Hakim Bey

A War in Heaven

As a historian of religion, it is extremely obvious to me that the internet is a 
religious phenomenon. This may not have occurred to everyone who is closer to it 
than I am. First of all, all technology can be analyzed according to religious 
principles. When I speak about religion, I am not speaking from the point of 
view of religion. All technology is a religious phenomenon: Why? Because unless 
you belong to the human condition, you cannot have technology. What is the human 
condition? What makes a human being different from an animal? I would say 
consciousness or self consciousness. One of the symptoms of consciousness, or 
self consciousness, is technology and it is impossible, structurally or 
historically, to separate technology from consciousness when we try to imagine 
what it is to be human. As soon as we see evidence in the archeological record 
of a Simian or a similar creature that we could identify as human, then the only 
reason why we do so is because there are some broken stones next to the bones, 
that look like they may have been intended to be tools. What separates animals 
from humans is technology. From one point of view, that is religion. Because you 
cannot have technology unless you can extricate consciousness outside the body. 
If you cannot understand that consciousness is something which projects outward 
into the world, you cannot create the prosthesis, the extension of the body, 
which is technology, be it a broken stone, or a computer. Because there is this 
intimate relationship between technology and consciousness, technology itself is 
always threatening to take the place of religion. Technology is always becoming 
confused with religion— the Marxists used to call this reification. It means 
making an intuition a “thing,” making it “thingy,” or giving it “thinginess.” If 
we want to talk about the Greek word technê, it would be useful to describe the 
whole range of prosthesis of consciousness. But, if we want to talk about 
technology, then we are moving into different ground.

Technology is technê plus logos in Greek. Technê, the technique or the mechanic 
principle plus the logos, or the word. If we are trying to find out what the 
first technology is, in the strict sense of the word, you would have to answer 
that it is writing, which adds the mechanic to the word. Therefore, there is no 
technê, but technologia. Then we see the process of reification that works 
immediately here. Writing itself defines words. Words do not define writing, but 
immediately a paradoxical feedback comes up, where writing defines words and 
words define things. Logically, it should be the other way around, but we know 
that language is a double edged sword. As a means of communication, language 
leaves a great deal to be desired. Heath Bunting said that “communication 
doesn’t always communicate.” Everyone can understand this immediately: a map is 
not a territory. As soon as you mistake the word Budapest on the map for the 
city of Budapest, you are in deep trouble. You have got a cognitive problem. If 
you want to talk about love, or patriotism, or valor, or truth, or 
communication, or the net, or freedom, or any words like that, which have very 
few references in the world of thinginess, you have a problem. We reify those 
concepts and solidify them in writing, in sign systems. Then they influence 
consciousness as you grow up, as a child learning language. All of these signs 
are imprinted. Even the alphabet, alphabetic writing, which is supposedly is not 
free of all images.

When you move from the alphabet to binary writing, this is also not free of 
images. It is a very simple image system, black–white yes–no, but it is still an 
image system. The computer is still a machine of inscription, it is still a 
writing machine, in fact for most of you it is just a glorified typewriter. 
There is going to be a gradual process in the realm of technology of the 
reduction of the sign: from the complexity of a representational picture to the 
abstraction of a binary sign system which apparently no longer contains 
pictures, although we can see that the pictures are just more deeply buried. The 
Greek word for symbol, symbolon, actually means an object that is broken in 
half. That is why communication systems are not monodic or unitary, they are 
always dual or diadic. I prefer to say that all communications are diadic, it 
involves twoness. There must be a speaker and a hearer, then these relations can 
be reversed. The breaking of the symbolon symbolizes the split in human 
consciousness itself. A split between the animal intimacy that we can 
hypothesize as our Simian heritage, and the idea that consciousness and self are 
two different things. As soon as that split occurs we have a symbolic system at 
work, where one thing stands for another. The same holds true for all language 
systems, all musical systems, all dance systems, anything which can possibly 
communicate on any level whatsoever. These are all symbolic systems. Language is 
a symbolic system. All computer programs are symbolic systems. It is important 
to remember that in any symbolic system this split, the doubling of 
consciousness, the hypothesis of consciousness which is actually prosthesis, 
obtains something which is outside the body, and which can act in the world. In 
the history of religion, this desire for lost intimacy, this desire to recapture 
unified consciousness, is the cause of yet a further split. We see the whole 
idea of sacrifice that is meant to heal this wound in the cosmic structure. 
Sacrifice appears very early in human religion, at least as early as 
agricultural systems in the Neolithic Age, if not sooner, and it is violent. 
Initially, it probably involves human sacrifice. Whatever is religious is also 
inherently violent, because it’s based on the split. The split consciousness, 
the act of splitting is violent, and so the act of repairing the split is also 
violent. In fact, the word religion, religio, in Latin, means to relink, which 
is really the same as the word in Hindi yogo which means yoke, as the yoke that 
connects two oxen. Religion itself, at its very base, is about this relinking of 
consciousness. It is an attempt to over come the split of consciousness and to 
unify what was doubled and make it one. This is a very violent process 
throughout human history, and it is not an accident that religions were 
associated with violence.

Most religions are systems of death consciousness because they posit a radical 
split between body and spirit, but they are no longer upset about it. They are 
not interested in reconciling the body and the spirit anymore. They are 
interested in eliminating one of those factors, the body, and perpetuating the 
other, the spirit, or mind, or perhaps information. So you have spirit and 
heaven at the top—and nature, body, and earth at the bottom. It becomes 
associated with the feminine; the catatonic, the chaotic, the uncultured, the 
uncultivated. It is associated with tribal societies, with hunting and 
gathering, with everything primitive, with everything despicable. Mind or 
spirit, which is now separated from the body, is associated with maleness; with 
power, with structure, with culture, with civilization, and with religion 
itself. What is in between is now only a technology of the sacred, the actual 
workings of religion itself. The ritual, the sacrifice, the priesthood, which is 
now a completely privileged closed off class; you now have class structure.

We now have the pyramidal structure, we now also have cyberspace. We have the 
concept of the virtual. Heaven or paradise, the mind principle, separated from 
the body, becomes cyberspace. Cyberspace is a version, paradoxical, or even a 
parody, of heaven. It’s a place where your body is not present, but your 
consciousness is. It is a place of immortality, of not being mortal, of having 
over come death. There is a view that cyberspace is a salvational reality, that 
it saves us from our crude, shit-filled, rotting bodies, and that we will 
transcend into an angelic sphere of pure data where we will download 
consciousness and never die. If you have read William Gibson, the image is very 
clear: you have the hacker, who is jacked in, literally jacked into the 
computer. The body is rotting, but the cyberpersona is clearly immortal. The 
problem is that what we have been promised is transcendence through 
technomediation. It is a false transcendence. If we have a god, as in some forms 
of paganism, that has a material nature, the god is a rebirth. We will call that 
a eminent form of deity, as opposed to transcendent. What we are being offered 
in the net is not eminence, not a true eminence, but a false transcendence. It 
is a dangerous, Gnostic fallacy. Cyberspace is spurious immortality.

This brings me to the point of the military aspect of the net, because the net 
is actually a war in heaven. What else would the phrase “information war” mean 
than a war in heaven? A war that would take place in this spurious heaven, this 
false transcendence of cyberspace. We know that the net originates as a military 
space. The original ARPAnet was designed in order to avoid the physical 
disruption that would have been involved in atomic explosion. The net itself is 
a very Gnostic invention since it transcendentalizes matter in a very rapid and 
effective way. Basically, we are looking at a war in heaven. Kevin Kelly likes 
to say that this technology is out of control. This is bullshit, it’s not out of 
control. It’s something very different and much more interesting. A brilliant 
French anthropologist, Pierre Clastres, wrote one book called Society Against 
the State, and another, The Archeology of Violence. I follow his thinking very 
closely on a number of points. He makes a distinction between two kinds of 
warfare in human history: there is primitive war and classical war. These are 
not at all the same thing. It cannot even be said that the classical war is a 
development of the primitive war, it’s rather a betrayal of primitive war. If 
the sacred is violent, then violence is not always negative, unless we believe 
in pacifism. There are certain kinds of violence which are positive, and 
primitive warfare is positive in this one sense. Clastres uses the metaphor of 
centrifugal and centripetal. The centrifugal machine is one that pushes out from 
the center, and the centripetal machine is one that pulls in toward the center. 
Clastres believed that this was a chosen path on the part of these societies. 
Consciously or unconsciously, these societies developed certain social functions 
to centrifugalize power, they don’t want power, they refuse power. They want a 
society, but they don’t want the state. They don’t want the centralization of 
power, they don’t want class structure, they don’t want economic hierarchy. They 
want egalitarianism, they want democracy.

Some explanations have given the switch over of the hunting, gathering societies 
that are egalitarian without exception and do not practice sacrifice, with 
agricultural societies that are nonegalitarian and almost invariably do practice 
sacrifice. We are still living in the neolithic age. We are still basically 
living in the agricultural–industrial period and we still practice sacrifice. If 
you don’t believe it, come to New York State, where they just reintroduced the 
death penalty, a symbolic sacrifice. At some point primitive warfare turns into 
classical warfare, and here is the interesting thing about the net. The net is 
born much more like a primitive warfare structure than a classical one, because 
of that strange Gnostic necessity to avoid atomic disintegration. The net 
suddenly turns into a space in which power is dispersed rather than centralized. 
They thought this was a brilliant strategy. It turned out that they lost control 
of the net almost instantly. That recentralization of power is going to have to 
come from outside the system.

This is my point about Kelly’s thesis. That a technology, which is out of 
control as long as you study only the technology, is nothing new. The postal 
system is out of control. I can get much better security with snailmail now than 
I can on the net, that is one of the reasons I still don’t own a computer. If 
somebody proved to me that I can really get top security by using a computer and 
I can send my evil revolutionary messages everywhere with complete safety, I 
would do it. All the people I knew in the sixties and seventies who were phone 
phreaking have moved on to the net. The telephone is so oldfashioned, it is just 
like hot and cold running water. No one is thinking about it at all, there is no 
mumbo jumbo in the telephone. There is no magic left in the telephone. The magic 
is all in the net, so that’s what everybody wants to control. Mumbo jumbo is 
power, and if you control the base of a basic symbolic exchange system, you have 
power. Those who control the definition of words have power. Those who control 
the means of communication between you and me have power over both of us. Where 
is this control going to come from, if the system itself, the technology itself, 
is out of control. Because it was designed to be out of control, then the 
control has to come from outside the system. The internet is not heaven, the 
internet is not paradise. The internet is not safe, in terms of control, simply 
because as a closed system it represents the decentralization of power 
structures. That power can just reach in from out side, and that’s exactly what 
the Church of Scientology can do. For example, the Church of Scientology can 
kill you, or disperse all your secrets, they can track you to your house and 
break in and smash your computers. And if you think that the Church of 
Scientology is powerful, wait until you hear from the U.S. government. And if 
you think that the U.S. government is a little outdated, and that as John Perry 
Barlow says, that governments are not the corporate entities ideally designed to 
control the new technology, then wait until you hear from AT&T, because they are 
designed to control. It is far worse.

Since 1989, there is not an ideological struggle in the world. The night the 
Berlin Wall fell, I turned on the television and I heard that the Cold War was 
over and we won. History itself, which involved the dialectical struggle, 
according to Hegel, is now over. The Cold War is over and we, the capital, won. 
There is now only one ideology that disguises itself as nature. Once again we 
have a false transcendence of bringing together culture and nature, in a totally 
phony way, where you can establish a more efficient control mechanism. The net 
can be controlled from outside, through fear, through terror. The net is 
extremely susceptible to terror, because the net is a religious phenomenon and 
religion is inherently violent, the sacred is inherently violent, and invariably 
both are involved in fear, in terror. That’s why the net is perfect ground, 
Grund, in German, for the passion play that is going to occur within five years, 
maybe within the next five minutes. The net can be controlled from outside, and 
therefore, resistance must be organized from outside.

So far, we’ve only had virtual resistance, and actually that is no more than a 
spectacle of resistance. If we don’t organize on the basis of politics, and of 
economy, then the net has no future as a space for human freedom. No future. So 
far, I don’t see that organizing going on. I see that the most brilliant minds 
that are involved in the net are all involved in cryptography and PGP, and 
various kinds of mechanisms, which are meant to protect the net from takeover 
from within the net, but that’s not what the danger is coming from. Sooner or 
later, some body will figure it out and it better be us because if it isn’t, 
then it’s going to be AT&T with six hundred channels and a hundred home shopping 
networksx. Or riskier, are those heavy-footed, jack-booted governments, or the 
Church of Scientology. So the net is not heaven, the body must be present. I 
love Heath Bunting’s point that, without the presence of body, this whole thing 
is just a curious form of metaphysical schlock with cream. Whoever understands 
the net as religion, whoever understands the problem with body and reembodiment, 
will have a tremendous edge, or at least gain an edge in the struggle of whether 
the net remains a space of potential freedom, or whether it doesn’t. Whoever can 
understand this, whoever can understand the reason why the state will be the 
first to lose control of the net?

I would like to think about the economics for a minute. We see that money is 
also going to heaven. Billions of billions of billions of billions of billions 
of whatever units of money are there, floating around in cyberspace. Money is 
now a purely transcendental principle, it’s a symbolic system, it’s a symbolon, 
just like any other symbol. It is broken into two halves and has meaning only if 
the two halves are reunited. That’s where money begins, precious metal, which 
has no inherent value whatsoever. The relationship between gold and silver, from 
the start, is based on the lunar solar cycle. It is pure symbolism. The first 
coins were temple souvenirs. This is historically known to numismatics experts 
studying the history of coinage. The first coins are souvenirs, they are picked 
up in temples and that coin, that image, becomes valuable as nostalgia. You can 
take them home and trade one of them for a cow, because it’s like mumbo jumbo. 
It’s called JuJu. Mumbo jumbo and JuJu are African words for mysterious power. 
The coins themselves, which still have a memorable, valuata aspect, are made out 
of precious metal, which is gradually added to less precious metal. Presume 
coins are largely symbolic, they could change to paper which represents the 
coins. Then in 1933, in America, the link between the paper and the precious 
metal is cut, paper is now floating free. It’s a reference without any referent, 
and we now have purely abstract money, ready to jack in. Ready to ascend to 
heaven, to the heaven of cyberspace, and that’s exactly what’s happened. Ninety 
percent of all commercial transactions are electronic and do not involve any 
form of paper. They are in a world where imagination and electricity interrelate 
in some strange and metaphysical way. Coins become papers become absence. 
Finally, there is an absence itself, valued as a form of money, in a kind of a 
reverse alchemy, changing precious metals into nothing.

In this regard, my favorite story is about the alchemist, Paracelsus, who was 
traveling through Germany and was invited into the court of one of those petty 
German princes of the fifteenth century, who said, “Oh, Mr. Paracelsus, great to 
meet you.We’ve heard so much about you. You’re such a great scientist, we’d like 
to set you up with your own laboratory here.” I don’t remember the details, but 
Paracelsus says, “Oh you must set me up in a laboratory! What do you want me to 
do?” The king says, “Oh, you had this lead into gold thing. This base metal and 
precious metal experiment...We are very interested in that.” Paracelsus says, 
“Oh, your Majesty, your Majesty, I am just a Puffer. You, your Majesty, you are 
the real alchemist.” “Why?” “This is because all you have to do is give a 
license to a bank to lend money. That is gold out of nothing.” That was in 
fifteenth century. It took another couple of hundred years for the Bank of 
England to be established on that basis. Now all banks in the world can lend up 
to ten times the amount of money that they have in the vault. It’s probably just 
a hard disk somewhere, so you can take ten times nothing and call it a dollar 
and change it into a dollar. That’s alchemy. Whoever understands that money is 
also religion, will also gain in the struggle. This lecture was meant to be 
called “Islam and the Net,” I should say something about that. First of all, you 
probably remember that the Iranian Revolution was entirely based on the cassette 
tape recorder. If you don’t know yet, I’m going to tell you. Khomeni would not 
have held power in Iran without the cassette tape recorder. He was in exile in 
Iraq and sent recordings of his sermons, which attacked the Shah, to Iran. The 
tapes were spread around in a network from mosque to mosque and from cassette 
recorder to cassette recorder. That was the chief weapon of the Iranian 
Revolution. There was very little blood involved in that revolution. A very 
serious revolutionary movement was carried out entirely through communications 
technology. Just think what they can do with the net. Just think what terrorists 
can do with the net. The net, to answer the questions of our friends from former 
Yugoslavia, The net will never reach this world in time. There will always be 
lag time. The net, the marvelous miracle of communication which might be some 
utopian reading of the situation, will never reach the other 99 percent of the 
world in time. The reason that it will never come to save the world, like a 
miracle, is that terrorists will invade the net. They will be representative of 
all of the outside, and the outside includes all the countries where the people 
don’t even have telephones. This is all the outside, the outside is all demonic 
for the inside, and therefore the technology will not be transferred, because 
that would be asking angels to transfer their technologies to devils. It’s not 
going to happen unless religious power itself is deconstructed or overcome. 
Because it’s religion that has prevented the net from arriving in time to save.

It’s a religious problem. We can deconstruct the religious aspect of technology. 
We can stop reifying technology, and worshipping it. This is a religious 
paradise, you can’t save your soul from technology, unless you know that 
technology can’t save it. An act, even more paradoxically, the process of over 
coming, can only be to understand and even more paradoxical, this process of 
overcoming can be carried out through religious means. In other words, we have 
to understand the power of the imagination to create values. It is, in fact, 
through imagination and only through imagination, that values are created. If we 
understand that, we are free. We, as least as individuals, then are free in some 
meaningful sense. Maybe not free of incompetence, but in some sense we are free. 
Communication doesn’t communicate. Communication as noise. Communication as 
cognitive dissonance causes separation. Mediation causes alienation. You can’t 
mediate beyond a certain extent. All forms of communication are mediated, even 
if I speak with you. It’s moving through the air and the molecules of the air 
are carrying sound to your ears. Simple conversation is already mediated, but 
you can carry that mediation, you can excaberate to a point where it becomes 
alienation, where you are actually violently separated or split from other 
people. Mediation which becomes alienation is then reproduced in the media, so 
the television, newspapers, the internet, all forms of communication, as a 
media, in the usual sense of that word, simply increase alienation, and of 
course, wherever advertising comes in, it is very easy to see how this happens. 
It is very easy to understand how the net itself has become a source of horrible 
alienation, once advertising has taken it over, once the ones in Rubeca have 
moved in, once Disney and CocaCola have moved in and taken it over. We even have 
to go back to language itself. We have to work on language, this is the job of 
the poet, to clarify the language of the tribe, not purify, but to clarify. We 
still need ideology in some sense, in that we need ideas, and that we need a 
logos, or a word, or an expression of those ideas. I would prefer to end by 
referring these problems to Mikhail Bahktin, the Russian critic, who uses the 
word dialogics. I like this word because it doesn’t bring in any ideological 
frame. It’s a new, fresh word. It means conversation—it means high value 
relating. We call it dialogics because it sounds like something we haven’t 
thought of before.

To me, it’s just a good, old nineteenth-century American word, 
communicativeness. Communicativeness is not necessarily the same thing as simple 
communication. It implies warmth, a human presence, an actual desire, a 
pleasure, a joy, a jouisance, if you like, of communication. Communicativeness 
is erratic, essentially, and festive. This is what Bahktin wanted us to 
remember, that the spiritual path of the material, the body of principle, this 
is something real. The material body itself, is in effect, a symbol. It is a 
spiritual principle, and that, if you going to overcome the religious problem, 
which is to split the body off from the mind, forever. What we need more than 
anything else, is a spirituality of the body for the body. A re-enchantment of 
the natural. Re-enchantment means singing, music. I am not proposing any kind of 
dialectical materialism or reductionism here. Actually, I am interested in a 
remytholization, in re-enchantment, in magic, in action at a distance. I am 
interested in technology because it is magical, it is magic, it is action at a 
distance. What I want to see is this technology used to reenchant nature, and 
finally, hopefully, to sacrifice the violence of the sacred.