| > being obsessed with something to an irrational degree This phrase, nor the key words "obsessed" or "irrational", does not appear in the text. > Being distracted by your phone doesn’t come with an entire metaphysical picture about the nature of life and death, proper social roles, or most of the other things religious systems typically come with. I would argue that, for most people under 40 and quite a lot of people over, if they have questions about those things, they're going to mediate them through the phone. Whether that's from philosophy youtubers, social media, or asking chatgpt. Phone use doesn't feel very spiritual, but what do people do on social media? Moralizing. Preaching. Dogma. Consider the history of "random+interpretation" fortune telling methods, like Tarot and I Ching. For the sorts of questions you might have asked your fortune, people are now asking LLMs. And treating the answer with the same kind of authoritiveness. The section about "algorithm" reminds me of Carl Sagan's phrase "the demon-haunted world". Algorithmic social media is extremely important, but it's not understandable by the public (because the workings are confidential!). So superstition creeps in. This is where things like "unalive" come from: people are avoiding saying "death" or related words because "the algorithm" will bring them bad luck (bans or shadow bans). Another word to bring in: idol. And idolatry. |
People have been moralising, preaching, dogmatists in the Letters to the Editor since whenever "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" was coined — I don't think that's enough to have made The Daily Mail or The Sunday Times into an idol, nor the newspaper preference into a denomination (even if there's that quote from Yes Minister).
But we are busy making Golems and Húsvættir, and you are right that superstition still plagues us.