tecnomagia

Hermano Vianna me passou a dica do Techgnosis:

Ranging from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to the Internet, TechGnosis peels away the utilitarian shell of technology to reveal the mystical and millennialist expectations that permeate the history of technology, and especially information technology. The book shows how the religious imagination, far from disappearing in our supposedly secular age, continues to feed the utopian dreams, apocalyptic visions, digital phantasms, and alien obsessions that populate today’s “technological unconscious.” In turn, TechGnosis also shows how the language and ideas of the information society have shaped and even transformed many aspects of contemporary spirituality. In the end, the book gestures towards a vision of “the network path”: a global, pluralistic perspective capable of grappling with some of the forces that are currently tearing us apart: spirit and science, modernity and nihilism, technology and the human.

Duende fala n’O Caderno do Cluracão sobre o conceito de Subcriação de Tolkien.

Subcriação é o poder de conceber, com o uso da imaginação e da manipulação quase mágica da linguagem (idéias e conceitos), uma dimensão outra de realidade, com entidades várias, cuja existência é conjurada unicamente pela capacidade de imaginação do ser. Trata-se de conjurar a existência de algo antes inexistente, ou antes inexistente naquela forma, pela pura capacidade de imaginá-lo e experienciá-lo em sua imaginação. Assim concebido e trazido à realidade (mesmo que apenas a uma realidade secundária), este ente passa a existir e deve sua existência unicamente ao poder imaginador (subcriador) de seu imaginante.

Haraway_CyborgManifesto.html

The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Fathers ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile — a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.