Harmony Books
New York 1998
ISBN 0-517-70415-3
English Text, 353 pages

False gods born form oceans of silicon, whispering cabalistic secrets while battling ancient and not so-ancient philosophers bleeding demented words of light...Satanic machines faxing amongst themselves plans for raising an invisible web of instant knowledge…Alchemists outwitting arrogant Marvel superheroes in their game of seduction with the innocent dreams of the Last Man as its ultimate prize. This would be you, daydreaming while sitting behind your PC, slowly clicking through mazes of useless information. Or is this really just a dream?

According to Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis, this mythical dreamstuff is far more compatible with our technological reality than we usually give it credit for. This in it self should be enough to raise a number of eyebrows, because myth, magic and mysticism were supposed to have disappeared as soon as the technological mindset illuminated premodern superstitions. Was it not the growth of rationality, and consequent mechanization that disenchanted the world as Max Weber presumed? In this exhaustive study Erik Davis shows that technology may never have been only about rationality, simply because it is a product of the human imagination. And as we know after Freud's hatchet job on Cartesian dualism, the human imagination never was a very rational place to begin with. Indeed once we scratch the cool logical surface of technology all sorts of interesting dreams, myths and hopes start to appear.