Humanist chaplain Greg Epstein: ‘Our bowed interactions with our phones look like worship’

Why did you decide on religion as the analogy with which to understand the modern role of tech?
Well, religion has been the governing analogy for my life in many ways. I’ve lived my life around diverse religions. And I’ve had this 20-year career now as a chaplain for humanists, atheists, agnostics and allies at Harvard and now at MIT as well. When I was asked to join MIT in 2018 something really struck me about the “T” in MIT. I had been educated to see religion as the most powerful social technology in the world, and it seemed that that was no longer true. The era of social media has made tech the most powerful social technology, but I thought that religion could be a very useful tool in understanding a tech world.

But does tech have a theology or an eschatology?
Well, there are many examples of people of influence in tech speaking the language of religion, doing things that are strikingly parallel to religion in which people talk of tech gods or of building God. But it’s more than that, it’s a useful frame, because religion is largely an attempt to understand the world and give human life meaning and purpose. Religion has done that both for good and to cause great harm. Tech ticks all those boxes too, with our lust to surveil everything, our online communities superseding all other kinds of community, the way tech has become a mythical realm that we refer to as Silicon Valley, and how it motivates people to enact its agenda.

Does tech present technological progress itself as a kind of moral progress?
For sure, because there’s a total failure to imagine in this “Silicon Valley tech religion” what moral progress would actually look like. There’s little understanding of what it would look like for human beings to treat one another better, to have more compassion for ourselves and one another, to create a more just and equitable society. Instead the emphasis is placed on more technology will equal more stuff, will equal better world.

We genuflect to the stained glass window in our pockets 200 times a day, and it can offer salvation or damnation

Do you think the prominent tech billionaires are conscious of the messianic roles they often inhabit in today’s society?
I think this idea of messianism is made quite explicit, which I explore in the book. For example, Peter Thiel, who is one of the demigod figures of the Silicon Valley religion, has a manifesto on the website of Founders Fund – a multibillion dollar venture capital fund – about how there is a messianic quality to the founders that the fund deems worthy of its billions. It’s an established fact in Silicon Valley that you want to have some belief in yourself as a saviour if you’re going to succeed. Russ Wilcox from the Harvard Business School was quite blunt about it. He told me that tech CEOs have got to base their judgments on faith.

You write in the book about religious rituals and the addictive behaviours encouraged by tech. What are the commonalities?
As early as 2008 I felt addicted to my Palm Treo. The same psychological mechanisms that are used to hook people on gambling are absolutely essential to our interaction with our devices. It’s random intermittent positive feedback. Many of us genuflect to this stained glass window in our pockets 200 times a day, and at any moment it can offer salvation or damnation. And our interactions look like worship, our heads bowed over our phones.

You’re pointedly critical of Harvard, which you describe as a networking platform to help the rich become richer. What’s been the feedback on that?
I’m not the first person at Harvard to criticise Harvard. I’m glad I’m not in a formal administrative leadership role at an elite institution, and I used to have ambitions of doing things like that. I used to see myself as a leader because that’s what I was taught. I’d rather be someone who derives meaning from supportive participation in a meaningful community that’s striving for the betterment of all.

There has been a lot of attention, most recently in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, on the bad effects of tech on the mental health of young people. Is that your experience too?
I know Jonathan, I’ve worked with him, but I think he takes his thesis too far. I don’t think the issue is entirely what he makes it out to be. For one thing, this is not something that you can simply go cold turkey from. It doesn’t work like that any more. So I didn’t want to be part of offering unrealistic solutions. It’s more like an eating disorder. You can’t afford to stop eating, so you have to change your relationship with food, make it more positive and nutritious. And I think that’s how we have to look at our relationship with tech at this point.

You work as a humanist chaplain. In what way is that different from being a counsellor? Do students come to you with some sort of spiritual yearning?
The job has evolved. But the most meaningful work I do is helping students who are trying to figure out who they want to be and how they want to live. They’re living in a world of overwhelming seismic change, climate change, technological change. These students are essentially being taught that everything they’re learning will be obsolete unless they become one of the winners who define how everyone else becomes obsolete. And they’re struggling with that. Is there something else, something more? Religion answers that question with answers that are not very helpful to many of my students. So the secular and humanist approach can be a valuable tool.
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Given the ubiquity of tech, how can a tech agnostic resist it without becoming a luddite?
We have to ask ourselves what do we do beyond just allowing ourselves to be swept forward by any and every powerful idea or company that comes along. I think agnosticism is a key part of the answer, because it’s not that no technology is good. I recognise that there are some technologies that come along in which it might be reasonable to place faith. We need to retain scepticism about the leaders putting forward these technologies and these companies need to be made accountable. We should adopt sparingly and carefully. It’s a slower process, but where is all this speed getting us?