Trithemius was a pious man; in a long passage at the start of the book, he insists that these spirits are not demons, and that “everything is done in accordance with God in good conscience and without injury to the Christian faith.” But readers had their suspicions; he does repeatedly warn that the spirits might harm you if given the chance. And while his internet can be used for godly ends, it can also be used for evil. “For though this knowledge is good in and of itself and quite useful to the State, nevertheless if it reached the attention of twisted men (God forbid), over time the whole order of the State would become disturbed, and not in a small way.” Today, a broad range of sensible types are worried—and not without cause—that the internet is incompatible with a civic democracy. Trithemius saw it first.
But the Seganographia held a secret, and its real purpose wasn’t revealed until a century after its publication: this book of magic is actually a book of cryptography. Not magic spells and flying demons, but mathematics. Take the spell above: if you read only the alternating letters in every other word, it yields nym di ersten bugstaben de omny uerbo, a mishmash of Latin and German meaning “take the first letter of every word.” This is a fairly simple approach; Trithemius warns that Pamersyel is “insolent and untrustworthy,” and that the spirits under his command “speed about and by filling the air with their shouts they often reveal the sender’s secrets to everyone around.” Others are subtler. The book’s third volume wasn’t decoded until 1998, by a researcher at AT&T Labs.
There is a direct line from this fifteenth-century monk to our digital present. Pamersyel and the other spirits are algorithms, early examples of the mathematical operations that increasingly govern our lives. They are also the distant ancestors of machines like the Nazi Enigma device, a cipher so powerful that to break its code, it was necessary to build the first electronic computer. Trithemius invented the internet in a flight of mystical fancy to cover up what he was really doing, which was inventing the internet. Demons disguise themselves as technology, technology disguises itself as demons; both end up being one and the same thing.
Exactly how long have we been living with the internet? There’s a boring answer, which gives a start date some time in the second half of the twentieth century and involves “packet-switching networks.” But the more interesting answer is one that considers the meaning of the internet, rather than its technological substrate: the thought of a world lived at a distance, a dream and a nightmare that has been with us for a very long time. The internet dates back five thousand years, or five billion, or it hasn’t been invented yet. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin E.H. Smith pleads for the interesting answer. The internet is very old; it is “only the most recent permutation in a complex of behaviors that is as deeply rooted in who we are as a species as anything else we do: our storytelling, our fashions, our friendships; our evolution as beings that inhabit a universe dense with symbols.”
pt 4