I just recently interviewed the founder of Podcast Notes (unpublished) and he helped me make a decision about my first investigative focus for my show Crazy Wisdom.
To build off of yesterday’s post, I’m going to dig into the inner lives of technologists to see what effect a spiritual practice has on someone’s material prosperity, I also want to analyze the intersections of religion and technology on a more broad scale.
A lot of people think that religion and technology have nothing to do with each other, but I am going to make the argument that they do and it might be one of the most important themes of our current age.
One of the most revolutionary technologies humans have ever come up with is the ability to write our thoughts down on paper.
Necessity is the mother of invention and the most important unmet need that humans have, which writing solved, is the need to express our spiritual lives to the universe (think cave painting which eventually became linguistic script).
Before the invention of the printing press, the vast majority of books that were thought important enough to be written and copied, painstakingly by hand, were religious books and scripture (financial accounting was a close second). The Bible was the first book that Gutenberg decided to copy when he created his famous technology, the printing press.
To bring the theme closer to the present, look at what Peter Theil says about starting a technology company in 2014:
You should run your startup like a cult. Here’s how.
The examples are endless.
Google is now a modern day Oracle that we go to with all of our deepest questions.
I found my meditation teacher through asking questions on Quora.
People who hodl bitcoin are doing so out of a messianic sense of what it will become.
I want to investigate all of these trends and chronicle them as they become more impactful.
The first trend I will investigate will be the intersection between spirituality and the development of Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies).
To those of you who don’t live in San Francisco, I’m going to let you in on a weird trend that is happening here and a few other urban areas (NYC and London, smaller communities throughout the globe):
The techies are going through an existential mid-life crisis. They are realizing that they didn’t quite change the world in the way they expected and the way they promised. They are realizing that technology is not an unlimited good for society and does come with drawbacks. They have a lot of power and money and they realize that it doesn’t really fill the abyss of wants that drove them to get it.
So they are doing what any other person who experiences the above does:
They are finding God.
They aren’t calling it God, but thats what they are searching for and some of them are finding It and creating groups around It. They are doing it through yoga, meditation, fasting and dance.
Through exclusive sound healings after authentic relating circles and eye gazing. Through tantra workshops. Through cacao circles. Through psychedelics. Through basically any combination of weird somatic healing modality you can think of (and many you can’t).
And its seeping right back into their work as technologists.
As I will uncover, the focal point of this divine mix of technology and spirituality is squared in the camp of blockchain and bitcoin. It’s died down a little since the bear market of 2019, but I had personal experiences at crypto events in 2018 where all of these themes mixed plus more.
As we enter another bull market, its going to make 2018 look as edgy as a Mormon Sunday BBQ and I want to share it with the world.
Before I start, I want to share my bias as well (a practice that is inspired by the Economist and its honorable editorial stance):
I’m a technologists who believes in the promise of technology. The reason I’m aware of the trend elicited above is because I have gone through it and am still going through it. This will not be a Gawker style expose of those weird privileged techies.
I think I can add to the conversation because I started spiritual inquiry a little earlier than most of the people currently going through it and can share some of the pitfalls, particularly the most insidious one:
I think that this trend will continue as Technology starts to have an even more profound effect on the globe and the soft power of Tech continues to spread. I want to share the difficult lessons I have learned in the hopes that others can learn from them and skip my mistakes.
So now that I have stated my bias I’m going to invite you to follow along (subscribe to this blog) as I peer into the inner-workings of the clash between technology and religion.
At some point I’m going to transition over to a paid newsletter for the best content so that I can continue to provide objective reporting (or as objective as possible) but for now it will be free.