Late one night many years ago, through a haze of smoke and meandering conversation in an apartment on Pine Street, something emerged in my mind. A whisper about the connection between the invisible forces that have shaped human civilization. This insight wasn’t clear then and still isn’t fully clear now. More of a hunch about the threads connecting our past and future relationships with the divine, and how we might have lost something profound in the translation.
What struck me was how the internet—and by extension, the digital world—mirrors the attributes we’ve historically assigned to gods. Like ancient deities, it’s an invisible yet omnipresent force, bringing light from darkness and connecting minds across vast distances. Our ancestors gathered around fires to share stories and seek warmth; we huddle around glowing screens, seeking connection through the pulse of protons.
The iPhone and fast internet were just emerging, and I wondered how long it would be until people started to somehow worship these things, to take membership in digital cults, just like we had devoted ourselves to religion for millennia.
As societies secularized, we didn’t abandon our need for organizing frameworks like religion—we only transformed them. The internet didn’t just create a new way to communicate; it opened a portal to a parallel dimension where our thoughts take a hybrid physical/ephemeral form. Every profile, every avatar, every carefully curated feed is a ghost of ourselves wandering through servers, leaving traces in databases like the spirit of a pilgrim leaving footprints in ash.
We’ve haven’t fully abandoned sacred geometry and religious symbols—we’ve adapted them for the digital age. The perfect rectangle of the screen has replaced circles and crosses as our primary symbol, mediating our relationship with reality. Our smartphones aren’t just tools—they’re modern-day amulets, carrying our memories, dreams, and fears in their crystalline structure. We expect a response, some sort of comfort or feedback from their Neodymium cores, reaching for them first thing in the morning and touching them last thing at night, a digital rosary keeping us tethered to our new faith.
New forms of divinity, whether we know it or now, have arisen. Each large language model emerges as a different god with its own personality, quirks, and followers. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok—they’re our new oracle machines, dispensing wisdom and predictions in exchange for the sacrifice of our data. We consult them like ancient Greeks consulted oracles and augurs, seeking guidance for everything from coding problems to life decisions.
Yet something profound and perhaps troubling happened when we crushed three-dimensional reality into two-dimensional screen-space. Physical existence, with all its mess, friction, and unpredictability, got translated into a clean grid of ones and zeros. This flattening paradoxically created its own kind of depth—not in physical space, but in webs of meaning and reference. Each post, story, and tweet becomes part of an ever-expanding digital memory, simultaneously ephemeral and (semi-)permanent, creating a new kind of space that exists between and beyond our screens.
The digital realm offers us the ability to “almost” satisfy our desires, but only in the space between us and our devices. This collected and unrealized potential has subtle yet profound effects on the real world. Our online participation, scrolling and daydreaming can make us feel like we have done something, but in reality we have not. There is no real charge, no final expression, only desire and imagination that has been elevated through our self-branding, temporarily satisfying an internal psychological need, but without relationship to the world.
Community becomes reduced to others who share our complaints or simply look like us, bound together by the performance of expected roles rather than genuine connection - something that in former societies could not be so easily chosen or severed. We just look at the post, re-post, now we don’t have to take any further action that might require risk.
Traditional spaces of gathering—churches, temples, community centers—are being replaced by digital forums that transcend geography but sacrifice the raw, unfiltered encounter with human difference. These digital spaces often become echo chambers for shouting rather than places to confront the strangeness of others and learn to build something greater than ourselves.
It wasn’t always meant to be this way. The early pioneers of the internet saw something far more expansive. Nicholas Negroponte spoke of bits replacing atoms, not as a flattening of experience, but as a liberation from physical constraints. J.C.R. Licklider’s vision of an “Intergalactic Computer Network” is about transcending the limitations of space itself. John Perry Barlow’s “home of Mind” suggested not a retreat from physical reality, but an expansion of human potential beyond it. Yet somewhere between these utopian visions and our present reality, something fundamental shifted.
While the idea that came out of that smoke-filled conversation years ago still isn’t fully realised, today it’s clear that it wasn’t only about technology replacing religion. It was an inkling of a fundamental change in our way of interacting with each other and the world—a recognition that we’re building something both ancient and entirely new. The digital realm isn’t just a tool or platform - it’s a mystical plane where the rules of physical reality bend and break, where thoughts become things, and where we’re all engaged in a vast, collective ritual we don’t fully understand.
The pertinent question isn’t whether to resist this new digital theology, but how to transform it. At its core, digital technology operates in binary—ones and zeros, on and off—and this fundamental limitation has seeped into our consciousness. We increasingly see our choices as binary: left/right, for/against, friend/enemy. Our social platforms reinforce this with their like/dislike, follow/unfollow mechanisms, causing us to forget our connection to intuition and our ability to see the textured, uncertain aspects of reality. Can we resist this flattening effect, where AI merely reflects our existing knowledge and neurosis back at us? Can we instead recapture that early vision of technology as a force for expansion rather than compression? Perhaps there’s still potential to use these tools not just to simulate three-dimensional reality, but to genuinely expand human consciousness and connection beyond it.
As our physical and digital lives become increasingly intertwined, we need a new kind of wisdom that honors both the tangible and the virtual. We’re not just witnesses to this transformation. We’re its priests and practitioners, its skeptics and believers. The challenge is to participate in this grand technological ritual while remembering that the true mystery of existence can’t be contained within a screen, no matter how divine its glow.
Also of Note
Preparing and Mourning for Deletion Death
This Substack just slid into my inbox, and I thought it relevant in light of the newsletter you’ve just read. From Matt Klein onZine.
Until Next Time
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