Technology as Techno-Religion & Hype Cycles
From Enlightenment balloons to AI, our technological faith hasn’t changed. Why do we worship at the altar of innovation’s false promises?
The crowds gathered that warm summer day in gardens of Tuileries in Paris, their necks craned skywards. Soon they gasped in awe, some falling to their knees in prayer, others openly weeping. The media would proclaim that a new era had arrived, that warfare, economics and humanity would be forever changed. It was 1783 and the launch of the first hot air balloon.
Money from investors would pour in with promises of human settlements in the skies, whole new transportation networks, flying carriages for mass movement. Some suggested that within a few decades, we would be settling on the moon.
Sound familiar? Remember the metaverse, Web3, blockchain and of course now, Generative AI? Our technological faith and optimism for new, revolutionary technologies goes back centuries and often resembles religious patterns. Complete with prophets, rituals and the promise of salvation.
So why do we imbue these technologies with the same patterns and thinking as we have done with religion? The parallels are remarkable and the reasons why rest deeply within our psyche.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz ones noted that humans are “suspended in webs of significance.” We are meaning-making animals and we respond to patterns, often making them so that we can make sense of our world.
One thing our brains always do is to create cognitive templates for understanding power and complex systems. Early religious practices personified natural forces creating multiple gods for everything from thunder to floods and fertility goddesses. We personify technologies in similar ways like saying “AI thinks this” or “the market wants to do that…”
Religions and technologies can often give us a sense of psychological security in times of existential uncertainty. Technologies seem to promise control while religions promise meaning. What Steve Jobs promised with the introduction of the iPhone was control of the messiness of communications and information. He was seen as a prophet for the future of technology.
One of the primary reasons religions became a mainstay of human societies thousands of years ago is because they enabled social organisation and cohesion. This enabled large groups of people to cooperate. This is today the same with technologies like social media and collaborative productivity apps. Some suggest there are even “cults of productivity.”
As we see the irrational hype over Generative AI today, we can almost see a sort of economic faith and investment as devotion. Investing in some of these AI tools, such as happened with the metaverse, that are unproven, is an act of faith. Venture capital as a patronage for technological priesthoods?
For some, information itself may be seen as some kind of spirit or essence that is separate from the materiality of the information technologies. Code as a fundamental reality underlying appearance. Sometimes we imbue algorithms with some sort of moral qualities.
The tech industry has, we might say, created it’s own form of clerical hierarchy:
Prophets: Visionary founders like Musk, Jobs, Zuckerberg who people will say have a view of the future.
High Priests: These are the technical analysts, pundits that can interpret meaning from the technology to the masses.
Evangelists: Which some tech companies actually have as a job title. Out on the speaking, podcast and media circuits.
Apostles: The early adopters, influencers and YouTubers who “spread the gospel”
Heretics: Critics and skeptics of a technology. Often socially disciplined, shunned by tech industry media and pundits.
Then there are all the tech events, SXSW, CES and others that function as annual pilgrimages where the faithful gather to witness new technological marvels and miracles. White papers for various technologies and books written about “prophets” can be seen as sacred texts.
Much of this type of worldview be techno adherents comes out of the Age of Enlightenment and the mechanist worldview as put forward by La Mettrie and his idea of “Man a Machine” in 1748 where he believed that our bodies could be understood as systems, along with societies.
Today we see this through movements such as e/acc (effective accelerationists) and Transhumanists where humanity will transcend into machines. Much of their thinking taken from a 1795 Enlightenment text, “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind” by Condorcet. In this text he proposed that humanity would move through predictable stages towards perfection ultimately eliminating inequality, disease and even, as the e/acc movement desires, defying death itself.
Emerging, revolutionary technologies reside in a sort of liminal place. As yet unproven, filled with hope, not yet constrained by reality. This creates a space for collective imagination to take hold, for stories to be told.
The better the story, the more promise it holds, groups rally and a sort of collective effervescence grows. Businesses and people get that FOMO (fear of missing out) fervour resulting in a cascading effect. This also feeds into our overweight potential gains in the short term and underweight the potential losses.
As I’ve written before, we have this tendency to think technology solves problems, especially complex ones. It does not. Never has. Technologies are levers, tools we use. Humans solve problems. Today we have arrived at a view that AI will solve our problems. Currently, this is nought but wishful thinking. AI has helped with some problems, but not the big ones. Yet.
We have today, collectively imagined a digital reality that has matched our desires rather than our needs and capabilities. Consider that the metaverse arrived during the pandemic, a time when we lived in restricted physical spaces.
Many technologists will say they explicitly reject religion, yet unconsciously recreate religious structures and narratives. Which also explains why tech hype cycles are remarkably resistant to to evidence that may be contrary. They’re live more in the realm of faith than empirical evaluation. Indeed, like conspiracy theories, they reject such criticisms.
We might say that religion and technologies address the fundamental human needs for making sense of complex and uncertain realities. Create social bonds and shared identities, establish moral frameworks and narratives of purpose while transcending our biological limitations and fears of mortality.
But we should not be disillusioned with this comparison. What we are likely to find, as we have with many technologies, is that while a utopia will not arrive, we will use technologies to enhance our humanity, rather than replace it.
We should not abandon technological innovation even though there are these parallels with religions. Instead, this gives us a framework and approach to increase our curiosity with technologies. It helps us to recognise when we are participating in rituals of faith and desires rather than reasoned evaluation.
We might better see that technologies are neither saviour nor demon, but rather an extension of our deeply human desire to create meaning and connection, to push our societies forward with greater rationality.
Rather than seeing technologies through a prophetic lens like technological oracles, but as our collective abilities, an incremental process of solving problems and challenges while being grounded in what it means to be human.