Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology: Or, how to make sense of techno-optimist manifestos, the Open Ai/Altman affair, EA/e-acc movements, and the general sense of cultural stagnation

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture, broadly understood. Before my detour into writing something about Vision Pro, the previous two installments had been a bit more reflective and meditative. This installment is written in a decidedly different mode. It proposes a thesis that I think helps clarify some of the weirdness of our moment. It is at once a commentary on techno-optimist manifestos, the perception of cultural stagnation, effective altruists and effective accelerationists. At least, it is an attempt to provide a useful frame by which these might be understood. The general argument is this: we’ve been secularizing out of a dominant religion, but that religion is not the one we assume it to be. It is rather the religion of technology. I suppose the mode here can be characterized as lightly provocative. As is often the case, the essay grew as I wrote it, but I tried to keep it moving along as best I could. I do hope it provokes a consideration and perhaps some helpful thinking about our moment. One last note in the interest of full disclosure: the links to books will take you to bookshop.org. If you make a purchase, you’ll support local bookstores and a small portion will come my way as well.

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Allow me to casually suggest that the enormous surfeit of cultural analysis on offer has failed to produce an adequate diagnosis of our moment because it has failed to account for one of the most significant unfolding developments.

And yes, obviously I’m the one who is going to tell you what everyone else is missing.

I’m being facetious, of course, but I do think there’s something of value in what follows. As always, you can tell me otherwise.

Let’s start here: The most consequential form of secularism has been almost altogether ignored because the underlying religion has not been recognized as such.

That religion is what historian David Noble called the religion of technology.

Off we go.

1. The more or less standard secularization thesis

The standard, although now much contested, secularization thesis, ascendent in the 1960s, told a relatively straightforward story about the retreat of religion from modern life. According to this story, modernity was characterized, in part, by the ...