Page 169 - Cyberculture and New Media

160 Cyborg Goddesses: The Mainframe Revisited
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first became implicated in the Christian project of
redemption. The worldly means of survival were
henceforth turned toward the other-worldly end of
salvation, and over the next millennium, the heretofore
most material and humble activities became increasingly
invested with spiritual significance and a transcendent
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meaning—the recovery of mankind’s lost divinity.

As David F. Noble illustrates in his work, the Religion of
Technology the “legacy of the religion of technology is still with us.” He
further remarks:

Like the technologists themselves, we routinely expect far
more from our artificial contrivances than mere
convenience, comfort, or even survival. We demand
deliverance. This is apparent in our virtual obsession with
technological development, in our extravagant anticipations
of every new technical advance—however much each fails
to deliver on its promise—and most important, in our utter
inability to think and act rationally about this presumably
most rational of human endeavors. […] (the religion of
technology) is offered in the hope that we might learn to
disabuse ourselves of the other-worldly dreams that lie at
the heart of our technological enterprise, in order to begin
to redirect our astonishing capabilities toward more worldly
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and humane ends.”

As David F. Noble illustrates, the religious rhetoric that gave
impetus to technologic developments in the western mind, secularizes
through time especially in the positivistic understanding of the socialists
(Owenites). However, the religious rhetoric is still visible in many parts of
space related, atomic and genetic research in the United States. Noble in the
final chapter of his book also illustrates his awareness of the predominant
masculine influence within technological research intertwined with the
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religious rhetoric. In this respect Noble quotes from Carol Cohn’s study
“Nuclear Language” (1987) where she “described the vivid vocabulary of
male competition and sexual domination that routinely came into play in
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discussion of nuclear warfare, and the overt phallic imagery of missiles.”
Brian Easlea argues that the field of the nuclear is a rather womanless
environment which “appropriates” “female powers of procreation” in order to
express “the development and detonation of atomic and hydrogen bombs
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from the beginning” with “recurring pseudo-maternal metaphors.”