Techno-dataism has become the new state religion, buttressed by global capitalism in its latest permutation. AI is now the new God, a suave techno-dataist mammon peculiarly persuasive due to its seeming usefulness in a time of pandemic danger and unease.
Churches boast of exponential numerical multiplication, thanks to geographically unbounded online services—an apparent testimony to the power of technology, so they say. Yet, questions remain as to just how spiritually and salvationally effective these numbers really are and what they really mean.
Governments splurge big money on big data and big AI-related projects, the bigger the better. Universities, especially so-called “applied” ones, jump on board this sexy bandwagon to pander to their political masters in haste. Critical interrogation of underpinning assumptions, ideology, and worldview of techno-dataism and AI remains absent. Mindful inquiry into deleterious effects and consequences of the same beyond hedonic concerns and materialistic priorities is startlingly devalued.
Even when humanities are acknowledged to be important, they are regarded as such only in terms of their perceived utility to technologism’s totalizing agenda, not in their ability to critique, deconstruct, reframe, and even discard technologism for the good of humanity and nature. Much less are the humanities valued for their own sake—as paradigms of wholeness and soulfulness so essential to being human and so critical to our survival, let alone flourishing.
We need to wake up to this idolatrous stupor, firing up our bullsh*t meter. It is time to start challenging dominant and received discourses before it is too late. Complete dehumanization and zombification of the soul is not a trivial matter to be casually dismissed.
