"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."
"Earlier this year, I found myself in an expensive condo, converted from a church, in San Francisco's Mission District, listening to a venture capitalist turned arms dealer recite parts of the Lord's Prayer to a crowd of 200 techies. Inspired by a religious speech Peter Thiel gave at a private birthday party a few years earlier, this VC's wife launched a group called ACTS 17 Collective-Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society-as a means of spreading the gospel to Silicon Valley."
During the ZIRP-fueled 2010s, many treated technology with near-religious devotion, elevating founders and CEOs to messianic status and ritualizing practices like biohacking and effective altruism. Promises of the singularity and techno-solutionism framed technology as a means to conquer mortality. A countercurrent emerged in which prominent technologists and wealthy elites embraced and promoted traditional Christianity within tech spaces. Wealthy gatherings and converted church venues hosted prayers and sermons attended by hundreds of tech professionals. Organized initiatives such as ACTS 17 Collective explicitly sought to acknowledge and spread Christian faith within technology and society, shifting cultural norms in Silicon Valley.
Read at WIRED
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