Infomancy and the Coming Ragnarok

This is a word I discovered today that is one of those things that describes a sensation I've felt for some time now. So it's with a great deal of happiness I present:

Infomancy! Defined here as:

"n. 1.The field of magic related to the conjuring of information from the chaos of the universe. 2.The collection of terms, queries, and actions related to the retrieval of information from arcane sources."

See it in practice here.

Basically it's a description of a phenomena I've seen on message boards for years. You shoot out an inquiry into the internet. Pretty much anything. If you charge the intent enough that it's interesting to the will of the collective information, you will get a drove of experts flocking to your fired questions, tripping over one another to answer your previously innane query.

In the instance above it was about the pinging of information regarding japanese robots. But it can really be anything. It really is the basis of how a search engine even works. You put out the coded information for what you want into the little search box, and it comes out the other end in useful or arcane information that you can apply outside of the internet or turn around and redistributed back into it. There's a frictive force at work here of ideas gyrating off of one another constantly generating new realities and factoids because of it.

It's almost it's own kind of alchemey. In the purest form, a true infomancer is just looking for elements of information to combine into a coherent gnosis which will allow them to break the bonds of the world of information around them.

I've talked often about the eschaton of 2012, and the theories of the mayans, and the norse, that the world will end, but come out in a new way that is changed. But I'm starting to think what we will experience is a loop back around. A lot of the concepts that we are seeing on the internet seem to correspond with earlier ideas and methods for villages and early groups of people. In all seriousness, the most important books you can read on understanding the internet and the coming(existing) world are ones based in concepts that we thought were long dead. Metaphors of shamanism, the village, black plague--the internet has already kicked off the next age of human life, and some of the former patterns are playing out in a predictable and usable way.

Our future is going to be shaped by the collision of magic and technology, and the resulting friction will usher us into a new sublime. But I don't really know if the two are just going to fuse, or repel. Judging some of the current metaphors I'm seeing though, I think some sort of fusion is at place. Or at worst a co-opting.

At any rate, this is a great quote:

" Where’s my flying car, you ask? You’re driving it right now."