Technology, Media, and Culture Critic, Erik Davis, Featured Speaker at PLANETWORK Conference

San Francisco----A high tech group working to accelerate awareness of the global ecological crisis makes final preparations for a conference called PLANETWORK to take place May 12-14, 2000 in the Presidioâs Golden Gate Club.

PLANETWORK, the first conference of its kind worldwide, was founded in 1998 by Erik Davis, Jim Fournier, Elizabeth Thompson and David Ulansey to create a forum for exploring the role that the Internet and information technology can play in creating an ecologically sustainable future.

Davis, a cultural critic, journalist, author of Techgnosis and freelance writer for Wired, Gnosis, 21C, Spin, Mediamatic, Lingua Franca, Magickal Blend, The Nation, Parabola, Green Egg, Details, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice, is also one of PLANETWORKâs featured speakers.
Educated at Yale University, Davis was recently interviewed by Caroline Casey for her Visionary Activist program on KPFA. Davis understands that technology is a two-edged sword÷that even the first technologies of written speech began by amputating manâs ability to remember in the oral tradition. Writing externalized memory and, therefore, written documents and the tools that make them become extensions of ourselves. At the same time, Davis argues with those who would say that technology is the current manifestation of Îevilâ in the world.

Technology is a trickster, says Davis. "I think it is represented by the god Hermes, the fleet-footed messenger of the gods and the god who was the mediator one god to another and from humans to the gods. But technology is also the Înaturalâ condition of man. We have been cyborgs since our beginnings in that we have always created tools in order to augment ourselves and manipulate our world."

Davis background in Gnostic thinking has led him to a holistic view of our current ecological crisis. Unlike the Neo-luddites who might wish that we could ban computers and all digital technologies, Davis feels we must include a wide range of voices and perspectives in a dialogue to solve the problems before us.

In his Saturday, May 13, PLANETWORK session called ãSnakes and Ladders, Holism and Technology,ä Davis intends to look at the collision course of holism and technology, and how an understanding of technology -- especially media technology -- can help the environmental movement outgrow some of its more naive assumptions about deep ecology. Davis has also lectured internationally on topics relating to cyberculture, contemporary electronic music, and spirituality in the postmodern world.