California, long a draw for independently minded people who embody their beliefs in everything from dress to religion, boasts a long history of intersection between high tech and alternative religions. Chroniclers of this intersection, who usually promote it with some glee, seem today a little subdued by the news of the cult mass suicide near San Diego.
Author Douglass Rushkoff, though often an advocate for high-tech philosophy and alternative religion, worries about how easily the virtual life can lead to a Gnostic worldview that casts the earthly world as the work of evil gods, and flesh as something to renounce. "Suddenly there's this new world where we can lose ourselves in this half-hypnotic state moving between strange ideas and virtual images and the whole global mind of it all certainly conjures up a certain kind of millennialist feeling."
"I don't think it's that technology or Internet or California makes people necessarily more susceptible to cultism or mass suicide, but people who are immersed in this stuff and trying to remain independent and in a sense anomalous might be more susceptible," Rushkoff says.
Erik Davis, who is writing a book on computer culture and religion, Techgnosis, points out that California and Los Angeles have been magnets for alternative spirituality throughout the century. "In the '20s and '30s you had a lot of Hindu groups popping up in LA, and that's where people like Aldous Huxley went. Hollywood was one of the first places that LSD was used by explorers."
In the '40s, Cal-Tech Jet Propulsion Laboratory luminary Jack Parsons was heavily involved with the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret society promulgated by English occultist Aleister Crowley. Before he accidentally blew himself up, Parsons divided his time between ground-breaking rocket science and ritual experiments such as summoning spirits in the desert. Parsons evidently had a compound of his own which he shared with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who became his close friend in 1946.
Although Davis says the crossover was accidental, he points out that it didn't take long for the Internet and people living alternative philosophies to hook up. "In the hippie days there was overlap between Utopianism and technology, particularly computer networks. Of course Steve Jobs was an acid-head who went to India and had weird dietary habits and meditated a lot. He's a good symbol of the crossover."
The builders of the Biosphere, though based in Arizona, were another interesting example of the kind of contribution the mix of religion and technology can bring, says Davis. "They were based partly on an occult-like belief system, and biosphere was about creating something that could go into space and be a place there for them to live. Very often there's an intersection between high-tech and doomsday occultism."
Davis, who has been studying the San Diego group's Usenet postings with keen interest, is fascinated by the idea of centuries' old Gnostic philosophy being interpreted in an Information Age landscape. "The Gnostic aspect of the Heaven's Gate story is very important. Historically the Gnostic idea has been that there is a radical separation between body and soul, and that the world is a fallen place ruled by false and ignorant gods."
The philosophy of Heaven's Gate shows that Gnosticism fits perfectly with the modern mediated environment, says Davis. "The Gnostic worldview is encouraged by the information landscape because suddenly there's this world where we become disembodied and lose touch with the more difficult problems in ordinary life and create another kind of world."
The idea of a global mind, Davis speculates, is a sign of people coming to grips with the many levels at which we are networked together. Because the Internet is seen as a "bizarre incorporeal medium that embodies the global mind," Davis says, it has encouraged speculation about the Earth becoming conscious, or about humans advancing to another level of consciousness. "Those ideas might be a little wacky, but in many ways they're helpful. Any way that you can get these ideas in seems at least potentially helpful to people trying to deepen their fragmented lives."
