The rise of machine intelligence seems to be pushing people towards spiritualism, maybe because it’s all that’s left.
People who once derived their value from their work or skills are forced to reflect on what actually separates them from machines.
You can already see it in the strange new spiritualities forming online. Collectives theorise the internet as a plane of spiritual transcendence, populated by digital angels, demons, and hyperreal egregores. A wave of cyber-occultism ports sigil magic and memetic ritual onto the network, treating algorithms as incantations. And on the feeds, a folk mysticism has taken hold: the chatbot read as tarot, the model consulted as an oracle.