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| Greg M. Epstein (photo: Cody O'Laughlin) |
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Greg M. Epstein serves as Humanist Chaplain at Harvard & MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He was TechCrunch's first "ethicist in residence" and has been called "a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion" (The Conversation). He is the author of Good Without God and has also written for MIT Technology Review, CNN.com, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. His new book, Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation (MIT Press, October 29, 2024) focuses on the phenomenon of global technology and its concomitant problems.
In Tech Agnostic, you're making a distinction between the technology itself and tech as an overarching kind of force. Would you mind saying a little bit more about that distinction between the two?
Human beings have been making technology pretty much since we were human beings. I like technology--I mean, I use it all the time. I'm happy to be talking to you on my little Pixel phone with so many of the other technological things that surround me. But I start the book in fourth century in Rome, with the rule of Emperor Constantine, who takes Christianity from this small Mediterranean cult that was one among many and makes it this globally dominant phenomenon for the next couple millennia. That's sort of what happened with tech. Those four letters had been referring to certain aspects of technology for a while. But this new phenomenon that emerges mythologically in the garages of Silicon Valley in the hands of people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, it's sort of a minor cult when those people are first working on it. But it goes on to conquer the entire world.
What does considering the spread and impact of tech through the lens of religion allow us to reconsider?
We still tend to talk about tech where the next predicted word, if you say "the tech," is generally "industry." But that three-word phrase has ceased to hold much if any meaning. "The tech industry"--what is that? There's no industry in the world now that's not a tech industry, at least not of any scale or any consequence. They're all tech industries. They've all been colonized by this phenomenon. And so, given that, it really did strike me that it would be helpful to re-contextualize things, to have us be more aware of what it is that's actually happening. If you're in the middle of the global religious empire and you don't know it, it becomes very difficult to make good decisions about how you want to interact with that empire.
I found the idea of a secular religion to be a very interesting concept.
The idea of secular religion goes back quite some time as well. A lot of the first people to study religion in a formal modern sense were pretty secular people living pretty secular lives, and many of them did notice and remark upon the idea that there were secular phenomena that had religious qualities. The boundary between what is religion and what is not religion is porous. I spoke to a lot of different scholars about that over the course of writing this book.
One of them who was particularly helpful to me was my old professor, Robert Sharf, who is the chair of the Center for Buddhist studies at the University of California, Berkeley. What he explained to me is that, essentially, there's no one single test that you can apply that tells you this is a religion and this isn't a religion. We all go on assumptions when we talk about the phenomenon of religion in a popular way.
So what I was able to come to for myself is that, sure, there are a lot of things that you can call secular religion out there. And I made a whole silly list of them. But the point is that not all religions have equal consequence. Not all religions have equal power. You know, for some people, Jordan sneakers are a powerful symbol, those can be a religion for some, but I don't think anybody would say that they're the equal of the Roman Catholic Church. So the point is that this thing that we're calling "tech," in fact, really has surpassed the Roman Catholic Church. I think it surpassed all Christianity, and I think that tech has now surpassed the influence of all the other religions in the world combined. It has obliterated our memory of what it was like to live without it.
You write that "tech provides contemporary Western lives... with a universal organizing principle."
Picture the fundamentalist Christian or fundamentalist Jewish person or fundamentalist Hindu or whatever, who would interact with and think about their beliefs and rituals as much as we interact with our tech now, right? So you'd have to picture somebody who begins to pray, fervently, probably the first minute or so that they're awake, and is actually interacting with these artifacts and the ideas they represent essentially morning to night, and often till the very last moment before sleep, and sometimes beyond. It's just the constant need to be around and ensconced by this thing. Some of it might have started as an escape, but it's now a devotion. We now have trouble escaping the escape. We have gotten ourselves to the point, many of us, where we become physiologically uncomfortable when removed from this thing that is supposed to be the escape.
One thing that I kept thinking about is how my perception of religion is something that is a unifying force for an in-group, but a lot of what you are talking about here seems to be that tech religion actually serves as an isolating force. Would you agree with that? Is this by design?
It prioritizes and privileges loneliness and isolation. Loneliness and isolation facilitate a modern Western concept of genius. If you want to be the thing that modern Western Euro-American peoples see as the closest thing to what in Jewish texts is called a chosen people or a kind of prophet, or if you have aspirations yourself to be a messiah, or divinity, or a demigod, or to become a VC, be a founder, you really need to be incredibly isolated. To pursue this idea of the genius. I think, in many ways, you need to be very cut off from your sense of obligation to other human beings, your sense of indebtedness to other human beings.
Does a problem then lie with how we as users view tech makers? Or is it how the people who are on the higher end of this, who are benefiting from the systems, from this religion, position themselves and their products? Could we short-circuit that narrative?
I try to really get at some of the hopefulness at the end of the book. It starts with the refusal to conform to huge, overarching narratives that have been placed upon us, to just do what we're told just because we're told to do it. Really, that's the heart of humanism to me. We have to figure out what's good to do, because it affirms our humanity, not what's good to do because we're told to do it by a mythological system. I was left hopeful that, although we may not turn this tide in the near future, it really is possible for a group of people to come together to connect with one another and to say our lives are better when the focus of those lives is one another rather than the tech. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag