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Post of the day: What tech can’t live without
Many people have come to feel or believe — even against their will — that technology is now the one unstoppable force in the world.
I think that the root of this techno-fatalism, which is the animating force behind both the optimist and pessimist versions on display today, is a judgment that tech wins out over everything else because, unlike everything else, tech stands on its own shoulders — it’s reliant on no foundation other than its own.
We’ll continue to spin around in confusion until we understand that tech is not the ouroboros. It is not perfectly recursive, self-reliant, and self-referential. The ground truth about tech is that it depends — like all else, when you look carefully — on faith.
Looking deeper, lurking around the heart of this judgment that tech is uniquely self-propagating or recursive is a still more radical idea: Technology simply is the recursively self-propagating, that which exists and grows and advances without having to rely on, defer to, or pay tribute to its origins.
You can think here of George Soros’ famous recursivity theory, which led him to his unique position of power, wealth, and influence today. At a more ancient level, you can think of the ouroboros, the mythical snake eating its tail, a pre-eminent alchemist and occultist symbol.
The post of the day belongs to @vikhyatk, formerly of Amazon Web Services and now at Moondream AI. In it, he suggests an old entry in Sam Altman’s blog “fully explains OpenAI’s vibe.” The line from Altman is this:
Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.
But it’s a quote, or at least a citation. Here’s the rest of Altman’s 2013 post:
I heard this from Qi Lu; I'm not sure what the source is. It got me thinking, though – the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.
In general, the big companies don't come from pivots, and I think this is most of the reason why.
Now is the right time to resurface that old post.
Some of us have been warning for years now that the unfolding of events today depends on technological and theological matters because these are interlinked in a way that digital tech specifically reveals in new and dramatic ways.
More Americans are catching on to this, but many still struggle to make heads or tails of the phenomenon, much less come to grips with it and coordinate an effective response.
We’ll continue to spin around in confusion until we understand that tech is not the ouroboros. It is not perfectly recursive, self-reliant, and self-referential. The ground truth about tech is that it depends — like all else, when you look carefully — on faith.
And the question facing all tech companies is exactly what faith they demand of you: faith in what, exactly, to be precise. Some insist that it’s just faith in tech itself, but that’s a parlor trick. From a certain distance, the ouroboros looks like a deity. But it’s really a simulation of one — a perpetual evasion of our created origin and therefore of our Creator.
The longing for a meta-religion that overcomes all the pesky details and commitments concerning our origins and our Creator can be powerful, in tech as much as anywhere else, and the occult worship of alchemically powerful recursivity feeds that longing as much as anything else.
But tech's reliance on the longing for religions — for gods to worship, on the one hand, and for the power and authority that comes from inventing new systems and structures of worship — reflects a deep-seated human longing for something much more visceral and specific than a meta-religion that spins you forever in a cosmic Möbius strip.
The simulation of the infinite isn’t enough to satisfy — or even spiritually nourish — human hearts. For tech really to advance in a direction that strengthens and protects our hearts and their deepest, purest longings, it will have to receive with humility the reality that the temptation to keep churning out new gods, new cults, and new spiritual scams will lead more to ruin than spiritual riches. It will have to locate its religious foundations somewhere spiritual seeds can grow and the spiritual footing is firm. On rock, so to speak, and not sand, silicon or otherwise.
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