Take a walk down the street and one sees people with cellular phones displaying behavior (laughing for no apparent reason, talking out loud while nobody seems present) that until recently was the exclusive domain of madmen. In music jungle producers like to think of themselves as scientists of sound yet more than any "science" these musical mutations seem to fulfill Arthur C. Clarke's beautiful words that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So in this sense a record like A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology becomes church music, awe-full music full of majestic desire that forces the ghosts of technology to sing of hitherto unimaginable joy and pain. We are surrounded by logic-machines, yet logic proved to be the dullest of masters. Luckily an excess of (techno)logic is a different matter altogether, capable of producing new irrational ecstasies as J.G. Ballard showed in Crash, my personal favorite technomyth, which sadly is absent from Techgnosis (and quite possibly the only one).

As we've come to expect it was Marshall McLuhan who saw all this coming when he wrote: "Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes." McLuhan keeps reappearing throughout Techgnosis, always ready to point out new avenues of thought, always giving the strange impression he foresaw everything through some drunken speculation. The other towering influence on Techgnosis is the science fiction Philip K. Dick (on who Davis wrote his thesis in college). The majority of people, that aren't theology students, who have any idea what gnosis is know because of V.A.L.I.S. the novel where Dick tries to make sense of a religious experience he had in 1974, when a divine knowledge entered his consciousness through a pink laser, by reinventing a Gnostic world-view.

But what is gnosis? Davis makes the distinction between gnosis as a collection of archetypal and psychological patterns and Gnosticism an obscure somewhat heterogeneous Christian sect, which held that the creator of the world was a minor deity. Sadly this world he produced was a false reality, often perceived as a prison. The Gnostic sought mystical knowledge that would break through this illusion not only to know the real God, but also to know what this God knows. As Davis states this framework still lingers on: "Today's techgnostics find themselves, consciously or not, surrounded by a complex set of ideas and images: transcendence through technology, a thirst for the ecstasy of information, a drive to engineer and perfect the incorporeal spark of the self."