Hey. If you're reading this, I owe you my apologies for two things:

Like never sending emails, and
then out of nowhere sending you this email, in which I'll ramble on excitedly about technology and semantics like a freshman responding to a college essay prompt.

Sorry. I was struck out of the blue by a writing mood the other day, and sometimes you've just got to spit something out even when it's half-chewed.

But okay, enough of whatever weird metaphor that last sentence was trying to be. Here's this.

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Technoreligion

There’s a large Amish population in Pennsylvania.

I used to see them occasionally when I went to school near Pittsburgh; they’d left the world but they were still out and about. I remember one time in particular, toward the end of a spring semester, driving out with some friends to some isolated spot at the edge of a woods, where, after a five-minute walk, you could sit beneath a waterfall, listen to the rustling of sun-dappled leaves, and forget you had homework or bad grades.

We’d had the place to ourselves for half an hour when another group of people, all right around our own age, arrived in a caravan of horses and buggies. We heard the clopping of their horses and their conversation before we saw them. They were talking loudly in a good-natured way – one of the guys nodded to us from underneath his funny hat, at least – but it was a small area and so it was a little awkward for all of us to be there. Of course we had nothing to say to them, being from different worlds. So our group looked sideways at each other and at the Amish and kind of grumbled a bit, and in a few minutes we left, heading back up to our cars and abdicating the natural world at the edge of the woods to them. They seemed to fit better in it.

My friends and I drove back on the highway with the windows rolled down and bad music from 2012 turned up. I remember we liked the first Imagine Dragons album more than it deserved. I also remember thinking how strange it was that there was a group of people missing out on all the good things of life; they had decided not to drive cars, they avoided “good” electric music, they chose not to use electricity at all. What might possess people – college-aged kids, even – to live that backward sort of life? What did they believe that caused them to retreat so far out of touch with the rest of the world? In apparent cheerfulness, they’d given up almost everything. Did they know that, in surrendering, they’d been left behind?

I felt then, very strongly, that there was something wrong with the Amish, although at the time I didn’t think too much about what it might be. Something about them bothered me. If I’d been asked, I probably would’ve described it as a too-strict fundamentalism. Maybe it was.

But maybe it was something else, and not in the Amish, but in me. I’ve since come to believe that our world, with its bottomless freedom of the internet, its limitless production of pleasure, and its open-mouthed, unending optimization of entertainment, lives under a strict fundamentalism, too – one that actually is more strict, more pervasive, and less chosen. Unlike the religion of the Amish, our religion does not seem to ask for anything. But it consumes everything.

I mean that we live under a technoreligion and its myth of unstoppable, limitless progress.

I don’t use the word religion glibly, as a tongue-in-cheek dig at billionaire tech-bros or something like that. People who use the word in that sense tend to mean it patronizingly, as if to call something which appears to be secular a religion is to point out how foolish it is. I should warn you that I’m a Christian; I don’t think religion is foolish. I do think it is the most accurate label for our cultural relationship to technology.

I mean that technology is a religion in a direct sense: It fulfills the roles of religion. It shapes our hope, both immediately by promising that every problem, from climate change to boredom, has a technological solution, and also eschatologically by saying that humanity’s ultimate destiny is to merge with machines and live forever. It shapes our epistemology. Past earliest childhood, nearly everything we learn is transmitted by technology through media which, as people like McLuhan and Postman have so well described, control what it is possible to know. And most obviously, technology shapes our rituals. With very few exceptions, the activities of modern life are embedded within and performed by technological tools.

But that’s all beating around the bush. Technology isn’t a religion because it checks a series of boxes. It’s a religion because it gives meaning to our lives: because it becomes the center of our lives. It explains the world, tells us how we should act in it, and then requires our worship. A religion says, “Here, this is what life is about. Serve this.” I might claim to be serving Christ. You might claim to be following the Buddha, or Mohammad, or the Dharma. But most of us now really follow our technology. If you doubt this, consider whether it’d be easier to give up your church or your internet connection.

This isn’t merely an analogy stretched too thin. You can see technoreligion plainly in the billionaires who are confessing disciples of transhumanism, or the regular old users of ChatGPT who refer to the tool, unironically, as God. At the moment these people are generally viewed as fringe cases, but if things keep up, I think we’ll see many more like them. In any case, they take the whole thing out of the realm of metaphor. It doesn’t just walk like a duck and quack like a duck; now it wears the name tag, too.

At this point, you might ask (fairly) what my deal is. If I can use the word religion to describe our cultural relationship to technology – so what? Does it matter, or am I just playing a pointless, smug little game of semantics?

You can probably guess that I think it does matter. It’s important if I call a collection of people a country, or a woman my wife, or an algorithm God. The word I apply to something shapes my relationship with that thing and tells me how I ought to act toward it. To call something a religion is to recognize what it wants from me: It wants all of me. The tricky thing about technology is that it doesn’t seem to ask for anything – it seems only to give – which is why it’s especially important to name it correctly. Words pull form from fog. Names have power.

Two other points are worth noticing here.

First, technology isn’t modernity’s only religion. I think you can just as easily classify movements like socialism, or individualism, or entertainment as religions, too (and I think you’d better do so if you want to think clearly about what they require). But technology is a kind of super-religion. It’s the scaffolding on which all other modern ideologies hang.

Second, to call technology a religion is not to say that most people really like technology, or that even its disciples find it satisfying. There’s nothing that says a religion has to be satisfying, and in fact a false religion will probably be more dissatisfying the further you follow it, just as an error on a math problem gets worse as you carry it on. This is why it’s no surprise that techno-optimism is much less fashionable than it was; so much of social media, for example, is made up of posts bemoaning social media. But this just shows how far we’ve carried our errors. Technology is more than ever the universe in which we live and move and have our being; whatever I want to say about things, there is no getting around the fact that I’m saying them on a computer connected to the internet using a Google account. The feeling of inescapability, I think, is why so much of the internet is ironic to the point of bitterness. We know we’re swimming in bad water, but we see no choice but to keep swimming. So we order ourselves to the disorder.

I don’t want to give too much credence to the dogma of technological determinism, though. There are other ways to live. We don’t have to choose between swimming or drowning, but we’d better get out of the water. To that end, I’m going to write a series of essays that examine several ideas:

First, that technology doesn’t necessarily move forward but that it does have a telos. In other words, it does move toward something, and I’ll argue that usually what it moves toward isn’t objectively good.

Second, that technology is the leading factor in governing our lives and our nations, to a degree that even our tech-drenched, tech-enabled discourse misses. (In this sense, I am a technological determinist, at least so far as I believe that a society’s technology shapes its course more deeply than its ideas. I think ideas have crucial roles to play – if I thought differently, I wouldn’t bother to write anything about it – but I tend to see a society’s culture as the sheet music and its technology as the instrument.)

And third, that we can fix the direction of our technology toward a good end; we aren’t doomed to follow it like a river over the edge of a cliff. And we should fix the direction of our technology, because if we don’t, we really might go over a cliff.

All these things have been written about before, of course, many times, and by people much smarter, more eloquent, and better informed than me. Writers like Byung-Chul Han, Wendell Berry, David Foster Wallace, Annie Dillard, and many others – really, every writer who’s reflected on the beauty of a sunrise – have said with better words what I’ll try to say here. But there’s no getting around it; I need to put my thoughts in line somewhere, and if others have already had the same sorts of thoughts in higher forms, at least I’m glad to be following a good crowd.

I’ve begun by talking about the Amish, but this really doesn’t have very much to do with them. I’m sure they have plenty of their own issues, and I don’t want to use them, like Tolstoy did the peasants, as some idealized foil against everything that’s wrong with the current cultural powers. But to my own mind their way of living, detached as it is from the motion of technology, unavoidably crystallizes something: Back then, on that spring morning when we left the natural world to a group more at home in it, I had things the wrong way around. Technology is not necessarily progress, and if it moves in any direction other than forward, then the Amish are not backward or out of touch. We are.

We live under an unchosen, false religion. What might it look like to deconvert?

Essays to come (maybe):

Technology Is Not Neutral
The Cult of Limitless Progress
The Rule of the Technologarchy
How to Tear Down the Temple

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If you read this far – wow, thanks. And if you find yourself here after skimming to the bottom, I don't blame you, and welcome.

I'm hoping to write more in 2026, and not just more of this college-essay-type stuff, but also things that are more fun, like stories and poems and okay jokes, maybe even all at the same time. As always, we'll see.

In the meantime, here's wishing you a Merry Christmas.

– Jon