The clear distinction between old and new technology is based in the digital discourse on the assumed compliance of the latter with the laws of nature. Nicholas Negroponte asserts that cyberspace and information networks “look and feel . . . much more biological, taking [their] character more from flora and fauna than from the unnaturally straight-line geometry in artifacts of human design” (Negroponte 1997). Negroponte is able to distinguish between two types of technology—natural and unnatural—and by that he achieves two goals: first, naturalizing and reifying network technology and, second, fending off a generalized critique of technology; technology might not have been emancipatory and benevolent in the past, but that is only because it has been unnatural. That has now changed with network technology.
Theologizing Technology: Technology as Transcendence
The rhetorical association of technology to nature evokes not only “truth,” “reality,” and “inevitability” but also appeals to our sense of transcendence as well and to the perception of nature as a secular sublime (Nye 1994). Technology, according to the digital discourse, is the locus of transcendence. By transcendence I mean here not only the overcoming of social conflicts and human ordeals by technological means (this type of “profane transcendence” was discussed in previous chapters) but also a more metaphysical experience of technology as elevating humans and the social to a realm beyond the mundane. According to the digital discourse, information, communication, and computing are not only the bases of contemporary society; they are metaphysical and transcendental as well.
AND GOD CREATED COMP<sub>U</sub>TERS
In a special issue of Wired about the intersection of science and religion, Kevin Kelly proposes that the universe, God, and its creation are all a computer. The title of the article—“God Is the Machine”—puts this assertion quite bluntly. Evoking the opening verse of the bible, the subtitle reads, “In the beginning there was 0. And then there was 1.” Thus
Network Cosmology and the Exhaustion of Criti<sub>q</sub>ue
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