1

Jeremy Johnson
Consciousness Studies
Nov. 23 2012

Ensouling the Media: Towards an Understanding of Digital

Networks and Planetary Culture

Thesis Abstract:
In this essay, I examine digital culture as the manifestation of a networked, planetary human
society. By employing the methodology of cultural historian William Irwin Thompson and
mathematician Ralph Abraham, I examine three core characteristics of the new digital culture
as the manifestation of a new socio-cultural consciousness. This new culture, I argue, is
exemplified in its planetization of society through communication networks, its new
relationship to time and space, and its retrieval of mythological consciousness. The purpose of
this thesis is to demonstrate that the complexity, interdependence, and new modes of thinking
in digital culture is best understood through the hermeneutics of the imagination.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction: An Evolutionary Perspective.! !

1.1. Methodology: Cultural Evolution and

Complex-Dynamical Systems! !

1.2. Planetary Culture: Interconnectivity, Complexity,

and Imagistic Thought in Electronic Culture!

11

2. The Rhizome: Networks and Planetization! !

21

3. Chaos-Dynamics and Nomadic Digital Culture! !

35

57

4.1. The Importance of Imagistic Thinking and Myth!!

58

4.2 Digital Technology Revives an Animistic Cosmology! !

59

4. The Return of the Image: Digital Animism

and Virtual Poesis! !

4.3 Virtual Poesis: Digital Networks, Spaces

and the Polytheistic Self! !

4.4. Challenges to Western Cosmology!

62

65

4.5 The Imagination, Mythology

and the Network: Conclusions! !

68

5.0 Conclusion!!

71

73

6.0 Annotated Bibliography!

7.0 Works Consulted!

83

1.0 Introduction: An Evolutionary Perspective

!
!

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the dominant characteristics of the

transformation of consciousness and society taking place within the digital age. First, I will
present the reader with my methodology, introducing cultural evolution. In this regard, I draw
from the works of cultural historian William Irwin Thompson and mathematician Ralph
Abraham and their theoretical work on cultural evolution. Secondary sources include Jean
Gebser and Teilhard de Chardin.
!

Secondly, I will attempt to create an initial draft of characteristics of this emergent human

society. This new social consciousness, I believe, is synonymous with what William Irwin
Thompson designates planetary culture, and the complex-dynamical mentality of Ralph
Abraham. I attempt to relate my own findings to both Thompson and Abraham through a
close look at the new social consciousness and its complexity, interactivity, and ability for rapid
change. My thesis, in short, is that the new consciousness, due to it being decentralized, highly
complex, nomadic, and mythological, is prepared like no other human society to adapt to the
impending ecological and economic crisis of the 21st century. I conclude with a close look at
how this new consciousness is also re-introducing previously undermined mythopoetic or
occasionally considered right-brained modes of cognition.
!

The participation in traveling between waking and virtual worlds, and partaking in

networks which are by definition transitional spaces, are now part of daily life. This, I believe,

has reinforced the role of creativity and re-introduces the role of ritual, as well as what
Thompson has called the animistic retrieval in the 21st century. I leave my speculations for
the long-term impact living in a society where the inner and outer world of Descartes has been
rendered irrelevant. I also leave a brief speculation for the transition from a culture that has
largely ignored myth and the imagination to one which not only embraces it, but in which it
dominates.

1.1 Methodology: Cultural Evolution and Complex

Dynamical Systems

This section introduces the concept of cultural evolution as understood by cultural

historian William Irwin Thompson and his colleague, the mathematician Ralph Abraham.
Thompson has authored a number of books on the evolution of consciousness since the 1970s,
and predates many contemporary writers such as Ken Wilber. I believe his writings are astute
and complex enough to best tackle the subject matter, more so than other contemporary
thinkers who rely too heavily on categorical and developmental systems, or writers who are
too nebulous or New Age for the sensibility of scholarship. Thompsons thinking, analogous
to the complex global era we are entering, is holistic and trans-disciplinary, bringing together
concepts from James Lovelocks theory on Gaia Hypothesis, to Lynn Margulis theory on the
evolution of the cell, to his own studies on mythopoetic and big picture thinking. Arguably,
Thompsons scholarship brings together both the humanities and the sciences in what he
called an imaginary landscape (also the title of his book, Imaginary Landscape: Bridging Worlds
of Myth and Science). I believe his writing is uniquely effective in highlighting the cultural
changes that are currently taking place. In combination with Ralph Abraham, a mathematician
at the Santa Fe Institute who has done extensive research on chaos theory and cultural

evolution, Thompson and his colleague provide us with a rigorous and extensive
understanding of the transformation of consciousness through history. First, I think it is
important to define what we mean by cultural evolution. Then we will apply some of their
important insights to the digital revolution.
!

Thompson defines evolution as a series of bifurcations, a term adapted from chaos

theory, which can loosely understand as a shift of attractors or centers of gravity in a

complex system. At each fork in the road, Thompson writes, the new chreod, or
necessary path, of development opens up a whole new adaptive landscape of possibilities, and
as some organisms cross the threshold into this landscape, the whole relationship between
organism and environment changes (Thompson 14). Organisms change their environment
and the environment channels their natural drift in new directions with new effects,
Thompson writes (14). The concept of natural drift is a term borrowed from his previous
colleague, the late biologist Francisco Varela. Natural drift is a narrative of bifurcations
with consequences, quips Thompson, differentiating it with the more common idea of natural
selection in evolution. His notion of evolutionary bifurcations is a concept that can also be
applied to cultural evolution. For example, the evolution of agriculture, as Jane Jacobs
theorized, may have occurred through the gradual accruement of grains may have led to the
first human settlements (Thompson 15).
!

Coinciding with the idea of evolutionary bifurcation through natural drift, is the

concept of emergence. Also influenced by Varelas autopoiesis, Thompson suggests that, one

can affirm the validity of emergent properties and emergent domains in the articulation of a
phenomenology of culture (15). In other words, Thompson suggests that emergence and selforganization happen within cultural evolution.
!

Here we can begin to articulate further concepts in the Thompson-Abraham study of

cultural evolution. Technological innovation is itself deeply embedded in various systems of

values and symbols; a new tool can emerge synchronous with a new form of polity, as well as
with a new form of spirituality, Thompson writes. Cultural history, as opposed to the more
linear history of technology, is concerned with the complex dynamical system in which
biological natural drift, ecological constraints, and systems of communication and social
organization all interact in a process of dependent co-origination. Similarly, Ralph Abraham
defines this methodology as dynamical historiography, which means a look at world
cultural history regarded as a complex dynamical system, a network of cultural ecologies, a
history of evolving through epochs (plateaus), segmented by bifurcations (generalized
paradigm shifts) (Abraham 1). The term cultural ecology was coined by Thompson after
working with James Lovelock, and the idea largely derives from Lovelocks Gaia Theory.
!

Gaia Theory posits a massively integrated theory, bringing together the Earths life

forms, atmosphere, geology and more into a single living Earth (Abraham 4). This is taken
one step further by Thompson and Abraham, with the concept of a cultural ecology. This
would include human societies into the drama and dynamics of the Earths living system.
Cultural ecology regards culture as an ecosystem, writes Abraham,

Its partsfor example, literature, visual arts, musical creations and performance,
mathematical developments and applications, scientific discoveries, economics, etc..are
interconnected like the flora, fauna, and environment in a biospheric ecosystem
(Abraham 4).

In addition, local microsystems are connected to the larger world ecology through trade,
migration and communication.
!

Finally, Thompson has categorized six transformations, which are embodied in seven

cultural ecologies, throughout history: Hominization, Symbolization, Agriculturalization,

Civilization, Industrialization, Planetization. The seven cultural ecologies themselves are:
Silvan, Savannahan, Glacial, Riverine, Transcontinental, Oceanic, and Biospheric (Thompson
14).
!

For the sake of brevity we will not be exploring each transformation and its cultural

ecology in detail. This essay will be examining the cultural bifurcation from Oceanic to
Biospheric, or Industrialization to Planetization.
!

Ralph Abraham has described five mathematical mentalities which coincide with

Thompsons cultural ecologies. The system can become complex, fast, but it is important to
remember that each of these terminologies attempt to describe different, inter-related facets of
culture. These five mentalities include: the Paleolithic (arithmetic), the Riverine (geometric),
Islamic (algebraic), Renaissance (Galilean Dynamical) and Modernist (Chaos Dynamical).

10

Reviewing this work, we can now turn our attention to the current evolutionary

bifurcation; the movement from Thompsons Oceanic cultural ecology to the Biospheric, or
Abrahams Galilean-Dynamical to Chaos-Dynamical. Thompson has also called this new social
consciousness Planetary Culture, a phrase we will use interchangeably.
!

In my study of digital media and technology, I believe we can assess a number of

important parallels with the Chaos-Dynamical mentality and Oceanic cultural ecology and the
emerging digital culture. First, we can look at their characteristics.

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1.2 Planetary Culture: Interconnectivity, Complexity, and

Imagistic Thought in Electronic Culture

To discuss the emerging Biospheric cultural ecology, Thompson references Teilhard de

Chardins Planetization of Mankind. In this essay, Teilhard argues that at the global level of
social complexity, even World Wars result not with increasing separation, but ever greater
forms of interpenetration of culture. Every new war, Teilhard writes, embarked upon by
the nations for the purpose of detaching themselves from one another, merely results in their
being bound and mingled together in a more inextricable knot.
!

Thompson gives us an example that, after World War II, Japan gave the US Zen

Buddhism and the US gave Japan auto-factories (pg 127). Today, Japanese technology
innovation and production is not only important for the US, but globally. Steve Jobs was a Zen
Buddhist himself, and applied many of the principles of Japanese aesthetic to Apple products.
!

Of all dimensions of cultural evolution, technology has been one of the most important, if

not the most tangible. This had made it easy for many authors like Kevin Kelly and Ray
Kurzweil, two technological enthusiasts and prophets in their own rights, to proclaim the
evolution of life on Earth from the lens of the information age.

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After examining Thompson and Abrahams complex-dynamical approach to cultural

evolution, it is clear we will be using more than a study of technical innovations. Nevertheless
they are important. Especially in the case of Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian media
theorist, who coined the phrase the medium is the message, and wrote extensively on the
impact of what he called electronic culture. McLuhan suggests that it is the adaptation of
electricity in all facets of Western civilization that has most profoundly influenced cultural
changes during the past 150 years. Thompson seems to at least concur in part. While the
counter-cultural movement of the 1960s was important to planetary culture, he recognizes a
second wave with the birth of Silicon Valley in the 1980s. The computer and internet
revolution:

Here we see a shift from the consciousness of an autonomous self within a biological
evolutionary body to more distributive lattices of multidimensional mind in which new
media constellate new forms of extensive phase-space consciousness through personal
computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. (pg.. 128)

Thompson suggests that there is often a Yin-Yang effect to cultural transformations, where
opposites create a diploid sexual reproduction, and the tension of opposites produce a new
culture. In this case, it is the ecological movement combined with Artificial Intelligence and
computer revolution, creating a strange hybrid of natural and artificial life. Thompson argues

13

that this is a planetary cellular mitosis. He also cites the development of scientific theories,
such as Lovelocks Gaia Theory, to represent the first indications of planetary culture.
!

In addition to Gaia Theory, Forester and Meadows published Limits to Growth on the

relationship between economy and ecology, catastrophe theory and chaos dynamics were born
(Thompson 128). Thompson argues that the complexity of our relationship with the planet has
grown beyond the control of the ruling globalist managers, and we will have to make the
shift from competing industrial nation-states to a planetary culture, the shift from a global
economy to a planetary ecumene (pg 128).
!

Coinciding with the developments of increasing social interconnectivity, planetary

awareness through sciences like Gaia Theory, and biological/technological hybridization,

Abraham dates the incipience of this new consciousness to the artistic-mathematic movements
of the early 20th century.
!

In the early 20th century, there were scientific-literary movements in novelists like Prousts

Madeleine and Bergsons thoughts on matter and memory. There was the new mathematics
from Poincare, chaos dynamics, the relativity of Einstein, Picasso, and the Surrealistic art
movement. Each of these served to break down the traditional Victorian picture of a stable and
objective universe. The destabilizing character of these discoveries is something we will be
returning to.
!

Of importance in this list is Poincares discoveries. Abraham suggests that in addition to

chaotic dynamics, he also discovered that our solar system was not smoothly rotating, but

14

actually chaotic in its motion. This shift in the perception of our solar system, Abraham tells
us, is as profound for us as the Copernican/Keplerian one had been for the Renaissance
world view. In addition, Poincares books were read widely by Parisian intellectuals and
artists (Abraham 102).
!

The computer revolution also served to help Poincares chaos theory, which although was

discovered in 1889, it was improved by Gaston Julia and came to the publics attention only
after computer graphics were invented in the 1970s (Abraham 95). It was through computer
graphics that we were first able to see fractal patterns through a seemingly chaotic system.
Benoit Mandelbrot developed fractal geometry in 1967 (Abraham 101).
!

In Thompsons forward to Bolts from the Blue by Abraham, he offers us a general synopsis

that can help review and bring us back to the central characteristics of our evolutionary
bifurcation in consciousness. The complex dynamic systems we have been describing thus far,
describe a shift from linear modernist ideologies and religions to planetary ecologies of
consciousness in which diversity can now be affirmed (Thompson, Abraham vii). With a
similar hypothesis to Leonard Shlains The Alphabet vs the Goddess, Thompson suggests that this
shift entails an activation of the right-brain. Most importantly, he attributes this shift to the reemergence of symbols. Similarly, Shlain argues that it is through television and computers that
the inclusive Icon has returned to public consciousness, triggering a movement back to the
holistic right hemisphere of the brain. As we learned from Abraham, it was through the
computers ability to generate graphical images that we could see fractals. This emergence of

15

a new visual mathematics expressed, in effect, a return on a higher turn of the spiral to
hieroglyphic thinking, Thompson suggests (pg viii). !

So far there are four important

characteristics of this era: the increasing interpenetration and interconnection of human

societies, an incipient planetary awareness through ecology and Gaia Theory, the discovery of
chaotic systems and the return of imagistic thinking through electronic computers.
!

The discovery of chaotic systems contributed a breakdown of what Thompson calls the

linear reductionism of modernism. Coinciding with the mathematical breakthroughs was a

cultural retrieval of animism and premodern esoteric thought. He notes that the composer,
Satie, was a Rosicrucian (a school of Hermeticism and alchemy), while painters like Kadinsky
and Mondrian were in fact, Theosophists (pg viii). Cultural writer Erik Davis affirmed in
TechGnosis that Theosophy coincided with the rise of electricity in the 19th century. Meanwhile,
the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and esotericist Rudolf Steiner were coming into their own.
Thompson characterizes this premodern retrieval of esoteric thought and animism as an
important characteristic of planetary culture. Clearly, he writes, complex dynamical
systems began to impact on the cultural evolution of human spirituality (pg viii). Through
our knowledge of McLuhan, we can also say that the retrieval of animism, and the breakdown of
linear reductionism, were both due in part by the rise of electronic culture.
!

McLuhan attributes many of these artistic and cultural changes to the adaptation of

electronic communication the telegraph in 1844. This pushes planetary cultures birth back
half a century. Further insight can be gleaned from Erik Davis, who ties the discovery of the

16

electromagnetic spectrum, which revolutionized the sciences in the 19th century, with a major
paradigm shift in Western culture. ! Effectively, the discovery of electromagnetism resurrected
in a scientifically acceptable way invisible realities. And for the first time: non-local
communication. These indeed had magical qualities for public consciousness, and as Davis
notes with great detail, electromagnetism retrieved the world of animism. That is, the world of
invisible relationships and correspondences. As Davis notes, electricity at least
psychologically is tied to animistic, Hermetic, and magical forms of thinking. It is worth
considering that the rise of esoteric, animistic and consciousness movements that punctuate
the 20th century are as a result of electricitys catalyzing effect on our cultural Imaginary.
!

There is some evidence that psychology and the study of the unconscious was due in part

to electromagnetism. Early pioneers of hypnotism, such as Mesmer himself, helped bring

interest to the field of psychology. Mesmer had a long discredited theory that tied the mind to
magnetism, and larger fields of consciousness that his patients would access for healing and
self-diagnosis. Freud would take what he saw from a student of Mesmers and apply it to his
own theory of the unconscious (Davis 162).
!

On a social level, McLuhan attributed the sixties cultural revolution to the rise of

television and the retrieval of what he designated oral culture.

!

We can draw connections between the Thompson-Abraham model of cultural evolution

to both McLuhan and Davis, who push back the new electronic culture to the 19th century
artistic, spiritual, and scientific breakthroughs. We can summarize thus far that planetary

17

culture and the complex-dynamical mentality were inspired, at least in part, by the rise of
electricity, scientific-artistic paradigm shifts that destabilized previous worldviews, and
retrieved esoteric, imagistic, and animistic thought to public consciousness. As we heard from
Abraham earlier, the dynamic historiography is a holistic approach to studying cultural
evolution. So we cannot disentangle scientific breakthroughs from artistic movements, from
technological innovations. They are in a co-dependent and emergent relationship which,
together, give us a holistic image of a cultural shift.
!

To conclude, we can re-iterate the introductions central themes. In the first section, I

introduced my hypothesis. Digital culture indicates a shift in social consciousness that has at
least three primary characteristics:

1) Network/Interconnectivity
2) Nomadic/Chaotic
3) Imagistic/Mythological & Digital Animism

These coincide with and shed light on the Thompson-Abraham model of cultural evolution,
with respect to what they call Planetary Culture. I summarized their characteristics as:

1) Interpenetration of World Culture and Societies (Planetization).

2) The Discovery of Chaos-Dynamical Systems

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3) A return of Imagistic or Hieroglyphic thought, coinciding with a retrieval of animism.

I believe that the internet age has not only confirmed these characteristics, but takes them

to a new level of intensification and proliferation. With the proliferation of digital environments
blending into real ones, we are slowly becoming immersed in a part material, part dream-like
virtual world. We will examine this as it relates to the digital recreation of animism as the
environment that millions, perhaps billions now live in.
!

The revolution of electronic communication that began with the telegraphy has reached a

new order of complexity with the cell phone and internet. This is effectively transforming our
experience of time-space, or as Amber Case calls it, a-synchronous time.
!

Combined with a new sense of time, we are also gaining new identities as the sense of

self extends to include digital avatars and gadgets. The self becomes symbiotic with machines.
As Thompson noted earlier, we see a shift from the consciousness of an autonomous selfto
more distributive lattices of multidimensional mind in which new media constellate new
forms of extensive phase-space consciousness through personal computers, the Internet, and
the World Wide Web.
!

This new world is chaotic, extremely dynamic and rhizomatic. Furthermore, it is nomadic,

in that virtual culture is inherently unstable much like the complex-dynamical

understanding of complex systems constantly re-inventing itself. In cultures like Burning
Man, a phenomenon which began in the early 90s, we see embodied examples of cities that

19

literally pick themselves up after a week and vanish for the remainder of the year. With the
coming climate and ecological crisis, such a dynamic, imaginative, and techno-nomadic
culture seems uniquely well-adapted to face the challenges for humanity ahead.
!

Finally, this new culture is deeply Imaginal. Meaning it utilizes creativity and collective

problem solving to adapt to new situations, play, innovate and develop. These characteristics, I
believe, will continue to spill into the real world from the virtual as the ubiquity of
technology continues to increase.
!

In the following section we will examine my three characteristics of the emergent digital

culture as they relate to, and give unique insight with the Thompson-Abraham findings on
Planetary Culture.
!

I believe that a number of parallels are not only possible, but serve to update and

contribute to the Thompson-Abraham model and, hopefully, contribute an added and

significant layer to the study of our rapidly changing contemporary consciousness.!

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2.0 The Rhizome: Networks and Planetization

In this section, we will examine the first characteristic finding of the digital age: the

network. I believe this is, in fact, a symptom of the complex-dynamical mentality in the
Thompson-Abraham model that the first section introduced. This mentality is noted for its
systemic view of inter-related systems of emergence, which is an apt description for a network
itself.
!

We start with this characteristic because it is the most general, observable, and sociological

phenomenon of the digital age. Digital media and communication systems now envelop the
globe, and in doing so, they offer unprecedented means of communication and
interconnection. The sociological impact on our consciousness due to this rapid sociotechnological evolution will be examined here.
!

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan was, early on, acutely aware of the implications of

electricity. In Understanding Media, McLuhan expresses his famous axiom: the medium is the
message. While this idea might be taken for granted now, during his lifetime this struck many
as a peculiar thought. It implies that the technologies we use have a reciprocal effect on us.
They change the way we experience the world, and in return we change our world. This is a

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similar idea to Thompsons concept of natural drift and a complex-dynamical view of history,
where technology and consciousness co-depend on one another to create transformation.
!

In one part, McLuhan uses a light bulb to exemplify the message of electricity:

The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally
radical, pervasive, and decentralized. For electric light and power are separate from their
uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio,
telegraphy, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth. (Pg 25)

Long after this statement was made, we can confirm McLuhans analysis of electricity by

the proliferation of digital networks through the World Wide Web, laptops, cell phones, and
wireless signals. McLuhans bold statement regarding time and space can be confirmed with
further reflection. Entire communities exist online, such as World of Warcraft, Eve Online,
Minecraft, and other communities defy the boundaries of geographical location, time zones,
and sometimes even language itself.
!

McLuhan associates all forms of electronic technology exemplifying decentralization, but

its latest form, digital media, strikes me, and many others, as the most pervasive and powerful
force yet. Like no other medium before, digital media empowers a radical form of
decentralization, best exemplifying McLuhans electronic culture. Electronic culture itself is
a term he designated for society in the age of electricity (McLuhan 4). He differentiates this
social order from older ones, such as Print Culture. Print culture originated out of the printing

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press, emphasizing rational analysis, intellectualism and detachment. McLuhan suggested that
many of the radical crisis and problems of the modern world were as a result of Print Cultures
mechanization and over-rationalization of nature. He saw the emergent electronic culture, as
noted earlier, creating involvement in depth (pg 25). In other words, participation.
!

What McLuhan means by decentralization is the socially empowering effects of electronic

media. Radio could broadcast to thousands, millions across the globe. A single voice could be
heard clearly, in real-time. Television has a similar effect in broadcasting media to a larger
audience. These two forms of media enabled the modern age of music and film as we know it.
One of the most famous examples is the Kennedy vs. Nixon debate, the first American
presidential debate aired in history. The popular opinion of the candidates was swayed for the
first time by their image. When NASA landed two men on the moon, the whole world watched
via their television sets. When McLuhan wrote that electronic media involves us in depth, he
means that we participate somehow. Arguably, we can participate with a book, too. But the
kind of participation with electric media is more immediate. Take the example of digital
media. Cell phones and computers let us download our own music without having to go to
the store. Software lets us publish our music directly online. Sophisticated programs turn our
laptops into portable recording studios and publishing houses. In other words, one of the most
powerful effects of digital media and electricity at large is that they decentralize the roles that
institutions previously held in society, thereby giving us more participation.

23

Many forms of media that once required a professional class like books, music, and film

publishing are now in the hands of everyday people. Often quite literally. An iPhone comes
installed with an HD video camera and self-publishing software, instantly letting its users
upload videos onto YouTube. During times of intense political climate, this has been an
immense aid to protestors.
!

In Clay Shirkys important book, Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing Without

Organizations, he writes that our social tools remove obstacles to public expression, and thus
remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization
of efforts previously reserved for media professionals (pg.55). Furthermore, he argues that
our new communication networks have removed the obstacles to group forming, which had
previously been constrained by transaction costs. (pg. 55).
!

The elimination of financial costs as well as technological impediments have created an

explosion in the kinds of social groups that can form, and in the case of recent political
upheaval, provided an unprecedented degree of democratic empowerment in Occupy, the
Arab Spring, and earlier, the famous Seattle 1999 protests.
!

These examples demonstrate the decentralizing effect of digital media. In the place of

normal, bureaucratic institutions, corporations, or professional classes, we now have vast

communication networks. While Shirky does not believe we are headed toward a posthierarchical paradise, he does suggest that the relative advantages of using institutions has
radically shifted. Instead, he writes, most of the relative advantages of those institutions

24

have disappeared. It is now easier for someone to publish their own blog than submit a
column for the New York Times, and they may be even more successful sharing their story that
way. Because of the complexity of human societies, organizational problems were addressed
by traditional institutions. Very often, these have been centralized and, religious or secular,
they have been hierarchical. With electronic culture, this structure has been challenged. New
social tools, Shirky writes, relieve some of those burdens, allowing for new kinds of group
forming (pg 25).
!

Notably, many of these groups have mainly affected media: the entertainment industry

most of all. Digital culture has only become more powerful, however, and political movements
like Occupy are beginning to demonstrate the power these new networks have in challenging
the traditional institutions of global civilization. Still more examples include Wikileaks, by
which Julian Assange and a small group of hackers threatened government security by
releasing dirty laundry big and small and swaying popular opinion.
!

Finally, the sociologist Douglas Rushkoff has noted the potential that digital media has

for challenging centralized banking systems. Current experiments with peer-to-peer network
economics include projects like Bitcoin. Many decades, perhaps centuries down the road,
governmental and corporate institutions could become replaced by their networked counterparts (Rushkoff).
!

In The Open Source Everything Manifesto, Robert David Steele argues that we can discern

two forms of organization. These are Epoch-A Leadership and Epoch-B Leadership. The

25

former is a traditional mode of organization which emphasizes exclusivity, centralized control

and secret sources and methods that are not accountable to the public. Beginning in the
industrial era, this mode of organization has reigned, set up on a Weberian concept of
organizational design, one that emphasizes command and control over a rigidly structured
top-down form (Steele 11). Steele paints this form of leadership as an ineffective and outdated system for an age of global complexity. In sharp contrast, he writes, Epoch B is
collaborative and multi-lateral, rather than uni-lateral. This approach allows for all
histories and perspective to be included, enabling more beneficial and sustainable decisions
are reached, grounded in the collective intelligence of the group (Steele 13). Steele claims that
this new method of social organization is better equipped to address and solve collective
problem solving, and is largely due to communication technologies of the Information Age (pg
13).
!

The meaning of open source philosophy began as a transparent network of programmers

who openly shared their coding. Operating systems such as Linux were developed as a result
of this network of coders. This open source philosophy, argues Steele, is now ready to be
utilized beyond the realm of programmers and into the realm of the global, social commons. In
other words, open source philosophy is relevant not only to programmers but the future of
human society. Here, he sums up the intention of his manifesto and the adoption of a new
political and social system of networks for global society:

26

New, open source, populist-based, information-era strategies will also serve our increasingly complex
lives better in future situations of crisis such as natural disaster, war, and social disintegration. Collapse is
cultural, systemic, a failure of process, not of any discrete event, institution or location. The industrial-era
model of command and control cannot adequately process information for a complex system, but an
information-era model of distributed localized resilience can (Steele 14).

Utlimately for Steele, we are facing a transition from an industrial civilization of unbridled
consumption, selfishness, and anything goes, to an information era where its all
connected we are all accountable for the whole. Resources are limited, brain power is
virtually infinite. Open Source everything is the meme, the mind-set, and the method (pg 21).
Steele introduces the reader to the concept of panarchy, in which every individual would be
connected to all relevant information and able to participate in every decision of interest to
them, which he suggests might be part of future human societies (pg 23).
!

There is a significant difference between Shirkys more immediate analysis of digital

medias impact on social behavior, and Steeles long-term philosophical, political and social
ideas. I believe both of these theorists can be understood better in light of Thompson and
Abrahams concept of the complex-dynamical mentality, which first arose in the early 20th
century. Discoveries in mathematics and physics, from Poincare to Einstein, and artistic
breakthroughs, such as Picasso and Surrealism, indicate this discovery of a new relationship to
space and time. There appears to be at least two connections between the nature of digital
networks and the complex-dynamic mentality.

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The first is the switch from centralized to decentralized models of communication and

social organization. Hypothesizing on the planetary culture, Thompson writes that egocentric
monumentality and the extensive clutter of industrial civilization could be
eliminated (Thompson, Abraham viii). Centralized control becomes displaced by other means
of social and cultural order. This idea strongly correlates with Shirkys and Steeles claims
regarding the decentralization of social order and the rise of digital networks. As an important
comparative note, we can observe similarities between the displacement of classical
Newtonian physics with Einsteins relativity theory at the turn of the 20th century, and the
displacement of traditional social institutions at the turn of the 21st century. Relativity theory
challenged, and transformed our understanding of the universe and is used by astrophysics
and astronomers to this day. The rise of power in social networks have similarly relativized the
effectiveness of traditional institutions and hold a similar promise for potentially revolutionary
social changes in our present century.
!

The second connection is the nature of the network itself as a self-organizing system. The

architecture for the complex-dynamical mentality, Thompson writes (my highlights), is an

emergent metasystem concerned with the self-organizing architecture of many possible
architectures: life or artificial life (pg 20). Meta-system is an important phrase here,
implying that self-organization is a concept that applies to multiple fields of knowledge. In
Kevin Kellys Out of Control and What Technology Wants, he draws intriguing parallels between
technological and biological self-organization, concluding with the hypothesis that technology is,

28

in fact, a force of nature that is out of our control. The notion of self-emergent and selforganizing systems has been existent in philosophy, biology and science since at least the first
evolutionary theories, but it has taken on a new life in the 20th century since the 1970s.
Francisco Varela, and Humberto Maturana, developed the concept of autopoiesis with regards
to consciousness studies in their book, The Embodied Mind. Here we can quote them at length.
First, to demonstrate how self-organization is an important school of thought in biology and
consciousness studies, and secondly, because of its relevance and parallels with digital
networks:

Because of the systems network constitution, there is a global cooperation that

spontaneously emerges when the states of all participating neurons reach a mutually
satisfactory state. In such a system, then, there is no need for a central processing unit to
guide the entire operation. This passage from local rules to global coherence is the heart
of what used to be called self-organization during the cybernetic years. Today people
refer to speak of emergent or global properties, network dynamics, nonlinear networks,
complex systems, or even synergetics.
!

There is no unified formal theory of emergent properties. It is clear, however, that

emergent properties have been found across all domainsvortices and lasers, chemical
oscillations, genetic networks, developmental patterns, population genetics, immune
networks, ecology and geophysics. What all these diverse phenomena have in common is
that in each case a network gives rise to new properties, which researchers try to
understand in all their generality (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 88).

29

The phenomena of self-organizing networks gets to the heart of this discussion. Without need of

a centralized state or authority, digital networks proliferate and self-emerge of their own
accord, challenging the role of traditional economic and bureaucratic institutions in the 21st
century. They also transform the behavior of modern society, promoting to borrow Varela,
Mutarana and Thompsons descriptors global cooperation, and self-organization. This
passage also goes further to demonstrate just how meta-systemic the knowledge of selforganizing systems is.
!

The impact of these networks is no longer an esoteric or academic problem. It is now a

social phenomena as ubiquitous as the cell phone, satellite and automobile. It is a lived
environment we are faced with. The implications for social consciousness are enormous.
Digital networks serve not only to bond communities and forge bottom-up social structures
within society. They are also, perhaps for the first time in history, catalyzing an emergent sense
of global consciousness. Like a global rhizome, we find ourselves enmeshed within a global network of
communication systems.
!

Similarly, in Daniel Pinchbecks Notes from the Edge Times, he cites the work of Michael

Hardt and Antonio Neri, who call for the creation of a global society without a state.
Pinchbeck writes, our increasingly networked society points toward a new global
orchestration that would eliminate the need for a centralized state apparatus (pg. 41).
!

In The Media Ecosystem, Antonio Lopez suggests that we see hope in peoples

movements around the world: across the planet citizens take root, occupying the last remnants

30

of the commons. According to Lopez, our social commons the sum total of the worlds
cultures, ideas, languages and stories has been threatened by the colonization of media by
corporations and the state. Colonized media coordinates the interests of corporate
kleptocracy; decolonized media emerges from daily practice and the communication habits of
people, write Lopez. Like Steeles Epoch A and Epoch B societies, colonized media is
vertically structured and controlled by a handful of multinational megacorporations, while
de-colonized media is horizontally networked communications environment that makes up
the rest of the global mediasphere (Lopez x). Here we have a similar idea, and can now turn
to the concept that Thompson raised earlier concerning the planetization of humanity.
!

The more we seek to thrust each other away, the more do we interpenetrate, wrote

Teilhard. Thompson contributes to this idea, noting the cultural exchange that took place
between the United States and Japan following World War II. After World War II, he writes,
Detroit automative factories end up in Japan and Japanese Zen Buddhist monasteries end up
in California (Thompson 125).
!

In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard de Chardin analyzes the impact of industrial

civilization as an important player in the compression of human cultures. In his typical

eclectic writing style, Teilhard asserts, through the multiplying effect of generations, we have
come to constitute, as we do at present, an almost solid mass of hominised substance (pg 240).
What is this hominised substance? Teilhard may be attempting to describe what the human
race might look like to an alien race visiting from another world. They might look over the

31

planet and see networks of roads and infrastructure, cities and villages that envelop entire
continents in a radiant glow at night; that strange hominized substance that envelops the
Earth with 7 billion people and all of their cultural and technological constructions.
!

Another, more well known description for this human-substance is the noosphere,

developed by Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Verdansky. Like James Lovelocks Gaia Theory
which sees the whole Earth as organism the noosphere is the collective consciousness of
humanity.
!

Rapid technological change over the past few centuries has revolutionized the face of the

planet. During the Industrial Revolution, human population exploded. For the first time, more
people lived in cities than on farms. Teilhard writes on this expansion:

Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the aero-plane, the physical
influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or
more (Teilhard 240).

Here, Teilhard near prophetically suggests the role of electromagnetism in planetization:

Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event presented by the discovery of electromagnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively)
simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the Earth (Teilhard 240).

32

Teilhard was famous for saying everything that rises must converge, (Which Flannery
OConnor adopted for her novel, with the same name) and perhaps more poetically than
scientifically, he has pointed out that rise of human civilizations would culminate in their
unification in some greater, supra-civilization. A planetary human society, or planetary culture.
Mankind, he writes, forced to develop as it is in a confined areahas found itself
relentlessly subjected to an intense pressure. He also notes the importance of the shape of the
Earth a sphere in spurring human culture to compress in on itself. (Teilhard 239).
Interestingly but for different reasons, another evolutionary thinker, Jean Gebser, would also
describe in his book that the up and coming consciousness could be represented as a sphere.
Philosopher and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva coined the term Earth Democracy, which,
according to Lopez, encompasses the planetary community of beings that comprise our living
systems, and originates in the Indian concept of vasudhaiva kutumbakam or Earth Family (pg
viii). Lopez suggests that our era has the potential to actualize such an awareness of Earth
Family. However, corporate media often works actively against that awareness by promoting
technological progress while excluding living systems from our awareness. Lopez suggests
that our part to play is to occupy our media space and work towards a healthy planetary
culture. As noted earlier,

...occupations glocalize their struggles by linking local conditions with a larger globalized
network. In the process they engage in a kind of cultural citizenship that is shifting planetary
culture toward an Earth Democracy. (Lopez x)

33

This shift is also what Ervin Laszlo describes as a move away from conquest, colonization,
and consumerism to connection, communication and consciousness (Lopez x).
!

Behind these calls to actualize an Earth Family or global consciousness is the influence of

digital networks, assisting us in coming to that awareness. Keeping in mind the dynamichistoriographical approach to history, we can see the rise of these global ideas as a codependent process with the rise of technological and social complexity. Digital networks seem
only to affirm and carry forward this process of planetization.
!

It is also of note here that many of these big picture philosophies such as Teilhards

noosphere, Thompsons Planetary Culture, and Vandana Shivas Earth Democracy are, like
Gaia Theory, another characteristic of the complex-dynamical age.
!

We have noted at least three earlier: planetization/interpenetration of cultures, the discovery

of complex-dynamical systems, and the return of Imagistic/Mythological thought. It would seem that
Gaia Theory, the Noosphere and other modern concepts are a mix of all three characteristics.
They are holistic big-picture images of our world, sophisticated and complex networks of
inter-related systems, and encourage sense of planetary solidarity or global consciousness.
!

As we learned from Thompson and Abraham, the complex-dynamical age is marked by a

confrontation with chaos-dynamics, complexity, new experiences of time-space, and selforganizing systems. To summarize, we can conclude that the complex-dynamical mentality of
Thompson and Abraham is affirmed by the proliferation of digital networks, which seem to

34

manifest the principles of self-organizing systems, decentralizing social order, and planetizing
human consciousness. These networks confront legal systems, social structures, and traditional
nation-states with a newer, more complex and interdependent social order.
!

Digital networks have revolutionized communication and created a social web that

envelops the Earth, regardless of geographical location. Despite firewalls and digital walled
gardensthat block off some networks from the rest of the world, digital networks have
nevertheless created a tremendous impact in raising social awareness and eroding what Shirky
described as the absolute advantages of traditional institutions. They have also inspired calls
for the propagation of a planetary cultural commons, as espoused by Steele, Lopez, Vandana
and countless other contemporary theorists and activists. Finally, we have Hardt and Negris
call for a global stateless democracy, organized by digital networks who could organize
themselves through distributed networks (Pinchbeck 41).
!

We have examined the rise of self-organizing networks and planetary thinking and their

correlation with the complex-dynamical mentality. Part of this new mode of thinking, as we have
noted, is its chaotic dimensions. In the following section we will examine a characteristic at the
forefront of digital culture: its nomadic and chaotic nature.
!

We will examine this in light of its relationship to Thompson and Abrahams analysis of

chaos dynamics and planetary culture.

!

35

3.0 Chaos-Dynamics and Nomadic Digital Culture

From the destruction of civilization comes the unimaginable creation of planetization (Thompson 75)!

!
!

In this section, we examine digital culture as a destabilizing force in the modern world. It

exhibits this in two ways: through retrieving nomadic behavior, and exhibiting many of the
characteristics described in chaos-theory.
!

In Thompsons Darkness and Scattered Light, he writes that, like Bosch before us, we

cannot tell whether we are living in a period of literal destruction or of restructuring, perhaps
because both processes are going on at once (Thompson 75). I believe this is an apt way or
describe the current ages paradox. In many ways, digital culture is exploding and writhing
with potential. In other ways, the future is entirely uncertain. Global economic, political and
ecological problems are reaching a boiling point, and we are uncertain how to go forward.
Occupy pushed for total reform but, as some argue, and as Thompson himself noted to me in
an interview1 it could not articulate its demands for change in a way that could be
universally applicable. That last point could be argued against. After all, the sociologist
Douglass Rushkoff has noted in his article on CNN following the 2011 protests in Zuccotti

William Irwin Thompson Interview: Consciousness, Occupy Movement and Planetary Culture: http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1iFpoXF0-I

36

Park2, we are witnessing Americas first true Internet-era movement, which unlike civil
rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign does not take its cue from a
charismatic leader, express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals and understand itself as
having a particular endpoint (Rushkoff). Yet this movement has yet to apply such a lifestyle
to human civilization as a whole. The question that remains is whether we can actually enact
such a way of life for an entire civilization.
!

As we noted in the previous section, this question is probably going to be answered in the

next century or two as many continue to develop approaches to self-organizing social

structures like peer-to-peer currencies. But can this kind of human society be actualized in time
before collapse? Many are hopeful, like Daniel Pinchbeck writes in his social commentary
book, Notes from the Edge Times: The chance for a conscious and participatory social evolution
is predicated on a great awakening happening quicklybefore ecological meltdown leads to
systemic breakdown (pg. 7). In a later chapter, Pinchbeck also calls our attention to the works
of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who suggest that a global democracy is possible, a
planetary society without a state, with a new set of institutions, legal codes, and social
systems (pg. 40). According to Hardt and Negri, production has shifted from material goods
to immaterial production of software, media, information and creativity. This immaterial
production relies more upon the utilization of social networks and collaborative teams.

Think Occupy Wall St. Is a Phase? You Dont Get it: http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/opinion/rushkoff-occupywall-street/index.html

37

However, as Pinchbeck notes, there is a tremendous task at work for these social networks to
take up the burden of building, not merely a protest culture, but human society itself:

For this to happen, the multitude would have to realize a shared political project not just
demonstrating against the powers-that-be, as in massive international protests against the Iraq
War, but self-organizing into a truly constitute body. Although they admit they do not know how
this takes place, Negri and Hardt theorize that insurrectional activity is no longer divided into
successive states, as in the revolutions of the modern era, but develops simultaneously (pg. 41).

Furthermore, Hardt and Negri seem to affirm the paradox stated at the beginning of this
section:

Resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemys power and the multitudes construction of a
new society are one and the same process (Pinchbeck 42).

If a new human society can be realized in the coming decades, or centuries, its characteristics
will have to be far more suited for adapting to a human society that must account for the
complexities of global politics, the health of the biosphere, and the well-being of billions of
people upon the Earth. What I find to be interesting about digital culture, however, is that in a
period of destabilization, the new media revolution is catalyzing a culture that is as wild and
chaotic as the crisis that faces us; in it lies, I believe, our hope and potential. If there is anything
to take away from this essay, it is that sentence.

38

Let us look at the emancipatory power of chaos from a mythological lens. In the old

Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, Thompson writes, the great male god, Marduk,
tore the Great Mother Goddess, Tiamat, apart to build the masculine citadel of Babylon. As
we confront the chaos of the modern world, however, the Goddess draws back the
dismembered pieces of her body to regain her ancient life, she is pulling Babylon to pieces...
The Goddess has come back to take all their toys of civilization away and dance gleefully in
the ruins, Thompson suggests, in a mythological interpretation of our time (pg. 47).
!

Ancient mythologies often concern the destruction of some great god or goddess in order

to create the world, and establish a new order on Earth. In an earlier article of mine, There Be
Dragons,3 I suggested that we can interpret the confrontation with climate change and super
storms as the mythological return of the serpent so often expressing and embodying the
chaos, or prima materia of a universe not yet forged by the order of the gods (Johnson).
Thompson utilizes a similar metaphor through his reflection on Marduk and Tiamat, but he
also adopts a Jungian understanding concerning a confrontation with chaos: What the
confrontation of ego and Self is all about is... the interface between opposites. The interface
between opposites is the place of transformation (Thompson 38). In this unstable relationship
there lies the chance for something new to be born. Thompson suggests that our current
tension of opposites lies in culture and nature, civilization and savagery... chaos and creation
in the emergence of a new world culture. He writes further:

There Be Dragons! Or Chaos, Complexity and Catastrophe: www.evolutionarylandscapes.net/there-be-dragonsor-mythopoeisis-chaos-catast

39

Think of the pregnant moment of silence the instant before Creation, when God is envisioning
everything there is to be. There is something wild about the totally open potentialities of of a
universe that is about to be, but has not yet been created. The complete wildness of total
potentiality seems almost the annihilation of all possible order; and then the Word is sent forth,
the hieroglyph for the universe that is to be with all its systems of order, and out of chaos begin to
appear specific limitations (pg. 39).

Within the seeds of chaos, there is some new order stirring. We also, I believe, have to
understand that digital culture is not merely in a period of destabilization, I believe that it is,
in itself, chaotic and extremely dynamic in nature. The opposite of this new chaotic culture is the
older, more stable human society: civilization. Between civilization and chaos, a culture that is
more dynamic can emerge.
!

As I described in the opening of this section, there are two main characteristics to digital

cultures destabilizing effect: nomadism and chaos-dynamics. The nomad is closest in resemblance to
digital culture, in that they both exhibit a de-structuring effect on civilization.
!

John David Ebert highlights the tension between the culture of nomad and that of the

city-state in his latest book The Age of Catastrophe. He suggests that the coming age of climate
change and technological disaster will make it impossible for civilization to exist as we have
known it to for millennia. He notes Kenneth Clarks statement in a BBC documentary series
called Civilization, the Vikings, though they had culture, since they did produce works of art,

40

nevertheless, did not have civilization, properly speaking, since they were nomadic (at least,
early on) and therefore hostile to the very idea of living in cities the principle and anchor of
civilization wherever they went (Ebert 39). Ebert notes that we appear to have the opposite
problem now. We have skyscrapers and buildings, but we no longer have culture. Electronic
technology has liquidated much of high culture, and the pop culture that now remains as the
tides of civilized, metaphysical society recede, is a poor excuse for culture of any kind (Ebert
39). According to Eberts hypothesis, electronic technology, and digital culture, sound the
death knell of civilization. High culture, accompanying civilizations roads and cities, are no
longer possible in the age of catastrophe. That is, the age of climate change, environmental
crisis, rising sea levels and a dynamic environment that removes the stability necessary for
building a civilization.
!

Ebert specifically explores digital cultures impact on Western civilization in his book, The

New Media Invasion, in which he argues that electronic media is causing a catastrophe of
knowledge and culture. Websites like Wikipedia make stable knowledge impossible, creating a
situation like Jorge Luis Borges infinite library, where texts by anonymous authors are
constantly re-writing history. Meanwhile, he suggests that, the Internet is a force of disruption
and discontinuity in the evolution of the Western mediascape (Ebert 12). They stop the
process of typography and the printing press, the possibility of high culture and academics.
It is rather the incarnation of a new kind of mentality altogether, Ebert writes, one in which
technology, learning and information occur at the speed of light via digitization. It is a

41

mentality that is at its best when its concern is with images, pattern recognition and icons; at
its worst when it attempts to take over and mimic the functions of the Gutenbergian landscape
that it is in the process of dismantling (pg. 12). Digital culture, as a complex-dynamical
system, characteristically has events occur all at once: creation and destruction, learning, and
creation all happen simultaneously. Furthermore, while print media builds up, favoring
structurally organized hierarchies of knowledge, the internet tears down, favoring
nomadologies of one sort or another. He borrows a phrase from the philosophers Deleuze
and Guattari, designating the internet as a nomadological technology, while the printing
press as a state apparatus (Ebert 13).
!

This seems to confirm Hardt and Negris understanding of the new medias potential to

create a human society without the need of a centralized state. Hardt and Negri seem to affirm
my point that, unlike Ebert, nomadism is not a negative culture, but holds the potential to
create what they call a global democracy, or as noted in the earlier section, the first Earth
Democracy. While this new digital nomadic culture may bring down civilization as we know
it, it might also pave the way for a new planetary culture.
!

As Ebert states, the coming age of climate change and technological catastrophes, like

Chernobyl and Fukushima, are ushering in an age where the relatively stable environment,
required for civilization and high culture, will cease to exist. As I pointed out, Ebert
successfully argues that the Internet, and digital technologies in general, are nomadological;
borrowing the phrase and Deleuze and Guattari. They are discontinuous with the technology

42

of the printing press, which builds up linear systems of order, legality, and centralized control.
He notes that the printing press is a state apparatus while the Internet is inherently
decentralizing and nomadic. The problem with Eberts thesis, however, is its bias in favoring
civilizations high culture over the nomadic cultures of the past and present. What makes
them intrinsically better, or even more sophisticated, than nomadic culture? Furthermore, it
would seem that nomadic culture is far better suited for the age of Catastrophe than high
culture ever could be. Its dynamism and movement is properly suited to be on the move,
pitching up tent in one place and leaving by weeks end when that place is no longer safe, or
habitable. The nomad has a healthier relationship with his or her environment and less of an
impact on its ecosystems, and the nomad is more immersed in the dynamics of the biosphere
because of having to live, and survive, in accordance with non-human laws like weather and
other animals.
!

Like the nomad, while online we peruse websites with startling speed and flow.

Navigating the digital world requires the behavior that nomads exhibit; flowing from site to
site, picking what we need and moving on. A popular phrase these days has been to describe
Internet users as hunter-gatherers of the Information Age. As we browse page to page, we
move through a steady running stream of images and text. On websites like Twitter, you never
stand still. Your page is constantly rushing with an influx of tweets and links. In the culture at
large, digital media as a nomadological technology is inspiring democratic philosophies that
imagine societies without the need of a centralized state or hierarchical control. Arguably,

43

digital culture is prepared like no other to face the catastrophic age we are entering and the
level of social complexity and interdependence with the worlds cultures and biosphere. We
will now look at a few examples that see, like I do, digital culture as a constructive force for
world change.
!

Burning Man is a fascinating cultural phenomenon that happens each year. Exhibiting a

nomadic lifestyle, thousands of people gather each year in Death Valley, NA and construct a
massive city which can be seen by astronauts from space. It is a culture of celebration, ritual,
psychedelics and imagination, ending each summer with a ritualistic burning of The Man.
Burning Man is a world phenomenon, attracting participants from all over the globe to
experience it. We recall earlier that Douglas Rushkoff suggests Occupy is the first internet
generation movement. Burning Man is analogous to Occupy in its emphasis on celebration
and cultural participation without any specific set of goals or long term plans (except perhaps,
to design the next years Burning Man). If Marshall McLuhan were still alive, he might
celebrate or speak at one of Black Rock Citys many lecture tents. Certainly, he would see this
culture as a demonstration of his Global Village, electronic cultures retrieval of nomadic
values of participation, celebration, and collectivized ritual4 (McLuhan). McLuhan himself
might have been a man of the old print culture, but he repeatedly noted that electronic
cultures re-tribalism was necessary and important to heal the planet.

Marshall McLuhan The World is a Global Village: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeDnPP6ntic

44

The correspondent example in virtual space has been the rise of video game culture and

the generation of virtual realities. Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
(MMORPGs) are international digital communities that run entirely in graphically generated
world (sometimes worlds). In 2010, Warcraft reached a population size 12 million larger
than over 100 small countries, like Greece and Cuba5(Epic Toon Blog). With computers, entire
worlds can be generated with the flick of a switch. Millions of youth now partake in video
game consoles and interact with others around the globe. Jane McGonigal believes that this
new generation of gamers have a dynamic and creative problem solving approach to reality:
if something is broken, you can re-code it. She suggests that this attitude will begin to spill
over outside of the entertainment industry and into reality in her book Reality is Broken. More
and more, she writes on collaborative gaming, these crowdsourcing games wont just be
about online work or computational tasks... they will take us out into the physical
environments... these new games will challenge crowds to mobilize for real-world social
missions (McGonigal 246). In addition to Warcraft, there are other games like Eve Online
which has been the subject of study for serious economists. In a BBC article, Money Matters
in Eve Online game, the author writes that the virtual universe with its hundreds of
thousands of players is an economic petri-dish in which the operation of markets can be
observed with a clarity impossible in the real world (Vallance). It just goes to show that
digital worlds are equally capable of generating economies, politics, love affairs and complex

http://www.epictoon.com/blog/2010/10/11/wow-hits-12-million-subs-overtakes-population-cuba-greece/

45

social dynamics that civilization could. But they do so without the need of being tangible like
their material counter-parts. The ability to turn off civilizations with a button might help us
alleviate the devastating effects of their carbon footprint, and let us, like Burning Man, pitch a
tent-city when the weather is good and move on when the storms come.
!

William Irwin Thompson agrees that such nomadism is a positive quality and one of the

central characteristics of planetary cultures self-organizing architecture. In Darkness and

Scattered Light, he imagines what this might look like:

I have no way of knowing, but I imagine someone playing a musical instrument and expressing
with it certain images in algebra and topology; as the instrument is played, the physical form of
the building is created... I imagine a future architecture in which you turn on a building the way
we now turn on the lights. These buildings will be temporary like concerts, and not enduring
like the pyramids; and so when the use of the building is finished, the people can move on... The
culture will be similar to the nomadic way of life of the old paleolithic hunters and gatherers; the
people will carry their cultures in their souls (Thompson 176).

Virtual worlds seem to foreshadow this process in which a code is played into the computer,
and a world is generated. When the game is up, the world closes up shop and vanishes back
into the computers memory. Thompsons description of buildings not enduring like the
pyramids, reflects the true difference between Eberts praise of civilization as a stable, long
lasting high culture and the dynamism of nomadic culture. While we are a long way from
virtualizing our cities and buildings, we are already well on our way, if Jane McGonigals

46

hypothesis is even remotely true. Virtual reality has been consistently enroaching on the rest of
our lives, and no doubt barring catastrophe (and even then it may) will continue. Earlier we
referred to Thompsons statement that the egocentric monumentality and the extensive
clutter of industrial civilization could be eliminated. We could shift from industrial object to
ecological process (Thompson viii). This further highlights the differences between
civilization and nomadism; while the former favors object and stability, the latter is dynamic
and process-oriented. Civilization, then, becomes something that we do. An activity rather
than a static high culture that is permanent and remains for centuries in the stone. This new
understanding and ability to carry our culture in our souls, I believe, is a deeper
understanding and far more compatible, as well as harmonious, way of life with the planet.
Thompson suggests one way these virtual cities might be constructed through nanotechnologies, etherealizing human civilization forevermore.
!

At this point, I have argued for the dynamism of digital culture exhibiting traits which

parallel it with the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers, and the de-structuring

characteristic of nomads as they compare to relatively stable civilizations throughout history.
However, I have attempted to demonstrate that these dynamic qualities are process oriented and
in line with an emergent understanding of the world-as-process, dynamic and fluid, complex
and interconnected. This new emergent understanding, reflected in popular culture in
examples like Burning Man and virtual realities, point to a new culture which virtualizes or
etherealizes as Thompson suggests civilization itself, packing up cities into hard drives and

47

potentially making us more prepared, as well as compatible, with the age of ecological change
and increasing social complexity. Human societies re-enter the wild from within; our cultures
are beginning to resemble a prehistoric past of being at home in dynamic movement and
relative instability. Digital culture is therefore extremely adaptable, creative and virtualized,
carrying its culture in its soul. This new attitude will make it more equipped than older,
static philosophies of centralized control, high culture, and long-standing civilizations. We
can describe this new culture a digital nomadic culture, utilizing nomadological
technologies which are, in fact, the way of the future as well as a retrieval of a lifestyle echoed
in the distant past.

3.1 Digital Culture: Entangled Time-Play

Digital culture is like a storm. It is always in flux, shifting centers of gravity like

ecosystems put in fast-forward of millennia. Within thriving digital networks and wireless
communication systems, we have the mashing together of different temporalities. Past, present and
future entangle in one another, as virtual worlds and waking worlds get tied up, too. The
architecture of the net gives us an idea as to why this happens: different virtual spaces,
communities and, truly, virtual realities all co-exist with each other in a vast techno-social
ecology. This ecology, however, is not just online. Websites like Meetup.com bring real people
together. But then program developers isolate themselves physically to meet in the virtual

48

world to produce new software, which reverberates back out into the network to affect
millions of lives through new operating systems, games, and programs. We have examined
digital cultures nomadic like qualities; now we will examine its relationship to chaos theory
and a new complex sense of time and space. If we recall, one of the breakthroughs of the
complex-dynamical mentality was a new relationship to time-space. We can now examine
how digital culture exhibits and embodies the concepts discovered in relativity physics and
chaos-theory.
!

With digital networks comes a new experience of time and a new way to encounter space.

In the Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology, Amber Case introduces a concept called the
automatic production of space, which defines a new geography created by software running in
networked environments. She cites Nigel Thrift and Shaun French, who both suggest that this
new geography has come to effect nearly all aspects of everyday life, and Case adds that,
the web has created a layer of infinite spaces between everyday reality, people, and
devices (pg. 19).
!

In addition to space, there are also new changes to our experience of time. Another

important term that each of us now experience on a daily basis is asynchronous

communication, where we communicate with another person through cell phones, computers,
email, or even letters. These messages are often received at different moments than when they
are sent, even if it is just a fraction of a second, like a text message. Another quality to
asynchronous communication is that it gives the user the experience of communicating in real

49

time. In her thesis, Cell Phones and their Technosocial Sites of Engagement, Case suggests
that the ritual of picking up the cell phone and transitioning to a conversation that exists on
another time/space plane is a liminal one (Case 11). She cites Victor Turners definition of
liminality, betwixt and between to analogize the use of cell phones. Furthermore, she argues
that there is something ritualistic about cell phone usage. A ritual, especially a rite of
passage, Turner writes, involves some change to the participants, especially their social
status (Case 12). Furthermore, Sadie Plant has suggested that the cell phone has created a bipsyche, which has created a new mode in which the human mind can operate, where the
user can be both physically present and also partaking in an ethereal space where a mobile
conversation is taking place. The cell phone user is operating as though in two worlds, Sadie
writes (Case 12). Case suggests to us that the cell phone user becomes, through their activity,
a transitional being. This highlights the dynamism so evident in the first part of this section:
the digital-user-as-nomad. A transitional being reflects the flux and flow of nature, and also,
arguably, retrieves in digital fashion the notion of altered states of consciousness another trait
of indigenous and religious cultures which will be explored further in the final section.
!

There is one particular philosopher who we can utilize to understand this new sense of

time. Jean Gebsers concept of the a-perspectival helps us understand this new, complex
relationship with time and the new transient being we become when using our
communication media. Writing in the early half of the 20th century, Gebser studied culture,
language, and poetry of his time. His many works, the most well known of which is Ever-

50

Present Origin, suggests that an emergent sense of time and space was occurring in Western
culture. After spending most of his career attempting to understand this new consciousness, he
designated at least four major structures of consciousness throughout history.
!

According to Gebsers phenomenology of consciousness, human beings have undergone

five mutations. The latest of which is the integral structure, which exhibits an aperspectival experience of time and space, marked by what he calls time-freedom. To the
perception of the aperspectival world time appears to be the very fundamental function, and
to be of a most complex nature, Gebser writes (Feuerstein 152). Integral consciousness, he
suggests, has everything to do with the irruption of time, where systematic attempts to
rationalize our experience of time what he called clock time were doomed. The late
Georg Feuerstein, his biographer, writes, What then, is time in Gebsers sense? To begin with,
it is undoubtedly more or other than clock time, or measured-spatialized time. It is more than a
concept... Gebser calls it an intensity. Furthermore, he remarks this form of time could
actually be called the achronon itself time-freedom (Feuerstein 152). For Gebser, emergent
examples in art, poetry, and photography were each attempting to deal with the time
problem. That is, to express time in a non-spatialized or systemic way. Feuerstein notes that,
the new sensitivity towards space-time which marks much of contemporary art is also
characteristic of avant-garde architecture,which often transcended the fixity of inside/
outside dualisms an understanding that is similar to the architecture of the net, which also
blurs the distinction between digital and physical realities (Feuerstein 148).

51

Gebser feared that Western civilization was on its way towards collapse by the end of the

century, should this new consciousness not take hold. While deserving a full essay and even
graduate study himself, Gebsers integral consciousness and its characteristic timefreedom are helpful to borrow from here to understand what is going on with digital culture.
As previously mentioned in section one, the breakdown of linear clock-time is also consistent
with Thompson and Abrahams complex-dynamical paradigm breakthrough (and break
down) in the 20th century.
!

In order to demonstrate the irruption of time in Western culture, Gebser, being a

cultural philosopher, looked to art and poetry. He argues that the qualitative dimensions of
life, which Western philosophy and rational science had so underplayed, were part of this new
mutation. I think that we can see various forms of time irruption in the digital age, and
digital culture indicates a potent new relationship to time that is relevant to the conversation
that this essay began with. This new relationship to time and space is synonymous with
Thompson and Abrahams complex-dynamical mentality: of multiple temporalities existing in
a larger, more multidimensional mathematical understanding of the universe.
!

On the net, history has become a vast play of time in which cultures can enter, inhabit,

and make art out of. The most powerful example is remixing art. Musically, remixing requires
sampling of various audio clips from everything and anything audible. These clips are
uploaded onto software which the artist can then string together with a beat (which can also
just be another clip). Remix culture has been popular for as long as digital media has been

52

available. In the 2000s and onward, we have witnessed an explosion of digital art. The artist,
Pogo, takes both audio and visual clips from old films and transforms them into beautiful
songs. There is a qualitative sense of magic in the creation of his music the old films seem to
be re-animated as if Pogo has found something intrinsic, but unsung, in them and helps them
play what was already there. His song, Bloom which mixes multiple Disney characters
together caught viral attention at 3.2 million viewers. Other artists, like Deadmau5 and
genres like dubstep, take noise and transform it into music. John Ebert has noted that, at the
end of Western civilization, we have all this old media sitting around collecting dust, stored up
and documented over the past fifty years. YouTube, he suggests, is like the scrap yard of old
media. Well, there is profound art to be made, even in scrapyards. Remixers go into the
compost heap and grow new life from old media. This new sense of time, where we can go
into different records of films, texts, and songs, and put them all together into remixes, I am
calling time-play. Not unlike Thompsons description of meta-systems emerging out of
our system-sciences, new art forms emerge out of the information overload of the digital age.
They take huge amounts of information and see patterns, symbols, and meanings amongst all
of them. Thompson has consistently noted that when you think big, you think myth.
!

So it is with digital culture, rendering a musical-mythos out of the vast swaths of

cultures, languages, sounds and media present now around the world. Mashups of different
times and places have become more and more common. Just as this has happened in music, it
has also happened in photography. Shawn Clover demonstrates this through an eerie series of

53

images of San Francisco, mashing up our time with photographs of the infamous 1906
earthquake.6 Numerous other examples abound on the net. There is a tangible, qualitative
sense one experiences from these photos, as if they are really revealing different qualitative
times. These photos converge present and past within the same moment, and are therefore
liminal in their effect. Finally, because of these new art forms, entire genres and subcultures
have emerged that combine nostalgia with futurism, including vintage, retro, hipsters,
steampunk, cyberpunk, and alternative history cultures. At this point, we can recall
McLuhans concept of a global village that is formed by a world acoustic echo chamber.
The digital, planetary culture is maturing into what I call time-play. We can understand this
through Gebsers concept of the a-perspectival. The contemporary internet user is certainly
still embedded in time, but they are also free to float through multiple experiences of time, and
multiple places, via virtual realities. We can inhabit alternate temporalities, remixing 1950s
movies with digital beats and sounds. Perhaps digital culture is even exhibiting what Gebser
called time-freedom, enabling us to become artists of different temporalities.
!

Science fiction, unlike any other fiction genre, exhibits most of the qualities discovered by

the new scientific and cultural mentality of our age. This makes sense, since science fiction is
by its nature exploratory and brings the scientific possibilities to life. Television shows and
movies seem to be exploring chaos-dynamics the most: of worlds, times, and realities all
smashing into each other. Television shows like Fringe start on the premise that our reality is

Earthquake mashup blends 1906 San Francisco, today: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-09-04/news/

33587195_1_huge-sinkhole-photos-earthquake

54

doomed to smash into another, parallel reality. It plays with time-travel, alternative histories
and explorations of the nature of consciousness. Specifically of interest in Fringe is a particular
human species the Observers who originate from one of many possible futures for
humanity. These Observers seem to be exhibiting Gebsers time-freedom. They observe time,
never aging, watching significant historical events unfold and occasionally getting involved
with them. The catch in Fringe, however, is that when you interfere with the flow of time, you
create unforeseen consequences. This complex reality, where fractures and splits in time and
space can occur, reflects the chaos-theory understanding of our universe. A popular image,
and metaphor used throughout the show is that of an immanent storm, as emphasized in my
article, There Be Dragons. Quite frequently, the image of the storm represents the chaos of
reality beyond our control. In the Fringe world, the storm is encountered on a daily basis.
Another example would be Jurassic Park, in which both the book and the film explore the
possibility of different evolutionary epochs, modern and prehistoric, colliding with each other.
Finally, the show LOST, by J.J. Abrams, explores time-travel, alternative realities, and quantum
physics experiments gone wrong. Each of these shows often demonstrate some form of
storm, which occurs as a result of science leading us into creating, or discovering realities
that are out of our control. This, I believe, aptly represents the chaos dynamics of planetary
culture.
!

Each of the examples I have given from modern art and cinema reflect the world we

already live in: a world of networks inhabited by different cultures, in different places, and

55

sometimes different time zones. The metaphor of realities and temporalities clashing and
colliding, tangling us into complex situations reflects chaos and complexity of our own
modern world. Digital networks, even if they only serve us as an un-reflected background in
our lives, create a new experience of reality: one where other places and cultures are wrapped
up and interpenetrating with our lives no matter if we like it or not. This takes us back to the
first section, where I analyze the interpenetration of human cultures through digital networks.
The universe that is full of many other universes, side by side, is none other than our own
digital reality. These artistic narratives describe a reality where the protagonists must learn to
internalize chaos, and find a home within it. The storm is a part of nature. And now that nature
is reflected in our own society through complex networks of communication, we seem to be
confronted with the wildness of reality first hand.
!

In conclusion, we are seeing a new cultural consciousness that exists within a complex-

dynamical reality. This new culture is relativistic, chaotic, and nomadic in its ability to be so
transient. We can inhabit different virtual spaces, as a simple web browsing experience
demonstrates, but this is extended to whole cultures and communities online and offline, as in
the example of Burning Man. We can also inhabit multiple times, through retro and vintage
subcultures. This new culture views time as play, remixing the worlds history into new
mashups. In addition, this new culture is fascinated by mashing together different
temporalities, and seems to express an anxiety for the sheer overwhelming complexity the
universe beholds us with. As I demonstrated, that anxiety is often expressed in science fiction.

56

All of these cultural traits are influenced deeply by the nature of networks: themselves being
liminal machines of transient communication.
!

57

4.0 The Return of the Image: Digital Animism and Virtual

Poesis
!

In this final section, we examine the third characteristic of the digital age: the return of

Imagistic and Mythological thought. I argue that our techno-social media landscape is retrieving an
animistic cosmology, and the daily use of computers has inspired what I call a virtual poesis, or a
creative act of imaginal world building.
!

The hermeneutics of myth and imagination are, I believe, at the basin of understanding

the digital age. We demonstrate this through the works not only from the works of Thompson
and Abraham, but also from James Hillman, Henry Corbin, and Cliff Bostock. Mythological
thought, as understood by Corbin, Hillman, and others, is rhizomatic, immanent and
multidimensional. Imagination lies at the heart of the other previous two characteristics of
digital culture: Complex/Networked, and Chaotic/Nomadic.
!

Through participating daily in the ritual of logging on to our Facebook accounts,

checking our text messages, and browsing the web, we partake in a dream-like virtual space.
The reality is that over a billion people, each day, enter what could be argued to be a
hypnagogic or altered state: bombarded with a rush of imagery, icons, and text, the net truly is
quite different than our regular waking state in our offices, homes, and work places. It is a
realm of symbols and pattern recognition. Furthermore, we will examine a concept that I call

58

virtual poesis, or an imaginative state of mind that the user enters into when using digital
media. Virtual poesis is adapted from mytho-poesis, or myth-making. Virtual poesis concerns
itself with the creative act of world-making when we use the net. Another important concept
introduced here is digital animism, a phrase that I adapted earlier on in my graduate research.
This term can be defined as the process where our techno-social environment has retrieved
some of the same behavioral qualities, and cosmologies, as animistic cultures.

4.1. The Importance of Imagistic Thinking and Myth

!

We begin with the return of big picture thinking. Thompson describes the birth of

computer graphics specifically fractals contributing to the return of the Image. As he

mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, our cultural Imaginary was given a gift of a new
alphabet of symbols. Dynamical systems were given geometrical portraits of their behavior,
and these were therefore called phase portraits. (Thompson, Abraham vii). In the age of
information overload, what helps us most is discerning patterns through the noise. The
linearity of the left-brain thinking was now to be balanced with a right-brain activation... a
new visual mathematics expressed... a return on a higher turn of the spiral to hieroglyphic
thinking (Thompson, Abraham). Earlier than Thompson, Marshall McLuhan suggests that it
was television before the computer that returned us to imagistic thought. In Understanding
Media, he writes how the linear film making process creates an iconic effect in our
consciousness:

59

!
The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of
sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure. The
message of the movie medium is that of transition from lineal connections to
configurations... We return to the inclusive form of the icon (McLuhan 27).

In addition to McLuhan, Leonard Slains book, The Alphabet vs. The Goddess, suggests that the
television has begun to move our consciousness away from left-brained, analytical thought,
and back into right-brained holistic thinking. Other, more recent texts such as A Whole New
Mind by Daniel Pink suggest that the emergent culture belongs to the holistic-oriented and
right-brained thinkers, creative types who can adapt to the information age. It is clear that the
adaptation of visual media, through both television, film and the internet, have had a
profound impact on the mind in the 21st century. But more so than television, digital media
intensify imagistic thought in a way that, arguably, is revolutionizing the invisible cultural
environment of the modern world.

4.2. Digital Technology Revives an Animistic Cosmology

!

The aggregate of our technological devices creates an environment around us that is often

the focus of media studies, and has a profound influence on us. More recently, Donna
Harraway and Amber Cases cyborg anthropology studies the the emergent techno-social
environment. McLuhan was famous for claiming that technologies are extensions of ourselves.

60

Similarly, Case writes that, devices are becoming external brains. Presentation of self extends
into the digital network now, just as one must present themselves in the analog world through
physical actions and clothing (Case 7). Donna Haraway developed the concept of
companion species. Our technology, Haraway argues, could be considered companion
species. Case writes that, cell phones... could be considered a companion species. They cry,
and must be picked up. They must be plugged into a wall at night to be fed. They must be
upgraded, protected, and cared for. In return, they provide information, connectivity and
entertainment. Most importantly, the evolutionary dimensions of technology-as-companionspecies is in our mutual adaptation to each other. They grow alongside humans, Case writes,
and adapt to fit their needs, as humans adapt to fit the needs of the device. This natural
drift of human beings and their technology is perhaps as old as we are. But it does highlight
the important, and challenging symbiotic relationship with technology in our time. Thompson
describes this evolutionary bifurcation:

Here we see a shift from the consciousness of an autonomous self within a biological
evolutionary body to more distributive lattices of multidimensional mind in which new
media constellate new forms of the extensive phase-space through personal computers,
the Internet, and the World Wide Web (Thompson 127).

61

The emergent environment created from the sum aggregate of our digital devices has
tremendous influence on our identity, sense of self, and even our sense of reality. This new
environment, arguably, is retrieving a form of digital animism.
!

In the last section, I examined how the modern human being lives in a new techno-social

liminal space. The iron walls of waking, material reality have become porous, filled with
portals into cyber worlds with different rules and different ontologies. Our technology has reintroduced other imagined realities into the public sphere. In the Caves of Paleolithic man,
John Ebert writes, the animals were painted onto the walls with casual disregard for
direction: they float disconnected from all contexts like astronauts in outer space. Ebert
suggests that the internet has recreated the world-as-cavern. Online, he writes, we are all
present everywhere on the planet at once... All the limitations associated with embodiment in a
material world are gone, for the Internet not only eliminates hierarchies, it also abolishes the
very idea of physical location in a specific place (Ebert 24). Amber Case suggests that the cell
phone itself is a liminal space because it is a space that exists as auditory signals in transit. It
exists between lived realities, and is a transitional communication medium (pg. 13). Digital
networks of all kinds, specifically the Internet, also demonstrate liminal spaces. Case suggests
that our use of cell phones fits the definition Victor Turner gave to liminality as a ritual, a
state between states. Since the adaptation of all forms of digital communication, the modern
human being lives within an entirely transitional space. The stable offline world, once the
center of reality, becomes relativized amongst other dimensions of reality: other portals

62

through which we now communicate with and travel through. The act of using any of our new
media devices to communicate can be interpreted as a new form of ritual, one that is
ubiquitous in modern society and part of our daily activities. This new environment
technologically retrieves the cosmology of animism: where reality becomes porous with
meaning, material objects become luminous and intelligent, and reality is infused with
imagination and meaning through our devices. A technological participation-mystique.
!

Physical and virtual space are blurred with modern cell phones and digital devices. Case

writes, cell phone technology has thus changed the dichotomies of place and non-place as
well as the private and public dichotomies into a technological-human hybrid (pg. 6). To
summarize, digital technology revives animism, to some degree, by remaking our entire
techno-social environment into a liminal and ritualistic space.

4.3 Virtual Poesis: Digital Networks, Spaces and the

Polytheistic Self
!

In accordance with my claim that digital media is retrieving animism, the internet is also

reviving the importance of dream consciousness and the active imagination. In Cliff Bostocks
article, Cyberwork: The Archetypal Imagination in New Realms of Ensoulment, he suggests
that the Internet is outering the imagistic psyche into waking reality. He refers to Hillman, who
suggests that every image has a telos, or meaning dwelling within it. The image, however, is

63

never static. Quoting Ezra Pound, Hillman suggests that the image is more than an idea. It is
a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.. a vortex, from which and
through which and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. This, Bostock suggests, is what is
happening when we surf the web, a center through which pours all manner of
thoughts (Bostock). The internet, Bostock argues, is akin to the dream images, a bricoleur,
cobbling together in the psyche a series of images that are actually the construction of
soul. From Bostocks point of view, the internet is none other than a new modality of soul
making. Here I would like to formally introduce digital poesis, as just that a new form of
dreaming or soul making utilizing digital media. Arguing against the claim that technology
disembodies us, he sides with McLuhans philosophy that technology extends the body. The
net, for Bostock is sensual, creative image making. Cybersexand virtual sex describe new
styles of lovemaking, he argues, the erotic, as image-production, is erupting and birthing
itself in cyberspace (Bostock). The dream, as a means of soul-work, is thus irrupting into our
waking reality through daily participation in cyber space.
!

Another important dimension to dreams and virtual poesis is Hillmans concept of the

polytheistic self. The many personalities of the night world infuse themselves into the attitudes
that dominate our daily lives, Hillman writes. To define my person by my waking state
neglects these figures and their influences. I then become tyrannical, reflecting the jealous
monotheism of Number One (Hillman 33). Hillman argues that we are actually made up of
little persons, of dreams and imagination. If I let myself be defined as well by the little

64

people of my dreams, I am free of self-tyranny, he suggests. In Hillmans therapy,

incorporating our dream selves is a crucial component to healing. They make the difference
between soul work and building the ego (Hillman 33). He continues further by suggesting
that the psyches basic structure is an inscape of personified images, and the structure of
myth is very much in step with this characteristic. It too is polycentric, with innumerable
personifications in imaginal space. Hillman suggests that personifying means polycentricity,
implicating us in a revolution of consciousnessfrom monotheistic to polytheistic (Hillman
35). He refers both to Hermes-Mercury, the Trickster, and Dionysus as the personification of
this consciousness. Arguably, Hillman suggests that a consciousness with no center is no worse
than a monotheistic one. It is simply a different style.
!

We can compare the description of Hillmans polytheistic psyche to the impact the

Internet has on our sense of self. It breaks us up into little persons, and images. It
deconstructs a monotheistic sense of self in favor of a pluralistic one. We can also begin to
connect this new sense of self to the larger, sociological changes in consciousness that digital
networks are doing to human society: breaking down center-periphery models and
decentralizing authority. Hillman suggests that self-division, dismemberment, and a flowing
multiplicity belong to a mythic pattern (pg. 35). Both the individual and collective seem to be
returning to this polytheistic and mythological self.
!

On the internet, the descriptions Hillman offers of the psyche are part of everyday

experience. The internet thus becomes a mirror for our own psychological makeup, for both

65

the internet and the psyche are concerned with the production of images and dream-making. It
begs the question: why does the Internet reflect our own psychological makeup? McLuhan
suggests that technology is an extension of the body. So with the internet, we may at last be
extending our consciousness into reality.
!

Through Bostock and Hillman, we can understand digital media as comparatively similar

to dreams and Hillmans polytheistic self. It produces images, reflects the polytheistic nature of
the psyche, and equally mirrors structure of myth.
!

In other words, digital media appear to be re-producing a kind of mythical or imaginal

reality, exteriorized through technology and democratized for each of us through the net.
Digital media outer our psyches, placing us in a new material space where our inner world
is reflected in a techno-social environment.

4.4. Challenges to Western Cosmology

!

The digital retrieval of dream-states in waking life has caused Jennifer Cobb and Pierre

Levy to consider that a new, ontological realm is being created through cyberspace. Through
digital technology, they argue, the classical notion of the Anima Mundi, or Henry Corbins
Mundus Imaginalis (Imaginal World) is being born. They also suggest that the internet is
analogous to Teilhard de Chardins concept of the noosphere, a collective mind of the Earth
(Bostock). Despite the fact that these concepts are far-fetched from the perspective of
mainstream academia, the intriguing challenge to Western materialism is offered to us by the

66

Internet itself. Despite our disbelief, digital culture and the new techno-social space that now
surrounds, and envelops us, is enacting paradigms and philosophies that have been shrugged
off long ago. These include the relativizing of waking and dreaming states of consciousness,
the belief in the World Soul common in Neoplatonism and many ancient cultures and the
idea that we can, and do, partake with other realities and daimonic intelligences. Each of these
concepts are being retrieved through technological means.
!

Books like Chorosts World Wide Mind legitimize Teilhards noosphere for technological

materialists, and artificial intelligences become the new daimonic presences, as well as gods,
which futurists now envision. The net itself is full of little people trolls and avatars which
populate the digital world and seem to have an autonomous life of their own. Like shamanic,
or even priestly rituals, members of social forums take on memes in order to participate with
each other and gain social status online. This has convinced me that the the animistic
psychology of the ancient world has never been fully transcended by Western society. Instead,
it appears to come back to us through the back door of our own technology, retrieving
animism through electronic media.
!

We have already seen through Hillman and Bostock that a form of mythological

consciousness is returning to us through digital media. But why is this the case? Henry Corbin
suggests that Western culture, since the Renaissance, has lost a critical imaginative faculty that
has resulted in a loss of soul, causing the schism of Descartes mind-body dualism:

67

Between the sense perceptions and the intuitions or categories of the intellect there has remained
a void. That which ought to have taken place between the two, and which in other times and
places did occupy this intermediate space, that is to say the Active Imagination, has been left to
the poets (Cheetham 136).

!
Between the faculties of sensation and intuition lies the imaginative cognition. It is an
intermediate realm which each of us participate in, and with, on a daily basis. I believe the
Internet, and digital media at large, fits the definition of Corbins Active Imagination, or
Imaginal World. More and more so, virtual reality is the passageway by which we interact
with the world. It helps us organize our tasks, communicate with friends and colleagues, and
shapes our sense of reality. As Amber Case suggests with her concept of architectural fiction,
virtual spaces enable us to experiment with designs before we construct them in the material
world (pg. 13). The internet is an imaginal space, the vortex of dream-making. Perhaps even
an extension of soul. I believe that Cobb and Levy are correct in their hypothesis that the net is
a form of embodiment for the Imaginal realm. The most powerful argument in favor of this
hypothesis is the sheer fact, or reality, of digital media, which is becoming relevant for
increasing numbers of people.

4.5. Imagination, Mythology and the Network: Conclusion

!

Digital media immerse us and present us with an environment in which invisible

realities, intermediary realms, myth and dream, liminal spaces, and the imagination are each
and all important to our daily existence. Corbins Imaginal World, Hillmans imagistic and

68

polytheistic psyche, and Bostocks cyber work all point to a shift in the psyche from centralized
and waking consciousness, to the return of the imagistic, polycentric self. I believe that digital
networks have a large role to play in the polytheistic/polycentric selfs return. Arguably,
digital networks are also images of the psyche. The imagination, as Corbin defines it, and as
Hillman especially outlines, is not centered but exists as a bricoleur of images and
personifications. Networks seem to reflect this decentralizing orientation. As we studied in the
first section, centralization and hierarchy are slowly (or rapidly, depending on how you look at
it) being eroded through digital technology and the rise of new open-source philosophies.
They return us to more organic models and structures rhizomes and networks. !In the same
sense, networks are also dismembering us, breaking us off into multiple persons, avatars,
and worlds. Secondly, digital networks are creating a new type of dream state, analogous to
the bricoleur rush, or vortex of images that Bostock and Hillman claim are essential to soul
work. Finally, the Internet as a whole can be viewed as the return of the Imaginal Realm of
Corbin; a means for it to become embodied and materialized in modern society. Each of these
examples represent powerful examples of a shifting orientation in the Western psyche.
!

This thesis has explored the three central characteristics of of the new digital culture as

they have related to Thompson and Abrahams model of cultural evolution. Networked,
Chaotic, and now Imaginal or Mythological. Thompson himself has attributed our age to an
animistic retrieval, as we noted in the introduction. These have occurred through esoteric
and artistic movements in the 20th century, through Steiners anthroposophy to Yeats poetry.

69

Secondly, digital technologies, according to Thompson, have aided the return of pattern
recognition and imagistic thought. I have attempted to demonstrate that the Internet and
digital culture as a whole goes further than introduce imagistic thought. The techno-social
spaces digital media creates effectively outers the inner realms of the psyche, dream
consciousness, and mythological thinking.
!

The deepest layer in which to understand digital culture is mythological consciousness,

which is Imagistic and decentralized. I am left to conclude that the hermeneutic which we may
best understand digital culture is the Imagination, as defined by psychologists like James
Hillman, and philosophers as Henry Corbin.
!

The tremendous techno-social changes that are taking place are arguably undoing the

course of Western cosmology, technologically re-introducing Corbins Imaginal World through

virtual realities, and the importance of mythological thinking through participating in digital
media.
!

My findings coincide with Thompson and Abrahams model of the emergent complex-

dynamical mentality, in which a planetary culture emerges as both new complex political and
social relationships through interconnected networks, and an animistic retrieval through
what Thompson describes as the planetization of the esoteric (Thompson 128).!

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5.0 Conclusion!
!

My thesis set out to understand the evolution of digital networks as they relate to an

emergent, planetary culture. My thesis was that digital culture was exhibiting three
characteristics, each interrelated: Self-organizing networks, nomadic lifestyle and a new
complex relation to time and space, and the retrieval of mythological consciousness and
animism. I concluded that the last characteristic: mythological/animistic, is the core means of
understanding digital culture, because the mythological consciousness and the imagination
compellingly exhibit the previous two characteristics.!
!

In section one, I introduce the concept of cultural evolution, and set the context of my

thesis as an examination of the current evolutionary bifurcation in human culture and

consciousness. This bifurcation is the shift from industrial nation-states to a planetary human
society, what Thompson describes as the Biospheric cultural ecology. I adapt Thompson and
Abrahams theoretical concept of the complex-dynamical mentality in order to analyze and
describe three core characteristics of digital culture: a) Networked/Interconnected, b)
Nomadic/Chaotic, and c) Mythological/Animistic.
!

In section two, I argue that digital culture, through its embodiment of organic networks

of communication, is toppling down hierarchical structures of government and political/social

philosophies.

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In section three, I examine digital culture as nomadic, through the lens of Eberts analysis

of the Internet as a nomadological technology, and Thompsons reflection on planetary

culture becoming nomadic in nature. I examine the new relationship to time and space that
digital culture exhibits, and give multiple examples, such as Burning Man and MMORPGs
(massive multiplayer online role playing games), and remixing art. This new relationship to
time and space, which digital culture allows, is consistent with Thompson and Abrahams
model of the complex-dynamical mentality, where linear time breaks down and cultures now
live in multiple temporalities and inhabit more than one space in any given moment.
!

Section four introduces mythological consciousness as a key characteristic of digital

culture, consistent with the Thompson-Abraham model. Mythological consciousness not only
retrieves the importance of images, pattern recognition and hieroglyphic thinking, but it also
outers the psyche into the physical world, rendering us in a techno-social dream space
through the internet and digital media. This new environment embeds us in reality where
inner and outer are blurred, and may eventually challenge Western cosmological stances. I
suggest an interpretation by Henry Corbin, who argues that the faculty of the Imagination has
been largely ignored by the West since the Renaissance, and has caused many of the mindbody problems thereafter. I also introduce the psychologist James Hillmans concept of the
polytheistic psyche to help us understand a new identity that is being formed through our
use of the internet and our extended virtual selves. Arguably, it is our psyche that is being
rendered material through technology.

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In conclusion, my study utilized the methodology of Thompson and Abraham to

consider digital culture as exemplifying an evolution of culture and consciousness in society. I

attempted to draw out three main characteristics of this new digital, planetary culture as
networked/rhizomatic, nomadic/chaotic, and mythological/animistic. I concluded with a
suggestion that the best means in which to understand digital culture, going forward, is a renewed
appreciation of mythological thinking which embodies and exemplifies all the characteristics of
digital culture at their core and will hopefully be the subject of further study.

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6. Annotated Bibliography:
1. Bostock, Cliff. "Cyberwork: The Archetypal Imagination in New Realms of Ensoulment." CG
Jung Page. N.p., 4 Dec. 2003. Web.An incredible article, Bostock suggests that the New Media
age represents an age of Imaginal eroticism; the creation of a new imaginal body, and the
internet as a legitimate realm of ensoulment. He argues persuasively for us to view the internet
as a form of hypnagogic trance, a dream like of creative participation, and suggests that we are
in the midst of creating a new, Imaginal body, in addition to our material bodies. There are a
number of other significant ideas posited, such as the cyborg as a new symbol for the
alchemical philosopher's stone, and a postmodern view of the archetype as a "vortex," similar
in many ways to rush of images we experience while online. I adapted this because it posited
many important relationships between mythological and Imaginal studies and the Internet
age.
2. Brien, Dolores. "The Star in Man: Jung and Technology." CG Jung Page. N.p., 5 June 2005.
Web. <http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=681&Itemid=40>.An essential Jungian interpretation
concerning the relationship between technology and the soul. Jung suggests that the machine
is actually a positive image of the soul: taking nature and transmuting it into its inner,
alchemical potential. The machine, therefore, is the symbol for the "star in man" of Paracelsus,
the alchemical laboratory of the Great Work. Brien also reminds us of Jung's thoughts

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concerning materialism: that the archetypes were forced to be projected into machines in an
age of mechanism and reductionism. These provided essential concepts for my understanding
of the relationship between the soul and technology, and encouraged me to see electronic and
digital media as a projection of soul.
3. Brockman, John. Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds
and Future. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011. Print.This is a series of short essays by a number
of public intellectuals, scientists and scholars on the impact of digital media on consciousness.
It covers neurological, anthropological and sociological perspectives. While not in-depth, it is
comprehensive. I used this text to draw examples of how the new media are resurrecting older
forms of consciousness, such as prehistorical and indigenous customs and behaviors.
4. Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology. New York: Penguin, 1976. Print.An essential
mythological text, perhaps Campbell at his best. Here Joseph Campbell lies down a foundation
of mythological thought through human history, leading us up into the present day. I adopted
many of Campbell's insights regarding the nature of myth and its importance to
understanding our ever-changing relationship with cosmos and psyche.
5. Chardin, Teilhard De, Julian Huxley, and Bernard Wall. The Phenomenon of Man. New York:
Harper, 1959. Print.This is a seminal text for insight on the evolution of consciousness and the
internet age. In it, Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit scholar and scientist posits the existence of the
"noosphere," or "thinking layer" of the Earth. Teilhard suggests that we are transitioning into a
planetary age where the world's cultures will be brought together in some great synthesis. He

75

suggests the concept of the Omega Point, and provides a complex evolutionary theory which
combines technology and consciousness in a teleological trajectory of life on Earth. I utilized
this text to adapt Teilhard's concept of the Noosphere into my own concept of the Noetic
Ecology.
6. Chorost, Michael. World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines and the
Internet. New York: Free, 2011. Print.This text hypothesizes the solution to our problems with
scattered attention with the internet by suggesting that we directly link our minds up to a
"global mind," through complex, neurological technology. This World Wide Mind would unite
everyone in a new consciousness where we could, as it were, bypass the gap between the
human organism and the lightning speed machines we are creating, ushering in a new
evolutionary epoch of human and machine cyborgs. This text, while mainly speculative, is a
good example of how technological culture mirrors most perfectly magic and supernatural
thinking of previous ages, promising to fulfill those magical abilities through science.
7. Corbin, Henry. "Mundus Imaginalis." Hermetic Library. Hakim Bey, n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2012.
<http://hermetic.com/bey/mundus_imaginalis.htm>.An essential text by the scholar Henry
Corbin on the Mundus Imaginalis, or the "Imaginal World," which Corbin is famous for
coining in modern esoteric literature. This world allegedly is the "intermediary" realm, the
Imagination, which Corbin suggests is a necessary ontological dimension of reality. This is a
crucial text for anyone interested in studying the Imagination, mythopoetic (or myth-making)
and a sound, philosophical argument in favor of an alternative conception of the human

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imagination. This text is also important for my research as I believe the Mundus Imaginalis is
synonymous with the advent of the Internet age. Through an analysis of the Imaginal World, I
demonstrate in my thesis that the Internet age is analogous to this ontological realm, and
represents an "eruption" of said realm into our modern, Western culture.
8. Davis, Erik. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York: Harmony,
1998. Print.This is an Internet study par-excellence. Erik Davis provides a marvelous
exploration of the mythological and magical contexts of the digital age. Suffice to say, Davis
provides a near insurmountable amount of connections between technology and the occult, the
unconscious dreams of techno-culture. I picked this text because it provides a grand study of
the digital age and its connections with esoteric motifs.
9. Dotson, Mark. "Soul Spelunker." Soul Spelunker. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2012. <http://
www.soulspelunker.com/>.This is an essential "hyper-text" by blogger and esotericist Mark
Dotson. Mark publishes regular articles that demonstrate the rise of what he calls the
"Rhizome Soul," whereby digital media are ushering in an era of Imagination and creativity,
and most of all, soul work. I developed a collaboration and conversation with Mark and
consider him a colleague who articulates a similar hypothesis as mine.
10. Ebert, John David. The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland &, 2011. Print.This is another essential text for my thesis. Ebert posits
that New Media, that is digital technology, is creating a "knowledge catastrophe," and a "mass
media extinction." In other words, electronic media are undoing hundreds of years of linear,

77

perspectival thought in Western civilization. Ebert hypothesizes that electronic media are
returning us to a world of dream-like technologies that resurrect an archaic form of
consciousness that is incompatible with the realm of rational thought and Euclidian spacetime. Like McLuhan, Ebert thinks this is effectively undoing Western civilization and bringing
back a mythic civilization in its place. I adopted this text in order to emphasis my own
thoughts on the resurrection of mythic and magical consciousness, the "archaic mind," in my
thesis.
11. Gablik, Suzi. Conversations before the End of Time. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
Print.An important text by an art critic and cultural writer, Gablik suggests that we are in the
midst of a "participatory turn," in human culture. She interviews a number of important
thinkers, art critics, and psychologists such as James Hillman on the coming participatory age.
I found this text to be especially relevant for my thesis, which also posits a participatory
culture realized by New Media, one which may re-introduce a sacred vision of the cosmos and
a human relationship with the divine.
12. Gebser, Jean. The Ever-present Origin. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1985. Print.This is a
phenomenal text that more readers in the Consciousness Studies program really should read. I
write this because Gebser is "in touch" with the etymological and experiential sources of
culture. In this text, he presents an entire phenomenology as vast as Jung's in which he posits
"structures of consciousness." Gebser is a modern evolutionary thinker who, ironically, does
not adapt the term "evolution" in his writing, but nonetheless demonstrates significant

78

"mutations" in human consciousness throughout history. I recommend Gebser more than most
other writers on cultural evolution because of his sensibility to postmodern thought: he is
overtly critical of positivism and Hegelian thought, and yet despite this he still provides a
coherent and beautiful picture of human consciousness that instills one with hope and depth
of vision. I adapted this work for my thesis because of his insights not only on older forms of
consciousness what he calls "magic" and "mythic" but also his insights for the modern
Internet age: the "integral" consciousness. I believe his descriptions of the integral structure are
not only parallel td the consciousness of the digital age, but help us understand it further and
deeper.
13. Hagerty, Lawrence C. The Spirit of the Internet. Tampa, FL: Matrix Masters, 2000. Print.This
text hypothesizes a similar view to my thesis: that the Internet is actually a "psychedelic" or
"Imaginal" medium. Hagerty claims that the Internet is actually a synthetic, or virtual sacred
plant, providing our civilization with much needed assistance for a planetary ecological and
economic crisis. Hagerty is a popular podcaster of the Psychedelic Salon, which hosts regular
interviews and discussions by countercultural authors and writers.
14. Harpur, Patrick. Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld. London: Viking Arkana,
1994. Print.This is quintessential Harpur: in this text he posits the existence of a "Daimonic
reality," adapting Jung's concept of the "reality of the psyche," and suggesting that many of the
contemporary world's issues arise from a repression, and crisis of soul. This is important
reading for anyone exploring parasychological phenomena and a cultural critique from the

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position of mythological, mythopoetic, and Imaginal traditions. I adapted his concepts to

describe the "loss of soul" and the means in which the soul can creep back in to our reality
through both scientific narrative and technological culture.
15. Harpur, Patrick. The Philosophers' Secret Fire. Victoria, Australia: Blue Angel Gallery, 2007.
Print.A longer narrative based on Harpur's earlier text, Daimonic Reality. This text explores in
detail the transition from an ensouled cosmos to the modern materialism, which rejects the
World soul at a great price. Harpur explores the crisis of modern civilization through the
tradition of Neoplatonism, Alchemy, and Mythology, suggesting that many of our world
problems are as a result of a loss of a daimonic perspective on reality. I adopted this text to
explain how the mythological narrative can inform the technological Western psyche.
Particularly. This pertained to a cosmological narrative in my thesis, and a historical
background.
16. Lilla, Jennifer. "Immanence: Divine within." Immanence: Divine within. N.p., n.d. Web. 20
Oct. 2012. <http://immanence.net/2012/03/23/the-culture-of-immanence-2/>.An important
study that hypothesizes we are entering the "age of Immanence," a time where the
transcendental spirit of Western civilization is sublimated in an immanent turn towards the
"depths" of spiritual realization, a decentralized society, and a soulful, participatory age. I
believe Lilla's work is an important contribution and synonymous with many of my own
insights on the internet age and creative soul work. It also relates to my hypothesis that the

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coming age is one of decentralized culture and an increasing participation with imaginal
worlds.
17. McLuhan, Marshall. "The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan." The Playboy Interview:
Marshall McLuhan. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2012. <http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/
mcluhanplayboy.htm>.This is a well-known and highly articulate interview with Marshall
McLuhan, of which Erik Davis cites in his book TechGnosis. McLuhan articulates his whole
philosophical vision of the evolution of media and consciousness, and provides a participatory
vision of the future, which he believes belongs to "electronic culture." McLuhan's ideas on the
future, are relevant to my hypothesis of the participatory consciousness that digital media are
inducing and encouraging.
18. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1994. Print.This is an essential Marshall McLuhan text where he explains most of the core
themes of his work. I picked this text because of his concept of "reversal," where electronic
technology deeply and unconsciously affects human consciousness, resurrecting the
importance of the image, the icon, and myth. McLuhan suggests that electronic culture is
creating a "Global Village" of participatory and holistic consciousness by "outering" the human
nervous system into a global, interconnected network. In many ways McLuhan foreshadows
the internet age by this book, even though he is mostly speaking of technologies up to the
television and early computers. Still a staple and landmark text for anyone studying media
and consciousness.

81

19. Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York:
Penguin, 2010. Print.This is an essential text for media studies and the internet age. Clay
Shirky demonstrates that the emerging age is one of intrinsic creative participation,
democratized by digital media. The millions of hours spent watching T.V. are rapidly being
syphoned off by digital media, which encourage not a passive, but active participatory society.
I incorporated this into my thesis in order to demonstrate the increasingly participatory and
creative characteristics of electronic media. Mainly, I appreciated its demonstration that we are
entering an age of creativity.
20. Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New
York: Penguin, 2008. Print.This is another important text by Clay Shirky, signaling an age of
decreasing bureaucratic competency and usefulness with the advent of the digital age. Shirky
carefully demonstrates the usefulness of bureaucracies as they evolved in recent history, and
then demonstrates their decline with the advent of the Internet age, where decentralized
networks and computer programs make self-publishing possible. This demonstrates the
decentralizing and "anarchic" effects of the social media revolution, with long-term
implications.
21. Thompson, William Irwin. The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and
Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Print.Another essential
Thompson text for the purposes of analyzing media. Thompson provides a brilliant synthesis
of cultural evolution, mythological and media studies to analyze the contemporary situation of

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the late 20th century electronic media. He proposes we are re-entering a mythological
consciousness, a kind of mythic retrieval by means cinema and electronic culture. In the
example of film, he asserts that movies retrieve religious experience like no religious ritual can
do. I adopted this text for my thesis because it affirms my hypothesis: that electronic media are
"resurrecting" an older form of consciousness that is most evident in Medieval and premodern
societies.
22. Thompson, William Irwin. The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the
Origins of Culture. New York: St. Martin's, 1981. Print.This is Thompson's "opus" par-excellence.
In it he articulates all of his positions on the relationship between myth and science, the soul
and story-telling, and the evolution of consciousness as it originates in the Paleolithic and
moves up into our modern day Western crisis. He concludes with Aurobindo's vision of an
evolutionary future, a mutation of consciousness where the Masculine and Feminine will be
brought together in some greater and higher integration. This is a foundational text for the
understanding of myth and cultural evolution; much under-rated by current dialogue on
cultural evolution (Such as Ken Wilber's work). I utilized this text as a foundational piece for
understanding mythopoetics thought and evolution.
23. Thompson, William Irwin. Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution. Great
Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 2001. Print.This text is an addendum to Thompson's "The Time
Falling Bodies Take to Light." In it, he offers a synopsis of the evolution of consciousness to be
utilized as a curriculum for students at the Ross School, or adopted for educators at large. I

83

utilized it for his description of the current planetary epoch, the Complex-Dynamical
Mentality, which he developed in collaboration with mathematician Ralph Abraham.

7. Works Consulted:
Abraham, Ralph H. Bolts from the Blue: Art, Mathematics, and Cultural Evolution. Rhinebeck NY:
!

Epigraph, 2011. Print.

Bostock, Cliff. "Cyberwork: The Archetypal Imagination in New Realms of Ensoulment." C.G.
!

Jung Page. N.p., 4 Dec. 2003. Web. <http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?

option=com_content&task=view&id=369&Itemid=40>.

Brockman, John. Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and
!

Future. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011. Print.

Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God. New York: Viking, 1959. Print.
Case, Amber. "The Cell Phone and Its Technosocial Sites of Engagement." Thesis. Lewis and
Clark College, 2007. Case Organic. Web. <http://oakhazelnut.com>
Case, Amber. The Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology. N.p.: Amber Case, 2012. Print.
Cheetham, Tom. All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings. Berkeley,
!

CA: North Atlantic, 2012. Print.

Chorost, Michael. World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines and the
!

Internet. New York: Free, 2011. Print.

Davis, Erik. "Erik Davis on Nature and Imagination." YouTube. YouTube, 04 May 2008. Web. 23
!

Nov. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLg49Yoz2kA>.

84

Davis, Erik. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York: Harmony,
!

1998. Print.

Ebert, John David. The Age of Catastrophe: Disaster and Humanity in Modern times. Jefferson:
!

McFarland, 2012. Print.

Ebert, John David. The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake.
!

Jefferson, NC: McFarland &, 2011. Print.

Feuerstein, Georg, and Jean Gebser. Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser-- an
!

Introduction and Critique. Lower Lake, CA: Integral Pub., 1987. Print.

Gebser, Jean. The Ever-present Origin. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1985. Print.
Harpur, Patrick. Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld. London: Viking !Arkana,
!

1994. Print.

Harpur, Patrick. The Philosophers' Secret Fire. Victoria, Australia: Blue Angel Gallery, 2007. Print.
Hillman, James. Re-visioning Psychology. New York: Harper Perennial, 1977. Print.
Jung, C. G., and Joseph Campbell. The Portable Jung. New York: Penguin, 1976. Print.
Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-biological Civilization. Reading, MA: Addison!

Wesley, 1994. Print.

Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. Print.
Lopez, Antonio. The Media Ecosystem: What Ecology Can Teach Us about Responsible Media
!

Practice. Berkeley, CA: Evolver Editions, 2012. Print.

85

McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the
!

World. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Lewis H. Lapham. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
!

Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall. "Marshall McLuhan - The World Is a Global Village (CBC TV)." YouTube.
!

YouTube, 24 Mar. 2009. Web. 23 Nov. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=HeDnPP6ntic>.

Pinchbeck, Daniel. Notes from the Edge times. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2010. Print.
Rushkoff, Douglas. "Think Occupy Wall St. Is a Phase? You Don't Get It - CNN.com." CNN.
!

Cable News Network, 01 Jan. 1970. Web. 23 Nov. 2012. <http://www.cnn.com/

2011/10/05/opinion/rushkoff-occupy-wall-street/index.html>.

Rushkoff, Douglas. "Web 2.0 Expo NY 09: Douglas Rushkoff, "Radical Abundance: How We
!

Get Past "Free" and Learn to Exchange Value Again." YouTube. YouTube, 19 Nov. 2009.

Web. 23 Nov. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHMvknT_uk4>.

Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin,
!

2010. Print.

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York:
!

Penguin, 2008. Print.

Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image. New York:
!

Viking, 1998. Print.

86

Steele, Robert David. The Open-source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust.
!

Berkeley, CA: Evolver Editions, 2012. Print.

Teilhard, De Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Print.
Thompson, William I., and Jeremy Johnson. "William Irwin Thompson Interview:
!

Consciousness, Occupy Movement and Planetary Culture." Evolandscapes. YouTube, 04

Jan. 2012. Web. 23 Nov. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1iFpoXF0-I>.

Thompson, William Irwin. Darkness and Scattered Light: Four Talks on the Future. Garden City,
!

NY: Anchor, 1978. Print.

Thompson, William Irwin. Transforming History: A New Curriculum for a Planetary Culture. Great
!

Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 2009. Print.

Vallance, Chris. "Money Matters in Eve Online Game." BBC News. BBC, 03 Mar. 2010. Web. 23
!

Nov. 2012. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8545268.stm>.

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science
!

and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991. Print.

"WoW Hits 12 Million Subs, Overtakes Population of Cuba and Greece." EpicToon Blog RSS.
!

N.p., 11 Oct. 2010. Web. 23 Nov. 2012. <http://www.epictoon.com/blog/

2010/10/11/!wow-hits-12-million-subs-overtakes-population-cuba-greece/>.