The really difficult trick that Davis pulls off is to take technology and culture equally seriously and to write about them in an equally knowledgeable way. He doesn't talk as if technology could ever be freed from culture, or seen without it, and this is tremendously important. Their central belief, after all, was that if we learn the hidden knowledge, we can go home to the stars. And almost everyone nowadays accepts the idea of passing into a higher, or spiritual, state, in which disembodied spirits talk to each other like the soundless angels made of light in C. S. Lewis' science fiction. The identification between souls and software, which is profoundly gnostic, seems also completely scientific.
Software is the completely immaterial animating stuff that makes hardware live.
Of course, in 100 years' time our children, or theirs, ought to be able to look back on such ideas with the patronizing incomprehension that we now feel for the Victorian crazes of spiritualism and Christian Science. Their mistakes will be quite different. But they, too, will see the technology around them largely by the shadows their imagination makes it cast on the walls of the cave that surrounds us all. All rights reserved.