Techgnosis, Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information

Abstract

ions, tend towards baroque complexity, contain magical or hyperdimensional operations and frequently represent their abstractions spatially. Like allegory, interfaces blend mimetic symbols (in the Mac's case, trashcans and folders) with unreal magical symbols (a phoenix in a didactic alchemical engraving is no mere image, but like icons on a Hypercard, "opens" onto a particular operation or unit of information). And some in the avant-garde of computer interface design are developing "agents," programmed anthropomorphic functions which help the user manage information space. As computer interfaces become more robust, the Mac's desktop "metaphor" may open like some sigil-encrusted gateway onto a huge realm of allegory. It's therefore no surprise that when we look at one of the computer's earliest virtual spaces, we discover the allegorical mode in all its magical splendor. Adventure was a text-based fantasy game created by programmers on the mainframes of Stanford's AI Lab in the '70s. By typing simple commands, players could probe Adventure's underworld cartography, gather treasure and spells, solve puzzles, kill trolls. Adventure was similar to Dungeons and Dragons, an impressively virtual game which consists of not hing more than dice-rolls, simple math, printed manuals and the imaginations of the players interacting with a virtual cartography described by the "dungeon master." In Adventure, the computer was the dungeon master, greeting the player with this description: "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully." This image is schematic but strangely potent, and it may remind us of another traveller, at the end of another road, about to begin another grand adventure: When I had journeyed half our life's way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. [14] So does Dante begin his descent into the underworld of the Inferno. Dante and a computer game resonate because both inhabit the peculiar environment of coded space. As Fletcher noted, allegory is "a fundamental process of encoding our speech." [15] Allegory's coded levels of meaning are not distinct from its surface, but the two levels interpenetrate each other. Neither reading is fully realized, but are held in an ambiguous tension which Fletcher believes creates the frequently enigmatic, surreal and magical quality of the mode. Dante's images thus compel us to tear through the surface imagery and unpack distinct meanings: historical personages, medieval theology, Italian politics. But the poetry, the phantasm, always comes back. Appropriately, when the Dartmouth Dante Project created a searchable on-line Dante database that linked six centuries of commentary with Dante's text, they embedded the tension between text and interpretation in cyberspace. Though the project was later discontinued, Dante became for a while a multi-dimensional cluster of poetry, information and commentary, a coded space that, like the Comedy itself, was searched. [16] Adventure's magical spaces also cloaked an underlying code, not just the puzzle that had to be deciphered to pass to the next room, but the computer itself. For computers are nothing if not hierarchies of code, higher-level programming languages descending into the decidedly unnatural machine language of ones and zeros. As Steven Levy writes in Hackers, "In a sense Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself--the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you'd be travelling in when you hacked in assembly code." [17] This magical metaphor, or allegory, seemed to fit the computer like a glove, and continues to influence cyberspace. Adventure laid the way for countless fantasy games, so that today even an elementary school computer spelling game like Wizards is organized around a magical model of powers, spells and levels. Adventure also inspired the "wizards" and virtual cartographies of the MUDs, or "multi-user dimensions," that populate the Internet. And it helped conjure up Vernor Vinge's Other Plane, the only SF cyberspace cartography that rivals Gibson's. In the novella "True Names," Vinge describes the Other Plane as a virtual representation of "data space" accessed by game interfaces called Portals. The reigning metaphor is a magical world of "sprites, reincarnation, spells and castles," as well as Spen serian woods where errant knights easily lose their way. The hacker denizens of the Covens perform various pranks for fun and profit, and take on colorful handles like Mr. Slippery and Wiley J. Bastard; like D&D players, they construct the imagery of their characters, most choosing to represent themselves as magicians and witches. As Mr. Slippery's description of the path to the Coven makes clear, the Other Plane is a space of techno-allegory, where imagery is directly linked to abstract functions. "The correct path had the aspect of a narrow row of stones cutting through a gray-greenish swamp... The subconscious knew what the stones represented, handling the chaining of routines from one information net to another, but it was the conscious mind of the skilled traveller that must make the decisions that could lead to the gates of the Coven." [18] At these gates, Mr. Slippery encounters the allegorical machine Alan, a sub-routine represented as a chthonic elemental creature who tests Mr. Slippery's authenticity by trading spells and counter-spells. Unlike the hard lines of Gibson's cyberspace, which are as objectively apparent as a video game image, the Other Plane requires that the imagination of the traveller cooperate with a minimum amount of signals. "You might think that to convey the full sense imagery of the swamp, some immense bandwidth would be necessary. In fact...a typical Portal link was around fifty thousand baud, far narrower than even a flat video channel. Mr. Slippery could feel the damp seeping through his leather boots, could feel the sweat starting on his skin even in the cold air, but this was the response of Mr Slippery's imagination and subconscious to the cues that were actually being presented through the Portal's electrodes." This process of eliciting phantasms with a minimum of signals dovetails with VR designer and theorist Brenda Laurel's insistence on the positive role of ambiguity in computer interfaces. Arguing against a high-bandwidth overload, Laurel--who began her career as a fantasy game designer--recognized that one of the imagination's greatest powers is its psychedelic ability to generate perceptions with a minimum of sensory cues. Using our ability to see faces in rocks and clouds as one example, Laurel argued that there is a threshold of sensory ambiguity that boots up fantasy, a threshold that virtual interfaces should emulate. [19] As Mr. Slippery notes, "magic jargon was perhaps the closest fit" to this process, for Vinge recognized that magic's manipulative power operates in the ambiguous gap between sensation and internal imagery. In Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano paraphrases Giordano Bruno, stating that "Magic action occurs through indirect contact....through sounds and images which exert their power over the senses of sight and hearing...Passing through the openings of the sense, they impress on the imagination certain mental states..." [20] The magician would not only impress fantasies on other people, but on himself through his virtual mnemonics. Some coven members in "True Names" argue that their magic jargon is simply a more natural and convenient way for manipulating data space that the "atomistic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols." As we now see, this "naturalness" stems from the structure of magic, its artificial mnemonics, phantasmic manipulations and allegorical conceptions. As Fletcher points out, modern science depends on a disjunction between the synthetic fantasies of the imagination and the rigor of analytic systemization, whereas allegory fuses these two modes. The allegorical pressure on coding also dovetails with one of Vinge's central concerns: cryptography. On the Other Plane, power is not knowledge--power is code. When Mr. Slippery follows the Red Witch Erythrina as she opens up a castle's secret passage s through cryptic gestures and spells, he enters a space of encryption. And when Mr. Slippery first accesses the Other Plane, he makes sure his encryption routines are clouding his trail. "Like most folks, honest citizens or warlocks, he had no trust for the government standard encryption routines, but preferred the schemes that had leaked out of academia--over NSA's petulant objections--during the last fifteen years." [21] Vinge's cryptographic hunch (he was writing in 1980) is born out in current cyberculture. While hackers have long explored restricted-access dungeons, and phone phreaks hoard phone spells, cypherpunks have begun creating anonymous remailing systems which will insure that all traffic is untraceable and all participants remain anonymous. For as Vinge realized, the ultimate secret code is one's True Name, one's real human identity. Though Vinge may not have realized it, magic spells are not mere metaphors for encryption schemes. Hermeticism is rife with secret codes and unnatural languages, most stemming from the complex numerological methods that medieval Kabbalists used to decipher the esoteric messages they believed were buried in the Torah. Two of these methods for mystical exegesis should be mentioned: Gematria and Temurah. Temurah consisted of simple letter transposition according to a number of schemes, while Gematria took advantage of the strict numerological equivalents for each Hebrew letter. By replacing words with their numerical equivalents, one could discover esoteric correspondences (for example, the words fo