Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Well, friends, we are right near the middle of a series of episodes on esoteric Christianity, and I'm offering this because I know that people are searching

for meaning right now, and that meaning is something that was previously given by religious life.

And since religious life is, in some ways, losing its foothold, in other ways, it's strengthening

its position, but in some ways losing its foothold, I think people are sort of, you know, feeling a bit of a vacuum.

And, you know, I'm not going to give you some great reveal here about the fact that tech filling

that space is problematic.

It gives us something that is both meaning providing and meaning draining.

You know, I mean, look, people have spoken and written about this adenosium.

Tech is where we go to connect with other people and record and listen to podcasts

and track our lives with wellness trackers and, you know, where we even just find meaning

and buying new things. But it's also, you know, tech companies tearing up cities to build

what they call housing for their labor forces and abusing their employees and

social media is terrible and visions of AI transhumanism are terrifying and vampiric forces

of tech, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

I think the thing that's shocking to me is that almost no conversations or articles and essays really have gotten us anywhere when

they're regarding this tension. They either languish and polarized views of singularity

versus Luddite neoprimidivist positions, or they do what I think is even worse, which is they don't really get us out of

the struggle, but they pretend to by offering postures of why you need to get rid of social

media or how to use your phone responsibly or whatever. These are tepid, ineffective approaches

that enforce polarization. They encourage polarization because they hide

any opportunity for radical evaluation of the situation. And by radical, I do not mean

...