“Techno-transcendentalism in Silicon Valley” by Dorien Zandbergen (Anthropology, Leiden University)

Abstract

Silicon Valley, the area between San Francisco and San Jose at the West Coast of the United States was in the 1970s both a breeding ground for the political and religious countercultural movements and a home for the emerging personal computer industries. This paper is an exploration of the ways in which these two cultural domains have been brokered in such a way that new types of spirituality became entangled with new types of digital technology, and vice versa. It discusses the emergence of so-called ‘free zones’ as a result of this brokerage, where spiritual seekers and computer scientists both feel at home and where they find a space to explore new conceptualizations of the divine, science and technology outside of corporate frameworks of production and mainstream conceptual depictions that tend to separate the two realms. An exploration of the emergence of such free zones and the discourses that dominate here, as this paper hypothesizes, can assist contemporary academics with the advancement of an understanding of new types of mediation that go beyond taken for granted dichotomies that distinguish between the secular and the religious, technology and spirituality, etc. One of the main arguments of this paper is that academic struggles of getting beyond taken for granted dichotomies –such as those between religion and technology- are paralleled by attempts to be found in popular culture, where certain elites are grappling with a similar desire to address ‘unlikely fusions’ for which no clear narratives and conceptual frameworks exist.

About the Author

Dorien Zandbergen is a PhD student at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of the University of Leiden, and at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, where she participates in the research programme Cyberspace Salvations (funded by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research). Dorien’s research is project is “Silicon Valley New Age,” which traces the history of interaction between (New Age) spirituality and high tech since the late 1960’s until the early 2000’s.  Her publications include: “Hacking your own reality: Computers as Instruments of Salvation in Silicon Valley,” in S. Aupers, & D. Houtman, eds. Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital (forthcoming).

Contact and Further Links

Contact Information: 
dorien@xs4all.nl