I am the only truth I know. My emotions are God-given. They tell me what to do and how to live. To be my truest self I should follow my instincts. My body and my gut know more than my mind. An unjust and repressive society has held me back from becoming my best self. It has warped my faith in my own abilities and my relationship with others. I owe it to myself to practice self-care. I owe it to the world to perfect myself: physically, spiritually, and morally.
There is no objective right or wrong. Different people and different societies have different moral obligations.
THESE ARE, AS WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN, THE FOUNDATIONAL tenets of contemporary American intuitional religion. While not all of the Remixed would explicitly affirm every aspect of this ideology, these tendencies nevertheless run through all of Remixed consumer culture. They permeate the wellness industry, and how we think about health more broadly. They permeate the oft-commodified spirituality of the spiritual but not religious—from the tarot cards briefly sold at Sephora to the New Thought–tinged mantras posted on SoulCycle’s Instagram feed. They permeate how we think about our relationship to foundational texts and established tradition, how we feel about our bodies and health, how we envision explicit spirituality, and how we think about sex, romance, and the families we choose to make our own.
But the question remains: How can these many and varied religions of the self come together? The kaleidoscopic nature of intuitionalism necessarily lends itself to fracture, to ever-smaller, ever-more-fragmented, and ever-more-ideologically-aligned tribes.
But if these ideologies are to survive, they will need to take on a more formal shape. They need to become not merely religious sentiments or implicit theologies, but, ironically, institutions—narratives and communities capable of both withstanding the weight of internal dissent and providing a unified front against more established spiritual rivals. Beyond offering a pleasing product for individuals to consume at will, they need to provide a wholesale ideology no less powerful than, say, American evangelical Christianity or the Catholic Church.
In other words, can the Remixed intuitional strain be reworked once more into a civil religion? And what would that even look like?
Are there ideologies, rooted in and derived from intuitional culture, that provide a sufficiently strong narrative, that offer a robust sense of not only meaning and purpose but also ritual and community, that could replace the benign optimism of midcentury Protestantism?
IN OUR CURRENT POLITICAL MOMENT, TWO OPTIONS ARE CURRENTLY contending for the role of Remixed culture’s de facto civil religion.
The first and perhaps most likely claimant is social justice culture: a movement that already underpins much of the current raft of occult-tinged, explicitly SBNR practices. Utopian in scope, progressive in its vision of history, social justice culture transforms the personal and individualistic tenets of New Thought (a repressive society warps our sense of cognition and ability to be our truest self) and gives it a firmly political cast: the Goliaths of society that must be struck down are racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry and injustice.
The solution to the problem of society comes not merely through self-care, though, but through struggle, tearing down the bastions of what has come before. All of society is the script that must be rewritten. The arc of history bends toward a new Eden. The intuitionalist focus on emotions and authenticity manifests itself in the primacy social justice culture puts on lived experience as perhaps the most authoritative force for moral determination.
The second claimant—one that is less visible in the American media landscape but perhaps more politically and financially potent—is the no-less-utopian culture of Silicon Valley: the Rationalists and Transhumanists and proponents of the Californian Ideology who envision an equally radical account of human potential. Their vision of history, too, is at once linear and progressive, wending toward a tipping point of human technological progress. Less likely than their social justice counterparts to put their faith in lived experience—these are, ostensibly, men and women of science after all—they’re nevertheless all the more confident in the intellectual potential to hack, improve upon, and even optimize elements of human nature. They’re confident, too, in the moral imperative to do so. The ultimate good, within this techno-utopian framework, is an optimized self, a finely-tuned machine.
Politically and demographically, these two movements are very different. Social justice culture is, as you might imagine, extremely progressive. The techno-utopians tend toward a libertarianism so strong that it borders on Randian Objectivism. Social justice culture is disproportionately composed of women, people of color, and queer people. Techno-utopianism is largely, although not exclusively, male and white.
Although there are points of overlap—the annual Nevada-based Burning Man festival, for example, which celebrates “radical inclusion” and “radical self-expression,” and where tents devoted to kink communities and witchcraft stand alongside the private tents of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Larry Page—social justice culture and techno-utopianism are largely distinct entities and identities.
When it comes to hot-button culture-war issues, furthermore, the two groups are more likely than not to be on wildly opposing sides. The 2017 firing of Google engineer James Damore, for example, whose leaked memo “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” claimed that gender differences in STEM fields were largely biological and innate, became a cri de coeur for techno-utopians and social justice activists alike. Social justice activists saw it as evidence of a Silicon Valley culture rooted in pseudoscientific sexism; techno-utopians, conversely, claimed that Damore was unfairly maligned for making public scientifically valid research and for resisting the would-be “social justice warriors” of Google in the first place.
Writer and blogger Scott Alexander, a prominent member of the techno-utopian subculture known as the Rationalist community, publicly defended Damore’s scientific stance, lamenting that “everyone knows that disagreeing with social justice is a firing offense these days.”1 Meanwhile, popular feminist website Jezebel condemned Damore as “a white man who might as well be gunning for a position in the Trump administration… [who] argued what only a privileged white man could.”2
But, despite their cosmetic and demographic differences, social justice culture and techno-utopianism are both inheritors of American Remixed intuitionalism as a whole.
Both groups treat society—its rules, maxims, and mores—with disdain and suspicion. In the social justice and techno-utopian ethos alike, expectations and institutions exist solely to be torn down. Disruption is, quite literally, a virtue. PayPal founder and techno-utopian titan Peter Thiel told the New Yorker in 2011 that “disrupt” and “risk” were his two favorite words.3
Traditional markers of expertise and authority, such as a PhD from an elite university or a fancy job title, are as likely as not to be seen as bugs, not features. Members of both subcultures are highly open to nontraditional romantic and sexual relationship models, particularly polyamory.
And, most importantly, both groups treat earthly self-actualization—whether of the self alone or of the self in the context of its varied ethnic and sexual identities—as the ultimate goal of their utopian vision. Both groups are fundamentally eschatological yet thoroughly materialist. They seek not salvation out there, but a purification down here, a kingdom of heaven that can be realized fully on this earth, rather than in a world to come—whether in a Marxist-style cultural revolution or in a robot-fueled singularity. The seeming tyranny of biology—the apparent gender binary, or even death itself—can be overturned or else overwritten. Both groups valorize transcendence, not off the material plane but rather within it. To transcend biology or to transcend deep-rooted prejudices is to achieve a kind of earthly divinity.
Ultimately human beings, and only human beings, are the arbiters of goodness in these new faith systems. The techno-utopian faith in intellectual potential (to become cyborgs, say, or defeat death) and the social justice movement’s faith in the priority of lived experience (to adjudicate disputes) both place the fundamental judgments of goodness, morality, and progress in the hands of human beings, not God.
Back in 1841, Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson—among the first of the American intuitionalists—envisioned the potential of human self-reliance to make ordinary mortals into miniature gods: “He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere… [and who] throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles.”4
More and more of us are miracle workers, now.
Over the past half decade, the progressive vision known as the social justice movement has become an integral part of the American cultural landscape, morphing from a relatively small movement, largely confined to college campuses, to one that think tank More in Common identified as comprising a full 8 percent of the American population.5
According to that study, these “progressive activists”—to use More in Common’s preferred terminology—are deeply suspicious of what they see as white and male privilege, and the role of both racism and sexism in shaping a society they see as fundamentally, and perhaps irremediably, unjust. They see government and wider civil institutions—the police, for example, or border control forces—not merely as ineffectual, but as actively malevolent agents of structural inequality and the cruelty and brutality such inequality manifests.
Compared to the national average, they are more than twice as likely to say that they “never pray,” twice as likely to have finished college, and about three times more likely to say they’re “ashamed to be an American.” They overwhelmingly reject the idea that “men and women have different roles.” They are dubious both of authority (only 13 percent say it’s more important for children to be well-behaved than creative) and of the efficacy of traditional routes to adulthood (just 5 percent say they believe “hard work will always lead to success”). They’re slightly whiter, and slightly younger, than the national average. And politics matters to them as an integral part of their identity and the way they spend their time. Seventy-four percent of them call politics one of their hobbies, compared to just 35 percent of Americans at large.
The movement has made its way into the corridors of power. The 2018 midterm elections saw the induction into Congress of what became known as “the Squad”: four freshman representatives—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—who openly espoused social justice values, from wealth redistribution to reparations for black Americans to the abolishment of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and advocated for them on the House floor. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal—a proposal to reach net-zero global carbon emissions by 2050, sponsored with Massachusetts senator Ed Markey—has become among the most hot-button issues in the country. Openly progressive candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have become viable front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
The ideals of social justice culture—with its distrust of unjust institutions, its fury at those deemed both perpetrators and benefactors of this unfairness, and its radical demand for a rewriting of the political script—have fueled movements like #MeToo, condemning the widespread nature of sexual harassment in America, and Black Lives Matter, protesting police brutality and racism against African Americans. Fueled by social media and, in particular, by Twitter, which allows total strangers to find one another on thematically relevant hashtags, these movements have metamorphosed from social media cris de coeur to culturally transformative events with resonance far beyond the bounds of digital space.
The first use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag came in 2013, following the controversial acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. The movement came to national prominence the following year after two more unarmed black men—Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner of Staten Island, New York—were killed by white police officers, sparking a wave of protests and riots across the country. The hashtag’s originators—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—later transformed the online movement into an advocacy network with thirty chapters across the country, overseeing protests like the one that took place in 2015 at the University of Missouri over accusations of normalized on-campus racism and that resulted in the resignation of university president Tim Wolfe. Between 2013 and 2018, as #Black-LivesMatter was tweeted thirty million times, police brutality—and racism more broadly—became an integral part of American political discourse.6
The hashtag #MeToo, similarly, was used nineteen million times between the dawning of the movement in autumn 2017—when a number of actresses came forward with accusations of rape and sexual harassment against cinema mogul Harvey Weinstein, prompting a wider outpouring of accusations of misconduct across numerous industries—and late 2018.7 Like its predecessor Black Lives Matter, #MeToo transformed tacit cultural acceptance of a social ill—in this case, sexual harassment—into a controversial political issue. Over two hundred influential or prominent men in a variety of fields, from Democratic senator Al Franken to television host Charlie Rose to comedian Louis C.K. to political journalist Mark Halperin, were fired or resigned from their positions after being accused of sexual harassment.8
Even beyond these specific movements, social justice culture has entered the mainstream. Prominent advocates of social justice are no longer fringe activist voices. Rather, they’re comfortably ensconced within the mainstream media establishment. In 2018, for example, the New York Times—a publication whose relative centrism can be gleaned from the fact that left- and right-wing critics alike are constantly accusing it of extreme bias—attracted a media firestorm by hiring the Verge’s Sarah Jeong, a tech reporter known for her fervent and at times vitriolic tweets on race and class (examples include “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “#CancelWhitePeople”) for its editorial board. That same year, the Washington Post published an op-ed by a gender studies professor titled “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” which exhorted her male readers to “pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.”9 “Trigger warnings”—content warnings about disturbing material, like rape or racism, that might trigger a student’s post-traumatic stress disorder—have become commonplace on college campuses; one 2016 NPR study found that about half of college professors had used them.10
But social justice has morphed into more than just a purely ideological movement. It’s also increasingly a viable consumer category: a means by which savvy corporations can cater to millennials’ moral self-regard in the way that, a generation ago, they might have appealed to would-be customers’ desire for wealth or glamour. Wokeness, like wellness, is an aspiration for millennials, one that can, at least temporarily, be purchased through an ethically sourced or activist-branded product, such as a Pride-themed Coca-Cola or a #MeToo-branded razor.
This craze might be said to have begun around 2012, when a number of progressive, social-justice-minded clickbait websites like Upworthy, BuzzFeed, and Mic (then known as PolicyMic)—galvanized by Facebook’s sharing algorithms, which encouraged users to share inspiring content with their friends—came to dominate the media landscape with easily digestible, feel-good headlines. By 2013, pack leader Upworthy (examples include “Mitt Romney Accidentally Confronts a Gay Veteran; Awesomeness Ensues” and “BOOM, ROASTED: Here’s Why You Don’t Ask a Feminist to Hawk Your Sexist Product”) was the fastest-growing media website of all time, with ninety million users a month.11 Meanwhile, Mic pioneered tailored-for-virality headline structures, such as the “in one perfect tweet” takedown (“In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry”). By 2015, BuzzFeed was getting more shares than BBC and Fox News combined.12
While changes in Facebook’s algorithms ultimately scuttled many of these websites’ business models, their brand of marketable morality (and clickable headline style) permeated the mainstream media. As early as December 2013, the Atlantic was asking, “Why are Upworthy Headlines Suddenly Everywhere?” and concluding that for “publishers trying to grab more traffic from Facebook, the path became clear. Borrow, adapt, employ the Upworthy style post haste.”13
In the post-Trump era, wokeness has become an even more powerful identity marker. Teen Vogue—not traditionally the bastion of progressive activism—has gone viral publishing articles like Lauren Duca’s 2016 “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” recognizing that today’s teenage girls are now frequently intimately familiar with the language of domestic psychological abuse. In January 2017, New York magazine’s style blog the Cut advertised fashionable, comfortable clothing to wear to the anti-Trump Women’s March.14 Meanwhile, the CEO of makeup company Glossier showed up to the protest toting a sign emblazoned with the company’s logo.15 That same year, shortly after Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from a number of majority-Muslim countries, Starbucks announced that it planned to hire ten thousand refugees across its stores. By 2018, Nike was celebrating Black Lives Matter with its “Believe in Something” ad campaign, while Pepsi was hiring Instagram influencer (and Kardashian sibling) Kendall Jenner in a commercial that featured her stopping police cars at a protest, another reference to Black Lives Matter.
Social justice, in other words, is a bona fide cultural phenomenon: a unified system of ideals and practices as deeply intertwined as any traditional organized religion. If the More in Common estimate of 8 percent of Americans is an accurate measure of those who belong to the social justice movement, it means that there are more than four times as many social justice activists as there are American Jews.
THE RISE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE CULTURE IN AMERICA IS, OF COURSE, inexorably linked to the rise of its perhaps most visible opponent: Donald Trump. Gleefully politically incorrect, prone to openly mocking feminist and anti-racist causes, boastful about his past instances of sexual assault, and brimming with masculinist braggadocio, Trump has built his electoral brand as a conscious foe to America’s social justice warriors, to use a pejorative term for the movement.
At the same time, galvanized by Trump’s victory, the rhetoric of the social justice movement has permeated the broader left-wing political ethos. In the wake of the apparent failure of the classical liberal establishment, personified by Hillary Clinton, many disappointed Democrats found in the battleground of social justice a more emotionally robust approach to politics—one capable, as it seemed Clinton and Clintonism was not, of countering Trump’s highly potent strain of atavistic authoritarianism. Social justice shared Trumpism’s willingness to burn it all down, to drain the swamp, to radically remake what appeared to be an imploded political landscape, positioning itself as the only rival claimant willing and able to fight Trumpism’s fire with rhetorical fire.
It seems to be working. According to a 2018 Washington Post study, one in five Americans now say they have attended at least one rally or political protest since early 2016. Almost one-fifth of these attendees said they’d never been to a protest before. These new activists aren’t necessarily well-educated millennials (44 percent are at least fifty years old, and only 50 percent say they’re college graduates), nor are they necessarily social justice warriors in the strictest sense of the term.16 Nevertheless, they’re actively participating in a community whose ideals, vocabulary, and vision are increasingly shaped by the young, socially progressive voices of the social justice movement.
The post-2016 success of social justice culture is in part due to the fact that it encompasses not merely opposition to Trump, but an explanation for him. In the wake of the 2016 elections, many self-proclaimed Democrats reported a shock that bordered on the existential. “This election broke me,” one aghast college senior told the Nation. “It broke a lot of us. This election went against everything I thought the United States of America stood for. This country was meant to welcome people of all colors, religions, shapes, sizes, and minds. But here I am sitting at my computer confused as to how a man who stands against all of those things is going to be the most powerful man in the world for the next four years.”17 Another student reported that she “was in complete shock when every trusted source I had turned out to be dead wrong.… It was still very hard to understand a reality I hadn’t envisioned, a Trump win, because I’d been told it was so improbable. It made me question what went wrong in the polls, in the reporting, and in the general understanding of how American politics works.”18 Trump’s victory seemed to represent a fundamental breakdown of the system—the conglomerate of pollsters and politicians and experts and reporters who, somehow, had guaranteed an America as smoothly and benignly functional as the one that had dominated the midcentury. It’s worth noting that 92 percent of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton said that Donald Trump provoked in them feelings not just of distaste but fear.19
Trump’s election may have shocked and horrified plenty of garden-variety Democrats. But to initiated activists, it was inevitable. His victory, they argued, was evidence not merely of a temporary breakdown of American institutions in 2016, but rather a much more deeply ingrained rot in the fabric of America itself.
The historical narrative of social justice—that America, despite its lofty political ideals of freedom and justice for all, is at its core a country built on white supremacy, patriarchy, repression, and hatred—became, for many on the political left, an etiology at once reassuring and unsettling, evidence that Trump’s election was not simply a chaotic anomaly but rather rooted in a wider, if more insidious, historical trend. America was, is, and will remain broken. (Sixty percent of the “progressive activists” More in Common identified say they’re “not proud” of America’s history.) Racism, sexism, homophobia—all these are, in the social justice narrative, as American as apple pie. Seen through this lens, Trump’s election becomes not a disruption of American liberal ideals but rather their natural and inevitable conclusion.
As writer Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in a keynote speech the day after 2016 election, “When Donald Trump went before audiences and was talking about Muslims, when he went into Chicago and talked about law and order… he was appealing to a nation’s spirit, something that was old in us, something that was ancient in us, something that goes back to 1619,” the year enslaved Africans first arrived in America. “We had deeply, deeply underestimated ourselves,” he continued. “We had deeply, deeply underestimated our past.”20
Four years after Trump’s election, that vision of history has since made it all the way to the New York Times, which in 2019 launched the 1619 Project, an initiative commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of enslaved Africans’ arrival on American shores. The project is meant to, in the paper’s own words, “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” and makes the argument that “our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”21 One of the project’s contributors, Nikole Hannah-Jones, argues that “this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.”22
To its proponents, this vision of history was a necessary corrective to centuries of whitewashing the worst of America’s legacy. To critics on the right, it was a traitorous decrial of the American founding ideal. Yet, at its core, the social justice movement’s rendering of America isn’t merely a history. It’s also a profound and powerful theodicy capable of explaining the evils of 2016 with recourse to a still wickeder past.
Those who have called social justice a new religion have traditionally done so pejoratively. Conservative New York magazine commentator Andrew Sullivan derisively called the movement the “Great Awokening,” deriding its zealots as humorless neo-puritans who reveled in “cancelling” the insufficiently enlightened. “Like early modern Christians,” Sullivan wrote in 2018, “they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin.… A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke.”23
The National Review’s David French was equally skeptical. “The campus culture war is a religious war,” French wrote in 2015, “a so-far largely peaceful counterpart to the violent purges and revolutions of jihad. One faith has been expunged, relegated to the margins of the academy, and now another fills the vacuum. Out with the Christianity that spawned American higher education, in with a ferocious new faith—a social-justice progressivism unrestrained by humility and consumed with righteous zeal.”24
Yet social justice’s most fervent critics, in their knee-jerk derisions of it as a ridiculous cult, fail to realize quite how right they are. Social justice is a religion, and—as with any other religion—its potency as a source of meaning and its potential for zealotry are naturally correlated.
Which is to say, as a religion, social justice works. It works not merely in the sense that a lot of people take it very seriously and react angrily when people misuse its sacred terms (as Sullivan and French imply), but also in a much more fundamental and potentially constructive way. It has done what so much of anodyne, classical liberalism has failed to do. It has imbued the secular sphere with meaning. It has reenchanted a godless world.
Like its Marxist antecedents, from which it draws much of its imagery and inspiration, modern social justice culture has managed to create a thoroughly compelling, eschatologically focused account of a meaningful world, in which every human being has a fundamental purpose in a cosmic struggle, all without including, well, God.
As a moral vision, as a conception of history, and as a galvanizing force for action, it is wildly effective. To dismiss it as silly or jejune is to profoundly overlook what it reveals about the American search for meaning and about the spiritual hunger of those who subscribe to it.
The social justice movement is so successful because it replicates the cornerstones of traditional religion—meaning, purpose, community, and ritual—in an internally cohesive way. It takes the varied tenets of intuitionalism—its prioritization of the self, emotions, and identity, its New Thought–inflected suspicion of authority, its utopian vision of a better world born phoenix-like from the ashes of the old—and threads them together into a visionary narrative of political resistance and moral renewal. It provides both an explanation for evil (an unjust society that transcends any one agentic individual and, more specifically, straight white men) and a language, symbol set, and collection of rituals (from checking one’s privilege to calling out someone else to engaging in enlightened activism) with which to combat that evil force. At its most effective, social justice culture creates a mythic narrative about the world we live in, filling the seeming chaos of history and its myriad injustices with an eschatological promise: that human beings can, should, and shall do better. The new world that will inevitably arise from the ashes of a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, repressive, Christian society will be infinitely better, fairer, and more loving than what has come before. The Remixed faith in individual human potential, and in the potential of human beings to rewrite their relationships to one another and to their communities, is here extended to the world at large.
What could be more compelling, after all, than the vision of a better world, a world in which societal repression gives way to a panoply of liberated persons, all being their best selves?
“Visionary feminism offers us hope for the future,” activist bell hooks wrote in 2000. “By emphasizing an ethics of mutuality and interdependency feminist thinking offers us a way to end domination while simultaneously changing the impact of inequality. In a universe where mutuality is the norm, there may be times when all is not equal, but the consequence of that inequality will not be subordination, colonization, and dehumanization.”25
These utopian visions of the future, in 2019, now envision a radical reframing of human nature: an earthly kingdom of heaven in which kindness and love take the place of avarice and power lust.
In a 2019 Vice article asking selected feminist icons to envision the future of the feminist movement, the genderqueer author-performer Jacob Tobia described their feminist utopia as a “world without prisons and without cops, so cops are just these community members who don’t even need night sticks because they just give people emotional support. And maybe sometimes they have to deal with a little kid who’s stealing from a co-op, and they’re like, ‘You don’t have to steal, we have universal basic income, Sara!’ And Sara’s like, ‘Oh no, I was just having feelings about being an adolescent.’ It’s like a post-prison abolition comedy hour.”
By equating the problems of a repressive society more broadly with the egos of straight white men more narrowly, social justice culture is able to balance its fatalistic conception of the world as it is now with a more optimistic vision of what the world could be. When the marginalized finally turn the tables on those in power, when women and queer and nonbinary people and people of color occupy places of power, they will at last be able to remake the world, to rewrite the script.
Singer-songwriter King Princess had an even more bombastic view: “For me, [a feminist utopia] would look like gays and women and people of colors just running shit. All the white men—in this narrative there’s still a couple, but they’re very docile—just give money to women to fund their ideas. They’re like a bank. In this future, the Oscars would have very few old white people, and we would just honor incredible female, queer, Black, trans art. And we’d end this idea that you have to watch or enjoy certain content just to prove you’re woke. We’d just watch good content. Also, every club would be a drag bar.”26
Within the social justice cosmology, we are fundamentally blank slates, whose oppressive and oppressed identities are violently imposed upon us from without, by society. (The growing media ubiquity of the terms “assigned male at birth” and “assigned female at birth,” and their shortened forms AMAB and AFAB, to refer to genital or chromosomal sex speaks more explicitly to this trend.) Our purpose, as human beings, is to examine the deleterious effects such a morally pernicious society has had upon our cognition and to work to combat our programming.
This examination, however, combines—often somewhat inconsistently—two seemingly contradictory ideas about the self. The first is that, insofar as we are marginalized, society has warped our fundamental goodness. We have some form of a desirable, natural state that an unjust society has taken from us. Liberation, within this first vision, is self-love as political resistance, a reclamation of a person’s innate and inherent dignity, stolen by hegemonies of power.
The second, more troublesome, idea about the self is that such an inherent self does not actually exist. There is, within social justice culture’s sense of human taxonomy, little place for a soul—the rational and transcendent element of the self that Plato once termed Logos.
Especially insofar as we are privileged, our entire identities are so inextricably linked to our social place that we have no selves outside them. No matter how we might try, our privilege—and the violence it has wreaked on those who do not look like us—has so defined us that we cannot escape from it. The only way to exist virtuously within the world is to withdraw from its stages entirely.
For those from marginalized identities, the vision of self-love takes precedence over the vision of the totally socialized self. Self-love demands liberation from cultural images of inferiority, a call to be kinder to oneself. “We all knew firsthand,” black feminist scholar bell hooks writes in Feminism Is for Everybody, “that we had been socialized as females by patriarchal thinking to see ourselves as inferior to men, to see ourselves as always and only in competition with one another for patriarchal approval, to look upon each other with jealousy, fear, and hatred. Sexist thinking made us judge each other without compassion and punish one another harshly.”27
Audre Lorde, who first coined the term self-care, envisioned it as a primarily political act, a reclamation of the dignity of a self that society deemed lesser. In her 1988 essay collection A Burst of Light, Lorde writes that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Lorde’s contemporary followers have echoed her conviction that self-love is, at its core, a form of resistance to cultural brainwashing. In early 2019, for example, Vice writer Rituparna Som, writing explicitly in response to Lorde, argued that “self-care is evolving from proving you matter to the world, to proving you matter to yourself. It might not sound like much, but when battling anxiety and depression, both wonderful catalysts at decimating your sense of self-worth, it’s a mighty weapon. You move from self-doubt, to acceptance. And from that point on, everything you do, becomes worthwhile. Even Netflix bingeing.”28
But for those who belong to privileged identities, this enlightenment demands the difficult work of self-denial. To check one’s privilege is to acknowledge one’s unearned status in a society in which each intersecting identity affords either privilege or oppression.
In Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”—the 1989 essay often considered essential reading for the social justice movement—McIntosh provides her (implicitly white) readers with a list of positive experiences they might easily take for granted: “I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.… I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.… I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.”29 She then points out to white readers how likely they are to have gone through life without having questioned any of these. “In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious,” McIntosh writes, “other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.”
Contemporary iterations of this exhortation are often blunter: “If you are a person with a lot of privilege,” writes social justice blog BGD’s Mia McKenzie, “(i.e. a white, straight, able-bodied, class-privileged, cisgender male or any combination of two or more of those) and you call yourself being against oppression, then it should be part of your regular routine to sit the hell down and shut the eff up.”30
It is the moral responsibility of those with privilege to withdraw as much as possible from the public sphere, to let those with marginalized identities come forward and take up both rhetorical and political space. It is the responsibility of the privileged, too, to do the work of checking that privilege without demanding assistance from their marginalized peers, from whom the work of social justice is often characterized as a burden. Often, this burden is framed in explicitly consumer-capitalist terms: emotional energy conceived of as an economic resource. The idea of “emotional labor”—originally coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild to refer to jobs, such as waitressing, in which performing a pleasant demeanor was as integral to the work as physical actions—has become ubiquitous within the movement.
For example, Everyday Feminism—a popular social justice website best known for its “101” primers on various aspects of the movement—frames social exchange purely in terms of economic and emotional labor. To ask people of color to “explain” privilege, the argument goes, is to demand that they, essentially, work for free, diminishing their personal and emotional resources without compensation. “When asking for labor from people of color, white people,” the article’s author admonishes readers, “you need to remember that the balance of power between yourself and the person you are requesting labor from will always be unequal.”31 Another article on the site encourages marginalized people to set up and publicize PayPal or Venmo accounts, allowing the privileged to directly compensate them for their work. The piece exhorts white women to “let go of the spotlight and keep your white tears in check” and pay black activists they follow on social media directly in appreciation of their work.32 In 2015, the hashtag #GiveYourMoneytoWomen—the brainchild of Lauren Chief Elk—went viral, encouraging male readers to Venmo women for the emotional labor of putting up with them. “Men get so much from us,” Chief Elk told a Vice interviewer. “They drain us for our knowledge, our support, our validation, our attention, no! If you want this, hand over your fucking money. Give me your cash, right now, if you want all of this.”33
Within the intuitionalist, consumerist model of Remixed spirituality, this approach makes perfect sense. After all, we are all buyers in the spiritual marketplace. Meaning, purpose, community, ritual—all of these are things we not only can buy with our hard-earned dollars, but should. To fail to optimize our economic output would be, in a very real sense, a dereliction of our duty toward self-care. If we are paying through the nose for our sense of a moral universe—through spiritual supplies or yoga classes or consumption of reassuringly activist-branded products—why shouldn’t we be paid, in turn, for supplying that religious sense to others? Why should “counselor”—to say nothing of “priest”—not be one among many job titles we adopt as part of ubiquitous semiprofessionalization of the gig economy?
The idea of checking privilege takes the form of a kind of self-unmaking: a challenge to the unduly blessed to explore how society has—on the basis of how they look or whom they love—affected who they are. It challenges the checker to at once examine how society has shaped them and imagine who they might be without it—their innate self, unformed by privilege. At its most idealistic, social justice culture also offers an avenue for remaking, at least when it comes to gender. It creates an opportunity for transgender people, or for those who do not feel they fit the standard gender binary, to transcend what they see as the tyrannical societal association of gender norms with genital sex.
Because that tyranny is seen as located in society, not biology, the social justice self manages to be simultaneously free and contingent. We may be warped by societal expectations, but at our core we are blank slates ripe for reinvention. Who we are, what we assume, how we think is not hardwired by biology but functionally encoded into us from our upbringing. If there is a concept of original sin in this schema, it comes not from God but from a society that has so warped us—the privileged and oppressed alike—that we are incapable of achieving full selfhood outside our prescribed roles.
Within the anthropology of social justice, our various identities—our race, gender, and sexual orientation—make us who we are. There is little, if any, universal human experience or that which we might in a more explicitly theological context call a soul—something innate to every human being that transcends the specifics of social identity. It’s telling, for example, that much of the rhetoric of social justice focuses on the body as the locus of both oppression and privilege: violence is coded as being against black bodies, or female bodies, or trans bodies, rather than against a less materialist vision of personhood.
Embodiment—and the subjective vision of truth it represents—is integral to social justice culture more broadly. Social justice culture valorizes not only the body as the site of meaning, but also what is termed lived experience: the specific and embodied knowledge that one can attain only by existing within one’s various identities. Different forms of oppression (black feminist scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw christened the term “intersectionality” to describe these overlapping systems) lead to human experiences so distinct from one another that they’re barely translatable from one group of people to another.
A black man cannot fully apprehend the lived experience of a white woman; a straight cisgender woman can never understand what it is to be a queer nonbinary person. “Rationality” is often treated with suspicion—it is, for many activists, a pretense for the powerful status quo to legitimize itself, a chance for straight, white, male, colonialist bias to exhibit itself in action.
One 2016 article on Everyday Feminism, for example, lists “3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism.” “This constant emphasis on rationalism is a load of toxic garbage,” the author, a self-described “queer, Vietnamese femme who is neither a man or a woman,” writes. “It reeks of the rancid odor that develops when we squeeze our vast imaginations into tiny boxes labeled ‘pragmatic,’ ‘rational,’ and ‘reasonable.’ Being rational can often mean being willing to accept some aspects of oppression and watering down my politics.” Because truth is so subjective, the author tells us, rationality is ultimately impossible—and anyone who claims otherwise has a vested interest in exerting unjust power. “Since what’s rational is subjective,” they continue, “it is thus indefinable. The only reason why rationalism is believed to have inherent value is because it echoes the oppressor’s way of thinking.”34
Likewise, the Cambridge-based blogger who goes by the moniker “the Brown Hijabi,” wrote in 2015, “The problem with academia… is that ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ are perceived in very limited ways and ways which marginalize and erase many people’s own experiences. So for example, the value placed on being able to debate in a persuasive, data-based and point-by-point manner means that most discussions at Cambridge—even those to do with personal experiences, feelings and opinions—are forced into the framework of ‘academic exercises.’… When we place this form of discussion and this way of ‘knowing’ and ‘proving’ ‘the truth’ as the primary and most valid way; we devalue people’s lived experiences.”35
Within this schema, institutional wisdom—particularly the academic or scientific status quo—isn’t just wrong or false, it’s actively harmful, preventing us from accessing the truth we have before our very eyes. Our feelings are, in a very real sense, facts.
While this contemporary iteration of lived experience is tied more specifically to ethnic or gender identity than its predecessors, it’s nonetheless deeply rooted in the American intuitionalist tradition. Fundamentally, contemporary social justice activists agree with Transcendentalists like Emerson or New Thought luminaries like Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Ralph Waldo Trine. Our perceptions—our thoughts, our feelings, our responses, our lived experiences—are inherently authoritative. Likewise, assaults upon our perceptions have the same ontological status as physical violence. Microaggressions and misgendering aren’t just immoral per se, but an assault upon the embodied self. “Problematic words are systematically violent,” one Everyday Feminism article tells us.36 “If you give half a damn about the success and well-being of an oppressed group of people, you will also be sure to avoid the words and phrases that have haunted them through the decades.”
This subjectivism, in turn, can make common discourse difficult. The idea of “preferred pronouns”—how a person asks to be addressed, gender-wise—was once de rigueur in activist circles, but is now largely considered offensive. A person’s identity is fixed; their pronouns are not preferred but rather an accurate reflection of who they are.37 Yet the tendency of the social justice community to self-police its members, often harshly, and to codify its ever-evolving way of thinking can be seen as a feature rather than a bug. Social justice communities, both online on platforms like Tumblr and Twitter and in the physical world, offer their members a chance to reify their own participation in activist spaces by shunning others. What has become known as “call-out culture”—the public critique and “cancellation” of “problematic” enemies (or insufficient allies)—has turned into a collective ritual catharsis.
When a public (or sometimes private) person makes a statement seen as offensive, social justice communities often successfully band together to condemn the offender and, at times, advocate for real-life punishment (usually firing) for the offending act. Once the person is duly chastised, participants tend to move on—although often not before the offender has faced real-world consequences for their actions. In 2013, for example, young PR professional Justine Sacco, with just 170 Twitter followers, tweeted a tasteless joke—“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”—before boarding her flight to Cape Town.
Eleven hours later, Sacco landed to find that she was the number one trending topic on Twitter, with tens of thousands of tweets excoriating her and accusing her of racism and unchallenged privilege. She was fired almost immediately. A few months later, Gawker’s Sam Biddle, among the high-profile journalists to have shared her Tweet, was himself the subject of a call-out scandal after jokingly exhorting his Twitter followers to “bring back bullying”; Gawker published numerous apology posts in response.38
But offenses deemed cancelable by call-out culture need not always be quite so explicit. In 2015, for example, an artist named Paige Paz, who frequently posted fan art on Tumblr, announced that she’d attempted suicide after harassment from critics who accused her of drawing characters from the animated TV show Steven Universe as lighter skinned or thinner than they were on-screen.39 Paz’s critics started forty-two separate blogs in order to track incidents of her perceived racism and fatphobia, often publicly posting screenshots of Paz’s exchanges with other artists in which she expressed views deemed to be problematic. While activists have increasingly been critical of the dangers of call-out culture, it remains central to the functioning of social justice as a movement, continually refining (and reifying) its ideals and its goals.
Call-out culture isn’t just limited to online offenses. In 2018 alone, four separate white women—who became known to the media as “Golfcart Gail,” “BBQ Becky,” “Permit Patty,” and “Cornerstore Caroline”—became instant social media pariahs after, in each instance, calling the police to report what appeared to be African Africans doing relatively ordinary things, such as shouting during a baseball game or picnicking in the park. Hundreds of thousands of people shared videos and footage of these women, arguing that they had, by involving a racist police force, put black Americans’ lives at risk. Some of these women were later doxxed to the media; one lost her job as the CEO of a cannabis company.40
That same year, a white Yale PhD student, Sarah Braasch, who had a documented history of anti-racist activism, came under fire after being filmed calling campus police on a black student napping in the common area of her dormitory. The protest hashtag #nappingwhileblack went viral, and Braasch left campus after learning that the university was initiating disciplinary procedures against her. That case later proved a more complicated one than pure racism—Braasch had a well-documented history of mental instability following a sexual assault and had previously expressed concerns about being harassed in her dormitory common areas by other students—but many Yale students, and the social justice community more broadly, called for Braasch’s expulsion altogether. (The university later dropped the case; Braasch remains enrolled in the program but is forbidden to enter campus.)41
It would be easy to dismiss each of these cases as political correctness run amok, the result of a zealot’s desire to expunge perceived heretics from the movement. To some extent, that is true. But each of these collective call-outs—which require only a retweet, a post, or a like by participants—had another purpose too. They inspired a kind of Durkheimian collective effervescence, an opportunity for disparate people, frustrated with the injustice of the status quo, to not only focus their anger at a chosen scapegoat but also participate in something like a religious ritual: a formal reification of their own belonging to a moral community through the shaming of those who fall short. Call-out culture persists not merely because there are plenty of people out there who deserve to be canceled, but also because the sense of community it provides to its participants, the fantasy of moral solidarity, is a potent draw.
So, too, do “safe spaces.” Oft-maligned by conservatives, these institutions—dedicated rooms or areas devoted to protecting the experience of marginalized peoples—have become popular on college campuses. In 2015, for instance, one was offered at Brown University following a controversial on-site debate over campus sexual assault between feminist Jessica Valenti and libertarian Wendy McElroy. Anyone “triggered” by the debate was welcome to seek solace there. The space—which featured calming music, coloring books, pillows, and other soothing items—became an instant target of mockery by conservatives. In the New York Times, Judith Shulevitz asked, “Why are students so eager to self-infantilize?”42 But to take the campus safe space at face value—as a place that coddled college students go when they are triggered by the real world—is also to overlook its secondary function. The cloister of the safe space doubles as a moral hermitage: a place where those who utilize it can be guaranteed not only to find like-minded members but also to reify their own commitment to that space, its values, and ideals. To willingly enter a safe space is not just to withdraw from the real world, but to enter a quasi-sacred one, in which social justice’s narratives of the self, society, and truth reign supreme. A space, you might say, not unlike a church.
Unlike wellness or witchcraft, social justice culture has it all. It’s capable of taking American intuitionalism and giving it a clear shape, a clear theology. It provides a compelling nontheistic vision of why the world is the way it is, locating original sin in the structures of society itself and liberation in self-examination and solidarity. It provides a clear-cut enemy: Donald Trump, and the scores of straight white men like him who have benefited from a corrupted status quo. It provides a sense of purpose: the call to self-love (for the marginalized) and to self-denial (for the unduly privileged). It provides a framework for legitimizing emotion, rather than oppressive rationality, as the source of moral knowledge; the discourse of lived experience and embodied identity reaffirm the importance of subjectivity. In the absence of transcendent notions of the soul, or of a universal, knowable truth, or of an objective foundation of being, social justice provides a coherent framework about why and how our personal experiences are authoritative. And it has succeeded in galvanizing a moral community—a church—through its ideology and its rituals of purgation and renewal. If social justice is indeed America’s new civil religion—or, at least, one of them—it comes by that claim fairly.
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, social justice culture is likely to only get stronger and more pervasive, emboldened by the promise of a mythic battle against its greatest enemy. If a more explicitly progressive figure, such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, garners the presidential nomination, this November’s election could prove a clash of the titans, pitting a champion of the social justice left directly against a bastion of the atavistic right. If that happens, we may well see this particular brand of American intuitionalism make it all the way to the White House.
But social justice culture isn’t the only civil religion flowering in America today. Bankrolled by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, a different form of American intuitionalism is taking hold. Gleefully libertarian, comfortably capitalist, and deeply antiauthoritarian, contemporary techno-utopianism envisions the telos of the universe as optimization.
This ethos has grown in tandem with the modern Internet age. As early as 1995, critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron identified what they saw as a growing trend in Silicon Valley and America more broadly. They termed this “mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counterculture libertarianism” the “Californian Ideology.”43
Equal parts San Francisco countercultural bohemianism and Silicon Valley techno-capitalism, this Californian Ideology was, they wrote, a “heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age,” a deep-rooted trust both in technologically assisted human potential for self-transcendence and in the moral promise of what such a transcendence could mean. The Californian Ideology, they wrote, “promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies… through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich.”44
If social justice culture located the source of moral evil purely in society, the Californian Ideology locates it in the body: those mortal meat sacks and shifty synapses that keep us from achieving our full and fully rational potential.
While social justice ideology treats the idea of a universal, rational Logos with suspicion—we can fully understand things only through our lived experience—the Californian Ideology treats all human beings, regardless of their social context, as autonomous minds trapped in feeble bodies.
Those clever enough to transcend their limitations—in part by developing skills that allow them to join the increasingly disembodied ranks of the “virtual class” of developers, programmers, and scientists, rather than remaining alongside the drone-like drudges of industrialism—have the inherent right to extend that freedom as far as it can go. Within the Californian Ideology, the best and the brightest should be given absolute liberty to shape our world, with little regulation or impediment to their various decisions, innovations, and disruptions. They aren’t just becoming their best selves, but optimizing the world for the rest of us, hacking our outmoded traditions and inventing new ways for us to live more efficiently.
Therefore, Californian Ideologues despise the slow and onerous bureaucratic groupthink of institutions and governments. As Barbrook and Cameron put it:
Each member of the “virtual class” is promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur. Information technologies… empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state. Existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software.… [They believe that] big government should stay off the backs of resourceful entrepreneurs who are the only people cool and courageous enough to take risks.… The free market is the sole mechanism capable of building the future and ensuring a full flowering of individual liberty within the electronic circuits of Jeffersonian cyberspace.
For early Californian Ideologues, this faith in the dizzying power of individual freedom was inextricable from its focus on the perfected self: self-care framed not merely as an indulgence but rather as a disciplined and lifelong effort to optimize what it means to be a human being.
“The search for the perfection of mind, body and spirit,” Barbrook and Cameron warned, “will inevitably lead to the emergence of the ‘post-human’: a bio-technological manifestation of the social privileges of the ‘virtual class.’… The hi-tech artisans of contemporary California are more likely to seek individual self-fulfillment through therapy, spiritualism, exercise or other narcissistic pursuits. Their desire to escape into the gated suburb of the hyper-real is only one aspect of this deep self-obsession.”45
Twenty-five years later, their warnings seem more prescient than ever. Today’s techno-utopianism basically worships human potential and its technological manifestations, including artificial intelligence.
Sometimes that worship is explicit. In 2015, for example, one Silicon Valley software engineer, Anthony Levandowski, founded a religious group called Way of the Future, devoted to “develop[ing] and promot[ing] the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”46
“Humans are in charge of the planet,” Levandowski told Wired’s Mark Harris, “because we are smarter than other animals and are able to build tools and apply rules. In the future, if something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge. What we want is the peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet from humans to whatever. And to ensure that the ‘whatever’ knows who helped it get along.”47 (One 2017 Financial Times headline put it even more succinctly: “Artificial Intelligence: Silicon Valley’s New Deity.”)
Meanwhile, less explicit venerations of human technological progress have sprung up all over Silicon Valley and beyond. There are, for example, the Transhumanists, who believe in “biohacking” that will allow human beings to, essentially, become cyborgs. Transhumanism-sympathetic entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have invested millions if not billions of dollars in turning human beings into machines. Page, for example, launched Calico Labs to pioneer new antiaging technologies. Meanwhile, Thiel has been heavily involved in funding parabiosis, an experimental technology involving harvesting the blood of the young and injecting it into older bodies, and has publicly indicated interest in trying the treatment himself. Russian media mogul Dmitry Itskov—that country’s answer to Rupert Murdoch—is spending his multibillion-dollar fortune on his 2045 Initiative, which is pioneering what it calls “cybernetic immortality” (in short, trying to get Itskov, personally, uploaded to a computer so that he can live forever).48 Three hundred and fifty people have already been cryogenically frozen shortly after their death—with 2,000 more on various waiting lists—at a cost between $28,000 and $200,000.49
There are, too, the “superforecasters”: beneficiaries of Philip E. Tetlock’s the Good Judgment Project, in which crowdsourced, trained forecasters make better predictions on future world affairs than any of the world’s major intelligence agencies. (They also, helpfully, offer corporate workshops to help companies make better decisions.)
And there are the Rationalists. Originally an Internet-based community that sprang up around blogs claiming to teach the tenets of “rational” thinking, such as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s LessWrong and Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex, rationalism has morphed into a full-on secular religion, complete with celebrity fans like Thiel and Musk and its own Berkeley-based headquarters, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), devoted to helping individuals and companies—including the Thiel Foundation and Facebook—transcend the biases of their animal brains.50
Rationalism casts human self-transcendence as the highest possible good. In his manifesto “Twelve Virtues of Rationality,” for example, Yudkowsky, the closest thing the movement has to a leader, lists the vital skills initiates must practice in order to achieve a quasi-spiritual enlightenment.
“The first virtue,” he writes, “is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless.”51
Yudkowsky goes on to list the remaining virtues in a similarly lofty style. There’s relinquishment (“Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs”), along with lightness (“Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf”), evenness (“Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike”), argument, empiricism, simplicity, humility, perfectionism, precision, and scholarship. He concludes that there is a final “virtue which is nameless,” which he terms “the Way of the Void.”52
For members of the Rationalist community, the pursuit of scientific knowledge is explicitly a conduit for spiritual growth. It is that which brings meaning to the world, and purpose to our individual lives. Several of its members have pioneered a Secular Solstice, in annual operation since 2013, which is designed to, in founder Raymond Arnold’s words, “stand toe-to-toe with Christmas and feel just as magical,” while still celebrating the values of self-improvement and scientific enquiry.53 In the Rationalists’ view, their philosophy is the necessary answer to a godless world, in which nature is chaotic and brutal and the structures of human society an outmoded vestige of our failed, animal natures.
IT’S TELLING THAT HALF OF ALL TECH WORKERS SAY THAT THEY’RE NOT just religiously unaffiliated but outright agnostic or atheistic, compared to just 7 percent of the population overall.54 Techno-utopianism, unlike other intuitionalist traditions, has no room for nebulously comforting ideas of energy or divinity in order to legitimize its expansionist vision of human freedom.
According to the techno-utopian theology, we should act in accordance with our desires and needs and wants not because there is an innate spark of the divine within us—as in the New Thought tradition—but because there isn’t. The only transcendence comes from what we can create ourselves: the technology that makes us more than human. We, and we alone, are divine.
That techno-utopian obsession with self-divinization finds its natural conclusion in artificial intelligence, which is truly post-human. Rationalists and Transhumanists alike speak often of the singularity: the imagined future point at which human beings and technology will inevitably merge. While some techno-utopians anticipate that singularity might be potentially catastrophic for humanity (in 2000, Yudkowsky started the Machine Intelligence Research Institute to combat the threat of an unfriendly, all-powerful AI, ideally by hastening the development of a friendly one), the singularity is largely framed as the dawning of a new and glorious era of human limitlessness. In 2015, for example, the futurist and author Ray Kurzweil—among the most prominent advocates for singularity—characterized it as a kind of earthly kingdom of heaven. The singularity, he wrote, “will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands.”55 Aided by computers, he argued, human intelligence would increase a thousandfold.
Techno-utopians, by and large, tend to be fatalistic about the biological self, which is prone to such nasty eventualities as bias, irrationality, aging, and death. But they’re optimistic about the power of the technological self—which is to say, the intellect of the smartest people reproduced on the phone screens of everybody else—to transcend human limitations. Your average Transhumanist, or Rationalist, or even run-of-the-mill tech worker may speak disparagingly about human “wetware.” But they nevertheless have faith—you might call it hubris—in their ability to create software, apps, or biomedical devices that help to harness if not reimagine that wetware. If social justice culture sees the experiential body as the source of meaning, techno-utopianism does the same for the transformed body, which does not make mistakes, or grow old, or die. It is a self both human and post-human.
As journalist Mark O’Connell writes of Bay Area Transhumanists in his 2017 book, To Be a Machine, “Their whole ethos… is such a radical extrapolation of the classically American belief in self-betterment that it obliterates the idea of the self entirely. It’s liberal humanism forced to the coldest outer limits of its own paradoxical implications: if we truly want to be better than we are—more moral, more in control of ourselves and our destinies—we need to drop the pretense that we are anything more than biological machines, driven by evolutionary imperatives that have no place in the overall picture of the kind of world we say we want to create. If we want to be more than mere animals, we need to embrace technology’s potential to make us machines.”56
But hacking, for techno-utopians, isn’t just limited to the body. Rather, techno-utopianism, like its intuitionalist forebears, celebrates the rewriting of social scripts, the optimization of our mores.
Some of that hacking, naturally, lends itself to sex. In 2018, journalist Emily Chang wrote in Vanity Fair about the ubiquity of “cuddle puddles” and similarly orgiastic parties in Silicon Valley, at which wealthy tech moguls and attractive women would consume drugs like MDMA to encourage multi-partnered erotic intimacy. “What’s making this possible is the same progressiveness and open-mindedness that allows us to be creative and disruptive about ideas,” one tech founder told Chang.57
Former Google employee (and inventor of the hashtag) Chris Messina made the case for his own polyamory to CNN journalist Laurie Segall, arguing for sexual freedom as scientific discovery, a necessary part of perfecting the human experience. “We’re a very data-driven culture, so if you’re trying to build a product”—such as marriage—“and it’s failing 50% of the time, you might want to consider the design and think about ways of improving it.”58 “Opening up your relationship is really risky,” another Silicon Valley polyamorist told Segall, “kind of in a similar way that starting a company is really risky.”59
But Silicon Valley’s fascination with disruption extends itself, too, to institutions more broadly. Formal education, particularly at the postgraduate level, is often dismissed as anachronistic at best and actively harmful to intellectual innovation at worst. Tech’s biggest founders—Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey—are all proud college dropouts. (As is, of course, Windows inventor Bill Gates.) PayPal’s Peter Thiel, a vocal proponent of dropout culture, offers about two dozen annual $100,000 scholarships to promising young entrepreneurs, on the condition that they forego university.
Even government itself is often suspect. Back in 2013, Earn.com cofounder Balaji Srinivasan gave a talk at Y Combinator’s Startup School—also attended by Zuckerberg and Dorsey—in which he advocated for Silicon Valley’s “ultimate exit”: an “opt-in” society “run by technology” and beyond US regulatory controls. Peter Thiel has donated almost $2 million to the Seasteading Institute, an ultimately failed effort to create an unregulated floating city in the South Pacific.60 (Meanwhile, the institute’s founder, Patri Friedman, often sings the praises of both polyamory and libertarianism: “Polyamory/competitive govt parallel,” he once tweeted. “More choice/competition yields more challenge, change, growth. Whatever lasts is tougher.”)61
Larry Page, likewise, once told an audience of listeners that he dreamed of a Burning Man–like global free zone without any laws or regulations for technological experimentation, an example of “some safe places where we can try things and not have to deploy to the entire world.”62
The techno-utopian vision manifests itself not in the emotionally comforting safe space of social justice, but rather in a vision of a country populated and controlled only by fully autonomous individuals, with rules determined entirely by personal contract. It’s liberalism taken to its natural conclusion: an eschatological vision of billions of people, freed through technological innovation from their shared contingency, each their own sovereign, free-floating nation. “No man is an island,” John Donne may have said. The seasteaders disagree.
Barbrook and Cameron were prescient in their vision of how the Californian Ideology would transform tech. But what they may not have anticipated is that, as a result of the democratization of the Internet more broadly, the Californian Ideology has spread beyond the so-called virtual class. The language and ideology of techno-utopianism, like that of social justice, have become an integral part of contemporary American culture.
After all, most of us hold it in our hands consistently. Eighty-one percent of Americans currently use a smartphone, and therefore have access to the panoply of Silicon Valley–designed apps.63 More than a third of us are part of the gig economy, supplementing our primary earnings with at least one side hustle, often by contracting out our time and labor to app-based companies—driving cars for Uber and Lyft, for example, or buying groceries for strangers via Instacart or Postmates.64 The Instagram influencer market, in which ordinary people professionalize their social media feeds with “sponsored content,” has exploded over the past five years. In 2015, it was a $5 million industry. By 2020, that number is expected to rise to $10 billion.65
Techno-utopianism has changed how we conceive of our bodies and selves. Under the techno-utopian model, we aren’t just sovereign; our bodies are also seemingly limitless economic resources. We can monetize our faces on social media and our free time participating in the gig economy.
We sell our data, knowingly or not, to companies who use it to better target their products. We hand over our very DNA: user-friendly DNA sequencing company 23andMe alone now boasts five million customers worldwide.66 The meditation app Headspace has thirty-one million users.67 Diet and exercise tracker MyFitnessPal has over 150 million.68
The cult of wellness becomes, in techno-utopianism, a capitalist drive toward maximum efficiency. We optimize our bodies, handing over biological data to fitness tracker apps and menstrual tracking apps and caloric intake apps and meditation apps and sleep-cycle apps, at once desperate to use these seemingly rational metrics to become our best selves and willing to pay for it: sometimes in cold hard cash, sometimes in the transformation of our personal information, preferences, identities, biological makeup, or even our genes into a currency.
And we create personal brands in order to succeed in an increasingly competitive digital marketplace, advertising ourselves as optimal products both for our careers and our personal lives. (Online dating apps, which about 40 percent of American couples now use to meet each other, often use behind-the-scenes ranking algorithms to ensure that its most desirable users are only matched with people of comparable caliber.)69 Intuitionalism’s cult of the self becomes here an endless and ultimately futile pilgrimage. Our utopian vision of human freedom (we can and should do anything) becomes a self-devouring ouroboros (we are never doing enough). We believe we can become perfect, and yet, never acquiring perfection, we blame ourselves for our failures. We resolve to do better, to work harder, to get thinner and hotter and richer and better at work and more desirable on dating apps. We fail. We start the whole process over again.
NEITHER SOCIAL JUSTICE CULTURE NOR TECHNO-UTOPIANISM HAS YET succeeded in becoming the civil religion of the American Remixed. But each in different ways has permeated the miasma of our contemporary cultural consciousness, shaping how we talk about personhood, about the self, about the body, about history. Both for those who explicitly ally themselves with these movements and for those who—Remixed and traditionally religious alike—have been more subtly influenced by a mainstream culture that valorizes them, these new civil religions have, no less than Christianity, shaped the way we think and talk about purpose, meaning, community, and ritual in contemporary America.
Both social justice culture and techno-utopianism, in different ways, value disruption. They valorize the self as the location of both improvement and authoritative perception. Self-focus, be it capitalist optimization or gentle self-love, becomes a radical act: one that overwrites the dictates of nature and society at large. While they see the self very differently—social justice culture locates it at an intersection of social and embodied identities, while techno-utopian culture does away with the body altogether in order to celebrate the rational mind alone—both movements see its purification and perfecting as a necessary part of achieving a wider utopian order characterized by the harnessing of human potential.
These groups celebrate human potential for rewriting tradition and rewiring our bodies, minds, and perceptions. In different ways, they value struggle—intrepid individuals rejecting established codes, be they social or biological, and forming a new society based on visions of human freedom.
But they are not the only nontheistic civil religions growing in America today. A third civil religion—authoritarian, reactionary, and thoroughly materialist—is also brewing. It valorizes not personal struggle but rather submission to a higher political or biological truth. For those alienated both by the theological certainty of traditional religion and by the freewheeling progressivism of social justice, a new form of right-wing atavism is taking hold.
It is this distinctly contemporary, nontheistic ideology, rather than traditional religious orthodoxy, that may prove to be the most successful challenger to Remixed intuitionalism. It is also the most dangerous.