Erik Davis wrote TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information in 1998, and I interviewed him in the spring of 2025, a bit more than a year ago. But editing the full version of the long conversation we had, the interview feels further away in time than the book. AI was less scary than it is today, Elon Musk had not yet become the first trillionaire in history, and thinking about everything that has happened in those sixteen months gives me a little vertigo.
The 1998 of his book, on the other hand, feels far more familiar. Yes, as he pointed out during our conversation, he missed smartphones and social media—he didn't anticipate them, and he says so himself. But he did highlight an aspect that is still routinely overlooked: technology is never only a technical question. It is fully entrenched in human aspirations, fears, myths, dreams of salvation and of damnation. In order to understand the role of some cutting-edge technologies in our lives and our society, we need to consider all these aspects and put these novelties in the right perspective. How far back does that perspective go? Davis looks at ancient Gnosticism, the movements of the first Christian centuries that saw salvation in a secret spiritual knowledge about the true nature of the world — a world that, together with our body, is a trap.
There is a problem, of course: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A theory this powerful risks ceasing to be useful, because once you know what to look for, you find traces of gnosis everywhere — and gnosis is not the only possible interpretation. But it is interesting that we can find these traces at all: that the most rational, most secular, most engineering-minded project of our time keeps rhyming with a second-century heresy.
What follows is the full transcription of the conversation, with minor editing. If you are interested in the work of Erik Davis, you can read him directly in his newsletter, Burning Shore.
What do you mean by “Techgnosis”? We usually think of technology as something very rational, very technical — a very different means than spirituality. So where does this idea come from?
Well, it was definitely a provocative term, and it was a way of arguing, just with the title of my book, my main thesis: despite the fact that technology, and particularly media technology, which is what I was focusing on, are products of reason and a modern mindframe based on progress and development and industrial application and markets and capitalism — despite this, from a number of angles you could see the way that technologies are imagined, the way that they function, and the way that they offer what you could call ideologies, or ways of understanding the world, that have to be seen in relationship with the much longer history of religion, of mythology, and of a kind of esoteric or magical mysticism. So that was the big project. The word “Techgnosis” is a kind of provocative term to say: hey, we think we’re dealing with reason and science and capitalism and markets alone, but actually we’re still on the field of wrestling with these deeper, older, and more ambiguous kinds of questions.
And I also had a specific argument embedded in the same title about gnosticism proper. And while gnosticism is a big term — you can think about it in many different ways, and scholars argue about whether it’s even a valid term, at least historically — it’s played an enormously important role both in Christianity and in modern esoteric and mystical thought and modern Christian thought. So it has a wide range of meanings, but some associations with gnosis I wanted to suggest are being picked up and transformed by technology, particularly digital technology — in particular the association that not all gnostics, but many gnostics, have with a kind of radical dualism about the world: the world was fallen, the world was a trap, the world was not created by a benevolent deity but was actually a problem, a mistake, a prison, and that the work of the religious imagination is to escape. That escapist logic and that dualism about matter and spirit, I believe, gets reproduced quite obviously inside of technological culture. So even if they’re no longer using mystical terminology, they’re no longer thinking about the Pleroma (a term indicating the totality of divine powers — ed.), they’re no longer worried about how to interpret Genesis — the pattern is essentially the same.
I wrote that before the Matrix movie came out. So when the first Matrix movie came out, I was like, yeah, that’s it. That’s what I mean. This is a model: you’re trapped in an illusion, you have to escape, all of the delusions of desire are bound up with this, and it’s all technologically generated, and we’re actually being abused, and so you need to wake up and red-pill and get out of the illusion. That’s a very gnostic mythos. And so what I was seeing were the ways in which modern technoculture was reproducing those same patterns.
I wrote this book a quarter century ago now, and what’s kind of amazing, if not altogether pleasant, is that a lot of the things I talked about are even more visible now. They’re even more obvious. With the collapse of ideas of progress, with problems in the progressive ideas on the left, with a kind of reactionary and populist mood on the right — all bets are off now about your worldview — some of these patterns I identified decades ago are even more visible. They’re more visible with AI. They’re more visible with certain ideas of using technology to escape the earth and populate other planets. And that’s also, to some extent, obviously a Christian story as well. So there’s all sorts of ways that we haven’t escaped this basic situation — which is that even though our scientists, and many philosophers, and many technologists are still very physicalist and materialist, they don’t believe in spirits, they’re not interested in God, they don’t think religion is valuable — they’re increasingly in the minority in general. And even in that context, the things that they do, and the way it gets taken up in society, and even to some extent their own motivations, I believe have to be seen against this larger, longer story about our inevitable embeddedness in religious stories — stories of transformation, of salvation, of damnation. We are fundamentally religious in the broad sense of the term, I believe. So that’s a lot of what I was trying to get at with the term.