Tech is a suicide cult
Tech is a suicide cult
Tech is our end-times religion. Admit it.
In my ongoing effort to piss off pretty much everyone in the tech industry by raining on their parade — our parade, really, as I am also in the tech industry — I thought I’d point out a few more unpleasant truths. Go, me!
Let me begin by saying that technophobes appear to be a dying breed. Nearing extinction, really. And as the tech industry is pretty much self-selecting, we can safely assume that virtually everyone in the industry is a technophile.
Technophilia is clearly a religion. Unfortunately, there is no agreed-upon definition of religion, so we’ll have to define it first. Fortunately, I am more than up to the task.
What is religion?
For the purposes of this polemic, and defining the term loosely as that is how it is often used today, let us define religion thus:
Religion is a set of beliefs held by faith—ergo without need for evidence or proof—considered by adherents not only to be true, but also to be the “one” truth.
Of course, religions often include features of the “supernatural”, rules for ethical and moral behavior, rituals, ceremonies, fetishes, and more. Most, if not all, of these are found in technophilia.
Religious zealots of all faiths are remarkably unable or unwilling to acknowledge that their religion might just be a steaming puddle of horse piss. It is simply obvious that they are correct and everyone who disagrees is an idiot.
If you are foolish enough to prove that their beliefs are steaming horse piss, they will most often kill you. It’s the easiest way to deal with inconvenient information: kill the messenger. Humans are nothing if not lazy.
How is technophilia a religion?
Oh, let me count the ways!
The most obvious evidence for technophilia as a religion is that the belief that tech is good and will solve all our problems rests entirely on blind faith.
I know. You’re shocked! How can I say that?
Well, all the evidence—when we actually look at all the evidence—shows clearly that tech is rapidly destroying all life on Earth and any chance for future generations.
Technophiles, of course, avoid any evidence that doesn’t support their faith in tech as our lord and savior. I think they call this “cherry picking”.
By “tech” of course I am referring to all of modern technology since the industrial revolution of a few centuries ago, not just the Internet, AI, social media, or even computers.
Automobiles, aircraft, railroads, steamships, nuclear-powered submarines, telephones, radio, television, robotics, CNC machines, genetic engineering, etc.—all of it is technology. And this includes the hundreds of thousands of new chemicals we’ve created, the biological agents hidden in our biolabs, and so much more.
Yes, medicine, too.
Whoever has ears, let them hear
Whoa! That’s a big claim about tech. Where is my evidence to support it?
Ha, ha! Sorry, but I’m not falling for that one. I stopped falling for it years ago.
True believers always demand evidence to prove that their beliefs are just plain stupid. But if you make the mistake of actually providing this evidence, it will have exactly zero effect.
They will ignore it.
Of course they ignore it! The evidence has been right in front of their faces all along. You really can’t miss it, unless you are missing it deliberately.
You see this a lot with conspiracy nuts. They will state a piece of “evidence” (virtually always laughable), and then I will utterly demolish that “evidence”. And they will admit it: “OK, maybe you’re right about that one, but what about…”
And then they will go through all their absurd “evidence”—almost always “someone on the Internet said” with no proof at all, or the proof has mysteriously vanished because… “them”—and I will demolish each claim in turn. And they will actually admit that I’ve demolished each claim.
So when they run out of arguments, the discussion is over and they give up their conspiracy theory, right? I’ve destroyed every argument they’ve put forth, and usually presented a dozen counter arguments none of which they could rebut.
Slam dunk!
But that is never what happens, and I went down this road dozens of times before I wised up (I’m a slow learner, I guess). What happens is this: they start all over again with their first piece of “evidence” exactly as if we hadn’t already disproved it conclusively.
After the second or third time around, I generally wake up and recognize the pattern. Did I mention that I’m a slow learner?
These people are hermetically sealed. No new information is ever going to penetrate their brains because they desperately don’t want it to do so. Game over.
So I no longer provide evidence. I am not arguing here. I don’t expect to convince even one single person that what I’m saying is true. I am just saying it because someone needs to say it.
Arguments require adults, and none remain.
Maybe if some intelligent alien species comes to Earth someday they will discover that not every human was a blind, blithering idiot. Hey, a boy can dream.
The truth is out there
That technology is leading directly and ever more rapidly to our doom is so obvious and inescapable that the technophiles must be continually exhausted from the non-stop energy loss they incur trying to block it all out.
The oceans are warming islands of plastic and the reefs are rapidly dying off. The fisheries are nearly barren. The lands are more and more desertified, clean water is becoming scare, toxic chemicals are everywhere in the environment including in our bodies.
Oh, look! Most of the mammals and even more of the insects have disappeared! Did they find a better planet? I hope so.
We’ve weaponized every bit of our technology—chemical, biological, genetic, nuclear, etc. and many of us can’t wait to use these horrific weapons. Everyone loves a dystopia, right? Tank girl, FTW!
And the concomitant destruction of human intelligence—tech makes us stupider, not smarter—and maturity—tech infantilizes us—are ensuring that their is no escape from our fate.
It doesn’t take five minutes to find more than enough evidence to support my claim that tech in the hands of infants—which is all of us—is killing us. Not in some distant, may-never-come future, but right fucking now.
We are dying right now.
It is a suicide cult
A cult is a group of people who surrender their individual responsibility to complete obedience to a leader or ideology.
This is proof positive of infantilism. The desire to surrender responsibility for our own actions and to defer to a mommy or daddy is a desire to return to infancy.
Tech is the mommy or daddy. Or both. We look to it to save us from ourselves.
Whenever I point to the obvious—that we are committing autogenocide as a species—the immediate response I get without fail is that more tech will solve it. Even though more tech has never done anything but make it much, much worse.
What is that if not a return to infancy and blind faith that mommy and daddy will make it all OK?
How utterly pathetic! If an intelligent alien species ever really does show up, I’m going to die of embarrassment on the spot. How could we even begin to explain how badly we’ve shit the bed? (Thought experiment: try it.)
Everyone in tech sees this. Everyone knows it. But we love tech and we sure as shit don’t want to grow the fuck up and be responsible adults, so we clench our eyes shut and cover our ears and shout, “I can’t hear you!” And we hope that the inevitable can be postponed just a little bit longer.
We know we’re fucked, but we’re not going to do a damn thing to avoid it. We’ll fiddle instead as the Earth burns. Hell, we’ll probably watch and applaud.
If that’s not a suicide cult, my friends—if I have any friends left at this point—then what is it?
OK, I left out any discussion of the other proofs that technophilia is a religion. I will leave these as an exercise for the reader, as the one proof above is already sufficient.
But anyone willing to take a look can find ample evidence of fetishism, ritual, ceremony, mob “justice”, a belief in the supernatural (see Star Trek, Star Wars, and every other egregious offense to true science), etc. There is even a “tech ethics”, at least in the West, and severe punishment for all transgressors.
And don’t get me started on this absurd belief in “progress”. If this is progress, then what does regress look like?