Gospel of the Algorithm

The Rising Altars of Technomysticism, the Liturgy of the Machines

I want to write a journey from the earliest quantum fluctuations, to the superstructure of the universe stars, to constellations and AI. But first, I need to make a major digression and write about religion, technology and control. I hope it makes sense when I get there.

First, some personal culpability. Welcome to another blog post where I take things way too seriously in order to get somewhere!

Raised Catholic

I know. You’ve heard this one before. The rest of this section may be completely superfluous, but here’s how it was for me.

I grew up in the guilt-and-shame traditions of contemporary Catholicism. It made me feel safe — a framework for understanding the world, one voice telling me I was loved even though I didn’t deserve it. But as I formed my adolescent identity, the framework began to crack. At first it just felt anachronistic — at odds with the science I was learning in school, and with how people actually lived. The handbook said “help the suffering,” but in practice, it seemed like we shamed or imprisoned them. My religious instructors hand-waved away my questions about the role of religion in war, colonialism, and slavery. Eventually, I couldn’t deny it: the very structure that taught me right and wrong revealed itself as the ultimate culprit.

I remember the long dark night when I accepted that I would never meet my grandmother in heaven, much less my beloved dog. That I would die, and so would everyone I know, with nothing awaiting me but perhaps the cold, eternal boredom of, like, rocks. No one would love me in that endless darkness. It was devastating.

Skip way ahead to 22, when I left the Deep South, with its everyday undercurrent of religion, and the silence that followed when I let it go.

Spiritual not religious

In the New York art and literary world I aspired to enter, abandoning faith wasn’t rebellion — it was the default. Being the lone practicing white Catholic would have felt much stranger. And while I didn’t begrudge others their beliefs (the more different from mine, the better!), I did look down on my own religious impulses. To me, religiosity meant refusing to face reality.

I embraced an argument so fundamental it was nearly its own scripture to me: Look at all the wars fought in the name of religion. End of conversation. Who would defend the Crusades, witch hunts, the religious justifications for slavery, colonialism, genocide? Catholicism was to blame. Get as far away as possible.

Only lately have I wondered: did I? Get far away from it, I mean. Or did I relocate my mystical yearnings. Through love, drugs, meditation, therapy, technology — don’t I still yearn, above almost everything, to be connected to something greater than myself?

‘Spiritual but not religious.’ Right? Though even that began to feel like another hand-wave. Yes, Earth! Of course I love trees and oceans. And ok, also the giddy way psychedelics or meditation convince me I am at one with the cosmos. In a way that feels like home, or water to the drowning. But, what are you saying, you idiot? it’s not a sustainable way to live.

On a Saturday acid trip, I may have been be completely convinced that, you know, me and that oak tree are the same. But by Wednesday, the dailiness of life returned. Follow the rules, make money, pay rent. These are the fundamental principles of life, without which we die. I can meditate on nonduality for twenty minutes every morning, but if I don’t keep up this cycle, I won’t have a place to rest my meditating ass. If I’m lucky, maybe I can escape next weekend to that shadowy place I can’t admit I ache for. Who can afford to be impractical. With this rent, in this industry?

So I paid the price of entry to swim in the intellectual sea: cognitive dissonance. I justified it by citing literary and scientific saints, who assured me that holding opposing ideas while still functioning was a sign of intelligence. To face reality without superstition. These intellectual saints gave me permission never to resolve anything.

Except, I began to wonder if I was just moving emotions around. Didn’t I have the same faith in science and technology as I had in the Bible? I don’t actually understand the fundamental physics of the universe; I take these articles on faith, because intellectual giants tell me they were true. I’m not saying the experiments of Newton are the same as the hallucinations of a stigmata. They aren’t. What I’m getting at is how I let believe bleed into everything.

I don’t often question the limits of their authority. There is nothing not knowable to science and technology, right? If there is, it’s hard to imagine. Even emotions can be discussed in terms of chemistry. If it cannot be experimentally tested or predicted, we just need more scientific knowledge. We just aren't there yet.

I took this yearning for something more — call it Oneness, that feeling of connection with a whole — and kept it at bay with shallow gestures: “we are all vibrations;” or fleeting psychedelic or meditation moments. Too-brief moments of relief that were gone too soon. It’s like, brain chemistry, I said with a hand-wave, just like my childhood spiritual mentors. (To be clear, I’m not saying neurobiologists are hand waving. I’m saying: I was.)

Old Magic, New Altars

I think it’s time to tell the truth.

I am a religious, superstitious animal. I believe in spells, in magic; I am haunted by intuition and algorithms. I summon my name three times in a digital enchantment, which I submit to the Cloud. I believe — with absolute faith — that I have cast a spell on a literal box of air, approximately 8000 square feet in volume between a floor and ceiling. It is located approximately ten feet above the earth. Someone else owns the 8,000 feet below, and the 8,000 feet above. I put a lock on the door and expect no challenge to my enchantment. Intellectually, I bemoan private property and the damage it has done, but with no other choice, I perform the ritual.

This is all alchemically sealed with money — that supreme enchantment. It will change only when I submit another digital incantation into a Cloud and accept a precisely defined amount of imaginary power to leave this apartment and never return, unless summoned to do so by the new magical owner.

We transmute hours of our finite lives into numbers on screens, believing these abstractions will ward off hunger, summon shelter, manifest status. Every transaction is an act of faith more absolute than any Catholic mass I attended. At least the Church admitted it was trafficking in mysteries.

Megan O’Gieblyn drills into the past and present of our techno-mystical culture in God, Human, Animal, Machine. She writes about our casual references to the ‘soul’ in everyday conversation, noting that Nietzsche said it best: we haven’t gotten rid of God because we still believe in grammar.

The Gospel of the Algorithm

I can’t remember the day I finally admitted I was just genuflecting to new altars. Maybe it was when I realized I was performing my life for algorithms I didn’t understand, subject to a hierarchy of priests and influencers promising revelations — for a fee. Where have I seen this before? The self-anointed lower priests claim to have privileged insight into to the mysterious higher powers — the feeling was so creepy, so familiar. This was the bloated church again, not saving my soul — or in this case, ‘connecting’ me with ‘friends’ — but monetizing my attention. Even worse, these algorithms have been optimized for addiction, manipulating my body and mind while delivering very little in return.

I return to this idea of seeking connection. Why does it feel shameful to admit that I want to understand this in my real life, but intellectually acceptable to pursue it through the high church of technomysticism?

And above all of this, is there a better way to address our religious nature?

Haunted

Here’s my claim: we never forsook religion. We are religious animals. If we’re honest with ourselves, maybe we can ask for more honesty from our culture — including our techno-religions. I’m not advocating for Catholicism or its harms. I’m advocating for facing what we’re missing, so we can break the cycle of kneeling before institutions that don’t have our best interests at heart.

Erik Davis saw this in the 1990s in TechGnosis: Myth Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information, where he writes:

Historians and sociologists inform us that the West’s mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations, and apocalyptic visions crashed on the scientific shores of the modern age. According to this narrative, technology has helped disenchant the world, forcing the ancestral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular game plans of economic development, skeptical inquiry, and material progress.

But it is not possible to disenchant the world. We are creatures that expect to be haunted by our past and future, and are easy to convince. We will always wander in search of ghosts. We reattach enchantment to technologies while pretending we don’t believe in enchantment anymore. The benefit is that we can call it rational. The black box is unknowable to us, but we’re told someone — usually a billionaire — understands. Isn’t that proof of priesthood, of divine favor?

Our lives are haunted by new mysteries: algorithms we are not permitted to know. A new priestly class. The invisible eyes of machine learning that see everything, conceal their nature, and deliver mythologies to shape our behavior to the advantage of the new priests, churches and popes.

O’Gieblyn notes how spiritual questions have been absorbed into technomysticism:

Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality. These are old problems, and although they now appear in different guises and go by different names, they persist in conversations about digital technologies much like those dead metaphors that still lurk in the syntax of contemporary speech. All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.

As a Catholic, I avoided the confessional. I could clearly see it was a surveillance technology, an ideological tool in the hands of an untrustworthy authority.

As a technomystic, however, I’ve missed the signs. I allow my life — my private communication, schedule, spending, even my home — to be inspected daily by a power I don’t even know how to question. I allow my very personality to be stretched, probed, manipulated. Then to be mined for meaning and addictive hooks. For compliant behaviors, and for transgressions.

The new religions differ from the old I’ve known in many ways, but one matters most: they serve different masters.

It turns out I never stopped believing.

Erik Davies points out that "of all technologies, it is the technologies of information and communication that most mold and shape the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self." Yet I relate to Ursula Franklin, who makes a sharper distinction — she divides the technosphere into technologies of work, and technologies of control.

Almost everything in our lives is shaped by technologies. But the technologies of control shape us much differently.