Sunday School for Cyborgs

Abstract

Sunday School for Cyborgs R. John Williams (bio) Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology, and God Scott A. Midson I. B. Taurus www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cyborg-theology-9781784537876/ 272 Pages; Cloth, £63.00 It takes no great sleuth to deduce that strange religious things are afoot in Silicon Valley. Massive financial investments, for instance, have been devoted to solving the "modest problem of death"—with immortality hovering just on the horizon. Re-wire the human DNA! Upload your consciousness to the machine! There are architectural signs of a new religiosity as well: Apple's secretive, four-story corporate building, built in the form of a "perfect circle," with a mega-church like auditorium at the center, and monastic cubicles where the smart phones we carry with us everywhere, like digital totems, are lovingly crafted for the masses. Archive.org, which has nowhere near Apple's budget (but all the same religious fervor), took the cheaper route and purchased a now-defunct Christian Science Church building in San Francisco's Richmond District. Visitors are greeted by a temple-like white stone facade adorned with Roman columns. Inside, on the walls of the "chapel," where organ pipes once hummed, archive. org's massive servers sparkle with little blue lights, reflecting against the stained-glass windows like so much digital incense—the churning of data from all over the world, terabytes of zeros-and-ones constantly in flux. Weirdest of all, in the pews of the chapel, curiously still in place, rows of little statues stand unblinking: colorful, human forms made of some kind of plaster or papier-mâché (if you work for longer than three years for archive.org, they commission a local artist to create a likeness of you, which will stand thereafter in the chapel). It feels definitively sacred. More to the point, a deep quasi-religious fervor burns in the hearts and minds of those who inhabit these techno-Delphic spaces. The "Reformed Church of Google" (Google it; it's real) is probably a clever joke among Valley atheists ("Googlists believe Google should rightfully be given the title of 'God,' as She exhibits a great many of the characteristics traditionally associated with such Deities in a scientifically provable manner"), but there is certainly no shortage of true belief infiltrating the burgeoning field of AI and its massively expanding digital infrastructures. Look at any fictional or documentary portrayal of contemporary technoculture, and you'll find an increasingly cyborg-ish mythos performing the kind of devotional energies formerly devoted to the world's great religions. FX's television series Devs (2020), directed by Alex Garland, of Ex Machina (2014) fame, is only the most obvious example: the big reveal, no real spoiler here, is that Devs doesn't stand for the company's "development" program; it stands for Deus. For those in the know, flashes of this god-in-the-machine zeal show up in even the most unexpected situations. Late last year, a friend of mine, a coder working at a startup in San Francisco, happened to be standing near a steel grate close to her favorite Sushi restaurant when one of PG&E's electricity transformers exploded underground. It was deeply traumatic. If she'd been standing just a few feet to her left, she could have died (it is common knowledge that PG&E refuses to spend the money necessary to safely maintain its own equipment, hence occasional blow ups and failures). She tweeted about it, hoping to understand what had happened, but she was unprepared for what some of her fellow digerati messaged her: "it's a sign," someone wrote, convinced that the "Singularity" was coming: "you have been prepared for this moment." It was evidence, they insisted, that a new digital "magic" was out there. Put simply, San Francisco has long since become Pynchon's San Narciso; the sacral-synth sounds of Blade Runner's Los Angeles trickle down from every loudspeaker; the techno-priesthood is in place; the apps are our sacrament; [End Page 9] the prophesied forms of Minority Report's (2002) "precog temple," creepily personalized ads, and zoom-screen surveillance are our everyday reality; John Lilly's sensory...