WHEN GODS ARE DEAD, WE CREATE NEW ONES
November 2020

When gods are dead, we create new ones.

In 1882, Nietzhe declared “God is dead”.

A couple of decades after, German theologian Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter in prison executed by the Nazis: “We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all: man as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.”

THINK Magazine by IBM: 1941

Decades after, when the public first got exposed to the machines created by IBM, the International Business Machines company, Time magazine made a declaration in its year-end issue: “Man is recreating himself, monstrously magnified, in his own image.”

Decades after, Marc Benioff, chairman of the $225B enterprise Salesforce, declared in front of a group of capitalist leaders: “Capitalism as we have known it is dead.” It’s the year 2019, the same year that the 16-year-old Greta Thunberg stood on stage and lambasted leaders of the United Nations: "We are at the beginning of mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"

We’re collectively awakening from the tales of old gods — the invisible hand, globalization, technotopia, billionaires, and fast cars. The ebbs and flows of our fears are being crisply captured by Google searches, Youtube homepage, trending tweets, and Instagram ads in real time. What makes this time different from the past awakenings is a set of participatory and creative tools that become readily available to anyone with access to the Internet. Online communities are sophisticatedly managed and mobilizing, enabling the birth of new language and the accrual of social capital at an unprecedented rate. Rather It’s as if we’re no longer confined by the identity at birth that once predated our fate, but now granted the power to pick our silo that comes with its own set of discourse. The increase in production transparency and the amount of attention that follows makes such identity construction both more powerful and fragile than ever. Like building a house on stage with the whole world as the audience, when it goes well, the crowd cheers and wants to come on stage and participate, and when the house falls, the crowd dissipates fast and boo loudly. A short-form media company that tantalized with every permutation of buzzwords that highly correlates with a billion-dollar valuation in a specific silo could get funded billions easily and evaporate in the span of six months.

The machines that coordinate these online communities start to take on mysterious properties beyond rational territories. The machine has become the temple of the new worlds. We offer our prayers with data and attention span, the gods reciprocate and bless us with connections that we otherwise would not have made, the instant gratification that our voices are heard, and information that was once caged like a secret. Only to discover that there might be no secret. The stark reality that has been present all along. When we look at the present, we see the breaking of systems whose inner making has long been abstracted away.


One of the most memorable scenes in the TV show succession is when the irritated Logan Roy, the builder of a decadent media empire, screams at his privileged “silk stocking” son: “how much is a gallon of milk?” An answer to which the son has no answer.

Shame was inspired when some truth was evoked. I may or may not have an answer to that question, but I’m well familiar with how some extra oat milk in my coffee costs 50 cents and a dollar for an extra shot of espresso. We briskly climb up the ladder of abstraction by readily taking out a debt of ignorance with a high interest rate. The bubble burst, we look around and recognize how little we really know about the world. Of course, this is not about the milk. This is about the quest to wrestle with what is real.

What I’ve been dedicating my time to doing is simply the patient relearning of all the fundamentals that can no longer be easily traced back. What’s broken doesn’t mean it’s bad and irrelevant, it might just mean that what was once there needs to be repurposed and redirected. The generalizations that surround us daily like to label the present as a “new reality” as if something new has been born when the reality as we see now is simply the world manifesting itself at its rawest. The novelty simply comes from a collective awakening into a chaotic truism.

Unable to tolerate the randomness and chaos of many worlds, some of us try to restore the order of the past by rebuilding Pantheon by migrating universities, hospitals, and offices to the cloud. If we’ve learned something from past migrations, it is through the creation of new gods, new hopes, and a new faith that anything meaningful gets built. By the end of the day, businesses are the metaphors of what we choose to believe as a collective at that moment in time, the acquiescence of social contracts like monogeny or the maximization of shareholder returns. AI can replicate the shadows of our past disguised as the present, but it is not the present, nor the reality. Business managers, knowing that robots are parsing through company statements, decided to abandon negative vocabularies altogether. To understand what is real is actually deceptively simple. It’s the resilience that we see in people around us, the gut to leave behind what no longer works, and the courage to speak up, to change, to rebel.

One friend relinquishes the ambiguity of institutional life and starts a candle brand on Shopify to reclaim some ownership over the means of production. One friend decides to bring back the platinum framed business diploma like a souvenir to his communist hometown and start taking the Coursera courses on AI. One friend finds solace in the Brave New World of decentralized technology, where pixel artists are being tokenized as entry tickets into exclusive Among Us championships for the bold and eclectic. One friend meets a girl on Zoom and gets married without a priest, in a place that was once too far away without missing a few important meetings. The line between progression and regression is thin, so is the line between passion and clarity, imagination and escapism, future and present, physical and virtual. When the claims made by any single god can now be demystified in seconds. Millions of people are flooding to online book clubs facilitated by Zoom, sharing the burdens of history, discovering the meaning of open discourse on Telegram, the craftsmanship that once was deemed unworthy of attention are now creating millionaires on Etsy. The heroism is all around us.

When we stare into the machines, we somehow feel intellectually and morally inferior to what’s in fact a carbon copy of our own making — the desire to belong, to love, to aspire, to do what’s impossible. At a pub in the American Gods, Whisky Jack said to the sentimental protagonist lamenting his imminent departure: “Gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land's still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn't going anywhere. And neither am I.”

The land is the cyberspace that you and I share now. The good places, and the bad, will be captured by the mass documentation of what it means to be alive in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Camus asked in one of his essays: “How can one consecrate the harmony of love and revolt? When the temples are deserted by the gods, all the heroes have feet of clay.”

When the temples are deserted by the gods, it’s when we see most clearly that gods are alive, and are among us.