Paper short abstract:

This paper offers an archaeological and genealogical tracing, as well as a retrospective re-assessment, of cyberpunk countercultural “techno-spiritualism,” which arose out of an enchanted response to the digital revolution at the end of the 20th century.

Paper long abstract:

By the end of the 20th century, the digital revolution swept the western world, carrying significant implications for human culture and cognition. As a result of digital technology, persistent rates of message transmission and production gave way to a roaring flood of media and information that, in turn, had a fragmenting effect on stable cultural forms and modes of subjectivity and cognition. Thus, the postmodern cultural moment was, de facto, established.

In this paper, I argue that the cyberpunk counterculture of the nineteen eighties and nineties - which arose, in part, as a symbolic-cultural response to the technological configuration of the digital revolution - was one of the first cultural movements to conflate between the postmodern sublime (facilitated by the digital revolution) and the religious sublime. Cyberpunk theory and fiction often portrayed the chaotic techno-symbolic realm with recourse to religious rhetoric and symbolism. This is most apparent when considering cyberpunk imaginations of cyberspace, which was often depicted as a liminal, non-representational, ‘gothic,’ and chaotic realm of pure potentiality. Thus, according to cyberpunk imagination, the immersion in cyberspace (now conceptualised in an enchanted manner) enabled, among others, new forms of psychedelic experimentalism, magical empowerment and ritualism, digital sorcery, and, ultimately - mystical transcendence. Cyberpunk counterculture thus embodied a contradictory thematic binary, simultaneously depicting the dystopian and fragmentary aspects of postmodern techno-culture, while at the same time locating within it, utopian and quasi-religious emancipatory potential.

With recourse to diverse cultural fields - such as cybernetics, cyberpunk theory, science fiction, counter-cultural thought, and western esotericism – the first part of this paper will offer a genealogical and archeological tracing of cyberpunk techno-spiritualism. The second part of the paper will draw this genealogical tracing into the present moment, offering remarks on the complicated and multidimensional legacy of this cultural theme in contemporary times.