Greg Epstein (Good Without God) is a Humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT who is concerned with the ethics of technology, and how the phenomenon of "tech" has transformed human life in the mid-21st century. In Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why it Desperately Needs a Reformation, he probes how the messaging and ethical concerns surrounding Big Tech have had a lasting impact on the human world. He incisively reads its moral and ethical messaging and its structures through the lens of organized religion. "Today technology is the water in which we swim, whether or not we notice we are fish. Tech provides contemporary Western lives, so polarized and divided in countless ways, with a universal organizing principle, a common story by which we tell ourselves who we are.... In other words: technology has become religion."

Epstein skillfully weaves his own technological experiences and observations with the study of religion as a Humanist. He also draws on a vast array of historical materials, sociological studies, and interviews with people from the tech world as well as those trying to disrupt it. The framing of tech as a religion filling the secular spaces of modern life is a persuasive one. The book is structured in three sections--Beliefs, Practices, and Beloved Community--with chapters on tech theology, doctrine, hierarchies, ritual, apocalypse, the congregation, and more included within them. This framework helps to drive home how tech has surpassed the space of producing things, and begun to take up a wider ideological space in society.

Epstein asserts that tech "possesses a theology, a set of moral messages, that dominate the way we think and feel," and that "if we can more clearly see and understand the beliefs and practices of our technological religion, we will be more likely to believe in one another, and in ourselves." He emphasizes the parallels between tech and organized religion in terms of how they both operate and pass on their messaging, as well as the "key ideas, concepts, and beliefs that animate tech today." In doing so, he argues, there will be a better chance for individuals and communities to question the power and place of tech in society, and the type of world that can be built from modern technological potentials. In other words, to consider tech through the lens of religion, or even as a religion, it will be more possible to ask exactly what society is moving toward.

Today's technological advancement may seem divorced from a past framed through religious hierarchies, but Epstein cogently outlines how tech, like religion in the past, has become "the medium through which we process our humanity." He relates tech use to ritual, tech manifestos to doctrine and theology, and even how concepts of both utopias and apocalypses (and who is destined to be affected by both) permeate this particular social phenomenon.

This, in and of itself, would be a necessary social conversation to open, but Epstein goes a step further. He proposes the idea of a reformation for tech, and explains how an agnostic approach could benefit everyone: it "leaves room for the idea that any given technology might hold potential to be of real benefit to humanity" while remaining "fiercely skeptical of any technology or technologist claiming to benefit all humans when they cannot demonstrate, in their hiring, firing, coding, and wiring, that they value different kinds and castes of humans equally."

Ultimately, the strengths of Tech Agnostic are its ability to identify solutions and to clearly articulate the problems that become visible when viewing tech as a religion. The third section of the book is devoted to movements and people who have been pushing against the discourses of inevitability and progress that benefit the few at the expense of the many. This section highlights thinkers, speakers, and groups that are actively trying to find new ways to talk about tech outside of the founder-as-savior narrative. Epstein provides access points to find communities of tech agnostics and to form collective voices that might push against the accepted doctrines.

This focus on community and connection is not one of Epstein's own making, but rather a recognition and echoing of what several of the thinkers and scholar-activists he interviews have independently identified: that as more people start to think critically of the narratives around the phenomenon of tech, they are becoming less lonely in their work, and in the interventions they are trying to make. Those interested in not only how tech has become a superimposed structure over our society, but also how something might be done about it, will find a lot to meditate on in this book. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag

Greg M. Epstein (photo: Cody O'Laughlin)

Greg M. Epstein serves as Humanist Chaplain at Harvard & MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He was TechCrunch's first "ethicist in residence" and has been called "a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion" (The Conversation). He is the author of Good Without God and has also written for MIT Technology Review, CNN.com, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. His new book, Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation (MIT Press, October 29, 2024) focuses on the phenomenon of global technology and its concomitant problems.  

In Tech Agnostic, you're making a distinction between the technology itself and tech as an overarching kind of force. Would you mind saying a little bit more about that distinction between the two?

Human beings have been making technology pretty much since we were human beings. I like technology--I mean, I use it all the time. I'm happy to be talking to you on my little Pixel phone with so many of the other technological things that surround me. But I start the book in fourth century in Rome, with the rule of Emperor Constantine, who takes Christianity from this small Mediterranean cult that was one among many and makes it this globally dominant phenomenon for the next couple millennia. That's sort of what happened with tech. Those four letters had been referring to certain aspects of technology for a while. But this new phenomenon that emerges mythologically in the garages of Silicon Valley in the hands of people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, it's sort of a minor cult when those people are first working on it. But it goes on to conquer the entire world.

What does considering the spread and impact of tech through the lens of religion allow us to reconsider?

We still tend to talk about tech where the next predicted word, if you say "the tech," is generally "industry." But that three-word phrase has ceased to hold much if any meaning. "The tech industry"--what is that? There's no industry in the world now that's not a tech industry, at least not of any scale or any consequence. They're all tech industries. They've all been colonized by this phenomenon. And so, given that, it really did strike me that it would be helpful to re-contextualize things, to have us be more aware of what it is that's actually happening. If you're in the middle of the global religious empire and you don't know it, it becomes very difficult to make good decisions about how you want to interact with that empire.

I found the idea of a secular religion to be a very interesting concept.

The idea of secular religion goes back quite some time as well. A lot of the first people to study religion in a formal modern sense were pretty secular people living pretty secular lives, and many of them did notice and remark upon the idea that there were secular phenomena that had religious qualities. The boundary between what is religion and what is not religion is porous. I spoke to a lot of different scholars about that over the course of writing this book.

One of them who was particularly helpful to me was my old professor, Robert Sharf, who is the chair of the Center for Buddhist studies at the University of California, Berkeley. What he explained to me is that, essentially, there's no one single test that you can apply that tells you this is a religion and this isn't a religion. We all go on assumptions when we talk about the phenomenon of religion in a popular way.

So what I was able to come to for myself is that, sure, there are a lot of things that you can call secular religion out there. And I made a whole silly list of them. But the point is that not all religions have equal consequence. Not all religions have equal power. You know, for some people, Jordan sneakers are a powerful symbol, those can be a religion for some, but I don't think anybody would say that they're the equal of the Roman Catholic Church. So the point is that this thing that we're calling "tech," in fact, really has surpassed the Roman Catholic Church. I think it surpassed all Christianity, and I think that tech has now surpassed the influence of all the other religions in the world combined. It has obliterated our memory of what it was like to live without it.

You write that "tech provides contemporary Western lives... with a universal organizing principle."

Picture the fundamentalist Christian or fundamentalist Jewish person or fundamentalist Hindu or whatever, who would interact with and think about their beliefs and rituals as much as we interact with our tech now, right? So you'd have to picture somebody who begins to pray, fervently, probably the first minute or so that they're awake, and is actually interacting with these artifacts and the ideas they represent essentially morning to night, and often till the very last moment before sleep, and sometimes beyond. It's just the constant need to be around and ensconced by this thing. Some of it might have started as an escape, but it's now a devotion. We now have trouble escaping the escape. We have gotten ourselves to the point, many of us, where we become physiologically uncomfortable when removed from this thing that is supposed to be the escape.

One thing that I kept thinking about is how my perception of religion is something that is a unifying force for an in-group, but a lot of what you are talking about here seems to be that tech religion actually serves as an isolating force. Would you agree with that? Is this by design?

It prioritizes and privileges loneliness and isolation. Loneliness and isolation facilitate a modern Western concept of genius. If you want to be the thing that modern Western Euro-American peoples see as the closest thing to what in Jewish texts is called a chosen people or a kind of prophet, or if you have aspirations yourself to be a messiah, or divinity, or a demigod, or to become a VC, be a founder, you really need to be incredibly isolated. To pursue this idea of the genius. I think, in many ways, you need to be very cut off from your sense of obligation to other human beings, your sense of indebtedness to other human beings.

Does a problem then lie with how we as users view tech makers? Or is it how the people who are on the higher end of this, who are benefiting from the systems, from this religion, position themselves and their products? Could we short-circuit that narrative?

I try to really get at some of the hopefulness at the end of the book. It starts with the refusal to conform to huge, overarching narratives that have been placed upon us, to just do what we're told just because we're told to do it. Really, that's the heart of humanism to me. We have to figure out what's good to do, because it affirms our humanity, not what's good to do because we're told to do it by a mythological system. I was left hopeful that, although we may not turn this tide in the near future, it really is possible for a group of people to come together to connect with one another and to say our lives are better when the focus of those lives is one another rather than the tech. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag