## Metadata - Author: [[Greg Epstein]] - Full Title: Tech Agnostic - Category: #books ## Highlights - Technology companies claim to provide unparalleled community by bringing “the world closer together,” as Meta tells us in a post about “why we build,” and by offering hope for “a more connected future,” as Mark Zuckerberg put it in his 2021 keynote about the metaverse.8 Tech investors like Marc Andreessen pronounce themselves the “patron saints of techno-optimism, claiming humans are becoming “technological supermen.”9 In a manifesto containing the words “we believe” no fewer than 113 times, Andreessen boasts that “the techno-capital machine . . . may be the most pro-human thing there is . . . liberating . . . the human soul.”10 And tech executives like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey do the seemingly impossible by carrying that vision even further, announcing that technology is “on a mission to extend the light of consciousness,” as Dorsey tweeted in 2022 to explain his choice to sell Twitter to Musk.11 (Musk had tweeted, a year earlier, that he was “accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary & extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”)12 In other words: Musk would take humanity to a kind of promised land. And according to the effective altruism movement and the many tech billionaires who fund it, technology (specifically “Godlike” AI) poses no less than a 10 percent risk of annihilating every single human being within the coming century.13 See under: Tech Hell. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=94)) - This book will offer an unconventional analysis of how and why tech became a religious empire, omnipresent to the point where there is no longer any realistic way to opt out of its reign. I undertake this task because we need to understand how tech has become not only a religion but the dominant religion of our time. ([Location 123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=123)) - “Tech, and the tech industry,” Hicks continued in their email to me, “is largely about power and control. In the best-case scenario technologies can be force multipliers for good—think sanitary sewers, or heart stents, or easier-to-operate wheelchair designs. In the worst-case scenario, they multiply force in incredibly violent, destructive ways—think sarin gas, firearms, or the atomic bomb.” ([Location 144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=144)) - However we choose to spend our day, one thing is clear: Not only will we be surrounded by intelligent products, each created to perfectly optimize every detail of our environment. Ultimately we are the product that must be optimized, less for our own benefit than for the glory of technology itself. As such, our daily existence will be tracked constantly by a thousand cookies we have accepted so that they might follow our movements, our moods, and our purchasing power. ([Location 160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=160)) - Tags: [[orange]] - Today technology is the water in which we swim, whether or not we notice we are fish. ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=168)) - In other words: technology has become religion. ([Location 173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=173)) - religion is the combination of institutions, cultures, identities, rituals, values, and beliefs through which we human beings bind ourselves together and find meaning in what might otherwise seem to be a meaningless world. ([Location 203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=203)) - Technology is currently playing a role in the daily lives of average citizens of our world that is eerily like the role religions played in the lives of ancient and early modern people. Like traditional religions once did, technology is shaping our thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, relationships, and future. And just like in the days of religions past, much of that shaping is taking place not in the interests of the average person but in the interests of the largest corporations in the history of humanity, who are doing the shaping. ([Location 219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=219)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Neil Postman published a book called Technopoly in which he argued that Americans had largely replaced religion and spirituality with a faith in technology. ([Location 243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=243)) - Postman had already become known for his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is still in print today. ([Location 244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=244)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In it he famously argued the future would be less like what Orwell envisioned in 1984 and more like what Aldous Huxley imagined in Brave New World. In other words, civilization won’t fall because of a fascist boot stomping on a human face forever. Instead, Postman warned, thanks to television—and all the media technologies to follow it—we would end up amusing ourselves to death. We now live in the era of a reality TV star turned president indicted for espionage who was elected in part because Russian hackers exploited our country’s obsession with social media. Seemingly every time a serious news journalist gets laid off, a new “influencer” gets their wings. All this time later, it’s getting harder and harder to argue against Amusing Ourselves to Death’s thesis. ([Location 245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=245)) - Technopoly was chosen in 2023 by the tech-forward website the Verge as the second-best tech book of all time, ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=254)) - In 1994 historian David Nye published a book called American Technological Sublime in which he argued that a large part of American culture was founded on the notion that technology is not only a way of solving problems or improving lives but is in itself the means of producing a sense of awe, wonderment, inspiration, and even terror that we might otherwise associate with religious or spiritual experiences. Nye defines this encounter with tech as the “technological sublime,” which, he explains, is part of a long history of “sublime experience” that has been discussed as far back as ancient Rome and theorized about by no less than Immanuel Kant. ([Location 271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=271)) - Tab, a VC-backed glowing AI pendant necklace that listens to your every word, and that is publicized by its Harvard-dropout inventor as a replacement for a relationship with God. ([Location 335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=335)) - tech has not only become a religion; it has become the world’s most powerful religion. ([Location 343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=343)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Because trillions of dollars have been invested, over the past generation, in creating technological alternatives to religious life. And while those new technological alternatives may not yet, in the most formal of senses, have traditional religion’s billions of devoted adherents, they can already manipulate the ability of billions of people to perceive and identify truth, like nothing but religion.39 And they can already boast billions of what fast food companies call “power users.” ([Location 376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=376)) - The great psychotherapist Alice Miller, in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, explains that though our parents may have loved and taken wonderful care of us in many ways, they may also have sent us the subtle message that we are only lovable if we are great. “You’re so smart,” parents tell their young children. “Look at how you won,” they say, practically by preschool. The comments are well-intentioned, but what they convey is clear: We are what we do. We’re worthwhile because we’re outstanding. Which means, God help us if we aren’t. Children might intrinsically value kindness, curiosity, or loving relationships, but all too often we become obsessed with proving how great we are. ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=422)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As an atheist and humanist chaplain, I’ve always believed that religious practices are more important and relevant than beliefs. ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=438)) - He lived his entire life believing he hadn’t achieved enough and hating himself for it. And he passed on to me the feeling that I had to achieve some kind of elusive state of greatness. ([Location 452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=452)) - Tags: [[blue]] - but I couldn’t feel love, because to feel love would have required me to feel loved, and that was something I could never quite deserve, no matter how much I did to try to earn the admiration of those around me. ([Location 458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=458)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The practices of the tech religion that I will explore in part II are its hierarchies—some might even call them castes. ([Location 472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=472)) - Freud spoke for a time in his career of a term he coined, Thanatos, or the death instinct. ([Location 484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=484)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “Remember kids: if you study hard, get good grades, go to a good college, get a job, work hard, never take a sick day, live within your means and do what you’re told . . . then one day your boss might go to space.” ([Location 541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=541)) - Tags: [[pink]] - It struck me as an apt metaphor for the heart of this city: a place that has generated unfathomable wealth for some while others use the region’s inventions to distract themselves from the devastation all around them. ([Location 604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=604)) - And as myth would have it, this “Protestant work ethic” enabled the development of what became American culture. As political scientist and journalist Josh Burek put it in the Christian Science Monitor, ([Location 615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=615)) - Puritan culture was also fundamentally a slave-owning culture, and slavery’s ethic of murderous, dehumanizing exploitation was responsible for much of the Puritans’ wealth. Indeed, chattel slavery—in which human beings were captured in Africa and forcibly transported to this continent to be sold at market as forced labor and property—was an integral part of New England culture from its earliest days. ([Location 619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=619)) - Tags: [[orange]] - Socialist humanist critic David Hoelscher pointed out that my first book, which was about what it means to be “good” from a nonreligious perspective, was published in the context of a nation where one in seven Americans was (and is) on food stamps, a milieu in which, solely because of their socioeconomic circumstances, tens of millions of high school students can never seriously imagine that they might one day be able to go to Epstein’s Harvard, and across 250 pages there is no discussion of the need to alleviate the human miseries or to undo the severe opportunity limits brought on by economic injustice. ([Location 694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=694)) - the wealthiest 10 percent of adults and the poorest 50 percent possess 85 percent and 01 percent of the world’s total wealth respectively. As the World Bank reported [in 2011], women own just 01 percent of the world’s wealth.16 No, that is not a typo. . . . Meanwhile, in the United States, 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom half of the population. According to the 2010 Census, 46.2 million Americans, including nearly one-quarter of the nation’s children, were living below the official poverty line—figures that, due to the federal government’s corrupt and unrealistic assessment criteria, are considerably lower than the actual numbers. ([Location 705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=705)) - But as Upton Sinclair said, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” In my case, Sinclair’s maxim was literally true: When I first accepted the role of humanist chaplain at Harvard in 2005, ([Location 712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=712)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “The winners of our age,” Giridharadas told me, “the people who manage to be on the right side of an era of precipitous change and churn, have managed to build, operate, and maintain systems that siphon off most of the fruits of progress to them.”18 I saw myself, and the institutions ([Location 725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=725)) - “That is the religion that my book seeks to slay,” said Giridharadas, “the religion of win-win-ism, which is a false religion. What win-win-ism says is, the best way to help the least among us is to do what’s good for the richest and most powerful. . . . It holds that if you do anything that has any cost, significant cost, for the winners of our age, you will only be hurting the most powerless among us.” ([Location 744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=744)) - Tags: [[pink]] - thought about how Harvard operates its endowment like an enormous hedge fund and admits a microscopic percentage of qualified but underprivileged applicants while mostly providing a networking platform for the world’s richest to get richer. And then I thought about how proud I felt when Forbes magazine used a picture of me and my students one year to represent Harvard in its annual rankings of prestigious colleges. The hamster took a few more laps. ([Location 752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=752)) - The story of tech’s commercial success—and, even where tech companies or leaders have failed individually, the story of tech’s remarkable success at becoming the water in which we all swim—is a story about how human beings understand ourselves in the world. It is a story about where we get a sense that our existence is meaningful, that our day-to-day lives have purpose, that we are connected with other like-minded people in working towards a common purpose. Because even (or especially!) in a world in which traditional theology seems dead or dying, we human beings still need to find and create ways to feel that our daily struggles are worthwhile, that the past mattered, and that the future is more promising than it is foreboding. ([Location 784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=784)) - of the long-standing tendency among American tech leaders to associate technological change with “the hope of collective salvation.”24 ([Location 836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=836)) - The Gospel of Wealth, by Andrew Carnegie. ([Location 859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=859)) - Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do, except in case of accident or sudden change. . . . He is the only true reformer who is as careful and as anxious not to aid the unworthy as he is to aid the worthy, and, perhaps, even more so, for in almsgiving more injury is probably done by rewarding vice than by relieving virtue. ([Location 866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=866)) - what significant form of capitalism on the planet Earth today is not also some form of tech capitalism? ([Location 878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=878)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Levandowski told Wired that “what is going to be created [as AI] will effectively be a god . . . not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?” ([Location 893](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=893)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Mormon Transhumanism, ([Location 950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=950)) - Americans who switched castes, moving from what many would see as a bottom rung of this society to a kind of penthouse perch. “Yes,” he replied, “but I don’t feel that way.” Which ([Location 984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=984)) - ninety-five percent of the world has not benefited from this system that people in the Silicon Valley believe is the end all be all cure all for what ails the world. “Because fundamentally they don’t actually add much value to the world. When you see yourself as someone who doesn’t actually in your own existence contribute to the world, ([Location 1012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=1012)) - There are people who are entirely invested in appearing to be smart, to be well connected, to be desired, so that they can shield the fact that they actually have nothing to offer.” ([Location 1016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=1016)) - Tags: [[pink]] - And it’s true that there is an enormous difference between the claims or capabilities of a Sabbetai Zevi and, say, a Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk. ([Location 1070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=1070)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “We are, all of us, already cyborgs,” Elon Musk pointed out at a discussion of the Future of Life Institute in 2017. “You have a machine extension of yourself in the form of your phone, and your computer, and all of your applications.” ([Location 1093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=1093)) - “You are already superhuman. . . . The limitation is one of bandwidth.” ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=1100)) - While attempting to fulfill its “majority” namesake by grabbing power at every level of American politics, the “moral” movement and its offshoots succeeded in many ways, from helping to elect President Ronald Reagan to inspiring the white Christian nationalism that has become mainstream among Donald Trump’s supporters. ([Location 1140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=1140)) - White evangelical Christians constituted 23 percent of the US population in 2006 but only 14.5 percent in 2020, and the excesses of conservative Christianity have been identified by social scientists as a major factor in this decline.16 Simply put, the Moral Majority and its fellow travelers made Christianity, religion, and even the term morality itself look bad. ([Location 1144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=1144)) - Tags: [[orange]] - Mark Harris, “Inside the Uber and Google Settlement with Anthony Levandowski,” TechCrunch, February 15, 2022, https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/15/inside-the-uber-and-google-settlement-with-anthony-levandowski. ([Location 5870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CTJMF3F6&location=5870)) - Tags: [[pink]]