is doing, adapting the description to the players’ choices. At a certain moment the players arrive at a set of two doors open in front of them. The narrating voice tells them that “Stanley entered the door on his left,” but the game itself will not enforce that choice. If the players decide to go right, the Page 12 of 16

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I Play, Therefore I Believe narrating voice will become slightly frustrated and will try to get Stanley back on track. The players will decide whether to listen to it or if Stanley should stray further and further. Not following the instructions, however, will soon destroy the narration. The game will stop making sense and the narrating (p.86) voice will become increasingly confrontational. It will even restart the game altogether in the attempt to bring it back on track. The game has multiple possible endings, according to the choices made by the players. Each ending, however, reminds the players that they are defenseless in respect to the game. The narrator has the power to enforce a monologue on them and restart the game, and the players have no way to stop him. He can propose a boring and loud mini-game that must be played for four entire hours to progress in a particular narrative branch. He can frustrate players by letting them go through endless, ever-changing corridors without really reaching any destination. In one instance, he sets off a countdown that indicates that a bomb will destroy the building. As this happens in a room full of commands, the players will frantically try to find a way to defuse the bomb. However, the narrating voice soon explains that it is not possible and will mock the players for trying and for assuming that all those commands might actually do something. Eventually the bomb goes off and the game restarts once again. There is a way, however, to exit the building in which Stanley—and the players— are caged. With some effort it is possible to climb onto a desk and slip out of a window, exiting the “map” designed by the game developers and free-falling in a completely white and empty virtual space. Finally, the players might think, there is a bug, a glitch in the game that can be exploited to exit from its range of control. Nevertheless, just when it seems that they might have escaped the allpowerful game, the narrating voice speaks again and mocks the players for trying. Ultimately, the game will restart yet another time. On the other end, if the players decide to follow faithfully all the instructions, the narrator will lead them to find a way out of the building into a green and sunny land where Stanley, having obediently done what he was told, is supposed to be finally “happy.” The happy ending itself, however, is just another mockery: the players will realize that, just like Stanley does in his job, they were just pressing buttons as they were told to. And then, the game will restart. There is no way of winning The Stanley Parable, no way of escaping the game while playing the game. The game does not offer any illusion of freedom; instead, it strives to underline that the digital game is like a cage. Normally, digital games would hide this, giving players the impression that they are free and that their choices matter. The Stanley Parable shows that all this is an illusion, that there is no agreement in digital games, only self-giving. The only way of being free is not playing, as the game is inevitably a limitation of freedom, both because of its rules and because of its digital nature. Yet, Page 13 of 16

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I Play, Therefore I Believe somehow ironically, The Stanley Parable may feel liberating, almost (p.87) empowering, precisely because instead of selling an illusion of freedom, it accurately describes the powers that the game has on its players.

Conclusions The aim of this chapter is to highlight the implications and interactions of belief dynamics in digital games and religion. We described how games, digital games specifically, produce experiential and semiotic dimensions that are akin to those involved in religion and the sense of religio itself. We described how players need to believe in the virtual existence of the ludic environment and in the meaning of their rules (fairness, purposefulness, trueness); otherwise, the ludic experience may become contradictory or incoherent or even collapse. In addition, while most fictional and fantasy games establish a process of “suspension of disbelief,” at the core of many digital games we can find traces of the symmetrical and collateral process that we have called “institution of belief”: the necessity for players not only to accept as possible what they perceive and interact with, but to consider it as the only possible existence in the (ludic) world. If any game depends to a certain degree on a balance between a contract or agreement (symmetrical relationship) and self-giving (asymmetrical relationships), most digital games tend toward the latter and create environments in which players must have an almost religious faith in the game they are playing. Most games do not focus on these processes: they exploit them to a limited degree, letting players trust the ludic interface and experience. Other games, however, put this process at the very heart of their experience, revealing that the act of playing itself means creating, establishing, and altering beliefs. Thus, we approached a series of games in which the relationships between religio, faith, belief, and the ludic experience are fully developed, both at a diegetic and a meta-diegetic level. We showed how games move from suspension of disbelief to institution of belief in Planescape Torment; discussed the relationships between perception and understanding, and faith and purposefulness in Nier: Automata; highlighted the meta-ludic trials of faith in The Talos Principle; and analyzed how the construction/narration of the ludic world makes players challenge and destroy their trust in the game, leading to the problematic believability of The Stanley Parable. Researching the sentiment of religio within digital games has a descriptive potential. It can help us understand how games work and why they have certain effects. It allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the games’ hermeneutics and how this corresponds to design choices. Moreover, our overview also shows that digital games can be an extremely productive tool to help (p.88) players develop a critical spirit, and not necessarily only within a religious context. Questioning what we are told and wondering about the environment Page 14 of 16

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I Play, Therefore I Believe surrounding us are very important skills in a world where falsity and deception are made particularly easy by new technologies.17 Digital games could—and maybe should—also be used to this end. Notes:

(*) This paper has been written together by both authors. For the formal attribution, please consider the sections “Introduction,” “Institution of Belief,” and “Reality as We Know It” as written by Vincenzo Idone Cassone and the sections “Play and Transcendence,” “Untrustworthy Games,” and “Conclusions” as written by Mattia Thibault. (1.) Emile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des Institutions Indoeuropéennes, Tome II (Paris: Les Editions du Minuit, 1980). (2.) Joan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-Element of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949). (3.) The term “suspension of disbelief” was introduced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. Nigel Leask (London: J. M. Dent, 1997). (4.) Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). (5.) Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016). (6.) Diana Walsh-Pasulka, “Passion Tickets Bear Mark of Beast! Otherworldly Realism, Religious Authority and Popular Film,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 11, no. 1 (2015): 1–20. (7.) Juri Lotman and Boris Uspenski, “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” New Literary History 9, no. 2 (1978): 211–232. (8.) Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1966), 30–32. (9.) Michael J. Apter, “A Structural-Phenomenology of Play,” in Adult Play: A Reversal Theory Approach, ed. John H. Kerr and Michael J. Apter (Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger 1991), 13–29. (10.) Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Psychiatric Research Reports 2 (1955): 39–51.

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I Play, Therefore I Believe (11.) “Calvinball” is a fictional sport played by the eponymous characters in Bill Watson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. At turns, every player can add a new rule to the game while playing it, making it very unstable and comically surreal. (12.) Roger Caillois, Les Jeux Et les Hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). (13.) Lotman, “Agreement and ‘Self-Giving’,” 125–240. (14.) There are, of course, forms of alliances and covenants in Abrahamic religions, but they are always asymmetrical. The believers may expect something from the deity, but they have no control over it, and they have to persist even when it seems that God is not respecting his part of the agreement —see, for example, the Book of Job. The covenant, therefore, is indeed based in an initial agreement, but one in which the believers have to abandon themselves completely to the deity’s will. (15.) Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). (16.) The “new game plus” is a typical feature of games. Once they are finished the story, players may start the game once again, usually unlocking different powers, or subplots, or new perspective on the original game. In Nier, the new game plus allows players to experience the different alternative endings of the game. (17.) Michela Del Vicario, Alessandro Bessi, Fabiana Zollo, Fabio Petroni, Antonio Scala, Guido Caldarelli, H. Eugene Stanley, and Walter Quattrociocchi, “Echo Chambers in the Age of Misinformation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 3, no. 113 (2016): 554–559.

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Repost or Die

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Repost or Die Ritual Magic and User-Generated Deities on Instagram Rose Rowson

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords This chapter is concerned with the analysis of contemporary, community-based practices surrounding the user-generated deity Safety Kitty on the imagesharing platform Instagram. Users engage with Safety Kitty both as an image and through the associated hashtag #safetykitty to protect themselves from the existential threat of supernatural chain images shared on the platform. This chapter first demonstrates that the use of “magic” as a rhetorical tool by programmers and advertisers to describe the various mysteriously obfuscating and wondrously enabling qualities of information technologies has fallen out of popular use in recent years. Attention is then shifted to magical thinking as manifest within lay users’ participation on the social web. Drawing from early sociological approaches to magic in conjunction with new media theory, this chapter proposes that the Instagram-based rituals associated with protection from supernatural threats is indicative of a collective understanding of the unknowability of the processes behind our personal devices. Keywords:   Instagram, chain letters, magic, ritual, platform analysis, digital media, user-generated content, deities

Speaking on the launch of the iPad in 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs described the new product as “magical and revolutionary,”1 as well as being surprisingly affordable. In an era defined by the ever-increasing ubiquity of digital media, Jobs’s pointed identification of magic as an integral aspect of what has since been comfortably accepted as another banal part of our shared media landscape Page 1 of 17

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Repost or Die seems misjudged. With this deceptively incongruous statement, however, Jobs placed Apple and the iPad within the wider genealogy of information technologies, where the concept of magic has often been deployed as a means of communicating the awesome powers of technical innovation to the unskilled or uninitiated. While promotional invocations of metaphorical magic are currently anomalous within the increasingly centralized and homogenized sphere of digital computation, there nevertheless exists fertile space within this sphere to establish and develop magical beliefs and practices at the lay user level. As such, this chapter considers how the magical practices of one such community on the image-sharing platform Instagram exist in conflict with established rhetorical trends of equating the functions of information technologies to magic. The idea of magic as an analogous shorthand for the powers of information technologies permeated the discourse of programmers, journalists, and advertisers during the latter part of the twentieth century, with these groups variously conflating magic with obfuscation of knowledge, immateriality, and automatism. As argued by Fortran developer John Backus, “many of the programmers of the freewheeling 1950s [regarded] themselves as members (p. 92) of a priesthood guarding skills and mysteries far too complex for ordinary mortals.”2 Writing in 1974, systems developers Charles Rich and Howard E. Shrobe smugly noted that “programmers are popularly and correctly identified in the public mind as practicing black magic.”3 With programmers operating as part of a highly educated elite funded by the U.S. government, this nominal idea of magic stood for meritocracy and the hierarchical protection of insider knowledge. This metaphor also slipped over into mainstream discourse, with Time magazine applying magical language to information technologies during the 1970s and 1980s to signal novelty, acclimatizing consumers to their changing media landscape while propagating and perpetuating the notion of programmers and programming as mediators of magic. Analyzing magical language in Time, William A. Stahl notes that for nascent users of information technologies, “magic is a declaration of hope in the face of fear and powerlessness,”4 yet concedes that such evocative language is designed to “promote definitions and understandings favorable to business.”5 Magic was also synonymous with the products themselves, with the presence of software setup “wizards” a mainstay of early mainstream computing. These wizards were a coalition of dialog boxes and animated characters designed to guide users through their newly purchased programs, and Karla Saari Kitalong critiqued them as “[functioning] to maintain the rift between novice and expert by preventing novices from becoming experts.”6 In his acerbic 2001 article “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter,” Matthew Fuller described software wizards as “the low-grade Artificial Intelligence that will in the permanently rained-off future help the user make those crucial tabulation decisions, but settles for cuteness over function.”7 Unlike their human counterparts from earlier decades, these software wizards Page 2 of 17

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Repost or Die harbored no human, emotional desire to obfuscate knowledge; rather, they acted as programmed layers of abstraction, designed to sell the promise of an easier life for consumers. Thus, magic flipped from indicating obfuscation of knowledge through the emphasis on highly skilled labor, to obfuscation of knowledge through abstraction of labor and the embrace of immaterial automatism. Samantha wiggles her nose, Sabrina points her finger, a user clicks her mouse: a function springs to life. A formerly dominant trope within mainstream discourse, the metaphor of magic waned from the turn of the millennium onwards: as necessity supplants novelty, magic seems an ill-fitting comparison for mundane tasks such as checking emails, paying taxes, or playing Candy Crush. In the period since Kitalong and Fuller lodged their complaints on the step-by-step handholding and patronizing limitations of software wizards, the wizards themselves have become outdated. We describe our contemporary (p.93) software not as magical but as “friendly” or “intuitive.”8 But has new media magic disappeared completely? Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously decreed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”;9 is magic still alive and well in our devices? In TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), Erik Davis extensively analyzes how information technologies and their associated practices are infused with magical thought. Davis criticizes Clarke’s “amply cited claim” as “a quip that deserves more scrutiny than it usually receives”10— before offering little scrutiny of his own. He concedes that, yes, the apparent spontaneity of advanced technologies can appear magical to the uninitiated; that, yes, micro- and nanotechnologies hide their inner workings so effectively as to remain inscrutable and “literally, occult”11—as in hidden—to laypeople; and finally, yes, new technologies are novel and magical until “their pixie dust settles and their glamour . . . disappears.”12 Davis’s failure here is his strength otherwise: to demonstrate that technology can have an active relationship with magic, rather than merely able to manifest its assumed characteristics. Clarke approaches magic as the awe-inspiring, functional pinnacle by which advancing technology can measure itself, seemingly homogenizing the vast catalog of practices that could constitute magic. I believe that Clarke’s approach boils down to sheer causality—the ta-da! of illusion—as opposed to the communal agreement that certain repeated actions yield particular mystical results. Galvanized by Clarke’s statement, this chapter proposes that while technology and magic cannot be equated, there do exist magical practices that emerge from human–machine relationships. Told during its nascent years that the magic of technology will positively influence their lives, contemporary lay users have developed rituals to alleviate fear and uncertainties related to their devices. As such, the focus here is an Instagram-based community who call on user-generated deity Safety Kitty for protection against perceived supernatural Page 3 of 17

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Repost or Die threats. While using the inbuilt platform functionalities of posting images and writing out hashtags, such protective practices conflict with both Instagram’s operational aims and the technological purpose of said features. While it is evertempting to frame magic as technology as just doing, we must approach this idea of direct causality or automatism with great caution. Before analyzing Safety Kitty proper, I must first challenge the unfortunate habit within new media scholarship of equating magic with the causality of computational code. In Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (2005), Florian Cramer explores the cultural precedent for executable code in computation, proposing that its roots lie in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition, and experimental (p. 94) poetry. He states that “the technical principle of magic, controlling matter through manipulation of symbols, is the technical principle of computer software as well. It isn’t surprising that magic lives on in software, at least nominally.”13 Cramer continues this line of thought in his chapter “Language” in Matthew Fuller’s Software Studies: A Lexicon (2008), arguing that “in its most powerful Turing-complete superset, computer control language is language that executes,”14 further stating that “the execution of computer control language is purely formal; it is the manipulation of a machine, not a social performance based on human conventions such as accepting a verdict.”15 Associating magic purely with the technical, Cramer blinkers himself to the thoroughly social, community-sanctioned bent of mystical belief and practice. French sociologist Marcel Mauss proposed that “actions which are never repeated cannot be called magical. If the whole community does not believe in the efficacy of a group of actions, they cannot be called magical. The form of the ritual is eminently transmissible and this is sanctioned by public opinion.”16 Stahl additionally states that “magical power is neither mechanical nor permanent. People learned the rituals of power from magical beings or ancestors. If they lose favor, or grow careless or arrogant, they may just as easily lose that power.”17 While language symbols and codes can be used within ritual, their function is based not on mechanical automatism, but instead on collective acceptance of their symbolic role within a larger belief system. A community of practitioners may lose faith in certain ritual use of language symbols, but the causal mechanical function of computational code cannot be disputed as a question of belief. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun acknowledges the limitations of this causal approach to computational code and/as magic, yet I believe also incorrectly equates magic to causality. She states that “we ‘primitive folk’ worship source code as a magical entity—as a source of causality—when in truth the power lies elsewhere, most importantly in social and machinic relations. If code is performative, its effectiveness relies on human and machinic rituals.”18 Here, Chun evokes an idea explored in Stanley J. Tambiah’s Magic, Science and Religion, and the Scope of Rationality: that of participation versus causality. As summarized by Erik Page 4 of 17

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Repost or Die Davis, “causality boils down to the pragmatic rationalism of science: the detached individual ego divides and fragments the welter of the world according to objective and explanatory schemes based on neutrality and instrumental action:”19 expressly, the dispassionate action of a machine processing input. Participation, conversely, “plunges the individual into a collective sea that erodes the barrier between human agency and the surrounding environment. In this world, which [Davis associates] with the magical paradigm, language and ritual do not objectively delineate the world but help (p.95) bring it into being.”20 While acknowledging that the modern “everyday world [is] defined by the technoscientific causality,”21 Davis proposes that cultures and rituals associated with them are not: “in fact, media technology may actually be amplifying the collective resonance that lies at the psychic heart of participation.”22 I thus find it telling that Chun approaches causality as opposed to “social and machinic relations” as being magical, a thorough indication that magic must be reevaluated in order to become a useful tool for discussing contemporary digital ritual phenomena. Grudgingly returning to Clarke’s axiom, I am drawn to ponder whether sufficiently advanced technology can be indistinguishable from magic if a universal definition of magic cannot be agreed upon. That is of course one of the joys of magic: present in cultures around the globe and throughout human history, different permutations are variously similar and dissimilar. What this more crucially reveals is that magic, even when applied as a metaphor, does not exist in a realm of impartial causation but is dependent on participation and is wont for reinterpretation. By equating the functions of advanced technology to magic, Clarke undermines the possibility for magic and technology to be used in tandem. For Clarke, whatever magic does, sufficiently advanced technology does to an equal level: taken as read, we ignore the core social concerns of magical practice. Following both Mauss and Stahl, it is the somewhat tenuous collective agreement regarding the efficacy of ritual that underlies magic, as opposed to its acting as an accurate simulacrum for technological advances over the linear passage of time. Following the increased normalization of digital computation and the rise of the social web, users have supposedly been free to establish personal relationships with their devices. This is, of course, subterfuge. The assemblage of hardware and software behind consumer-level devices remains complex and is neither more accessible nor understandable to average users. It is, following Davis, as occult as ever: confusing inner functions hidden behind friendly interfaces, material infrastructure obscured by immaterial ease. So, while magic has retreated from popular nominal use, the explicitly participatory nature of Web 2.0 and its platforms is a fertile environment for the development of magical thought and ritual.

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Repost or Die There is a pleasing echo between Davis’s evocation of participation in magical thought and the idea of participatory culture in Web 2.0. While early users of the World Wide Web were readers, denizens of Web 2.0 could be writers, generating and sharing content. Web 2.0 requires user participation to “help bring it into being,”23 while being undergirded by a coalition of restrictive technological protocols that enable personal computer peer-to-peer interaction, offering a finite but ostensibly pleasing degree of input. Chun (p.96) argues that “constraints—the acceptance of certain interface conventions as self-enforced rules—enable agency and an arguably no less magical feeling of power: a sense that users control the action and make free and independent choices within a set of rules.”24 While I have expressed reservations at Chun’s equation of magic to causation, I believe here she offers a useful approach to magic in contemporary digital culture. When we consider once more Stahl’s assertion that “magic is a declaration of hope in the face of fear and powerlessness”25 alongside Chun, there emerges productive space to analyze how interface-level magic by lay users confronts feelings of powerlessness or fear within the mechanically abstracted, user-friendly sphere of Web 2.0. Stahl makes this key point in light of work done by early twentieth-century anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. He quotes Malinowski’s influential 1925 text Magic, Science and Religion: “The function of magic is to ritualize man’s optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.”26 Unlike other early anthropologists concerned with the developmental space between magic, science, and religion such as James Frazer, Malinowski emphasizes that magic does not exist at the apex of human savagery and in a void of rationality. In his fieldwork from the Trobriand Archipelago in Melanesia, Malinowski proposes that magic does not flourish in a dearth of reason but instead functions to supplement gaps in knowledge and to acknowledge the unknowable. His Trobriand subjects are skilled fishermen, traders, manufacturers, and gardeners, who use magic notwithstanding their technical skills. Despite—or, perhaps more interestingly, because of—their rational capability to create a functioning society, Trobriand Islanders know they are at the mercy of uncontrollable natural forces. A canoe is built using the requisite skills and materials, but “even with all their systematic knowledge, methodically applied,”27 also has magic performed on it to ensure safety within the unknowable conditions of the sea. Canoes must be built, crops must be yielded, using technical knowledge of wood, soil, and so forth, but magic supplements this labor when needed. Malinowski notes that “in the lagoon fishing, where man can rely completely upon his knowledge and skill, magic does not exist, while in the open-sea fishing, full of danger and uncertainty, there is extensive magical ritual to secure safety and good results.”28

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Repost or Die Similarly, users know the shallow, user-friendly surfaces of their devices. However, beyond a certain point, average users cannot comprehend how their machines work, and know that their machines can turn against them: hardware crashes, viruses, lackluster security leading to data leaks. Technical uncertainty is exacerbated by social unease and surveillance culture: we worry (p.97) that our machines can do things with our information once it is released that we cannot control. Just as Malinowski’s fishermen cannot see the bottom of the ocean when they lean over the sides of their boats, contemporary users cannot peer hard at their devices, seeing past graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to fully understand transistors, miles upon miles of fiber optics, and banks of servers whirring in air-conditioned hangars. It is upon this unease I would like to dwell. Keeping in mind the social core of magical practice, let us examine a community on image-sharing platform Instagram who turn to Safety Kitty to provide protection against threatening images on the platform. Embodied as both an image and a hashtag, believers place a magical bent on Instagram’s platform-specific functionality in the hope of protection against horrible threats of death, dismemberment, diminished sex lives, dead dogs, and so forth. These chain posts typically consist of an image— showing alleged ghost photography, a creepy drawing, or something of a similar ilk—with accompanying text, threatening those who have viewed said image with all manner of ills should they not repost it. Following my argument against the likening of advanced technology to magic, I shall crucially establish how community-decreed magical practices deviate from the platform-specific functionality of Instagram, instead relying on rituals that require greater exertion of effort, or that are nonsensical within the social and technical infrastructure of the network. At time of writing, a search for #safetykitty via the Instagram iOS application returns over 28,000 results. Two images of the feline herself appear over and over again, alongside various scary chain images. With a cartoon cat as the centerpiece, the recurring images share the following caption: “This is Safety Kitty. If you repost Safety Kitty, you are safe from all chain mail and scary posts. ♥” Alongside this shared text, one of the two images features the addition of a hashtag—#SAFETYKITTY—emblazoned above the tufty crown of the stylized cat’s head. Including the explicit instruction of reposting being equal to immunity, these images exist in the wider genealogy of information (re)distribution within a digital context. Writing in 2005, Marjorie Kibby discusses email as a newly “dominant”29 communications medium for folklore distribution practices. She argues that the core characteristics of email—quickly sent regardless of distance, easily edited, and “ostensibly economic”30—makes it an ideal method for disseminating established folklore, as well as forming new stories and beliefs. Kibby notes that “email forwardables consist primarily of virus alerts, chain letters and various Page 7 of 17

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Repost or Die stories couched as warnings, petitions and requests for help, all with the directive to ‘Please forward’.”31 From cautionary tales about stray HIV needles in payphone coin slots to promises that Microsoft guarantees a certain (p.98) cash prize per email forwarded, Kibby posits that “people [forward an email] not because they believe it is true, but because of a dread of the consequences should it happen to be true and a belief that others would want to know of the possibility.”32 Unlike those who fearfully post supernatural chain images on Instagram—who can either repost or die—forwarders of an email warning women about the potential risk of deadly “perfume” samples, for example, can see themselves as doing a good deed for those who receive it. Despite Kibby’s emphasis on societal rather than supernatural threat, she provides invaluable guidance by which to analyze the transfer of ritual across media infrastructure, maintaining that heightened credulity among email users directly links to how authentic they deem forwarded messages to be. She states, “Just as our belief that ‘if it’s in print, it must be true’ was shored up by the physical permanence of the print form separated from its author, the existence of online texts independent from their originators makes them somehow more believable than spoken forms.”33 This crucially does not claim that the more times information is shared, the less likely it is to be disinformation, but rather acknowledges that as communication technologies develop, the rituals associated with them tend to lag behind. Think perhaps of your grandmother using letter-writing etiquette in text messages, beginning each SMS with “Dear X” and ending by signing her name. Carolyn Marvin broadly defines ritual as “memory-inducing behavior that has the effect of preserving whatever things or ideas that are indispensable to [a] group.”34 And one of the most important things to any group is naturally its own survival. This inheritance of ritual is twofold: from the communicational infrastructure of email to Instagram, and from text to image. Instagram has certainly inherited characteristics of email, like the sharing or forwarding of information, while operating in a more public, complex, and intertwining network of human and nonhuman actors than the sender/receiver model. But unlike other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, Instagram lacks an inbuilt function to share or regram other users’ posts. Indeed, Instagram states that users should “share only photos and videos that you’ve taken or have a right to share . . . Remember to post authentic content, and don’t post anything you’ve copied or collected from the internet that you don’t have the right to post.”35 While external applications using the Instagram application programming interface (API) provide the means to repost others’ content, they do so with the addition of watermarks and banners that infiltrate the image itself. Users can and do circumvent this, using their devices to take screenshots of images they wish to redistribute. This method is also not without flaws: as well as general pixellation, sections of the Instagram interface can find their way into such images. With disregard for Instagram’s (p.99) request for “authenticity” from users, such Page 8 of 17

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Repost or Die practices afford images a different kind of authenticity: the degradation of quality that occurs through myriad copy making gives such forwarded pictures an eerie lack of origin, as well as visually vindicating reposting as a means of mitigating threat. In “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography” (1995), Lev Manovich discusses the perceived differences between traditional and digital photography. One such difference is loss of information: Manovich argues that contemporary digital photography is “characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise” and claims that such noise “is even stronger than that of traditional photography.”36 Two decades after the fact, this is still the case: within the humanly perceptible presence of pixels lies a form of vérité, with the detectible imperfections of digital images a visual shorthand for verifiable truth. Examples of Safety Kitty reposts and scary chain images are what photographer Daniel Palmer calls “compression artefacts,”37 their aesthetic embodying the process of their digital creation and distribution. In his 2014 article “The Triumphant Rise of the Shitpic”—so named “because they look like shit”—journalist Brian Feldman discusses compression of images within online meme culture. He states, “Shitpics happen when an image is put through some diabolical combination of uploading, screencapping, filtering, cropping, and reuploading. They are particularly popular on Instagram.”38 More interestingly than simply observing the presence of such “shit” images, Feldman proposes that in the absence of metrics provided by an inbuilt sharing mechanism on Instagram, “the Shitpic aesthetic could very well be the first nonnumerical indicator of viral dissemination.”39 Feldman’s concept is also applicable to fear and ritual magic. Unlike humor-based memes, scary chain images invariably include specific instructions to be reposted. The deterioration of such posts is indicative therefore of sustained communal ritual practice, a belief that by following specific instructions—albeit opposing the intentions of the platform upon which said instructions appear—a sticky end is avoidable. For Kibby, “the existence of online texts independent from their originators makes them somehow more believable than spoken forms.”40 Collective belief in both the threat of these chains and the efficacy of continuing them is embodied in their appearance. With inheritance of distribution rituals from email to Instagram, there comes infrastructural change and the introduction of newer social practices. A common feature across contemporary social platforms, the hashtag has entered the cultural lexicon as a method of emphasizing meaning and rallying interest, and as a frivolous sign of the times. With their base purpose as metadata, the social functionality of hashtags varies between platform and community. On Twitter and Facebook, hashtags are broadly used to (p.100) shape conversations around current events, the feature applied to harness discussions about the outside world within the codifications of the platforms. Unlike these text-focused networks, hashtags on Instagram are primarily used to index images under keywords and phrases. In contrast to the former platforms, the Instagram app Page 9 of 17

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Repost or Die does not support commonplace functions such as clickable external URLs, or even the ability to highlight and copy caption text. Instagram is insular, with hashtags focusing attention inward to platform-based content, rather than the outside world. Furthermore, and unlike Twitter and Facebook, Instagram does not allow plain text search through its interface: searches can only be made for tags, cementing their status as the only platform-relevant text. In the wonderfully named “Obvious Aspects of Ritual” (1974), anthropologist Roy Rappaport proposes that “the magical power of some of the words and acts forming part of the liturgies derives from the factive relationship between them and the conventional state of affairs with which they are concerned.”41 Following Rappaport, I would argue that protective characteristics collectively applied to #safetykitty derive from the powerful status of hashtags on Instagram, as well as wider contemporary culture. Ritual use of hashtags is not, however, in alignment with Instagram’s platform-specific tagging functionality. Safety Kitty devotees not only repost images but use #safetykitty to provide magical insurance. While the protective characteristics of #safetykitty are magical, its function as a call, and as metadata to index images, is not. When users call out for help by tagging their images with #safetykitty, they create a portal, a black hole in which both Safety Kitty herself and the threats she should repel dwell together. Drawing from Plato’s concept of the pharmakon, as developed by Jacques Derrida, the written talisman #safetykitty acts as both protection from and an attracting beacon for scary chain images; this duality moreover embodies the uncertain and treacherous nature of contemporary platforms. Protective, friendly, and useful on the surface, once users click through the linked tag, they are plunged into a sea of fear. The ritual associated with #safetykitty belies its platform-specific purposes as a means of indexing data. Hashtags are afforded meaning outside of their functional context: tattooed on bodies, printed on T-shirts, spoken aloud. As such, it is unsurprising that Safety Kitty devotees use her tag as a core part of their belief system. If her full image is a shrine, then her hashtag is a talisman, deployable at will whenever believers feel threatened. More so than her image, the hashtag gives the incorporeal Safety Kitty a symbol and allows ritual to take shape. Under scary posts tagged #safetykitty, a stream of other users mimic the call: #safetykitty repeated over again, the surplus sealing the hashtag’s ritual importance in disregard for its platform-specific functionality. For users (p.101) commenting the magical tag under someone else’s post, their action is purely symbolic. This would be the case with any hashtag, magical or otherwise: only the poster of an image has the authority to index it through hashtagging, and these repeated invocations of #safetykitty offer no new information, intending only to protect. Returning to Rappaport’s proposal that the conventionally factive power of words influences their inclusion in liturgy or ritual, and moreover the misguided assumption that magic is equal to causality, we can clearly see that the use of hashtags in ritual magic is related to but ruptured Page 10 of 17

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Repost or Die from their platform-specific purpose. Users have learned that hashtags wield power both within and without their technical context. In appropriating hashtags for ritual, disciples of Safety Kitty disregard their intended function: that is, to sort signal from noise. Worship and ritual built around Safety Kitty is at odds not only with the platform-specific operations of Instagram but also with integral aspects of community. In a digital context, belief fabrication through efficacious repetition becomes spam. Finn Brunton notes that “ ‘spam’ is very nearly the perfect obverse of ‘community,’ a negative term in both colloquial and specialized technical use that remains expansive and vague, covering a vast spectrum of technical and social practices with varying motives, incentives, actors, and targets.”42 He adds: Whereas “community” stands in for our capacity to join one another, share our efforts, sympathize, and so on, “spam” acts as an ever-growing monument to the most mundane human failings: gullibility, technical incompetence, lust and the sad anxieties of male potency, vanity and greed for the pettiest stakes—the ruin of the commons for the benefit of the few.43 While I generally accept Bruton’s description, for Safety Kitty the anxietyinducing nuisance and seemingly mindless repetition of chains is fundamental to community formation. These scary chain posts surely do ruin the commons for anyone susceptible to believing their threats, but engagement with them as part of a spammy community practice doesn’t really benefit anyone. Quite unlike the dread-induced “paying it forward” of chain emails discussed by Kibby, those who repost scary chain images and/or tag them with treacherously protective #safetykitty do so in self-interest. While such beliefs and practices could be cynically painted as sheer gullibility, I would argue on the contrary that engagement with these creepy, menacing chain posts is an acknowledgment by users that they are at the mercy of unknowable information, that they are not in control. Magic spam becomes a means (p.102) by which users can defend themselves from the technology that binds their community together, and believers do not know when they may be confronted by supernatural threats. Indeed, if they have seen and interacted with a scary Instagram post in the past, there is no guarantee that similar posts will not appear to them in the future: Instagram’s Search & Explore function is specifically designed to lead users to more content like that which they have previously engaged, essentially leading believers to greater degrees of fear and uncertainty. Ruminating on the current and future state of TechGnosis almost two decades after his book was first published, Erik Davis posits that “it is maybe in horror that we most clearly see the traces of technological enchantment today,”44 drawing particularly from contemporary philosopher Eugene Thacker’s concept Page 11 of 17

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Repost or Die of dark media. Thacker frames dark media as having, “as their aim, the mediation of that which is unavailable or inaccessible to the senses, and thus of that we are normally ‘in the dark’ about,”45 using examples such as the cursed videotape in J-horror film Ringu to discuss mediation being so effective as to induce abject terror. Davis believes dark media are frightful “not because the technology breaks down, but because it works too well. Glitches, noise, and stray signals are no longer technical faults but the flip side of another order of being leaking through.”46 I would argue that rituals associated with scary chain posts manifest this precarious relationship between humans and their devices. The #safetykitty hashtag provides mystic protection but is also the doorway to a metadata orgy of malevolent demons and ghost children, who know where you are and are coming soon. Returning to earlier invocations of magic, I believe that the relentlessly friendly and helpful wizards of early mainstream software in fact influenced these fears. Making just four keystrokes, spelling out D-E-A-R, an anthropomorphized paper clip cheerily bursts onto the screen, announcing that it knows what you’re doing. While “it looks like you’re writing a letter” is wholly less threatening than “this murdered child is going to kill you in the middle of the night unless you perform a certain action,” I would argue that such human– computer relationships influence the development of repeated folklore narratives and rituals in contemporary digital culture. Writing in 2012, Alexis C. Madrigal argues that we as users move through our Internet experiences unaware of the churning subterranean machines powering our web pages with their cookies and pixel trackers, their tracking code and databases . . . We sometimes think the ads following us around the Internet are “creepy.” We sometimes feel watched. Does it matter? We don’t really know what to think.47 (p.103) Pondering uncanny mediation as a prevalent theme of the massdistributed spooky online stories known as creepypasta, Will Wiles states that “our use of networked computers is daily coloured by a fear of infection and corruption, of predators and those who would assume our identity, of viruses and data-sucking catastrophes. What if something dark is able to breach that allimportant final firewall, the gap between the central processing unit and the person sitting at the keyboard?”48 At its very essence, Safety Kitty provides a comforting shield against such fears, the crossed bars of the hashtag creating a cage across the treacherous screen, which creepy spirits held within can nevertheless wriggle through. I understand why magic was used by powerful groups to both entice and alienate laypeople from the powers of information technologies. Magic is so evocative, encapsulating both wondrous promises and the vast unknowable, the perfect shorthand for “this will do amazing things; just don’t ask us how.” If I can be forgiven for briefly succumbing to the thrall of the metaphor myself, early Page 12 of 17

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Repost or Die computer users must have felt like Jack planting his magic beans, climbing the resulting stalk and returning home—despite some trouble along the way—with treasure. But therein lies the point about magic: it is based upon feeling, belief in what cannot be seen, used to provide collective comfort in times of need. It was crucial to challenge Arthur C. Clarke’s concept of magic and technology to demonstrate that magic is dependent on collective belief in the influence of repeated actions, rather than fleeting amazement or bewilderment at the causal power of mechanical processes. Marcel Mauss argues that magic is tied up in repeated actions, the effectiveness of which are agreed upon by a community of believers, and the causal processes of our devices are of course repeated, not just individually but by a vast community of users worldwide. Yet these processes occur independently of the casual user herself. Abstracted, automatic, algorithmic: mechanical causality runs in the background. It is in this space of uncertainty and the unknown that ritual beliefs and practices develop. To conclude this exploration, I would posit that in this instance magic is a collectively understood conflation of belief and fabrication, legitimized through sustained and efficacious action. Although it is tempting to make overarching definitions of magic, I believe any attempt to do so is misguided: mutations of ritual and their binding circumstances are always bound to occur. The true role that #safetykitty plays in the wider genealogy of magic as relating to fear and uncertainty of our devices will become apparent after the fact. Discussions at this juncture are not, however, premature; on the contrary, in media res analysis of these practices is integral to the posterity (p.104) of such cultures. Indeed, Safety Kitty and her symbols are not anomalous on Instagram, or contemporary social media in general. Other, less prevalent Instagram deities such as Paul the Ball, Protection Puppy, and Watch Out Wolf offer similar forms of protection. A Tumblr post of hand-drawn sigils currently has over 66,000 likes and reblogs, with each symbol shielding a unique threat: guilt trips, family danger, bad luck, the summoning of evil spirits.49 The practices are not isolated but are rather indicative of a common train of fearful thought. Discussing the 1980s marketing narrative of purchased software being “healthy” and shareware and freeware being potentially “infected,” Jussi Parikka states that “a desire to consume as a way to fight fear and anxiety is at the very heart of digital culture.”50 Although not enacting traditional modes of capitalist consumption, these protective rituals are thoroughly ensnared in production and consumption. Reposting images only to expose others, mystifying the metadata-sorting and culture-defining nature of hashtags, these practices perpetuate the fears that spawn them. Malinowski argues that in “precarious conditions, [Trobriand Islanders] hold fast to the safety and comfort of magic.”51 Safety Kitty worshippers do much the same: rather than just logging off, these believers invest in the precarious conditions of Instagram, their idiosyncratic use and blatant misuse of platform features showing the tenacity of established ritual and their belief in the platform’s inherent power. Safety Kitty’s rituals are not Page 13 of 17

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Repost or Die perfect, with creepy chains and other anxieties ever able to manifest. But, as I have argued, magic is not causal, and it does not follow the rational model of technology: these rituals will surely continue developing as community platforms change, as will the fears users protect themselves against.

Notes:

(1.) Apple, “Apple Launches iPad: Magical & Revolutionary Device at an Unbelievable Price,” January 27, 2010, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/ 2010/01/27Apple-Launches-iPad/. (2.) Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18 (2005): 30. (3.) Charles Rich and Howard E. Shrobe, Understanding LISP Programs: Towards a Programmer’s Apprentice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, December 1974), 10. (4.) William A. Stahl, “Venerating the Black Box: Magic in Media Discourse on Technology,” Science, Technology & Human Values 20, no. 2 (1995): 253. (5.) Ibid., 254. (6.) Karla Saari Kitalong, “‘You Will’: Technology, Magic, and the Cultural Contexts of Technical Communication,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 14, no. 3 (2000): 293. (7.) Matthew Fuller, “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter,” Heise. Telepolis, March 7, 2001. Web. May 10, 2012, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/ nettime-l-0009/msg00040.html. (8.) Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 30. (9.) Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Warner Books, 1985). (10.) Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), 180. (11.) Ibid., 181. (12.) Ibid., 181.

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Repost or Die (13.) Florian Cramer, Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, 2005), 15. (14.) Florian Cramer, “Language,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 170. (15.) Ibid., 170. (16.) Marcel Mauss,A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (New York: Routledge, 2001), 23. (17.) Stahl, “Venerating the Black Box,” 247. (18.) Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish,” Configurations 16, no. 3 (2008): 311. (19.) Davis, TechGnosis, 174. (20.) Ibid. (21.) Ibid. (22.) Ibid. (23.) Ibid. (24.) Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 66. (25.) Stahl, “Venerating the Black Box,” 253. (26.) Bronisław Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1948), 70. (27.) Ibid., 13. (28.) Ibid., 14. (29.) Marjorie Kibby, “Email Forwardables: Folklore in the Age of the Internet,” New Media & Society 7, no. 6 (2005): 770. (30.) Ibid., 771. (31.) Ibid., 774. (32.) Ibid., 783. (33.) Ibid., 772.

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Repost or Die (34.) Carolyn Marvin, “Media Rituals: Follow the Bodies,” American Cultural Studies, ed. C. A. Warren and M. D. Vavrus (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 182. (35.) Instagram,Community Guidelines, 2016, https://help.instagram.com/ 477434105621119. (36.) Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,” in Photography After Photography, ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen (Munich, Germany: ArtStock, 1995), 8. (37.) Daniel Palmer, “The Rhetoric of the JPEG,” in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, ed. Martin Lister (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 151. (38.) Brian Feldman, “The Triumphant Rise of the Shitpic,” The Awl, December 17, 2014, https://www.theawl.com/2014/12/the-triumphant-rise-of-the-shitpic/. (39.) Ibid. (40.) Kibby, “Email Forwardables,” 772. (41.) Roy Rappaport, “Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 2, no. 1 (1974): 29. (42.) Finn Brunton, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Boston: MIT Press, 2013), 8. (43.) Ibid. (44.) Erik Davis, “TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information: Afterword 2.0,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 29, 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/myth-magic-mysticism-age-information/. (45.) Eugene Thacker, “Dark Media,” in Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, ed. Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 85. (46.) Davis, “TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information: Afterword 2.0.” (47.) Alexis C. Madrigal, “I’m Being Followed: How Google and 104 Other Companies Are Tracking Me on the Web,” The Atlantic, February 29, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/im-being-followed-howgoogle-151-and-104-other-companies-151-are-tracking-me-on-the-web/253758/. (48.) Will Wiles, “Creepypasta Is How the Internet Learns Our Fears,” Aeon Magazine, December 20, 2013, https://aeon.co/essays/creepypasta-is-how-theinternet-learns-our-fears. Page 16 of 17

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Repost or Die (49.) “The Sigil Witch,” Tumblr, April 26, 2016, http://thesigilwitch.tumblr.com/ post/117456757054/demonglitchwitch-actualthiefblind. (50.) Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, 2nd ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 137. (51.) Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, 14.

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Instant Karma and Internet Karma Karmic Memes and Morality on Social Media Beverley McGuire

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the representation and interpretation of karma in social media, focusing on karmic memes and morality. Internet memes depict karma as a strict retribution, often occurring instantaneously, and occasionally revel in the possibility of witnessing or controlling karma. Memes serve as ways of meting out retribution online; by creating, sharing, and reposting karmic memes, people can engage in moral critique without appearing overly judgmental. The chapter also examines the notion of “internet karma,” which enables people to uphold their conscience and appear to be morally upstanding online, even though they may not act on such principles in their real life. It analyzes online discussions that debate whether the “karma points” accrued by such status updates, tweets, and upvotes should be seen as purely fictitious and imaginary, or whether they have positive effects that could support and motivate ethical action. Keywords:   karma, social media, memes, internet, Buddhism, ethics

One of the most familiar Internet memes—“Keep Calm and Carry On”—is based on a motivational poster produced by the British government in 1939 in preparation for World War II that was rediscovered in 2000 at a British bookstore. While the original slogan evoked a sense of self-discipline and calm amidst adversity, online spinoffs such as “Get Excited and Make Things” under a crown made of wrenches or “Keep Calm and Use the Force” under a Darth Vader image suggest other ways of responding to difficulty. In April 2009 the Keep Calm-o-matic image generator was created, and the meme was featured in the Page 1 of 17

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma New York Times Magazine in July 2009.1 In 2011 a United Kingdom–based company, Keep Calm and Carry On Ltd., registered the slogan as a community trademark in the European Union, and it currently advertises itself as “the only official and licensed store.”2 Nevertheless, online iterations abound, including karmic variants that read “Keep Calm and Let Karma Finish It,” “Keep Calm and Let Karma Do Its Job,” “Keep Calm and Wait for Karma,” and “Keep Calm and Trust Karma.” This chapter examines the representation and interpretation of karma in social media, focusing especially on such karmic memes. Internet memes depict karma as a strict retribution, often occurring instantaneously. Videos and images show troublemakers getting what they deserve, accompanied by phrases such as “Karma strikes again,” “Karma bites you in the ass,” or “Karma. It’s a bitch.” Occasionally they revel in the possibility of witnessing karma, showing images of Morticia Addams and others wryly smiling and stating, “That moment when you witness karma in its full glorious (p.108) splendor.” At other times they express frustration when karma does not mete out punishment, with “Dear Karma, I have a list of people you missed.” However, a striking number express the desire to control karma, with “When is it going to be my turn to drive the Karma Bus?” or delight in the possibility of violently punishing others oneself, with “Mess with Me? I’ll let karma do its job. Mess with my family? I become karma.” Memes serve as vehicles for meting out retribution online, and they mimic karma: once distributed, their images and slogans enter the public domain and surpass anyone’s control. Building upon scholarship about memes, this chapter analyzes the sociohistorical contexts surrounding such retributive interpretations of karma and the cultural needs fulfilled by such representations. Creating, sharing, and reposting karmic memes enables people to engage in moral critique without appearing overly judgmental, as the playfulness of memes seems to offset the severity of karmic reward and punishment. Appeals to karma give supernatural weight to situations that might otherwise be deemed ironic, but they often strip karma of its religious complexity, equating it with good or bad fortune.

Internet Memes Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his work The Selfish Gene (1976), where he proposed that cultural development occurs through the transmission and imitation of memes, such as tunes, ideas, catchphrases, and fashion.3 He suggested the appeal of the god meme derived from it providing a psychologically compelling answer to troubling aspects of human existence, such as injustice in this world being rectified in the next.4 Dawkins identified three characteristics of successful memes: longevity (the duration of its transmission), fecundity (the rate at which it spreads), and copying-fidelity (the quality of the meme that enables it to be copied and passed from mind to mind relatively intact).5 As Susan Blackmore notes in The Meme Machine (1999), memes Page 2 of 17

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma successfully spread because they are memorable rather than important or useful.6 While scholars debate whether one should understand memes as ideas, behaviors, or a combination of both,7 scholars who focus on Internet memes tend to emphasize the role memes play within particular cultural spaces. While they may seem trivial or superficial, Internet memes reflect and shape social mindsets, and they serve as vehicles for understanding aspects of contemporary culture.8 Comparable to offline jokes in their speed of transmission and the fidelity of their form, Internet memes differ in the fact that their networked transmission transcends physical space and their online (p. 109) accessibility overcomes restraints of time. Internet memes have been defined by Peter Davison as “a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online transmission,”9 and more specifically by Limor Shifman as “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.”10 Internet memes as digital media are replicable but also malleable, because parts can easily be lifted and manipulated. Davison and Shifman identify three components of a meme: (1) its observable external form, (2) its behavior or stance, which refers to the actions taken by individuals to create the form and the ways they position themselves in relation to it, and (3) its content—the ideas and ideologies conveyed by the meme.11 When tracking the spread of a meme, it can be useful to identify which component is being replicated and which adapted, and when analyzing the layers of a meme, one can discuss variations of text or image, as well as the humor conveyed.12 A final challenge of analyzing Internet memes derives from some memes being attributable to certain authors by their metadata, but other memes eschewing such attribution for anonymous authorship, with no intellectual property rights.13 Internet memes typically depict karma as a strict retribution, often occurring instantaneously. Hunters taking a video of themselves with their prey lion show them immediately attacked by another lion, or hunters posing for a photo with their killed bear reveal another bear lurking behind them in the background. The images alone could be considered ironic, as they portray situations unfolding in the opposite way than such hunters expected, but when paired with phrases about karma—often capitalized as Karma—they imply that a divine being or supernatural force has meted out such retribution. In the next sections I examine three examples of memes—Positive Karma, “That Moment When,” and Instant Karma memes—that convey the desire to experience good fortune or witness another’s misfortune, presented as karmic retribution. The memes demonstrate how digital media can easily appropriate and oversimplify religious concepts such as karma, and then proliferate misunderstandings about them in online environments.

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma “That Moment When” Meme This meme originated from the “That Awkward Moment” meme that encompasses a range of socially uncomfortable experiences. The blog TheAwkwardMoment and the Twitter hashtag #thatawkwardmomentwhen began in December 2010, but the meme became extremely popular in the beginning of 2014, peaking in May of that year.14 Examples include that awkward (p.110) moment when “you laugh but it’s completely inappropriate” or “you realize you’re the last one singing.” Spinoffs include other types of moments, such as “that moment when you step on a Lego” (with an angry baby face) or “that moment when you don’t know whether to cry or laugh” (showing a girl holding up a screwdriver in the foreground with “I love my dad” etched into the side of a car in the background). The meme seizes upon familiar situations that generate strong emotional responses, such as “That Moment When You Realize You Forgot Your Keys” shown in Figure 6.1. “That Moment When” memes depict instants of realization— for example, when you realize you had homework or you realize you forgot your wallet— that resonate with wide audiences. They typically poke fun at one’s own foibles or mishaps, although they can also address political or social concerns, as illustrated in Figure 6.2.

Figure 6.1. Bankstrong, “That Moment When You Realize,” Memes.com, February 25, 2013, http://memes.com/ img/1560.

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma This meme emerged alongside many others following Donald Trump’s election as president. Another popular meme showed two photographs of President Barack Obama and Michele Obama on inauguration days in 2009 and 2017. In the former, they appear stern standing alongside George W. and Laura Bush, while in the latter they smile and lean into each other as they stand beside Donald and Melania Trump. The text above reads: “That moment when it’s not your problem anymore.” A third example was a picture of (p.111) Donald Trump looking awkward in front of a microphone, accompanied by the text, “That moment when you realize you’re not even remotely qualified to be president.” Such examples demonstrate the flexibility of

Figure 6.2. “Funniest Trump Transition Memes,” Pinterest, accessed April 4, 2017, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/ 155374255874722956/.

the “That Moment When” meme, which can capture ordinary behavior and experiences as well as political stances and critiques. Karmic offshoots of “That Moment When” include a subtle but significant textual variation that shifts the perspective of the meme from one who experiences (“you realize”) to one who observes (“you witness”), impacting the idea conveyed by the meme. Although their images vary, they share a common text: “That moment when you witness karma in its glorious splendor.” Instead of drawing attention to one’s own potential shortcomings or political concerns, it reflects the longing to witness other people getting payback for their misdeeds. The meme uses images of powerful and unconventional figures from television shows and movies, such as Anjelica Huston as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family (1991), Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in (p.112) The Great Gatsby (2013). As exemplified in Figure 6.3, with Anjelica Huston smiling deviously into the camera, the meme portrays the desire to observe others getting what they deserve.

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma Morticia Addams, Jay Gatsby, and Willy Wonka are wealthy, powerful, and occasionally condescending characters whose status affords them the chance to reprimand others for misbehaving—an opportunity unavailable to most people. Thus, if one examines comments in response to the meme posted on Facebook with a preface of “That’s It! That’s the look!” one reads comments such as “If only the time will come when I can,” “Can’t wait,”

Figure 6.3. “Witness Karma,” FunnyAnd.com, accessed April 4, 2017, http://funnyand.com/witness-karma/.

and “I hope I see it.”15 Especially popular from 2014 to the present, the text of the meme occasionally appears separate from the image in status updates on Facebook before sharing news articles about lion hunters being killed by lions in illegal hunts, price-gouging pharmaceutical company executive Martin Shkreli being arrested on fraud charges, and so forth. Another variant that made its rounds on Facebook in 2014 was “Isn’t it fantastic when you get to witness karma coming and biting the ass of the people deserving? A thing of absolute beauty.” The karmic meme speaks to the cultural need for justice and fairness, calls for which have become pronounced in America during the 2010s. During this decade protest movements, including the Occupy Wall Street movement that (p. 113) began in 2011, the Black Lives Matter movement that began in 2013, and the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, have advocated for legislation and policies to address economic, racial, gender, and sexuality inequalities. In this context where people experience injustice and discrimination because of their socioeconomic status, race, gender, or sexual orientation, retributive notions of karmic justice can hold certain appeal. The meme capitalizes on the notion that the wealthiest members of society wield considerable power, including the power to avenge those who have wronged them, while everyone else remains powerless to mete out such punishment. By sharing the meme on social media, the disempowered assert their belief in the eventuality of justice and their hope to someday witness karmic retribution in action. Not all karmic memes position the addresser as a witness: some portray the addresser as the person who reaps good or bad karma. Another karmic variant of “That Moment When” depicts “That Moment When You Win The Karma Lottery,” using the popular image macro of Success Kid shown in Figure 6.4, a Page 6 of 17

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma meme that originated in 2011 and peaked in popularity in February 2012 as well as April 2015.16 The karmic meme draws on popular associations between winning the lottery and karma, exemplified by the viral story of a man who won a $1 million lottery after someone cut ahead of him in the lottery ticket line in November 2016,17 and in the popular television series My Name is Earl (2005–2009), which depicts the transformation of a petty criminal into a karmic believer after Earl receives a $100,000

Figure 6.4. “Success Kid,” Know Your Meme, accessed September 19, 2017, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ success-kid-i-hate-sandcastles.

winning lottery ticket only to lose it when he is hit by a car. Convinced that his misfortune is a direct result of his previous wrongdoing, (p.114) Earl writes a list of 259 past misdeeds in order to rectify each one, clinging to the idea that he will be materially rewarded for his good actions. While this understanding of karmic retribution may initially seem superficial, there is precedent for Earl’s list of misdeeds among the “ledgers of merits and demerits” and “morality books” that were popular among Buddhists in late imperial China. Such texts appealed to Buddhists because they gave a clear moral code and suggested that people could establish their own destiny regardless of the turmoil surrounding them. Urging readers to draw up an account of their merits and demerits each day, tally and record the results each month, and calculate the balance at the end of the year, ledgers encouraged a quantified measurement of morality in particular and concrete actions, which, scholars such as Judith Berling have noted, encouraged a kind of “management of moral capital.”18 Similar to the ledgers of merit and demerit, Earl’s list gives him a sense of control over his destiny because he trusts in the mechanism of karma: he repeatedly emphasizes, “I may have made the list, but I did not make the rules. Karma makes the rules.” When the viewer sees scenes of Earl’s life prior to his construction of the list, it becomes apparent that his socioeconomic situation allowed him very little control. Although as a white male his race and gender implies a certain degree of privilege, his poverty, lack of education, unemployment, and homelessness suggest otherwise. The show garnered criticism for stereotypically portraying Earl as white trailer trash; however, his straitened circumstances render his attempt to transform himself more poignant, as Earl seeks to remain loyal to friends and family who are still Page 7 of 17

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma inclined toward bad behavior while he gradually develops a moral conscience in the course of redressing his past sins. Not only does My Name is Earl adopt a materialistic and mechanistic view of karma, but it also suggests that karma can be instantaneous. In the show— whose tagline is “Karma is a funny thing”—karma delivers slapstick comic relief as the audience views characters getting their “just deserts”—for example, when Earl’s ex-wife Joy steals guardrails for scrap metal only to later careen her car into the very same ravine.19 This approach to karma similarly underlies the Instant Karma meme explored in the next section.

Instant Karma Memes Instant Karma figures prominently in memetic videos shared on YouTube and Facebook. As Limor Shifman has argued, successful memetic videos incorporate at least three or four of six common features: a focus on ordinary people, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness, and whimsical content.20 “Instant Karma” videos share several of these characteristics, as they (p.115) portray ordinary people engaging in illegal or mischievous acts who immediately get their payback in humorous and simple ways. On YouTube, the most popular “Instant Karma” compilation from 2016, viewed by over 37 million people, depicts store owners grabbing robbers’ shotguns or spraying them in the face, and police immediately pulling over people making illegal turns on red.21 Another popular compilation entitled “Instant Karma Fails,” viewed by over 21 million people, contains humorous video clips of people throwing a plastic ball at a person only to have it ricochet and hit them in the face, or bicyclists spraying a fellow cyclist with water and immediately having a bike accident.22 The post includes the text: “Sometimes people get what they deserve. It is especially enjoyable when they try to punk someone and end up getting punk’d themselves.” “Punked” means tricked, teased, or humiliated, but Punk’d can also refer to the American television series (2003–2015) that captured Ashton Kutcher’s elaborate pranks on celebrities. Some Instant Karma memetic videos fall within this prank genre. For example, the YouTube channel TwinzTV baits robbers into the back of a U-Haul truck, then locks them inside and videotapes them getting tossed around. Responses to the compilation video, viewed by over 11 million people and shared by almost 200,000 people on Facebook with a tagline of “Karma don’t ever try to steal a truck” and viewed by over 150,000 people on YouTube with the tagline “Karma is a bitch,” range from assertions that the thieves got what they deserved, to noting that the pranksters could be brought up on felony charges for kidnapping, assault, criminal mischief, and various traffic violations.23 One could certainly raise ethical objections to such pranks, as they border on justifying bad behavior, captured in a Dilbert meme where Dogbert states: “I believe in karma.

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma That means I can do bad things to people all day long and assume they deserve it.”24 The popularity of such Instant Karma videos partly derives from people’s desires to see a direct correlation between misdeeds and instant repercussions, and occasionally to mete out justice themselves. This longing also surfaces in the memes “When is it going to be my turn to drive the Karma Bus? I have a couple stops to make,” “Dear Karma, I have a list of people you missed,” and “Welcome to the Karma Café. There are no menus. You will get served what you deserve.” As scholars have noted, memes make intuitive sense and are meaningful to individuals in ways that allow the ideas to be imitated or reproduced readily.25 The Instant Karma meme—especially the notion that “what goes around, comes around,” as Alicia Keys sings in her song “Karma” (2003)—makes intuitive sense to many people. Indeed, this vision of karma appears in numerous pop songs, including Radiohead’s “Karma Police” (1997) with “this is what you get / When you mess with us,” and Culture Club’s (p.116) “Karma Chameleon” (1983), with “karma chameleon / you come and go, you come and go.” However, if we trace the Instant Karma meme to its namesake “Instant Karma” (1970), a song written by John Lennon, although it suggests a similar stance at the outset, it undercuts the notion that instant karma solely serves a retributive function. The song begins, “Instant Karma’s gonna get you / Gonna knock you right on the head,” which recalls the Instant Karma memetic videos that show people literally getting knocked around. However, the song immediately follows with, “You better get yourself together / Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead / What in the world you thinking of / Laughing in the face of love / What on earth you tryin’ to do / It’s up to you, yeah you.” Lennon’s song underscores the potential role of karmic retribution—as a guide for morally rectifying oneself—as well as its limitations if it leads one to mock others and their plight. Although the Instant Karma memes speak to people’s desire for instant justice, they also encourage them to laugh at the humiliation of others, even if it seems deserved. Instead of “laughing in the face of love,” Lennon’s song encourages people to embody compassion, and it acknowledges that positive change relies on each and every person. In the next section we explore a final genre of karma memes that place more emphasis on karmic transformation than karmic retribution.

Positive Karmic Memes Although some memes delight in the prospect of witnessing people getting their just deserts, other memes draw attention to the potential for good karmic actions to have positive and transformative effects on people. Examples include Helen Barry’s meme of “Do You Believe in Karma? What goes around comes around. Keep your circle positive. Speak good words. Think good thoughts. Do good deeds. Type ‘yes’ if you agree,” which has been viewed by 21.5 million people on Facebook,26 and Raven Emrys’s essay entitled “12 Little Known Laws Page 9 of 17

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma of Karma (That Will Change Your Life),” which circulated on Facebook in the fall of 2013 and again in the spring of 2015.27 Emrys begins the essay by stating, “Karma is the Sanskrit word for action” and then specifies, “When we think, speak, or act we initiate a force that will react accordingly.”28 However, it quickly becomes clear that Emrys equates karma with positive thinking—the notion that positive thoughts bring forth good and favorable results—evidenced by her recommendation of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006) as a resource for learning about “The Law of Cause and Effect.”29 The danger of such assumptions—that if we put positive energy into the universe, we will be rewarded with wealth and good fortune, which some refer to as “a (p.117) belief in spiritual meritocracy”30—is that they can justify existing economic and social hierarchies rather than allowing for positive social change. Some positive karma memes focus on the social impact of engaging in good karmic action, including an entire genre of memetic videos that has emerged since 2013 that capture the antithesis of the Instant Karma meme: the “Tearjerking Thai Commercial.”31 In September 2013 a commercial for Thai mobile company TrueMove went viral on social media, reaching almost 6 million hits a few days after it was posted and over 20 million since then.32 It begins with a noodle seller’s generous act for a boy caught trying to steal medicine for his sick mother, and it then shows the noodle seller suffering a heart attack thirty years later, leaving his daughter struggling to pay for his hospital bills until she finds the bill has been paid by the very same boy—now a doctor—who writes, “All expenses paid 30 years ago.” Shared on social media with the tagline “karma,” the video generated such hype that it was featured in news programs such as Headline News, and it also won an award from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.33 A similar commercial from a Thai life insurance company made its rounds on Facebook in April 2014, showing a young man performing the same generous acts day after day with the subtitles: What does he get in return, for doing this every day? He gets nothing. He won’t be richer. Won’t appear on TV. Still anonymous. And not a bit more famous. What he does receive are emotions. He witnesses happiness. Reaches a deeper understanding. Feels the love. Receives what money can’t buy. A world made more beautiful. And in your life? What is it that you desire most?34 The video ends with the name of the company and “Believe in Good.” With over 8 million views and 54,000 likes on YouTube, the video generates a great deal of positive comments, such as, “This video touched me on an unthinkable level, so much that I’m almost re-evaluating my life right now on how I can do nicer things to people.” Another commenter wrote with incredulity, “Why does this video have more than 500 dislikes?!?!?! Don’t you people have feelings?”

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma These memetic videos resonate with other positive karmic memes that have circulated widely on Facebook, such as the image of the karmic domino effect shown in Figure 6.5. Although it depicts a karmic chain reaction, Buddhist groups on Facebook that shared the image on June 24, 2012, wrote, “Effect of Action is not fixed, but Modifiable by new Action.” In this way, the (p.118) group drew attention to the man’s action—his pushing of the first domino— rather than the tumbling of the dominoes themselves. A similar potential underlies the karmic meme “How people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours.” Such memes emphasize that agency rests with the individual who can determine how she reacts or acts. This is echoed in a video that circulated on Facebook in January 2013 entitled “Karma: Bond to Past

Figure 6.5. KeldBach, “Karma Domino,” Stash, accessed September 7, 2017,

and Future.”35 Clearly rooted in the Buddhist tradition, showing

https://sta.sh/0l82vvtz806.

footage of Buddhist monks in a forest monastery, the video draws attention to the impact of karma on other sentient beings. For example, when explicating karmic cause and effect, the narrator states: Whatever we do or think shapes our world, a tiny little bit, be it towards greed and anger, or be it towards loving-kindness. We can increase suffering in our world, or we can prevent suffering. It is up to us. So our actions directly affect our world—our own, as well as other people’s world —because, from a Buddhist perspective, all is one. Nothing is separate, all is connected. We are all connected.36 While positive thinking karmic memes focus on the individual benefits of good karma, these videos emphasize the communal value of good karma and promote an interconnected understanding of reality. One could argue that social media affords an incredible opportunity to underscore this interconnection as people post, share, and comment on each other’s thoughts and words. (p.119) In fact, one social media website explicitly associates its users’ online activity with karma: Reddit.

Internet Karma Reddit uses “karma” as a form of currency in its online forums to encourage users to post links and comments, and they put the total number of “karma points” next to usernames to indicate “how much good the user has done for the Page 11 of 17

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma Reddit community.”37 On their “Frequently Asked Questions” page, where they explain why one might want to accumulate karma, they draw comparisons with points scored in video games or sporting events, but then suggest that one could “look at things from a less competitive and more altruistic perspective . . . just set out to be a good person, and let your karma simply be a reminder of your legacy.”38 Reddit uses karma as a means of promoting a capitalist model of value where one’s online worth and “legacy” is based on points accumulated from “likes” and upvotes. They link to a Wikipedia entry on “karma” that explores how it is understood within Buddhism and other religious and philosophical traditions, but the “goodness” they equate with posting popular links or comments bears little resemblance to the virtuous actions promoted in such traditions. Links and comments that garner thousands of points are often provocative, snarky, or vulgar, designed to entertain people or transgress social conventions rather than promote virtue, generosity, or loving-kindness. As one user remarks, “I once had a 1000 comment karma bomb. It’s kinda like winning at the slots, except you’re really losing at life.” Although it may be as exhilarating as winning while gambling, he distinguishes between “karma points” accumulated online and meaningful activities in one’s offline life. Indeed, one could argue that Reddit chooses “karma” for its currency to suggest their users’ online activity has a meaning or purpose, when ultimately it seeks to encourage people to remain within their website, to increase their site’s visibility through links, and to generate a large user base. Reddit users debate the extent to which their online interactions might be analogous to offline connections, and whether the former is more artificial than the latter. For example, in one Reddit forum users debate whether an upvote of someone’s post is analogous to a hug.39 Against those who criticize users who value “fake” or “imaginary” internet points, or who argue that the physical contact between bodies in a hug cannot be reproduced online, one Reddit user claims that virtual interactions can feel the same as a hug as he writes, “It feels good, when a comment gets upvoted a lot, when people answer positively, when they gild a comment of yours. These are signs of (p.120) appreciation and affection.” Although some users agree that upvotes serve as a type of social currency and public record of one’s valued contributions to the Reddit community, others reject the comparison as “over intellectualizing” and criticize upvotes, saying, “they are what forms the mob, the in-cliques, the dominant discourse, or what is termed the hivemind and circlejerks on Reddit.”40 Some users value upvotes as a sign of affirmation, but others criticize them as promoting uncritical conformity. Buddhist views of karma can shed light on such debates, especially the distinction between “spiritual friends” (Sanskrit kalyāṇamitra) who can support and encourage one’s virtuous action, and others who may deter one from the path. Reddit’s formula makes no distinction, equating the number of upvotes with one’s “karma” or “goodness,” overlooking

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma the fact that upvotes can encourage bad thoughts, words, and actions as easily as good.

Conclusion “Internet karma” raises interesting questions about how Asian religious terms like “karma” become understood and represented in popular culture. Why karma? What cachet does “karma” give that “points” cannot? As Jane Iwamura notes, Americans have a certain fascination with Asian religious vocabulary and images because they seem exotic and mysterious, but Americans appropriate them as one would a style—something that adorns or ornaments rather than fundamentally changing or altering one’s being.41 In the case of Reddit, “karma” becomes stripped of all its content and is used as a marker for popularity that seeks to justify the website as a community. In the case of Instant Karma memetic videos, it not only becomes overly simplified but also gives license for people to mock and deride other people. In the case of “That Moment When,” it has the potential to draw attention to one’s own shortcomings, but it can also encourage people to fixate on feelings of ill will or anger toward other people. In the popular imagination, karma can also be molded in theistic ways, essentially reproducing God without any cultural or religious baggage, as evidenced in the karmic meme: “I saw that.”—Karma. Although such portrayals of karma may make it more appealing to a popular audience, it comes at a significant cost. Admittedly some Buddhists understand karma as retribution, which implies a deterministic relationship between previous or present actions and future repercussions, but other Buddhists perceive karma as subtle and inscrutable, analogous to the shadow cast by a form, or the echo created by a sound. Some view karma as organic, comparable to planting seeds that depend on certain causes and conditions to come to fruition. Other Buddhists maintain that one can extenuate the effects (p.121) of karma and even eliminate it entirely by performing repentance rituals and other meritorious ritual acts. Most importantly, many Buddhists would agree that human beings lack the capacity to know their own—or others’—karma and would assert that only Buddhas and other advanced beings have the power to perceive karma. Because people cannot know their own karma, they cannot definitively conclude that difficulties in one’s life are retribution for some previous transgression. Instead, they may view such obstacles as opportunities to transform their karma. As Peter Hershock states, “Karma is also the inflection of things as-they-are-coming-to-be”42 and “Karma is always playing out live, in ways that are open to significant improvisation.”43 A karmic worldview does not necessarily lead to fatalism, as it allows one to see future possibilities in the present moment. Some Buddhists on social media see a karmic potential to their posts, links, and comments. In response to the vitriol and anger that surfaced during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, several Buddhist users emphasized the need Page 13 of 17

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma to engage in the practice of metta—loving-kindness. They posted phrases wishing that all sentient beings—including themselves, their neighbors, those they don’t know, and their enemies—might be peaceful, happy, safe, well, and free from suffering. In this way, they seized upon the karmic potential of social media to encourage skillful and compassionate thoughts and words. However, as the Trump administration began proposing policies promoting racism, genderand sexual orientation–based violence, xenophobia, economic injustice, and environmental degradation, over 100 American Buddhist leaders issued a call to action that was circulated on Facebook. Appealing to the ideals of wisdom, love, compassion, and justice, they wrote, “We hear the cries of a nation whose democracy and social fabric are at risk . . . The wisdom of interdependence deepens and inspires our compassion. Understanding that none of us is separate, we know that the suffering of others is our suffering.”44 With this call, they challenged Buddhists to engage not only in karma of words and thoughts, but also karma of action—physical action—only accomplishable offline. These offline forms of engagement—such as marching, supporting nonprofits that serve vulnerable populations, or promoting civility and tolerance in day-today interactions—draw attention to the limitations of karmic memes and Internet karma. Karmic memes, while unconventional and transgressive in many respects, cannot effectively challenge such injustice and suffering. They may criticize people or situations offline, or even reflect a belief that their online activity might have a magical impact offline, but such words and thoughts do not necessarily inspire actions toward social justice. One (p.122) must move offline to encompass the full scope of karma—body, speech, and mind—and to promote karmic transformation.

Notes:

(1.) Rob Walker, “Remixed Messages,” New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05FOB-consumed-t.html. (2.) Keep Calm and Carry On, March 30, 2017, http:// www.keepcalmandcarryon.com. (3.) Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniv. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 192. (4.) Ibid., 193. (5.) Ibid., 194–195. (6.) Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 57.

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma (7.) Shifman describes three different positions as (1) “mentalist-driven memetics” of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Aaron Lynch that understands memes as idea complexes, (2) “behavior-driven memetics” that views memes as behaviors and artifacts, and (3) the “inclusive memetic approach” of Susan Blackmore that sees memes as any type of information that can be copied by imitation. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 37–41. (8.) Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 4–6. See also Asaf Nissenbaum and Limor Shifman, “Internet Memes as Contested Cultural Capital: The Case of 4chan’s /b/ board,” New Media & Society 19, no. 4 (2017): 483–501; Noam Gal, Limor Shifman, and Zohar Kampf, “‘It Gets Better’: Internet Memes and the Construction of Collective Identity,” New Media & Society 18, no. 8 (2016): 1698–1714; and Carrie A. Rentschler and Samantha C. Thrift, “Doing Feminism in the Network: Networked Laughter and the ‘Binders Full of Women’ Meme,” Feminist Theory 16, no. 3 (2015): 329–359. (9.) Peter Davison, “The Language of Internet Memes,” in Social Media Reader, ed. Michael Mandiberg (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 122. (10.) Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 41. (11.) Davison, “The Language of Internet Memes,” 123; Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 40. (12.) Davison, “The Language of Internet Memes,” 127. (13.) Ibid., 132. (14.) Venusaurmaster, “That Awkward Moment,” Know Your Meme, January 10, 2012, http://www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/that-awkward-moment. (15.) 105 The River, Facebook, 6 November 2016. (16.) Greg McCorel, “Success Kid/I Hate Sandcastles,” Know Your Meme, August 24, 2009, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/success-kid-i-hate-sandcastles. (17.) Brianne Tolj, “That’s What You Call Karma! Man Wins $1 Million in Lotto Because Someone Pushed in Front of Him in the Queue,” Dailymail.com, September 26, 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3807294/Manwins-1million-Lotto-person-cut-queue.html. (18.) Judith Berling, “Religion and Popular Culture: The Management of Moral Capital in The Romance of the Three Teachings,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (Taipei: SMC Publishing, Inc., 1985), 188–218.

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma (19.) “Randy’s Touchdown,” My Name is Earl, Season 1, Episode 3, 2005. (20.) Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 74–85. (21.) EnormousVIDS, “Instant karma—Instant justice—Compilation 2016 #5,” YouTube, March 14, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E14CpfUJXvU. (22.) FailArmy, “Instant Karma Fails Compilation II FailArmy,” YouTube, June 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj0m6On8DQ0. (23.) Famous and Blue, “Karma Don’t Ever Try to Steal a Truck!,” Facebook, February 21, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/famousandblue.international/ videos/1282168968530950/?hc_ref=SEARCH. (24.) Scott Adams, Dilbert.com, August 6, 2005, http://www.dilbert.com/strip/ 2005-06-06. (25.) Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, “Offline Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production,” in A New Literacies Sampler, ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 202. (26.) Helen Barry, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/pg/HelenBarryOfficial/. (27.) Raven Emrys, “12 Little Known Laws of Karma (That Will Change Your Life),” Social Consciousness, September 14, 2013, http://www.socialconsciousness.com/2013/09/12-little-known-laws-of-karma-that-will-change-yourlife.html. (28.) Ibid. (29.) Raven Emrys, “The 12 Laws of Karma,” HubPages, April 16, 2015, https:// hubpages.com/games-hobbies/The-12-Laws-Of-Karma. (30.) Shawn Van Valkenburgh, “The Dangerous American Myth of Corporate Spirituality: How Invocations of ‘Karma’ and Zen Are Being Used to Justify Deeply Unequal Systems of Power,” Salon.com, October 26, 2014, http:// www.salon.com/2014/10/26/ the_dangerous_american_myth_of_corporate_spirituality/. (31.) Humabon Kurogbangkaw, “Tear-Jerking Thai Commercial Strikes Again,” Humor Tech Blog, April 5, 2017, http://www.humortechblog.com/2017/04/tearjerking-thai-commercial-strikes-again.html. (32.) TrueMove, “Giving,” YouTube, September 11, 2013, https://youtu.be/ 7s22HX18wDY; Rebecca Cullers, “Watch the Thai Ad That Has Half the World Sobbing Uncontrollably,” Adweek, September 27, 2013, http://www.adweek.com/ creativity/watch-thai-commercial-has-half-world-sobbing-uncontrollably-152481/.

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Instant Karma and Internet Karma (33.) HLN, “What an Amazing Tearjerker!” YouTube, September 18, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v+GkuwYVtCXP4; “True Move H—‘Giving’ Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2014,” AdForum, accessed 4 April 2017, http://www.adforum.com/award-organization/6650183/showcase/ 2014/ad/34492191. (34.) Linaloved, “Heartwarming Thai Commercial,” YouTube, April 4, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZGghmwUcbQ&feature=youtu.be. (35.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SzRS3a48ec. (36.) Mdesign, “Karma—Bond to Past and Future,” YouTube, May 2, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SzRS3a48ec. (37.) “Frequently Asked Questions,” Reddit, accessed April 4, 2017, https:// www.reddit.com/wiki/faq. (38.) Ibid. (39.) Darthvalium, “The Phenomenology of Karma, or How ‘Imaginary Internet Points’ Are About as Useless as a Hug,” Reddit, August 26, 2015, https:// www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3ig28y/ the_phenomenology_of_karma_or_how_imaginary/. (40.) Ibid. (41.) Jane Naomi Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 35–36. (42.) Peter Hershock, “Valuing Karma,” in Revisioning Karma, ed. Charles Prebish, Damien Keown, and Dale S. Wright (Journal of Buddhist Ethics Online Books, 2005), 183. (43.) Ibid., 186. (44.) Bhikku Bodhi, Norman Fisher, Joan Halifax, Mushim Patricia Ikeda, Jack Kornfield, Ethan Nichtern, Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Lama Rod Owens, Greg Snyder, Gina Sharpe, Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams, Jan Willis, and Myokei CaineBarrett, “Stand Against Suffering: An Unprecedented Call to Action by Buddhist Teachers,” Lion’s Roar, April 6, 2017, https://www.lionsroar.com/stand-againstsuffering/.

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Disciples of the New Digital Religions Or, How to Make Your “Fake” Religion Real Ken Chitwood

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords This contribution expands and explores the concept of “hyper-real religions” through the case of the Disciples of the New Dawn (DOTND). A pure parody internet religion, DOTND is subtle and sly with its snark but quite real in its religious import and impact. Based on digital ethnographic observation on social media sites such as Facebook and on blogs, this contribution adds to the conversation about hyper-real religions and “authentic fakes.” Drawing on the literature surrounding these terms and interviews with individuals who share their perspectives and opinions about DOTND, this chapter reconsiders what an authentic religion is in light of authority, authenticity, community, identity, and ritual. By doing this with an “ambiguous fake” religion such as DOTND, this chapter helps enlarge the understanding of what constitutes “religion” in light of digital parody and the ambiguity of the features of religion online. Keywords:   hyper-real religions, religion, digital religion, parody, digital ethnography, ambiguous fake, Disciples of the New Dawn, internet religion

All hail Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption, and blessings be upon its anointed Megareverend John Oliver! Indeed, the host of Last Week Tonight on HBO is now the head of a brand-new religion. Brian Pellot of the Religion News Service reported, “The HBO satirist launched a tax-exempt church Sunday night to criticize the Internal Revenue Service’s hands-off approach to televangelist fraudsters who promise prosperity, at a price.”1

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions In crafting his own “Church of Perpetual Exemption,” Oliver joins a long list of parody religions, “antibelief systems,” and “authentic fakes”2 like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Church of the Almighty Dollar, and the Discount House of Worship in registering a scathing satire of established religions in an effort to critique or call into question the proposed abuses, miscues, and false claims of religion. While new media and communications technologies (such as the internets, Web 2.0, and social media) are conduits for conventional religions and institutions, they are also fertile ground for the growth of these types of fresh, fabricated, and “fake” religions. In a culture replete with parody, satire, snark, and irony, are we the least bit surprised? David Chidester wrote that “even fakelore or fake religion, although invented, mobilized, and deployed by frauds, can produce real effects in the real world.”3 Not only do they (p.126) parallel accepted religions in their rhetoric and form, their medium of communication, and other characteristics such as founders and creeds, myths and symbols, rituals and proclamations, but they also have religious effect and affect; they do the work of religion in a world where religion is unbounded, porous, and digitized. Indeed, I contend that these digital religions—or hyper-real religious creations and constructions4—force us to call into question our very notions of the “religious.” What Adam Possamai calls hyper-real religions, “a simulacrum of a religion partly created out of popular culture which provides inspiration for believers/ consumers at a metaphorical level,”5 might shed light in this case. Hyper-real religions, as posited by Possamai, often take on more meaning and relevance to individuals because they are more related to the experience of the isolated and independent religious consumer. Expanded and critiqued by the likes of Eileen Barker and Markus Davidsen and in relation to the work of Carole Cusack, this line of thought within the sociology of religion might give us pause to consider what religious ritual is when it is performed in a digital realm by otherwise seemingly disconnected individuals. Specifically, this chapter will deal with how individuals construct a religious identity, form community, engage in ritual, and construct a sense of authenticity even in opposition to a hyper-real religious form that is ambiguous in origin and nature. To explore this phenomenon, I will use the Disciples of the New Dawn (DOTND) as a case study. While John Oliver is clear in his purpose and parody, DOTND— which is a pure parody internet religion—is subtle and sly with its snark but quite real in its religious import.

Disciples of the New Dawn DOTND, supposedly led by the enigmatic Father Patrick Oliver Embry, uses social media to infuriate the masses with its provocative posts and off-putting memes on topics as diverse as condemning cesarean sections6 and burning pagans and “steampunks” alive.7 Internet comment boards and Reddit forums Page 2 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions believe the DOTND to be just a group of “internet trolls”—individuals or parody pages who provoke people on the internet by starting arguments with inflammatory or off-topic posts and messages in an online community. It is said that DOTND goes against the grain of “true Christianity” by speaking only in curse words filled with hate messages toward others. Others believe this is a real Christian group because of its claims to have gone underground and “off the grid,” while at the same time, somehow, posting on Facebook. Many people have been outraged by the group’s behavior.8 Rumors in internet forums and in casual discussion of the group suggest that the group (p.127) was founded in 1956 by Father Patrick Oliver Embry. Their page has been appearing on Facebook since 2013, popping up in new manifestations after the Facebook gods shut them down. They target everyone and everything and are quite generous in their hate-filled vitriol. They condemn neo-pagans and Wiccans and claim these people will “steal your children,” and “witches will ruin your lives.” They even go so far as to say that pagans should be burned alive. They also state that women who give birth naturally are “superior” to those who had cesarean sections. Their opinion on cesarean section can be extreme: they think that if you were supposed to die in childbirth, that’s God’s will, and you shall not go against God’s will by having a C-section. They also have a meme targeting the “steampunk” culture that these kids whose mothers had a C-section are an embarrassment to their parents and society. They state that members of the culture practice hedonism and most likely have orgies and bondage sex. Just as some believe that the “The Onion” parody news articles that make their rounds on social media are actually true, some swear that DOTND is real, and the group has been attacked for its insolent assertions and offensive opprobrium. Multiple Change.org petitions were set up in an attempt to have the DOTND Facebook page taken down. These petitions worked, and the page was shut down five different times. DOTND’s Facebook page is now in its sixth version, having existed in one form or another since 2013. Although DOTND has not made its forgery public knowledge, there is some evidence that they are a bona fide “authentic fake”—what Chidester frames as seemingly “fake” or created internet-based religions doing “authentic” religious work. Even so, as ambiguous as the DOTND parody has been, it has real effects. Thus, it might be termed an “ambiguous fake” religion. This phenomenon is related to “Poe’s Law,” an internet proverb stating that without a clear gauge of the author’s purpose, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers for sincere expressions of the parodied views.9 In this case, the DOTND members do not reveal their intentions, so it is thus often assumed to be an authentic group. To raise the fact that the group may not be real but is taken as real, internet consumers and commenters invoke Poe’s Law and have even spawned their own parody page—Disciples of the New Lawn—which, in

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions turn, is regularly attacked for its “offensive beliefs and statements” even though it’s a fake of a fake. This case’s somewhat extreme nature should give us pause to consider: Why are parody religions and digital fakes so compelling and, as will be shown in this chapter, so convincing? I will argue that they do the work of religion—here defined by its expressions in ritual, identity construction, the (p.128) formation of community, and contestations of authority and authenticity—in a world where religion is often unbounded and digitized and where life is liquid and on the loose. The religious effect and affect of reactions to the DOTND page are, in some ways though not all, just as real as those of a local mosque, church, temple, or meetinghouse.

What Is a “Digital Religion”? Or, How to Make Your “Fake” Religion “Real” DOTND can certainly be classified as a “hyper-real religion” and the study thereof situated within the field that has coalesced around Possamai’s original work referenced earlier. At the same time, as this brief review of the literature will show, DOTND’s ambiguous nature—and the fact that the religious characteristics I will outline largely develop in reaction to DOTND rather than around it—make it less of an authentic fake than an “ambiguous fake” religion due to unanswered questions about its origins, intentions, and so forth. To properly situate DOTND within the extant research in the field of hyper-real, invented, fictional, and other expressions of “new new” religions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, what follows is a brief review of some of the most prominent literature. First, the concept of “hyper-real religions” was Possamai’s attempt to build upon the work of Jean Baudrillard’s work on “simulacra.”10 Baudrillard contends that we no longer are able to distinguish between reality and constructed representations of reality—what he calls “simulacra.” Today, simulations are not even reflections of reality or points of reference but constructions of a new real, what he calls the “hyperreal,” in which the difference between map and territory disappears. Possamai sees these simulations percolating in popular culture, where it is nearly impossible to distinguish the real from the unreal; thus, the boundary between the two categories collapses and we are left in a hyper-real world of symbols where fictional worlds become just as “real,” or more so, than the real world. Possamai applied this theory to religions that play on this simulacra of reality and defined hyper-real religions as “a simulacrum of a religion created out of, or in symbiosis with, commodified popular culture which provides inspiration at a metaphorical level and/or is a source of beliefs in everyday life.”11 As an ambiguous concept, the notion of a hyper-real religion, as Eileen Barker noted, is able to flex to fit various manifestations of religion beyond religion and how popular culture, contemporary philosophies, and digital media are shaping religious ideas, experiences, and worlds.12

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions (p.129) Therefore, DOTND certainly fits within the realm of the “hyper-real.” The experience of many of its detractors and supporters online illustrates how difficult, nay impossible, it is to know whether or not DOTND is “real” or not. Indeed, it might be said that DOTND is playing with the very world of the “hyper-real” to have its desired impact (whatever that intended impact may be, no one knows for sure). Thus, while in one sense DOTND is part of the hyperreal phenomenon, it also manifests as a second-level simulacrum. In other words, DOTND is a simulacrum of simulacra. In recent years various scholars have done well to flesh out the field surrounding hyper-real religions and provide various case studies and types of the simulacra that DOTND seems to play with. I want to focus on the work of Cusack and her notion of “invented religions” and Davidsen’s ideas surrounding “fiction-based religions.” Cusack covers the range of various religious groups, both selfidentified and not, institutionalized and not, and spiritual practices that fit within broader conceptualizations such as the “hyper-real.” As she rightly noted, all of these religions and spiritualities touch on ideas about “authenticity and legitimacy, since those are the first and pivotal questions that come to one’s mind when listening about hyper-real religions.”13 The question becomes who gets to speak with authority about a hyper-real religion’s beliefs, ethics, or practices. This too will be the case with DOTND, in which the questions about authority and authenticity become critical at every juncture of religious phenomenon (e.g., ritual, identity, community). Thus, they are the crux of this chapter’s consideration of DOTND as a “religion” at all. Cusack has focused on what she terms “invented” or “new new religions” in trying to flesh out these critical issues, along with others, concerning “hyperreal religions.” Although Cusack acknowledges that invention has a role to play in all religions, the active role played by invention is more significant in “hyperreal religions” that “either eschew, or significantly modify, the appeals to authority, antiquity, and divine revelation that traditionally accompany the establishment of a new faith.”14 Referencing “new new” religions such as Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, or Jediism, Cusack identified a few key characteristics of invented religions. Following Possamai, she agreed that these are to a great extent predicated on popular culture and mediated in the digital realm. Both of these characteristics are true of DOTND. However, she also posited that “invented religions” explicitly reject more institutionalized or traditional methods of religious establishment and authority and are transparent about their fictional status.15 In this, what Cusack terms “invented religions” does not quite encompass something like DOTND. Although DOTND appears to eschew traditional forms of religious establishment and authority, the group is not open about its fictional status or not. Thus, (p.130) observers are not even confident of whether or not DOTND is real, let alone how it has established itself as a religion. Further, the religious community that has formed around DOTND is not from within, but without, as the religious phenomena that we will analyze Page 5 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions later in the chapter come from those who are reacting to DOTND rather than producing its content. Another noteworthy feature of invented religions is that they share features of what Chidester called “parody religions”16 insofar as they use mockery and humor as a means of substantiation. Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius (COSG), and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM, or Pastafarianism) are prime examples of such invented religions that toy with conspiracies and nonsensical doctrines and rituals, and they are often communities made up of individuals who attest that they are not religious. In many ways DOTND is akin to these invented religions, and discussions about DOTND in online chatrooms often assume that this is another “parody religion” taking the play around traditional religious doctrines and nonsensical conservative positions to the max. However, there is no distinct evidence that DOTND is actually a parody religion. In fact, the originators of DOTND may very well be playing with the notion of parody religions and engaging in a higherorder parody than previously witnessed with hyper-real, or invented, religions. The final noteworthy feature of invented religions segues nicely into the work of Davidsen. Cusack argued that invented religions take works of fiction and play as sources for invention, meaning, and materials upon which to build religious community. Sharing this estimation, Davidsen made the case that these types of invented religions are more properly called “fiction-based religions.”17 Arguing, with Barker, that for Baudrillard all religions are hyper-real in that they all derive their strength from supposed realities without referents, and thus that there needs to be another term to denote what can be considered a distinct class of religious expression. For Davidsen, these are “fiction-based religions,” which draw their principle impulse from fictional narratives such as Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Because these works do not claim to refer to the actual world but have constructed an entire universe or world of their own, they are, in his view, distinct from religious narratives attempting to draw on history. Furthermore, Davidsen disagrees with Cusack that fandom can count as religion. He instead makes a distinction between play and religion in order to distinguish between the religious use of fiction (what he would call “fiction-based religions”) and playful encounters and interactions with fiction (“fandom”). This distinction bears importance in the case of DOTND. As mentioned earlier, this chapter focuses more on the religious phenomena that emerge in reaction to DOTND rather than around (p.131) DOTND. These reactions cannot be determined as play as with Star Trek fans or Pastafarians who blur the line between reality and fiction with their ludic and play. The reactions and sentiments outlined later in the chapter are not play; as we will show, they constitute serious consideration as religious phenomena.

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions To be sure, DOTND shares several features with hyper-real, invented, and fiction-based religions in that it is seemingly invented from popular understandings of religion and meme culture, it engages in mockery and humor à la “parody religions,” and the questions of authenticity and authority are at the forefront of any consideration of DOTND’s religious status. And yet, as we have stated, the very ambiguity of the reality, or non-reality, of DOTND alters the context in which religious sentiment and community emerges around it. DOTND is also somewhat distinct from what Cusack calls “invented religions” or “new new religions.” Even though she commented on the parallels between these online invented religions and post-humanism/trans-humanism by deconstructing the binary between the “virtual” and the “real,” DOTND takes that boundary crossing nature to the next level. As an “ambiguous fake”—one that is invented yet ambiguous in its origins, purposes, and sources—DOTND provides a different type of religio-social encounter for those who interact with it and form community in reaction to it. To illustrate how this “ambiguous fake,” this particular type of “hyper-real religion,” is made and manifest as real, I will use the categories of digital religion as offered by Heidi A. Campbell in her work, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds. These categories reflect some of the same phenomena that the authors and critics already mentioned have observed and written about in regard to “invented religions” and “fictional religions.” In this case, they will be applied to DOTND, an “ambiguous fake” digital religion. While there are continuities with various globalization periods of the past,18 multiple theorists have marked off the ways in which the current global age involves hyped-up processes of time and space compression,19 and one of the principal means of this compaction of chronos and topos is via digital technology.20 Living in such an age of time and space compression, it would behoove those of us who are interested in the “religious” to pay attention to digital religion as a primary locus for the investigation of religion in the contemporary scene. At the same time, we must properly situate our study so as not to lose sight of the ways in which the offline and the online are involved in a dialectic of tension and cooperation—that there is a feedback loop between the digital and the physical. Indeed, religion is being reformulated right where these two bump and grind, rend and tear against one another, and (p.132) where new spaces are created in the slippages and crossovers. As Campbell wrote, “rather than being an alternative social space for a few, digital technology [is] an important platform extending and altering religious practice for many”21 and is a key site for perceiving the evolution of religious practice in a global and digital age. Digital culture nudges us and helps us negotiate our understandings of religious practice in ways that can lead to new experiences, authenticities, and reflexivity —both online and off. And so, allow me a moment—before we dive into the Page 7 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions exploration of DOTND—to talk about methodology in such a situation. If we are to understand the ways in which the digital and physical interact, intermesh, and interpenetrate one another, we must—in our theory and methods—be willing to maintain interstitial tension in our research. When lived religious practice and digital culture come in contact, a “third space” or hybrid context22 emerges that requires new thought processes, and singular types of meaning-making, identity construction, ritual, authenticity debates, and authority must be contested and created. Hybridity has come to mean all sorts of things concerning the mixing and combinative forces occurring in the moment of cultural exchange.23 Hybridity is that “in between,” which refers to the “third space” as a space of cultural separation and merging. It is the place where “transculturation” takes place, which involves the acquiring of limited aspects of a new culture, the loss of some elements of an older one, and the creation of a new, hybrid-but-coherent body of old and new amalgamated together in between the spaces of old and new. In this instance, the “third space” is a digital borderland—the DOTND cosmos. As Manuel Vásquez and Marie F. Marquardt explained, community can be centered around things other than temples, synagogues, churches, and mosques. “In allowing congregations to make their boundaries more flexible and permeable, [computer-mediated communities] turn them into border zones where the global and the local, the sacred and the profane, and face-to-face, and virtual networks meet.”24 Thus, virtual spaces such as the DOTND on Facebook and elsewhere act as “borderlands” where processes of “glocalization” and the dialectic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization play themselves out. They become the locales where individuals can navigate their new identity in a globalized world and attempt to merge the multiple cultures living inside of them and being embodied in their religious beliefs and practices and in contestation with the contours of economic, political, sociocultural, and religious power. Thus, digital religious worlds—like DOTND—point to new understandings of religion online and offline, ones that are simultaneously informed by social structures, political realities, cultural practices, and economic forces in (p.133) a technologically savvy and informationally inundated society. Our goal, as students of the religious, is to “inter-stand” them. Mark Taylor wrote that understanding is impossible in our postmodern and global world because nothing stands under us anymore—we are all on the move, in between, and betwixt here and there with nowhere to stand firm.25 Thus, the best we can hope to do is inter-stand, because everything stands between. Thus, let us now enter into the in-between space of the hybrid third spaces of the here and the there, the online and the offline, the digital and the real.

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions In Digital Religion Campbell sets out the themes of authority, authenticity, community, identity, ritual, and religion as critical for understanding the form and function of religion in the digital world.26 These categories help scholars think about the linkages, and ruptures, between religions digital and not. In that text, scholars took up these themes to explore the world of digital religion, offering case studies to further elucidate the ways in which things such as religious identity and ritual are transposed online or in digital form. This chapter will take these same themes and use them as a base from which to explore the “religious” nature of DOTND, whether or not this site and its worldview can be considered “real” or not. Ritual

In a digital age, people’s rituals of connectivity are cohesive and compelling— checking email, searching for information on Google, and maintaining friendships via social media are now part of the daily routine for many in society. Worldwide, there are an estimated 1.35 billion active Facebook users—those who log on to the social media website at least once in 30 days.27 In the United States 71% of internet users are on Facebook, 70% engage with the site daily, and 45% engage with Facebook several times per day.28 Given these statistics, and in chorus with numbers concerning other social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and so forth, it is no stretch to say that social media represent a potent, and influential, popular force in the world today. Likewise, in the realm of religion, social media hold sway. As Stewart Hoover wrote, “It has been argued that the media are today the most credible sources of social and cultural information, setting the agenda and the context for much of what we think and know about reality. Religion, which addresses itself to such questions, must be expressed and experienced differently as a result.”29 So too must the study of religion. Increasingly, individual and communal religious actors are engaging with media religiously or encountering religion through various forms of digital media. However, we would be naive to posit that it is only the forces of media that impact religion and not vice (p.134) versa. As the twenty-first century comes of age, religion continues to prove a potent local, regional, and global force that is shaping the way we interact with, view, and create media. Indeed, both media and religion compete for the central constructive roles in the formation of social solidarity.30 Thus, studies merging the two streams of cultural production are necessary and beneficial to understand religion, and/or media, in the digital age. If we take ritual to be “purposeful engagement with the sacred” and examine it according to both what ritual is and also what it does, we see religious ritual reflected and realized online.31 Principally, by participating in rituals surrounding DOTND, members of a group (as yet to be defined) are affirming in a performative way that they accept the ritual activity they are undertaking and maintain the beliefs and core practices associated with the ritual—whether that Page 9 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions is elaborate and structured or spontaneous and personally constructed. In the case of DOTND, the ritual forms around the aforementioned Poe’s Law and the participation of the protestors in the ritual of comment and response. Relating her experience, Ruth said, “I found myself commenting despite myself. I just couldn’t stay away from gawking at the photos, responding in anger, and sitting there amazed at their audacity.”32 Perplexed by her participation, notwithstanding her better judgment, she said, “I wasted too many hours looking up more info about this church and each time I would say, ‘I could be doing something so much better or more worthwhile with my time’ . . . and then the next day I would log back on to see what they were posting that day.” Even if commenters find themselves leaving their reactions there despite themselves, they are taking part in the ritual prompted by the creators of DOTND. They have been summoned, and they respond. Another individual who encountered the page, Bobby, had even stronger words: “This person who made this clearly has mental issues and is seeking attention.”33 He reacted against individuals like Ruth who posted comments and protestations: “By continuing to respond you’re just fueling their narcissistic disorder. This person clearly doesn’t care what any of us think. So everyone may as well stop replying. I’m quite frankly tired of getting notifications and it won’t let me turn them off. It’s been almost 3 months since this post was made. Don’t fuel the nutjobs’ fire.” Even with his own assertions and desire to disconnect from the phenomenon, he still treats DOTND as a real person, a real group, and relates his experience with the ritual of notifications and comments, logging on and being reminded of his former participation. How is it that these individuals participate in the rituals of DOTND despite themselves? Identity, our next theme, might be the key. Identity can be, and often is, defined by your participation in, or reaction against, certain ideas, (p. 135) practices, and groups. Thus, reacting to the DOTND’s posts—commenting and liking, sharing and posting—can become rituals of meaning-making and identity-construction in a sea of conflicting categories (both situational and relational), permeable media boundaries, and a proliferation of satire and simulacra in the contemporary digital world. Even if we don’t know if DOTND is real, our ritual realizes it in our reactions. Simultaneously, we make ourselves real by denouncing or deriding DOTND like Ruth and Bobby. Hence we are drawn back, again and again, not to make DOTND real, but perhaps in some way to make ourselves real. Identity

This discussion of identity in an age where “increasing mediation of selfrepresentation and social interaction” has challenged the traditional role of religion in the formation of identity causes us to question the formation of identity betwixt and between online and offline worlds, between the digital and Page 10 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions the physical.34 In a shifting world of self-making via personal digital media, how do we find the “authentic self”? At times, negative constructions—whether real or fake—offer the greatest promise. We define ourselves in opposition to what that is. Whatever that is, we are not. And in that statement, we perhaps find ourselves. Social media identity-construction often takes the path of kenosis—selfemptying. It is a via negativa way to the identification of one’s self. Since our identity is a choice, we get to choose who we are and who we are not. Looking at how individuals interacted with DOTND online, specifically as it regards this satire as a “religion,” I wondered what it meant for, or how it corresponded to, life offline. Talking to Sherry about her experiences with DOTND, I asked her what she thought of DOTND as a “religion.” She said: it’s not religion, but it tells us what is wrong with religion. It builds off what’s real about religion and hyperbolizes it—rather than covering up the bullshit of grace and peace, mercy and love, they show the reality of what religion does in the world—spread hate, lies, and anger. That’s why I respond on the page—not because DOTND is real, but because they expose the real problems surrounding religion. Whether it’s Islam or Christianity . . . or even Buddhism or Hinduism . . . religion spreads hate. It breeds anger. It is dogmatic and dangerous and we all need to get away from it. If DOTND helps us realize this, then I guess I’m a disciple.35 (p.136) Another responder, who did not come down on one side or the other on the “reality” of DOTND, said something entirely different than, but also quite similar to, Sherry. Burt said, “I’m a religious person and DOTND is not what religion is. I don’t know who they are or what their goal is, but they are making Christianity look bad. C-sections and steampunk: Jesus isn’t about condemning those things. There may be some things wrong about those choices, but to make the posts so strong, so angry, so hurtful—that’s not what my religion is about.”36 Both Sherry and Burt are trying to identify themselves in contradistinction to what DOTND represents. For both, DOTND stands for the worst of religion and what it is or can be. For Sherry, this helps her identify as staunchly nonreligious. For Burt, it helps him identify his religion as authentic. Both build their identity in juxtaposition to whatever it is DOTND is made, by them, to be. As Cusack noted, “the story is what’s important, and how people build that story into an identity formation” reveals how human beings create, to some extent, their reality in the sense that they, as individuals and then in communities, tell narratives that make meaning, and they externalise those narratives, those narratives gain an objective Page 11 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions status, and then, they’re re-internalised by individualized and communities as something that has facticity outside of simply being a human cultural production.37 This same process can, given prolonged immersion and social encounter, also lead to the creation of a new community. Community

Community can be formed around these contradistinctive constructed identities. Sociologists have thought about what might be called “collective consciousness” in modern societies in multiple ways. Émile Durkheim wrote that it consists of the “totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society,” which then “forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.”38 Other sociologists have started to talk about groupthink and herd mentalities, variably referred to as a “hive mind,” “group mind,” “mass mind,” or “social mind.”39 In this instance, rather than existing as separate persons, individuals collect together as dynamic groups to share values, resources, and knowledge. Benedict Anderson has talked about “imagined communities” as a way (p.137) to understand and analyze nation-states and nationalism.40 The concept has been broadened to incorporate other socially constructed notions of community between people who may not share face-to-face contact or regular interaction but still identify as part of the same polity, group, or community. It can also be said that the character of “collective consciousness” often depends on the type of mnemonic encoding used within particular groups.41 For example, cohesive groups with an informal structure may tend to stand in for significant aspects of their community as episodic memories. This, in turn, has a foreseeable influence on group behavior and collective ideology. It can lead to, among other things, strong solidarity, an indulgent atmosphere, and an ethos of exclusivity. It is possible to see this reflected in the community of critics that gather together, without anything else to bring them into contact, to critique and condemn DOTND. Indeed, entire chatrooms, websites, and Reddit threads have popped up to attack DOTND, decipher its message, or discuss religion and other topics. A Change.org petition42 entitled “Remove Disciples of the New Dawn page” brought together over 2,000 individuals who felt called to sign the petition. While this might be a form of “slacktivism,” hundreds of people also took the time to leave a comment/reason for signing the petition. The condemnation was universal, and several individuals echoed one another and relied on one another to shut down the page and take action together. One commenter from Texas wrote, “I am signing this because of the hatred and condemnation they give to mothers who were not able to have a ‘natural vaginal’ birth and they are saying anyone who did not have this type of birth was due to drugs or ‘being a little w****’.”43

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions In the current age, more and more individuals live in multiple and overlapping social spheres and sodalities. They create “community” from myriad groups, crafting a web of social significance from various strands and interweaving personal relationships. Pages oriented around taking action against DOTND may serve as a site for community formation. To further see how the “community” around DOTND is indeed community, we can appeal to the concept of a “networked community” in which online communication and interaction acts as a means of sustaining community life. The internet, and its attendant social networks and digital communities, is not detached from this life but rather is “embedded” and “emplaced” within it. It forms a thick sinew of social connection with one’s “physical” relationships and everyday interactions and experiences. The connections and community formed around the protest and pushback against DOTND may be defined as a “loose network” of relationships that builds off informal connections and organizational methods and ethos in other locales (e.g., church, work). The internet, as work, church, or home, becomes an-other place where networks (p.138) and community are extended and established, where relationships begin and end. Indeed, we see here that the internet and the networked communities formed, extended, or established there constitute a critical space to explore questions of what constitutes community, and religious community in particular, in such an age. Authority and Authenticity

These two elements, more than any other aspect of religious being and practice, are linked together when it comes to understanding digital religion and “ambiguous fakes” such as DOTND. Authority and authenticity are the critical questions involved at every juncture—of ritual, identity, community, and even religion itself. And thus, they are the crux of our consideration of DOTND as a “religion” at all. Our questions concerning DOTND would be: Who is the authority in the hyper-real religious world of DOTND? And is DOTND an authentic religious world in the first place? First, authority and authenticity are inherently linked. In the case of DOTND, the authenticity of the practices and posts are questioned because the authority is not known. When it comes to digital platforms, users must identify or create their own specific criteria in order to develop selective choices as to what is “real” and authoritative and what is not, given the proliferation of data and deceptions online (e.g., “The Onion” posts that are shared as “real” news or the recent discussions of “fake news” and who is behind these viral forms of media). There is no central authority to decide what is useful and/or false information. In classical or previous publishing and religious processes, there tended to be a stricter hierarchy of experts who oversaw and delineated the flow of communication and monitored what information was published or powerful.

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions Online users may not find it easy to identify whether they are dealing with something real or not. Indeed, this discourse seems to dominate the discussions surrounding DOTND—is it real? Or is it fake? This consideration was taken up in an Enki Village page from a neo-pagan community: Back in August of 2013, a very mean hate page surfaced on Facebook. The owner of the page threatened pagans and attributed certain practices to paganism, including cesarean section births and not teaching kids about Jesus which will lead to prostitution and sodomy. The page disappeared but this violent hate group, Disciples of the New Dawn has resurfaced with just as much hate and judgment of others. In all honesty, the posts and memes are very ignorant and cruel (p.139) towards others and the comments from the page owner to people who respond are very inappropriate. For someone pushing Christian principles, the language can be downright foul and many cannot believe the page is not a joke. Fact is, they are a very real group with a following that agrees with them.44 Likewise, and on the flip side of the authority and authenticity debate, there is the Patheos.com blog, “The Friendly Atheist,” who wrote: How do we know this is all just a Poe? It’s too over the top to take seriously. For all the God talk, there are virtually no Bible verses mentioned (and when does that ever happen?). The leader of the group is Father Patrick Oliver Embry. Let me repeat that last one: Patrick Oliver Embry. P.O.E. Yet, despite the obvious parody, a Change.org petition has called for the group’s Facebook page to be removed (and the original one was indeed taken down) and the Daily Mail says it’s “unclear” if the site is satire.45 Then there are those who work both sides of the authenticity debate: It is very possible that the Disciples of the New Dawn is the project of politically left leaning individuals mimicking extreme right wing moralistic dogma to stir the anger of liberals and moderates, and if so it is working . . . to an extent. Par with course, the comments and replies are full of vitriol against the group and fall on simplistic name calling and threats of violence. Will emotional responses prompt rational reasoning on how to oppose this “hate group”? Continuing with the notion that this is a satire, then it is important that the “man behind the curtain” needs to make a reveal at some point in order to complete the process. Will they slam on the brakes so that all the commenters fly straight through the windscreen of critical thinking? If not, people will just continue to believe that this is real group and that extreme right wing religious fundamentalist do actually hate with this much fervor. But what if the group is actually real?46 Page 14 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions Ultimately, these discussions of authority and authenticity are concerned with power and the ability, or dynamic strength, to perceive past what Baudrillard refers to as a tension, and space, between simulacra and the real.47 Of course, through Baudrillard, we might consider whether or not the mediated images of the “real” are just as potent or powerful as the “real” as we (p.140) construct or imagine it. Masked in this discussion of whether or not DOTND is “real” are bigger questions about whether the digital counts as real or not. In having these discussions, the actors engaged with DOTND seek to actually make DOTND “real” for themselves. In seeking to establish some sense of their identity vis-à-vis, or in contradistinction to, DOTND, the actors involved in the conversation must have some way of validating their cause and the “reality” of DOTND. In seeing the authority—in this case Facebook—take action, DOTND and the discourse surrounding it take on “reality.” This entire struggle over DOTND’s authenticity and authority can be seen as a microcosm of a larger “crisis” in authority and authenticity in religion and power—whether digital or physical, online or offline. The question “what is real?” is robust and relevant, no matter the context. Therefore, research on authenticity and authority can be located online or offline but must confront the strategies and legitimating processes employed by the actors involved rather than the inherent authority and authenticity of the object of analysis itself. We must reinitiate and resituate our research to focus on the audience-actors that create and construct authority and credibility in a heavily mediated world. What we must first come to admit is that whether or not we can answer the question of authenticity and authority behind DOTND, the posts are doing authentic religious work. First, their brand of sharp wit and snark are par for the course and increasingly popular among Millennials and their ilk who thrive on the culture of irony. Second, they are a product of digital media. The internet is more than a platform for cat videos and vague Facebook posts. The fact is that the World Wide Web changes how we interact with the world, connect with others, and learn, sort through, and judge the veracity of information. In the world of Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia, the former Enlightenment ideals of authenticity and authority are often called into question or undermined entirely. In the age of the internet, Tweeters can break news faster than CNN. Websites can hold governments accountable. Fake religions can “raise the problem of religious authenticity even when they are obviously fake, because they present themselves as real religion.”48 In the face of the internet—for all its good and ill —the traditional tests of what is real and what is hoax are subverted and the lines between authentic and counterfeit are blurred.

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions Given the smorgasbord of options available to the individual religious consumer today and the competing claims of the commercialized religious marketplace, these “authentic fakes” force us to question the very basis of traditional religious identities and claims in the first place. At the same time, they also re-enchant the world as they think, act, and feel like “real” religions. (p.141) In this sense they are “hyper-real religions” à la Possamai. As Chidester wrote, “Apparently advancing a universal religious claim, this assertion radically personalizes religious identity, because anyone, wherever he or she might be, whatever he or she might believe, feel, do, or experience, is the author of authentic religion.”49 Just as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s parody news became more real and relevant for Millennials than traditional news sources in 2008 and 2012, and as “fake news” came to influence the electorate in 2016, so too are parody religions like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, John Oliver’s Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption, and DOTND are now being anointed as more authentic in their religious sensibilities than established religions and spiritual institutions. Rather than dismissing these “authentic fakes” or potential “ambiguous fakes,” it is important for us to pay attention to why they are so viral and apropos. Why are their sarcastic statements and stances so spellbinding? What critiques are they leveling? How are these censures speaking to the real religious needs of their “followers” and digital disciples? What does it mean for a religion to be “real” and “authentic” in the (post)modern world? Furthermore, as Chidester concludes, we cannot discount them as “fake religions” with no real-world religious effect “because they are doing real religious work in a medium of communication in which anything, even religion, seems possible.”50 The only question left is whether we who care about religious identities, literacy, and claims of legitimacy will listen to, and learn from, these “authentic” and sometimes “ambiguous fakes” as well. Religion

Of course, this entire discussion brings into sharp relief the very onerous question of what “religion” is in the first place. Oddly enough, I have left this for last. While most papers and presentations that call into question the category of “religion” start with propositions, questions, and definitions of this category of analysis, which is at the heart of our discipline, I have chosen instead to approach it at the end. Why? Part of this is because this is how Campbell et al. decided to organize their analysis. I share their perspective that while the study of digital religion may call into question some of our preexisting categories for what qualifies as “religious” or not, it is not, in the words of Gregory Price Grieve, “a litmus test to definitively answer the question of what is religious and what is not.”51

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions Instead, by taking digital religion as the primary locus of our research (while not losing sight of the dialectic feedback loop between online and offline (p.142) worlds), we are simply extending and enriching our study of religious ritual, identity, community, authority, and authenticity, not necessarily replacing it. And yet, at the same time, we are peering into the past, present, and future of religion itself. Price Grieve also wrote, “digital religion emerges within what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity,’ a period of global capitalism where life is constantly changing, highly mediated, hurried and uncertain.”52 In such an environment of time-space compression, religious practitioners, from various religious institutions or persuasions, construct their own meta- and micronarratives of belief and ritual, idea and matter, through flexible tactics and multiple media. As I have attempted to intimate, interaction with the DOTND and its hyper-real religious memes and posts is one way in which individuals do the work of religion—in ritual and community, identity and authority/authenticity—amidst the stress of liquid modernity where nothing has time to solidify or be made sure. By engaging in the practices described above, actors and audience are able to simultaneously opt out and engage in religious practices as they choose and construct or debate and deconstruct. In so doing they make the digital a locus of their religious experience—in dynamic tension and interrelatedness with other locales of religious ritual and belief, ideation and action. Thus, it would do us well to look to digital religions as an increasingly relevant field of study to understand the novel, flexible, and new forms that religious belief and practice will take in the near and far future.

Areas for Further Consideration One of the limitations of this chapter is that it is largely stuck in discourse. Gleaning conversations from online blogs, chatrooms, and individual interviews on social media, the analysis necessarily lacks an account of the physical, material, and embodied ways that digital religion is made real. The assumption is that interaction on the internet is an experience of the mind alone, but that is far from the truth. Our interaction with digital worlds is physical just as interactions with the material world are, albeit perhaps in different or augmented ways. For example, as I spoke with various interviewees I took note of the fact that many of them spoke of authenticity and embodiment as they reflected on DOTND. One said, “I felt this pain in my stomach as I looked at the page” and another, “they make me physically sick.” Still others reflected, “I was burning up when I first saw their posts, my face would flush” or “I look at the scar on the woman in the photo and I could almost feel the pain of my labor and I couldn’t believe these jerks were saying such horrible things.” As we take (p.143) digital religion seriously and consider how it might help “religion” in and of Page 17 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions itself, we must also consider the ways in which digital religion is embodied, physical, and material despite our predilection to relegate the digital to the realm of the mind and discourse. Also, one challenge I have received in presenting this idea has been that opening up our definition of religion to include enigmatic entities such as DOTND may mean we lose any firm idea of the “religious” in the first place. Perhaps that is the case. However, I feel that the cat is already out of the bag when it comes to trying to pin down a definition of religion. Such a task is, if I might venture to say, like trying to pin Jell-O to the wall. All religion is, in some way, beyond religion. Religion is unbounded. There is nothing we can do about it. And so, as we study DOTND and see how “hyper-real,” “invented,” “fictionbased,” “authentic fake,” or “ambiguous fake” religions are made real as they spawn further fakes, simulacra of simulacra one might say, we may have to expand our definitions or discard them altogether. However, it is my sense that we will not lose the idea of the “religious” in this endeavor. Instead, we can further enlarge, and simultaneously refine, our definitions of religion. In discussing such exercises in definition and delineation of the object of study within religious studies with Thomas Tweed on Twitter, he replied to me, “may the definitions of religion abound!” While Tweed readily admits that there is no “constitutive disciplinary term [that] is elastic enough” to fully encapsulate the “what of the what” when it comes to religion, it does not mean that we should abandon the search. We should enlarge our understanding, and our material for consideration, and seek to “continually refine and revise our understanding.”53 That is true whether we are studying religions online or off, real or fake, or somewhere in between.

Notes:

(*) This chapter was originally presented, in partial form, as part of the Davis Lecture Series at Shenandoah University, Virginia, on March 22, 2016. (1.) LastWeekTonight, “Televangelists: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO),” YouTube video, 20:05, posted August 16, 2015, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUndxpbufkg. (2.) David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). (3.) Ibid., 17. Page 18 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions (4.) Adam Possamai, Handbook of Hyper-real Religions (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2012). (5.) Adam Possamai, Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-real Testament (Brussels: P.I.E-Peter Lang, 2007). (6.) Unfortunately, these posts have been pulled down by Facebook and the URLs for linked images are continually changing. Examples can be found, at time of publication, at http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/facebookdisciples.asp. (7.) Cf. Erica Tempesta, “‘You Didn’t Really Give Birth!’ Alleged ‘Religious Group’ Angers Thousands of Women with Satirical Anti-Cesarean Campaign Shaming ‘Lazy’ C-Section Moms,” Daily Mail, April 1, 2015. (8.) Ibid. (9.) See the Wikipedia page on Poe’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Poe%27s_law. (10.) Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra et Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–86, 159–164. (11.) Possamai, Handbook of Hyper-real Religions. (12.) Eileen Barker, “Preface,” in Handbook of Hyper-real Religions, ed. Adam Possamai (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2012), ix–xii. (13.) Carole M. Cusack and Pavol Kosnáč, eds., Fiction, Invention and Hyperreality: From Popular Culture to Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). (14.) Carole Cusack, Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction, and Faith (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). (15.) Ibid., 1. (16.) Chidester, Authentic Fakes. (17.) Markus Davidsen, “The Spiritual Milieu Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Literary Mythology,” in Handbook of Hyper-real Religions, ed. Adam Possamai (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2012), 185. See also Markus Davidsen, “From Star Wars to Jediism: The Emergence of Fiction-Based Religion,” in The Future of the Religious Past, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 376–389. (18.) Cf. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Melange (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004).

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions (19.) David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell, 1989). (20.) Cf. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). (21.) Heidi A. Campbell, ed., Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1. (22.) Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge Press, 1994). (23.) Ibid., 112. (24.) Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). (25.) Mark C. Taylor, Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). (26.) Campbell, Digital Religion, 12. (27.) Statistica, “Number of Monthly Active Facebook Users Worldwide from 3rd Quarter 2008 to 3rd Quarter 2014 (in Millions),” accessed January 11, 2015, http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebookusers-worldwide/. (28.) TechCrunch, “Pew: Facebook User Growth Slowed as Others Gained, but Still Has Most Engaged Users,” accessed January 11, 2015, http:// techcrunch.com/2015/01/09/pew-facebook-user-growth-slowed-as-others-gainedbut-still-has-most-engaged-users/. (29.) Stewart M. Hoover, Religion in the Media Age (Media, Religion, and Culture) (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9. (30.) Ibid. (31.) Christopher Helland, “Ritual,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi A. Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2013), 25–40. (32.) Interview with author, Facebook message, January 25, 2016. (33.) Interview with author, Facebook post, January 27, 2016. (34.) Mia Lövheim, “Identity,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi A. Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2013), 41–56. Page 20 of 22

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions (35.) Interview with author, phone, February 1, 2016. (36.) Interview with author, Facebook message, January 29, 2016. (37.) Carole Cusack, “Invented Religions,” Religious Studies Project, accessed June 10, 2017, http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/tag/invented-religions/. (38.) Kenneth Allan, Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2005), 108. (39.) John D. Greenwood, The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 110. (40.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2016), 6–7. (41.) Ioannis Tsoukalas, “Exploring the Microfoundations of Group Consciousness,” Culture and Psychology 13, no. 1: 39–81. (42.) Cf. Andrew Eaton, “Remove Disciples of the New Dawn page,” Change.org, accessed March 1, 2016, https://www.change.org/p/facebook-remove-disciplesof-the-new-dawn-page. (43.) Ibid. (44.) See Lucas, “Who Are The Disciples of the New Dawn?,” on EnkiVillage, accessed March 14, 2017, https://www.enkivillage.org/disciples-of-the-newdawn.html. (45.) Hemant Mehta, “Disciples of the New Dawn, a ‘Godly’ Group Whose Images Are Going Viral Online, is a Parody. .. So Stop Freaking Out,” The Friendly Atheist Blog, accessed March 14, 2017, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/ friendlyatheist/2015/04/11/disciples-of-the-new-dawn-a-godly-group-whoseimages-are-going-viral-online-is-a-parody-so-stop-freaking-out/. Emphasis in original. (46.) Aloysius Fox, “Disciples of the New Dawn. .. Satire, or Sincere?” The Pandora Society, accessed March 31, 2017, http://thepandorasociety.com/ disciples-of-the-new-dawn-satire-or-sincere/. (47.) Baudrillard, Simulacra et Simulation. (48.) Chidester, Authentic Fakes, 192. (49.) Ibid., 211. (50.) Ibid., 211.

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Disciples of the New Digital Religions (51.) Gregory Price Grieve, “Religion,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi A. Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2013), 104–118. (52.) Ibid., 109. (53.) Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2006).

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Where Soul Meets Technology

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Where Soul Meets Technology Catholic Visionaries and the Stanford Research Institute as Precedents for Human–Machine Interfaces and Social Telepathy Apps D. W. Pasulka David Metcalfe

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords The chapter examines how the visionary dream of connecting people’s minds wavered between religious cosmologies, media theories, and researches into human–computer interaction. It focuses on a series of historical case studies: the writings of Ramon Llull, a fourteenth-century Catholic lay missionary from Spain; the concept of noosphere as described by the Jesuit anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Marshall McLuhan’s characterization of media as “extensions of man”; and research on telepathy or clairvoyance conducted at the Stanford Research Institute, a center where pioneering research into interactive computing led to the invention of the computer mouse in 1968. The authors argue that the beliefs, expressions, discourse, and spiritual framework that supported the development of digital media and the internet have been and still are largely religious, mythological, and enchanted. Keywords:   telepathy, religion, human–computer interaction, Ramon Llull, Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan, Stanford Research Institute, Augmentation Research Center

In the days following the announcement by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook had bought Eye-Tribe, an eye-tracking-technology company, we received a series of email invitations from the Authentic Company with the subject title “The Saga Continues.” The email was an invitation to download their latest app, Saga, touted as “the first social telepathy app.” The picture in Page 1 of 14

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Where Soul Meets Technology the email was captioned, “Yes, you can read your friends’ minds.” The picture amused us. Two smiling college-age women are shown taking a selfie in front of a building that is burning to the ground. The raging flames and imminent destruction of the building are in stark contrast to the smiling faces of the young women. Given the headlines about Facebook, we assumed it was a parody. But as we researched the Authentic Company, we realized that the app and its implications were intended to be very real. The email and the company’s rhetoric exuded spiritual significance, as it informed me that “you are receiving this email because you opted in, visited an event, or by divine intervention.”1 The tracking technology of Eye-Tribe and similar companies is based on a strictly physiological framework for understanding computer–human interfaces. However, the implication of Saga and the historical precedents for this particular type of human–computer or human–network engagement suggest something more esoteric than pure technology meets physiology. (p.150) On the one hand, scientists forge technological connections to human physiology, and all within the rational framework of science. On the other hand, the language and growing discourse used to describe this process—such as the Authentic Company’s marketing team feeling comfortable putting opting in to a mailing list and divine intervention side by side—is esoteric and spiritualized, and the implications go well beyond a scientific physiological framework. In some instances, even the safety of scientific rationalism fails to protect from evidence that goes beyond any possible reductionism. It bespeaks a direct connection, a literal hookup, to a vast mind, or an esoteric connection to other minds. It may surprise you that something as familiar as a computer mouse was designed by a group of scientists working under the title Augmentation Research Center, and that the augmentation they were investigating was aimed at enhancing and potentially supplanting the natural perceptual faculties of human beings. Indeed, during the initial stages of development, especially in the area of online communities, researchers did not stop at seeking a direct connection between minds—other human minds, and a vast mind that has been historically called many things, such as the noosphere, the Cosmic Christ, and most recently the internet.2 Early twentieth-century Jesuit anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin called this the Cosmic Christ, and the mind the God. The Authentic Company, in a less grandiose spin, refers to it as social telepathy. These are just degrees of the same assumption: humans can hook into a digital field connected to physical computers. This field is assumed to have direct access to our minds, our thoughts, our desires, and we to others. Additionally, we can hook into or access Page 2 of 14

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Where Soul Meets Technology the vast internet mind, and in turn, through our interactions within it and with any aspect of the environment that it can research through sensor systems or data collection, it can plumb the depths of our thoughts, desires, aspirations, and goals. Of course, the internet, Facebook in particular, is actually developing this type of access by gathering information physiologically, not necessarily esoterically, and their use of it is expediently commercial. They observe our eye movements, our files, the things we buy, and what we hover over, among other things, in order to create a dynamic personality profile that can be monetized and employed to better tailor messaging suited to the user. Yet, the beliefs, expressions, discourse, and spiritual framework that support this development have been and still are largely religious, mythological, and enchanted. Although this chapter will keep these two frameworks separate—the science-based technological infiltration of our bodies and thus our minds—the other (p.151) framework, which we will dub spiritual, has presaged the physiological-technology developments. It is important to note that whereas the Catholic visionaries Ramon Llull and de Chardin saw this coming technosphere as spiritual and good, contemporary corporate and even military developments have made specific, nonreligious use of these digital technologies and implicit ideological frameworks, and many of these would likely be interpreted as “not good,” or even evil, by de Chardin and Llull. The Catholic media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s private reflections about media indicate that he was well aware of the darker side of media technologies. In the end, we will suggest a novel and not uncontroversial possibility: perhaps these two frameworks, the scientific/physiological and the spiritual/psychodynamic, have the potential or the inherent capacity to merge, revealing that telepathy and the human–computer engagement really has no boundaries or demarcations.

Catholic Visionary Code: The Great Art of Ramon Llull Avoiding a generalization as to the prehistory of informatics and information science, we can say without equivocation that Ramon Llull (1232–1315), a Catholic lay missionary from the Majorca region of Spain, stands at an important juncture in the development of the field’s theoretical underpinnings. Beyond any questions of practical application or whether Llull’s work truly represents computer technology as we know it, he presents us with a framework for thinking about the world in a way that prepared future generations to develop these ideas into the massive global information infrastructures we see today— and it all began, like so many spiritual narratives, with a mountaintop vision. In his autobiography, dictated during the end of his life, it is related that after a period of prayerful retreat,

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Where Soul Meets Technology Ramon went up a certain mountain not far from his home, in order to contemplate God in greater tranquility. When he had been there scarcely a full week, it happened that one day while he was gazing intently heavenward the Lord suddenly illuminated his mind, giving him the form and method for writing the aforementioned book against the errors of the unbelievers. The “aforementioned book” is Llull’s Ars Magna, or Ars Generalis, which might be more accurately described as a lifelong project rather than simply a book.3 The Llullian Art, as it is sometimes called, is an incredibly complex memory (p. 152) system and symbolic science that used tables and cipher-wheels to codify the common language that all the Abrahamic faiths use to describe God and God’s perfection within creation. Set in a globalist milieu not unlike the one we find ourselves in today, Llull’s grand hope was that the Art would allow for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to find a common language with which to describe the ultimate reality and in the process come to an understanding of each other’s place within that reality.4 As Leibnitz would later say of the Art, reflecting his own theoretical predilections, it provided a way of working with language that was based on mechanization rather than interpretation. It solidified the ideal of philosophical logic and reasoning by allowing the practitioner to run through all of the available combinations within a set of propositions, thereby eliminating any arguments that were solely based on opinion, emotion, or dogma.5 Within the standard cosmologies of the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, such a mechanism was thought to be a window into the deeper orders of reality. Llull’s appellation of “Angelic Doctor” fits his understanding that the root principles that formed the central figures in the Ars Generalis were essentially the angelic names, per Islamic and Judaic mysticism, through which God formed and empowered the material world. The Ars Magna sought to bring the human mind into order with God’s ordered cosmos. The irrefutable mechanization of this process, Llull and his successors felt, would offer global peace through its ability to clarify the essential logic within the propositions it sought to solve—even more so since his innovative approach was not only missionary in intent but reflected the years of multicultural intellectual exchange that he was privy to, living within the vibrant cultural cross-streams that fed the thought life of Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East during his lifetime. Used as an interior contemplative practice by Llull, the Great Art reconstructs a perfected vision of divine creation within the confines of medieval cosmology— given boundaries by the narrative of the Christian redemption process, it seeks

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Where Soul Meets Technology to clarify the murkiness of comparative theology and philosophy in order to open the inquirer to deeper levels of meditation. This clarification takes the form of codification, and when this codification is turned outward to the world and applied, the same systematic architecture that worked to create a calculation of our perceptual world becomes the root dynamics of our current attempts to reproduce those perceptual states through mechanical calculations. Llull’s inner art turned outward becomes the inner workings of our current information systems. The historical context and depth of Llull’s influence and ideas is better detailed elsewhere; here what we are considering is just the fact that in (p.153) seeking to create a mechanism of logic and reason he opened a space to begin thinking about mechanisms capable of logic and reason. In seeking to augment human reasoning with a mechanized logic, he also laid the ground for the mind– machine interfacing that we see today on the web and in so many other areas of contemporary life.

Jesuit Anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin and his Cosmic Christ, or Noosphere Another Catholic visionary scientist presaged a conscious internet. Although there are certainly historical examples of a magnetized or technological sphere that encompasses the world and that humans are able to access in some capacity, a very precise description of such a thing was the life work of the Jesuit anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1851–1955). He believed that he first accessed a biofield, or biosphere, when he was a soldier on the frontlines of World War I. To him, this sphere was palpable and spiritual: [I]t was, I am quite sure, from having plunged into that atmosphere—from having been soaked in it for months and months on end—and precisely where it was at its most dense and heavily charged, that I ceased to notice any break (if not any difference) between “physical” and “moral,” between “natural” and “artificial.” The “Human-million,” with its psychic temperature and its internal energy, became for me a magnitude as evolutionary, and therefore as biologically, real as a giant molecule of protein. I was later to be astonished on many occasions to find in my own circle that those who could not agree with me suffered from a complete inability to understand that precisely because the individual human being represents a corpuscular magnitude he must be subject to the same development as every other species of corpuscles in the World: that means that he must coalesce into physical relationships and groupings that belong to a higher order than his. It is, of course, quite impossible for him to apprehend these groupings directly as such . . . but there are many indications that enable him to recognize perfectly well their existence and the influences they exercise . . . I have no doubt at all (as I said earlier) Page 5 of 14

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Where Soul Meets Technology that it was the experience of the War that brought me this awareness and developed it in me as a sixth sense.6 Chardin, in later works, would call the atmosphere he detected the beginning of a “noosphere,” and believed it was the destiny of humans to connect to (p.154) it through an innate “sense,” a sense that he discovered in the midst of the charged environment of death and destruction. There is some confusion about the origin of the term noosphere, but it is associated with de Chardin’s idea of a biotechnological canopy of human consciousness that engulfs the Earth and within which humans are immersed. Working from the theories of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, de Chardin suggests that earthly evolution has progressed from a geosphere of nonconscious life to a biosphere of conscious life, and is now progressing to a noosphere.7 The noosphere emerges from the transformation of elements through biotechnology and materials science. From these emerge intricate systems of communication that will link humans in ways that suggest a new type of environment. This environment of material communications will be unprecedented. Significantly, de Chardin does not separate institutions like education or governments from their materiality. Systems of communication, for de Chardin, are not ephemeral or without substance; instead, they are material forms and environments. De Chardin is no dualist. He envisioned the noosphere as an emerging body of human consciousness. Individuals are immersed within this environment. In this sense, they cannot opt out or even choose not to connect to it. There is no “off the grid” choice in de Chardin’s universe. Instead, the mass of human consciousness is physiological; it is where the boundaries of the human body erupt into a mass physiological communication network. In one sense, this presages the technologies of Eye-Tribe and Zuckerberg’s intention to create an environment within which human physiology informs and instructs social technology, which then, in a feedback loop, morphs into what appears to be, and for all intents and purposes is, reality. This would appear to be, as professor of robotics Masahiro Mori wrote, “the uncanny valley” in which the digital environment appears to be alive, responsive, and human—a literal extension of an individual’s thoughts, desires, and internal world.

Marshall McLuhan and the New Flesh: The Human Nervous System Exteriorized as Analog and Digital Media Although Marshall McLuhan, who was a scholar of media studies before the discipline even existed, is not known for his Catholic visionary experiences, his work emerged directly from this context. He was never open about his (p.155) experiences in a professional capacity, but his private interviews and letters indicate that this is precisely the context that motivated his work.8 Additionally, he was influenced by the work of de Chardin, both theologically and, more significantly, in understanding technology as biology. This is a strange, Page 6 of 14

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Where Soul Meets Technology counterintuitive statement, but this aspect of both visionaries’ work presaged developments in contemporary human–digital or human–computer engagement.9 De Chardin wrote that the discovery of electromagnetic waves was a biological event with biological implications. According to him, this discovery revealed a network of human mind-to-mind communications of which people had been largely unaware except through experiential and anecdotal information that manifested as telepathy or clairvoyant knowledge. His interpretation would be followed by his idea of an emergent technosphere that would allow humans to communicate more directly as well as merge closer together. De Chardin’s idea is evident in McLuhan’s suggestion that the new electronic nervous system—yet another biological metaphor for the emerging connectivity produced by media and communication technologies—will create a human “tribe.” Whereas, according to McLuhan, the technology of books produced the idea of the individual within his or her own sphere of being, the “new flesh” would produce a new way of being human akin to a tribe, which is collective, as opposed to autonomous.10 Technology as a biological extension of the human being is a theme that permeates McLuhan’s work. At one time movie director David Cronenberg was a pupil of McLuhan’s at the University of Toronto. McLuhan’s ideas were a huge influence on Cronenberg, and several of his movies pivot around the theme of technology as biological. In the movie eXistenz (1999) the main characters enter a video game through a biological pod made from the parts of amphibians. They “port” into the pods, which contain the game, by opening a hole in their spine through the game cord, which looks like an umbilical cord. The pod itself resembles a uterus. The pod can be infected, too. The players can also, and some do, develop an emotional attachment to their pods. Almost all of the technology within the movie, and in Cronenberg’s earlier film Videodrome (1983), represents the merging between technology and humans. There are no boundaries, and there is no separation between the human and the technological. Technologies, especially media technologies, are the new flesh. Like de Chardin and McLuhan, Cronenberg’s films suggest that this is an evolutionary process, yet the moral or ethical status of this development is left either ambiguous or very bad.

(p.156) The Militarization of the Technosphere: The Stanford Research Institute’s Early Experiments into Telepathy and the Proto-Internet The history of the early development of online community technology at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) is murky. It is murky because the written sources of its founding history and activities differ markedly from the oral testimonies by many who have been associated with it—and due to the fact that the Augmentation Research Center that housed the program transitioned with SRI when it severed affiliation with Stanford University in 1970 to become an independent nonprofit under the name SRI International. This restructuring Page 7 of 14

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Where Soul Meets Technology allowed for a gap in institutional knowledge and corporate identity, and like any liminal space from such gaps legends spread.11 Declassified documents from the 1970s and 1980s reveal that in addition to developing the first computer mouse, hypertext, and online journal, scientists affiliated with the Institute were working on experiments dealing with human telepathy or clairvoyance and its connections to the proto-internet, ARPANET. This research was partially funded by the U.S. military, most likely in an attempt to replicate or assess similar efforts being conducted in Russia at the time.12 Within this context, its history differs depending on the sources one uses and trusts. We will be using actual data and essays published during the 1970s and 1980s, including the testimonies of several of its founding members, such as Russell Targ and Michael Murphy, and contracted scientists such as Dr. Jacques Vallee.13 Throughout the “cold war,” the Russian government was actively using television and radio to attempt to psychically connect with its citizenry. The assumptions behind these efforts were very similar to de Chardin’s own ideas about electromagnetic waves and their ability to connect with human brain waves. The Soviet government, in partnership with the Soviet media apparatus, conducted experiments on its citizens, attempting to hypnotize them through television in an effort to bolster confidence in the government during the collapse of the Soviet Union.14 They were also involved in experiments regarding human telepathy in an effort to gain information that was otherwise impossible to obtain. Ingo Swann, who participated both as researcher and subject at SRI, relates that [I]t was the collision of Soviet bio-mind research with the stereotyped stigma of psychic research in the West which occasioned the circumstances within which remote viewing was identified and (p.157) developed. Had not this collision occurred, then remote viewing would never have seen the light of day.15 Because the United States was in direct competition with Russia, the US military was willing to attempt to replicate these types of experiments to ensure strategic and kinetic dominance in what have come to be known as the Information Environment and Electromagnetic Spectrum warfighting domains.16 According to testimonies from the early members of SRI, multiple research studies were conducted to harness psychic function through the development of specific protocols, which were formalized under the term remote viewing (RV). Based on the assumption that certain individuals possess innate psychic functioning, RV was designed as a training program to enhance these perceptual channels in order to achieve operationally relevant information that could not be obtained through any normal source, like the five senses or deductive reasoning. Page 8 of 14

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Where Soul Meets Technology According to Swann, “in its refined and developed state, its chief characteristics were twofold: its gradual increase in scope, precision and accuracy; and its closeness more to general human potential rather than to special things seen as psychic or parapsychological.” He adds, “when remote viewing was understood, even in its natural state in individuals, it was no longer ambiguous, but seen as a precise set of existing faculties against which the ambiguous term ‘psychic’ was no longer useful.”17 One of the best-known programs was Project Star Gate, which began in 1978 under the project name Gondola Wish and lasted in various capacities until 1995. Official discomfort with the high strangeness of the research and changes in organizational oversight caused the project to go through several names during its tenure. The program was created to train remote viewers and to study the mechanisms by which they acquired their information, as well to use the data gathered during RV tasks for military and intelligence operations alongside data gained through more traditional means.18 Shortly before Project Star Gate was officiated, computer scientist and astronomer Dr. Jacques Vallee was involved in experimental research using the burgeoning computer network systems then in development at SRI and the Institute for the Future as an automated means to facilitate data collection for RV tasks. At the time he was an associate with SRI and was the principle investigator for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation in conducting experiments to understand how teleconferencing augmented the experience of professionals within a communication network. His findings were published in a series of peerreviewed articles. (p.158) Dr. Vallee is an academic scientist and makes his research freely available to all who are interested in the topic. He was one of the first scientists to publish his findings on human–technology engagement, in a way that tangibly demonstrated what Llull, de Chardin, and McLuhan had foreseen. When humans engage with network communication systems, interesting things are observed, including an altered state of communications, a term that Arthur Hastings used to describe similar experiments. Two journal articles address how the esoteric framework and the physiological framework, mentioned earlier, merged in Vallee’s research. The first of the papers is “The Computer Conference: An Altered State of Communications.” Vallee notes how human behavior is changed through the new medium of the computer conference session. He writes, “A computer conference which uses computers and telephone lines to join individuals at great distances in a conference alters the communication state and may provide a change to explore new patterns of human expression.” Vallee notes the physiological changes accompany this new medium, such as how the individual works in isolation yet is Page 9 of 14

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Where Soul Meets Technology connected to others thousands of miles away, changing the experience of time and space. He points out, “These conferences may coordinate groups of people into ‘Invisible Colleges’ and allow for faster thinking and new ideas.”19 Vallee, writing in the 1970s, already articulated Ray Kurzweil’s futurist understanding of the exponential growth of the human brain and its engagement with technology in his famous work about singularity.20 Ironically, Vallee and his team of scientists were working from the assumptions laid out by Kurzweil in the late 1960s that technology was already biologically linked to human beings. It was already a done deal, and Vallee was merely experimenting with it to gather more data. The second paper moved from Vallee’s interest in computer network systems as providers of an extremely controlled environment to conduct RV experiments, by which variables such as simultaneous thoughts and impressions could be datestamped. Vallee was the first researcher to conduct RV experiments under the controlled medium of the computer network. The advantages to this were “the ability to capture unobtrusively the date, time, duration and text of every comment, thus greatly facilitating monitoring and analysis.” Among these factors was “the remarkable feeling of connectedness created by the computer network itself,” an altered state of communication.21 Was Vallee hammering out the specifics of de Chardin’s noosphere? One thing is certain: with continuous shifts in funding, leadership, and institutional support during crucial points in the web’s evolution, contemporary developments were put into the service of corporate and national interests. The physiologicaltechnical biosphere that we know today diverges markedly (p.159) from the early visionaries of the internet, including Vallee’s own hopes that it would inaugurate a more democratic society.

The Corporate Technosphere: Contemporary Developments There is now established a physiological framework connecting human beings to a vast network of information and media technologies. It can be argued that this network is not the spiritual panacea foretold by de Chardin, but, in many other ways, it functions like his vision. Human physiology directs its course, and through symbiosis, it directs human physiology and behavior. This is the new environment from which we cannot escape, and in this sense it also confirms de Chardin’s and McLuhan’s ideas that this is an evolutionary development. Pending human extinction through a meteorite or some other natural disaster, the technological genie cannot be put back into the bottle. The physiological interface between humans and computers is a hot discipline within both academia and the corporate world (not to mention the military), with these sectors overlapping to co-create more efficient systems of symbiosis. Take, for example, the new marketing department of Facebook, which specifically focuses on neuroscience. Beyond its eye-tracking forays, Facebook is actively Page 10 of 14

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Where Soul Meets Technology identifying ways in which users’ brains and bodies interface, react, and engage with the platform, what this means, and how to apply it in specific ways—be these commercial or otherwise. Although “it’s the first time Facebook will have its own lab, it’s not the first time it’s conducted neuroscience testing to understand how users view and think about content in a controlled environment.”22 The data that will be collected include eye movements, skin responses, facial expressions, and other types of biometric data, including the future ability to measure brain waves. This is, as the genre implies, a “relational database,” which is a vast storage system for user data that solicits information from voluntary users. Yet, as Vallee points out in his brief essay “Stating the Obvious: I, Product,” “you may think of yourself as a user of Google, Facebook or Amazon, but you are actually their product.”23

The Once and Future Machine: Open Source Experiments On June 18, 2018, the executive director of the Rhine Research Center, John Kruth, gave a presentation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the Episcopal Center (p.160) at Duke University. The subject was the most recent findings from the Rhine Center’s psychokinesis, bioenergy, and mind–matter interaction research. This presentation was broadcast live on the Rhine Center’s YouTube channel and was recorded to be rebroadcast in perpetuity in a 14-minute YouTube highlight video (the full presentation is in the Rhine Center’s media archive on its website).24 Before a global audience, members of the Rhine Center conducted an application of Vallee’s early online community networking experiments at SRI. Continuing the application through distributed networks, the key experiencer featured in Kruth’s presentation, Edd Edwards, participated in an unaffiliated webinar series and podcast hosted by Evolver and Evolver Learning Labs, in which he discussed the research and his bioenergy practice, and in the webinar series he provided instruction on activation, cultivation, and application of bioenergy modalities. He suggested that users have simply become so accustomed to interactive and interconnected communication that they don’t see what is actually happening. During the webinar Edwards used multiple cameras set up in his home office in north Georgia. These provided video feeds to boxes on the participants’ screens around the globe. He directly engaged with participants through a chat window that allowed them to type comments and questions, which he then answered. The webinar was administrated by a host, Henrietta Weeks, located in Mexico and a technical support coordinator, Jeremy Johnson, located in Florida. Edwards was going to demonstrate how he actively engaged and influenced the

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Where Soul Meets Technology technology of which he was a part, and he sought to teach others that they could do this as well. The scientists who have worked with Edwards include researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Division of Perceptual Studies, the Rhine Center, the Monroe Institute, and a number of other independent laboratories around the country. His expression of what he experiences is encapsulated in a simple idea, “Nature becomes your extended sensory system,” which is a contemporary version of the visions of Catholic monks and priests who wrote about a spiritual bionetwork. While SRI scientists thought they could operationalize a version of such a network, people like Edwards claim to actively, consciously engage it.

Notes:

(1.) The Authentic Company, “The Saga Continues,” email received June 12, 2018. (2.) Jacques Vallee, The Heart of the Internet—An Insider’s View of the Origin and Promise of the On-Line Revolution (Newburyport, MA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2003). (3.) Ramon Llull, Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader, ed. Anthony Bonner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 17–18. (4.) Charles Lohr, “The New Logic of Ramon Llull,” Enrahonar: Quaderns de Filosofia 18 (1992): 23–35. (5.) Who is Ramon Llull? Llullism, Universitat de Barcelona Centre de Documentacio Ramon Llull, http://quisestlullus.narpan.net/eng/ 3_lulisme_eng.html. (6.) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Heart of Matter (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1980), Kindle locations 412–419. (7.) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). (8.) Thomas W. Cooper, “The Medium Is the Mass: Marshall McLuhan’s Catholicism and catholicism,” Journal of Media and Religion 5, no. 3 (2006): 161– 173.

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Where Soul Meets Technology (9.) De Chardin’s influence on McLuhan: https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/ 2015/04/18/teilhard-de-chardins-concept-of-noosphere-his-influence-on-marshallmcluhan/. (10.) McLuhan was highly influenced by the Jesuit priest and scholar Walter Ong, who was his student and whose work dealt with eras of human evolution and their communication technologies, such as the transition from oral culture to written culture. (11.) Vallee, The Heart of the Internet. (12.) Wladimir Velminski, Homo Sovieticus—Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny, trans. Eriik Butler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). (13.) Based on interviews with Michael Murphy (June 21, 2018), Jacques Vallee (June 24, 2018), and Russel Targ’s correction and review of the book by Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 2017). (14.) Velminski, Homo Sovieticus. (15.) Ingo Swann, Remote Viewing: The Real Story (A Memoir) (self-published online), accessed at Archive.org https://archive.org/stream/IngoSwannmemoir/ RemoteViewingTheRealStorymemoirByIngoSwann_djvu.txt. (16.) Ibid. (17.) Ibid. (18.) Edwin C. May, Victor Rubel, Joseph W. McMoneagle, and Loyd Auerbach, ESP Wars: East & West: An Account of the Military Use of Psychic Espionage as Narrated by the Key Russian and American Players (Hertford, NC: Crossroad Press, 2016). (19.) Jacques Vallee, Robert Johansen, and Kathleen Spangler, “The Computer Conference: An Altered State of Communications,” The Futurist 9, no. 3 (1975): 116. (20.) Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Penguin, 2005). (21.) Jacques Vallee, “Remote Viewing and Computer Communications: An Experiment,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 2, no. 1 (1988): 17–27. (22.) Marty Swant, “Facebook is Building Its Own Neuroscience Center to Study Marketing,” AdWeek (May 23, 2017), https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-

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Where Soul Meets Technology is-building-its-own-neuroscience-center-to-study-marketing/, accessed June 25, 2018. (23.) Jacques Vallee, Stating The Obvious: I, Product (October 20, 2010), https:// boingboing.net/2010/10/20/jacques-vallees-stat.html. (24.) https://www.rhine.org/media-library.html.

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Plurality Through Imagination

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Plurality Through Imagination The Emergence of Online Tulpa Communities in the Making of New Identities Christopher Laursen

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords Starting around 2009, online communities envisioned and began practicing “tulpamancy”—the ability to imagine a sentient being, or “tulpa,” into existence through heightened states of imagination. Originating in Tibetan Buddhist mysticism and contemporary paranormal lore, online users create tulpas, which they sense as a distinct personality within their minds and bodies, for companionship. Advocates of the practice emphasize healthful and positive aspects, and the plurality of identity that can exist in one body. They promote their practice as a way to overcome depression, loneliness, and other issues of mental well-being. Tulpa creation and plurality arrived precisely because avatars, anonymity, and, perhaps most crucially, inward-focused creativity and collaboration in online environments enabled radical, free-form identity experimentation. Tulpamancy shows how online communities act as participatory spaces in which supernatural or trans-human possibilities are evaluated and repurposed. Keywords:   tulpamancy, online communities, imagination, imagined companions, plurality, identity, consciousness, mental health

In the early twentieth century, Alexandra David-Néel, a French-Belgian explorer who studied Mahāyāna Buddhism in Tibet, introduced the Buddhist concept of tulpas to European and American audiences. She described tulpas as visible apparitional forms that were consciously or unconsciously created from a person’s imagination.1 These were not unlike the contemporaneous Theosophical Page 1 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination thought-forms said to be created from human emotions and thoughts.2 Both tulpas and thought-forms could become independent, unless their human creator managed, through concentrative meditation practices, to maintain control over them. David-Néel’s tulpas and Theosophical thought-forms could be sensed— most often seen, heard, or felt—as human or nonhuman (e.g., animals, deities, or fantastical creatures), appearing and disappearing like ghosts. In the late 1950s, the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung argued that such thought projections could produce visible apparitions and unidentified flying objects (UFOs); this proposition has significantly influenced how paranormal phenomena have been theorized.3 These concepts of thoughts creating autonomous forms have established themselves within paranormal research and lore, inspiring episodes of television series such as The X-Files and Supernatural in which malevolent apparitional tulpas break free of the consciousness of the person who imagined them.4 Around 2009, the concept of the tulpa gained attention in online paranormal forum discussions. Some forum users began to experiment with the idea that with time, patience, and concentration, they (p.164) could create tulpas through meditative and visualization exercises. Unlike the earlier paranormal theories, these beings did not appear to them as external apparitional forms; rather, they were sensed through heightened states of imagination. Tulpas were perceived to be independent, self-aware, sentient beings within their minds and bodies. Since then, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of online users have created tulpas out of curiosity, for companionship, to develop a more confident sense of self, and to help them cope with life’s challenges. While metaphysical or paranormal explanations persist—for example, that tulpas may be incorporeal beings of external origin—about three-quarters of tulpa creators give purely psychological reasons for their tulpas’ existence—that their mind can deliberately harbor more than one identity.5 Motivated by personal experiences, new forms of social advocacy are emerging from the online tulpa community, which proposes that human identity is not fundamentally single or unitary. It can be plural—that is, more than one identity can reside in one person. Sometimes there can be many identities. Plural advocates emphasize the healthful and positive aspects reported by many practitioners in online message boards, YouTube videos, blogs, and research surveys. Tulpa creation and plurality arrived precisely because avatars, anonymity, and, perhaps most crucially, inward-focused creativity and collaboration in online environments enabled radical, free-form identity experimentation. The internet acts as an intermediary to realize people’s desires for companionship, which are practiced online in so many different ways, from dating apps to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). In this case, people discover online that they can create their own companions (tulpas), from which a new way of being (plurality) has emerged. Crucially, online interactions facilitate the Page 2 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination establishment of plural identities. This suggests that online spaces that foster tulpa communities go beyond a mere communication platform. They are participatory spaces in which supernatural or trans-human possibilities are evaluated and repurposed. Tulpa message boards intensely cultivate ideas, with greater speed than traditional, physical modes of meeting, discussing, and publishing. As I will show, research on online communities underlines how anonymity and pseudonymity expedite the construction of identities and social movements. In the case of tulpamancy message boards, existing supernatural concepts are renegotiated to challenge status quo conceptualizations of selfhood and consciousness. In this, users attempt to expand the boundaries of natural knowledge. The “super” element that a person can, through mental practices, manifest a sentient being is enacted through online collaborations and knowledge sharing. Message (p.165) board users aim to healthfully enable more than one identity within a single body, a practice that harkens to shamanism, mediumship, and channeling, but is framed by most tulpamancers as a purely psychological tool. Through the internet, in defining and theorizing their practices, tulpamancers attempt to shift the “supernatural” into the “natural” register. Most significantly, they promote their practice as a way to overcome depression, loneliness, and other issues of mental well-being. The chapter is organized in four sections. After reviewing the scholarly and methodological context of this study, I will introduce the experience of creating and maintaining tulpas, and the common language and concepts used online to discuss this experiential phenomenon. Then I will show how the idea of creating tulpas arose in specific online message boards in which anonymity and inwardfocused creativity and collaboration allow ideas and identity to flow more freely than generally allowed under typical cultural constraints. Online communities nurtured tulpa creation and the embrace of plural identities. Lastly, I will cover how online advocacy of voluntary plurality as a healthful way of being draws from self-guided strategies, peer support, and similar types of mental health activism. For plural systems, online media have been crucial to creating, comprehending, and advocating their new identities.

Studying the Online Tulpa Community Studies of tulpamancy—as the practice of creating and maintaining tulpas is often called—reveal a creative, online-rooted approach to a very human endeavor: seeking close companionship. Through websites, YouTube videos, blogs, chatrooms, and other electronic media, people encounter the possibility that they can imaginatively create an ideal companion—a tulpa. Guides posted on the community’s websites teach them offline tulpa-creation techniques. Their questions and offline experiences are shared and discussed in online message boards. Compare this to how, as the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff shows, Second Life provides a virtual world for people to design on-screen avatars through which they live a simulated life—user-generated activities and interactions contained within the parameters set by programmers.6 Page 3 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination Tulpamancers take this much further. Along the lines of how mystics and mediums enter altered states of consciousness to communicate with incorporeal beings or how some authors channel their characters to write fiction, tulpamancers adapt longstanding creative visualization and contemplative practices within an online, networked framework.7 Their own unbounded imagination is the virtual sandbox in which they initially design their tulpas like (p.166) avatars, to reflect ideal personalities. Many establish tulpas based on existing characters from popular culture—from games, manga, animated series, books, television programs, and movies. But then tulpamancers commonly describe how the tulpas unexpectedly deviate from their creative intentions. The tulpas, as self-aware, autonomous beings, reportedly develop their own appearances, personality traits, and motivations. So far, two scholars have produced substantive studies on tulpamancy. In 2014– 16, the anthropologist and cognitive scientist Samuel Veissière conducted multiple surveys of the online tulpa community with up to 166 respondents. He found that the majority of practitioners were “predominantly white” youth living in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Russia, with 75% identifying as male, mostly between nineteen and twenty-three years of age. The most common factor for creating tulpas was loneliness; most tulpamancers were shy and had difficulty socializing. In another survey, Veissière interviewed thirty-three subjects who spoke of having social anxieties, including twenty-four who were medically diagnosed with psychopathologies. He found that almost all of the respondents reported that tulpamancy had “made their condition better.” Those with Asperger’s or autistic spectrum disorder claimed that the problems they had in “reading” other people improved significantly after creating tulpas. In other words, the practice helped them develop social skills and self-confidence.8 In 2016, the communication studies undergraduate student, tulpamancer, and plural advocate Jacob J. Isler produced a study with sixty-three respondents that demonstrated similar demographic and beneficial mental health claims. Isler emphasized the social stigma associated with plural identities, which is often conflated with mental dysfunction and illnesses. The online tulpa communities have provided a platform to voluntarily explore plural identities as, Isler argued, “a non-disordered variant of human cognition.”9 Outside of the academic setting, a larger-scale 2015 survey of 456 respondents made in the Reddit-based Tulpas discussion forum further asserts Veissière’s and Isler’s demographic findings and the reasons why people create tulpas.10 For this study, I created a twenty-question online survey promoted through three major tulpa message boards: the Tulpas subreddit, Tulpa.info, and Tulpa.io. It garnered a small sample of thirty-eight experiential testimonials, which, again, support existing findings.

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Plurality Through Imagination Tulpas, Hosts, and Mindscapes Before investigating the role of online message boards in the making of tulpamancy, it is helpful to outline the terms of the practice. As mentioned, a (p. 167) major idea emerging from the online tulpa communities is that one human mind can voluntarily and healthfully host multiple identities or consciousnesses. Tulpas are intentionally created to be close and trusted companions, beings in whom hosts can confide. Hosts believe that through their imagination, within their minds and bodies, they are creating new forms of consciousness—new life that is both sentient and sapient in that they are self-aware and they bring insights that positively reshape the lives of their hosts. As imagined companions, tulpas take many forms. In my survey, I learned about Sheila, a two-dimensional, animated tulpa who “looks like Hiiragi Kagami from the anime Lucky Star.” She coexists with three “realistic” human female tulpas: “platinum blonde” Iris MacKenzie, Jenna “with dirty blonde hair” who reads a lot, and Seraphim, “a red-haired woman” in her twenties originally based off a model from the erotic photography website MetArt. The host Vampire, age twenty-three, from Indiana, describes his female tulpa, Ivy, “with shoulder length red hair and loving blue eyes” and “black bird wings on her back.” A male tulpa creator, Contrail, age twenty-three, from Arizona, defines his tulpa Scylla as “a female reflection of myself, sort of like a Jungian anima.” Others report having anthropomorphic animal tulpas—felines and wolves, for example. Some have abstract, mythological, shapeshifting, or deity-like tulpa forms. On the Reddit Tulpas discussion board, tulpa is defined as “a mental companion created by focused thought and recurrent interaction, similar to an imaginary friend.” Unlike imaginary friends from childhood, “tulpas possess their own will, thoughts and emotions, allowing them to act independently.” The Reddit glossary adds that the tulpa is an “autonomous consciousness, existing within their creator’s mind, often with a form of their creator’s initial choice and design.”11 The independence of the tulpa from the creator while simultaneously existing within the creator’s mind is further emphasized on Tulpa.info’s home page: “a tulpa is like a sentient person living in your head, separate from you. It’s currently unproven whether or not tulpas are truly sentient, but in this community we treat them as such.” Given that they are considered to be sentient, the website outlines the pros and cons of creating a tulpa, much like how a family planning counselor or a health teacher in a school might warn young people of the great commitment that comes with having a baby. Creating and maintaining a tulpa involves responsibility. “It takes time for a tulpa to develop a convincing and complex personality; as they grow older, your attention and their life experiences will shape them into a person with their own hopes, dreams and beliefs.”12 Tulpa creation, therefore, is like the creation of a person. This is a striking concept. Given the belief that tulpas are sentient, that tulpas are persons (albeit not always humanoid), (p.168) and given that they also share the same mind as the host, the term plurality or plural system is actively Page 5 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination used in the community to normalize how one body can hold multiple identities— host and tulpa(s), the system-mates. In online message boards, a person may encounter text written by those who have created tulpas or by the tulpas themselves, and they often speak together as “we.” The communities’ websites feature guides written by members to teach people how to create a tulpa. On Tulpa.info’s message board, for example, guides are approved or disapproved according to guidelines set by a “Guide Approval Team.” The team categorizes the guides and makes sure they are easy to read and meet certain standards, such as not repeating what has already been written in other guides.13 At the core of creating tulpas are meditation and visualization exercises. Some hosts report that it took them many months for the tulpa to become apparent, where others write that it took only a matter of weeks. There are varieties of techniques employed to enable communication between hosts and tulpas, and for tulpas to interface with online and physical environments. For example, there is a technique called possession in which the tulpa takes control over parts of the host’s body, such as using the host’s hands to type messages onto the message boards or in the chats that enable tulpas to interact with the world at large.14 Not all hosts learn or permit possession. Many solely intermingle with their tulpas in an imagined world, dubbed the mindscape. Mindscapes, also known as wonderlands or dreamscapes, are, according to the Reddit glossary, “a mental environment created in the host’s mind where the host and tulpa can interact visually, without the need for imposition.” Imposition is a challenging practice in which hosts sense the tulpa in the real world, “hallucinating them into sensory perception.”15 That is, the hosts begin to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch their tulpa in the real world. For many, the imagined mindscape is an easier way for hosts and tulpas to interact. Mindscapes are paracosms, elaborate private worlds in the mind, places of hosts’ imaginative creation. Hosts describe their mindscapes in great detail, sometimes sharing illustrations in online message board threads, or recreating them in open-ended world-building video games such as Minecraft. Many mindscapes have grand natural features such as mountains, cliffs, exotic gardens, hot springs, and ecotopian cities. Mindscapes develop over time, with some hosts starting with a simple room and building from there. Through their imaginations, anything is possible.16 As plural systems, both hosts and their tulpas interact on online message boards. Through tulpa-themed online forums, guides, chats, and blog or YouTube comments sections, experienced plural systems communicate (p.169) online, mostly textually, with new hosts and those who are curious about tulpas. When plural systems become friends, they often expand their interactions to private Page 6 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination text messaging and video chats. The internet provides the space in which plural systems share stories, experiences, and techniques. Like any community, there are diverse and conflicting opinions that can create tensions, but overall, the online tulpa message boards serve the common purpose of enabling hosts and tulpas to learn from and support each other.

The Internet as the Intermediary Plural systems (tulpas and hosts) and mindscapes exist because of ideas that emerged among online community users, mostly youth in their teens and twenties. Originating in the European Minitel of the 1970s and dial-up electronic bulletin boards of the 1980s, online communities have facilitated diverse niche interest groups made up of people who otherwise—given their lack of social visibility and how they are geographically spread far and wide—would likely not meet offline, in person. Since the 1990s, online community users have mainly communicated through textual and image-oriented posts made in website-based online forums or through thematic chatrooms, such as those found on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Online interactions have since diversified, particularly since the turn of the millennium, to include blogs, homemade videos (mainly posted on YouTube), virtual worlds (such as Second Life), MMORPGs (like World of Warcraft), social media websites, and apps—all media technologies that plural systems use. But the online communities have chiefly provided the platform for them to make new identities.17 Plurality and the advocacy around it is also possible given the growing acceptance of human diversity, which in large part is due to globalized online interactions between diverse people. For example, since Minitel, online communities helped enable lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people to explore their sexual orientations, meet other queer people, and politically mobilize. Online communities co-constituted advocacy to public media and governing bodies, bringing about a quickly growing sea change in social attitudes, policies, and media portrayals of LGBTQ people.18 Intolerance, cyberbullying, and cyberstalking—not to forget pervasive big data mining and the tracking of individuals’ private online use—are very real, often dark and disturbing issues affecting how the internet is used.19 Here, I wish to emphasize a socially beneficial aspect: how claims made by tulpamancy advocates correlate with studies that show how certain types of online communities positively impact the attitudes of youth growing up in societies that are increasingly accepting of human diversity. The new media scholars (p.170) Katie Davis and Howard Gardner note that in this globalized, networked era, “youth enjoy greater freedom to adopt and rejoice in identities that were either unknown or scorned in decades past”—sexual orientations, racial and cultural backgrounds and blends, and, as this study shows, plurality.20 Online message boards have provided forums for geographically separated, similarly marginalized individuals to work through those complex identity and social issues themselves. Given their active online engagement on identity issues, an increasing number of tulpa Page 7 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination community members are choosing to identify as plural—that they can healthfully host more than one identity. Since the plural identity movement is very young, it remains to be seen how it will impact broader cultural notions of identity. The community is worth further study. Researchers can accessibly follow their online-documented advocacy, experience sharing, and peer support conversations. The tulpa community’s engagement through specific kinds of online media— website-based message boards, chats, blogs, and YouTube videos—allows for specialized, inner-focused creativity and collaborative, often anonymous, interactions with others who share (or who are curious about) plural ways of being. Their choice of website-based media provides greater opportunities for countercultural self-expression compared to the dominant prepackaged social media apps downloaded on smartphones and tablets. Prepackaged apps tend to be geared to socially acceptable, outward self-presentation, such as upbeat status updates and desirably manipulated selfies. Davis and Gardner write: “This packaging has the consequence of minimizing a focus on an inner life, on personal conflicts and struggles, on quiet reflection and personal planning; and as the young person approaches maturity, this packaging discourages the taking of risks of any sort.”21 In ways that run counter to the overall focus on the outward self-presentation to meet cultural expectations in generic apps like Snapchat or Instagram, tulpa message boards specifically enable young people to radically explore and experiment with their identity. Since around 1900, developmental psychologists have studied how adolescence is a time in which self-directed and peer-influenced experimentation helps individuals form a healthy, coherent identity that helps them determine their social roles.22 Digital media technologies have expanded the contexts in which identity expression and experimentation takes place. World of Warcraft players and Second Life users, for example, craft avatars that reflect their “ideal self,” the person they aspire to be. They can do so without other users knowing their actual identity.23 According to media scholars Patti M. Valkenburg and Jochen Peter, this helps develop young online users’ “psychosocial autonomy,” “a secure feeling about who they are and who they wish to become.” Through online communication, adolescents can “validate their (p.171) identities against a vastly expanded social sounding board.”24 Katie Davis finds that online platforms that permit anonymity, like the ones used by plural systems, enable young people to fashion more diverse and fluid identities that challenge cultural norms.25 Existing boundaries that define normative identity are becoming increasingly blurred. The online tulpa community shows this process in action. Anonymity has been central to the making of tulpamancy and plurality. The history of this online movement has been succinctly outlined in a Tulpa.info message board thread and infographic created by the community member Albatross.26 They document how discussion about tulpas began in 2009, most actively on the 4chan forum, /x/, dedicated to posting images and discussion Page 8 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination related to the paranormal. In volatile, anarchic ways, 4chan, founded in 2003 by fifteen-year-old Christopher Poole, yields many possible social responses. Anyone can participate, with the freedom to pseudonymously (choosing nicknames) or anonymously (unidentifiably, namelessly) post whatever they wish, usually challenging social norms and niceties. The images and ideas posted may be constructive, caring, and insightful or hatefully intolerant and disturbingly exploitative, the latter of which gives 4chan a controversial public reputation.27 Individual lives and societies are impacted and shaped by anonymized online interactions. The anthropologist Gabriella Coleman and digital politics scholar Jessica L. Beyer each show how the anonymity of 4chan users—known as anons —brought about new forms of online social activism—or hacktivism, such as the social dissent enacted (often with inflammatory humor and sarcasm) through digital media by users who identity as Anonymous.28 But, as the new media writer Cole Stryker notes, 4chan is also “a forum where the lonely nerd can ask for help meeting girls” or “where a closeted homosexual can vent about his abusive, homophobic parents” without having to reveal their actual identity.29 Beyer writes that “veil of anonymity allows people to ask questions that they might not be willing to ask offline or when using their legal names,” making conversations “far more open” than they would be in the offline world.30 It was in this online environment, where anonymity enables heterodox dialogs, that tulpamancy was born. Albatross recounts how in 4chan /x/ discussions, tulpas initially remained a paranormal idea. Inspired by the discussions, users wrote Creepypasta, horror stories widely shared in online forums and websites, about the concept of creating tulpas. One from circa 2009, “Tulpa,” tells the story of an individual who, in a scientific experiment, visualized a doppelgänger—a double of the genderless narrator—who incited violent behavior.31 This followed how tulpas had been depicted in movies and television series: horrifying variations on (p. 172) how, in 1929, Alexandra David-Néel described creating a tulpa of a monk that escaped her control, whose personality became mischievous and threatening.32 Around 2010, some /x/ anons experimented and reported creating tulpas. The first creation guides were made by the users Irish and FAQ Man.33 However, Albatross notes, many /x/ users became inhospitable toward discussing tulpa creation, making it difficult for the concept to advance. Tulpa hosts and those curious about the phenomenon sought new online bases, which proliferated between February and May 2012. A dedicated chat, #tulpa, formed on IRC. 4chan’s channel dedicated to the My Little Pony fan community, /mlp/, became a major online site for discussing tulpa creation. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is an animated television series made for children that attracts adult fans with its ethos of warm and loving companionship. Since finding ideal friendships Page 9 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination was a desire that existed beyond the My Little Pony fan base, specialized online tulpa communities and resources emerged. The tulpa community established its first online resource website and forum, Tulpa.info, in April 2012. Since Tulpa.info’s founding, a variety of tulpa communities have attracted thousands of people to sign up for accounts, primarily on English- and Russian-speaking websites, although only a small portion actively contribute to the forums.34 The Tulpas subreddit (/r/tulpas) and the website Tulpa.io also contain detailed information, glossaries, message boards, live chats, and guides on tulpa creation and maintenance. The online tulpa communities provide a safe space for plural systems who otherwise might not be accepted in greater society or in other online communities. Ci, a fifteen-year-old from California, for example, values the anonymity of the online communities; revealing self as plural to intolerant people could be dangerous, potentially putting a job, reputation, or personal relationships at risk. “Internet access allows tulpas to be completely open and honest without fear of judgement,” she tells me. Tulpa creators are faced with whether or not to “come out” as plural to people they know—family members, friends, and peers. The online communities create private support systems that enable discussions of how to bring the plural self into a society that is largely unfamiliar with plurality, or that associates tulpas with psychosis.

Online Plural Advocacy Since the majority of people claim to have a single identity, there is a common cultural and psychiatric assumption that this is the most healthy, functional way of being. Multiple identities tend to be viewed as problematic, associated with pathological diagnoses of dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously referred to as split personality or multiple personality disorder, which tend (p. 173) to involuntarily manifest after traumatic life events. In actuality, there are a variety of experiences involving multiple identities, some of which impair people’s healthy functionality, others with which experiencers learn to cope, and some of which, like plurality, are intentionally induced. Online identities typically incorporate plurality in that users have different profiles in different social media, each of which has its own mandate and approach—for example, the profile generated for family and friends in Facebook or Instagram, or to appeal to strangers such as in online dating profiles, or the avatar-based profile in online gaming or in Second Life.35 In a greater sense, this plurality of profiles has created a foundation in which to imagine and put into practice tulpamancy, and make plurality itself an identity, online and offline. Online plural advocacy emphasizes the positive aspects of hosts’ sociality with tulpas. They attest that it brings about an overall improved sense of self. Plural systems describe how both the offline practice of tulpamancy and online interactions with tulpa community members tend to reduce shyness, social anxiety, and, as Veissière and Isler show, possibly even the symptoms of Page 10 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination diagnosed mental disorders from which some hosts had suffered. The experience of voluntary plurality contrasts with pathologized, involuntary multiple identities that disrupt people’s healthy functionality. The 2013 fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association, emphasizes how DID involves “marked discontinuity in sense of self and sense of agency, accompanied by related alterations in affect, behavior, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensory-motor functioning,” causing “significant distress or impairment.” The coherence sought for a healthy identity is compromised. The DSM-5 differentiates DID from “broadly accepted cultural or religious practice[s],” of which tulpamancy could be considered part, or, among children, “imaginary playmates or other fantasy play,” activities that psychologists have shown can healthfully extend into adolescence and adulthood.36 Some passionate hosts and tulpas seek to counter pathological assumptions by normalizing the plurality or multiplicity of identities. Primarily through online media, advocates of plurality demonstrate how hosting tulpas has a positive impact on their well-being—that they are not psychotic or delusional. Plural systems are not the first to challenge negative cultural assumptions about identity and mental health. In 1987, the Dutch psychiatrist Marius Romme, his colleague Sandra Escher, and Patsy Hage, who like thousands of other people involuntary hears voices and learned to cope with them, founded the Hearing Voices Network (HVN). As with DID symptoms, the voices tend to arise from a trauma. HVN approaches the voices as being real and meaningful to the voice hearers. The multinational network offers strategies (p.174) through which voice hearers can learn to manage their experiences through in-person peer support groups and educational and interactive media. HVN advocates use print, broadcast, and online media to reach out to other voice hearers and to collect testimonials of how they coped with the phenomenon, beyond what psychiatric care could provide. Similar to the online tulpa communities, HVN has resource websites and message boards where people can share their experiences, gain information, and connect directly with supportive experiencers.37 HVN’s success inspires advocates of plurality. For example, until 2018, Jacob J. Isler (also known as Ford or Jade online) ran a YouTube channel, essay blog, and research effort that contrasted voluntary tulpa creation with mental pathologies. Isler differentiated the involuntary symptoms of DID and schizophrenia that negatively affect sufferers’ functionality from the deliberate choice to create and host tulpas where plural systems lead otherwise normal, healthy, and functional lives.38 Isler’s research combined interviewing other plural systems and speaking as an expert-by-experience, as someone who self-reflexively examined and spoke on their own plurality. They argued that “in the majority of cases, the friendship and emotional intimacy that come with tulpa companions instill improvements in one’s life and mental health.”39 In their YouTube videos, Isler and their tulpa, Aury, an anthropomorphic pony, shared Page 11 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination their personal experiences to exemplify these positive effects, illustrating events with a whiteboard and colorful markers (called “draw your life” videos). A particularly powerful video narrative by Aury told of how she intervened and supported Isler during emotionally difficult and, at times, suicidal moments.40 Sharing such personal experiences in online media conveys the transformative power of plurality. Personally transformative accounts, including overcoming suicidal thoughts, are consistent among the thirty-eight plural systems I interviewed. Plural systems often describe tulpas as being close, supportive, encouraging, and loving, like friends or family—in a way that is more intimate than knowing other people. The tulpas’ presence is described as soothing and motivating. Twenty-three hosts (60%) note that they created tulpas for companionship. “They’ve made my loneliness disappear,” writes Lyra. Hosts usually associate significant positivity with the tulpas’ attitudes. “She helps me see the bright side in everything,” Floh says of his tulpa Corazon, who appears to him as a “kind of golden fairy.” She encourages him to gain trust in other people and become less shy: “Her existence made our ‘social me’ stronger.” Interacting with like-minded plural systems online also helps them relate better to people. Numerous hosts describe working through personal problems with their tulpas, and the quality of their lives improves as a result. Mica explains how her social anxiety was alleviated through her tulpa Eli’s companionship: “I’m (p.175) able to go out by myself in public, run errands, hang out with friends, a lot of basic things I couldn’t do before because my anxiety would cause me to panic and stay to myself. Eli makes me feel safe and confident.” The tulpa Iris MacKenzie says, “I provide a shoulder to cry on, ear for listening, a voice for laughing and talking, and a heart overflowing with compassion and understanding.” She expresses gratitude to her host for creating her: “he has given me the WORLD. I would not exist without my host and his open-mindedness.” Of his tulpas, Kayden affirms, “They have been an immense sense of comfort for me, as I currently wrangle with depression and anxiety, and they help me weigh in on things I wouldn’t otherwise think of.” Gaining new perspectives is commonly reported by plural systems. Contrail writes that his “outlook on the world” has improved. Tau tells me that his tulpa Paige—deviated from a character from the animated television series Tron: Uprising—made him more attentive to other people and their needs. Vampire writes that his tulpas Samuel, Raven, and Ivy can see his most intimate memories and listen to his thoughts, and therefore they know him “better than anyone else can, sometimes even yourself.” “Having someone who unconditionally loves you, having someone who can understand you 100%, because they literally share the same brain. I wouldn’t want to miss that,” Atraxia comments. Adamant says the tulpas “are in my head and know everything about me.” He feels that he has no choice but to improve his life

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Plurality Through Imagination situation: “we forged a relationship in which I can fully invest myself [in life] without any fear or worry.” Experiential testimonials support Veissière and Isler’s findings, showing how self-improvement is consistently reported among plural systems. The challenges that hosts contend with most are self-doubt, increased emotionality, and simply finding the time to maintain and interact with their tulpas. Often, they are stressed about opening up to friends and family about their plurality given the social stigmas associated with multiple identities. Some of the hosts report friends and family being supportive when they “came out” to them as plural. Others, like Isler, recount negative reactions. Their parents had them seek psychiatric consultation, which in itself turned out to be a positive experience, as Isler reported that the psychiatrist confirmed they were functioning healthfully as a plural system.41 The recent emergence of online plural advocacy challenges longstanding psychiatric and cultural notions about multiple identities. I have restricted the scope of this chapter to introduce how anonymous and pseudonymous—and therefore more openly expressive—online communities facilitated the creative, collaborative conditions to experiment with a paranormal concept, tulpas. The inward focus of offline tulpamancy practices developed through online experience sharing, guides, and introspective discussions. These online (p.176) communities are predominantly textual and image-based message boards and chats. They contrast with the outward, filtered self-presentation of prepackaged social media like Facebook and Instagram. In online communities, users have generated a common language about their experiences, giving rise to their identity as plural systems. They attest to healthfully hosting more than one identity within their minds and bodies. Increasingly, plural advocacy is moving beyond insulated online communities to public online media, such as YouTube and blogs. Beyond paranormal conceptions and pathological assumptions, through online communities and advocacy, plural systems are positioning themselves to redefine human identity.

Notes:

(1.) Alexandra David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (Escondido, CA: The Book Tree, 2000), originally published as Mystiques et magiciens du Thibet (Paris: Plon, 1929). (2.) Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1905). Page 13 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination (3.) See, for example, C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (New York: Signet Books, 1969) and his collection of essays Psychology and the Occult (London/New York: Routledge, 1982). Major thinkers on the Jungian concept include the UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, the parapsychological researchers William G. Roll, George and Iris Owen, and Walter von Lucadou, as well as the sociologist Eric Ouellet. (4.) For more on conceptions of the tulpa, see Natasha L. Mikles and Joseph P. Laycock, “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the ‘Tibetan’ Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea,” Nova Religio 19, no. 1 (2015): 87–97. (5.) Shinyuu, “Tulpa Census 2015,” Tulpas subreddit, 2015, https:// www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/wiki/census. (6.) Tom Boehlstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). (7.) On channeling, an exceptional study is Michael F. Brown, The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). On authors, see Marjorie Taylor, Sara D. Hodges, and Adèle Kohányi, “The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?”, Imagination, Cognition and Personality 22, no. 4 (June 2003): 361–380. (8.) Samuel Veissière, “Varieties of Tulpa Experiences: The Hypnotic Nature of Human Sociality, Personhood, and Interphenomenality,” in Hypnosis and Meditation: Towards an Integrative Science of Conscious Planes, ed. Amir Raz and Michael Lifshitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 59–62. (9.) Jacob J. Isler, “Tulpas and Mental Health: A Study of Non-Traumagenic Plural Experiences,” Research in Psychology and Behavioral Sciences 5, no. 2 (2017): 36, doi:10.12691/rpbs-5-2-1. Isler had removed their Tumblr blog and YouTube channel at the time of publication. Jade and Aury left behind a website with their contributions to the Tulpa community including a farewell message in 2018, http://fordaplot.tulpaforce.tk. (10.) Shinyuu, “Tulpa Census 2015.” (11.) “Glossary,” Tulpas subreddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/. (12.) “What Is a Tulpa?”, Tulpa.info, https://www.tulpa.info/what-is-a-tulpa/. (13.) See the thread on the Guide Approval Teams, https://community.tulpa.info/ thread-gat-nominations-2016-edition.

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Plurality Through Imagination (14.) See “Terminologies,” tulpa.io website, https://tulpa.io/terminologies, which are drawn from glossaries on websites such as /r/tulpas, Tulpa.info, The Multiplex Quandary, and from the webpages of specific host–tulpa systems. (15.) “Glossary,” Tulpas subreddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/. (16.) See, for example, the Tulpas subreddit and Tulpa.info threads in which mindscapes and wonderlands are discussed. (17.) On Minitel, see Tamara Chaplin, “Lesbians Online: Queer Identity and Community Formation on the French Minitel,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 23, no. 3 (2014): 451–472. On the broader development of online communities, see Jessica L. Beyer, Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also see Boelhstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life. (18.) Chaplin, “Lesbians Online.” (19.) There have been many recent publicly funded studies on intolerant and aggressive online behavior that aim to educate youth, their families, law enforcement, health providers, and teachers. Also of note is indie game developer Zoë Quinn’s experience-based study Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), which strategizes how to combat online harassment. Notable academic engagements on the topic include the media scholar Roberto Simanowski’sData Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), the scholar of privacy Danielle Keats Citron’sHate Crimes in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), Cyberbullying: From Theory to Intervention, edited by the psychologists Trijntje Völlink, Francine Dehue, and Conor Mc Guckin (London: Routledge, 2015), and the criminologists Anastasia Powell and Nicola Henry’sSexual Violence in a Digital Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). (20.) Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 77, 80, 86–88. (21.) Ibid., 61. (22.) See, for example, the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson’sChildhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1950) and Youth: Identity and Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968). (23.) See, for example, Boelhstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life, and Katherine Bessière, A. Fleming Seay, and Sara Kiesler, “The Ideal Elf: Identity Exploration in World of Warcraft,” Cyberpsychology & Behavior 10, no. 4 (2007): 530–535. Page 15 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination (24.) Patti M. Valkenburg and Jochen Peter, “Online Communication Among Adolescents: An Integrated Model of Its Attraction, Opportunities, and Risks,” Journal of Adolescent Health 48 (2011): 122–125. (25.) Katie Davis, “Tensions of Identity in a Networked Era: Young People’s Perspectives on the Risks and Rewards of Online Self-Expression,” New Media & Society 14, no. 4 (2011): 636. (26.) See “History of tulpae,” Tulpa.info message board, July 3, 2012, onward, https://community.tulpa.info/thread-history-of-tulpae, and Albatross, “Tulpa Timeline of Events,” http://i.imgur.com/PpzHrxj.png. (27.) Cole Stryker, “Introduction,” in Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web (New York: Overlook Press, 2011), Kindle Edition. (28.) See Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (London/Brooklyn: Verso, 2014); and Beyer, Expect Us. (29.) Stryker, “Introduction,” Epic Win for Anonymous. (30.) Beyer, Expect Us, 6. (31.) For the story, see “Tulpa,” Creepypasta Wiki website, http:// creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Tulpa. (32.) David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, 313–315. (33.) See the creation guides by Irish, “How to Tulpa/Tulpae,” Tulpa.info website, https://www.tulpa.info/archive/irish-creation-guide, and “FAQ Man’s Guide on How to Create a Tulpa,” Tulpa.info website, https://www.tulpa.info/ archive/faqman-creation-guide. (34.) See Veissière, “Varieties of Tulpa Experiences,” 61; Albatross, “Tulpa Timeline of Events”; and “The History of Tulpamancy,” tulpa.io website, https:// tulpa.io/history-of-tulpas. (35.) On the construction of multiple identities in online spaces, see Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 178–180, 258–262. (36.) American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5 (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013), 292–298. On imaginary companions, see Inge Seiffge-Krenke, “Imaginary Companions in Adolescence: Sign of a Deficient or Positive Development?” Journal of Adolescence 20 (1997): 137–139, and Marjorie Taylor, Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). Page 16 of 17

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Plurality Through Imagination (37.) See, for example, Thomas Styron, Lauren Utter, and Larry Davidson, “The Hearing Voices Network: Initial Lessons and Future Directions for Mental Health Professionals and Systems of Care,” Psychiatric Quarterly 88, no. 4 (2017): 769–785, which notes several associated studies; T. M. Luhrmann, “Living with Voices,” The American Scholar (Summer 2012), https:// theamericanscholar.org/living-with-voices; and the Hearing Voices Network websites, including http://www.hearingvoicesusa.org, https://www.hearingvoices.org, and http://www.intervoiceonline.org. (38.) Isler, “Tulpas and Mental Health” and “Ford and Aury” blog and YouTube channel, now offline. (39.) Personal correspondence with Isler, April 18, 2017. (40.) Isler, “Life of a Tulpa,” was originally published on the Ford and Aury YouTube channel, January 29, 2017, but is now offline. (41.) Isler, “I Saw a Psychiatrist for My Tulpas,” Ford and Aury YouTube channel, originally published January 12, 2017, but now offline.

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil Rafael Antunes Almeida

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0011

Abstract and Keywords This chapter presents an ethnography of a Brazilian ufological community that focuses on the role of digital media on its constitution. The author offers a critique of the heuristic capacity of the notion of “belief” to interpret the socialities formed around extraterrestrial motives and proposes a move from the discussion concerned with the “secret of belief” to what has been termed the “pragmatic of secrecy.” Drawing on the idea of “pragmatic of secrecy” and on Bruno Latour’s analysis of science networks, the author discusses three processes: reduction, multiplication, and differentiation. When combined, they constitute ufology by translating the order of the supernatural into the realm of the “ultra-natural.” Keywords:   secrecy, UFO, ufology, anthropology of science, belief, digital media

Introduction The social sciences have been resistant to study the collectives formed through the relation with unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and extraterrestrials (ETs) because, as Pierre Lagrange argues, the claims of these groups have very frequently been reduced to a “psychological phenomena ignored by reason,”1 and this justified the refusal to treat them as more than a community of believers. In line with Lagrange,this chapter aims to contribute to the discussion of UFO collectives by rejecting the use of the concept of belief as an analytical frame in

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil favor of an ethnographic approach and to attend to their process of construction, be it in digital platforms or “away from keyboard.”2 In the first section, I will present an outline of the anthropological critique of the heuristic capacity of the concept of “belief” to interpret not only UFO collectives but also any kind of human experience. The second section explores three processes of constructing ufology that, when combined, translate the order of the supernatural into the realm of the “ultra-natural”—that is, it describes how ufology transforms “alleged beliefs” into ET-related data. An “ultra-natural”3 reality animated by beings with whom ufologists maintain various relations of different kinds. The final section suggests that digital technologies and press publications do more than represent previous positions of the UFO collective: they are constitutive of ufology and contribute to what I term a “pragmatic of secrecy.”4 This concept aims to capture the process by which ufology reproduces itself by constantly releasing secret information, such as declassified documents, interviews with military (p.182) personnel who allegedly participate in UFO cover-ups, and testimonies from individuals who received messages from ETs. By calling this process a “pragmatic of secrecy,” I intend to switch the focus on belief to an ethnographic approach that follows the constitution of ufology. If other researchers produced works that aimed to reveal the “secret of ufology”—that is, belief—my point is to treat secret as the material that circulates inside ufology by a very specific form: its revelations always point to a whole set of new secrets. The notion of “pragmatics of secrecy” differs from what Paul Johnson, drawing from Simmel, calls “secretism”—that is, “the active invocation of secrecy as a source of group identity.”5 “Pragmatics of secrecy,” on the other hand, refers to the continuous process of disclosing secrets that were not yet possessed by the group. This movement is consubstantial to the plea for the revelation of more information, or secrets. This chapter is based on four years of field research among UFO/ET collectives, which followed ufologists in their conferences, groups, and scheduled meetings, and it studies the press and digital platforms of the Equipe UFO (UFO team) as a fundamental locus for the constitution of Brazilian ufology.

The Secret of Belief French anthropologist Jean Pouillon discusses belief as a framework of analysis. In a short essay entitled “Remarks on the Verb ‘To Believe’,”6 he scrutinizes the uses of the verb and, by doing so, points to a paradoxical relation between the doubt and the conviction contained in the word: “to believe is to state a conviction; it is also to add a nuance to the conviction: ‘I believe’ [je crois] often signifies ‘I’m not sure.’ This ambiguity involves the subjective side of belief [croyance].”7 Page 2 of 14

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil Besides the ambivalence contained in this use, Pouillon comments that there is a connection between sustaining the distinction between the natural and the supernatural realms and, on the other hand, to establish the difference between the domain of belief and the domain of knowledge. According to him, once European Americans operate within the notion of natural law, they must appeal to the notion of belief to contemplate everything that falls outside of these laws. That is why Pouillon asks if it is possible to find equivalents to the notion of belief in other contexts and answers that the concept is singular to the West. In the following passage Pouillon clearly anticipates Bruno Latour’s reflections on the subject, when he recognizes in the notion of belief “not a state of mind but a result of relationships among peoples.”8 Pouillon (p.183) comments that “[i]t is not so much the believer, I would say, who affirms his belief as such, it is rather the unbeliever who reduces to mere believing what, for the believer, is more like knowing.”9 Or “it’s the unbeliever that believes that the believer believes.”10 This last move is a central shift for the anthropological discussion on the notion of belief, since it points to an understanding of belief as a relation. The philosopher and anthropologist of science and technology Bruno Latour formulates his discussion on the subject following a path similar to that used by Pouillon. For him the problem of belief is not epistemological, but sociological. For him, belief turns into a modality of relation, as he announced in one of his essays, “On the Modern Cult of Factish Gods.” The similarities between the formulations of Latour and Pouillon are also visible in other works. In the paper “Quand les anges deviennent de bien mauvais messagers,”11 Latour comments that “the notion of belief only expresses the way scientists, inside their network think the ‘outside’ of their network, that will be the explanation. To put it in a polemic way, only the scientists believe that the others believe in anything as they believe in science. To say in a technical way, the belief is an asymmetric notion.”12 If we depart from this last quotation, we could conclude that use of the notion of belief can’t stand if it doesn’t come with a sort of need for explanation. That is, after designating the others as believers, it would be necessary to substitute their claims for a sort of mechanics of explanation. As Latour puts it, the belief is usually explained appealing to “the symbolic dimension, to the social forces, to the combination of signs, to the economy.”13 In a 2001 article14 commenting on the work of Elizabeth Cláverie, Latour reflects on the possible outcomes of research based on the notion of belief: We are so accustomed to this professional reflex that when we have to study a pilgrimage where the Virgin Mary appears at noon every Sunday, no one in his or her right scholarly mind would take the Virgin herself as the reason why so many people gather there every Sunday for decades, in Page 3 of 14

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil spite of the fact that this is what is explicitly said by thousands of the faithful. If they confess ‘the Virgin has changed my life,’ they are deluded and should be either redressed—in the militant manner of past centuries— or studied with interest—according to the hypocritical respect of so many social scientists—as one more glaring case of manipulation by forces unbeknownst to the actors.15 According to this passage, when analysts convert the statements of the interlocutors in the field about the apparition of a deity into interpretations (p. 184) that reduce them to very common concepts in the social sciences, we end up taking others’ claims as beliefs—that is, “an imitation of knowledge without ground.”16 Commenting on the same topic, Adam Miller17 criticizes the use of the notion of belief to think about religion. In his words, “Belief is not a religious idea. Belief is a stopgap explanation imposed on religion by those unable to see the too immanent objects that animate it.”18 Márcio Goldman discussion on the problem of belief puts a series of questions that may help us19: when faced with UFOs, the images of the Virgin Mary, or ghosts in the discourses and practices of our interlocutors, is it the case to accept their version of the phenomena without any sort of question? If the notion of belief has been proved to be asymmetrical, should we subscribe to the experience in the field without questioning the reality of the entities presented to us? The mentioned author, while commenting on Evans-Pritchard’s famous claim on the existence of witches, opens the following path: In other words, it’s not a question of existence or nonexistence, but of considering that in anthropology we deal with relations, not with substances or even actions. Consequently, we should frame our problem as how to include the witches (or whatever it is) in the set of relations that we describe and analyze.20

The Equipe UFO In this section I describe a collective of ufologists that is constituted by sets of relations with UFOs, pointing to three processes of constitution. The Brazilian Equipe UFO is one of the most resilient producers of ufological content of its kind.21 Unlike similar publications, which have perished, since 1985 it has continuously published works by ufologists and other researchers who work in neighboring fields of the so-called parasciences. The group’s monthly magazine, which is distributed all over the country and is sold in most of the newsstands, contains analysis of sightings, discussions of alleged military cover-up operations, book reviews, and interviews with specialists from the field of ufology. The chief editor and manufacturer of the Page 4 of 14

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil magazine, Ademar Gevaerd, a former student of chemistry and an enthusiast of phenomena since his early days, is the person responsible for the continuity of the publication over the years. With few resources, no public funding, and a reduced operational team, he contacts possible contributors, translates international articles, takes care of correspondence, and is actively (p.185) engaged in the complex routes of the activists pressuring the Brazilian state to declassify alleged UFO photos and reports produced by the military. At the time of my fieldwork among Brazilian ufologists, he was helped by his long-time friend and ufologist, Marco Antônio Petit, who acted as co-editor of the publication, and several other people, such as Toni Inajar Kurowski, image analyst; Rafael Amorim, image editor; Renato Azevedo, site editor; and a large editorial board.22 In addition to the continuity of the print publication and its online version, the Equipe UFO has inspired a collective of researchers who have influenced the field of ufology by organizing large conferences and symposiums. Partnering with local UFO groups, the conferences attract people from all over the country. These conferences usually have names that indicate the profile of the speakers, who are usually either related to a spiritual/mystical type of ufology or a scientific type of ufology. These two categories refer to different approaches to the UFO/ET phenomena, which today are maintained only in the discourse. Mystical ufology usually refers to spiritual contacts to extraterrestrials, whereas scientific ufology looks for hard evidence of UFO sightings or human abductions. Gevaerd earns his living through the publication and by organizing these symposiums, and they are now being organized more frequently than in the past years. As the major producer of UFO content and the major organizer of UFO-related symposiums, Equipe UFO is the strongest UFO collective of the country. It acts as what Michel Callon calls “an obligatory passage point”23—that is, the UFO team has enlisted so many allies and has established such strong ties throughout the ufology network that the group now figures as the preeminent one in the country. This can be measured by their presence in TV shows, in which they act as commentators, and in documentaries, such as Círculos, a TV documentary released by History Channel Brazil, and also by their influence on the discourse on most of the UFO investigators and UFO groups in Brazil. Besides the printed magazine, the symposiums, and the group’s presence in the media, the team has been maintaining an online mailing list since 1998. After sending a message to the moderators, the participants have access to news concerning the events organized by the team and can also start discussions. Most of the messages consist of UFO-related news or contain scientific information related to astronomy or astrophysics.

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil I started participating in the listserv in 2012. As is customary in ethnographic work, I took notes, made backups of the discussions, and eventually posted observations or asked for information about cases or situations in which I was interested. The listserv was a basic site for conducting my (p.186) research because ufologists often state their unofficial positions on the site. In addition, the arguments between members of the listserv or critics from other groups provided clues to conflicts inside the collective. During my fieldwork, one of the more active moments in the list occurred when the UFO team released freshly declassified documents from the Ministry of Defense through the Access of Information Law, published in 2011. Team members informed listserv members about the technical means to obtain desired documents from the military. The listserv has now over 2,000 members, but most of them are not professional ufologists, and only a tiny fraction actually participate, sending or answering messages. Moreover, most of the cases reported on the listserv come from members of the UFO team or individuals with strong ties with the group, who often receive encouraging messages praising them for their work. Besides the listserv, there are other spaces in the internet where ufologists can be found. The UFO team maintains a Facebook group, where members interact. And several other pages were created by ufologists who are related in some way to the UFO team; for instance, one of the largest fan pages on Facebook, “Ancient Aliens,” now has over 30,000 members. Gevaerd uses his personal page on social media to announce conferences and new publications and, often, to communicate with so-called skeptics, individuals who often launch attacks on ufology or who produce alternative analyses on UFO cases regarded as having solid evidence of ET participation. During the ethnography, the use of digital media and the presence of UFO groups in digital media turned out to be part of an assemblage of sites in which UFO discourses and practices produce and reproduce themselves. The way ufology is practiced online extends the possibility of interchange of information, the circulation of materials, and even the power of the UFO team, but the subjects discussed by the community have not changed significantly. The most common topics continue to be the cover-ups, the “ancient alien” theories, the different races of ETs, the flying saucer photos and videos, even though the number of publications related to these topics has increased with the use of digital media. New ways of interacting in the web communities have emerged, such as the multi-user video conferences that are scheduled and advertised by Gevaerd. But the same topics are still discussed in these “Google hangout sessions.” However, I had the impression that due to the increased online presence, there has been a reduction in the activity of UFO local groups and the

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil number of printed newsletters, which were a key form of communication between ufological groups in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. (p.187) My commentaries on the topic of digital media must be regarded as ethnographically situated. In other words, the continuity of the subjects that interest ufologists cannot be generalized to all contexts in which ufology is produced. In terms of the strategies used to deal with the alleged phenomena and of the methods, there were similarities between digital media and press platforms. Comparing the first volumes of the magazine from which Revista UFO was created—Ovni Documento (the first issue appeared on 1978)—with the articles published on the internet, I found few differences in style. In 1978, one of the first cases24 to be presented in the magazine was “The case of Barra da Tijuca.” And in 2017, on the Revista UFO Facebook page, there were a profusion of similar cases, analyzing the smallest detail of the stories. Ufology is a set of relations where the “case” has a special centrality not only for occupying its investigators with renewed material, but also because the profusion of cases acts as a massive bloc that gives the impression of a mass presence of ETs. Despite the similarity in content between the print magazine and digital media, when the UFO team turned to the internet, two articles were published alerting readers to possible misleading information. In one of them,25 Gevaerd observed that despite the proliferation of websites dedicated to UFO phenomena, there is plenty of unreliable material on the internet, thus justifying the continued publication of the print magazine. In another article,26 Gevaerd noted that the internet had greatly increased the number of individuals who claim to be ufologists but whose only task involved publishing ufological content in a website. Of course, even though the research style and the focus on “cases” hasn’t changed significantly, moving to digital scenarios has altered ufology. The internet-based communities widened access to the UFO magazine content and certainly helped its propagation. I will next detail some of the processes undertaken by these ufologists to perpetuate themselves that also occur in digital media. My comments will be based not in any trend of the discourse analysis but in what I am calling “lines of propagation.” Based on Bruno Latour’s27 (1993) reflections on “irreductions,” a great deal of work is needed to establish the so-called identity of any collective. In Latour’s words: If there are identities between actants, this is because they have been constructed at great expense. If there are equivalences, this is because they have been built out of bits and pieces with much toil and sweat, and because they are maintained by force. If there are exchanges, these are always unequal and cost a fortune both to establish and to maintain.28 Page 7 of 14

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil (p.188) UFOs and the Propagation Lines One of the major contributions of Debbora Battaglia’s work to the study of the UFO/ET collectives is her observation that UFO/ET religious movements become visible—that is, constitute themselves as collectives—because UFOs are “partially hidden.”29 It is because they are not totally seen that they trigger the propagation lines of ufology, such as websites dedicated to the topic, field investigations, case analyses, theories on the origins of humanity, classifications of ET races, and speculations about ETs’ intentions. This leads us to reverse one of the fundamental assumptions of many studies—especially those that base their analysis in the notion of belief—by pointing to the fact that UFOs are not constructions but should actually be studied as constructers of certain socialities. If we follow the reflections of Michael Serres (1982), UFOs seem to have the attributes he concedes to quasi-objects: “This quasi-object, when being passed, makes the collective; if it stops, it makes the individual. If he is discovered, he is ‘it’ [mort].”30 This means that UFOs produce ufologists but, at the same time, UFOs are produced by ufologists. In the following discussion I have applied Latour’s framework to analyze the process of the production of ufology. Making Allies

I interviewed Gevaerd in February 2013, after meeting him several times at conferences and smaller symposiums. Gevaerd serves as the spokesperson for ufology in Brazil, but this title wasn’t achieved without a great deal of effort. He uses several strategies to maintain his position. The first is to speak of his partners in terms of a “community,” a term that carries less a descriptive and more a normative sense. During the interview, he said, “So, if I go for a talk as I did last week during the Campus Party: I believe that there there is no Gevaerd; there is the Brazilian ufology.” When Gevaerd speaks as a representative of Brazilian ufology, he doesn’t subjugate his partners’ views to his own perspective. He can act as a spokesperson only because he contributes to the multiplicity of perspectives inside ufology. Second, to expand ufological networks, he decided to present the UFO team as a sort of middle ground between scientific and mystical or spiritualist ufology. By blurring the frontiers, the conferences organized by his group are able to welcome people with different viewpoints and, as a consequence, to extend the reach of the UFO team. (p.189) Third, the magazine, the website, and the online mailing lists are the result of collaborative work. Translators for English and other languages are often recruited from among those who are interested in the topic. The magazine

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil articles are produced by long-time collaborators, and the analyses in the field are done by associates. The Reduction Operation

I will call “reduction operations” the claim of the equivalence between a multiplicity of manifestations that are called fantastic and the experiences with UFOs and ETs. Reduction operations, although without this name, were mentioned in the ethnographies by Daniel Pícaro and José Ferreira Neto. According to Pícaro, ufology “studies in the present the way by which flying saucers may be occult in the report of those who believe to have seen a miracle, or the apparition of an entity known in the folklore and popular culture of some local.”31 Neto observes that ufology is not considered a religion, but a scientific discipline which although dedicated to the study of the UFO phenomena, faces facts related to the religions—paranormality in general, like premonitions, astral projections and mediumic communication—which are seen not as things related to the supernatural world but attaining to the natural order of the universe.32 By using reduction operations, the ufologists are inserted in what Susan Lepselter (2005), while commenting on Todorov’s notion of the fantastic, describes as a hesitation mode: “But the fantastic, says Todorov, is never resolved in one way or the other. Is it natural or supernatural? The fantastic ‘occupies the duration of this uncertainty.’ ”33 This means that reduction operations act in this gradient of doubt over whether what has been seen is part of the terrestrial landscape or if it inhabits the domains of the dead, or other sort of beings with vague definitions. The reduction operations, as performed by ufologists, work through the notion of misunderstanding. For example, Pícaro (2007) suggests that ufologists interpreted the report of the children of Fátima, Portugal, who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in 1917, not as a miracle but as an ET incident confounded with a religious phenomenon. I must emphasize that reduction operations do not aim to question the reality of the report given by the witnesses. Ufologists are sure that the children had seen something and do not claim that they experienced religious delusions or any form of temporary altered (p.190) consciousness. This passage perfectly exemplifies their attitude toward these reports: “The so-called haunted places, which we used to hear about in fantastic reports when we were kids, are nothing more than places with high UFO activity. In fact, they were close encounters of different kinds that were considered supernatural, by absence of knowledge at that time.”34 Reduction operations act through processes that transform magical or fantastic reports into ufological cases that can now be analyzed by ufologists. The quoted

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil passage not only uses the image of the misunderstanding but also displaces the experience to the realm of the ultra-natural.35 To understand what I mean by an “ultra-natural domain,” as opposed to the notion of supernatural often found among other groups formed in relation with that which is not totally visible, it’s important to remember that this notion depends heavily on what Jayme Aranha called “a cosmological model based on analogy and evolution.”36 That is, these beings and their machines are seen as belonging to the ultra-evolved natural domain. However, what I call an ultra-natural domain is not a way of describing ufologists’ cosmologies; that is, here my task is not to forge a conceptual tool that allows me to interpret how they perceive the ETs and their machines. The notion of the “ultra-natural domain” must be regarded mainly as an artifact, a device, and a modality of relation that, while reducing the magical gradient of the world to the action of ETs, ensures the multiplication of the UFO cases and contributes to the perpetuation of the ufological networks. I regard reduction operations as a sort of technique developed by the ufologists to perpetuate themselves and, by the same move, to populate the world with aliens. Differentiation

In 1996 the UFO team began publishing a series of articles in which the objective was to differentiate their work from UFO-based religions and contactees who presented what they perceived as suspicious discourses. These articles ran for many pages and argued that because the field doesn’t require a professional certificate in order to admit researchers, anyone could claim to be a ufologist and use this title for different ends than studying ETs. In 1997, the UFO team took a different tack: they developed a campaign denouncing the abuses of the “ufological sects.”37 This was in response to the suicide of thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California. The editorial characterized the practices of “these sects as exotic and ridiculous rituals”38 and accused their members of believing in “unimaginable absurdity.”39 (p.191) This campaign against the ufological “sects” continued in the next issues of the magazine, and the focus changed from the international groups to those that were developing in Brazil. Now the target was “Project Portal,” a ufological community in the city of Corguinhos, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Urandir, its leader, was described as someone who had appropriated the stories of a contactee called Lúcio. The magazine suggested that the alleged ET lights that were shown to visitors were no more than laser beams manipulated by Urandir and his fellows. What is curious in this crusade against this ufological “sect” is that the ufologists not only accused the group of producing fake phenomena but also used a modality of interpretation similar to that used by ufology skeptics. Page 10 of 14

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil Marco Antônio Petit, one of the most prominent ufologists associated with the UFO team, wrote that the spread of these sects was due to the retreat of traditional religions, which “can’t fill the emptiness left by the materialism of the contemporary world.”40 He continued, “They simply seek a new belief, something that fills the emptiness of their souls, needy for something that may give a new meaning to their lives.”41 According to Petit, the sects should be regarded as nothing but a mundane response to his version of the secularization process, characterized by a void left after what he understands as a retreat of the traditional religions. The sects, then, are now scrutinized by a sort of sociological explanation, very similar to the arguments used by the detractors of the sects in the public debate that happened in France between the 1970s and 1990s.42

Ufology and Digital Media In my exploration of the different perceptions of a certain group of ufologists, I commented that its methods have not changed substantially with the emergence of digital platforms. Of course, this does not mean that ufology has remained the same over the years. My argument is that although the style seems to continue very close to what we found in the print magazine, with no substantial change in terms of the pattern of the cases or the actors who take part in the events, the move to digital media has contributed to the propagation of the number of reported cases and the dissemination of the field. This is noted in the speed with which news associated with the topic is spread, in the growth of the number of cases reported, and in the amount of abductees who emerge in the field. In the propagation of ufology, the participation of what I have been calling the “pragmatics of secrecy”43 (i.e., a certain form of “secretion” of secrecy44) must be considered. That is, the little bits of information, the partial reports (p.192) often missing pages, the blurred photos, and all sorts of corrupted and incomplete data seem to feed this field. And digital media, no doubt, accelerate this process of circulation.

Notes:

(1.) Pierre Lagrange, “Ênquetes sur les soucoupes voulantes: La construction d’un fait aux États-Unis (1947), et en France (1951–1954),” Terrain: anthropologie et sciences humaines 14 (1990): 92. (2.) The expression “away from keyboard” comes from the documentary TFB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard (2013), directed by Simon Klose, and refers to interactions that do not take place online. (3.) I attempt to convey by using “ultra-natural” the assumption that UFOs are not part of a supernatural reality—that is, governed by different laws. The term

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil aims to express the idea that UFOs and ETs as objects/beings that are subject to the same laws governing the lives of earthlings. (4.) Rafael Antunes Almeida, Objetos Intangíveis: Ufologia, Ciência e Segredo, Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade de Brasília, 2015. (5.) Paul C. Johnson, “Secretism and the Apotheosis of Duvalier,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (2006): 421. (6.) Jean Pouillon, “Remarks on the Verb ‘To Believe’,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographical Theory 6, no. 3 (2016): 485–492. (7.) Ibid., 485. (8.) Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2. (9.) Pouillon, “Remarks on the Verb ‘To Believe’,” 489. (10.) Ibid., 488. (11.) Bruno Latour, “Quand les anges deviennent de bien mauvais messagers,” Terrain: anthropologie et sciences humaines 14 (1990), https:// journals.openedition.org/terrain/2972.. (12.) Ibid. (13.) Ibid. (14.) Bruno Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain—Being a Sort of Sermon on the Hesitations of Religious Speech,” Anthropology and Aesthetics 39, no. 1 (2001): 215–234. (15.) Ibid., 230. (16.) Ibid., 231. (17.) Adam Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). (18.) Ibid., 123. (19.) Márcio Goldman, “Da existência dos bruxos: ou como funciona a antropologia,” R@U: Revista de Antropologia da UFSCAR 6, no. 1 (2014): 7–24. (20.) Ibid., 14. (21.) For a longer description of the Equipe UFO see Almeida, Objetos Intangíveis. Page 12 of 14

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil (22.) For a detailed list of the editorial board members see http:// www.ufo.com.br/institucional/expediente. (23.) Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of Scallops and the Fishermen of the St Brieuc Bay,” Sociological Review 32, no. 1 (1984): 196–233. (24.) Fernando Cleto Nunes Pereira, “A verdade sobre a Barra da Tijuca (26 anos depois),” OVNI Documento, October 1978. (25.) Ademar Gevaerd, Revista UFO no. 85 (March 2003): 3. (26.) Ibid., 37. (27.) Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993). (28.) Ibid., 162. (29.) Debbora Battaglia, “‘For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future’: Raëlian Clonehood in the Public Sphere,” in E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, ed. Debbora Battaglia (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 163. (30.) Michel Serres, The Parasite (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 225. (31.) Daniel Pícaro, Extraterrestres: Ciência e Pensamento Mítico No Mundo Moderno, Master’s thesis, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, 2007, 44. (32.) José Fonseca Ferreira Neto, A Ciência Dos Mitos e Os Mitos da Ciência, Master’s thesis, Universidade de Brasília, 1984, 62. (33.) Susan Lepselter, The Flight of the Ordinary: Narrative, Poetics, Power and UFOs in the American Uncanny, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2005, 35. (34.) Antônio Faleiro, “Ufos no folclore: a fenomenologia ufológica no interior de Minas Gerais,” Revista UFO no. 4 (1988): 9. (35.) Neto captured it well when he stated that for UFO people, “there is no supernatural world. However, there is the human limitation to grasp the magnitude of this reality” (A Ciência Dos Mitos e Os Mitos da Ciência, 61). (36.) Jayme Aranha, Inteligência Extraterrestre e Evolução: As Especulações Sobre a Possibilidade de Vida em Outros Planetas No Meio Científico Moderno, Master’s thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1990, 27.

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UFOs, Ufologists, and Digital Media in Brazil (37.) The expression “ufological sect” appeared in number 51 of the magazine. I don’t subscribe to the use of the word “sect,” which is usually mobilized for accusations. Emerson Giumbelli comments that “it’s extremely rare that we find cases in which sect refers to an assigned or auto-proclaimed identity. The sects are often the others” (O Fim da Religião: Dilemas da Liberdade Religiosa no Brasil e na França [São Paulo: Attar/Pronex, 2002], 65). (38.) Editorial, Revista UFO no. 51 (June 1997): 5. (39.) Ibid. (40.) Marco Antônio Petit, “Fanatismo ufológico tem raízes no Brasil,” Revista UFO (July 1997): 41. (41.) Ibid. (42.) See Giumbelli, O Fim da Religião. (43.) Almeida, Objetos Intangíveis. (44.) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2005); Graham M. Jones, “Secrecy,” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014): 53–69.

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion Recent Developments and Their Significance Joshua L. Mann

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0012

Abstract and Keywords This chapter seeks to survey the current landscape of religious uses of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications and begin to answer the following question: In light of relevant AR/VR research to date, what impact might religious uses of AR/VR have in relation to three essential features of religion—myth, ritual, and faith? Surveyed examples of AR/VR range from immersive experiences of holy sites and objects (including reconstructed ones), prayer and meditation, sacred texts and objects, film and storytelling, and social interaction. Drawing on general AR/VR research that shows how immersive experiences impact human beliefs and behavior, the author suggests a number of possible impacts the technology could have on religious experience and raises additional questions that stakeholders—from developers to religious scholars to religious devotees—can begin to answer as the technology becomes more widely available. Keywords:   virtual reality, augmented reality, immersive technology, religious experience, faith and technology, digital religion, digital humanities, digital theology

Introduction One of the most hyped recent technological developments is virtual reality (VR) systems for the consumer market. Growing interest since the release of the Oculus Rift DK1 in 2012 has been matched by the development of many consumer VR applications and VR (360) videos, including some that relate to Page 1 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion religious spaces and practices. During roughly this same period, the proliferation of mobile devices with accelerometers and ever-faster processing capabilities has been met with the development of consumer-level augmented reality (AR) applications for smartphones and tablets. Additionally, VR social networks and worlds are being developed by the likes of Facebook (via its acquisition of Oculus) and Linden Lab, creator of the online world, Second Life. The trajectory of this technological development suggests that scholars, while remaining wary of the hype,1 should seriously examine AR and VR applications in religious contexts to date and consider what impact they might have upon religious experience, formation, and behavior.2 Because previous AR/VR research has not focused on religious experiences to any great extent, it is important that scholars of religion weigh in and begin to raise questions not only for their own discipline as regards the technology but also for others focused more generally on immersive technology. This chapter therefore seeks to survey the current landscape of religious AR/VR and answer the following question: In light of relevant VR research to date, what impact (p.196) might religious uses of AR/VR have in relation to three essential features of religion—myth, ritual, and/or faith, as explicated below? Defining AR and VR

This chapter considers a subset of technologies often given the generic label “virtual reality.” Two main areas within this subset (which are not mutually exclusive) are VR and AR, where “reality” should be loosely understood as a person’s perception of reality, especially using the visual senses.3 Accordingly, VR describes the immersive experience of a completely synthetic virtual world, such as that enabled by headset systems like HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Gear VR, or Google Cardboard.4 These systems essentially restrict the user’s view to what is displayed on a monitor within the headset, allowing the user to move and look around in the world by moving and turning the head. AR describes the experience when the perception of “an otherwise real environment is ‘augmented’ by means of virtual (computer graphic) objects.”5 AR applications range in complexity. Relatively simple is Pokémon GO, an app with which the user can encounter virtual objects mapped into physical space—an encounter mediated entirely through the camera and display of their smart device in a “window-on-the-world” manner.6 More complex are systems like Microsoft’s HoloLens, a wearable holographic computer that resembles bulky safety glasses through which the user sees his or her “real” physical environment (as through a clear lens) juxtaposed with various 3D digital objects projected in such a way that they appear to be “out there” in physical space. Sometimes “mixed reality” (MR) is used to describe these more complex AR environments, but for the purposes of this chapter, the categories of AR and VR are sufficient.7 It is important to also clarify what this chapter is not about. In the study of technology and religion, one finds terms like “virtual reality,” “virtual worlds,” or “virtual churches” used to describe a diversity of phenomena, most of which I Page 2 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion will not seek to directly address. For example, “virtual” is often used to differentiate religious communities and practices that are principally “online” or in “cyberspace” from those that are in physical space or the “real world.”8 Such a broad approach is taken, for example, by Rachel Wagner in Godwired, in which VR is considered “any form of digital technology that involves user engagement with software via a screen interface.”9 In these cases, “virtual” describes an experience enabled by a high degree of digital mediation and with a varying but relatively limited degree of immersion. The VR and AR defined in the preceding paragraph, however, largely exclude these kinds of experiences from the analysis that follows. (p.197) What Constitutes “Religious Use”?

“Religious use” is the use of AR/VR for experiences, practices, and/or expressions within a religious tradition. What constitutes “religion” or a “religious tradition”? Answering this question is difficult. As Gregory Price Grieve warns, “This becomes complex, as ‘religion’ as a concept is only a few hundred years old, contains no essential or absolute quality and holds many different interpretations.”10 Nevertheless, Grieve offers some help, describing “religion” in the context of its Enlightenment origins as having three essential features: (1) myth—nonscientific metanarratives; (2) ritual—unordinary practices that create “mythic significance”; and (3) faith—beliefs that are not “immediately susceptible to rigorous proof.”11 This description is serviceable for the purposes of this chapter as the categories sufficiently get at what we usually mean when we describe “religion.” Further, given the scope of this chapter, like Heidi Campbell’s When Religion Meets New Media, I focus on “religion as it is experienced, expressed, and practiced within a given tradition,” what might be called “official religion” such as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and so on.12

Religious Uses and the Potential Impact of AR and VR It must be emphasized at the outset that AR/VR technologies are not new. Although the mobile computing power required for AR/VR in the consumer market has only recently become affordable and widely available, computer scientists and technologists have been working in this area since at least the 1950s. Victorian stereoscopes aside, some of the earliest applications of AR/VRlike technology were envisioned for viewing films as early as the 1940s.13 This technology was employed quite early in military applications as well, including in head-mounted displays used in aviation (as early as 1961), and later in other contexts like manufacturing and medicine.14 Three waves of technical interest in the field are apparent, in the 1960s, the early to mid-1990s, and the 2010s, respectively.15 Many of today’s technical applications and their associated technical problems received significant attention in the scholarly literature in a wave of interest in the early 1990s.16 Consider that in 1993 Michael Heim could write The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, which included consideration of hypothetical immersive virtual worlds that are just now beginning to become Page 3 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion technically possible.17 Despite this long history of research, however, actual (as opposed to imagined) examples of religious uses of AR/VR (as earlier defined) prior to 2012 are difficult to find. Certainly some have described VR as analogous to religious experiences, and others have considered the potential impact (p.198) of VR on religion and spirituality.18 Religious use of new media, including digital VR-like (non-immersive) technology, can also be seen as anticipating the kinds of uses that are now being employed—from the “virtual tours” of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s to the three-dimensional (3D) online world, Second Life, in the 2000s.19 Since 2012 development of AR/VR applications has increased exponentially. Software specially designed for developing immersive apps has made it relatively simple and affordable for developers to build, and not unlike the early personal computer (PC) era, this situation has attracted significant interest in developing apps relevant to religious use.20 I have arranged a selection of examples below under descriptive categories. Applications are discussed in conversation with recent research into the cognitive, sociological, and psychological impact of immersive technology in order to reflect on the potential impact of such uses of AR/VR on religious belief and practice. Rare Spaces and Objects: Accessibility and Materiality

One of the promising features of AR/VR is making extant spaces and artifacts that are difficult to access or no longer extant virtually accessible. It is therefore unsurprising that many religious objects and spaces have made their way into AR/VR environments already. Stakeholders vary, from cultural heritage institutions to commercial companies to religious devotees. A range of examples can be found on Sketchfab.com, a YouTube-like website that hosts 3D and VR user-created content produced by contributors ranging from amateurs to major museums. The website includes a number of religious sites, such as the Temple of Bel at ancient Palmyra, the ruins of which were notoriously destroyed recently by ISIS.21 Compare Google Expeditions, which hosts various educational VR spaces, including places of faith around the world like the old city of Jerusalem, Borobudur (a Buddhist temple) in Indonesia, the mosque at the Taj Mahal, and Westminster Abbey.22 Similarly, BibleVR’s Android and iOS apps promise immersive Holy Land tours made up of VR-360 videos.23 Al Noor Apps offers a handful of VR experiences of sacred Islamic landmarks, including a tour of Masjid Al-Haram (the Great Mosque of Mecca) and Al-Masjid an-Nabawī (the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina), complete with an audible call to prayer (adhan) and Salawat.24 These virtual religious sites and objects offer users experiences that would be expensive and, in some cases, nearly impossible to come by otherwise. Users who are explicitly seeking or having religious experiences are not obvious in every case but may be inferred by each application’s features and probable target audience. BibleVR, for example, appears to be targeting a (p.199) Page 4 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion Christian market and provides some explicitly religious features (described briefly later in the chapter. User testimonials and social media interaction related to Pakistan-based Al Noor Apps appear to come from those located within or near Islam.25 In contrast, the examples from Google Expeditions and Sketchfab appear more educational in purpose. However, it is not difficult to imagine a user “stopping” to pray in one of these sacred sites or meditating on the significance of a religious artifact as one might do if viewing it in a museum or holy site.26 Recent research has shown that AR/VR users experience subtle behavior- and belief-altering activities within virtual worlds, suggesting that these examples of religious spaces and objects may produce a similar effect on subjects as when experienced non-virtually.27 Further, if greater immersion enables a greater sense of the materiality or spatiality of a represented place or object, it stands to reason that these experiences will provide closer approximations to analogous religious practices than non-immersive digital counterparts (e.g., as those of Second Life). Thus, while the experience of a physical pilgrimage to Mecca may not be easily replaced by joining that of another in VR, it is apparent that VR experiences offer something of the “real thing.”28 Nevertheless, how religious communities will value these immersive virtual experiences relative to the “real thing” remains to be seen. It is one thing, for example, to see digital photos of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, another to “look around” in a VR-360 video, but still another to be physically present in the space. Having viewed the Sistine Chapel in each of these three ways, I value the least accessible of these the most —when I physically walked through it, looked around, and drew breath from that very space. In fact, insofar as certain experiences are valued for their unordinary character—as Grieve also suggests is an important aspect of religious practice—religious virtual experiences may well remain subordinate to their physical counterparts for religious users and communities.29 How such assessments play out will become clearer if/when the technology becomes more popular. Prayer, Meditation, and Reading

What about AR/VR for religious rituals? As one recent headline asked, “Is Virtual Reality the Medium that Buddhism Has Been Waiting For?”30 This article goes on to describe the VR meditation app Finding Your True Self. The app is “an attempt to give people an idea of what could have been the Buddha’s journey into enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree.” Grieve, who helpfully introduced the discussion of “religion” earlier in the chapter and has given perhaps more scholarly attention than anyone to Buddhism in digital (p.200) spaces, reflects on the app: “By understanding the created nature of a virtual world, you’re able to see the created nature of the actual world.”31 Compare BibleVR, whose Holy Land tours have already been described, and its promotion of devotional use of the app, which includes “sacred destinations for exploring, prayers or meditation.”32 In the current version of the iOS app, VIP users can also access Page 5 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion “Devotional VR,” described as “VR movies for your Daily Devotionals.” Along these lines, in 2016 researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a proof-of-concept VR system, the goal of which is to “improve mindfulness.”33 The jury is out, however, on the extent to which immersion contributes positively or negatively to users’ attempts to meditate or pray. I do wonder, however, what effect the bright pixels and immersive features of these “worlds” will have on the focus and concentration usually associated with these rituals, during which practitioners often close their eyes. What about religious reading experiences? Because of the high resolution required for comfortable reading of digital texts, most AR/VR applications involving sacred texts do not including reading any significant amount of text.34 Yet AR/VR has the potential to better convey the materiality and paratexts of a book, features to which religious users often, even unknowingly, attach significance (e.g., the binding, the thickness of the book, the presence of other pages, the book’s relative size).35 Consider this AR example. In the educational and cultural heritage space, the $800m Museum of the Bible, in Washington, DC, has contracted a Jerusalembased software developer, Compedia, to create an AR app for use with an educational Bible curriculum. This app has not been publicly released, but a demo video available online indicates some of the ways that sacred texts might be represented.36 In one example, a user scans a printed icon in a textbook using the camera of an iPad. This action causes the printed image of the 1611 King James Bible title page—displayed on the iPad via its camera—to transform itself into a 3D 1611 King James Bible in AR. The user then “flips” the pages using gestures on the touchscreen, causing the pages to flip, bend, and fall realistically. Again, these material features of the book are important hermeneutical factors in the mediation of a text. This, along with the growth of electronic reading formats, has led to renewed attention on the effect of the physicality of books on a reader’s experience.37 More broadly, scholars of material culture have maintained and interpreted the significance, including hermeneutical effects, of physical “things” (as opposed to ideas), including religious objects. As Colleen McDannell says in Material Christianity, “The material world of landscapes, tools, buildings, households goods, clothing, and art is not neutral and passive; people interact with the (p. 201) material world thus permitting it to communicate specific messages.”38 This raises the question: Will the material culture, including religious books and objects, represented in AR/VR communicate the same messages as their nondigital counterparts? If so, to what extent will these messages be muted or otherwise affected by the digital mediation? I am not aware of evidence sufficient to assert an answer in these early days of religious AR/VR. However, I

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion reason that the “truer to life” an immersive experience of religious objects or spaces, the closer their messages will correspond to their analog counterparts. Social VR and Affective Avatars

Another important area of VR that is just emerging is avatar-based social VR.39 For example, Facebook’s Oculus recently launched its “Parties” and “Rooms,” in which users can experience avatar-based chat.40 In October 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg previewed the latest features, complete with avatars whose mouths move as users speak, show emotion and use hand gestures based on user input via hand controllers, and can exchange objects with each another.41 Not only could this enable virtual participation in a religious gathering (as in any non-immersive virtual world), but the experience would be both immersive and embodied in the sense that the avatar bodies move in conjunction with their respective users. What effect might this have for religious uses? Research has shown that avatarbased experiences can significantly impact beliefs and behavior.42 For example, some experiments have shown how the character/features of an avatar can affect its user—the “Proteus effect”—even after leaving the virtual environment.43 In one example, users whose avatar resembled their aged selves allotted more money for their retirement.44 In another, users performed saving acts in a virtual world either by flying in a helicopter or by superhero-like flight. After the experiment, the users whose avatars were superhero-like were significantly more likely to help pick up pens spilled by an experimenter, suggesting “the potential of using experiences in virtual reality technology to increase prosocial behavior in the physical world.”45 Consider a similar experiment, the published title of which indicates its claim: “Putting Yourself in the Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces Implicit Racial Bias.”46 Theoretically, then, religious social behaviors could be learned and/or reinforced in virtual environments, and all the more as the user-avatar control is more physically connected (i.e., movements, emotions, and expressions of the user are mapped closely onto the avatar). Recall the significance of ritual in Grieve’s threefold definition of religion. The complex social VR envisioned earlier in the chapter may provide a space for learning ritualistic (p.202) behavior—prayer and meditation postures, worship postures in communal services such as making the sign of the cross, and so forth. Since social VR is still in its infancy, it is not clear to what extent available platforms are being used for religious purposes to date. Yet if the online world of Second Life is any indication, one can reasonably expect that religious uses will increase as social VR itself grows. Interested scholars will want to pay attention, then, when Linden Lab’s VR version of Second Life, called Sansar, is released—a release anticipated as “soonish” in March 2017 (though still not public as of July 2017).47 It is also difficult to foresee what impact social VR—including religious Page 7 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion use of VR—could have on religious practice. But to the extent that it is taken up broadly, some experts suggest the impact could be profound: Current social networking and other online sites are just precursors of what we’ll see when social networking encompasses immersive virtualreality technology. When people interact with others for substantial periods of time, much as they do now on Facebook but with fully tracked and rendered avatars, entirely new forms of social interaction will emerge. Avatars can be more human than humans, and what that means for the brains responding to them will be understood only many years from now.48 Film, Storytelling, and Artistic Expression

AR/VR offers new ways to (re-)tell and experience religious stories, including foundational/scriptural “myths,” to draw on Grieve’s language once again. Religious artistic expression and storytelling has been a mainstay of religion, from ancient religious carvings to paintings in religious spaces to readings and narrative performances of religious stories. More recently, religious narratives have been told via film, itself a medium that elicits cognitive and bodily reactions. Zacks, for instance, has suggested that the brain is wired such that it responds to film similar to reality—we jump, duck, smile, become tense, and so forth, according to what is depicted, even while we know it is “just” a film.49 As Reeves and Nass remind us, Equating mediated and real life is neither rare nor unreasonable. It is very common, it is easy to foster, it does not depend on fancy media equipment, and thinking will not make it go away. The media (p.203) equation— media equal real life—applies to everyone, it applies often, and it is highly consequential. And this is surprising.50 Further, deeper immersion intensifies the effect, as can be seen in so-called VR fails where users overreact with body movements to what they are seeing in the virtual world.51 VR films not only enable viewer immersion in terms of the content; they give the viewer a certain level of control over perspective. The anticipated presence of the viewer also impacts the ways in which scenes are shot in the first place. For example, BibleVR’s founder, Pearry Teo—perhaps best known for his role in directing a pair of successful horror films—describes the experience of directing one of his biblical VR scenes: While other [depictions] are all about, here’s the story, here’s what happened, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, my characters actually interact with the camera. So when you’re putting on a virtual reality headset, you will feel like the actors are including you in that moment of time. . . . when Gabriel the angel came up to Zechariah and prophesied the birth of John —  when I was shooting it, I made sure the actors knew that the audience was Page 8 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion not just an observer. The actors acknowledge [the audience] to be there. Gabriel was talking, looking into the camera. It makes the audience feel like, “Oh, wow they’re including me in this experience, so that means I am a part of this story.” I’ve seen a lot of people make virtual reality to show everybody like, “Oh look at what’s around you, how cool is this?!” I don’t want it to be around you, I want you to be in it. I want you to feel like you were there when Gabriel went to Zechariah, you were there when Jesus was born, you were there when John the Baptist was born.52 In the interactive films of the future, Zacks suggests that this viewer autonomy or interaction will be conducive to social learning.53 One can easily imagine religious films in which scenarios are constructed to instill certain religious beliefs or morals. To date, however, religious VR films are still finding their way. Consider the critical review of what might be the first VR full-length feature film, Jesus VR: The Story of Christ, to be publicly released later in 2017: As the wise men presented their gifts to the baby Jesus during the nativity scene, I spin round to be confronted with a large, placidly chewing cow. . . . And during the sermon of the Good Samaritan I found myself watching two actors pretending to fix a cart at the edge of the crowd. (p.204) The film works reasonably well in the crucifixion scene, which is conceived on intimate terms with just a small gathering of centurions, believers, etc. (though where were Mary and Mary Magdalene?) and there is a reasonably bold Christ’s-eye view shot.54 VR films of a religious nature can also be found on With.in, a site that hosts short VR films. One such film, Waves of Grace, follows the story of Decontee Davis, an Ebola survivor from Liberia, whose Christian faith is featured.55 Another story, The Vodou Healer, lets the user experience a Ceremony of the Dead performed by Vodou priestess Katy, offering what for many viewers is likely a rare up-close experience of this ritual.56 In 2016, the New York Times produced a VR film that documented a pilgrimage to Mecca taken by photographer Luca Locatelli.57 More difficult to classify is the New Jerusalem Virtual Reality exhibit by Michael Takeo Magruder.58 In a sense it is an unreal film, an intentional “virtual unreality” that attempts to represent both the biblical text of Revelation 21 and a significant event described by that text: the descent of the heavenly New Jerusalem, described there as a cube-like city. The exhibit is visual and multisensory and may tap into something of the emotion of the biblical scene, perhaps in a way not unlike the illuminations of medieval manuscripts. In fact, AR/VR may enable new kinds of religious artistic expression, not unlike the religious paintings, illuminations, furniture, and architecture of the past.

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion A Glimpse into the Future

Having offered a selection of AR/VR examples, let us consider very briefly what might be possible in the near future. Technologically, it is reasonable to expect improvements in mobility (smaller, lighter, untethered devices) and display resolution, and greater audio effects. New techniques to bring haptic interfaces to AR/VR are also being developed, allowing for, say, the “touching” of a religious object or transmitting touch between users via avatars.59 Integrating smells may be more difficult, but one recent AR project suggests it is within reach.60 Social VR will almost certainly grow, especially considering the commitment to this area from Facebook, whose social network reported 1.86 billion monthly active users at the end of 2016.61 As smart devices (such as phones and tablets) are increasingly designed with AR/VR capabilities in mind, access to the prerequisite hardware will also increase substantially. These trajectories underscore the importance of thinking critically about what difference this technology may make to religious experience.

(p.205) Further Questions for Ongoing Research As I have mentioned, stakeholders in the religious AR/VR space are various, and a number of outstanding questions are apparent. For example, communities of faith will have to continue to make decisions about how/whether to value virtual practices, including pilgrimages, sacraments by avatar, virtual gatherings, and so forth; about what practices AR/VR can facilitate, simulate, or both (and what is the difference, if any, between facilitating and simulating?); and about the relationship between the community’s truth claims and simulated reality. Along these lines, consider how two leading university VR researchers contrast Pope Benedict XVI’s wariness toward virtual reality with a quote from Mark Twain: Pope Benedict XVI recently said: “New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality” and might result in “indifference towards real life.” But Mark Twain cautioned, “Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”62 Indeed, AR/VR will continue to raise questions as new media always have for religious communities.

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion In light of VR research to date, I suggested earlier that immersive experiences could potentially impact what Grieve identified as essential to religion—myth, ritual, and faith. Recall a few examples already mentioned: the VR experience of meditating under the Bodhi Tree, watching Jesus perform miracles, or experiencing a Vodou ceremony. From a religious studies perspective, these raise questions that future VR research might attempt to answer: What is the educational value in experiencing various religions in this way; for example, does it create greater tolerance of various faiths? Will some immersive religious narratives traumatize users (e.g., with a VR experience of a violent biblical story)? How does experiencing religious scenes or worlds in VR strengthen the mythic significance the user assigns to each respective religion? How does greater exposure to these narratives strengthen or reinforce what Grieve calls faith? How can VR scenarios be designed to modify behavior to conform to certain religious morals? (p.206) It is also possible that AR/VR will reshape religious practice, even if subtly. There is little doubt, for example, that the printing press had a profound impact upon Christianity and many other aspects of culture.63 I am wary of predicting what this might look like in the case of AR/VR, and the impact will certainly be related to how popular this technology becomes. However, it must be acknowledged that technologies used to mediate religious experiences are not hermeneutically neutral. To state this positively: the technologies themselves mean something; they have illocutionary force. Thus it is incumbent on stakeholders of religious technology—including developers, users, faith communities, and scholars—to ask, In what ways are the associated technologies conveying meaning?, as this chapter has begun to do.

Concluding Summary AR/VR technology is developing at incredible speed, with consumer products available now and more to come in the near future. Religious apps are already appearing as well as other AR/VR experiences that, while not explicitly or solely intended for religious use, nevertheless offer the opportunity to visit religious spaces, handle religious objects, or engage with religious narratives. AR/VR research to date has shown that immersive experiences impact human beliefs and behavior. In light of this research and select examples of AR/VR applications I have surveyed, I have suggested a number of possible impacts the technology could have on religious experience and raised additional questions that stakeholders, from developers to religious scholars to religious devotees, can begin to answer as the technology becomes more widely available.

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion

Notes:

(1.) Although the media have recently been bullish on AR/VR, Forbes recently ran a piece that warned that AR headsets in particular are overly hyped (Paul Armstrong, “Stop the Hype—Microsoft and Magic Leap Are Creating Their Own Disasters,” Forbes, February 20, 2017, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ paularmstrongtech/2017/02/20/stop-the-hype-microsoft-and-magic-leap-arecreating-their-own-disasters/); cf. Scott Stein, “Magic Leap’s Mixed Reality Future Is Blurrier than Ever,” CNET, February 21, 2017, https://www.cnet.com/ news/magic-leaps-mixed-reality-future-is-blurrier-than-ever/. (2.) On the narrow sense of “virtual reality” in this chapter, see below. Note that a number of scholars are in fact researching the effects of immersive technology on behavior and cognition—for instance, the work of Jeremy Bailenson and others at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University (see Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution [New York: HarperCollins, 2011]; “When Does Virtual Embodiment Change Our Minds?,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 25, no. 3 [2016]: 222–233); cf. Jeffrey M. Zacks, Flicker: Your Brain on Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); MarieLaure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); for a who’s who in the field, see also James D. Ivory, Virtual Lives: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2012), 123–150. (3.) Immersive technologies are also targeting other human senses such as hearing by using 3D audio (see Mona Lalwani, “For VR to Be Truly Immersive, It Needs Convincing Sound to Match,” Engadget, January 22, 2016, https:// www.engadget.com/2016/01/22/vr-needs-3d-audio/). The sense of touch is also being targeted. See, for example, the work of Ultrahaptics (https:// www.ultrahaptics.com). (4.) Cf. Paul Milgram et al., “Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum,” in Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies (1994)—SPIE Vol. 2351 (International Society for Optics and Photonics, 1994), 283, http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=981543. (5.) Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino, “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays,” IEICE Transactions 77, no. 12 (1994): 1322. Page 12 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion (6.) I borrow the label “window-on-the-world” from Milgram et al., “Augmented Reality,” 284. (7.) Milgram and Kishino see augmented reality as a subset (along with “augmented virtuality”) of mixed reality (“A Taxonomy”). For a helpful review of definitions of related terms and the conceptual issues involved, see Hanna Schraffenberger and Edwin van der Heide, “Everything Augmented: On the Real in Augmented Reality,” Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts 6, no. 1 (2014): 17–29. Graem Devine, working for a much-hyped AR/VR startup called Magic Leap, recently described mixed reality as an AR environment in which the virtual elements interact with the user and/or the user’s “real” world (“Into the Future” [presented at the DICE Summit 2017, Las Vegas, 2017], https:// youtu.be/4SNdrEGSVUY?t=1h42m42s). (8.) Of course, the “real–virtual” dichotomy is problematic and often criticized. See Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, “Authenticity,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi A. Campbell (London: Routledge, 2013), 88–103. (9.) Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1. (10.) Gregory Price Grieve, “Religion,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi A. Campbell (London: Routledge, 2013), 104. (11.) Ibid., 105–107. I hesitate at the qualifier “nonscientific,” even if it accurately reflects the Enlightenment perspective, because it a priori excludes scientific metanarratives from the religious domain. (12.) Heidi A. Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (New York: Routledge, 2010), 8. (13.) Frank Steinicke, Being Really Virtual: Immersive Natives and the Future of Virtual Reality (Cham: Springer, 2016), 25–27. (14.) Milgram et al., “Augmented Reality,” 284; cf. Kiyoshi Kiyokawa, “An Introduction to Head Mounted Displays for Augmented Reality,” in Emerging Technologies of Augmented Reality: Interfaces and Design, ed. Michael Haller, Mark Billinghurst, and Bruce H. Thomas (London: IGP, 2007), 44. (15.) For a concise overview of the history of VR, see Steinicke, Being Really Virtual, 25–32. See also fn. 2. (16.) E.g., Milgram and Kishino, “A Taxonomy”; Milgram et al., “Augmented Reality”; P. J. Metzger, “Adding Reality to the Virtual,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality International Symposium (VRAIS’93) (Seattle, 1993), 7–13; Page 13 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion Hiroshi Ishii, Minoru Kobayashi, and Jonathan Grudin, “Integration of Interpersonal Space and Shared Workspace: ClearBoard Design and Experiments,” ACM Transactions on Information Systems 11, no. 4 (1993): 349– 375. (17.) Michael R. Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). (18.) Ibid., 109–128; Mark E. Koltko-Rivera, “The Potential Societal Impact of Virtual Reality,” Advances in Virtual Environments Technology: Musings on Design, Evaluation, and Applications 9 (2005): n.p. (19.) Again, see Wagner for a broader approach to “virtual” and literature cited (Godwired, esp. 9–10). (20.) The developer software I have in mind includes Unreal Engine and Unity 3D, two of the most commonly used gaming engines for VR. On development of religious software in the early PC era, see for example John Jay Hughes, Bits, Bytes & Biblical Studies: A Resource Guide for the Use of Computers in Biblical and Classical Studies (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1987). (21.) https://sketchfab.com/models/02c4e194c6d64a4385a30990ed9899bf. (22.) https://edu.google.com/expeditions/. (23.) Pearry Teo, “IT’S FINALLY HERE!,” Bible-VR, n.d., http://www.bible-vr.com/ single-post/2016/11/23/ITS-FINALLY-HERE. (24.) “Al Noor Apps,” n.d., http://www.alnoorapps.com/. (25.) However, the use of English in the marketing and social media would suggest a desire to reach a broader market than simply those located in or near the company’s home country or region. (26.) Timothy Hutchings recently undertook a “Digital Pilgrimage Project” in association with CODEC Research Centre of Durham University, where I also work. The pilgrimage is meant to take place in Newcastle (UK). The user is guided via an Android app and alerted along the way to various sites and objects, many of which were created by the community for the project. The app can be downloaded on the Google Play store (NB, the two parentheses are part of the URL): https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer? id=Digital+Pilgrimage+Project+(Tim+Hutchings). Hutchings has given a talk on the subject, available at https://youtu.be/W0wC3MklDCo. (27.) For examples of research, see fn. 2 and further below. The strength of this inference can be tested in the near future by research that focuses on the effects

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion of immersive virtual religious experiences—research that is just beginning to be undertaken. (28.) Also, AR/VR allows for period reconstruction, whereby, for example, no longer extant or ruined buildings might be reconstructed and virtually experienced. Relatedly, new religious objects and spaces can be designed, shared, and experienced in the same way. As was already noted, the kinds of religious experiences available in Second Life will inevitably be had in the VR equivalent, Sansar. (29.) Recall the discussion of religion in the section “What Constitutes ‘Religious Use’?” and Grieve’s description of “ritual” as including unordinary practices that create “mythic significance.” (30.) Sam Dean, “Is Virtual Reality the Medium That Buddhism Has Been Waiting For?,” MEL Magazine, September 21, 2016, https://melmagazine.com/isvirtual-reality-the-medium-that-buddhism-has-been-waiting-for-7a0f9c2a5169; cf. Gregory Price Grieve, Cyber Zen: Imagining Authentic Buddhist Identity, Community, and Practices in the Virtual World of Second Life (New York: Routledge, 2016); Gregory Price Grieve and Daniel Veidlinger, Buddhism, the Internet, and Digital Media: The Pixel in the Lotus (New York: Routledge, 2014). (31.) Dean, “Is Virtual Reality the Medium That Buddhism Has Been Waiting For?” A similar app, Guided Meditation VR, offers nine guided meditation sessions, as well as four synthetic meditation VR environments, within each of which are four locations from which to choose (“A Relaxing Virtual Reality Application/Guided Meditation,” Guided Meditation VR for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Gear VR, n.d., https://guidedmeditationvr.com/about-2/). (32.) “Bible VR—Explore Our App,” Bible-VR, n.d., http://www.bible-vr.com/ explore-our-app. (33.) Judith Amores, Xavier Benavides, and Pattie Maes, “PsychicVR: Increasing Mindfulness by Using Virtual Reality and Brain Computer Interfaces,” in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’16 (New York: ACM, 2016), 2, http:// doi.acm.org/10.1145/2851581.2889442. (34.) One secretive Finnish company, Varjo (= “shadow” in English), has recently gone public with an announcement promising such high-resolution technology, possibly to make it to market in 2018 (Steve Dent, “Varjo Promises a VR Headset with ‘Human Eye-Resolution,’ ” Engadget, n.d., https://www.engadget.com/ 2017/06/19/varjo-promises-a-vr-headset-with-human-eye-resolution/). (35.) Joshua L. Mann, “How Technology Means: Texts, History, and Their Associated Technologies,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12, no. 3 (2018), http:// Page 15 of 18

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/12/3/000398/000398.html; Katja Rakow, “The Bible in the Digital Age: Negotiating the Limits of ‘Bibleness’ of Different Bible Media,” in Christianity and the Limits of Materiality, ed. Minna Opas and Anna Haapalainen (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 101–121. (36.) Demo: https://youtu.be/-mbP88oQLgc. (37.) See Naomi S. Baron, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. 131–156 and literature cited; Cf. Rakow, “The Bible in the Digital Age.” (38.) Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 2. (39.) This development has been anticipated for some time. See the accurate prediction, for example, in Jim Blascovich and Jeremy N. Bailenson, “Virtual Reality and Social Networks Will Be a Powerful Combination,” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, May 31, 2011, http:// spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/virtual-reality-and-social-networks-will-be-apowerful-combination. (40.) Conor Allison, “Facebook’s Oculus Rooms on Gear VR Is Good for Chat, TV and Games,” Wareable, January 24, 2017, https://www.wareable.com/vr/ facebooks-oculus-rooms-gear-vr-chat-tv-games-888. (41.) Alfred Ng, “Facebook Shows How It’s Gonna Make Virtual Reality Social,” CNET, October 6, 2016, https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/facebook-markzuckerberg-shows-off-live-vr-virtual-reality-chat-with-oculus-rift/. It is not clear whether all of the features demoed by Zuckerberg are available in Oculus Rooms at the time of writing this chapter. (42.) For a recent discussion on the user–avatar relationship, see Stina Bengtsson, “Avatar as Second Suit: Power and Participation in Virtual Work,” Games and Culture, June 28, 2017, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/ 10.1177/1555412017710616 and literature cited; Bailey, Bailenson, and Casasanto, “When Does Virtual Embodiment Change Our Minds?”; Blascovich and Bailenson, Infinite Reality; cf. the social effects of watching characters in film as discussed in Zacks, Flicker, summarized in 3–24. (43.) Though see Bengtsson for a more moderate view of the effect of avatars: “Avatar as Second Suit.” (44.) Hal E. Hershfield et al., “Increasing Saving Behavior Through AgeProgressed Renderings of the Future Self,” Journal of Marketing Research 48 (2011): 23–37.

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion (45.) Robin S. Rosenberg, Shawnee L. Baughman, and Jeremy N. Bailenson, “Virtual Superheroes: Using Superpowers in Virtual Reality to Encourage Prosocial Behavior,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 1 (2013): e55003. (46.) Tabitha C. Peck et al., “Putting Yourself in the Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces Implicit Racial Bias,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 779–787. (47.) Sean Sullivan, “VR World Sansar Is Coming Soonish: The Next Second Life,” MMOs.com, March 7, 2017, https://mmos.com/news/vr-world-sansarcoming-soon-next-second-life. (48.) Blascovich and Bailenson, “Virtual Reality and Social Networks.” (49.) Zacks, Flicker, 3–24. (50.) Byron Reeves and Clifford Ivar Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5. (51.) On technological immersion and user presence, see especially James J. Cummings and Jeremy N. Bailenson, “How Immersive Is Enough? A MetaAnalysis of the Effect of Immersive Technology on User Presence,” Media Psychology 19, no. 2 (2016): 272–309. (52.) Alyssa Bereznak, “An Interview With the Man Bringing the Bible to VR,” The Ringer, July 17, 2016, https://theringer.com/bible-virtualreality-8ff40138751d. (53.) Zacks, Flicker, 275–276. (54.) Peter Bradshaw, “Jesus VR: The Story of Christ Review—Virtual Reality Cinema Gains Disciples,” The Guardian, September 2, 2016, https:// www.theguardian.com/film/2016/sep/02/jesus-vr-the-story-of-christ-reviewvirtual-reality-cinema. (55.) “Waves of Grace: A Virtual Reality (VR) Film | With.in (360 Video),” With.in, n.d., https://with.in/watch/waves-of-grace/. (56.) “The Vodou Healer: A Virtual Reality (VR) Film,” With.in, n.d., https:// with.in/watch/the-vodou-healer/. Another example related to storytelling is the use of animated characters juxtaposed in physical space through AR. I recently experienced one such app at Turku Cathedral in Finland (“Sanan Seppä -Sovellus,” Turun Tuomiokirkko, n.d., http://www.turuntuomiokirkko.fi/sananseppa).

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Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Religion (57.) “Pilgrimage: A 21st-Century Journey to Mecca and Medina,” New York Times, July 21, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/world/middleeast/ pilgrimage-virtual-reality-in-mecca-and-medina.html. (58.) Michael Takeo Magruder, “A New Jerusalem (De/Coding the Apocalypse) : Michael Takeo Magruder : 2014,” n.d., http://www.takeo.org/nspace/2014-dtanew-jerusalem/index.htm. For a demo video: https://vimeo.com/131471303. Note a panel discussion of the exhibit at Kings College London: https://vimeo.com/ 114447276. (59.) Dean Takahashi, “Ultrahaptics Shows off Sense of Touch in Virtual Reality,” VentureBeat, December 10, 2016, https://venturebeat.com/2016/12/10/ ultrahaptics-shows-off-sense-of-touch-in-virtual-reality/. (60.) Stuart Eve, “Finding Out What the Past Smelled Like,” The Atlantic, March 11, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/finding-outwhat-the-past-smelled-like/387352/. (61.) “Company Info | Facebook Newsroom,” n.d., http://newsroom.fb.com/ company-info/. (62.) Blascovich and Bailenson, “Virtual Reality and Social Networks.” (63.) Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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Algorithm Magic

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Algorithm Magic Gilbert Simondon and Techno-Animism Betti Marenko

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0013

Abstract and Keywords Drawing on Simondon’s vision of the primitive magical universe—the original harmonious mode of existence of the human in the world—the chapter proposes that a new algorithmic magical and animistic universe is in the making in our contemporary computational world. By framing the immersive experience of computation and its sensibilities, perceptions, and affects through Simondon’s magical unity, where humans are an integral part of a totalizing and harmonious whole, the chapter looks at the black mirrors of our digital screens as the portals into a new magical and animistic reticulation of the human and the nonhuman. This perspective locates the algorithm within a genealogy of the relationship between technology and magic, and reads it as a mysterious form of nonhuman intelligence performing in inscrutable ways. It is the increasing autonomous agency and digital uncertainty of algorithms that engenders a new magical and animistic universe. Keywords:   algorithm, uncertainty, techno-animism, Gilbert Simondon, computation, nonhuman

Apparatus always function increasingly independently from their programmer’s intentions. VILÉM FLUSSER1

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Algorithm Magic Introduction This chapter examines the peculiar technical object “algorithm” from the perspective of its enchanting and incantatory potential. It puts forward the idea that the way algorithms perform may be less rational than may be conventionally believed. Instead, it proposes algorithms as magical utterances whose power to make things happen is rooted in the unknown, indeterminate, and unforeseeable space of contingency. If this seems counterintuitive—Isn’t the algorithm a logical series of steps undertaken to accomplish a defined outcome?2—the chapter brings together three different perspectives to unpack its central thesis: that a new algorithmic magical universe is in the making in our contemporary computational world. The first perspective locates the algorithm within a genealogy of the relationship between technology and magic, a link that has never been severed. On the contrary, as media theorist Siegfried Zielinski reminds us: “it is of vital importance to know that a magical approach toward technology continues to be possible and to be reassured that investment in it is meaningful.”3 Framed within this lineage, the algorithm becomes a magical object, a spell with the power to create worlds. To sustain this argument, the chapter then shows how algorithms operate on the basis of growing margins of openness. Following philosopher Luciana Parisi, the argument is that incomputability and uncertainty are now found at the very core of computation. Algorithms perform in increasingly inscrutable ways, their agency no longer graspable by human cognition, but rather more mysterious and more similar to forms (p.214) of nonhuman intelligence.4 Finally, the chapter examines selected facets of French mechanologist Gilbert Simondon’s thought to validate the case put forward. Specifically, it looks at Simondon’s vision of the primitive magical universe—the original and harmonious mode of being of the human in the world prior to any distinction between subject and object.5 By examining the algorithm through the triangulation of these theoretical strands, it appears more clearly how our present algorithm-driven computational environment may be read as laboring toward a new type of magical universe. If algorithms possess elements of uncertainty and mystery, then these will feed into the world-building and sense-making power that algorithms exercise already. Moreover, this framework of analysis of the algorithm extends to the computational environment humans inhabit (and are made of). The fundamentally immersive experience that computation creates, far from representing or simulating reality, actively constructs it. Indeed, it is reality itself. Computational aesthetics in particular—the sensibilities, perceptions, and affects emerging from the computational experience—“is not produced by the

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Algorithm Magic social but is social. Similarly, it is not the result of a certain culture; it is culture.”6 Can this aesthetic experience of computation be understood through Simondon’s magical unity where humans are immersed in a totalizing and harmonious universe?7 Simondon’s magical unity is described later in the chapter. For now, suffice it to say that the magical phase is the simplest and most fundamental way in which the environment of living beings can be structured. According to Simondon, the environment appears as “a network of privileged points of exchange between the being and the milieu”8 through which humans are directly integrated with the world. These key points are “places of contact and of mixed, mutual reality, places of exchange and of communication because they form a knot between both realities.”9 Together, they create a reticulation of “thresholds, summits, boundaries and crossing points that are connected to one another by their singularity and their exceptional nature.”10 Whereas Simondon was thinking about natural points such as mountains, valleys, and forests, I wish to push this image further and postulate that the black mirrors of our digital screens are the portals into a new magical reticulation, with algorithms as the salient points. If this intuition is valid, then algorithms must be investigated to verify whether their increasing autonomous agency and resulting digital uncertainty can effectively be leading to a new magical universe. (p.215) I will start by looking at algorithms to discuss how uncertainty is constitutive of their functioning. Once framed within a lineage of the relationships between technology and magic, this digital uncertainty acquires magical connotations. To support this idea, the chapter will then turn to Simondon’s explanation of how the primitive magical universe shifts into producing technicity and new types of networks. Here is where my key argument comes into focus. Algorithms create a new reticulation that enables unmediated connections between the human and its planetary computational milieu: a new kind of magical universe. To elucidate this, let us begin by looking at the algorithm itself.

Algorithms, Incomputability, and Whispered Spells Algorithms are everywhere, and not just because they have become synonymous with digital culture. Indeed, algorithms can be executed not only by machines, but also by human actors. Food recipes, for instance, are often given as an example of what an algorithm is: the procedure of transmitting and processing information to achieve a certain result. Philosopher of media Yuk Hui, however, counters that the comparison between an algorithm and a recipe is imprecise because it pays no attention to the difference between automatization of instructions (pure repetition) and automatization through recursion, where functions are (partially) self-defined. For Hui, “if we define instructions as Page 3 of 16

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Algorithm Magic sequential step-by-step schematization, and understand them as one pole of the algorithm, then the other pole of the algorithmic spectrum would be recursive and non-linear operations.”11 Put differently, instructions such as recipes are instrumental and their simple “automation through repetition” does not take into account the unknown. As “automation through recursion,” on the contrary, the algorithm becomes modulated by a horizon of contingency: what is neither known, nor present, yet. Furthermore, algorithms “bear a crucial, if problematic, relationship to material reality.”12 Andrew Goffey’s formula “Algorithm = Logic + Control”13 tells us that while “logic” concerns the problem and the abstract formulation and expression of a solution (what is to be done), “control” concerns the problem-solving strategy and the instructions for processing the logic (how it should be done).14 Thus, there is more to algorithms than logically consistent form.15 As a statement of intent within a machinic discourse, not only does the algorithm make things happen; it also problematizes the distinction between theory and practice, natural and artificial; it brings to fruition a double-pronged power to utter and to generate. “Algorithms do things, and their syntax embodies a command structure to enable this to happen,” (p.216) writes Goffey.16 Crucially, algorithms function also because they draw on contingency. “Algorithms act, but they do so as part of an ill-defined network of actions upon actions, part of a complex of power–knowledge relations, in which unintended consequences, like the side effects of a program’s behavior, can become critically important.”17 In this sense, algorithms are made of an unknown component too. It is by relying on this mystery that they perform like incantations. If the algorithm is both abstract and pragmatic, then computation at large must be similarly understood as a technique of abstraction and yet as a technology of material agency that makes the world happen.18 As said, computation is not merely constitutive of reality, but is reality. Parisi’s analysis of algorithmic cognition and its capacity to respond to, adapt to, and learn from both environmental and recursive inputs is useful here. Algorithmic automation foregrounds the emergence of an autonomous, purposeless, and impersonal mode of thought indifferent to human qualities.19 Drawing on mathematician Gregory Chaitin’s algorithmic randomness—the idea that in every computational process the output is always greater than the input —Parisi argues that algorithmic procedure signals the irruption of a nonhuman thought, able to modify its initial conditions and profoundly alien.20 By provoking irreversible changes in algorithmic rules, computation becomes an incomplete affair constantly open to revision.

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Algorithm Magic This notion of the algorithm as open is indebted to Simondon, for whom openness is the key characteristic of the postindustrial technical object. In the short text Technical Mentality, discovered after his death and written probably around 1970, he discusses the openness of technical objects as the condition of their perfectibility.21 The object possesses both a stable core and a layer that can be worked upon, expanded, amplified, and upgraded “because it is made up of elements that are all similar, impersonal, mass-produced by industry and distributed by all the networks of exchange. It is through participation to this network that the technical object always remains contemporary to its use, always new . . . The object is not only structure but also regime.”22 The object’s openness is the prerequisite for achieving technical perfection through continuous work, improvement, and expansion. Crucially, for the object to be sensitive to outside information and adapt accordingly, a margin of indeterminacy is necessary. The entire history of technical objects can be seen as a movement toward increasing degrees of openness and, consequently, of uncertainty.

(p.217) Technology Is Magic by Other Means For anthropologist Marcel Mauss, magic and technology are inextricably interwoven. By providing efficacy through ritual, magic shapes needs and prefigures techniques, and through these methods it satisfies human desires and expectations.23 This view is echoed by anthropologist Alfred Gell, for whom magic is a craft activity representing the technical domain in enchanted form.24 The goals of magic are therefore aligned with the goals of technology: both aspire to control and change the natural environment by artificial means. Even more, magic is “the ideal technology which orients practical technology and codifies technical procedures at the cognitive-symbolic level.”25 This is why it haunts technical activity like a shadow. Technical innovation itself, Gell reminds us, happens “not as a result of attempts to supply wants, but in the course of attempts to realize technical feats heretofore considered ‘magical’.”26 Technology is, therefore, magic by other means. The persistence of magic in the shaping of technologies and, broadly, in the history of modernity is well documented, in particular how the development of modern techno-science is connected to the tradition of natural magic.27 Historian Anthony Grafton, for instance, uses the expression “technological brand of magic” to describe the work of military experts, clockworks makers, engineers, and architects like Filippo Brunelleschi, who, in fields as diverse as optics, hydraulics, pneumatics, and warfare, used innovation as a technological spell to harness and outdo the forces of nature, while inducing awe and amazement in their audiences.28 The undercurrent of mathematical and artificial magic that traverses the Western history of technology, although overlooked, remains vividly present.29 This counters Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s argument that the Enlightenment project meant fundamentally the Page 5 of 16

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Algorithm Magic disenchantment with the world.30 Things were robbed of their power to enchant. They famously wrote: “animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things.”31 Granted, both magic and techno-science are concerned with goals. However, while magic pursues its ends through mimesis, science does it by establishing a distance from its object of study and autonomy of thought. This is the prerequisite for an all-embracing technology replacing the practices of the magician (or the medicine man, or the shaman). But what if the power to enchant never went away? What if magic never really disappeared but was actually incorporated within technological innovation? Anthropologist Michael Taussig’s evocative blend of fiction and criticism is particularly apt to elucidate this point. For Taussig magic consists in (p.218) knowledge and words, when these words have the power to effect things: “We are talking about the marketing of a theory of signification and of rhetoric, indeed, not just of knowledge but of what is in a deeply significant sense the knowledge of knowledge that has to remain inaccessible for that knowledge to exist.”32 What he emphasizes is the combination of efficacy and the mysterious expertise manifest in the form of “whispered spells.” In a magic formula the whole spell sequence associated with a procedural sequence creates a full cognitive plan; only the exact sequence, or part of it, may be unknown. Besides, for Taussig, magic is an art form with the “stupendous ability to blend aesthetics with practicality.”33 What matters is not only the efficacy and pragmatic of magic, but its aesthetic capacity to impact the realm of the sensible, to produce sensations, and to affect the human sensorium, whether in a conscious or unconscious way.34 Taken together, the three components of magic—efficacy, mystery, and aesthetic—feed into its intensified computational version, what this chapter calls techno-magic.

Techno-Magic, Technological Unconscious, and Animism 2.0 I use the term techno-magic to describe not only the entanglement of technology and magic I have outlined but the current digital manifestation of this entanglement. What is known as planetary computation—the Earth-wide impact of digital technologies and infrastructures on human cognitive, affective, and perceptual spheres—is characterized by a radical increase of the speed and intensity affecting all human senses: cognition, affect, and perception.35 At the core of this process we find the algorithm. By reading this intensification through techno-magic we see how the efficacy, mystery, and aesthetic of magic find expression within the algorithm. Can it be, then, that algorithms perform an intensification of techno-magic? After all, both imitative magic (concerned with copy and replication) and contagious magic (concerned with connection and material transfer) are expressed through algorithms. If we consider the perceptual and sensorial impact of algorithms, we realize how this is way more pervasive than what mere Page 6 of 16

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Algorithm Magic rule-based logic might do. Largely unregistered by human perception, algorithms shape, regulate, affect, and build our own human reality. Think about how automated communications, interactive technologies, and information flows produce a nonhuman universe of signification where cognitive operations keep on running in the background—unseen, unheard, unknown, and incommensurable to human scale. (p.219) Already in the nineteenth century, the invention of technologies of optical reproduction had generated new perceptions holding a nonhuman dimension—unseen by the human eye and unsensed in habitual ways. What is more, it privileged the tactile over the optical, as if the optical had now dissolved into touch.36 As Taussig remarks, such rewiring of seeing as tactility is a fundamental aspect of how technological innovations propel new sensibilities.37 He points out that this also concerns the historical evolution of enchantment. It is through tactility that earlier forms of religious and cult-like magic were displaced and “a sort of technological or secular magic was brought into being and sustained,”38 initiating a process where demystification and reenchantment paradoxically cohabit. This cultural framing helps us to understand the aesthetic experience induced by computation, where the production of new sensibilities takes place in the interaction with machines and is mediated by algorithms. This interaction demands to be negotiated anew as the hybrid outcome of human and nonhuman ecologies encountering each other. For digital media theorist Anna Munster, recognizable (human) fields of perception collide with the imperceptible, thus engendering unheard-of sensibilities and novel techno-aesthetic experiences.39 The role of algorithms in this process is crucial. By directly acting on human neuroperceptual capacities, modulating responses, and anticipating possible choices, by substituting search for sort,40 and by questioning what counts as human, algorithms generate new forms of aesthetic power. An example of this dynamic is the normalized logic of Google search, whose page ranking and algorithmic curation determine the kind of information prioritized on any user’s accessed content, preferences, and social media profiles.41 The milieu of techno-aesthetic sensibilities, computation, and human–nonhuman entanglements can also be described as technological unconscious. Italian artist Franco Vaccari coined this expression in the late 1960s to signal the autonomous capacities of the machine to produce a memory independent from human awareness.42 The technological unconscious evokes humans increasingly constituted by computation, software, and codes; and electronic objects recursively reshaping the world.43 For sociologist Nigel Thrift, the technological unconscious constitutes a new kind of immersive milieu where humans and computation feed into and adapt to each other. As computing flows in the environment, filling every interstice, the technological unconscious becomes the operation of powerful and unknowable information technologies that generate “a Page 7 of 16

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Algorithm Magic pre-personal substrate of guaranteed correlations, assured encounters and therefore unconsidered anticipation.”44 In doing so, they keep on producing everyday life. (p.220) I suggest that this scenario can be also read through animism—the notion that objects and other nonhuman entities possess a soul, life force, and qualities of personhood. After all, animistic responses emerge when technologies connecting objects become simultaneously smarter and more pervasive yet more invisible. Cultural critic Erik Davis, one of the first to popularize the notion of techno-animism or digital animism, writes that a degree of animism is “a psychologically appropriate and imaginatively pragmatic response to the peculiar qualities of the information jungle. We associate intelligence with what reads and writes, and nowadays everything electronic reads and writes.”45 It is not a coincidence that the last decade has seen animism being redeemed from its nineteenth-century anthropological roots46 and reevaluated as a strong theoretical contender for an imaginative understanding of the human–digital milieu.47 Whereas positivism, with its rational view of social phenomena, empiricism, and faith in techno-scientific progress, saw animism as a failed epistemology, an error or, at best, an immature stage in the development of individual and society,48 contemporary animism problematizes the boundaries between the social world of the human (the animate) and the material world of the nonhuman (the inanimate). Influenced by new materialism, agency theory, and the “animistic turn” in radical anthropology,49 this Animism 2.0 prompts a rethinking of the ontological distinction between the living and the nonliving, thus offering insights into human interaction with increasingly sentient smart objects. What is remarkable about this animistic approach, and what makes it so attractive, is that it can perform at multiple levels. While it foregrounds theoretical debates on the relations between the human and the nonhuman, it also informs practical strategies of engagement with digital objects. For instance, in what is known as animistic design, animism is taken as a fictionbuilding tool to think differently about interaction: “neither from the perspective of the user, nor from the perspective of the object but from the ongoing modulation of their less-than-predictable interaction.”50 Some of the work done in this field explores how ecosystems of connected objects can express degrees of personality, yet carefully refraining from anthropomorphism.51 The idea is to foster a curated uncertainty around the outcomes of interaction—both as a speculative method of investigation and as a research-and-development tool. Although stemming from similar concerns, this animistic design approach differs from Davis, who, in the afterword to the new edition of his classic TechGnosis,52 remarks how an animistic worldview is never far away from paranoia as the logical outcome of attempting to explain our hyper-mediated world. For him, the invisible agency of devices becomes an ominous yet unavoidable threat against Page 8 of 16

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Algorithm Magic which the only antidote is esoteric fabulation. Paranoia, (p.221) however, has no place in the unfolding of an Animism 2.0, predicated on algorithmic magic.

Aesthetic Thinking and Simondon’s Magical Universe Simondon presents us with a suggestive view of the linkage between technology and magic. In the beginning is magic, the harmonious integration of the human in the world prior to any separation between subject and object. Humans are immersed in the world and an integral part of it. Likewise, the world is an integral part of the human. No separation exists; rather, a profound sense of completeness permeates the relationship between humans and their magical universe. In this original primitive unity humans and world mutually affect each other. Their connection and exchange are manifest through a network of key points and key moments in space and in time. Animistic influences seem to surface when Simondon mentions the “summits of mountains or certain narrow passes . . . the heart of the forest and the centre of a plain”53 as privileged key points where special exchanges happen between the living being and the milieu. Effectively conceived as portals into different levels of reality, they are linked with each other through their own singularity and their own exceptional character, and they express the forces of the ground that supports them. It is the distribution of key points, their reticulation, that creates a distinction between figure and ground, a dynamic equilibrium where key points draw their force from the ground, yet they are not separate from it. Any of these points—a forest, a mountain, a gorge—concentrates in itself the power to govern the surrounding environment while catalyzing human effort. Eventually, says Simondon, a de-phasing of this magical universe takes place. Technicity and religion emerge from this unfolding. As this happens, the figureand-ground relationship is split, too, and the reticulation wanes. Key points detach from the ground as free figures and lose their power on their surroundings. They become technical objects, ready to be abstracted from the milieu and to be active only instant by instant. Simultaneously this process frees the ground. While key points become objectified as tools and instruments, the ground powers are subjectified, acquiring personification under the guise of the divine and the sacred (this is the birth of gods, heroes, priests). Technical objects incur in a process of technical objectification: they retain only the characteristics of the figure, and lose the ground. Religious subjects incur in a process of religious subjectification: they retain only characteristics of the ground, and lose the attachment to the figural (i.e., the hic et nunc). This is the instauration of object and subject as separate entities, (p.222) which in turn produces a distance between humans and world. Clearly, the first object is the technical object; the first subject is a divinity. Both float away from their milieu; both acquire a concrete dimension; both, now detached and estranged from one

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Algorithm Magic another, become “mobile, divisible, displaceable, and directly open to manipulation because disconnected from the world.”54 The relationship between human and world is now mediated in two distinct ways: objectified as technicity and subjectified as religion. Although they both emerge from the division of the original magical unity, technicity and religion are neither degraded forms nor relics of magic. Rather, they are the heirs of magic, but on the condition that they are taken together as a coupling of two symmetrical and contrasting mediations. This symmetry also explains why they are both equally related to magic. While technical thinking operates “point by point and step by step; it localises and multiplies the schemas of mediation, always remaining less than the unity,” “religious thinking finds the opposite equilibrium: in it, the totality is more stable, more powerful, and more viable than the element.”55 Simondon describes their relationship as producing “aesthetic thinking,” a constant reminder of the original magical universe. In this sense, then, the original magical universe does not stop producing effects; on the contrary, the creation of magic is continuous. The charge proper of the magic phase keeps on insisting and persisting, as an energy that constantly vivifies the dynamic between technicity and religion. More than a phase, aesthetic thinking is a moment that, while constantly reminding us of the rupture of the initial magical universe, drives us toward a future unity. As it generates nostalgia for the magical world, aesthetic thinking tends toward magic as if persistently reanimating it. This is why aesthetic objects like artworks provide continuity with the primitive magical unity: because they have the power to evoke it through perceptual analogy. The power of an artwork, and, more broadly, the aesthetic character of an action, an event, or a thing, resides in its being at the same time subject and object, thus creating the sensation of surpassing the division ensued after the first de-phasing. Aesthetic objects, in other words, work toward a recomposition of that split. Even though they cannot really reconstitute the magical universe, still they can recall it. They can make it felt. They can evoke it. This is what artworks have in common. Whether it is the oldest human-painted images ever found56 or contemporary work challenging established notions of what art can be,57 the aesthetic experience alters the contours of what can be sensed. It is telling, therefore, that for Simondon anything—be it an action, an event, or a moment—has the capacity to become a significant key point in a new reticulation of the universe. Indeed, every culture selects those acts, situations, places, and moments that are more suitable to this aim. This (p.223) explains how, after having detached themselves during the initial phase shift, technical objects (retaining now only the traits of figures) return into the world to establish new alliances with it. This is how technicity becomes concrete. It attaches itself to the world through new key points, for instance cement and rocks, cable and valley, pylon and hill. Novel reticulations are created, this time Page 10 of 16

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Algorithm Magic chosen by technicity. Nonetheless, because of the localized nature of technical objects, even if they keep on multiplying, the original primitive unity of the world cannot be regained. No matter the extent to which technical objects go on reproducing themselves, they cannot recapture the original magical thinking.58 Elsewhere, however, Simondon states: It is the natural structures themselves that serve as the attachment point for the network that is being developed: the relay points of the Hertzian “cables” for example rejoin with the high sites of ancient sacredness above the valleys and the seas. Here, the technical mentality successfully completes itself and rejoins nature by turning itself into a thought-network, into the material and conceptual synthesis of particularity and concentration, individuality and collectivity—because the entire force of the network is available in each one of its points, and its mazes are woven together with those of the world, in the concrete and the particular. The case of information networks is so to speak an ideal case where the success is virtually complete, because here energy and information are united again after having been separated in the industrial phase.59 It can be argued that, had Simondon lived long enough to witness the stratospheric expansion of computation and its planetary reach, he might have agreed that the algorithmic architecture of computation constitutes precisely the type of information networks where “energy and information are united again” and where “technical mentality rejoins nature by turning itself into a thought network.” Through its proliferation, pervasiveness, and immediation, the technical object algorithm is not attached to one place and one moment only, but is enveloping with simultaneous connectivity the entire “ground.” An obvious instance of this is the way Google Earth operates, blending visual representation and constructed simulation, and effectively constructing the world-as-map and the map-as-world.60 As the localization and particularization of this specific technical object is superseded by a simultaneity of presence, a scenario emerges where such technical proliferation (not a mere “adding”) gives birth to a new phase that brings together figure and ground, (p.224) religion and technicity. A new kind of magical unity rises, based upon the development of the thoughtnetwork Simondon had foreseen.

The Digital Murmur of Algorithm Magic As they embody infinite recombinatory, perfectible technicity, and are open to unbounded possible futures, algorithms are the epitome of the postindustrial technical objects. They are not just mere mechanical calculations, but nonhuman agents possessing increasing degrees of animation, soft intelligence, and autonomy, relationally entangled with humans in complex, variable, and emergent ecologies. No longer mere tool or instrument, accessory to the establishment of meaning, algorithms become the hinge of new forms of sensePage 11 of 16

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Algorithm Magic making that are relational, milieu-based, and postcognitive. Sense-making shifts from being the mere outcome of subjective act to emerge “from the nonsignifying collaborative practices of humans, objects, and machines.”61 Algorithms operate a radical ontological reorganization as they mediate the encounter between extensively cyberneticized, heterogenic subjectivities and the nonhumanity of planetary networked computation. From this encounter new animistic techno-aesthetic sensibilities develop. A new enchanted milieu is generated from the triangulation of pragmatic efficacy, contingent unknown (incomputability), and techno-magic. This is the milieu we humans inhabit, where the incantatory digital murmur spoken into things makes the whole universe resonate—and us within it. It may not be the harmonious magical milieu of human and world evoked by Simondon, but this animistic algorithm magic is an exquisitely close approximation. It certainly is the only one we live by.

Notes:

(1.) Vilém Flusser, Post-History (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013), 25. (2.) Tarleton Gillespie, “Algorithm,” in Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, ed. Benjamin Peters (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016), 18–30. (3.) Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 255. (4.) Will Knight, “The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI,” MIT Technological Review 120, no. 3 (May/June 2017): 54–63. (5.) Gilbert Simondon, “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,” Deleuze and Guatarri Studies 5, no. 3 (2011): 407–424. See also Pascal Chabot, The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 127–144. (6.) Beatrice M. Fazi and Matthew Fuller, “Computational Aesthetics,” in A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 284; emphasis added. (7.) Simondon, “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,” 410. (8.) Ibid., 411. (9.) Ibid., 412. Page 12 of 16

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Algorithm Magic (10.) Ibid., 414. (11.) Yuk Hui, “Algorithmic Catastrophe. The Revenge of Contingency,” Parrhesia 23 (2015): 122–143 (quote is at 134). (12.) Andrew Goffey, “Algorithm,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 15–20 (quote is at 16). (13.) Ibid., 15. (14.) Rob Kitchin, “Thinking Critically About and Researching Algorithms,” The Programmable City Working Paper 5 SSRN, 2014, http://ssrn.com/ abstract=2515786. (15.) Goffey, “Algorithm,” 19. (16.) Ibid., 16. (17.) Ibid., 19. (18.) Fazi and Fuller, “Computational Aesthetics,” 286. (19.) Luciana Parisi, “Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Capitalism, and the Incomputable,” in Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas, ed. Matteo Pasquinelli (Luneburg, Germany: Meson Press, 2015), 125–137 (quote is at 129). (20.) Algorithmic automation can no longer be understood within Turing’s discrete computational machine, based on a priori instructions (mechanism of first-order cybernetics; i.e., a closed system of feedback). Today’s “combination of environmental inputs and a posteriori instructions proposed by the interactive paradigm embrace second-order cybernetics and its open feedback mechanisms” (Ibid., 129). (21.) Gilbert Simondon, “Technical Mentality,” Parrhesia 7 (2009): 17–27; reprinted in Arne de Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward, eds., Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 1–15. (22.) Ibid., 24. The notion of the object being not merely structure but “regime” evokes Félix Guattari’s late-1970s writings on integrated capitalism as a phenomenon of semiotization expressed through a sort of “collective calculator,” a definition that predates the current FANG (the high-performing tech stocks Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google). Félix Guattari, Il Capitale Mondiale Integrato (Bologna: Cappelli, 1982). (23.) Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 175. Page 13 of 16

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Algorithm Magic (24.) Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 40–66 (quote is at 59). (25.) Alfred Gell, “Technology and Magic,” Anthropology Today 4, no. 2 (1988): 6–9 (quote is at 9). (26.) Ibid., 8. (27.) Simon During, Modern Enchantments. The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002); Anthony Grafton, “Magic and Technology in Early Modern Europe,” Dibner Library Lecture, October 15, 2002, Smithsonian Institution Library; Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, eds., Magic and Modernity. Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment. A Historiographic Review,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 692– 716; Barbara Stafford, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). (28.) Grafton, “Magic and Technology in Early Modern Europe.” (29.) Betti Marenko, “Filled with Wonder. The Enchanting Android from Cams to Algorithms,” in Encountering Things. Design and Theories of Things, ed. Leslie Atzmon and Prasad Boradkar (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 19–34. (30.) Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). (31.) Ibid., 21. (32.) Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 262. (33.) Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 145. (34.) Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation (London and New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2003). (35.) Benjamin Bratton, “The Black Stack,” e-flux no. 53 (2014); Benjamin Bratton, “Outing Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning with Turing Tests,” in Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas, ed. Matteo Pasquinelli (Luneburg, Germany: Meson Press, 2015), 69–80.

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Algorithm Magic (36.) The tactile optics is what Benjamin describes as the physiognomic aspect of visual worlds. The emphasis on touch is strikingly apt to describe the prominence of contemporary touch-based interactive devices. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in One Way Street (London: New Left Books, 1979). (37.) Taussig, Nervous System, 144. (38.) Ibid. (39.) Anna Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). (40.) Mario Carpo, “Big Data and The End of History,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 48 (2015): 46–59. (41.) Pariser Eli, The Filter Bubble (London: Penguin, 2012). (42.) Franco Vaccari, Fotografia e Inconscio Tecnologico (Torino: Einaudi, 2011). (43.) Erich Horl, “The Technological Condition,” Parrhesia 22 (2015): 1–15. (44.) Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005), 213. (45.) Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Harmony Books, 1998), 225. (46.) Anselm Franke, Animism, Volume 1 (Berlin: Sternberg Press and Extra City, 2010); Anselm Franke, Sabine Folie, and Maurizio Lazzarato, eds., Animism: Modernity Through the Looking Glass (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2011). (47.) Betti Marenko and Phil Van Allen, “Animistic Design: How to Reimagine Digital Interaction between the Human and the Nonhuman,” Digital Creativity 27, special issue: Post-Anthropocentric Creativity, ed. Stanislav Roudavski and Jon McCormack (London: Routledge, 2016), 52–70; Betti Marenko, “NeoAnimism and Design: A New Paradigm in Object Theory,” Design and Culture: The Journal of the Design Studies Forum 6, no. 2, special issue: Design, Thing Theory and the Lives of Objects, ed. Leslie Atzmon (London: Berg, 2014), 219– 242; Betti Marenko, “Object-Relics and their Effects: For a Neo-Animist Paradigm,” MEI Médiation et Information, no. 30–31, special issue: Objets & Communication, ed. Bernard Darras and Sarah Belkhamsa, Centre of Image, Research, Culture and Cognition, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris: Editions de l’Harmattan, 2009), 239–253. (48.) For anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, children and primitives are the best examples of animists, both unable to distinguish animate from inanimate, both Page 15 of 16

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Algorithm Magic with a delirious and deluded perception of the world. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871), reprinted as Religion in Primitive Culture (Harper, 1958). (49.) Linda A. Brown and William H. Walker, eds., Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15, no. 4 (2008). Tim Ingold, “Rethinking the Animate, ReAnimating Thought,” Ethnos 71, no. 1 (2006): 9–20. Notions that reconfigure animism as a relational ontology characterized by mutuality, pluralism, emergence, and situated-ness are indebted to seminal anthropological work, for instance Marilyn Strathern’s analysis of Melanesian cultures (The Gender of the Gift [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988]), where individuals are defined by the sum of their relationships with the human and the nonhuman (objects, animals, minerals, plants, natural events). Also Nurit Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40 (1999): 67–91. (50.) Marenko and Van Allen, “Animistic Design,” 53. (51.) Ibid., 58–68. (52.) Erik Davis, “Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mythmagic-mysticism-age-information/#!. (53.) Simondon, “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,” 413. (54.) Ibid., 416. (55.) Ibid., 421. (56.) Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). (57.) Grayson Perry, The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! (London: Serpentine Galleries, 2017). (58.) Simondon, “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,” 421. (59.) Simondon, “Technical Mentality,” 22. (60.) Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks, 51. (61.) Erich Horl, “The Artificial Intelligence of Sense: The History of Sense and Technology After Jean-Luc Nancy (By Way of Gilbert Simondon),” Parrhesia 17 (2013): 11–24.

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Afterword

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural Simone Natale and Diana Pasulka

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780190949983 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190949983.001.0001

Afterword Religious and Digital Imaginaries in Parallel Lines Carole M. Cusack Massimo Leone Jeffrey Sconce

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190949983.003.0014

Abstract and Keywords In this afterword, three leading scholars, whose work explores the intersections of media, communication, and religion from different viewpoints, enter in dialog on the subject. Carole Cusack is a historian of religion and the author of groundbreaking works about the relationship between religion, imagination, and popular culture. Massimo Leone is a semiologist whose work has stretched the boundaries between the study of religion and the study of signs, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. Jeffrey Sconce is a scholar in film and media studies whose pioneering monograph, Haunted Media (2000), placed the theme of the supernatural at the forefront of studies in media and communication. Their responses provide a map of potential trajectories to further explore the connections between digital media and the supernatural. Keywords:   media, supernatural, digital media, religious studies, history of religion, media studies, semiotics, media imaginary, imagination

Written from a cross-disciplinary perspective to interrogate the relationship between digital media and the supernatural, this book challenges established boundaries within fields and areas of expertise. In this afterword, the editors asked three leading scholars, whose work explores the intersections of media, communication, and religion from different viewpoints, to enter in dialog on the subject. Carole Cusack is a historian of religion and the author of Page 1 of 10

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Afterword groundbreaking works about the relationship between religion, imagination, and popular culture; Massimo Leone is a semiologist whose work has stretched the boundaries between the study of religion and the study of signs, both linguistic and nonlinguistic; and Jeffrey Sconce is a scholar in film and media studies whose pioneering monograph, Haunted Media (2000), placed the theme of the supernatural at the forefront of studies in media and communication. Their responses provide a map of potential trajectories to further explore the connections between digital media and the supernatural. Cusack: It is tempting to start by quoting Arthur C. Clarke’s memorable line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but that is only true in certain descriptive ways. That is, magic has internal logics and in systematic forms possesses a “rational” quality, but actually technology involves hardware skills that evolve and build upon earlier discoveries, whereas magic involves apparent physical changes or results that are caused by conceptual or symbolic means rather than mechanical or scientific advances. I think that magic has a much longer history than the (p.230) advanced technologies we experience in the twenty-first century (and its close relative religion does too), and every culture has a language that describes magical phenomena, so popular accounts of computing developments draw upon that language due to analogies or resemblances between our encounters with IT and what we all know of magic from childhood fairy tales and the like. Yet, I still get a frisson sometimes when online, even at work, because it is a separate mode of existence that has been superadded to my life. I’m fifty-seven this year and got my first computer (black screen, orange text, no hard drive) in 1989, aged twenty-seven. That was a useful addition to my research for my Ph.D. but I did not feel that frisson. That came later with the Web and the graphics interface, and browsers (though retrospectively Mosaic was terribly clunky). But now Google, Amazon, and various other players CAN read my mind. Well, I know they just follow my searches, but the realization of how accurately this happened came about eighteen months ago when I was reading about the American novelist Joy Williams, whom I admire, and when I went back to Google and typed “Alison” it immediately completed that tentative beginning “Lurie American novelist.” I thought, holy fuck, this thing can read my mind (and I know it can’t, but the language is irresistible). Leone: I think that in the domain where religion and spirituality intersect with digital technology and communication, two dimensions can be distinguished. On the one hand, some features of the latter may be metaphorically evoked with reference to the former. In this case, the metaphor does not actually grasp any substantial characteristic of digital technology and communication, but limits itself to compare them to phenomena that are familiar to popular culture. The marketing of digital technology and communication plays an essential role in such circumstance. For instance, Apple has chosen to design its logo and name Page 2 of 10

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Afterword with reference to one of the most famous myths of the Jewish and the Christian civilization, that of the apple eaten in Eden by Eve and Adam. Similarly, the possibility to upload data in a server, instead of saving them into a hard drive, is currently known as “cloud,” with subtler but also evident spiritual connotations. In these and other similar examples, though, it is not technology that contains an intrinsic religious or spiritual value, but it is rather the marketing of it that exploits the popularity and potential virality of some religious memes in order to better spread a brand, a product, or a practice. On the other hand, digital technology and communication may be underpinned by more structural dynamics, which resemble those that underlay religions and spirituality more in depth. For instance, since the quantitative logic by which computing algorithms usually proceed is strongly diverging from the qualitative trends of human cognition, the magnification (p.231) of the former’s role in society and culture may give rise to a sort of estrangement effect: humans have created software so as to complement their cognitive abilities, yet software produces results that are now so uncontrollable by human cognition that the relation between creators and creatures is sometimes and increasingly thought of as reversed: we have the impression that we are created by software more than we have created it. That contributes to bestow on digital technology and communication an aura of uncanniness that is akin to that traditionally attributed by some cultures to their deities. Also before the emergence of digital media, in many religious imaginaries, human beings have attributed to deities or other supernatural beings the capacity to challenge and defeat the natural limits of the body. For instance, levitation was considered a prodigious attribute of both sacred objects and saintly people in the Abrahamic religions well before the development of flying technologies enabled common objects and people to actually levitate. Analogously, angels were deemed able to telepathically communicate well before the invention of technology that is controlled directly by the brain without any need for language impulse, and so on. Every time that technology seems to match one of these utopias of the human body, then such technology is often connoted with the same aura that its religious forerunners would enjoy. The phenomenon, however, is surprising only when the deep nature of the so-called secularization is ignored. Although traditional religious tenets such as the belief in spectacular miracles have been marginalized or even ridiculed in postmodern cultures, these continue to hold, in their long-term memory, the anthropological desire for empowering the human body beyond its limits. Digital technology and communication do not bring about any miracles, yet what they bring about is often interpreted with reference to this old spiritual category, although its proper religious manifestations are no longer part of the common imaginary.

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Afterword Cusack: Indeed, the same or similar associations could be observed with earlier technologies. The association of smiths with magic in almost all ancient and medieval folklore and mythology is because they could take rocks and seemingly get gold and silver from them, and they could then make this fascinating but apparently useless hot liquid into swords and so on. The gods Dagda, Goibniu Creidne, and Dían Cécht, in the mythological text Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), are respectively a builder of fortresses, a smith, a wheelwright, and a leech (doctor). They are gods because they have those “magical” skills that are actually technological advances: the opening of the text describes the Tuatha dé Danann, which is the collective name of the gods and means “people of the goddess Danu,” as masters of (p.232) magic. I could pile on examples, as I started out as a medievalist and still teach units on medieval Christianity and also Celtic and Scandinavian mythology. Sconce: How individuals regard digital technology’s ability to “predict the future” and “read the mind” says much about personal psychology, too. Most of us still operate with the McLuhanesque idea that the media are an extension of our sensorium, so it can seem empowering and flattering that these technologies “think for” or “know” us in helpful ways. Equally McLuhanesque, however, is the idea that these technologies are rewriting us and the world in terms of data positivism. For this reason, I’ve never found the association of the digital and the supernatural all that persuasive. Telegraphy, wireless, radio, television—these technologies evoked the occult in the truest sense of the word, a hidden realm that was otherworldly, other-dimensional, and so on. They were all technologies that suggested something else, perhaps unknowable, animated their miracles of disembodiment. To me, the digital is the final nightmare of occultism’s positivist encryption, what Baudrillard described as “integral reality”—the translation and visualization of everything as data. In the analog world, there was the potential for an infinity to unfold between the 1 and 0. In the digital, there is either the 1 or the 0. Already we are witnessing the transition to a world where the nondigitized is in danger of evaporating into nonexistence. To the extent that the digital evokes the occult, it is more the secular mysteries of power and conspiracy. Who is watching me, optically or as a data profile? How are algorithms producing information that ultimately dissolves any remnant of human agency? In this respect, simulation through the control of information is more significant than any residual metaphysics of presence and absence. Born of modernity, the analog occult appeared to radiate outward toward the infinite. The digital, in contrast, seems more a secretion of power, an attempt to encode the world as Big but ultimately finite Data. Leone: I agree that the distinction between analog and digital technologies is important. And we can bring this further by taking into account how any different type of technology may have particular implications and evoke specific Page 4 of 10

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Afterword visions and meanings. A hairdryer is a technological tool, yet it is unlikely attributed any religious or spiritual connotation (except, paradoxically, in the case of some atheist communities, which use it as an instrument and symbol of “un-baptism”). Also, much more complex technology, such as that involved in a nuclear power plant, for instance, does not necessarily beget any spiritual or religious metaphor, evocation, or connotation. One might argue, in this sense, that only digital technologies that exert a significant impact in affecting a human group’s cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic relation with the environment are capable of receiving a supernatural connotation. That is (p.233) the case also because there is a likely causal link between the emergence of new technologies of human cognition and that of new religious trends. The invention of writing played a fundamental role in the rise of monotheisms, that of print with movable characters in the development of modern religions like Protestantism, and it is not to be excluded that digital communication will in the long term bring about religious and spiritual forms that match the new devices, practices, and trends mediating between human beings and their environment. Sconce: I would imagine most people consider all electronic technologies to be a black box—something happens in there that is magical, except when the box breaks down and becomes, inexplicably and catastrophically, “dead.” In this respect, I associate supernaturalism more with electronics than the individual media technologies of the past two centuries, or even technology in general. Enlightenment thinkers believed electricity held the secrets of the universe, but there were always two possible trajectories from this insight. Electricity might be divine, the animating spark that connected humans to God; or, as in Shelley’s Frankenstein, it was a material force that animated a material bag of bones in a potentially godless universe. Obviously, we’re not thinking about this every time we use our iPhone—but that association between electricity, electronics, and living presence is always there in some way. Even as neurochemistry displaces electronics as the dominant vernacular model of brain and mind, the “wired” body remains salient. Cusack: The relationship between what human beings are at a base level—an unclothed body, foraging for food and sheltering in caves or under trees—and the cultural products that we have created since the first stone tools is a complicated one. I do not subscribe to the Heideggerian position that modern technology is different (challenging forth, which conceals rather than reveals) from older technologies (bringing forth, which reveals truth). Trust and belief in the efficacy of technology is not the same as religious belief; it is only in 1 Kings 18:20–40 that offerings on an altar (think meat on a barbecue that is not fired up) get burnt by fire from heaven. That is because Elijah was a prophet of Yahweh, unlike the 450 prophets of Baal. It helps to be a follower of the “true” god, but of course truth is a slippery thing in religion, as most religious people think their God is the true God. Only a small number of perverse pranksters deliberately venerate deities they think are false—and even that is ambiguous. Page 5 of 10

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Afterword Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, the founders of Discordianism, both came to believe in the reality of Eris, for example. Yet, every time I put bread in my toaster it turns into toast. Every time I switch on the washing machine my clothes get washed. Every time I get on a plane it flies me to another state or country. I am sometimes struck that it’s (p.234) amazing that a huge heavy airplane flies, but the laws of physics underlie the technology; it’s not like the stone boat that allegedly brought the corpse of St. James from the Holy Land to Galicia, where it landed at Finisterre, near Santiago de Compostela, where pilgrims visit his alleged grave to this day. Stone boats don’t float. That being said, I was entranced when I first read Margaret Wertheim’s The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space From Dante to the Internet (1999). It now seems easier to see her argument, as narratology and cognitive science have made huge changes to the study of religion, and it’s now clear that heaven and hell, bardo and Avalon, reincarnation and sheol, are all just narrative worlds that humans have invented, in exactly the same way as Tolkien devised Middle-Earth. The one difference is that they originated such a long time ago that by the time they made it into texts they were so venerable that distrusting the “reality” of such otherworlds was not an option. Leone: Another dimension of this issue is how advances in fields such as artificial intelligence and robotics are affecting ideas and visions about agency, life, and humanity. Several scenarios are possible in this domain. On the one hand, human beings might increasingly fetishize their technology, as they partially already do, replacing their customary attention to the human relations that these devices bring about with attention to these devices themselves. Smartphones, for instance, allow human beings to communicate, as social networks enable them to interact; when either of them is valorized independently from the offline relations that they technologically empower, however, the risk of fetishizing them into sources of alienation is high. On the other hand, though, the urge to include nonhuman agents such as robots or other advanced machines into the ethical sphere might also be beneficial, in the sense of encouraging human beings to divest themselves of the status of ethical center of the universe and consider that other forms of life (or, to include also nonliving beings, other forms of existence) deserve a gentle and sometimes even compassionate approach. Whatever is able to make choices is then potentially endowed with the capacity to exist, and whatever exists must enter a relation of possibly peaceful coexistence with other existing beings. Human beings must protect themselves from the potentially harmful choices of advanced machines endowed with artificial intelligence, but must also consider this potentiality as related to an embryo of sensibility and self-awareness, of existential states that deserve dialogue and, in some cases, protection.

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Afterword Sconce: I find the other side of this equation also interesting. No doubt robotics and human–machine interactions will become more fluid and “natural” (from a human point of view)—but along with these more accommodating interfaces is the growing recognition that we are being asked to function (p.235) more and more like machines. Examples of this are legion. Neoliberalism demands that everyone think in terms of utility, marketing, and transactional interfacing— essentially tasking us with the worries of constantly updating our operating systems to remain socially and economically functional. And then, on a more mundane level, human minds are now expected to memorize (or at least access) dozens of passwords just to get through the day. Truly, we are the weakest link in this system! At present, futurists continue to grapple with a branding problem. For many, Mark Weiser’s idea of “ubiquitous computing” suggested an Orwellian nightmare. There followed the “Internet of things,” a savvy appeal to technomodernity’s insatiable desire to own objects and receive services. But of course this term also had the potential to remind users they, too, are simply “things” within this system. Of late, I’ve noticed a turn toward the “Internet of you”— perhaps this will do the trick of integrating human egos more seamlessly into systems of data management. Much of the energy in digital futurism focuses on robotics and AI, but in the long run the smartphone may be the more impactful intervention. The future as imagined by Ray Kurzweil and other technophiles imagines information as yet another “standing reserve” out there to be harnessed, typically in the service of enriching human experience. But as the smartphone suggests, we are gradually becoming the “standing reserve” for technology’s agenda. Already the smartphone has rewritten the world in terms of mandatory access and compulsory participation. This incessant demand that we remain “in contact” at all times is rewiring the brain by evaporating any lingering interiority. As early as 1959, Max Horkheimer predicted an emerging information economy that would have little need for individual knowledge, wisdom, or experience, preferring instead to exploit the youthful capacity for energetic and instantaneous executions of corporate directives. I see little reason to revise this vision of the future. Now that neural implants and interfaces are becoming science rather than science fiction, it can only be a matter of time until the smartphone assumes its inevitable destiny as a “brain chip.” Perhaps we will still cling to the Cartesian ego, even as cyborgs. Then again, our mass implantation may force a philosophical crisis as we confront our status as nodal points in a network that needs us more than we need it. Cusack: The question of beings that are not humans that exist in the “real” world (for want of a better term) and how humans relate to them is complicated, but again I’d argue that the difference between avatars and robots and other sorts of “others” (animals, teddy bears) is less than many would have us believe. My own—very sad—response to questions like this is that we live on a planet where, of the seven billion people, the number that have the rights (p.236) that Page 7 of 10

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Afterword we enjoy in the West, the developed world, whatever you want to call it, is WAY too few. Why are people worrying about people having sexual relations with rubber dolls or robots, if all over the planet real live humans, male and female, children too, are locked in rooms and used as sex slaves, if people die from lack of water, and basic medicine? We in the West are aghast when a few people (our own, Western people) die in terrorist attacks, where millions are displaced by war, mutilated and living out their lives in huge refugee camps without hope. I love my four cats, the magnificent Ka, Sam, Venus, and Lucy, and I love soft toys, and sometimes I have to remind myself that real humans suffering, my species, I should care more about. It does concern me, though, that a preponderance of twenty-year-olds that I know are glued to their phones every hour of the day and don’t seem to know what to do with actual people they meet. Another aspect of this is the relationship between reality and fiction. Fictionbased religions have overlapped with IT subculture since the 1960s and 1970s. The Web presences for religions in the text-based, Usenet era were way stronger for alternative religions than they were for mainstream religions. There was also far greater decentering and interactivity, and that’s still true today. If you look at the Vatican website it is sophisticated and informative, but it gives the party (church) line; there is no opportunity for the faithful to change anything, or even to have input that is critical. In 2016 I wrote an article with a former student, David Pecotic, on the Gurdjieff Work online, and we noted that some sites were just information providers, like the Vatican. But others were partially interactive, and the Gurdjieff Internet Guide (GIG) was fully interactive; people could do inner work online. Amazing for what had been a secretive, esoteric, initiatory tradition only twenty years ago. But there is another perspective on the connection between the Internet and invented religions. Things spread faster online, and people who are geographically distant can find each other quickly, as research by Venetia Robertson on Therianthropy and Otherkin shows, so community is facilitated and solidified. Some religions are primarily online, for example the now-defunct Heaven’s Gate, which is now an exercise in museology, whereas the Church of All Worlds has digitized much of their print publications and have a very rich online archive, while maintaining a strong “real world” presence. The existence of virtual worlds like Second Life where religions mainstream and weird flourish is particularly relevant in that it is a clear example of participation in a world “apart” or “other” than the mundane. My friend and colleague Helen Farley has an active Second Life presence. I’m always amazed how anyone can: my realworld life is so full I can barely manage it, so I’m not looking for another life! (p.237) Leone: The desire and ability to imagine a possible world separated from the “real one,” and to endow the former with characteristics that overcome the disliked limits of the latter, is probably consubstantial with the cognitive functioning of the human species. It is a byproduct of the human linguistic Page 8 of 10

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Afterword capacity as well as of the imagination that it brings about. From this point of view, a novel or a movie is not necessarily inferior to an immersive videogame in granting the receivers an experience of otherworldliness. The increasing digitalization of the body in the interaction with such fictional possible worlds, however, might in the long term deeply affect the relation with the nonfictional environment. Significant technological steps forward will be necessary, though, to bring about total immersion. Digitalization is often considered from the point of view of its achievements, but it should be considered from the point of view of its shortcomings too: there are still many senses that escape digitalization (smell, taste, partially also touch), not to speak of the difficulty of digitally rendering proprioception and self-awareness. Sconce: No doubt new media affordances will have an impact on religion, just as they have on other spheres of human activity. Particularly fascinating in this respect is the digital’s place in an emerging form of molecular materialism. The resurgence of Deleuze in media theory speaks to this in the academy, a search for a materialism that sidesteps the boring and ultimately messy dynamics of social formations and cultural production to imagine a more occult play in the realm of ceaseless “becoming.” In the realm of hard science, meanwhile, there are the ongoing efforts at “whole brain emulation”—the belief that one’s unique consciousness might be digitized and uploaded into a giant computer to animate a holographic avatar. There are serious scientists working very seriously on this project, fully operationalizing N. Katherine Hayles’s critique of cybernetics as a theology that believes information can exist independently of material form. Having killed off God as the ego’s only defense against its mortality, this branch of (im)materialism imagines we will one day live forever (or at least until the heat death of the universe) as data. On a less cosmic level, perhaps the most pressing challenge concerns the body politic, a phantasmic entity conjured with increasing zeal over the past two centuries. With Trumpism, the typically abstract debate over the merging of fact and fiction came to an unexpectedly early crisis. Ironically, many on the left who previously critiqued the contingency and relativism of “truth” now find themselves in the role of defending some phantom and fading notion of social reality. The right, on the other hand, appears much more willing to embrace information warfare as a strategy for rewriting the world according to its own terms. After Trump’s election, many pundits, critics, and politicians (p.238) called for a return to a shared foundation in facts, but it is unclear how this would actually happen. And as most media theorists would acknowledge, this “shared world” of facts was always an ideological illusion of fake consensus. As many have predicted, the end of “mass media” may well bring an end to the very “mass” posited by these media in the first place. Despite the continued networking of the world, we may be facing an immediate future that looks less like a “global village” than a proliferation of information bunkers. Page 9 of 10

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Afterword But, to be more positive about the situation, perhaps this fragmentation of shared truths will bring more attention to the role of fantasy in daily life. Psychoanalysis has long sought to disabuse us of the notion that we have a direct, objective relationship to either the self or the social. Perhaps acknowledging that we all live in our own idiosyncratic yet also socio-historical fantasy formations is the first step toward the media accommodating difference rather than sustaining fictions of false unity.

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