Erik Davis's TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998) traces the esoteric afterlife of each communications technology: the telegraph spawning spiritualist seances (the Fox sisters' 1848 rappings arrived within four years of the first commercial line), radio attracting etheric mystics, and cyberspace reviving explicitly Gnostic dreams of escaping the body into pure information. Davis documents engineers, hackers, and occultists borrowing each other's vocabulary for a century and a half.
The thesis names what became ordinary: uploading as apotheosis, the cloud as heaven, disconnection as exile. Silicon Valley's vocabulary, transcendence, singularity, immortality-as-backup, is, on this reading, medieval mysticism in venture capital dress.
Davis's deeper claim is structural: any technology that moves messages without moving bodies recreates the séance's conditions, presence without flesh, voices without sources. The enchantment is not a misuse of the medium; it is the medium's oldest use.
If every new medium immediately fills with ghosts, is the ghost in the machine or in us?