Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation

Tech Agnostic

Tech Agnostic

How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation

Greg M. Epstein

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2024 Greg M. Epstein

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence systems or reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications. We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Epstein, Greg M., author.

Title: Tech agnostic : how technology became the world’s most powerful religion, and why it desperately needs a reformation / Greg M. Epstein.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023050678 (print) | LCCN 2023050679 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262049207 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780262379755 (epub) | ISBN 9780262379748 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Technology—Religious aspects. | Technology—Social aspects. | Dystopia. | Secular humanism.

Classification: LCC BL265.T4 .E67 2024 (print) | LCC BL265.T4 (ebook) | DDC 215—dc23/eng/20240412

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023050678

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023050679

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Contents

Introduction

Part I: Beliefs

1 Tech Theology

2 Doctrine

Part II: Practices

3 Hierarchies and Castes, or, Utopia for White Men

4 Ritual

5 Apocalypse(s)

Part III: Beloved Community, or, the Reformation

6 Apostates and Heretics

7 Humanists

8 The Congregation

Conclusion: Tech Agnosticism Is a Humanism

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

Thou rulest the raging of the sea: when the waves thereof arise, thou stillest them.

—Psalm 89:9, King James Version

We now have the technological tools to quite literally code nature, and the payoff to human flourishing will be profound.

—Marc Andreessen, Technology Saves the World, 2021

Let’s begin in October, in the year 312 CE, in Northern Rome.

Constantine I, later to be known as Constantine the Great, was a successful general, the son of a successful general, and the head of the army of the Western Roman empire. And he’s fighting another successful general, Harvard historian Shaye Cohen explains, struggling for who is going to be at the top of the heap of the very higher echelons of Roman government.¹ His rival, Maxentius, was also co-emperor at the time. Oh, and Maxentius was also Constantine’s brother-in-law—the brother of Constantine’s second wife, Fausta.

Constantine was dealing, in other words, with some extreme relationship drama. But though the leader who would be Roman emperor from 306 CE all the way until 337 CE was an aggressive warrior, [and] a sometimes cruel partner, he was not an impractical man, but rather an immensely shrewd ruler.² And as he contemplated how to gain a crucial victory over his colleague and kinsman, a novel idea occurred to him: a fusion of worldly strategy and . . . something more transcendent. As Eusebius, the fourth-century Greek historian of Christianity, later put it, Constantine considered that,

of the many emperors who had preceded him, those who had rested their hopes in a multitude of gods, and served them with sacrifices and offerings, had in the first place been deceived by flattering predictions, and oracles which promised them all prosperity, and at last had met with an unhappy end, while not one of their gods had stood by to warn them of the impending wrath of heaven.³

Polytheism, in other words, had not been profitable for the emperor’s predecessors. Despite significant investments, various Mediterranean divinities had underperformed, he reflected, offering disappointing returns. Reviewing these considerations, Eusebius related, Constantine judged it to be folly indeed to join in the idle worship of those who were no gods.⁴

Instead, Constantine sought a partner offering a better value proposition—a god who could help him gain a competitive advantage against his rival sibling-in-law. Per Eusebius again: Being convinced . . . that he needed some more powerful aid than his military forces could afford him . . . he considered . . . on what God he might rely for protection and assistance.⁵ So he started a new venture: faith in a young, emerging god who, unlike his pagan competitors, might possess sufficient operating power (Eusebius’s actual term, from Ernest Cushing Richardson’s 1890 translation, is co-operating power) to solve an emperor’s unique problems.⁶

The events that followed turned out to be important beyond what even the most grandiose monarch might have imagined at the time. In preparation for a decisive battle over a bridge crossing the Tiber River in northern Rome, Constantine ordered his men to paint the Chi-Ro, an early Christian symbol, on their shields. It became a killer rebrand—literally. When Maxentius committed a strategic error, leading his larger forces over the bridge too soon, Constantine pounced. Maxentius drowned, weighed down by his own armor, either after being thrown into the river by his horse or while attempting to swim to the other side.

His foe vanquished, Constantine rose to uncontested power over an empire so large it had been split into two kingdoms just decades earlier because of the sheer difficulty of ruling such an expansive territory. The merger represented a truly epic pivot, and Constantine’s eventual formal conversion set Christianity fully on course to become the dominant force it has been since. Few events in the history of civilization have proved more transformative [than Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the year 312 CE], writes Bart Ehrman, a noted historian of the Bible and Christianity.⁷

Likely so. But over the past generation, we have witnessed one of those few events. The rise to global dominance of a new phenomenon has, we are often told, been as rapidly transformative as almost anything in the history of human civilization. Let’s call that phenomenon Tech.

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Technology companies claim to provide unparalleled community by bringing the world closer together, as Meta tells us in a post about why we build, and by offering hope for a more connected future, as Mark Zuckerberg put it in his 2021 keynote about the metaverse.⁸ Tech investors like Marc Andreessen pronounce themselves the patron saints of techno-optimism, claiming humans are becoming technological supermen.⁹ In a manifesto containing the words we believe no fewer than 113 times, Andreessen boasts that the techno-capital machine . . . may be the most pro-human thing there is . . . liberating . . . the human soul.¹⁰ And tech executives like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey do the seemingly impossible by carrying that vision even further, announcing that technology is on a mission to extend the light of consciousness, as Dorsey tweeted in 2022 to explain his choice to sell Twitter to Musk.¹¹ (Musk had tweeted, a year earlier, that he was accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary & extend the light of consciousness to the stars.)¹² In other words: Musk would take humanity to a kind of promised land. And according to the effective altruism movement and the many tech billionaires who fund it, technology (specifically Godlike" AI) poses no less than a 10 percent risk of annihilating every single human being within the coming century.¹³ See under: Tech Hell.

Tech often presents moral and ethical messages not as mere secondary features but as integral to its overall value(s) proposition, from Google’s infamous don’t be evil (which became Alphabet’s do the right thing) to Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s exhortation to make history.¹⁴ Zuckerberg, in a letter to staff on the occasion of Facebook’s IPO, said the company’s vision of a connected future would give everyone a voice and . . . help transform society.¹⁵

AI engineers tell us they have created sentient souls.¹⁶ Tech leaders even predict futures where humanity communes with an artificial superintelligence, or magic intelligence in the sky, they say will be an almost literal god.¹⁷ And why not? After all, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pontificates, abundance is our birthright.¹⁸

Christianity, if it weren’t for Constantine converting the entire Roman Empire to his new faith, might well have been a minor Mediterranean cult, perhaps with something like Judaism’s ten to twenty million adherents worldwide.¹⁹ Instead, it has influenced billions. And a tech culture that began as a garage project for nerdy dropouts has become the driving force of our entire civilization. This book will offer an unconventional analysis of how and why tech became a religious empire, omnipresent to the point where there is no longer any realistic way to opt out of its reign. I undertake this task because we need to understand how tech has become not only a religion but the dominant religion of our time.

What Is Tech, Today?

Most people would say tech is an industry, but that’s an absurd statement, because every industry in the world is now a tech industry. We’re in a period where tech has expanded to take over nearly every aspect of our lives, economically, socially, and politically, said Mar Hicks, an award-winning historian of technology, specializing in the history of computing, when I asked them just how big technology is today. And that’s due both to the ever-expanding definition of what we consider tech to be, as well as to the real and intended consequences of overfunding an industry and a field of study—computer science—that has long promised people the ability to escape reality and even more importantly to control their environments.²⁰ Indeed, the size and scope of tech has grown so difficult to quantify that when I asked a similar question of Jason Furman, a Harvard economics professor who served President Barack Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), he acknowledged that even traditional measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) and stock valuations don’t do justice to the exalted status of technology in our world. As Furman pointed out, one could calculate the fraction of GDP (or value added) in technology companies, but that doesn’t count the ways that General Motors, J. P. Morgan, and the corner store all use technology to produce what they produce.²¹ Tech stocks would represent an even higher percentage of the $50 trillion of stocks overall, Furman wrote to me in fall 2023, but even such a measure doesn’t count GM, JPM, and the corner store. The distinguished economist ultimately suggested I might simply stick, without quantification, with Mar Hicks’s definition above—that tech has taken over nearly every aspect of life—because, as Furman said, it seems true.²²

ChatGPT on Constantine’s Epic Pivot.

Tech, and the tech industry, Hicks continued in their email to me, is largely about power and control. In the best-case scenario technologies can be force multipliers for good—think sanitary sewers, or heart stents, or easier-to-operate wheelchair designs. In the worst-case scenario, they multiply force in incredibly violent, destructive ways—think sarin gas, firearms, or the atomic bomb.

✵

We wake up, and before our smart mattresses or smart watches can stop monitoring our every sleeping heartbeat and breath, our smartphones light up as we check them for the first time that morning. Male Orthodox Jews are required to thank God they are not a woman (among other prayers) upon exiting their bed. Many of us, immediately upon rising, stare at our smartphones, performing our own strange rituals. These may or may not include cursing God for our Twitter (X) feed.

Phone still in hand, where it will remain for much of the day, we stumble to the bathroom, where we might, if we’re lucky enough to afford one, brush our teeth with a smart toothbrush or clean ourselves with a smart toilet. In the kitchen, we barely notice our smart refrigerator or smart dishwasher, but our network sees them. Our smart doorbell, watching vigilantly for intruders, lets us know whether we have achieved fulfillment . . . in the form of our Amazon package having been successfully delivered. The smart thermostat adjusts itself for our comfort. If your kid is like mine, they haven’t eaten breakfast and are running late for school because they’re mesmerized by whatever slop the YouTube algorithm is feeding them. Maybe we share a witty TikTok or notice an Instagrammable moment on our way to work or school. Or perhaps we’ll never make it to a physical workplace at all, because we’re working from home or even from a beautiful beach we barely notice, thanks to a constant pinging of Slack messages. Or maybe generative AI has made redundant our role as a coder, paralegal, financial analyst, graphic designer, or even teacher.

However we choose to spend our day, one thing is clear: Not only will we be surrounded by intelligent products, each created to perfectly optimize every detail of our environment. Ultimately we are the product that must be optimized, less for our own benefit than for the glory of technology itself. As such, our daily existence will be tracked constantly by a thousand cookies we have accepted so that they might follow our movements, our moods, and our purchasing power.

At night maybe we’ll stream the news from a podcast or scroll through headlines on our feed, feeling depressed and anxious about the fate of a world continually under attack by rogue forces using the Internet to manipulate, disinform, and stoke hatred for clicks. Maybe that will trigger us to binge on the artisanal ice cream or vodka that we bought because the brand microtargeted us for an ad while we were shopping on Instacart. Eventually, eyes and brains aching from an overdose of ultraviolet light, we’ll log off. Until we do it all again tomorrow.

Today technology is the water in which we swim, whether or not we notice we are fish. Tech provides contemporary Western lives, so polarized and divided in countless ways, with a universal organizing principle, a common story by which we tell ourselves who we are. It offers myriad rites, capturing our attention and transforming our consciousness, connecting us with a community of people who spend their days, weeks, years, and indeed their entire lives engaging in the same repetitive behaviors with the same fervent intensity. Naturally, we all hope our devotion to this communion of fellow travelers bears fruit: surely tech will lead to a better future! Even a kind of paradise! But the truth is that many of us fear, more than we’d like to admit, that this may all be heading to a deeply dark place.

In other words: technology has become religion.

Am I speaking literally, or have I written this book to weave the most elaborate and annoying metaphor you’ll ever read in your entire life? Yes.

What Is Religion, Anyway?

As I’ve been saying for years, including in occasionally bitter arguments with esteemed colleagues such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and even the late, great Christopher Hitchens, religions are much more than mass delusions about white-bearded, omnipotent sky daddies. For many deeply religious people, the dogmatic aspects of religion are an afterthought and notions of the supernatural are optional and mysterious.

The word religion—literally by definition—can marginalize or distort our understanding of non-Western traditions that do not align exactly with Christian structures and beliefs. Derived from the Latin religare, to bind, the contemporary concept of religion was created by Christians and applied to non-Christian traditions for the specific purpose of making Christianity and its structures and practices seem like the norm from which anything else was deviating. Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, were not originally or consciously created as religions, but they have long since come to be understood as such.

When I talk about religion in this book, I am purposefully using the Western, Christian-centric sense of the word, analyzing both traditional religion and contemporary technology through the lens of Christian definitions and understandings of what religion is.²³ This is not because I discount other traditions but because of the importance of recognizing how much power Christianity has been able to amass in the world, in part by successfully framing itself as the model for how we ought to understand and categorize any and all human activities that might seem even remotely similar.

These days many academics use the word religion less as a precise category into which only certain institutions fit perfectly and more as a term of art, according to Robert Sharf, professor of Buddhist studies and chair of the Berkeley Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. There are departments of religions, courses of introduction to religion. . . . We know that those courses are supposed to teach people some kind of breadth of stuff that we recognize as religion, around the world, Sharf told me when I asked him about what methodological approaches to the study of religion he would recommend for a book about technology as a religion.²⁴ But when it really comes down to it, there’s no special methodology required for the study of religion.

Sharf, a scholar of religion who has been known to tell students that he is an academic who just happens to also hold ordination as a Zen Buddhist priest, was a role model for me when I was an undergraduate student. I took religion courses like his to try to understand the human condition, but it was the unexpected complexity I found in such classrooms, learning that there is no one right way to be human and also no single correct way to understand a phenomenon like religion, that ultimately motivated me to pursue the unusual work around religion, technology, and humanity that I will be exploring in this volume.

We’ll more closely consider questions about what religion is—and is not—in each chapter of this book, starting in chapter 1, where, as part of an analysis of the ideas behind contemporary tech, we’ll ask what exactly is meant by the term theology. For now, however, let’s choose a working definition: religion is the combination of institutions, cultures, identities, rituals, values, and beliefs through which we human beings bind ourselves together and find meaning in what might otherwise seem to be a meaningless world. To be as fair as reasonably possible, let’s add a perspective on the definition of religion from a very different kind of thinker: John F. Haught, a distinguished Catholic theologian and scholar of religion known for being a staunch advocate of both science and religious faith.²⁵

In a conversation with a group of secular intellectuals including Daniel Dennett, one of the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse, Haught defined religions as

the most important ways in which human beings on our planet, for the last 50,000 years or so, at least, have sought reassurance: in the face of fate, and the experience that they’re not in control of their lives; of death and having to die; of the feeling of shame, guilt and even self-rejection that comes from living in the context of community, where things are expected of you and you never live up to them.²⁶

Continuing along those lines, Haught adds that religious people have especially sought the reassurance he describes in the experience of being grasped by or carried away by what they have taken to be another dimension of reality, other than the profane, other than the mundane, other than the proximate environment that they live in . . . an ultimate environment that is infinite in scope and inexhaustible in its mysteriousness.²⁷ Though Haught’s perspective differs from my own, his definition is a fair and thoughtful articulation of an influential viewpoint.

What is the Internet, if not something that can grasp or carry people away to another, seemingly infinite dimension?

Technology is currently playing a role in the daily lives of average citizens of our world that is eerily like the role religions played in the lives of ancient and early modern people. Like traditional religions once did, technology is shaping our thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, relationships, and future. And just like in the days of religions past, much of that shaping is taking place not in the interests of the average person but in the interests of the largest corporations in the history of humanity, who are doing the shaping.

Technology is not the first secular phenomenon to be compared to religion. Various sports, politics, work, video games, economics, science, the Grateful Dead, Harry Potter, Bitcoin, veganism, wokeism, fraternities and sororities, deregulation, Bardolatry (the worship of William Shakespeare), small talk, elk hunting, and South Indian cinema are all among the responses I’ve gotten over the past few years when asking about interesting analogies for religion. And thinking of all that work reminds me: Derek Thompson, at the Atlantic, is also, sadly, correct in pointing out in his brilliant writing on workism that work itself seems to have become a religious pursuit for many of us.

So when I make this comparison, I do so not because it is a perfect one; I don’t even believe religions can be compared to one another in any perfectly correct way. My point is that we don’t currently have a better concept than religion for how technology impacts our world today. If you want to argue that the University of Texas football team or limited-edition Nike sneakers are also religions, perhaps that could be valid, but they would be minor to middling cults that do not have much impact on human existence beyond a relatively narrow group of people. Or if they do impact a large group, then they do so only within a narrow slice of life. Tech, on the other hand, has billions of devices sold, trillions of dollars in combined value, and billions of customers so devoted that calling them daily users is no longer particularly useful when we use these products almost every minute. Not to mention an undetermined but surely troubling number of votes influenced by social media disinformation.

The History of Tech-as-Religion

The idea of a similarity between technology and religion is not novel. Influential thinkers from Karl Marx to Martin Heidegger to Martin Luther King, Jr., have commented on the relationship between the two phenomena. And in fact, technology-as-religion, as an idea, had a significant moment in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, or around one biblical generation ago. Reviewing the compelling arguments made back then (by several important thinkers about both religion and tech) will help us appreciate what is new about our current moment—and what is new about my argument, which is different from theirs.

In the summer of 1992, around the time that Bill Clinton, the relatively unknown young governor of Arkansas, overcame a crowded field to win the Democratic nomination for president, the great author, educator, and critic Neil Postman published a book called Technopoly in which he argued that Americans had largely replaced religion and spirituality with a faith in technology.

Postman had already become known for his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is still in print today. In it he famously argued the future would be less like what Orwell envisioned in 1984 and more like what Aldous Huxley imagined in Brave New World. In other words, civilization won’t fall because of a fascist boot stomping on a human face forever. Instead, Postman warned, thanks to television—and all the media technologies to follow it—we would end up amusing ourselves to death. We now live in the era of a reality TV star turned president indicted for espionage who was elected in part because Russian hackers exploited our country’s obsession with social media. Seemingly every time a serious news journalist gets laid off, a new influencer gets their wings. All this time later, it’s getting harder and harder to argue against Amusing Ourselves to Death’s thesis.

Technologies work, Postman argued in 1992 about innovations like the airplane, television, or penicillin, contrasting them with prayer or even faith in God, which aren’t as rational and don’t always do anything tangible or material for us (though certain religious believers and social scientists alike would agree that prayer and faith have profound, even measurable impacts on individuals and communities).²⁸ The relatively obscure Technopoly was chosen in 2023 by the tech-forward website the Verge as the second-best tech book of all time, but the blurb about the book doesn’t mention that the volume frames tech as religion.²⁹

Our new religious faith in these technologies had been evolving for quite a while, Postman asserted in Technopoly: since the eighteenth century, Western society had been in the process of reorienting itself away from earlier fundamental beliefs that traditional religions and gods held the answers to central human questions of meaning, purpose, and ethics. In place of those beliefs, more and more of us were looking to science, engineering, and all sorts of new technologies, not just for solutions to specific problems like how to cross the Atlantic or defeat a harmful bacterium, but for solutions to the broader problem of being human. Many of us, he observed, believed in a strikingly religious way that technology would soon conquer even death itself. Amid such worldwide changes, for Postman, the United States of America was the first technopoly: a place where, more than in any other culture in the history of humanity, an entire population had embraced and dedicated itself fully to technology, and where the people were redefining themselves by it. As we enter the middle of the twenty-first century, it seems our dedication has reached new levels of fervor, which may be of great consequence if current (as I write this) US President Joe Biden was anywhere even close to correct when he said, while preparing for his 2024 campaign, that there comes a time, maybe every six to eight generations, where the world changes in a very short time. And . . . what happens in the next two, three years are going to determine what the world looks like for the next five or six decades.³⁰

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Neil Postman, meanwhile, was far from the only writer on the technology-as-religion beat in his era. In 1994 historian David Nye published a book called American Technological Sublime in which he argued that a large part of American culture was founded on the notion that technology is not only a way of solving problems or improving lives but is in itself the means of producing a sense of awe, wonderment, inspiration, and even terror that we might otherwise associate with religious or spiritual experiences. Nye defines this encounter with tech as the technological sublime, which, he explains, is part of a long history of sublime experience that has been discussed as far back as ancient Rome and theorized about by no less than Immanuel Kant.

It would be the opposite of a sublime experience for most readers to take time right now for a lengthy intellectual history of what a historian like Nye meant when he described the technological sublime. What you need to know is this: religion has never been the only way for masses of people to have profound experiences. No matter how far back you go in history, there have always been people who experience awe, not because they read some theological scroll but because they looked out at a majestic canyon or stared up into the abyss of a starry night. Tech, for David Nye, was a uniquely American continuation of that experience, and he elegantly chronicled how Americans fashioned a kind of modern spiritual tradition out of ever-increasing mechanization, from bridges to skyscrapers, from Robert Oppenheimer’s bomb to the Apollo space program.

Nye’s book came during what we can call the first wave of speculation about tech as religion. But because that was the 1990s, he could not weigh in on what, for better and for worse, has become the ultimate ever-present sublime experience, which is our total unification with tech. In the final chapter of American Technological Sublime, Nye explored the development of the city of Las Vegas as a commercialized landscape in which people were meant to be surrounded by a commodified, yet awe-inspiring, experience of technology. As impressive as one might imagine the lights and sounds of Sin City to have been to its original observers, it’s hard to believe they could have pictured the degree to which we have surrounded ourselves—or even merged—with our tech today. We’re human casinos. Our phone is a little pocket slot machine. It’s also everything else.

In 1997 the late historian and technology critic David Noble published a book, called The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, in which he argued that the impulse toward technological advancement emerges from the same place in our human spirit as does the impulse to perfect ourselves spiritually toward a better world, or even a heaven. Elegantly tracing the history of such impulses back through time into antiquity, Noble’s book expressed the longing that we might learn to disabuse ourselves of the other-worldly dreams that lie at the heart of our technological enterprise . . . to redirect our astonishing human capabilities toward more worldly and humane ends.³¹

That didn’t happen. If anything, the opposite did.

In late 1993, meanwhile, when MIT anthropology professor Stefan Helmreich was a PhD student at Stanford, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, dedicated to research on complex systems science. There, as Helmreich described it, a collection of highly distinguished—and almost exclusively atheist and nonreligious computer scientists and biologists were engaged in a practice that they designated as . . . ‘Artificial Life’—the quest to create life from the absence of life.³²

One of my informants said in no uncertain terms, wrote Helmreich in a 1997 article in Science as Culture, that science was his religion: ‘I have not been religious since high school [said the artificial life scientist to Helmreich]. Science plays the role of religion in my life, in the sense that when I look for ultimate answers to ultimate questions, I look to science.’ Helmreich also noted that many researchers thought of themselves as ‘gods’ with respect to their simulated worlds . . . some so much that they felt that the artificial life they were producing was in fact real life in a virtual universe.³³

I first learned about this project in spring 2021, while auditing Helmreich’s MIT course The Meaning of Life. It seemed to me then that the concept of artificial life had gone nowhere for decades—until 2022 and 2023 brought a generative AI invasion to rival anything since the coming of the Beatles and said, Hold my [virtual] beer.

The Rise of Tech

Here it becomes important to make a major point that might seem minor: One difference between the book you are currently reading and the aforementioned literature is that this is a book about the religion of Tech, not (just) the religion of technology. What does that mean?

Technology, as a concept, has been discussed for at least 2500 years or so, dating to when authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Socrates debated the precise meaning(s) of the Greek term techne—essentially a way of doing things.³⁴ As should be obvious, there have been infinite ways of, well, doing things, over the course of modern history.

This book, however, is about a phenomenon called tech, a relatively new offshoot of earlier concepts of technology. The four-letter word tech has existed in the English language for some time: the Georgia Institute of Technology has also been known as Georgia Tech for well over a century, for example.³⁵ But as you can see in the following chart, tech was rarely used throughout the nineteenth century and even well into the twentieth. Its usage spiked dramatically starting in the 1980s, as Americans in particular were beginning to speak of personal computing and other hi-tech innovations.³⁶ Tech, as a religious term, then, might be considered a splinter group from the religion of technology, which has conquered and reshaped the world much as Constantine’s empire, and his legacy, remade a world of paganism, Judaism, and other Mediterranean cults, in Christianity’s image.

Or think of it this way: in modern English, technology is a word that can be pluralized. We can speak of technologies. But the word tech can only be articulated in the singular. There are no techs.

Tech is one.

Usage of the term tech over time. Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer, http://books.google.com/ngrams.

✵

This book was written over a period of a few years during which technological terminology itself was in flux. Up until relatively recently, for example, the term artificial intelligence was the subject of some controversy, at least among academics and experts in the field who tended to prefer terms such as machine learning or neural networks. Eventually, however, AI became the dominant expression, even among people who believe that algorithmic systems are neither artificial—because people created them—nor intelligent, in any meaningful sense. It may even seem to readers in late 2024 that AI, not tech, is the real religion. And indeed the now-burgeoning field of AI-branded startups is demonstrating a striking penchant for religious claims, such as the algorithm claiming to predict when you’re going to die, or Tab, a VC-backed glowing AI pendant necklace that listens to your every word, and that is publicized by its Harvard-dropout inventor as a replacement for a relationship with God.³⁷ Though I will mainly refer, below, to the tech religion, I will also refer to and describe the religiosity of AI, which for current purposes can be seen as interchangeable with tech, generally.

As we’ll explore throughout Tech Agnostic, the ideas, practices, and products we associate with the term tech include the notion that we can connect literally every human being to every other human being through digital communication; the conviction that we can make literally every fact and experience that has ever been had knowable and understandable to all; the intention to place watching eyes and ears above every one of us so that we can all be seen, known, and surveilled at every moment; and, of course, the faith that we can ultimately create machines so powerful, breathed full of intelligent life, that they may even eclipse us and become new gods themselves. In other words: tech has not only become a religion; it has become the world’s most powerful religion.

My Tech Theology

Themes of tech-as-religion were also being pursued in the 1990s by leading theologians. In their 1997 paper Religion and Technology: A New Phase, distinguished Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox and coauthor Anne Foerst (then a postdoc at both MIT’s AI Lab and the Harvard Divinity School) analyzed then-emerging tech from a theological perspective.³⁸ They did so with striking prescience, even seeming to anticipate several scenes in the film The Matrix, released two years after the article’s publication. They pointed to Marvin Minsky, founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who had claimed that humanity would soon create a new, computerized life-form that would be as different from and superior to humans as we were from the lifeless chemistry that preceded us. This language clearly falls within the category of what theologians commonly call ‘eschatology,’ they wrote, the study of the future and of ‘the last things.’ Cox and Foerst even anticipated, in 1997, how digital dreamers might co-opt the vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., of a Blessed Community in which all humanity might come together as one. What Cox and Foerst described then as a cybernetic global village where misunderstandings and suspicions will melt away as billions of individuals communicate with each other from the privacy of their home (or hut) is instantly recognizable to anyone who lived through the halcyon days of Web 2.0.

When Cox and Foerst published their paper, I was a few years away from deciding to join people like them at Harvard Divinity School (HDS). At that time, I was a college religion major. I was concentrating in Chinese language and culture, wondering whether I should become a Buddhist or Taoist priest, and actively looking for a spiritual and communal home for a religious misfit like me. Virtually all my adult life, I have been a passionate atheist and fascinated by all things religious, as part of what I would have to call an obsession with questions about what it means to be human.

A quarter century later, I am at Harvard and MIT, serving as clergy for their rapidly growing student populations of humanists, atheists, agnostics, and other nonreligious people and allies. I am a professional atheist, in other words, at least regarding traditional religions and gods. In the religion of technology, I am merely an agnostic. Because surely there are at least some technologies worth believing in, and at least some signs that tech might one day justify more of our faith—aren’t there?

I became the humanist chaplain at Harvard in 2005. I’ll talk more about my unusual career throughout the book, but for now I’ll say: for over a decade in that role, my biggest professional project was to create and build a nonreligious congregation that would fill the role of religious communities in the lives of my fellow nonbelievers (though as I argue in my book Good Without God, even without knowing it, we may in fact be deeply principled believers in a faith in secular human ethics and meaning-making that some call humanism). Called the Humanist Hub, the community of and for atheists, agnostics, and allies was a product of millions of dollars raised from thousands of donors, over a thousand events and programs attended by hundreds of members, and countless eighty-hour workweeks for me.

I organized the congregation for many reasons, but I like to think the most relevant ones stemmed from my intention to build something positive. I believed then, and still believe, that secularist activists tend to complain too much about the flaws in religion without asking ourselves what should exist in its