The tendency to attach mystical powers to technology is quite old. Humans have a long history of having faith in the technologies they create, not just to solve problems but also to talk to the divine and anticipate the future. Be it oracle bones, the casting of lots, the I Ching, bibliomancy, cartomancy, the electric telegraph, radio, or the early internet, people have sought connection with the transcendental and begged surety of fate by asking questions of advancements in communication technologies. Similarly, recent A.I. discourse reveals not a loss of religion, but rather a transmigration of religiosity into new domains. In the twenty-first century, the sacred has not disappeared, despite statistics citing a falling away from established religions, but rather religion has gone digital. [3] The faith once invested in divine revelation is now attached to algorithmic revelation. The prophets of salvation now wear hoodies or oxfords open at the collar instead of robes and mitres. Tech CEOs and founders such as Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Peter Thiel, Patrick Gelsinger, and seemingly countless others are all couching their arguments in favor of A.I. in messianic language. These rhetorical moves recall what David Nye termed the “American Technological Sublime” and calls to mind Kenneth Burke’s assessment of the religious, allowing us to diagnose how the rhetoric surrounding chatbots and large language models is coalescing around a new vocabulary of the divine: a logology of the neural network age. And if that is so, then we would do well to understand this rhetoric as, quite literally, an act of faith. “The faith once invested in divine revelation is now attached to algorithmic revelation. The prophets of salvation now wear hoodies or oxfords open at the collar instead of robes and mitres.”
From the promethean moment of harnessing fire, humans have imbued their technologies with powers mystical and divine. Across cultures and centuries, new technologies of inscription, transmission, and computation have persistently migrated into esoteric or oracular domains.
MODERN OCCULTIST MAGAZINE
At left, a Shang Dynasty-inscribed scapula; below, a illustration entitled, “Gutenberg’s First Proof.”
From the moment a medium begins to mediate between unseen causes and visible effects, whether in the movement of birds, the crack of a bone, or the flicker of a screen it becomes available for religious, divinatory, and mystical appropriation. The contemporary fascination with artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) as algorithmic oracles is not as an aberration so much so as it is the latest episode in a long and recurrent history of what Erik Davis calls “technomysticism:” the tendency of technical systems to acquire spiritual aura and become machines for meaning rather than mere instruments of utility. The earliest divinatory technologies, such as oracle bones in China, the casting of lots in Greco-Roman traditions, or the drawing of runes in northern Europe combined physical randomness, symbolic representation, and interpretive labor. Each relied on a mechanism of inscription (cracks, marks, letters) that rendered invisible forces legible. Bibliomancy, the consulting sacred or literary texts by random selection,
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