From Marx to Postman: The Roots of a Tech-Faith Analogy
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.
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.
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.
Technopoly and the Rise of Technology as Belief System
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).
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.
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.”
The Technological Sublime: Awe, Machines, and Meaning
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.
The Religion of Progress: Noble’s Spiritual History of Innovation
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.”
That didn’t happen. If anything, the opposite did.
Artificial Life and the New Gods of Silicon Valley
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.
“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.’”
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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.”
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.”
