Erik Davis

Erik Davis is an American writer, scholar, journalist, and public speaker whose writings have ranged from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is perhaps best known for his book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, as well as his work on California counterculture, including Burning Man, the human potential movement, and the writings of Philip K. Dick.

Davis played a critical part in the documentary A Glitch in the Matrix. Born in Redwood City, California, in 1967, Davis grew up in Del Mar before attending Yale University, where he graduated magna cum laude with a degree in English. He wrote a senior thesis on science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and has since written a number of articles in the popular press about Dick and his unusual religious experiences. 

Davis would go on to co-edit The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published in 2011. While at Yale, Davis began writing for Nadine, an on-campus magazine that turned out a number of rock critics and pop culture writers in the 1980s and 1990s. Soon after graduation in 1988, Davis pitched his first story to the Village Voice, a review of the Swiss heavy metal band Celtic Frost.

Writing for the Village Voice throughout the early 1990s, Davis also contributed to Spin, Details, Rolling Stone, and Wired magazines, writing about music, art, film, pop culture, and technology. In July 1995, Davis published a piece in Wired magazine called "Technopagans," which was one of the precursors for Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, a dense cultural history of the mystical, magical, and apocalyptic dreams and fantasies that haunt modern technoculture. 

Published by Harmony Books, the book is a cult classic of media studies and was eventually translated into five languages. It was re-released in paperback by Serpent's Tail in 2004 with a new afterword. Throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, Davis continued to write for both popular magazines and scholarly publications. 

Also, he expanded his speaking career, where his eclectic interests in subjects ranging from music, art, popular culture, and esoterica led to speaking engagements at such diverse venues as Stanford University, the British Museum, Burning Man, the Boom Festival, the Houston Jung Center, the Ojai Foundation, and Esalen.