Rushkoff: The anti-human religion of Silicon Valley

Underlying our tech vision is a gnostic belief system of leaving the body behind, as it is an inferior biological system thwarting our evolution. Hence all the goals of downloading our supposed consciousness into a machine. It's an anti-human and anti-environment religion that has no concern for either, imagining that tech is our ultimate savior.

And ironic enough, it's a belief system that teamed up with the US human potential movement at Esalen. What started as an embodied based human potential program, with practices geared at integrating our minds with our bodies and the environment, got sidetracked by this glorious evolution beyond all that messy material and biological stuff.

And then there's the devil's bargain of this religion with our social media, like Facebook and Google, who use tech merely as a means of manipulating us for their own capitalistic purposes. Apparently it has been accepted that there is no alternative to capitalism, since the latter also assumes that humanity is strictly utilitarian and self-interested, the latter also being just mere algorithmic computations determined by an equally algorithmic ‘natural’ selection. Since tech can do all that better then what’s all the fuss?