Faith in the Machine: On Techno-utopianism, Mortality and the Religion of Innovation

Altered Carbon Promo at CES 2018 | Photo courtesy of Netflix

Lately I’ve been thinking about how all the richest men in the world are trying not to die.

Trump’s been working the Heaven angle. Musk’s got Mars. Peter Thiel is pouring money into longevity labs and cryogenic freezing while giving lectures about the end times. If you ever wanted to see what happens when money outlives meaning, well, this is it

There was a time when technology was about curiosity. Breaking things open and touching the world to understand it. We built tools to see farther, to heal and to reach one another. Now the tools build themselves. The mission has changed from understanding to evacuation. The more we innovate, the less we seem to know what any of it’s for.

The funny thing, though, it that this belief that salvation hides in the next invention—it’s old. Older than code, older than capitalism. We’ve been praying to it for centuries. The Enlightenment gave us faith in progress; the Protestant work ethic gave us salvation through labor. Silicon Valley inherited both creeds. Same impulse, different altar.

The prophets of today wear Arc Teryx and talk about the future as if they’ve already been there. Behind every promise of progress hums the same sermon: you will not die, not if you move fast enough.

The irony is that these men are obsessed with mortality precisely because they have conquered everything else. Death is the one system they can’t disrupt. So they do what they’ve always done: they throw money at it. 

Bryan Johnson injected himself with his own son’s plasma in his quest to preserve youth. Larry Ellison has invested millions of dollars into biomedical research into anti aging. Jeff Bezos is a reported investor in Altos Labs, a biotech startup focused on cellular rejuvenation. Musk believes transhumanism will finally deliver us from the curse of being human.

I can’t blame them, not entirely. Death is hard to look at. You can almost understand why someone might want to live forever if they could. But what’s strange is how this terror of decay has merged with a kind of macho idealism, a conviction that we can out-engineer the human condition. 

And like every myth of transcendence before it, this one comes with hierarchy. Not everyone gets to ascend. For all their talk of “saving the species,” the new prophets of progress seem only interested in saving themselves. 

And, still, it is the rest of us who will inherit the residue: the emissions, the e-waste and the empty towns left when the next Eden opens its gates.

It’s easy to forget that technology once felt like liberation. The early internet was chaos and possibility, a tangle of strange connections and sudden kinships. It was a mess of ideas and contradictions and hope. It felt infinite yet still incredibly human.

Now it feels claustrophobic with too many mirrors and not enough windows. Every new advancement promises freedom while quietly shrinking the room.

I think about all of this sometimes late at night while scrolling through feeds that were built to keep us looking. It feels devotional, in a way. The quiet ritual of surrendering my attention to something larger, something that claims to know me.

And I wonder if this is what faith feels like now: not kneeling in prayer, but submitting to the machine’s gaze, trusting it to tell us who we are.

All this intelligence, all this power and we still can’t sit with the basic fact of being mortal.

The gods we build will never weep for us.

They’ll never hold our hands, or remember the taste of salt on our lips.

Perfect machines, built by imperfect people trying to escape the one truth that gives life meaning: that it ends.