Miko Matsumura's eyes glisten when he talks about Java and what it can do.
Sitting in the sunstream of a midwinter afternoon, the young JavaSoft evangelist pulls out what looks like a credit card with an embedded computer chip, but it is no ordinary smart card. "Java allows this card to exhibit many behaviors," Matsumura says ardently, well aware that he is ascribing human qualities to an inanimate object.
Matsumura says his zeal for his work stems from a fervent belief that he is a foot soldier in a revolution - one that happens to be rooted in technology. And he is not alone. San Francisco just finished hosting the annual Macworld Expo. Part trade show, part spiritual crusade, the expo is a gathering of nearly 100,000 loyalists who came to reaffirm their faith in the Mac.
Macintosh. Java. Internet. Magick. Zen Buddhism. Gnosticism. Technology and spirituality are fusing into one - the former inspires the latter and vice-versa. Religious observers say this phenomenon reflects a natural human desire. "Technology is fundamentally about humans trying to control their environment," said David Levy, research scientist with Xerox PARC.
Before the personal computer, technology, and information were kept behind fortresses of information departments; it was up to the MIS department what information workers could have, and when they could get it. But with Apple and the Macintosh, the individual gained access and control to the means of creating this data. It was a sense of empowerment.
Likewise, religious crusades took hold because the believers took issue with the tenets of the dominant churches such as the Catholic and Anglican faiths. Sects broke off and formed their own theologies including Calvinism, which empowered their followers.
"The individual is seeking his own understanding, his own spirituality [in these movements]," said Erik Davis, San Francisco-based author of an upcoming book, Techgnosis, which studies the relationship between technology and spirituality.
Davis sees a thread that links this quest for individual spirituality, the '60s counterculture movement, and the founding of the personal computer industries: It is the desire to create new worlds outside conventional society and form a new community. The Macintosh, at its inception, defied convention with its graphical user interface, and needed its own community for affirmation, said Davis.
"You had this palpable sense that something was going to change, and that change was marked with a religious sensibility," he said.
But the Mac and its icon-based technology were mere baby steps to the image-based worlds that await on the Internet.
The digital age has lifted people to a sense of a greater existence. Through the World Wide Web, people are chronicling their lives in homepages, seeking community in online chats, and inspiring a new afterlife for groups such as extropians, a sect that equates the contents of their minds with a form of existence. It is the attraction of a digital immortality, a perpetuity that will only last as long as someone catalogs a person's Web pages - a promise that is not yet met, said Levy, a practicing Jew and lecturer at a Marin, California-based Zen Buddhist center. "To the extent that we find something to hold on to, that's the one way we try to save ourselves," he said.
