technoshaman

It strikes me that there's a lot of pseudo-shamans floating around in the technology industry, and even more people who perceive anyone who can get their computer working again as such. Moreover, this phenomenon seems to go back at least to the mainframe days.

I can't count on a dozen hands the number of times that I've fixed someone's machine for them, and they claim its magic.

To back up this assertion, check out this from the jargon file's "Casting the runes" entry: A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most talented systems designers used to be called out occasionally to service machines which the field circus had given up on. Since he knew the design inside out, he could often find faults simply by listening to a quick outline of the symptoms. He used to play on this by going to some site where the field circus had just spent the last two weeks solid trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram of the system out on a table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and cast them over the diagram, peer at the bones intently for a minute, and then tell them that a certain module needed replacing. The system would start working again immediately upon the replacement.

A technoshaman is essentially a shaman living in the 21st century. To ver, technology is a living being, manifesting all the evolutionary, self-replicating processes that organic lifeforms exhibit. The computer is recognized as the culmination of a long human/machine co-evolution and technoshamans feel a personal affinity with it, often becoming hackers or programmers. To them, surfing the internet is a very serious thing, and they often have an uncanny ability to do so. Everything is a haven for this kind of lateral thinking. Furthermore they are, to varying degrees, cognizant of the impending total transformation of the world.

A shaman is someone who has been to the end; it's someone who knows how the world really works. And knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space, time, and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the board... The shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery.

- Terence McKenna, Re:Evolution