To be human is to yearn for a Sky Daddy. Something that explains the unexplainable, someone to blame. No wonder, then, that in the ZIRP-fueled 2010s, when a new gospel of creation was being spread, some people started to see technology as a kind of religion. And on the eighth day, He made a mobile app that delivered us our daily bread—that sort of thing.
Startup founders and CEOs became messianic figures. Alms-giving got a new name: effective altruism. Biohacking was ritualized, and the singularity seemed ever nearer. These would save humanity from “as Biblical a scourge as there ever was: death itself,” wrote Greg Epstein, a humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT, in his book Tech Agnostic. All of this was as close as Silicon Valley, famously skeptical and not so secretly libertarian, would come to publicly embracing theology.
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