Unfortunately. I really miss the Old World. Now, objectivity has been traded in for subjectivity, subjective preferences/ experiences are being treated as empirical and scientific fact. Reddit has become the sole arbiter of whether you are good or bad, people seek online strangers to approver of their conduct.
I mean, now that the world has abandoned religion, where do our values come from? TV commercials? Tweets? Whatever the algorithms decide should be on front page of youtube/ fb feed?
We could argue that the (Western) world hasn’t abandoned religion at all, but continues to seek to fill a “dogma shaped hole”.
Your latter point I think is a very cynical one, but absolutely crucial in a religious context.
Let me try something out: as society and interactions have become so relentlessly, oppressively
literal, I think we’ve lost the ability to have a skeptical religiousness, i.e. a “software believer/hardware skeptic”. You used to be able to ‘believe’ without believing, allowing the religion to function while maintaining a private identity, insulated from it.
When we all watched the same broadcast news, read the same one or two newspapers, and the whole of a daily news cycle was digestible, you could know the ‘truth’ without believing it.
Now, you must ‘believe’ everything you believe. But how do we know what’s true enough to believe?
This, is where the Algorithm really takes a nefarious shape.
We haven’t abandoned religion so much as we’ve adopted the rigors of anti-religion (the scientific method) in the only place it doesn’t belong: our thoughts. We’ve lost our ability to participate in religion while maintaining a healthy skepticism for it.
This makes us vulnerable to what I call “the wolf in wolf’s clothing”: we can only parse one layer of meaning. Things cannot be false on their face and true on a deeper layer (i.e. religious tenets) and things cannot be true on their face and false on a deeper layer (i.e. Algorithm mediated facts).