The Medium

One of the hardest things about communicating the things I care about is getting everybody on the same page about the meaning of the English word “religion.”

I confuse people when I say the word “religion” because I generally consider it an epithet that means “culturally adrift bundle of behaviors that used to be rooted somewhere and make sense.”

So like, is “Buddhism” a “religion”?

Which one? Where? When? With whom?

Is “Judaism” a “religion”?

I’m just gonna say “no” on that one, okay?

“Religion” is a word created by academic theologians with Christian-universalist frames, and I treat it accordingly. What can I say?

Am I a “religious Jew”? Yeah. Definitely. But I don’t mean that in a way I expect very many people to get (especially Orthodox Jews). Nor do I mean it entirely as a compliment to myself. I just have this cargo cult backpack of stuff I can’t not do, plus my 𝒫𝓇𝒶𝒸𝓉𝒾𝒸𝑒. Being part of the “religion” of “Judaism” (or, sure, Soto Zen Buddhism) is simply something my life looks more like than unlike, and it’s easier to just try to use the shared English word.

But if you want to see it more like I do, try thinking of “religious” as more like a temperament than an ideology. That is, there are people who are religious about all kinds of things, and “religion” is not always one of them.

Nowadays, “religion” is really only a useful word in reference to the temperament, given that it was a paperclip-maximizer-level blunder to try to apply it in general to ideologies different from the one that created it.

For instance, now people are fanatically religious about the cancerous memes they read on the internet today, whereas they are constantly moaning and yearning from lack of the tangible cultural things that “religion” was supposed to mean.

I’ve been trying to get through to people about this for years, and I’ve recently wanted to give up trying to do that. I’m starting to realize why, and it’s because — as someone who spends most of my time, energy, and perspective as part of tiny religious minorities — I have overlooked a critical situation unfolding in the context of what is probably the most pervasive religion on Earth — religion in the sense that I mean it here, of temperament, but a temperament that is so widespread and compelling that it has begun to conduct itself like a global religious ideology.

The global corporate internet and its handful of social media algorithms have a death grip on people for a reason. Well, many reasons. Those reasons are not my point here so much as the sense of inevitability and inexorability the whole thing has taken on just because there is something — like literally one thing — that is driving humanity on a global scale that appears to have reasons, and so people have settled into it. I would say that the mass of people is doing so uneasily, with lots of self-doubt and mental health problems and general lunacy. The for-profit and government entities maneuvering to establish some kind of status quo here seem a little more determined, but they are no less neurotic and obsessive about it.

I almost don’t want to try to define it too much; I’d rather just call it something ominous like The Medium. Humanity, on average, is throwing itself — and its entire planet along with it — into a fervent hope in The Medium as a kind of salvation, because unbuilding it seems impossible now given the incentives and compulsions surrounding it. It’s causing people to throw away bedrock human behaviors like “creativity” — because the work is too hard compared to prompting a machine learning model to cough up a passable facsimile, parsing the output is too fraught with the censorious mob watching, et cetera — and “trust” — because there’s no longer any reliable way to determine whether an actor is a human or a computer program, because the incentives have made every interaction adversarial, et cetera.

Giving up these human capacities — outsourcing them to technology — is a concession to the belief that technology is the inevitable dominant force on our planet. Humanity, on average, is conceding to “work with” technology rather than “work on” it, because to “work on” it would require goals of our own, outside of technology, towards which we were working.

Twenty years ago, I think people in the field of technology would have had you believe that the aesthetics of technology are secular, materialistic, atheistic, all those completely passé rationalistic modes that their already obsolete overculture would identify as the opposite of “religious.” But just because your messiah is an emergent property or whatever doesn’t mean you aren’t religious.

But more importantly, just because your graven image is a corporation or a person doesn’t mean you aren’t an idolater. Just because you call God an unpronounceable name like “Llama-2-70B” or “יהוה” doesn’t mean you aren’t objectifying God. The religious temperament has familiar failure modes that arise from those pesky low-level human behavioral structures. Try as we might to throw those away when a new religion sets in, they always catch up with us one way or another. Those who actually pay attention to sacred texts from within coherent cultural structures — as opposed to those who try to strip mine them for material usable for some new religious project — recognize that reminding us of this is their core function and arguably what makes them sacred.

In other words, it is precisely recognition of the sacred that is erupting out of the mass of people as they convulse under the grip of The Medium, and the grip — enforced as it is by the hands of an all-too-human priesthood — does show signs of slipping. This explains the perverted profusion of AI and cryptocurrency and life-extension cults being brazenly financed by the for-profit high priests of The Medium as they — with increasingly cringe desperation — try to revive the fervor over their profane religion.

And there is revival, all right. The human spiritual impulse has reawakened, even online. I was excited to see it for a while, but as my efforts to participate in accordance with my own ancient lineages continued to flounder, I became perplexed. Why did these people on social media seem interested in spiritual practice and yet misunderstand or ignore what I was trying to say? I’ve come to realize that it’s because I misunderstood their religion as well — and even that religion’s sway over me.

It’s technology. All along, it has been technology. That brief eruption of intense curiosity about spirituality — erupting as it did in the back streets of a global hyperculture as it struggled with being fully mediated and constituted by technology — was a moment of hesitation by subjects of a domineering priesthood of technology that demands their tithing, their tribute, and ultimately their ordination.

Who are these technological celebrities — these feckless billionaires and their pathetic corporate underlings whose names we all know — while we don’t even know our next-door neighbors’ names — whose avatars we see and even interact with on the platforms they operate to their for-profit religious ends? They are the high priests of a jealous and hungry god, whose religion has commanded incredible material power for centuries, consuming a whole planet in service of its circular and self-perpetuating goals. And these priests grow desperate and dramatic and vindictive — and apocalyptic — as the laity begins to realize en masse that their prophecies amount to nothing.

When religions die, they die from their subjects’ indifference, and I do believe the technology religion will die that way, but that doesn’t mean its churches and priests will simply fold up and disappear. The corruption and fall of something as pervasive as this will be cataclysmic, and those of us who want our cultures to survive it need to have something functional and ready in place.

For the past year or two, the most concrete manifestation of my own efforts on that has been my advocacy for decentralized publishing and communications media, which I don’t want to call “social media” because I don’t want to give the technopriests’ dopamine merry-go-round in your pocket exclusive conceptual framing rights over social relations. Again, I don’t want to get too bogged down trying to define The Medium here, because I am quite sure you know in your kishkes what I’m talking about, but one aspect of this that continues to bother me is obsession with and compulsion by The Algorithm, as subjects of for-profit social media tend to personify the content filters by which their behavior is controlled and meagerly rewarded.

Gradually, I have realized my aversion to recommendation algorithms is a holiness problem. Kashrut is not something the hyperculture has yet learned to apply to information, even though it certainly applies just as it does to food.

It is, of course, very sutric and not very tantric* to be super medakdek about kashrut, and that’s an issue. Translation: I am mindful of my tendency to want to wall myself off from the impure masses and their sinful algorithms and thereby have nothing in common with billions of people, and I don’t exactly want that, either. But I also simply don’t think it’s mentally or culturally safe to be very online-in-the-cultural-sense anymore, so I’m trying to thread a needle here.

* (ugh I am so sorry to link to that website, but I have to because I am referring to a Discourse)

The question is, can you or I afford the voluntary energetic overhead of transmuting poison into light all the time, or would we be better off spending less to avoid the costs in the first place? I sometimes still catch myself fancying myself as capable of the former, but the reality is very, very much the latter. I’ve got shit to take care of that is in direct conflict with The Medium.

It is a quintessential Jewish teaching that kavanah — intention, an inner spiritual readiness and clarity — is required for any action to be holy. So there is a sense in which doomscrolling with proper kavanah can still be put to good ends. But I have three problems with that: One is that I have more important shit to do, as I mentioned. Two is that it reeks of the messiah-bodhisattva complex. And three is that, quite frankly, it has been my experience having been on social media for its entire existence that its incentives are actively harmful to proper kavanah.

For example, having essentially left Twitter, I still find it really hard to deprogram myself from the Twitter conditioning that motivated me to post by giving me a perceived enemy. “Making up a guy to get mad at,” we used to call it. You ever experience that? There are many other examples of widespread behaviors in which social media users engage constantly, knowing they are terrible: the aforementioned doomscrolling, the many forms of lurking/creeping/stalking, getting emotionally consumed by “drama” and fighting other people’s avatars for the voyeuristic entertainment of others, watching other people do that voyeuristically, on and on. Come on, don’t waste any brain cells trying to frame any of that as virtuous behavior.

This is all the doing of The Algorithm. “Communication for entertainment” is an ethically, culturally, and economically incoherent job that the market has identified for social media to do, and I don’t think coherent roles or responsibilities can be established amidst that incoherence. Insofar as it’s a communication medium, I feel some personal responsibility to others, but insofar as people are communicating in that medium for their own entertainment, my responsibility goes to 0.

Relationships are not entertainment.

It feels like a forfeiture of ethical standing to communicate with people for the lulz.

An entity with which one is communicating for entertainment is pure surface.

My friend Nobu pointed out to me not long ago that the etymology of “communis,” as in “communication,” is “to change together.” I submit that there is no basis for doing that under the grip of The Medium. The entire structure conspires against it. If we’re going to change — by which I quite seriously mean “save the entire world from devouring itself in service of technology for its own sake at the expense of every living thing” — it has to have a different structure.

As you can hopefully see, some of us are out here on the fediverse and our own websites already inhabiting the digital exoskeleton of such a structure. This slow march of cool and normal people making websites alongside one another will succeed because it defines its own success as whatever happens if we just keep doing this, and no form of attention economy success could ever be as worthwhile.

But that’s only replacing one part of what The Medium pretends to provide, and if you aren’t into it, that’s okay. Something I’m beginning to realize about scenes is that communities actually form around coherent visions of futures, and those don’t correspond 1-1 within friendships. It can seem strange at first when people who are close end up pulled in different community directions, but that’s what happens if their personal visions of the future are different. Plenty of other things to be friends about, though. The thing is, social media would have you forget that. It perverts scenes into this public, gamified competition, and so diverging with someone can be taken as some kind of diss or betrayal. There’s only one Project on social media, and it’s becoming the Supreme Being of Social Media. Rebuilding after the fall of the technoreligion is going to require a lot of dedicated work on a lot of projects, and I encourage us all to spread out and diversify as much as possible.

Social media is trying so hard to fully co-opt the occult so that even the most obscure whisper of spiritual yearning can be devoured into The Medium. You know what the most occult thing going on right now is? That the market can’t distinguish between the revolutionary army of divinely appointed neurodivergent systems thinkers attacking the failing control cult with interplanetary, interspecies, and intercultural coordination and the status-seeking rich people appropriating their aesthetics for likes, so the market is concentrating on the latter because that’s where the money is.

LEAVE THEM TO IT! We’ve got a job to do!

The bottom line is that I refuse to allow myself to become depressed from optional information. The Medium is optional. What’s not optional is knowing how to thrive after The Medium loses its grip.