Man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull, his nerves outside his skin.
New technology breeds new man.
When he is surrounded by electric media, he enlarges his nervous system, as the wheel extends his foot, the wired planet extends his nerves. To make a long story short, alchemy derived from the basic idea that matter is alive and that we can, by manipulating matter, increase its quality of organism and take advantage of that spiritual quality. The first time that electricity enters the English language is in a book by an alchemist. The idea in alchemy is that you take the nature of matter and by distilling it and changing it and forcing it and fighting it, you will create a spiritual essence from it. That essence was associated with electricity.