Making a Magical Internet: The 1990s, Futurism, and the Techno-Occult

Shira Chess, “Making a Magical Internet: The 1990s, Futurism, and the Techno-Occult,” paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Boston, MA, March 14, 2024.

Abstract: While there is a significant history of intersection between technology and the occult (Peters 1999) it is often linked to the distant past. For instance, Sconce (2000) historicizes the telegraph as being in conversation with the spiritualist movement. However, while perhaps less overt, popular esotericism did not dissolve entirely over the century that followed the spiritualist movement; it just became more diffused into mass culture (Gunn 2005). Building off the hallucinogenic counterculture of the 1970s, early Silicon Valley was an odd mix of unlikely characters that formed the zeitgeist of our contemporary digital culture (Turner 2006). Figures from this era such as Timothy Leary, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson mediated a path between the technological and the spiritual, often building upon older occult themes. Thus, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, popular esotericism affected internet counterculture with the notion of “reality hacking,” a broad term often used at the time to imply a combination of cyberpunk, psychedelics, and esotericism. In this paper, I explore how esotericism carved its way into two techno-counterculture magazines from the 1990s (Mondo 2000 and FringeWare Review). In turn, internet entrepreneurs and innovators such as Jaron Lanier, Mark Pesce, and Brenda Laurel (among others) gave interviews and wrote articles in these publications, demonstrating that they had one foot in the technological and another in the spiritual, further promoting beliefs with readers. In this, a kind of techno-occult was placed as an unlikely, yet inevitable futurism predicted by a subset of the early netizens that helped to shape the internet. Further, I suggest that the techno-occult from the 1990s had a far more reaching influence on how we broadly understand internet technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented realities, and cloud computing.