I play basketball at the YMCA down the street at nine o’clock most Wednesday mornings, our ragtag group of guys self-selected based on who can make the workday time work. We get mainly retired grey-beards in their 50s or 60s who are finally free from office shifts, plus a few venerated elders who are still showing up in their 70s, jump shots still good and fake hips be damned. There’s a 13-year-old kid who punches above his weight and should be in school but apparently goes to some kind of co-op. And then there are most of us: the guys in their 20s through 40s, myself included, all either night-shifters, showing up with red eyes and no sleep for the love of the game, or work-from-homers fortunate enough to have a flexible schedule or a lax boss.
I assumed that was the case for all of us 20s-40s, at least. But the other day, walking out of the gym after the run, I asked one of the younger-looking guys what he did for work. “Oh, I’m actually retired,” he told me. “I was on the team that made the Covid vaccine. So I don’t really need to work again.” He looked maybe 33. The Covid vaccine, for reference, made around 90 billion during 2021 and 2022.
Five years before Covid, when I worked at a marketing agency, we took on a client who was in the start-up phase of building a drug manufacturing company. The founder had been in the industry for decades, but he’d quit his role at a big pharmaceutical company to start making niche drugs. Usually to develop a drug, he said, you needed to be sure you could make money from it, which meant you needed a lot of sick people to sell it to. If you didn’t have a large enough market, you’d never get the money to make the drug. The problem, he explained, was that many diseases are “rare,” meaning they affect less than 200,000 people in the US. Taken together, that makes for a pretty big rare-disease market, because around 30 million people in the US have qualifying diseases. But separated, it’s peanuts. The unfortunate result is that little rare-disease drug research is done and few rare-disease drugs get made, because there isn’t big money in any one small-scale solution.
The founder wanted to change this. He hoped to raise capital for rare drug development by getting buy-in from do-gooders. But the company ended up failing a few months into our engagement, because, unsurprisingly, they didn’t make enough money.
Money is convenience and power.
Money offers the ability to accomplish effects without personal effort or pain. When money can’t accomplish effects, it ceases to be money and becomes something else: paper to be burned for warmth during Germany’s hyperinflation, or a golden calf to be worshipped in the desert outside of Egypt. To argue, as I have so far, that technology moves toward power and convenience is also to say something simpler and, for most of us, more intuitive: Technology moves toward money. This is especially true in a capitalistic economy, where technological development is (at least in principle) driven mainly by the financial rewards of a free market.
The examples I’ve given above – rare drugs and the Covid vaccine – don’t reflect solely on the pharmaceutical industry; they exemplify the motion of industry as a whole. You can look at any area of technological development, especially over the past couple hundred years, post-Industrial Revolution, and see this same direction being followed. Car development, to pick another random example, accelerated rapidly as cars beat out horses and consumers demanded more power and efficiency – we went from engines that could go roughly the speed of a horse to engines that could hit 120 miles per hour in the matter of a few years, because people paid for the speed. Then the industry ran out of financial incentive for technological development as the market became satisfied. To go faster was dangerous and there was no external pressure to change the model. So for sixty years, car technology mostly stagnated, until, eventually, the government incentivized electric cars, and then the money pulled the technology along again.
The same movement happens in media technology. Every form of media you consume exists not because it’s some kind of demonstrable societal good, but because it makes money. A dominant technology does not need to be technically better than whatever came before it. Blu-ray, for example, is a better technology than video streaming in terms of both audio and video resolution. But consumers value the convenience of something like Netflix over the video quality of a single disc, so streaming makes gobs of money while Blu-ray is basically dead. Similarly, short-form, topic-based video feeds are not a better form of media than, say, 4K movie theaters, but they’re much more convenient and better at hijacking human attention for ad revenue, so they’ve become the dominant form of video consumption while movie audiences decline. Facebook was not any better than MySpace at mediating friendships, but it was worlds better at increasing its bottom line.
All of this would be fine if the motion toward money coincided, at least in broad strokes, with a motion toward good. But as every faith other than our own technoreligion will tell you, money and goodness often pull in different directions. Consumers in a free market don’t buy on the basis of virtue; they buy on the basis of personal desire or ambition, which most often inclines them toward increasing their own power and convenience. We vote with our dollars for GrubHub and FanDuel and TikTok. At scale, economists argue, all of our individual selfishness cancels itself out, and actually justifies itself through the sheer volume of its material production. If this is right – and because of, among other things, our incapacity to accurately weigh long-term results against short-term pleasure, it probably isn’t – it’s only right as far as it treats human flourishing like a math problem. But it’s mainly a moral one1.
Morality has to do with relational rightness. It leads to connection. Money, being a means of power and convenience, is inclined toward separation. Watch the motion of media technology again as it follows money: We’ve gone from shared live performances – theaters, dances, symphonies, religious rituals – where everyone comes together in a place as art is made, to movie theaters in which the watchers are separated in space and time from the performers, then to living room radios where audiences are segmented into single families in their own homes, then to bedroom TVs where each family member is segmented into their own room, then to seven-inch phone screens designed to facilitate individual obsessions. The next step is to put it all in our heads so that what we watch will be separated from any representation in a shared world. Money can drive the creation of life-saving drugs, as it did with the Covid vaccine, but it doesn’t necessarily pull technology toward what is good. More often, it pulls people apart.
None of this, as an aside, is meant as a diatribe against capitalism. For what little it’s worth, I’m not a capitalist, but I’m also not a socialist, and the idea that you have to be one or the other is as artificial as the systems themselves, seeing that for the vast part of human history neither system existed. I believe capitalism is deeply flawed, but I also have, as Simone Weil said about her troublesome France, a deep compassion for it. In its highest form, capitalism is a system that tries honestly to make the best of a bad deal, to curb human apathy and assuage humanity’s material needs by whatever means it can. It (accurately) finds personal ambition to be the most efficient means toward those ends, so it wields selfishness as its weapon for good, like Boromir wanted to use the One Ring.
This is dreadfully effective. But the problem in this system is that personal ambition gets elevated to the status of ultimate virtue, so the wielder of the weapon is corrupted. Worship of capitalism clearly produces a material surplus, but it just as clearly produces a moral poverty – and so it undercuts itself, because capitalism works best when individuals are rational and virtuous. The answer is not to demonize capitalism, but it certainly isn’t to deify it, either. At the very least, we should handle it carefully.
More than ever, though, we are on the other end of things: no longer handling capitalism but being handled by it, less the rulers of our technology and more its subjects.
When technology, pulled toward money, has advanced to the point where it mediates nearly our entire reality, it naturally comes to assume a role of governance.
This is true in at least two ways. First, our interior lives are increasingly governed by technology. Think of how much of your attention is focused toward information mediated by technology. Are you concerned about a political issue – Donald Trump’s economic policy, or ICE raids, or the woke LGBTQ+ agenda? How much of your concern is informed by your personal experience with that issue outside of media technology, and how much is shaped by the tech-enabled content about that issue that you’ve consumed? Do you have a passion for some form of entertainment – maybe a sports team, or the Marvel universe? What proportion of your engagement with that thing happens outside of the confines of a screen? Do you have friends – and do you talk with them more in real life or in a group chat or on reddit? How many of your desires have been inculcated in you by Instagram?
Most of us, I think it’s fair to say, have the growing majority of our mental lives mediated by technology. This isn’t to say that the objects of our attention are themselves good or bad, or that we should stop caring about anything and let atrocities happen while we bury our heads in the sand. But it is to say that because technology mediates our attention, it also dictates the possibilities for where we can direct it. In TV terms, we are given channels to choose from – Fox News or CNN or CBS – but the catalogue of channels itself is set for us, and it’s all TV. The same thing, of course, is true to an even greater degree on social media. As Neil Postman argued, it’s not just that the medium is the message; it’s also that the range of possible messages is governed by media. You can only say what you have the words for; you can only watch what you can see. Technology is epistemology. There are many consequences to this, but one of them is that the people building ChatGPT or making the TikTok and Instagram algorithms have a greater impact on our society’s mental life than the people making policy.
But the lines are blurring because – and this is the second form of governance – technology also increasingly rules our public lives. I mean this literally: Technology companies now shape public policy to a degree that is, frankly, scary. This is demonstrated in brazenly visible ways, such as in the fact that, for example, Elon Musk, who owns a social media company and Neuralink, was appointed to head a US government department, or that Trump’s inauguration was attended by, in addition to Musk, the CEOs of Amazon, Facebook, and Google. But it’s also happening in less visible ways. So-called “big tech” companies, according to Bloomberg, spent 109 million on lobbying in 2025 alone, and that number is likely to be dwarfed by 2026’s total as AI-related spending ramps up. But the lobbying happens in the wake of the boat, anyway, when the thing itself has already passed by: AI can write human-sounding words and create human-looking art and will take real human jobs, not because democratically elected governments decided that all of these were good things, but because money moves faster than legislation, which is, of course, the whole promise of capitalism. Now it’s just a matter of managing the backwash through politics.
That powerful organizations are attempting to consolidate power through policy is nowhere close to being unique in the scope of human history. This stuff happens all the time. What is terrifyingly unique to our time, though, is the progression of these two forms of governance: the governance of humanity’s interior life as a step toward the governance of its public life. Until now, the monopoly on these two modes of governance – interior and exterior – has mostly been done from the other direction, by governments pushing propaganda down to their people after seizing public power. (You can argue that many revolutions began ideologically, but they really only started governing attention after assuming control of government.) In most cases – Nazi Germany, Cold War Russia, etc. – the top-down monopolies proved extremely powerful, but limited. Cracks in attention control existed, and when dictatorships were toppled, their propaganda machines crumbled with them.
That seems unlikely to happen in a technocracy, since our monopoly has risen solidly from the ground up, built on a set of powerful and pervasive tools that we’ve crafted ourselves and continue to lovingly groom, grow, and worship. We’ve built our own cage. If Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Sam Altman or whoever were to be deposed – forcibly removed as a CEO and sent to jail or something – that’d say nothing for our addiction to technological entertainment or our love of power and convenience. We’d watch the whole thing compulsively on YouTube or TikTok.
To throw it back to Postman one more time: We live in something closer to A Brave New World than to 1984. We’ve voted with our dollars for technology, and now technology is subsuming our right to vote for anything else. If the transhumanists have their hopes fulfilled, it’ll subsume us. That’s the inevitable endpoint of technoreligion, and of all religions, really: union with God, whoever – or whatever – He is.
Thankfully, the real God is not a machine. He’s a person. And even in an age dominated by the dogma of technoreligion, we’re still human, still people, too. We still get to choose what we worship.
- The math vs. moral framing comes from my friend Sam Gaffigan. It’s a good line, imo. ↩︎
