perhaps, in worshipping the internet, we’ve finally found the god we deserve.
The act of habitually opening our browsers has become a ritual, a reinforcement of worship practices. Consuming Quora threads and Instagram comments like communion bread, each post is another opportunity to rekindle the diminishing dreams of the early internet—a time when cyberspace felt like a digital Eden. But whether you’re like me, having full-on conversations with DeepSeek—the Chinese counterpart to ChatGPT—or sitting in a driverless WAYMO as L.A. burns, reality is unavoidable: utopia cannot exist without its dystopian counterpart. And still, we refuse to relinquish our belief in tech, especially as our relationship with the web evolves.
Ecclesiastical hierarchy divides the members of our online congregation, but unlike the Church’s rigid structure, power on the internet is decentralized. There is no single pope—only platforms like Meta, X, and Google acting as gatekeepers. Instead of a doctrine interpreted by clergy, algorithmic code governs the internet. The rest of us exist somewhere between priesthood and laity, with the ability to rise and fall in digital leadership. Even influencers peddle like preachers in strip-mall office spaces—until they monetize, at which point their status is elevated. Positioning within the institution’s lower ranks is fluid; anyone can decide to share guidance, painting themselves as all-knowing. Communities like fandoms become structures-within-structures, mirroring the internet’s wider dynamic, with self-appointed superiors setting the rules. Worshipers devote themselves to a singular figure, establishing their own institutions within the online sphere.
Sifting through the deepest recesses of Reddit, I lament what could have been alongside others filled with contrition for the present. “The privatized internet has failed us: the early promises about the utopia that the internet would bring us have proven wrong… We need a publicly owned internet,” mused user spiritoffff.
In congregation via social media, the line between mass-consumption and sacred experience blurs. I’m not an avid Reddit user myself—except when my inner-hypochondriac emerges, thinking strangers on the internet should give me medical advice. But when scanning the endless comments on r/Futurology, a subreddit devoted to the future of humanity, it’s clear that we live parallel digi-lives, fully uploaded onto privatized channels, outsourcing our most valuable relationships to the internet. But like utopia, the fantasy of a public internet is alluring.
As every click is monetized, morality is reinvented through internet worship. Though religion and moral code aren’t meant to be interdependent, it makes sense that the space where we devote most of our time emphasizes its own, increasingly nonsensical rules. It incentivizes us against so-called sacrilege. On Instagram, for example, we avoid posting too many nudes to prevent excommunication, but anti-trans hate speech slips through the cracks, unchecked by scriptural loopholes. An article by Chanté Joseph, host of The Guardian’s podcast Pop Culture furthers this, revealing how the algorithm’s targets certain communities, deciding who gets to participate online: “When images of fully-clothed plus-sized or black women are removed for being ‘inappropriate,’ the platform’s AI learns to adopt biases that reinforce misogyny and racism, creating barriers for certain groups in the digital realm.” The screen acts as a veil, perpetuating exclusion and enforcing new regulations. Social media pages often use their users as a system of constant, passive surveillance reinforcing these rules and ensuring compliance among their fellow parishioners.
One of the more bizarre examples of community-enforced delusion was the repeated yassification of Vice President JD Vance. His official portrait was doctored to appear more masculine by X users who champion hyper-masculine ideology. When questioned about the obvious digital alterations, Vance’s supporters responded with simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic rationalizations, defensive remarks, and ideological scripture, constructing a permission structure for their alternate reality. It’s become so extreme that I’m not sure anyone actually remembers what the Veep looks like anymore.
The internet gives us the illusion of power, making us believe we are shaping the world we want to live in. We can regulate our own appearances, curate posts based on past likes, and report an ex’s page, convincing ourselves they’ll disappear from the internet forever. But these perceived benefits are just another mechanism to keep us engaged—complicit in the internet’s now capitalist intent, trapped in echo chambers that justify our continued participation. Selling our data has become akin to the indulgences peddled by the 11th- and 12th-century church in exchange for safe passage to heaven. In our online world, perhaps indulgences take the form of buying followers or investing in life-hacking software. Yet, despite the potential for misuse, online forums often foster camaraderie.
Reveling in e-communion, I scroll through Reddit, a space with thousands of idols to glorify. Of course, I end up on r/Catholicism. Here, the idea of spiritual exchange is brought to the internet in a literal sense: online mass services and sacrament prep classes. In using it as an interface, even established religions have created sects of internet worshipers. Tapping into the intersection of spirituality and technology, a community member on this page redirects me to the Turing Church, a Substack “hacking religion,” presenting God to intellectuals. Its founder, Giulio Prisco, argues that technological and spiritual transcendence should be a joint aim: “Transhumanism promises to build a technological heaven on Earth in a few short decades (or, more likely if you ask me, many long centuries).”
Prisco’s dilemma? Most tech believers seek to evade death but shy away from spirituality. With Project Blueprint, tech millionaire Bryan Johnson pushes the boundaries of reverse aging, extending human lifespan through meticulous, data-driven analysis. Using STEM to engineer a precise, DNA-based regimen designed to “reduce biological age,” Johnson deepens his body’s dependence on machines. If bridging the gap between faith and technology is the path to enlightenment, it’s also a narrative the internet eagerly sells us. We can’t get enough of the web, our inseparability from it marking the dawn of a transhumanist agenda—but what happens when we become addicted to our own faith, inhaling it at every chance?
In Catholicism, when partaking in the Eucharist one is said to consume the body of Christ. The longing to devour what we worship isn’t new. On the internet, we say that we “consume” content—our language revealing the depth of our digital devotion. Even cult members receive “downloads” from their higher powers these days as they tap into manipulated transcendence. A line from Ecclesiastes, quoted by Jean Baudrillard in The Precession of Simulacra, sums it up: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
In Baudrillard’s world, the internet is feminine, its power of seduction lying in its manipulation of signs. Applied to our lives, this suggests that our online representations are just as real as our physical selves. We devour celebrities on the internet just as we consume pieces of our deities to feel closer to them. This gamification for the user becomes enticing, and our lives begin to run parallel to our internet personas—until they inevitably overtake us. Fear of committing blasphemy lurks all around us. After posting something we regret or exiting a porn site, the digital footprint left behind makes us wary. Each Instagram story is carefully considered, and we reload our pages every ten minutes after posting awaiting adoration, sinning and repenting in the same spaces, creating a kind of ‘don’t shit where you eat’ situation on Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.
Though this strain leads me to delete and reinstall my social media every other day (I just end up using it in the browser anyway), for many there is an incorporeal bond that manifests between the mind and the internet. Formed under the influence of capitalism, technopaganism refers to a modern form of paganism where popular culture and digital environments are elevated to holy status. On viewing the digital sphere as consecrated, one Reddit user adds their two cents:
“I consider myself a technopagan in the sense that technology plays a role in my worship. I’m a pantheist, so I consider my smartphone just as divine as a thousand-year-old tree. It’s all manifestations of nature, just in different forms. Technology is very much a natural thing to me, and the creation of the internet is simply an extension of the same instinct that makes rabbits burrow.”
This devotion manifests in extreme, crusade-like battles over digital holy land, such as the online left v. right turf wars. The race for rare earth metals is a stark example—desecrating the very ground we once worshipped to extract minuscule bits of the objects we now deem sacred, powering an international race to use rare earths to power cellphone magnets and semi-autonomous weapons systems which now extends from conventional mines to the sea floor. In contrast to the dark undertaking of tech manufacturing, the Frutiger Aero aesthetic, popularized in 2004, offers a more humanist and fantastical vision of technology. With floating bubbles and angelic lights, this design language visually echoes natural landscapes, bringing elements of the outdoors inside. Its aura of hopefulness is a hallmark of tech optimism, a sentiment that has resurged in recent years.
Yet this optimism enables the rise of technocracy, where techno-libertarianism has become a distorted shadow. Born in Silicon Valley, the movement initially advocated for the separation of technology and state. The 90s cypherpunk hackers who laid its foundation leaned more toward human rights protections than today’s middle-aged tech moguls, who champion capitalist privacy while simultaneously cannibalizing government funding while calling for the end of entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. It’s an invisible monopoly on our dreams and aspirations in which we don’t even realize we are participants. The internet’s cult-like worship of figures like OpenAI’s Sam Altman grants these individuals the illusion that they can rewrite social codes at will. This year, the U.S. announced a $5 billion investment in AI infrastructure, further fueling the idea that a neo-feudalist society could emerge—one where these “religious” figures sit at the top, clinging to power while the rest of us become digital serfs, paying our dues by farming data instead of wheat.
But even our faith has its heretics. Those who question the system—who attempt to unplug, deconstruct the code, or demand a decentralized internet—are cast out, labeled digital apostates. And yet, the internet itself is an unreliable god. It is omnipresent but not omniscient. It glitches, it censors, it misremembers. It fabricates false prophets, spreads misinformation, and traps us in algorithmic purgatory. The devout live forever online, their profiles preserved long after they’re gone, their words echoing in cyberspace like digital ghosts.
Maybe we’ve made our own horror story: A digital creepypasta so immersive we no longer question its reality.
in print: