Technopagan: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the CCRU

Ms. Calendar: I teach computer science at the local high school.
Giles: A profession that hardly lends itself to the casting of bones.
Ms. Calendar: Wrong...you think the realm of the mystical is limited to ancient texts and relics? That bad old science made the magic go away?...The divine exists in cyberspace same as out here.
Giles: Are you a witch?
Ms. Calendar: I don't have that kinda power. 'Technopagan' is the term.
[Giles lets out a chuckle]
Ms. Calendar: There are more of us than you think.

There are indeed more of them than you think. Swarms, even...

Or so goes the conversation in Buffy the Vampire Slayer S1E8 'I,Robot...You, Jane" between Giles, the bespectacled British scholar who lives in his library-office surrounded by ancient tomes, and Ms. Calendar, the completely 90s-on-brand, witty, cutting, dark, angular, computer science professor.

And what might these two be talking about? The demon Moloch, of course.

The episode begins in 1418 with Christian (presumably) Monks trapping Moloch in a tome through a binding ritual. In classic campy 90s specialfx fashion, we watch as Moloch's body is literally transformed into text on a page, text that if read aloud will release the demon back into physical form. Flash forward 579 years to 1997 and the Moloch-bound-book has ended up in Giles library where one of his students scans it into his online, digital database, a scanning process - being as it is a form of  (machine) reading - that releases Moloch into not physical, but cyberspace.

From here, Moloch infects the internet, or 'the net' as it is referred to, and, in addition to crashing the global economy, disrupts the libidinal one too; he poses as 'Malcom Black' who seduces others into doing his bidding -  breaking into the Calax Research and Development (CDR [reminiscent vaguely of CCRU]) labs to have a robot body built. However, despite taking physical form as a robot, not unlike the incident in 1418, Moloch is defeated through a binding ritual - he is disconnected from the internet and pushed into an electrical box where he explodes. Instead of being transformed into words in a book, he is transformed into energy in a surge box, a signal to open an information flow, a diagram.

Here, it is clear I, Robot...You, Jane demonstrates the core thrust of the CCRU. Magic and tech, the occult and the cyber, the ancient and the present, mesh. Going forward brings us back to the old ones. Magic is 'primitive' tech. Everything meshes. Distinctions breakdown. Feedback gets going. Signification - written language - no longer represents or symbolizes, it induces, functionalizes. Asignifying diagrammatics - words that act as - not like as D and G remind us - chemical agents, molecules, particles, etc. Command prompts as spells. Abracadabra is information creation; Hebrew for 'as I speak, so I create.' Hyperstition - fictions make themselves real. For Marx, all that was solid melted into air. For magic-tech, all that is ethereal (signification) meltdowns into solid (physical).

But don't take my word for it...

Giles: I still prefer a good book.

Fritz: The printed page is obsolete. Information isn't bound up anymore. It's an entity. The only reality is virtual. If you're not jacked in, you're not alive.

Ms. Calendar: Thank you, Fritz, for making us all sound like crazy 

people...Fritz comes on a little strong, but he does have a point. You know, for the last two years more e-mail was sent than regular mail.

Giles: Oh...

Ms. Calendar: More digitized information went across phone lines than conversation.

Giles: That is a fact that I regard with genuine horror.

Information isn't bound up anymore. Genuine horror, indeed.

Despite all this, Moloch himself is only mentioned once, very briefly, and cryptically in the CCRU. In the text Qabbala Unshelled, the demon is evoked only in mentioning Malkuth's position in the the arbitrary system of the Jewish tree of life (here, on the Hyperstition blog frequented by Reza, Nick, and Mark, Nick mentions that Moloch is related to, or another name for, Malkuth. In that some hyperstition post, Leviathan is mentioned as well. See Vincent Garton's Urbanomic text on Leviathan that also briefly mentions Moloch, and later discusses Nick Land ).

This does not stop him from being a demon linked to Land, however, as the popular blogger Scott Alexander / Slate Star Codex shows in writing a long reflection on Moloch and the demon's relation to Nick Land's work. It is not my interest here to summarize or analyze the excellent text, but I will say this - Alexander, for better or for worse, equates Land's Gnon with Moloch after pointing out that others have argued Moloch symbolizes - as far as poetry is concerned -  Capitalism and its tempting, outside, incentive forces.

So, at the risk of sounding foolishly reductionist, perhaps Moloch was all that the CCRU was ever working towards...

Regardless, one wonders what the aptly named Ms. 'Calendar' (whose extension of her computer science to the analysis of bones brings to mind the archaeologically minded DC Barker and his geotraumatic adventures) and Giles would discuss now, in 2020. We will never know. All that is for certain is that demons don't die, they go cyber. They go viral. They go world dominating. As the tagline to the terrible past-gone-future slasher film Jason X goes, 'evil gets an upgrade.'