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The Age of the Silicon Gods The Mythological Substratum of the Technological
Worldview

Conference Paper · January 2019

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The Age of the Silicon Gods
The Mythological Substratum of the Technological Worldview

Sorin Petrof, PhD

Researcher at CTS-IARSIC (CORHIS - EA 7400)
Paul Valéry University of Montpellier, France
petrofson@gmail.com

Abstract: Most of the research surveying the intriguing relationship between religion and
technology is typically based on the traditional premise of non-overlapping magisteria (Gould,
1999), the complete separation of two in terms of the agency and telos. However, the purpose
of this paper is to evaluate another perspective in which religion and technology could be
perceived in a consubstantiation relation, meaning that the imagined presence of magic and
sacred are emerging from the technological medium as a result of specific hieratic formulas
and rituals. For this reason, we not are approaching the technology as a developmental
mechanism to produce a technological society, but specifically as an explicit narrative
employed to generate a certain worldview with the potential to become prescriptive. It is an
attempt to understand the current conversation that revolves around the immanent capacity of
the technological apparatus (Agamben, 2009) to generate either a utopian or a dystopian future
with the help of the silicon machine. We are going to explore the mythological roots of the
religion of technology (Noble, 1999), and its eschatological promise for a new transformative
condition where a carbon-based individual might be very well superseded by a silicon
constructed collective entity floating into a data-heaven. Because the inflation of information
is generating obfuscation and redundancy, clarity as the new currency is the emerging power
(Harari, 2018). This is why we are suggesting that only by understanding the metaphysical
substratum of the technological machine we could pierce the fog of the mystification and really
join the conversation within the same mythological paradigm, thus being able to participate
somehow in the new advertised digital eschatology (Geraci, 2012).

Keywords: future, worldview, technology, salvation, mythology.

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Introduction

A suitable manner to approach the contemporary technological worldview would be

via the “side gate” of mythology. American Gods (2001) is a modern mythological novel. The
premise of the Neil Gaiman’s book is that gods actually do exist, but only because people
believe in them. However, belief in the old gods is on the wane – human thoughts being
obsessed with technology and electronic images – the old gods themselves are also on the
wane. The time has come for the new gods – Media, Technology, Globalisation, Market – to
take over the minds and souls of the worshipers, an impending conflict between the old and
new religion seeming absolutely inevitable. And typically for any mythology, it is up to a
chosen human to play the sacerdotal role in negotiating the fragile balance between sacred
and profane, old and new, real and imaginary, restoring thus the social order of the world,
sometimes with the flip of a coin. That coin is the most mysterious and magic object in the
whole novel, and it seems that almost everything is depending on which side is falling, the
apparent randomness of reality being offered as a literary bonus.
Although a novel, the American Gods do confirm an old social phenomenon, the
deterministic function of the myth production. Kołakowski (1968) has identified this
occurrence arguing that once the old mechanism of traditional religion become obsolete, new
myths are produced, sometimes originating in technical advancements or scientific discoveries.
Kołakowski is not alone in asserting this fact. Others too have established that is hard to
represent the modern world without considering the social function of the myth, magic and
religion in the construction of reality, especially in the case of the technological society (Weber
1948; Malinowski, 1948; Ellul, 1967; Marx, 1975; Heidegger, 1977; Eliade, 1978; Eisenstein,
1979; Postman, 1992; Davis, 1998; Benjamin, 1999; Peters, 1999; Noble, 1999; Stahl, 1999;
Alexander, 2003; Nye, 2004; Aupers, 2009; Mumford, 2010; Stolow, 2013; Harari, 2017 etc.).
Following Müller (1873) hypothesis that mythology is inevitable, an inherent necessity
of language, and Cassirer (1953) argument that in the ambiguities of linguistic denotations lies
the source of all myths, we are suggesting that the production of the symbolic forms, such as
languages, metaphors, images, and narratives is mythological by default. The social function
of the myth was explored by Malinowski (1948) and Cassirer (1946) in various forms and
different perspectives, both concluding that the myth is not necessarily a primitive explanation
of social and religious phenomena but actually constitutes a narrative resurrection of a primeval
reality (Malinowski, p. 79), mostly because myths are not regarded as symbols but as realities
(Cassirer, p. 57).

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 The "contemporary" dimension of the myth, this self-actualization function is somehow
generated by this interesting relationship between myth and reality and confirmed in the form
of the technological worldview. For this reason, in looking for a better explanation, magic is
the most common term associated with the internal complexity of the technological system.
This is why it is important to become part of this current conversation by understanding the
profound metaphysical feature of the technological worldview, thus being able to communicate
within the same mythology.

Methodology

In order to respond to the main research question, “what is the nature of the
technological worldview and is there any other function of it except the informative, descriptive
one?”, we shall take into consideration several aspects: (a) we are hypothesising technology as
a worldview, as a sign system that is subject to semiotic constrains. Although performing as a
hieroglyph1 there is still great value in this logographic script: the image, the symbol, the
metaphor, although embedded in the language are more open to the production of meaning.
For this reason, we are going to let the technology-based language “speak” for itself in the most
literal way, using for this objective many direct quotations in order to understand the narrative
architecture that could lead us to a proper and functional translation of this metaphysical and
hieratic language. Thus, we could acquire a certain understanding of the religion behind it and
find the proper way to engage in a meaningful conversation, using myth as the same language;
(b) following Lule (2001) analysis of news as modern myths we shall explore the technological
discourse from this angle, to identify if there is a mythological substratum. According to Lule
there are seven dominant myths that permeated the news production: The Victim, The
Scapegoat, The Hero, The Good Mother, The Trickster, The Other World, and The Flood (pp.
22-25). From this perspective, the technological worldview, either as simple description or
complex narratives is saturated too by myths, our purpose here is to spot certain mythological
markers and themes, the most important ones being the soteriological and eschatological
promise of the technology; (c) the concept of framing (Johnson-Cartee, 2005) would be
employed as a hermeneutical tool to understand the narrative, images and metaphors behind
the worldview.

1 This is the paradox: the more technological society become the more technologically illiterate the majority are.

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 These frames are interpretative structures used by writers to frame events in their wider
context. Usually, written in a highly comprehensible form, these messages are reduced to
narrations and iconographies that are compatible with the dominant narrative of the society.
However, as a precautionary note, not everything is comprehensible or open.

Disenchantment, Re-enchantment or just Magic?

With the advent of the Enlightenment, the evolution of the human knowledge was
required to make a complete transition from a religious worldview to a scientific matrix.
The key formula for the new paradigm was supposed to be presented in the following sequence:
reason–science–technology–progress–future–salvation. Weber's concept of Entzauberung, or
disenchantment, is usually perceived as the right hermeneutical instrument for understanding
the paradigm shift occurred during the Enlightenment. Writing about the disenchantment of
the world through the instruments of rationality Weber asserted that with the progress of
science and technology, man has stopped believing in magic powers, in spirits and demons.
(Freund, 1969) Nonetheless, while meditating about the consequences of this desacralisation,
and if the sacrifice2 did achieve the intended purpose, Weber contemplated a new strange
condition in human consciousness: “ [the man]… has lost his sense of prophecy and, above all,
his sense of the sacred. Reality has become dreary, flat and utilitarian, leaving a great void in
the souls of men which they seek to fill by furious activity and through various devices and
substitutes” (p. 24). It seems that Weber underestimated what Ferrarotti called, “the hunger for
the sacred”, the eternal return to the myth-making habit of the human mind, the only
explanation for this hunger being that the sacred cannot return for the simple reason that it was
never gone (Ferrarotti, 1984).
Probably is not presumptuous to inquiry if the Enlightenment ever reached its ambition.
In its quest to demystify the reality by opposing myth, magic and religion, and using the
exclusive language of reason, science and empiricism, the prophets of the new age, as
Nietzsche pertinently observed (Turner, 2005), out of an unconscious loyalty to previous faiths,

2
The ritual of sacrifice involved two processes: sacralization and desacralization. The first process endows a
profane offering with sacred properties—consecration—which provides a bridge of communication between the
worlds of the sacred and profane. Once the sacrifice has been made, the ritual must be desacralized in order to
return the worlds of the sacred and profane to their proper places. (See Bell, C., Ritual: Perspective and
Dimensions, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 24).

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adopted belief in a single explanation, rejecting thus the mythos. Inevitably, the logos did
become a normative, definitive, unique narrative employed to find a new meaning.
However, it seems that this strategy backfired. By undermining the human capacity to
find mythological expressions for questions of meaning (Cox, 1997), the Enlightenment
opened the Pandora box for the mechanical mythology (Boia 2006). Alexander (2003) even
challenges a common societal understatement – the possibility for a society to be dominated
by technical rationality. Questioning the nature of our mental structures, he concludes that this
mental matrix cannot be “radically historicised … human beings continue to experience the
need to invest the world with metaphysical meaning.” (p.184) These meanings are associated
with the theological and religious function of the technological inquiry, producing a new
mysticism representative for the modernity: “technological mysticism lies at the heart of
advanced industrial society. When we look at technology this way, we find some remarkable
similarities with theological traditions. Like a religion, technological mysticism 'binds together'
core values into a coherent, if implicit set of beliefs and ritual” (Stahl (1999, p.19). If religion
could be described as a
“set of coherent answers to the core existential questions that confront every human
group, the codification of these answers into a creedal form that has significance for its
adherents, the celebration of rites which provide an emotional bond for those who
participate, and the establishment of an institutional body to bring into congregation
those who share the creed and celebration, and provide for the continuity of these rites
from generation to generation.“ (Bell, p. 429)
then the same existential space could be very well occupied by science 3, especially by
technology. Eliade studied the mythology of the homo faber in order to understand the meaning
and function of his conquest of the material world before the rise of scientific thought. From
the very beginning, it seems that the tool-making humans were allured by the inherent magic
of the technology, the material act of production being dependant on the spiritual act of
incantation. ’To make’ something, according to the Romanian historian of religions, means
knowing the magic formula which allows it to be invented or to ‘make it appear’ spontaneously.
(Eliade, 1978)
By employing certain rituals, old narratives, specific symbols, seductive images,
psychological conditioning, material commodities, alpha and omega myths, technology did

3 Both science and technology are socially constructed cultures : “The divisions between science and technology
are not between abstract functions of knowing and doing. Rather they are social.” (see Layton, 1997, p. 209).

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succeed by creating and maintaining an emotional bond with the public, based on fidelity, even
more efficient than a religious system. Technologies have become - for some people - the new
way of expressing myth. (Cox, 1997, p.57) This means that the technical support, whatever
might be, is not only a combination of instruments, devices, and techniques but rather a social
construction born of “the anticipation and confirmation of its social profitability; economic,
ideological and symbolic… ; the machine is always social before it is technical.” (Comolli,
1980, p. 122)

The Technium is the Discourse

The predisposition to interpret society through technology and its lens is neither new
nor unusual. Postman (1993) makes an overview of the connection between the technological
context, the production of cultural forms and material conditions of life, considering this form
of taxonomy almost inevitable, society and technology is in an almost ontological relationship.
Thus, over time, have succeeded,
“the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Steel Age. We speak easily of the
Industrial Revolution, a term popularized by Arnold Toynbee, and, more recently, of
the Post-Industrial Revolution, so named by Daniel Bell. Oswald Spengler wrote of the
Age of Machine Technics, and C. S. Peirce called the nineteenth century the Railway
Age. Lewis Mumford, looking at matters from a longer perspective, gave us the
Eotechnic, the Paleotechnic, and the Neotechnic Ages. With equally telescopic
perspective, José Ortega y Gasset wrote of three stages in the development of
technology: the age of technology of chance, the age of technology of the artisan, the
age of technology of the technician. Walter Ong has written about Oral cultures,
Chirographic cultures, Typographic cultures, and Electronic cultures. Mc-Luhan
himself introduced the phrase "the Age of Gutenberg" (which, he believed, is now
replaced by the Age of Electronic Communication)” (p. 22).

However, neither Postman himself escapes this taxonomic conditioning, from his
perspective cultures, are classified into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and
technopolies (p. 22). Also, in this context can be added the categorization proposed by Castells
(1996-1998) which, in order to describe the dynamics of technological development, divides
the societies into The Information Age, The Age of Consumption, and The Network Society”

6
and Schwab’s (2017) own envisioning: the fourth industrial revolution; the second machine
age; Industry 4.0.
Castells (2010) and other analysts are justifying their position based on the premise that
technology and society cannot be analysed separately because a society could not be
represented or even understood outside its technological tools. However, moving beyond the
symbolic forms, for Tegmark (2017) technology is already identified with life itself, biological
and cultural, which is evolving to its ultimate destination: Life 3.0, the final upgrade, which
can design both its software and hardware, being the master of its own destiny, finally free
from its evolutionary constrains.
The distinction between technology as a technical device and technology as a social
spirit can be very useful in understanding the ambiguity specific to denotative signs. Somehow,
technology seems to possess a spirit that does not belong to the material, mechanical, and
utilitarian sphere and which is conceived precisely from the "substances" of the social
substratum. Perhaps it would not be off the mark to paraphrase Comolli (1980) by saying that
essentially the technological worldview is not just social but religious too.
Here we get close enough to some concepts that define the almost metaphysical nature
of a system that generates definitive, normative symbolic forms: dispositif or apparatus
(Agamben 2009), understood as “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to
capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions
or discourses of living beings.” (Agamben, p.14); technium (Kelly 2010) a term coined by the
author himself to describe technology as “a self-reinforcing system of creation.” (p.12); fetish
(Marx, 1946), a representational designation for the commodity as a mysterious thing full of
metaphysical and theological niceties. These concepts indicate the reality of the technical gods
that transcends their material medium and even the inevitable question of their right behaviour
– a sort of instrumental theodicy that justifies the necessity of the device in light of the apparent
technical imperfections, these digital emanations having the power to achieve the total
subjectification of the individuals (Foucault 1980). From this viewpoint, technology is seen as
Deus ex machina: in ancient Greek tragedy resolving a particular dramatic crisis with a sudden
intervention of a god, “a dramaturgical convention apò mēchanês theós by employing a certain
mēchanê typically for the purpose of rescuing characters from an impending doom, a formulaic
use of a plot device in which a conveniently perfect solution emerges for an otherwise
inextricable problem.” (Stolow, 2013, p.1)

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The Religious Frame of Technological Worldview

Different scholars have perceived the mythological worldview of technology without

trying to be aware of its internal complexity. This is why the black box model (Latour, 1999),
where only the inputs and outputs are understood but not the implementation per se of a certain
system, is very useful when we are analysing the opaque and obscure function of the
technology as a worldview. It is worth to note how the following authors employed specific
languages, symbols, and images that are very specific in their meaning.
Erik Davis (1999) writes about the consequences of such increasing opacity of our
digital environment: “The logic of technology has become invisible – literally occult. Without
the code you’re mystified. And no one has all the codes anymore” (p.181, quoted by Aupers,
2009, p.169). Susan E. George (2006) is suggesting a new metamorphosis “[f]rom the nexus
of religion and technology we find a “techno-religious age” emerging, representing the absence
of conflict between religion and science. (p.251). Jeremy Stolow (2013) has surprised the
magical roots of technology, arguing that “magic as a family of tools, techniques, and
understanding of the world that, according to a long tradition of scholarship is the ancestor (or
illegitimate cousin) of what we moderns call technology, modernity is pervasively haunted by
its very effort to disenchant the world” (p.9). John Barbour goes further suggesting that the
computer world is in effect taking the material world and making it immaterial: “Once the
Word became Flesh,” but now “the Flesh is becoming Word.” (Cox, 1997, p. 54). Then, the
very communication itself is susceptible to follow the role similar to the old high priests,
“[e]very communications technology generates its own balance between the real and
imaginary, and thus its own secularity and sacredness. (Aupers, Houtman & Pels, 2008, p.694)
and David Noble (1999) using an iconoclastic language asserts that “[t]he present enchantment
with technology is rooted in religious myths and ancient imagining, driven by distant dreams,
spiritual yearnings for supranatural redemption, an enduring, other-worldly quest for
transcendence and salvation.” (p.3) Aupers & Smith (1997) argues that “[e]xpectations for
salvation have been inseparable from the technological inventions of industrial capitalism. The
mythical discourse about technological salvation and apocalypse saturates popular culture in
the Western world” (p.258) and Dinello (2015) testifies that the great religious mutation is
already happening: “Technologism, replacing Christianity, becomes the sole vessel through
which humanity accesses the divine and enters heaven… is the new religion of the self-
aggrandizing techno-elitists. (p.31), whereas Alexander & Smith (1997) are pondering that
“[t]echnology is coded as sacred or profane and is narrated as bringing salvation or damnation.”

8
(p.251). Now the language is becoming quite explicit: “Technology is magic. As practice,
identity and mystification, technological mysticism lies at the heart of advanced industrial
society” (Stahl, 1999, p.19). And finally, the future is already in here, believes Harari (2018):
“Silicon Valley, that is where hi-tech gurus are brewing for us amazing new religions that have
little to do with God, and everything to do with technology. They promise all the old prizes –
happiness, peace, justice and eternal life in paradise – but here on Earth with the help of
technology, rather than after death and with the help of supernatural beings.” (p.409)
The aforementioned quotations are samples of how the discourse about technology is
permeated by the mythological themes which in turn not only has produced the worldview in
the first place but further on informs, guides and transform the nature of the conversation
between technology and religion. More specific, the following keywords and themes, very
descriptive in their meaning, are fairly relevant for the purpose of our research: salvation,
magic, religion, heaven, hell, sacred, profane, occult, transcendence, myth, spiritual,
enchantment, haunted, damnation, apocalypse. This is a religious language. This explains what
Stahl (1999) argued that much of the language associated with technology “is ideological and
mystifying, much of it is magical and implicitly religious4. Throughout history most human
cultures have surrounded technology with myth and ritual, still permeated today with symbol
and myth, but now they are implicit and hidden.” (pp.1-3).
This could be coined as the religious frame of the worldview that is deeply embedded
at the mythological level of the human epistemology. When approaching the religious feature
of technology, we need to keep in mind that we cannot escape the temptation to approach the
topic using a mythological approach (Cassirer, 1953), to identify what role has performed myth
as well as language in the mental construction of our world.
However, this worldview about technology appears to be depended on another frame,
established by what Bijker calls the technological frame, “a combination of current theories,
tacit knowledge, specialized testing procedures, goals, and handling and using practice”
(Bijker, 1987, p.168). More than that, a technological frame consists of the “symbols and
metaphors, which a particular group use to make sense of the artefacts and techniques they
employ” (Stahl, 1999, p.37). They are not displaying just an abstract, theoretical, character or
are resumed to the functional layers of the societal reality. Since technology is society, and
society cannot be understood or represented without its technological tools (Castells, 2010),

4 Stahl is suggesting that symbols and rituals directed to the numinous are located outside formal religious
organizations, and often are unrecognized, unacknowledged, or hidden.

9
the frames play a certain type of influence having “powerful effects in that people’s
assumptions, expectations, and knowledge about the purpose, context, importance, and role of
technology will strongly influence the choices made regarding the design and use of those
technologies” (Noble 1986; Orlikowski 1992; Pinch and Bijker 1987).
It can be easily observed that the technological frame is the other side of the same coin,
performing in every way, very much like the religious frame. A good explanation for this
apparent paradox is what Elide (1978) considers to be the interchangeable nature of both
technology and religion in generating myths and alternative realities, the mythological
creations becoming possible through the discovery of agriculture and metallurgy.

The New Technological Mythology

Noble (1999) is the leading scholar in advancing the thesis that technology and religion
are not in a relationship of non-overlapping magisteria5 (Gould, 1999), neither are they
different stages of human development but a complete hybridization of an old mythological
inquiry. The technological enterprise as an essentially religious venture was "a continuation of
the Western millennial expectations in which the advance of the useful arts become implicated
in the Christian project of redemption” (pp.4-6). Initially and traditionally, technology was
perceived as the product of the fallen state, with no relevance beyond it. Totally severed from
the transcendence, in fact, a denial of it, the recovery of the lost perfection was supposed to be
an exclusive divine initiative and not a human self-help project. However, in the early Middle
Ages, believes Noble, for some opaque reasons, the relationship between technology and
transcendence began to change, the former in its pre-modern configuration as arts and crafts,
“came to be identified with both lost perfection and the possibility of renewed perfection, as
evidence of grace and means of preparation, even a sign for the imminent salvation.” (p.12).
The Protestant reform initiated a new mutation in the evolution of the religious thinking
(Harrison, 1998): firstly, the Protestant demystification of the world based on their literalist
interpretation of the sacred text and fuelled by their scepticism about miracles, sacramental
magic, the role of intermediaries and infallibility of religious organizations promoted a

5 Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) is a philosophical worldview that places religion and science in
separate domains of questioning ("magisteria") in order to avoid one contradicting the other. NOMA hopes to
provide an end to the conflict thesis between science and religion by establishing a demarcation.
(https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Non-Overlapping Magisteria).

10
deterministic view of the cosmos and a mechanical understanding of nature, which is a sine
qua non condition for a scientific inquiry (pp.7-8); and secondly, as a result of that, a new
epistemological focus is gaining supremacy over the performative ritual acts resulting thus in
this present world technical activities. “No longer was salvation considered to be a process in
which the divine image in mankind was restored. Instead, the impulse was redirected outwards
into the natural world, and scientific activity become an increasingly material means of
obtaining secular salvation. (p.273) Further on, it is worthy to remember that Weber argued
that those who created modern industrial society did so in order to pursue salvation.
(Alexander, 2003; Alexander & Smith, 1997). And it was Weber who developed the typology
of this worldly versus otherworldly paths to salvation, comparing the Eastern Asceticism with
Western Puritanism, the-world-to-come vs. this-world salvation (Alexander, 2003, p.185).
The soteriological function of technology is not the result of a hermeneutical
transgression or a historical determinism, neither of a modern tendency to transform any
technical device into a fetish, as a matter of fact, an old Marxian prediction. The salvation
associated with technology is actually a representation of a long existential quest. The machine
is supposed to bring liberation, to create a space where the humans are no longer slaves to their
own natures and environments, but free to float above the material limitations and able to
generate a time that doesn’t includes the past, nor the future but only an eternal present that
freezes the context into a sublime condition (Agger, 2011). Making the information all-
powerful, they are transforming the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipresence into
basic technological features. “This is the dream of unending progress, fuelled by science, which
for centuries has driven Western thought and effort. It has pointed towards an apocalypse of
happiness as complete as anything religions have promised, and, in that sense, has become a
religion itself.” (Turner, 2015, p.187)
As a secular version of the religious eschatology, progress is a powerful myth
(Kołakowski, 1968). However, in a technological society that aims beyond its lapsarian
condition, there is no future without progress. And the progress could be monitored only by
the soteriological function of the technology: its ability to solve the biggest challenge of the
human species, its fallen state6, to save the individuals from themselves and their environment.
The world and the human species are imperfect and the only reason to be stuck in this material
and limited condition is their lack of belief.

6 The notion of the fallen state has been recycled into a more acceptable, secular concept of imperfection.

11
 The only limit is the imagination itself, an imagination that is able to transcend even
the condition of humanity, reaching out to a telos invariably called posthuman (Hayles, 1999;
Bostrom, 2008) or homo sapiens + (Sandu, 2015) or homo deus (Harari, 2017) or transhuman
(More, 1990) or anything that is not just carbon-based human. This transition from homo
sapiens to altered carbon7 will no longer be achieved through the mechanism of natural
selection but through the process of artificial selection that introduces humanity into an
existential singularity of a demiurgic nature (Sandu, 2015, pp.4-5).
With the rise of the new gods from the ashes of the old, the technological medium has
a proclivity for the ascent of the digital gods. Because of its metaphysical substratum, the
technical system is generating electronic and digital deities that have the tendency to transform
and control the public space through prescriptive narratives and definitive images (Petrof,
2015). The image, the sound or the device itself is more than a “threshold”, a passage to other
space but contains even the “spark of the sacred”, the hierophany hidden in the “sleeping mode”
anytime potentially activated by the simple ritual of connection to the “other world”. It can
compress the time and space that separate mundane from ideal lives and promise an immediate
experience of transportation into another space 8 – an experience that reflects a desire for a
magical relocation and instant forms of salvation (Aupers, 2008, p. 694).
It seems that the posthuman salvation is no longer singular, nor spiritual or in a celestial
heaven. The new eschatology is forged here with the help of biotech and infotech, a new entire
virtual world with heaven and hell (Harari, 2018), emerging from the sparks of the old
industrial age, salvation being delivered, collectively, as digits and signs in a silicon paradise.
Finally, technology is perceived as an imagined means of re-actualization of the old
religious archetypes, the ultimate avatar of a very secular messianic promise of salvation,
acting as a high priest of the new digital religion, the only instrument that can mediate the
sensitive relationship between the sacred and the profane. There is a soteriological promise
attached to the modern technology in its attempt to lead to a new transformative condition of
humanity, paving the way to an ultimate, prescriptive, artificial reality. It seems that the
traditional religious paradigm where the transcendental divine functions of omnipotence,
omnipresence, and omniscience envisioned as the guardians of the cosmic equilibrium and the
cornerstone of the social order are required to be ultimately materialised in the form of the

7 Altered Carbon is a 2002 science fiction novel by British writer Richard K. Morgan that presents a dystopian
future where the transferring consciousness between bodies makes possible even immortality.
8 The example of a cyberspace wedding is quite relevant here: the ceremonial event is not on the other side of
the screen or camera but in media space itself; the rite did not transpire behind the medium but within it.

12
secular immanent agency of a technological system. An original digital cosmogony is
inevitable. New technologies are killing the old deities, giving birth to the new gods.

Conclusion

We started with the premise that the technological worldview is framed as a religious
narrative influenced by a mythological substratum. Historical and social speaking, technology
is perceived as a deliverance instrument for a secular salvation. Apparently, there is nothing
occult here: the language, narratives and, metaphors related to this worldview are literal and
open. However, without understanding the mythological grammar of the technological
worldview we cannot comprehend the current conversation and its morphology.
There are several reasons why we pursued this interpretative approach when suggesting
the religious nature of the technological worldview: firstly, to understand a particular feature
that characterized this worldview across history, namely a mythological aspect that apparently
seems to be at odds with the rational and scientific feature, traditionally associated with the
development of technology. According to Stolow (2013), “there is no clear and unproblematic
divide between reality and its construction, the ‘real’ world of technoscience being very close
alignment with the ‘illusory’ universe of transcendence, fetishism, miracle, magic (p.3);
secondly, to analyze in which ways this religious element is inspiring, defining and producing
the language, visual images, symbols, metaphors, and narratives related with technology, our
specific focus here being the eschatological dimension projected in either a utopian or
dystopian outcome9; and thirdly, to explore the determinism of the soteriological nature of this
worldview, technology is generally perceived as the ultimate tool of technical redemption from
the material and environmental constraints of this world.
The idea of offering salvation by technical fix is an old and a very persuasive one
(Midgley, 2013), technology becoming the last vehicle for secular transcendence in order to
pursue salvation. This is why when arguing about the mythological substratum of the
technological worldview, we are following Campbell & Pastina (2010) assertions that have
highlighted three distinctive framing narratives about the relationship between religion and

9 A syntopian perspective is earning now a place in the mainstream conversation about the nature of the future.
It rejects both dystopian and utopian perspectives on the social uses and consequences of information and
communication technology. Rather, it emphasizes how people, groups, organizations and societies adopt, use
and reinvent (Johnson & Rice, 1987; Rice & Gattiker, 2000; Katz, J. E. & Rice, R. E., 2001).

13
technology: a) technology offers human redemption, and humanity becomes godlike by
embracing technology; b) technology itself is a divine or spiritual force; and, c) engagement
with technology offer humans a magical or religious experience. (p.1194)
What we are trying to suggest here is that this mythological substratum seems to
generate a peculiar worldview, not just a descriptive ideal but a prescriptive reality as well.
There are genuine concerns about the possibility of a digital secular eschatology where techno-
elites may attempt to manufacture a world-wide data religion (Harari, 2017), an electronic
golden calf (Goethals, 1990), a technological divinity (Tegmark, 2017). In this new
transformative condition, the total subjectification of the individual means that humanity could
no longer be saved as the old human species but only as a new digital collective being.
Technology was always perceived not only as a harbinger for the future, either utopian or
dystopian, but mostly as a present actualization and realization of that future. Because the past
is frozen in history and the future is just a mystical dream, technology, in a special sense, is
coming from that dream to guide us here and now within our fluid present to write the best
narrative and construct a social reality that has the power to lock the future in a permanent,
definitive structure. Seen from this perspective, the future is revealing itself now.

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