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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s obsession with social media.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Reviewing the compelling arguments made back then (by several important thinkers about both religion and tech)<\/strong> will help us appreciate what is new about our current moment\u2014and what is new about my argument, which is different from theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a><\/em> in which he argued that Americans had largely replaced religion and spirituality with a faith in technology.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n Postman had already become known for his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death<\/em>, which is still in print today. In it he famously argued the future would be less like what Orwell envisioned in 1984<\/em> and more like what Aldous Huxley imagined in Brave New World<\/em>. In other words, civilization won\u2019t fall because of a fascist boot stomping on a human face forever.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, Postman warned, thanks to television\u2014and all the media technologies to follow it\u2014we would end up amusing ourselves to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s obsession with social media. Seemingly every time a serious news journalist gets laid off, a new \u201cinfluencer\u201d gets their wings. All this time later, it\u2019s getting harder and harder to argue against Amusing Ourselves to Death<\/em>\u2019s thesis.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTechnologies work,\u201d Postman argued in 1992 about innovations like the airplane, television, or penicillin, contrasting them with prayer or even faith in God, which aren\u2019t as rational and don\u2019t 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The relatively obscure Technopoly<\/em> <\/a>was chosen in 2023 by the tech-forward website The Verge<\/em> as the second-best tech book of all time, but the blurb about the book doesn\u2019t mention that the volume frames tech as religion.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n Our new religious faith in these technologies had been evolving for quite a while,<\/strong> Postman asserted in Technopoly<\/em>: 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of us, he observed, believed in a strikingly religious way that technology would soon conquer even death itself.<\/strong> Amid such worldwide changes, for Postman, the United States of America was the first \u201ctechnopoly\u201d: 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cthere 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.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neil Postman, meanwhile, was far from the only writer on the technology-as-religion beat in his era. <\/strong>In 1994 historian David Nye published a book called American Technological Sublime<\/a><\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n Nye defines this encounter with tech as the \u201ctechnological sublime,\u201d<\/strong> which, he explains, is part of a long history of \u201csublime experience\u201d that has been discussed as far back as ancient Rome and theorized about by no less than Immanuel Kant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201ctechnological sublime.\u201d What you need to know is this: religion has never been the only way for masses of people to have profound experiences.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, <\/strong>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\u2019s bomb to the Apollo space program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nye\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As impressive as one might imagine the lights and sounds of \u201cSin City\u201d to have been to its original observers, it\u2019s hard to believe they could have pictured the degree to which we have surrounded ourselves\u2014or even merged\u2014with our tech today. We\u2019re human casinos. Our phone is a little pocket slot machine.<\/strong> It\u2019s also everything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTechnopoly and the Rise of Technology as Belief System<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Technological Sublime: Awe, Machines, and Meaning<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe Religion of Progress: Noble\u2019s Spiritual History of Innovation<\/h2>\n\n\n
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