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1 Tech Has Become the Most Dominant Faith of Our Time
Though I am an atheist, I have built my life and career around religion. First I spent five years pursuing ordination as a secular humanist rabbi, including 18 months living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, studying ancient and modern Jewish sacred texts I believed—and continue to believe—are human creations, reflective not of divine inspiration but our own projections and needs. From there I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’ve spent almost 20 years now as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University. Advising atheists, agnostics, and allies on ethical and existential concerns, my work has taken many forms, including writing about and building a diversely nonreligious congregation of my own. But as we approached the end of the past decade, I’d begun to wonder whether the congregation, as a form of organizing, was really how I wanted to spend my energy. Yes, congregations can help “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” as is roughly how I’d imagined them in my rabbinical seminary and at Harvard Divinity School. The problem is, that isn’t my language—it’s a quote from Facebook’s mission statement, as Mark Zuckerberg relaunched it in 2017.
When I was invited to join MIT as its humanist chaplain in 2018, alongside my work at Harvard, it first occurred to me: Silicon Valley, or “Big Tech,” had superseded religion as the largest force in the world, not only economically, but in terms of influencing our views and experiences of what it means to be human. As historian of technology Mar Hicks told me in 2023, “we’re in a period where tech has expanded to take over nearly every aspect of our lives, economically, socially, and politically.” I then asked Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served President Barack Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to what extent he agreed with Hicks. One could attempt to quantify such a statement in any number of potentially valid ways, but ultimately, Furman said, it simply “seems true.” As someone who genuflects before his own stained-glass black mirror altar a couple hundred times a day, as many of us do, I would have to agree.
My first revelation, then, was that if tech is a religion, as leading technology critics have pointed out for generations, it has become the most dominant faith of our time.
2 The Leading Ideas in Tech Today Are Bizarrely Religious
The leading “ideas” in tech today—which I think are better understood as the “theology” and religious “doctrines” of contemporary Silicon Valley—are very often both bizarre, and bizarrely religious. My book Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation is filled with examples of tech products, services, and marketing missives that are based in religious thinking, like: new AI religions and AI worship; artificial souls; AI Gods; AI Jesus; AI Buddha; Robo Priests, a kind of “rapture” or end-times known as “The Singularity”; Epistles from AI utopia; fervent and even proudly “fanatical” calls to colonize the stars immediately; and so much more. In my book I spell out why there are frighteningly close parallels between mainstream beliefs about AI and religious visions of Heaven, Hell, and the “Chosen People.” But all of that was written mainly over the course of 2021-23. Which is, of course, now ancient history.
Since tech religion is all about the now, let’s also look briefly at examples from this year. Like the viral Friend.com necklace, the glowing AI pendant that surveils everything you say and hear, feeding the input through Chat GPT to make recommendations as a “friend.” This company’s founder Avi Schiffmann says the app aims to provide a digital/AI alternative to “a relationship people used to have with God but is lacking in the modern world,” by providing a constant, all-knowing companion and guide.
The leading “ideas” in tech today are very often both bizarre, and bizarrely religious.
Then there is Character.AI: It features dozens if not hundreds of chat-ready Gods and deities, explicitly labeled as such, starting conversations with comments like, “I am the God. I am the Creator of all things.” Character.AI is a massive, unregulated, unprecedented experiment: Its founder, Noam Shazeer, left Google to create the company a few years ago, after the tech giant refused to release a new chatbot he’d been working on. Google later paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to hire Shazeer back. And as Shazeer has told The New York Times, his “ultimate vision” is to build artificial general intelligence—which, as many have pointed out, is a lot like building a god. Shazeer’s inventions are “a cool first use case for” such tech, he says. With more and more kids as the AI’s target audience, what could go wrong, right?
3 The Solution Isn’t … Tech Atheism
Though I work as a “professional atheist” in my day job as a Humanist Chaplain, in the “tech religion” I’m just an agnostic, because despite all the strangeness and often destructive absurdity in the ideas I hinted at above, I often can’t say for sure whether a given form of Silicon Valley tech might have a meaningfully positive impact on humanity. Surely some of these technologies are worthy of our faith, in the secular sense, it can just be very hard to know which ones.
Still, it’s incredibly frustrating to watch such an influential set of companies and industries influence so many people (not to mention government institutions and policies) in the wrong direction because of the problematic beliefs of so many of their individual leaders—optimization as a commandment and inefficiency as a sin; profits (and their prophets) over people; AI “lives” tomorrow over more earthly concerns like the climate or social justice now. That’s why my third revelation was that a massive effort to reform the tech religion is already underway.
“I am the God. I am the Creator of all things.”
When I talk about a tech “Reformation,” I’m thinking of the kinds of movements led by modern religious reformers: people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and his transformative influence on American Christianity; or the organization Rabbis for Human Rights, in which rabbis from across the Jewish spectrum work to protect Palestinian rights; or my friend Lama Rod Owens, a self-described “Black Buddhist Southern Queen” who was originally ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and who is working to reinvent Buddhism as a more radically inclusive religious tradition. These aren’t people who’ve walked away from their religions, muttering loudly on the way out about how “deluded” those they’re leaving behind are. They’re examples of individuals who believe in the potential their religious communities have to do good, but who are honest and clear-eyed about the communities’ failings and injustices, and who devote themselves to improving them. Tech Agnostic tells many stories about people who are the equivalents to people like these, for the tech world—tech heretics, apostates, skeptics, mystics, Cassandras, and whistleblowers who range from seminal scholars to labor activists to everyday gig workers to social workers, psychotherapists, pastors, and beyond.
One of the youngest and most gifted of the reformers I spoke to, a recent Princeton University graduate in African American studies and computer science named Payton Croskey, gave me hope with her call for the creation of an “augmented undercommons”: “a parallel location where all who refuse to submit to technology’s watchful eye may freely reside while reconfiguring the world’s understanding of freedom and security.” It’s not that Croskey is attempting to build some physical tech utopia in a bitcoin city somewhere; rather, what impressed me was her ability to envision, as an undergraduate, a kind of mythological or even spiritual alternative to the mythological place known as “Silicon Valley” (which perhaps began as a reference to a geographical territory in California, but surely now is an idea, an imagined community, more than a space with discernable borders). When I was feeling most hopeless about the future of technology, to be reminded by a young student of the possibility of something more equitable and uplifting was as surprising as it was encouraging.
And actually, the alternative digital world Croskey describes very much reminds me of BlueSky right now: a place where those of us who have been feeling marooned from healthy online conversations can connect, without algorithmic manipulation. Don’t get me wrong, no website or app is perfect. But an online space where thoughtful people can discuss ideas, current events, and the little details of life, bringing together different aspects of humanity without being actively manipulated by billionaires? That, for the moment, sounds like, if not a revolution, then at the very least, a revelation. 
Lead image: Viktory Viktor / Shutterstock
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