False faiths

Elon Musk, founder of the company Neuralink, which seeks to develop a brain-computer interface, is dreaming of uploading human brains to machines. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the weird and not so wonderful world of tech bro-dom, a company is promising to create virtual simulacra of your dead relatives for you to have cheery check-ins with on your smartphone. Silicon Valley is rapidly becoming an uncanny valley — a land of weird neurodivergent conmen, promising technological miracles and creating illusory worlds for the lonely, desperate and confused to inhabit. 

The promise of all-knowing AIs, uploaded brains or digital communication with the dead are of course the basic building blocks of religious faith. You have deities, who will, on the day of their birth, immediately discern the secrets of the universe and build a paradise on earth for humanity — or destroy us for their own unknowable reasons. And of course you have an afterlife, and the ability, by the power of the holy machine, to commune with these saints and spirits. In this new digital faith, we all stare at screens like sacred icons that mediate a better, truer world, and respond, in liturgical fashion, to the sounds, lights and messages that buzz and flash from these windows to beyond. And like any good universalist faith, it unites all of humanity, blind to race, sex or class, within its all-embracing arms. 

It is almost too easy to draw the religious parallels of digital technology and the internet. Yet perhaps as striking as the likenesses to religious faith are the differences and inversions. Religions present themselves as the search for ultimate truth. One day the veil will part and we will see the face of God, as St Paul writes, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 

In as much as secular modernity has an implicit faith, it is a materialist reflection of the ancient urge for encountering ultimate reality. The arguments made by Dennett or Dawkins are not that atheism is simply a better way of living, but that it is true. Scientific progress is thus a collective striving towards the final truths of a material universe, whose fruits are material improvements in our lives in the form of rational governance and technological innovation. 

This very 20th century creed of constant material progress was the “religion” of the Soviet project as much or more as it was the Western one. Soviet propaganda posters showed astronauts looking in vain for any sign of God amongst the stars, and depicted, in heroic, Faustian form, mankind striding out into the universe to claim distant planets. This was the age of the Apollo missions and Concord, racing cars and skyscrapers, luxury and logic. 

Something very strange has happened to this worship of material progress. Increasing inequality and stagnating growth in much of the Western world, combined with a shift of capital and social energies away from manufacturing and into services, finance and digital technology, has seen a kind of “virtual capitalism” emerge, and with it a very different sort of materialist “religion”. If the old faith was a modernist creed, the new one is aggressively postmodern. 

The striking thing about brain uploads and dead relatives on your iPhone is that they are, definitionally, unreal. No matter how sophisticated your brain upload is, no matter how advanced a machine, indeed even if the upload was intelligent or conscious, it would not be you or your consciousness. It’s the old Star Trek problem from Philosophy 101. The Star Trek transporter isn’t a window in space that you step through, it works by disassembling you, transcribing you into information, then reassembling your atoms somewhere else. The you that ends up on the other end may have all your memories, may be identical to you in every way, but the you that went into the transporter died — from that experiential viewpoint, things turned black the moment the button was hit. In the same way, if you upload your brain, you and your body will still be inconveniently around, unless actively disposed of.

Not only are the promises of the new religion unreal and untrue — they are known to be unreal and untrue. The AI you chat to isn’t thinking or feeling. The consciousness you upload isn’t conscious, and it isn’t you, or the person you love. And the people using, or hoping to use, these services are aware of this fact. In this new economy of sensation, desire and identity, reality is less important than experience — experience and the power and self ownership of the autonomous individual. The promise of technology is precisely that of autonomy: the dream of a life can be regulated and mastered, without relying on others. 

Alienated from the material world, those around us and even our own biology, the modern digital subject loses any grasp of reality

Authenticity has come to mean something like its opposite. From the concept of sincere relationships and meaningful activity, it has been transformed into the notion of total attunement with your own desires. Anything that causes you to compromise your own desires and self-identity becomes threatening and oppressive. Reality, far from being the source of authenticity, is at war with your authentic self. Digital spaces, which allow you to select and filter your social interactions, have seen the formation of new sexual and gender identities through social media sites like Tumblr. The central claim of trans ideology, for example, is that the body itself must be forced to submit to the abstract, virtual and synthetic self-image of the authentic self. 

Alienated from the material world, those around us and even our own biology, the modern digital subject loses any grasp of reality. The idea of uploading your brain becomes much less absurd when your self is not your body or even your spirit or consciousness, but rather an identity that you have constructed and determined. In the end, even our own minds rebel against us. The digital native generation is also the generation that reports suffering most from anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD and a host of hysterical maladies. 

Reality, in this context, is less important than sensation and identity; unmediated passion and unrestrained pride. Dante, in delimiting the circles of hell, located lust as the least severe of the sins, with the severity of the evil increasing until it culminates in those guilty of treachery and betrayal. Lust is the most forgivable sin, for civic-minded Dante, because it is the least selfish, and most oriented to the other. The worst sin, by contrast, is that of placing the self above the other in the most extreme way possible, inverting a relationship of love and trust into one of total selfishness, cruelty and abandonment. 

Though our passions lead us into disordered habits, they are more forgivable because they also open us to human relationships. Desires for sex, food and wealth can be corrupting, but in their proper place, rationally and socially ordered, they are constructive of the good life and flourishing families. What begins as the desire for pleasure gets us out of the house, puts us in relationship with other people, and forces us to reflect on and navigate our own urges in the public realm. Yet in the religion of the autonomous digital self, these desires have been twisted so that instead of drawing us close to one another, they intensify our isolation. 

The promise of a digital life is that you can make a living from cryptocurrency, order your food to the doorstep via an app and get sexual satisfaction from pornography. The healthy vital forces that sweep us out of our homes and into the complexity of real life are diverted by the easy seductions of desire swiftly met without the need for negotiation or compromise. We become acclimated to the aristocratic pleasures of an existence without judgement or shame, lived however we choose, beholden to nothing and nobody. 

This unreal religion of the digital self is as doomed an enterprise as the faith of the Easter Islanders

Politics and economics themselves start to take on more of the queasy qualities of the virtual. Government policy is subject to the invisible judgement of the bond markets, and much of the nation’s “work” is nothing other than the manipulation and exchange of information on a screen. At some point this corresponds to the real world, but those managing the data are rarely the same as the people enacting or living with the consequences of abstract decision-making. Silicon Valley dreams of UBI (universal basic income) need not be the stuff of fantasy: as more than half the population are net recipients of government largesse, we are already halfway there. 

This unreal religion of the digital self is as doomed an enterprise as the faith of the Easter Islanders, and the idol of the self is just as certain to destroy the health of society as the carving of the Moai heads. Reality will always wreak its revenge on the virtual. We can abstract our economy and society all we wish, but as the costs of fuel, food and energy increase, along with the deficit of our struggling state, reality is knocking at the door. The individual lost in the worship of his own identity is no better off either. Growing old without children to care for you, a shrinking circle of friends and family, the inability to politically organise or advocate for shared interests; the social consequences for millions look set to be nothing short of catastrophic. In the end, the virtual gods will have to answer to the Gods of the Copybook Headings:

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!