Sacred Culture vs Social Credit

The first generation born after the triumph of the smartphone is now coming of age in the digital world, where what happens inside the database is more important than what happens outside. Yet much of this generation is seduced by the allure of cyborg projects promising superhuman utopias or subhuman dystopias. Some insist tech will transform us into gods. Some avow it will make us akin to bugs. Still others sell a future where our online lives are so divine we won’t care that, offline, we’ve been reduced to blobs in pods.

Such projects attack our human dignity and identity by enclosing us within elaborate social credit systems, which control our sense of self and worth by applying official scores to our words, our actions, and eventually our mental and spiritual life. To defend our humanity against these cyborg projects, we must put datacenters to work in ways that create and protect memorable, valuable, sacred culture. We have the technology. Do we still have the soul?

***

James Poulos is the cofounder of The American Mind at the Claremont Institute and of RETURN at New Founding. He is previously the author of The Art of Being Free and a prolific writer whose work has appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, Le Figaro, National Affairs, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among many other publications. James holds a PhD in Government from Georgetown University and is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Digital Life. He lives on the edge of Los Angeles.

Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash