The Techno-Theodicy: How Technology Became the New Religion

Abstract:This essay addresses the rise of what is understood to be a global techno-theodicy. Recognizing the pandemic of 2020 as representing the first crisis of the post-liberal order, it maps out the changing nature of religious power as it relates to the appropriation of the abstract, from earlier claims on the monotheistic God to the powers of salvation and redemption invested in technology today. Technology in these terms is no longer seen as enabling, let alone a tool for advancing or progressing the lived conditions of life on earth. Nor can it further be seen as an integral force that shapes being in the world alone. It's now presented to us as the only thing which could save a fragile and broken humanity from itself. This has been achieved by collapsing the human into the species, collapsing the species into nature, and collapsing nature into the technological in such a way that there remains no distinction. This results in an outright assault on the poetic sensibility and the art of possibility. Moreover, it also reaches further into the philosophy of death and the remaining frontiers yet to be colonized.