Symbolic Order
A technology such as writing, although external to ourselves, supplements and extends our internal brain memory system. Like a Shadow out of Time, the equivalence of dreams and books becomes apparent in the long tradition of dreambooks. According to ancient traditions a cosmos is contained in the alphabet and letters are pictures of supernatural realities and universal archetypes in complex non-linear relationships, not just mere abstract signs or phonemes. Canonical texts in this tradition were written as hypertext with various layers of meaning and corresponding ideographic visualization methods, many of them linking stars and script and abstract entities. The book of law for the Data Body is a living Book of the Dead, a silicon necronomicon of digital demons, a Julia-set picture of irrational numbers and self-fulfilling prophecies on liquid paper. Intelligent libraries of autopoietic grimoires, self-modifying databases and intelligent software entities in hieroglyphic codices are trained to detect and react to patterns of activity sets on a wired planet. Anything transferred in symbolic exchange is the vehicle of meaning and information just as cults and believe systems have always functioned as informational networks and have been media itself.