Erik Davis on Counterculture and Technology’s Hidden Mysticism

Transmission 071: Interview with Erik Davis

Erik Davis is an American writer, scholar, journalist, and public speaker born on June 12, 1967, in Redwood City, California. His work spans various fields, including rock criticism, cultural analysis, and esoteric mysticism. Davis is known for his book “Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information,” as well as his writings on California counterculture, Burning Man, the human potential movement, and Philip K. Dick. His books include “Led Zeppelin IV,” “The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape,” and “Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica.” Davis has also contributed to numerous other books and publications, covering topics like art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality. In addition to writing, Davis has given talks at universities, conferences, and festivals worldwide. He has taught at several institutions, including UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and Rice University. Davis hosted the podcast “Expanding Mind” on the Progressive Radio Network for a decade and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015.

This interview is also published on the issue no. 02 of our free digital magazine RetroFuturista.

Erik Davis’ official site

What were your earliest influences in music and writing, and how did they shape your creative outlook? Can you recall a specific moment or experience from your childhood that ignited your passion for cultural analysis and esoteric mysticism?

I guess it was probably reading. When I was very young, six or seven, we read Tolkien’s The Hobbit in grammar school. My friends and I got very into it. We used to walk home through a canyon in Southern California – imagine a dry desert arroyo with bushes and shrubs. We’d go down into the canyon and climb up the other side to get home. It became a place for fantasy. It was Mirkwood, and we were going through Mirkwood. I had a sense of how reading and fantasy can map onto your experience, especially nature, friendship, and collective exploration. That stayed with me. Reading was always a big source of things.

Music too. I wrote a book about Led Zeppelin. When I was 12-14, I was really into Zeppelin. They were my favorite because there was something enchanted about them. There were references to Tolkien, and spooky songs that felt like horror movies. That was a sense of listening that was magical and enchanted.

Another big influence was the Grateful Dead, when I was 15-16. It was about immersion in a whole social world, with different groups and a quasi-religious approach to dancing, psychedelics, and gathering together to celebrate. A Grateful Dead show is a journey from happy to tragic to psychedelic. That was a very important influence.

Being a cannabis user from a young age, and a psychedelic user, I was identified with that world. It never left me; I always stayed interested in it, even as I matured in other ways.

What inspired you to start writing for Nadine magazine at Yale, and how did this experience influence your career trajectory?

That’s the next stage. I grew up in California, going to Grateful Dead shows, living by the beach. It’s permissive California, a bit new age, intellectual hippie. Then I go to Yale, which is very different – the other side of the country, an elite school with people from prep schools, future bankers, cabinet members and Supreme Court lawyers. I had a schizophrenic experience there. I was into intellectual work, writing papers, studying literature and philosophy.

In the 80s, there were many student magazines. Some people started a music culture magazine called Nadine. It was significant because in the 1980s and 90s, there was an idea that you could take pop culture seriously and use cultural tools from sociology and literary theory to talk about it. Nadine combined that intellectual interest in popular culture with the rich, non-academic culture of rock criticism.

I wrote a piece about Nick Cave, who I was obsessed with. Writing about music became my id – I’m writing elegant, intellectual papers for class, then I could turn and write about rock music and just go crazy. The people at Nadine liked that and introduced me to other rock writing, especially Lester Bangs. It gave me an excuse to write in a different way.

Nadine became as important to me at Yale as writing literary papers. When I graduated, I thought maybe I wouldn’t be a grad student, maybe I’d just go to New York. I didn’t know I was going to be a freelance writer, but soon enough, I became one writing rock criticism. It became my avenue out of Yale, different from going to graduate school. I’m still friends with people from Nadine, and many rock critics who went through it went on to do stuff in New York and other places. It ended up being quite an important experience.

What drew you to focus on Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson in “High Weirdness”? How did their writings reflect and shape the cultural shifts of the 1970s?

I encountered Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson in the same summer of 1985, after my first year at Yale. My girlfriend from California was at Berkeley, and I went to live with her that summer. It was a very influential time.

I was living in Berkeley, still the tail end of the hippie freak era, lots of weirdos. I lived in a student co-op called Barrington Hall, notorious for being anarchic, with a squat feel – very druggie, punk rock, speed, heroin use, psychedelics, the whole thing. That summer, I came across Illuminatus in local bookstores and started to read Robert Anton Wilson. Someone at Barrington Hall turned me on to Philip K. Dick.

I became an obsessive Philip K. Dick reader and wrote about him in my philosophical work at school. I was interested in postmodernism and simulation theory. Jean Baudrillard was important. I was thinking about the end of reality as it gets circulated through technological mechanisms. I was also reading a lot of Gnosticism. All these things came together as a fruitful way to look at Philip K. Dick. I wrote about him for my senior thesis, which did well.

Robert Anton Wilson was very influential philosophically. He taught me how to be in a world of multiple realities, not worry about making them all fit together, and move through different frameworks – a creative as opposed to nihilistic postmodernism.

Terence McKenna was different. I met him in the early 1990s. He was part of my world of alternative writing and psychedelic culture in the 1990s, and he was a friend. That was a more psychedelic decade for me.

I was going to write my PhD about Philip K. Dick, his exegesis and mystical experience. At the last minute, I decided I didn’t want to spend years inside his brain. When I pulled out, I saw a pattern where these guys, along with others like John Lilly, had strange experiences in the early 1970s. I realized there was a story to tell about the early 1970s, how they were different from the 60s, and how they made space for radical, mystical, psychotic experiences that seemed symptomatic of that era and went on to be very influential.

So that became my project – about California, the 70s, and the stories of these gentlemen as examples of a larger phenomenon.

How do you think Philip K. Dick would respond to today’s technological, social and cultural environment?

A lot of people agree that Dick’s work predicts the future as well as anyone, possibly better. Not because he specifically anticipated concrete developments in technology or society, but because he anticipated what it would feel like to be subject to the dystopian and apocalyptic features of our moment. In that sense, he would recognize this place as anticipated in some of his texts.

On the other hand, I suspect he may have fallen down some crazy rabbit hole by now. He was susceptible to paranoia and bizarre ideas. While he changed his mind often, I could imagine if he had lived, he might have found himself in some weird reality tunnel or strange movement of followers. I don’t imagine it would have been rosy, given how crazy things are.

He would not have been unfamiliar or unprepared for our moment. He would have been fascinated by certain developments, but he might have also felt very tragic. Towards the end of his life, he was very aware of environmental issues. He thought a lot about the wounding ofearth and the tragic situation with the environment and could get sentimental about the need for apocalyptic change in a good way.

So, it would have been really interesting to see how he’d respond.

How do you define “techgnosis,” and what are its core principles?

Techgnosis has been around for a long time and people still read it. They still translate it. So I got something right.

There are a number of core ideas. One is that new technologies release experiences, ideas, and feelings that have an irrational or even esoteric or religious dimension to them, almost whether we want them to or not. I see human beings as having a core religious, spiritual, or ecstatic dimension that they manage one way or another, and that gets bound up with technological development and media.

Even though from one angle we are becoming more technological, more disenchanted, there’s another kind of enchantment, not necessarily good, that emerges at the same time. That’s one of the major themes and why it’s still relevant today, even though it was written over 25 years ago, in a very different technological era. This situation hasn’t changed and has gotten more obvious with the rise of conspiracy theory, online esotericism, and a sense that ordinary pragmatic rationality is not sufficient to capture the complexity, nuance, wonder, and terror of our lives.

The non-rational side of things is very much on the table, even among rationalists. In Silicon Valley, you’ll find many tech people who at some point in their life were very rational, maybe atheists who believed only in reason, and they realized the end of it. So they start experimenting with meditation or psychedelics or tarot.

This kind of shift is a very techgnosis kind of shift. That’s the main thrust of it.

How do apocalyptic dreams and fantasies manifest in modern technoculture?

One example is the idea of a singularity. It’s popular in Silicon Valley and among tech watchers – the notion that there’s a moment on the historical horizon where perhaps artificial intelligence manifests a fully capable AGI that’s able to program itself, or some other kind of bifurcation point. At that point, human history as we understand it is no longer recognizable. It becomes a point of no return or maximum confusion or novelty, in Terence McKenna’s sense, maximum novelty.

This idea, which people can come to using reason and technological understanding, looks and smells like a religious apocalypse. It’s an interesting connection – things that are not religious end up reproducing patterns of ideas, feelings, and expectations that resonate with apocalyptic ideas.

Another example is the spread of simulation theory. When people saw The Matrix movies, it was a funny idea in a movie or comic book. Now more people are accepting it to some degree, which is another kind of apocalyptic thinking. It pulls the rug out from under any claim of the substance of this particular reality and resonates with religious and spiritual ideas about illusion or the delusional quality of ordinary reality.

A more concrete example is how technology fuels the speed-up and hyper-development of Western civilization at a point where we can clearly see how that process is undermining the coherence of the environment and the planet’s capacity to sustain these developments. There’s always been an apocalyptic dimension to capitalism in that it’s constantly undermining the previous arrangement of society and exploring new places to exploit or transform.

The fact that AI and cryptocurrencies require so much energy is destroying whatever gains we had in terms of energy resources. If we don’t have some kind of magical energy breakthrough , which may happen, we’re in an ironic situation where we’re fueling the development of technological systems that will be extremely disruptive to most people’s lives and minds within 10 years or so.

How do you see the intersection of technology and mysticism evolving in the future?

There are crazy ideas, weird cults, and feedback mechanisms that attract people into a wide variety of worldviews. You have altered states produced partly through technologies, partly through drugs, connected to certain ideologies. Some of these ideologies will be left-wing, some New Age, some right-wing. Things are just going to get crazier.

At the same time, I think there’s an awakening process happening as methods, tools, teachings, and teachers are able to communicate possibilities of consciousness that are more authentically related to the living core of various mystical and religious traditions. So there’s a kind of genuine awakening process happening. It’s not just crazy stuff. These things are interlinked.

It will be interesting to see if there becomes a very anti-technology kind of religious neo-Luddite attitude. It’s not clear whether there will be some kind of refusal to go into the machine or an anti-AI movement with a religious logic to it. It’s hard to see the future.

It’s very complex and there’s a lot going on. But I think it’s clear that as conventional forms of authority, knowledge, and education break down, there’s more room for certain aspects of mystical approaches or cultures to emerge. I don’t think they’ll look familiar, but they’ll be part of the story.

What initially sparked your interest in the history and art of LSD blotter paper? And what’s the cultural significance of LSD blotter paper within the psychedelic community?

I’ve been interested in psychedelics for decades as a place to work and think. It was an interesting place to be with other cultural figures trying to think about the implications of psychedelic experience, learning about the plants, the molecules, remembering the histories of drug cultures as something important. Within that story, LSD is obviously extremely important.

It’s still the most influential and important psychedelic in the 20th century. It doesn’t have quite the same rock star status that it did in the 60s, 70s and even 80s for various reasons. But I’ve always been interested in that history, particularly because it’s also a history of the modern world, of the technological world. It’s not a mushroom in a mountain in Mexico or a brew cooked up in the jungles of the Amazon. It’s a pharmaceutical product, cooked up in the middle of Europe during World War Two.

LSD plays an extra role in the modern world that’s always fascinated me. Blotter, the papers used to distribute LSD often covered with printed, silkscreened, or hand-drawn images, is a kind of marginal media that nobody really paid much attention to as a medium. It’s like poster art or comic books or postage stamps – it has its own character, history, and things to say.

I was in a fortunate situation through a friendship with Mark McCloud, who has the world’s largest archive of street blotter, as well as more recent forms of blotter done more for art than drug delivery. We decided to do a book.

It was a great treat because nobody really paid much attention to it. It’s like this particular psychedelic medium hiding in plain sight. For many people who grew up with LSD, it has a strong connection and sense of meaning, adventure, and goofiness.

It’s a fun project to take something not taken seriously and designed to disappear. It’s like an art medium designed to disappear, like food – you make a fancy meal, and it’s just going to go away. You make fancy blotter, it looks beautiful, and it’s just going to be eaten. There’s a poignancy and humor to it that’s very representative of LSD.

Understanding how blotter works – its humor, satire, griminess, grittiness, and ephemeral quality – points to something specific about the LSD experience that I think is still really important. As we’re taking psychedelics more seriously, we really have to wrestle with the message and meaning of LSD a little more than we are.

Is there any equivalent of blotters in our contemporary culture?

People still make blotter, more to trade as art objects than to carry LSD, although LSD is still often carried on blotters. I’m not an NFT fan, but maybe that becomes some equivalent.

Some other drugs have icons associated with them. There’s a history of MDMA pills going back to the 90s that have been pressed with images. There’s a similar quality there. Although for me, part of the interest in blotter is that it’s print media. There’s something special about print and its histories, its dynamics.

If we look at image cultures today that have that connection to a subculture, I’m not so sure about equivalents. The ecology or environment within which we consume media has changed dramatically in the last quarter century. It’s changed the rules about a lot of things. It’s hard to have anything that’s kind of hidden away, but also popular. LSD blotters – there were hundreds of thousands, millions of hits printed every year for decades. But they were mostly unknown unless you were in those worlds or you were a cop. And even most cops didn’t know much about it. That sense of a subculture where you could have media very important inside a world, but not visible outside, is very different now.

There are pockets online of people trading images in an esoteric way. But everything is more available, more visible, and more part of the circulation. Everybody wants everything to go viral or to be seen. This changes the logic of media and images.

Instagram has allowed something extraordinary to happen with the circulation of images. But I’m not that intimate with it, so I can’t speak specifically about how esoteric images are functioning online today.

There are some kinds of images that have been very potent, not always in a pleasant way. If you follow the story of Pepe the Frog,  and what happened to him, it shows there are ways that images can still be very meaningful and subculturally identified and deployed in intense ways. Again, not always to the betterment of humanity.

But other than that, I think it’s hard to draw a strict equivalence to blotter paper in contemporary culture.

Photos courtesy of Erik Davis

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others