The city of god revisited: Digitalism as a new technological religion

Andoni Alonso and Iñaki Arzoz
Additional contact information
Andoni Alonso: Departamento of Humanities, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, Spain
Iñaki Arzoz: Independent Research, Pamplona, Spain

Environmental Values, 2024, vol. 33, issue 1, 42-57

Abstract: A Religion of Progress has taken shape over the last 21 centuries, from the Enlightenment to present times. It is quite simple to follow a thread from Hermeticism to today, however, several facts have altered its content, therefore, reformulating some of its promises and vision of the world. This paper attempts to evaluate how that Religion of Progress has become a sort of Techno-Hermeticism 2.0. Digital technologies have redefined old hermetic myths into a high-tech religion with dire environmental consequencies. Some of those myths are the resurrection of the bodies, the construction of the City of God, the Adamic universal language and so forth. Now religion must confront the upcoming collapse, however, it is unable to provide satisfactory answers. This goes for all the different churches, from accelerationists (Nick Land) to extinctionists and believers of digital solutionism. That leaves possible imaginative responses to that sociecological crisis without any relevant proposals.

Keywords: Religion of technology; progress; digitalism; accelerationism; collapse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09632719231209743 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envval:v:33:y:2024:i:1:p:42-57

DOI: 10.1177/09632719231209743

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environmental Values
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().