As new technologies are adopted into society, their logics permeate fundamental aspects of our lives, including the spiritual — offering new deities and values that redefine what it means to worship. Online, many young people are now keenly aware that their lives are fodder for attention algorithms — that all digital expressions of thoughts, hobbies, and experiences operate within a larger ecosystem of data analysis. Friends spend hours curating their Spotify feeds, or post “algoselfies” on Instagram to maximize reach. On TikTok, spiritualists encourage you to “like, comment, and interact” to claim your message from the universe and help others find it, a tacit acknowledgement and befitting offering to the workings of the algorithm.
We have been trained to measure personal success, impact, and meaning by how many views and comments we get, which, in times of precarity, can be understood as both an economic necessity and a mode of self-actualization. The algorithms offer to center our lives and concentrate our expression of self, and thus our expression of belief, into new practices based on performance and engagement. In place of being subject to forms of algorithmic control, one can see oneself instead as engaging in algorithmically inflected rituals, tapping into the power of faith.
As a symptom of this, many creators focus their practice on abundance, proselytizing about how TikTok spirituality can connect users with wealth, health, new audiences, and more. In this prosperity gospel, the algorithm is our idol. Dedicated posting, liking, following, and commenting becomes a form of worship to be rewarded with more followers, visibility, and money. This approach, which conflates and confuses technology and magical thinking, is currently salient in the promotion of crypto, which defies coherent explanation for even its most outspoken salespeople. “To the average person, it does sound like voodoo,” Web3 promoter Bobby Allyn declared in an All Things Considered segment on NPR. “But when you press a button to switch on lights, do you understand how the electricity is made? You don’t have to know how electricity works to understand the benefits. Same is true of the blockchain.”
This, of course, is not an explanation but a demand of faith that mirrors the attitude of 19th-century spiritualists toward the telephone. The promoters hope to spiritualize “blockchain” in the same way as “the algorithm” has already been spiritualized, as an all-powerful force capable of performing miracles and benevolently reorganizing our everyday experience. At the recent Bitcoin 2022 conference, one acolyte told a Daily Beast reporter that Bitcoin “gets into your life from every point of view — not only the economic point of view.”