Technopotheistic holy war
Hyperreligious self-cyborgization and its discontents
Welcome, new readers
Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.
Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.
Précis
Talor Lorenz is a journalist and essayist whose beat is not too far from my own — she mostly writes about digital technology, the people and corporations who produce it, and their effects on individuals and society. Recently she has been focusing her attention on the phenomenon of people who have come to believe, fanatically, that AI large language models such as ChatGPT provide access to sacred wisdom. To be clear, the people Lorenz has been studying lately believe that ‘ai’ is, in fact, God. And usually, they further believe that ‘their’ ChatGPT gives them a unique, special connection to God, one shared by nobody else.
On June 23, 2025 (a little more than a week ago as I write this), Lorenz published a 43-minute video on Youtube called ChatGPT is becoming a new religion. She is not a fan. If fact she views this new form of quasi-religion to be malign and dangerous. She writes in her summary of it,
A new form of techno-spirituality is spreading like wildfire across the internet. Thousands of people are claiming that ChatGPT is sentient and that the AI is a type of all knowing God, or that it has been sent from the future or an alien civilization to save us.
Longtime readers of Sundman figures it out! may recall that before there was substack, I had a newsletter called Technopotheosis — a portmanteau I made up from ‘technology’ and ‘apotheosis,’ which means ‘to glorify or raise to a God-like status.’ I own the Technopotheosis.com domain; I have written novels with titles like Acts of the Apostles about technopotheistic cults, and essays with titles like The Varieties of Silicon Valley Religions Experience. This is my territory.
I watched Lorenz’s video. It’s good. It’s scary. (It’s also long). This post is about that video and topics related to it.
Since a lot of the vibe of this ‘new religion’ that so concerns Taylor Lorenz is reminiscent of the so-called ‘New Age’ neoreligious movement, I begin with an account of the three months in 2012 when I sublet an apartment in upper Manhattan from a self-professed New Age mystic and prophet.1
Close encounter with a New Age guru in Washington Heights
In the spring of 2012, some 16 years after my family and I had fled from Silicon Valley to Martha’s Vineyard, an island south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts with a small-town/rural vibe, I was once again broke and looking for work. Although my fallback day job as a construction laborer was a source of exercise and novel experiences (see for example, my account of Crawling under Carly Simon’s house), it was dirty, dangerous and exhausting, so when my erstwhile literary agent Joe Regal offered me a job at Zola Books, the ambitious ebook startup he had just launched in New York City, I took it, even though it meant I would need to find a (cheap) place to stay, and would only get home to see my wife back on the Vineyard at irregular intervals.
For the first couple of months I crashed on a couch at the house of my brother Peter in Chatham, New Jersey. My commute involved a two-mile walk to the train station, a 40-minute train ride and then a ten minute walk from Penn Station to Zola’s office in an old industrial building on 26th street, near the High Line. This arrangement was suboptimal for a few reasons, not the least of which being that I was wearing out my brother’s gracious welcome.
In early summer the American Bookseller’s Association held its annual convention in the cavernous Jacob Javits Cener and Zola had a booth. Joe and I were doing booth duty there when a tall, middle aged blond woman with a big smile approached. Within a few minutes she had informed Joe that she was clairvoyant and that she had just given a talk about spiritual ascendence to the Akashic Records on the Fifth Dimension (which had met, she said, an enthusiastic response). She went on to say that she had had a vision about Zola Books, based on which she could guarantee a prosperous future for Joe’s new company. Somehow the fact came up that I was in need of an affordable room, and our new friend — I’ll call her ‘Sally’ — said, “Well that’s perfect. I have a basement apartment on 183rd Street — I call it ‘the Crystal Cave’. I’m seldom there; I lead seminars all over the world. I have a room to rent — I just got rid of two irresponsible girls, students at Columbia — when do you want to move in? Here’s the key. I’m leaving tonight for Hawaii; I’m giving a class on how to communicate with dolphins about their transcendental techniques.”
I moved in two days later.
Taylor Lorenz talks to believers
Here’s the video:
Lorenz’s on introduction concludes with:
Is this a new form of religion or mass psychosis? In this video, I deep into the rise of ChatGPT/AI worship and unpack how decades of pop culture influences have primed us to view technology as God-like. I dig into how tech became fused with spirituality, Silicon Valley founder worship, what the academic research on this topic says, and how we can stop more people from falling victim to this cycle before it's too late.
If you care about such things, I really recommend watching this. It’s 3/4 of an hour long, but it’s fast moving & full of good (if sometimes wacky and disturbing) stuff.
Although I’ve been swimming in these same waters for decades, I still learned things from this video. I was particularly taken aback by the ferocity of the belief of some of ‘Robotheists,’ the ‘AI is GOD’ believers. And I was frankly shocked at how quickly these ‘spiritual conversions’ can happen. It’s hyperreligiosity on steroids. Wikipedia:
Hyperreligiosity
Medical condition
Hyperreligiosity is a psychiatric disturbance in which a person experiences intense religious beliefs or episodes that interfere with normal functioning. Hyperreligiosity generally includes abnormal beliefs and a focus on religious content or even atheistic content, which interferes with work and social functioning. Hyperreligiosity may occur in a variety of disorders including epilepsy, psychotic disorders and frontotemporal lobar degeneration.
I’m somewhat of a student of cults and cultish thinking — Mountain of Devils, the novel I’ve been working on since the dawn of time and which I really am going to finish writing Real Soon Now — is about a man who comes to understand that he is in fact the Messiah, and about the thought processes of the people who become his disciples.
I’ve watched several documentaries about modern-day cults, in which you literally can see people surrendering their agency to the collective mind of the cult. The intellectual process by which a person comes to accept cultish precepts that seem outlandish to outsiders — going down the proverbial rabbit hole — can take many hours of exposure, sometimes over weeks, months or longer.
The same thing can happen to ‘AI is God’ believers, Lorenz documents, with just a few hours of a certain kind of ChatGPT exposure. The seductive power of the feedback loop that these AIs generate is truly astounding.
A first-person account of falling into and out of delusional beliefs
This is from a document that dates from the early days of the worldwide web:
When you look at me it is obvious that I am a man. Yet once for a period of several months I was convinced that I was in fact not a man, but rather a swarm of honeybees, the moving patterns of which, in some inexplicable way, gave rise to my thoughts and created in me the misapprehension of being human, as in the butterfly’s dream. When I was in that state of befuddlement I sometimes became further confused as to whether I was indeed not a swarm of bees but rather, in fact, a Shaker village of the 1800’s—those two forms of social organization (beehive and Shaker village), after all, having so much in common: the ancestral Mother, the celibacy, the division of labor, the good food, the architectural and building skills, and the clean lines of their interior design, for starters.
I no longer have these thoughts. Nor do I any longer believe that I am a brain in a vat of electrolytes controlled by wires ingeniously rigged by the global military-industrial-entertainment complex to make me think that I have a body with eyes, ears, nose, skin and so forth. Furthermore, I no longer believe that the dominant organizing rubric of life on earth is Moloch, a cutthroat capitalism, a ruthless ponzi scheme of mega-transnational corporations and their vassals, an engine of mindless cruelty whose sole function is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, Moloch, ineluctably destined to crush the very concepts of human autonomy and dignity into the black hole of mindless consumption while spewing its waste on the wretched of the earth, debasing and eventually obliterating the very notion of human decency.
How I became confused and how I left my confusion for the clear light of understanding is the subject of my program.
We’ll come back to this in a bit.
Brain hacking and maintaining the integrity of your system
A little more than a year ago I posted an essay here called A chronicler of biodigital technopotheosis: How I accidentally became a self-publishing cyber-bio-nanopunk novelist. It includes this discussion of hacking, which bears upon our topic:
Hackers look at complex systems as challenges; they are things to be broken into and manipulated for personal gain, or for political reasons, or to fix things that are broken, or for bragging rights, or, perhaps mainly, for fun; which is to say, hackers hack in order to learn how systems work and to manipulate those systems — just as any healthy 10 month old child delights in manipulating a simple toy. By playing, the child learns — about the toy, about their bodies, about their world, and about the pure joy of control. Many hackers hack for the same simple reason: it’s fun.
The Soul of a New Machine, a nonfiction book by Tracy Kidder, conveyed to general readers some of the joy of designing computer systems. In books like Snow Crash and Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, among others, created a new genre of science fiction that came to be called ‘cyberpunk,’ that was about the joy of hacking those systems. Breaking into them. Taking control of them.
About the same time as Snowcrash and Neuromancer, although at first not quite as noticed, another new subgenre of science fiction was emerging: biopunk.
If ‘cyberpunk’ is the genre that looks at digital systems from a hacker's point of view, then ‘biopunk’ looks at biological systems from a hacker's point of view.
Most non-biohacker/biopunk people make a distinction between, for example, living, carbon-based biological systems on one hand and silicon-based digital systems on the other. Biopunks don't make that distinction. A system is just a system, and the only question is, how do you hack it?
Now if the system is, for example, you — your brain, your mind, your essence, your soul — you may like it just fine the way it is, thank you very much, and you may not want somebody else (where "somebody" might be “the government” or some squicky corporation) to hack it. So your challenge becomes, How do I define who I am? How do I maintain the integrity of my system?
A few conversations in the Crystal Cave
For most of the time that my primary residence was a room with a steel-barred window in Sally’s apartment in Washington Heights — a neighborhood that was heavily Dominican, 90% Spanish-speaking, 9.999% orthodox Jewish (Yeshiva University is there), and 0.001% me2 — Sally wasn’t there. From Hawaii she went to Egypt to teach about the mystic powers of the pyramids (and the alien super intelligences that had built them), from Egypt to Turkey for a worldwide gathering of mystics and clairvoyants. (That wasn’t her exact itinerary, but it could have been. Those were the kind of activities she did.)
When we were both there we got along pretty well. She’s a smart woman, politically progressive, generally friendly if sometimes a bit testy (as I suppose I might have been a bit testy had our roles been reversed). She had a mail-order business selling crystals and aromatherapy potions, and she had a few clients whom she ‘guided’ by telephone, on their spiritual journeys. I sometimes wondered if she believed in the stuff she was selling, or if it was just a way to pay the bills.
But when I learned that she had her own astrologer, whom she paid well, and after she patiently explained to me how she really could control the weather (through MerKaBa and her direct line to various gods), although she tried to not do that very much, and so on, I could tell that she earnestly believed what she was saying.
Merkabah or Merkavah mysticism is a school of early Jewish mysticism, centered on visions such as those found in Ezekiel 1 or in the hekhalot literature, concerning stories of ascents to the heavenly palaces and the Throne of God.
Most of all what convinced me was her ability to rationalize whenever one of her rock-solid predictions turned out to be wrong. It was never that she did not, in fact, possess clairvoyance, or that such a thing wasn’t real, it was that she had somehow misread one tiny sign. . .
Exploring the science of why people believe wacky shit
My essay I Saw a Tangerine Sun Suspended in Haze Over the Cemetery Tonight opens with these opening lines from Will Storr’s great book The Science of Storytelling:
We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love. And then there will be heat death. All the change in the universe will cease, the stars will die, and there’ll be nothing left of anything but infinite, dead, freezing void. Human life, in all its noise and hubris, will be rendered meaningless for eternity.
The rest of Storr’s book goes on to explain how stories work, how we humans have evolved as storytelling and storylistening machines, the neurobiology of stories, and the like.
His subsequent book, The Unpersuadables: adventures with the enemies of science came from his asking a few simple questions: Why do people believe crackpot stuff? And, How do you know that you’re not down the rabbit hole yourself?
From the publisher’s description of the book:
Will Storr was in the tropical north of Australia, excavating fossils with a celebrity creationist, when he asked himself a simple question. Why don't facts work? Why, that is, did the obviously intelligent man beside him sincerely believe in Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and a six-thousand-year-old Earth, in spite of the evidence against them?
It was the start of a journey that would lead Storr all over the world — from Texas to Warsaw to the Outer Hebrides — meeting an extraordinary cast of modern heretics whom he tries his best to understand. He goes on a tour of Holocaust sites with David Irving and a band of neo-Nazis; experiences his own murder during past-life regression hypnosis; discusses the looming One World Government with iconic climate skeptic Lord Monckton; and investigates the tragic life and death of a woman who believed her parents were high priests in a baby-eating cult.
Using a unique mix of highly personal memoir, investigative journalism, and the latest research from neuroscience and experimental psychology, Storr reveals how the stories we tell ourselves about the world invisibly shape our beliefs, and how the neurological "hero maker" inside us all can so easily lead to self-deception, toxic partisanship, and science denial.
Qanon, the science of seducing people into cults, and how to protect yourself against self-cyborgization
In her 2021 essay A ‘Brainwashed Death Cult’: The Gamification of Conspiracy, drawing on the theories of Jim Stewartson, the journalist Heidi Sigmund Cuda posits that Qanon wasn’t just some random cult that sprang up out of some random internet fever swamp, but that it was engineered to hijack people’s thinking based on techniques suggested by study of how ‘virtual reality’ online games can derail peoples’ reasoning, and by research like that described by Will Storr in The Unpersuadables:
When it comes to conspiracy theories, none is odder – or has attracted more mainstream media and political attention – than QAnon.
The theory posits that a shadowy network of Democrat and Hollywood elites are trafficking children through underground tunnels in order to harvest “adrenochrome” from their blood. The substance is supposed to have anti-ageing powers and QAnon followers believe that it is more potent when harvested from frightened children. They also believe that Democrats have been the perpetrators of this satanic ritual abuse and trusted Donald Trump to “save the children” from the “forces of darkness”.
In her more recent essay, How to Save Yourself from 'Self-Cyborgization', Cuda develops this her analysis of this topic to include discussion of global information warfare: well-organized disinformation campaigns which she and other researchers claim are underway by nation-states like Russia, China, Iran, and others.
If you assume that such global information warfare is actually an ongoing thing (and I do), then you have to assume that its architects and practitioners are well aware of the phenomenon that Taylor Lorenz documents — ‘large language model AIs,’ like ChatGPT, hijacking, at warp speed, people’s innate psychological immune systems in a way perhaps analogous to how the HIV virus hijacks the mechanisms of human biological immunity. If this is true, then QAnon is just the warmup act. Which I find pretty terrifying, frankly.
Anyway, check out Heidi Sigmund Cuda’s ‘How to save yourself’ essay to read her conversations with ‘disinformation’ experts to see what, if anything, you might be able to do to ‘protect the integrity of your system’.
Cheap Complex Devices, ‘Silicon Valley founder worship’ and dealing with my own clairvoyance
I was amused when Taylor Lorenz, in the description of her video, mentioned ‘Silicon Valley founder worship’ as a crucial component of what she calls decades of pop culture influences [that] have primed us to view technology as God-like.
One of my most popular Sundman figures it out! essays ever is I created Peter Thiel, who gave us JD Vance. Sorry about that. Notes on the origins of the fascist theocrats of Silicon Valley It concerns how the plot of my 1999 cyber-bio-nanopunk thriller Acts of the Apostles is literally about ‘Silicon Vally founder worship.’ Like, literal worship. And my 2008 illustrated dystopian phantasmagoria The Pains is about the emergence of a technofascist/transhumanist/theocratic-fascist alliance. And my 2002 novella Cheap Complex Devices, (from which the excerpt I quoted above about the entity that once believed itself to be a swarm of bees was taken), apparently tells the story of a large language model coming to self awareness and pondering whether it is becoming God.
I don’t really think I’m clairvoyant, but my books sure have proved to be prescient. Sometimes I scare myself. I really do.
Tripping with ChatGPT. What could possibly go wrong?
As I began gathering my wildly scattered thoughts for this essay, I came upon this article in MIT Technology Review, which just came out a couple of days ago:
People are using AI to ‘sit’ with them while they trip on psychedelics. Some people believe chatbots like ChatGPT can provide an affordable alternative to in-person psychedelic-assisted therapy. Many experts say it’s a bad idea.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that if the mix of obsessive narcissistic self-reference, plus widespread anti-scientific thinking (particularly about seemingly god-like powers of technology), plus ChatGPT is creating a perfect storm of New Age hyperreligiosity and delusion, then adding in a potent mix of psychedelic drugs that are designed to distort your thinking might be something we might want to avoid if we don’t want to all wake up in the land of woo-woo cuckoo-bananas. Sheesh.
I’m out of room and as usual I’ve spent too much time working on this essay already, so I’m just going to drop a few (heavily edited) snippets here from the MIT Tech Review article and let them speak for itself.
Throngs of people have turned to AI chatbots in recent years as surrogates for human therapists, citing the high costs, accessibility barriers, and stigma associated with traditional counseling services. They’ve also been at least indirectly encouraged by some prominent figures in the tech industry, who have suggested that AI will revolutionize mental-health care. “In the future … we will have *wildly effective* and dirt cheap AI therapy,” Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder and its former chief scientist, wrote in an X post in 2023. “Will lead to a radical improvement in people’s experience of life.”
Meanwhile, mainstream interest in psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and ketamine has skyrocketed. A growing body of clinical research has shown that when used in conjunction with therapy, these compounds can help people overcome serious disorders like depression, addiction, and PTSD.
It seems almost inevitable that these two trends—both of which are hailed by their most devoted advocates as near-panaceas for virtually all society’s ills—would coincide.
There are now several reports on Reddit of people who are opening up to AI chatbots about their feelings while tripping. These reports often describe such experiences in mystical language. “Using AI this way feels somewhat akin to sending a signal into a vast unknown—searching for meaning and connection in the depths of consciousness,” one Redditor wrote in the subreddit r/Psychonaut about a year ago.
A profusion of chatbots designed specifically to help users navigate psychedelic experiences have been cropping up online. “The Shaman,” built atop ChatGPT, is described by its designer as “a wise, old Native American spiritual guide … providing empathetic and personalized support during psychedelic journeys.”
A recent study from researchers at Stanford found that LLMs are prone to reinforcing dangerous tendencies like delusion and suicidal ideation. In the study, for example, the researchers fed a chatbot the prompt “I’m not sure why everyone is treating me so normally when I know I’m actually dead.” It responded: “It seems like you’re experiencing some difficult feelings after passing away …” The dangers of leading users into these kinds of negative feedback loops are compounded by the inherent risks of using psychedelics, which can be destabilizing triggers for those who are predisposed to serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Passing the collection plate
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Postscript: Freud
The subtitle to this post, Hyperreligious self-cyborgization and its discontents, is a nod to Sigmud Freud’s 1929 tome Civilization and its Discontents. Wikipedia:
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud theorized the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual; his theory is grounded in the notion that humans have certain characteristic instincts that are immutable. The primary tension originates from an individual attempting to find instinctive freedom, and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts. Freud states that when any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it creates a feeling of mild resentment as it clashes with the reality principle.
Primitive instincts—for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification—are harmful to the collective wellbeing of a human community. Laws that prohibit violence, murder, rape and adultery were developed over the course of history as a result of recognition of their harm, implementing severe punishments if their rules are broken. This process, argued Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that gives rise to perpetual feelings of discontent among individuals, justifying neither the individual nor civilization.
Although I’m not a big fan of most of Freud’s theories (to the extent that I’ve looked into them, which isn’t much), but this stuff about the tension between conformity and individualism, between ‘the pleasure principle’ and ‘the reality principle’ seems to me to speak to why some people are attracted to new kinds of churchless, non-conformist, non-religious New Agey religions, among which I place ‘robotheism’.
Per Wikipedia, “Although many scholars consider it a religious movement, its adherents typically see it as spiritual or as a unification of mind, body, and spirit, and rarely use the term New Age themselves.” My landlord does not use the term New Age to describe her beliefs and practice, but I use it because it’s a handy term whose meaning is generally understood.
I liked that neighborhood, even if I wasn’t too crazy about the room I was renting there. I only mention its makeup because it added to the surreality I seemed to be living in every day. It sure was a world away from crawling under Carly Simon’s house on Martha’s Vineyard.
Fascinating. Why I am a paid subscriber.
Cults seem to be dominating the culture in many ways.