The Syntheist Movement and Creating God in the Internet Age

Home , Alexander Bard, Copyright abolition, Netocracy, Rick Falkvinge, Technological utopianism

I Sing the Body Electric: The Syntheist Movement and Creating God in the Internet Age

Melodi H. Dincer

Senior Thesis

Brown University Department of Religious Studies

Adviser: Paul Nahme Second Reader: Daniel Vaca

Providence, Rhode Island April 15, 20 2

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... 3

Introduction: Making the Internet Holy...... 4

Chapter (1) A Technophilic Genealogy: Piracy and Syntheism as Cybernetic Offspring...... 12

Chapter (2) The Atheist Theology of Syntheism ...... 49

Chapter (3) Enacted Syntheisms: An Ethics of Active Virtuality and Virtual Activity...... 96

(In)Conclusions...... 138

Works Cited...... 144

Acknowledgments

I would briefly like to thank anyone who has had a hand—actually, even the slightest brush of a finger in making this project materialize outside of the confines of my own brain matter. I would first like to thank Kerri Heffernan and my Royce Fellowship cohort for supporting my initial research on the Church of Kopimism. My time in Berlin and Stockholm on behalf of the Royce made an indelible mark on my entire academic career thus far, without which this thesis would definitely not be as out-of-the-box as it is proud to be. I would also like to thank a few professors in the Religious Studies department who, whether they were aware of it or not, encouraged my confidence in this area of study and shaped how I approached the religious communities this project concerns. Specifically, thank you to Prof. Denzey-Lewis, who taught my first religious studies course at Brown and graciously sponsored my Royce research amidst her own travels. Also, infinite thanks and blessings to Fannie Bialek, who so deftly modeled all that is good in this discipline, and all that is most noble in the often confusing, frustrating, and stressful task of teaching “hard” topics. I miss you profoundly, but am grateful for your continued guidance. Thank you as well to Prof. Nahme—you opened both your office and your home to me, and I will bug you for your latest media theory reading suggestions well into the future. One thousand blessings on Joshua Kurtz and Noah Fitzgerald for making thesis seminar a two-hour chunk in a muggy bar and/or academic conference room that I actively looked forward to each time. Many thanks to my mentors outside of academia, especially Kathy Flores, for giving me much needed perspective and helping me enjoy life as much as possible outside of this infernal thesis-writing. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends and family for their emotional and comedic support. Much thanks to the Pitman Herbatorium, including future medical doctor extraordinaire Chance Dunbar, for keeping me the right amounts of chill, inundating my own black mirrors with high quality memes, and letting me get those poststructural theory rants out of my system. Thanks also to my Pickle for treating me much better than I deserve to be treated, especially enabling me to eschew my thesis duties near the end there just to enjoy your flatteries. I could have easily finished this project a month ago, thanks to you. And finally, thank you to my wonderful, loving parents. Thank you to my father for raising me on endless Twilight Zone marathons, and thank you to my mother for always encouraging me to read whatever I wanted whenever I wanted—including all the dangerous, radical science fiction I probably should not have touched until I was much older (if at all).

Introduction: Making the Internet Holy

“The kind of philosophy one chooses thus depends upon the kind of person one is. For a philosophical system is not a lifeless household item one can put aside or pick up as one wishes; instead, it is animated by the very soul of the person who adopts it.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftlslehre and Other Writings, 1797-18001

“[Syntheism]’s a very interesting experiment in what you might call postmodern skeptical religion…but it seems to me, this is an experiment bound to fail. There's that joke about herding cats—how do you get people like that to come together on anything?” –Dr. Stephen O’Leary USC Annenberg School for Communication2

In July of 2016, I found myself deep inside a (replica) Soviet-era space station, couched in a desolate corner by the Spree River. A man was gleefully describing to me the hours of physical and electrical work he had poured into building the “c-base”, one of the world’s first hack-spaces, back in the mid-1990s. This building, with its whirring LCD and LED displays,

USB flash drive drop-boxes, neon signage, paper mache aliens, and tactfully exposed electrical wiring, simulated an experience akin to entering the Star Trek Enterprise command center. Our impassioned tour guide took me aside, showing me a massive bookcase overflowing with science fiction, all the while outlining the elaborate self-mythology of the c-base. According to legend, a space shuttle had crash-landed here carrying on board a myriad of alien species with technologies far more advanced than our own. In c-base lore, the famous television tower in

Alexanderplatz was actually the space shuttle’s antennae, and other parts of the space shuttle’s

1 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Introductions to the Wissenschaftlslehre and Other Writings, 1797-1800. Translated by Daniel Breazeale. Hackett Publishing Co, 1994. pp. 20. 2Paulas, Rick. “Can an Open-Source Religion Work?” Vice Magazine, 11 April 2017. www.vice.com/en_uk/article/can- an-open-source-religion-work-456. 5 debris are scattered about the city, still waiting to be discovered. As we were leaving the c-base, I was informed that the German Pirate Party itself had been established right there. This mythical headquarters for hackers and pirates alike affected my academic interest—a group of cynical, skeptical, anti-authoritarian, and highly scientific individuals made their technological activities and communities intelligible through a literally outlandish, well-defined origin story. I began to question how this particular mythology actively shapes this space, predicating interactions with technology on social communion, and vice versa. What cyclical legitimation, in other words, occurs between a shared self-fiction and its author(ing) community, especially online?

In a prescient essay published in 2003, Anastasia Karaflogka defines two kinds of religious groups beginning to appear on the internet: religion “on” and religion “in” cyberspace.

While the first type refers merely to digital “information uploaded by any institutionalized or non-institutionalized religion,” religion “in” cyberspace refers to a different category of religious community altogether. This new type of cyber-community is “a religion, spiritual, and/or metaphysical expression, which is created and exists exclusively in cyberspace.”3 The invention of an academic term for such a community became useful in the wake of a proliferation of religions “in” cyberspace as early as the early 2000s, when the internet looked almost nothing like it does today. In this period of the internet’s development, what we might now view as an integral function of the web, namely social media connectivity, appeared only in heavily mediated forums, typically among those with the know-how to create such spaces. Multi-billion user (and dollar) platforms such as Facebook and Twitter did not yet exist, but regardless many individuals were already aware of the virtual community-building capacities of this growing technology. Virtuality seemed to suggest a radical restructuring of what it meant to be part of a

3 Karaflogka, Anastasia. “Religion On-Religion In Cyberspace.” Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular, and Alternative Futures. Eds. Grace Davie, Paul Heelas, Linda Woodhead. Routledge, 2003. pp. 194. 6 community, reproducing social connectivity without the spatial and time-based constraints that had previously configured human societies. The possibilities of virtual community enraptured those who believed that the networked organization of the technology itself could be mirrored by the humans who invented, spread, and use it.

In his newest documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, filmmaker

Werner Herzog explores the deeper implications of just such a virtualss “revolution.” He narrates deftly how the steady proliferation of technology in this so-called Digital Age will need to inspire a similar revolution “in our theology.” Herzog claims that,

We don’t even have a name for it, but it’s around the internet, it’s around connectivity…and I think we’re due for another shift in our morals, in our definition of what it means to be human. We’re right just at the beginning of that, and so you can see us trying to kind of feel out this new society and invent these new ideas of what’s right and wrong. What can we depend on each other for or what can we expect from each other? How much do we want to do that? So I think it’s an incredibly creative time in human history—not just technologically but also morally and culturally.4

Herzog’s musings provide this thesis with an excellent starting point. Our main subject,

Syntheism, is an example of religion “in” cyberspace which attempts to answer the sociological and existential questions Herzog poses. Crucially, Syntheism regards itself as a religious movement, one which seeks to create God in the Internet Age. That this moral and cultural revolution must take place in the context of religion is especially interesting, considering that this movement is one of “Spiritual Atheism.”5

What use do atheists suddenly have for a God, and why do they feel compelled to construct a theology for the internet of all things? This project will attempt to begin to answer those questions by interpreting Syntheist beliefs as expressed in their text Syntheism: Creating

4 Herzog, Werner, director. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. Saville Productions, 2016. 5 “The Syntheist Movement—The Religion of Spiritual Atheism.” Facebook. Accessed September 2016. 7

God in the Internet Age alongside various insights provided by media studies, cultural theory, and postmodern philosophy (and its criticisms). As part of the Royce Fellowship, I have had the opportunity to travel and meet the founders of the cyberreligions discussed in this thesis, as well as many members of the political groups which preceded them. Although I am not an anthropologist, my project will nonetheless maintain an ethnographic quality—this is the first project of its kind, and as such I would hope that the voices of those involved in creating and maintaining its focal communities will be discernable, even through its academic register.

Relatedly, it is important to note from the outset of this project that the communities we will explore, especially the emergent cyberreligions of Syntheism and Kopimism, are “real” religions and will be treated thus. Often when I have attempted to describe the Syntheist movement, even to other religious studies scholars, I am met with a flurry of comparisons to the

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Church of Google, or some other satirical religious group. Although these groups also offer interesting and productive means for examining the evolving role of religious metanarrative in the post-postmodern age, I would like to stress that the religious movements examined in this thesis consider themselves bona fide religions. Their members co-opt religious terminology, ritual, and community not to mock religious organization, but to reimagine and resuscitate it. Syntheists do not reject religion’s place in society today by consciously making a farce of it. On the contrary, they believe that an inherently religious impulse defines humanity itself. This innate capacity must be reconfigured to re-enchant those who have become thoroughly disaffected with spiritual development in the Digital Age. Their text, Syntheism, is supposed to outline how exactly this re-enchantment is to take place, detailing how the internet itself will provide a model for the new atheist theology they construct, as well as their virtual-yet-active ethics. 8

Below, I have provided a particularly illustrative exchange that took place on the

Syntheist email LISTSERV this past summer. These snippets of the kinds of conversation that take place virtually for this emergent religious movement hopefully convey its constant constructedness, their self-conscious queering of terms, practices, and assumptions of religion which we might take for granted as normal, legitimate, or authoritative.6

6 Syntheism LISTSERV. August 23, 20016. Names of email participants blocked for privacy. 9

ù ù ù

In the following chapters, we will chart out the development of a new cyberreligion, one which places spiritual salvation in the clutches of technology. In Chapter (1) A Technophilic

Genealogy, we will provide theoretical and political contexts for the emergence of the Syntheist movement. We will also undercover an underlying cybernetic ethos of the Digital Age, facilitating eventual connections between Syntheism and the cybernetic philosophies which serve as its ideological foundations. In Chapter (2) The Atheist Theology of Syntheism, we will describe Syntheology, the atheist theology Syntheists construct in order to sacralize the internet, configuring it both a metaphysical symbol and existential imperative. We will explore their use of philosophers critical of postmodernism’s total rejection of metanarrative to ground their philosophical project of constructing this theology. We will also outline the contours of the

God(s) Syntheists create for and through the internet itself. In the final section, Chapter (3)

Enacted Syntheisms, we will describe the Syntheist worldview through and against which

Syntheists configure their metaphysical project (creating God for the internet) and their ethical 10 imperative (answering some of Herzog’s questions mentioned above). This chapter will also undertake a more meta analysis of the Syntheist insistence on a technological God as “utopia”, the ambiguous ethics this belief produces, and the positionality of Syntheists themselves in systems of global capitalism which enable their faith in technology’s salvific capacity. The critical analyses undertaken in this final chapter will hopefully serve a constructive purpose, creating possibilities for rebranding and growing the Syntheist movement rather than just aimlessly nitpicking their its shortcomings.

Just as Syntheists attempt to reconfigure religion in order to revitalize its relevance, this thesis inherently struggles against underlying normativities within religious studies in order to draw out and question these norms. This thesis is quite unconventional in two respects. First, its main subject has never been written about in any formal capacity (besides Syntheism), especially not as the central focus of an academic thesis. Second, although Syntheism is built upon the synthesis of certain aspects of various pre-existing religious traditions, it has no distinct and singular institutional predecessor. There is simply no immediate precedent, academic or religious, for this thesis to drawn on and reflect itself against. As such, it represents only a first step in the experiential practice of reconfiguring what religious studies looks like, and the kinds of subject matter the discipline can stretch to encompass without losing any of its academic legitimacy.

By organizing this project in the manner outlined above, beginning at the beginning by producing Syntheism’s genealogy, then describing its theological belief system, and finally its enacted ethical system and ritual practices, I am simultaneously reinscribing and challenging what a religious study entails. Although these three sections are informed by (and even model) the structure of many previous works on religious communities, it is most immediately informed 11 only by the claims Syntheists themselves make about their own movement. This means that I have allowed, to the best of my ability, a group that redefines religion itself to dictate my study of their religion. Through this thesis, I modestly hope to confer to Syntheism and cyberreligions like it a foothold in a rigorous discipline, one which will welcome their experimental ilk with equal parts constructive skepticism and intellectual generosity.

(1) A Technophilic Genealogy: Piracy and Syntheism as Cybernetic Offspring

“The media are not coefficients but effectors of ideology.” -Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign7

"Religion is first practiced, then formulated. Saint Paul wrote his letters after Christianity was being practiced across the Roman Empire. I firmly believe that Syntheism is already being practiced and we are just formulating it." –Alexander Bard Co-Founder of Syntheism8

Introduction: Tracing an Ethos

With this project, we face the difficult task of uncovering a religious movement that seeks to reformulate religion itself. This subject naturally renders our prescribed tools of analysis ill-suited to the task. Yet leaving such a fascinating development in religious understanding unexamined would seem equally disappointing, at least to this particular student of religion.

While later sections will excavate the series of conceptual gymnastics Syntheism enacts as its doctrine9, the task currently at hand is to provide a sufficient amount of context for these later, more substantive investigations. To begin to understand Syntheism and its implications for post-

Enlightenment religiosity, we must first trace the development of an obscure yet culturally- suffuse ethos. This underlying ethos largely informs and provides a cohesive discourse for the

Open Source and pro-internet piracy movements, the latter of which represents a political model for the later development of internet-based religious groups (whose members are largely involved in both political movements). The beliefs and lexicon generated by this ethos are so

7 Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Telos Press Publishing, 1981. pp. xv. 8Piesing, Mark. “Is the Internet God? Alexander Bard’s Syntheism paves the way for a new elite.” The Guardian, 7 October 2014. theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/07/god-internet-alexander-bard-syntheism-new-elite. 9 I use this term ironically, as Syntheism prides itself on having no one, distinct set of defining beliefs that are essential and immutable. The only “doctrine” Syntheism has is one of no doctrine at all. 13 influential that they still animate most academic and commercial representations of technology and society today.10

Syntheism claims it provides a new metaphysics for a new age in human society, communication, and organization, namely the Digital Age. Many of the terms we now encounter regularly, like “information economy” or “communication technologies”, tend to seem redundant when applied to our increasingly technologically-normalized societies. As Ronald Kline points out in his book The Cybernetics Movement: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age, “we rarely examine why we call our era the information age.”11 For Syntheism’s religious interventions to display their true force, we must first examine the construction of the information age we tend to take as given. Its ethos is based in cybernetic theory, a largely forgotten academic experiment rooted in Cold War technocracy, from which the field of modern ecology found its immediate inspiration. Cybernetics provided much of the past half century with a cosmological framework, as well as a precise vocabulary, which could narrate the impacts of rapid societal reorganization (and redefinition) due to technological developments in information and communication systems.

The following section will begin with an exploration of a few themes from cybernetic theory which relate most directly to the political organization of pro-piracy groups, as well as religious offshoots from the pirate community, namely Kopimism and Syntheism. With this foundation, we will then briefly track the development of the pro-piracy movement and its particular deployment of cybernetic themes, paying special attention to the Pirate Bay Trials in

2005 which sparked the formation of the world’s first-ever political Pirate Party. Next, we will

10 To the extent that the modern academic and commercial spheres can be separated. 11 Kline, Ronald R. The Cybernetics Movement: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. p. 5. Emphasis added. 14 turn our attention to the first officially recognized internet religion, Kopimism, which borrowed elements of cybernetic theory to create their belief system and receive registration with the

Swedish government, despite worshiping through the illegal act of peer-to-peer file sharing. With this groundwork laid, we will hopefully feel better prepared to delve into the following chapter, which focuses on Syntheism’s atheist theology, and the one after that, which places their virtually-active ethics in conversation with skeptics of techno-utopic narratives.

1 Cybernetics: Norbert Wiener’s Mechanical Cosmology

In an episode of his BBC television documentary All Watched Over by Machines of

Loving Grace, director and provocateur Adam Curtis makes an interesting, sociological observation:

We have come to believe that the old hierarchies of power can be replaced by self-organizing networks…Today, we dream of systems which can balance themselves without the intervention of authoritarian power. But in reality, this is the dream of the machines. It reflects how they are organized. It has nothing to do with nature. And as a model for political institutions and human behavior, it is wholly inadequate in the face of the powerful, dynamic forces that really dominate the world today.12

Curtis’s three-part series is named after a poem by Richard Brautigan, written in 1967, which captures both the gist of cybernetic theory and the hopefulness it’s totalizing structures produced for the disaffected members of the hippie movement. The fairly popular poem is as follows:

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

12 “The Use and Abuse of Vegetative Concepts.” All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. Dir. Adam Curtis. BBC. 23 May 2011. Emphasis added. 15

I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.13

Brautigan’s poem provides a fairly accurate description of the main thrust of this highly technical amalgam of theories we will refer to as cybernetics. It provides a cheery future for all living organisms, one in which human and natural deficiencies are allayed by technological integration. The term “cybernetics”, coined by Norbert Wiener in his seminal text The Human

Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society refers to the centrality of communications between humans and non-human machines as the theoretical first step towards a future of technology-induced, universal harmony. Wiener writes that “society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it…messages between man and machine, between machine and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.”14

13 Brautigan, Paul. “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. New York: Communications Company, 1967. 14 Weiner, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York: Da Capo Press, 1954. p. 16. 16

With the development in the 1940s and 1950s of more capable communications technologies, largely a result of wartime innovation and increased investment in university communications programs (like the Institute for Communications Research at the University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champlain, founded in 1947), came the need for an accounting of their potential societal implications.15 Scientists who engineered and developed these communications technologies (and a few social scientists, like Margaret Mead and spouse Gregory Bateson) began to meet in a series of conferences retroactively named the Marcy Conferences in order to account for the impact of their technological breakthroughs on the organization of human societies. These conferences were lengthy and heady, saturated with highly technical jargon and complex mathematical formulae. Nevertheless, their ultimate goal was to articulate one, comprehensive theory that could universalize the study of communication systems to all worldly phenomena. Cybernetics thus “positioned itself both as a metascience and as a tool that any other science could use.”16 By doing so, these scientists hoped to dissolve the tensions between the hard and social sciences, as this totalizing theory would be able to explain all phenomena that involved communication between any two, or multiple, entities, no matter the (a)biology of their collocutors.

There are three key concepts which begin to simplify this techno-theoretical movement: feedback, entropy, and reflexivity. The first two come from the first wave of cybernetics, defined broadly by the writings of mathematician Norbert Weiner, and the third comes from a later wave of cybernetic theories, referred to as second-order cybernetics. The first concept to emerge from

Weiner’s texts, and arguably the most impactful, is feedback. Wiener spent much of his career

15 For a comprehensive historical analysis of the cybernetics movement, I suggest Robert R. Kline’s The Cybernetics Movement: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. 16Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 96. 17 around machines with feedback systems that provide information on their own performances.

Through this mechanical feedback, machines could be programmed (or, eventually, could learn) to self-adjust their performance to more perfectly align with their commands. Similarly, Weiner recognized that humans, responding to “feedback” by taking certain actions in order to alter their environment to procure a desired result. Feedback is an inherent element of communication, as

Weiner defines a message broadly as any “sequence of events in time which, though in itself has a certain contingency, strives to hold back nature’s tendency toward disorder by adjusting its parts to various purposive ends.”17

The second important concept Weiner develops is specifically this default trend towards disorder exhibited by nature when unchecked. He refers to the physical world’s “tendency toward disorder” as entropy, following the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy in Weiner’s sense refers to the way that unintegrated systems tend to become less organized with time. While popular conceptions might associate entropy with a descent into chaos, Weiner understands entropy more so as a diffusion of energy approaching a state of equilibrium. However, because entropic systems are not connected to one another, meaning they are not communicating and producing feedback, they cannot reach true equilibrium. For Weiner, communication is thus essential because it is negentropic. Because communication systems rely on organizational structures to channel messages and feedback loops, a wholly-integrated communication system, as opposed to isolated natural ones, would resist entropy and create true equilibrium. The point of feedback is to combat entropy through immediate self-corrections, and the ultimate goal of communication, whether it be between humans, machines, or some combination of the two, is to strike a perfect balance between both members of the communication system (and throughout the

17 Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings, p. 27. 18 greater system itself). In this ideal system, all energy is conserved, no matter how disparately energy is produced and received by each party. Basically, every part of such a system plays an equal role and shares equal importance, making the cybernetic ideal essentially anti-hierarchal.

The final concept of note comes from the second-order cybernetic movement. Also referred to as “new cybernetics” or the “cybernetics of cybernetics”18, the tone of this re- articulation differed greatly from that of the original Marcy Conferences. While the cybernetics of Weiner’s day revolved around depicting systems in mathematical registers, new cybernetics focused more explicitly on the applicability of communications systems to biology and even epistemology. Theorists like Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana started to question the cybernetic scientist—how this subject constructs and confirms their own mental production of cybernetics and how this reflexively shapes their thoughts in the first place. Many years after the second-order Marcy Conferences, von Foerster writes “a brain is required to write a theory of a brain…Translated into the domain of cybernetics, the cybernetician, by entering his own domain, has to account for his or her own activity.”19 Maturana concluded that “perception is not fundamentally representational,” and that “to speak of an objectively existing world is misleading, for the very idea of a world implies a realm that preexists its construction by an observer.”20 For Maturana, “the observer can observe only because the observer is structurally coupled to the phenomenon she sees.”21 This creates an infinite epistemological regression wherein the observer of phenomena becomes both receiver and producer of what they are observing. A man in a bowler hat sees another man in a bowler hat, and his mind uses previous

18 Foerster, Heinz Von. Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition. New York: Springer, 2003. p. 289. 19 Ibid. 20 Hayles, Posthuman, p. 136. 21 Ibid. 19 men in bowler hats to construct both his view of the object, and his own self-positionality. This final concept, called reflexivity, is nicely depicted in an illustration by fellow cybernetician

Gordon Pask, provided below:

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Now that we have provided descriptions of these three cybernetic concepts, feedback, entropy, and reflexivity, we are in a better position to parse out their influences on certain political organizations undertaken during the information age. To do so, we will first have to locate the cybernetic (human) body in relation to the political systems which configure it, teasing out the cosmological impacts of Weiner’s concepts of feedback and entropy. This will include a relevant detour into the field of ecological thought, whose founders were heavily influenced by

22 Referenced in Hayles, Posthuman. 20 cybernetic configurations of humanity and machines in reflexive, feedback-drenched systems.

Adam Curtis’s depiction of the commune movement of the 1960s also represents the internalization of cybernetic principles as a politicized impetus for human organization. Only a few years later, the same cybernetic principles which animated the counter-culture began to inspire the managers of the burgeoning computer industry in what is now Silicon Valley. Finally, cybernetics informs more recent political groups representing the digital integrity movement, advocating for the free and open use of software and the internet. This last node of influence immediately effects the internet religions formed directly from these digital/political movements.

For now, let us trace the specific co-optations of these cybernetic concepts by political and social organizations in the decades immediately following both sets of Marcy Conferences.

How can an individual be rendered part of a totalizing, non-hierarchal system, and what happens to that individual as a political agent when they are thus configured? According to Katherine

Hayles, the ontological implications for the human subject in a cybernetic worldview are a point of anxiety for Weiner, a fan of liberal humanism and its individuated, autonomous subject. She writes that “the danger of cybernetics, from Weiner’s point of view, is that it can potentially annihilate the liberal subject as the locus of control.”23 This is because the individual in a cybernetic system occupies a space of “dematerialized materialism” where “life struggles against entropy and noise, [and] the body ceases to be regarded primarily as a material object and instead is seen as an informational pattern.”24

Weiner saw humanity’s predicament as a “cosmological drama between cybernetic mechanisms and noise...he suggests that human beings are not so much bone and blood…as they

23 Hayles, Posthuman, p. 110. 24 Hayles, Posthuman, p. 104. 21 are patterns of organization”25 This total integration into a system, becoming just a cog in the machine so to speak, eradicates any notion of individual control and complicates the solid, liberal subject with self-specific, unalienable rights. In a cybernetic universe, humans are reduced to their communications, and their communications are reduced to feedback loops. Weiner notes,

“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”26 Because communication for Weiner “is about relation, not essence,” Weiner extends this relationality to human identity, anticipating post-structural theorists by questioning whether “humans, animals, and machines have any ‘essential’ qualities that exist in themselves, apart from the web of relations that constituted them in discursive and communicative fields.”27 Intentionally or not, it seems the first wave of cybernetic thought began to articulate this revolutionary idea that the boundaries of the human subject are ultimately

“constructed rather than given.”28

Although some second-order cyberneticians were particularly beholden to the notion of an autonomous human will, their theories nevertheless expanded the ontological implications of

Weiner’s work. Hayles describes how reflexivity complicates the notion of an objective, untouched observer as the observer is intimately and immediately connected to the object being observed. Furthermore, the system’s own reflexivity, its “doubling back on its own representations generates the human subject as an observer.”29 Whatever grounding for a subjective autonomy the human being can have in this systematized framework shifts, in Hayles reading, from “self-possession, with all of its implications for the imbrication of the liberal

25 Ibid. 26 Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings, p. 96. 27 Hayles, Posthuman, p. 91. 28 Ibid, 84. 29 Ibid, 144. 22 subject with industrial capitalism,” instead to “the reflexivity of a system recursively operating on its own representations (the observer’s distinctions close the system).”30 The political implications of these reconfigurations of individuality within cybernetic systems are considerable. Hayles notes that in this description of autonomy within a closed, reflexive system,

“we see the affinity of autopoiesis not for industrial capitalism…but for utopian anarchy.”31

Autopoiesis, a system which is capable of reproducing itself, represents the pinnacle of reflexive systems—second-order cybernetics’ salvific boon against entropy. Salvation from the isolation of entropy is thus configured on both the relational subject produced by Weiner’s human- machine integration as well as the ontologically reflexive human subject trapped in Maturana’s infinite cycle of bowler-hat wearing “observers.” This particular political subject, in other words, breaks free from the myth of an essential, liberal subjectivity in order to etch out a more reflexive, relational identity. The anti-hierarchy of the system this new agent is produced within is precisely what pushes Hayles to describe it as “utopian anarchy”.

These esoteric implications for enactments of cybernetic theory manifest in surprisingly clear ways in actual political and social movements. A most immediate and perhaps accessible articulation of cybernetic influence is surprisingly the field of ecology. Another leader of the cybernetic movement, MIT engineer Jay Forrester, was “convinced that the whole world…was composed of systems.”32 Through feedback, the mechanism by which all systems stabilize themselves, “every [human] action we take has consequences that feed through the system, then return to shape our actions in ways we cannot see.”33 Although humans are not aware of their

30 Ibid, 146. 31 Ibid., 147. 32 Curtis, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts.” 33 Ibid. 23 own feedback loops, machines, mechanical and “objective”, can read them back to us. In

Forrester’s own words:

We live in these networks of feedback loops that are controlling us and most things we interact with…we’re just part of a system, and that is anathema to many people because they like to think of us, as people as independent, but basically they are driven in most of their actions by feedback loops, which means physical systems, electrical systems, social systems, political systems...34

In Forrester’s view, humans are just components in a system. Curtis describes this notion as “a computer’s-eye view of the world, and from that perspective there is no difference between human beings and machines.”35 Forrester’s work inspired two American scientists, Howard and

Eugene Odun, who incorporated this feedback-based systems view into ecology. Eugene would go on to publish Fundamentals of Ecology, based on the field research of his brother Howard, who visited various natural ecosystems and meticulously tracked every single energy transference (or, feedback loop) between living organisms. Ecology thus articulated an underlying system which controls every single living being not only in a specific biome, but in the world as a global ecosystem. According to Curtis, “what they were really doing was creating a machine-like fantasy of stability…Organic organisms were expected to act in mechanical ways, animals became robots.”36 These notions of nature as an interconnected web in which everything from the anthill to the human factory are immediately implicated in one another still dominate current debates and research on global climate change. They motivated arguments for the necessity of human intervention in species control and protection. Acting in a way to help protect nature’s balance becomes a human duty, increasingly through our development of technologies which can better detect and resolve imbalances in a global ecosystem. In Stockholm

34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 24 in 1972, the United Nations held a conference for the first time ever on the world environmental crisis under the apt banner: “Only One Earth.”37

Forrester’s cybernetic view, which directly informed the development of ecology in the

United States, combined with another cybernetician’s view of biological and social systems to produce the motivations for the commune movement of the 1960s. Buckminster Fuller, a successful engineer and architect, believed fully that in nature, the individual organism is weak but becomes incredibly strong when combined with nature as a whole being, one integrated system. He extended this view to humanity as well, and believed that in order to tap into the incredible strength of all humans as a global community, there had to be a conceptual shift in the way humans saw their place in the world. Curtis explains how according to this view, “instead of seeing themselves as members of nations, or hierarchies of power, people should instead see themselves as equal member in a global system.”38 To facilitate this shift, Fuller started to describe Earth as a spacecraft, creating a metaphor in which Earth became a cybernetic closed- system kept in balance by the enlightened cooperation of a global human society with computers.

For Fuller, politicians represented the major threat to this vision, and that instead of politics and government, “the system should be allowed to find its own stabilizing structures, and there would be no need for politicians or hierarchical organizations of power.”39 This view thrived among the disillusioned members of the counter-culture, and Curtis draws a link between the motivations of members of famous, anti-hierarchal communes like Synergia and these underlying, cybernetic cosmologies.40

37 See The UNESCO Courier January 1973 special edition entitled “Only One Earth.” unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0007/000748/074879eo.pdf. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. Connection made through interviews with past commune members. 25

Here, Curtis makes a crucial move that bears on the rest of our own project. He deftly connects the commune mentality, drenched as it was in cybernetic conceptions of nature and authority, to the emerging computer industries in Silicon Valley during the very early 1970s.

Computer engineers on the cusp of a so-called digital revolution viewed themselves as creating

“prototypes for a society built on a global scale”, just as the members of the communes had.41 In

1968, these engineers stopped working on developing large, centralized mainframes to pursue developing interconnected networking capabilities instead. Without this pivot towards small, personal computers connected to one another through virtual networks, the internet may never have existed (at least not in the way it currently does).

Innovations in this direction were inspired by a mythology that hoped to realize the globalization of the commune system through technology, a triumph of virtuality that would free the individual from dominating hierarchies of control. According to Stewart Brand, a member of the commune movement whose prolific writings anticipated the internet, notes that these engineers “felt that computers had liberated them, and they thought that they would use computers to liberate society. Civilization. Every-damn-body.”42 He goes on, “Computers were going to save the world…it was going to be power to the people in a very direct sense, and that was an early iteration of the internet…that this was a vast network that was self-correcting.”43 By the 1970s, Curtis notes that the ecological view of nature had fused back together with this cybernetic understanding of computers, and out of this fusion “came an epic new vision for how to manage the world without the old corruption of [political] power.”44

41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 26

Hopefully, it has become clearer just how influential cybernetic conceptions of human beings and their place in global systems has been in the formation of various anti-hierarchal social developments. From counterculture communes to Silicon Valley, cybernetic articulations of feedback and the avoidance of entropy through total, integrated systems have informed efforts to re-imagine social organization, as well as challenge existing political regimes of control and authority. The impact of the concept of reflexivity has not yet been discussed, but will factor into the following subsection on the more recent development of the political pro-piracy movement.

Before moving on to discuss this development, it might be useful to quickly reiterate what we have already uncovered about this materializing information age ethos, without which Syntheism could not exist.

1. Our focus on information comes from the cybernetic movement’s preoccupation with communication systems, which first provided a paradigm for the organization of hard and social sciences into a unified theory.

2. Norbert Weiner developed a cybernetic vision in which closed-communication systems based on self-correcting feedback loops provided the perfect defense against nature’s tendency for entropy.

3. Second-order cybernetics theorists expanded Weiner’s mathematical premises into epistemological territory by developing notions of infinite reflexivity. These developments led to a crisis for the concept of an individualist, atomized liberal subject with total free will, implying a necessary reconfiguration of a reflexive cybernetic subject.

4. Later cyberneticians like Forrester and Fuller simplified these concepts, articulating them into grand metaphorical descriptions of the world as a whole being a closed, cybernetic system. These descriptions in particular inspired political and social movements in the decades following the Marcy Conferences, namely the field of American ecology, the commune movement of the 1960s, and even software engineers in Silicon Valley in the 1980s.

6. These movements attempted to maintain anti-hierarchal social organizations based on internal feedback as a self-correcting power in lieu of traditional top-down systems of control (like politics).

7. Cybernetic theory reflects technology’s power to inspire people to redefine what it means to be a human subject in a human society in a global community (that encompasses both humanity, nature, and technology all at once). Notably, the machines do not do the redefining, they merely inspire it.

2 Pirates in the Political Arena

In an essay entitled “Internet Piracy as Radical Democracy?”, Mark Poster points out how each new technological progression has “changed the circumstances of reproduction, changed the medium in which the cultural object was embedded and placed on the market.”45

The internet represents one of the most radical technological advancements to date, and its boundless creative possibilities consequently destabilize our already contestable delineations between producers and consumers, creators and passive observers. In his book What’s the Matter with the Internet?, Poster digs into the virtual reality of holding multiple identities at once online, specifically as it plays out in the realm of cultural production on the internet. Poster uses the terms “analogue” and “digital” to refer to physical cultural works and digital cultural works, respectively. He describes two key differences between these two kinds of products. The first difference is the “degree and shape of alterity in the relation of author to writing.”46 “Set firmly on the printed page,” Mark Poster notes, “the words of analogue authors speak to readers without a response…This page is here and now.”47 The digital author, precisely due to certain particularities of the digital medium, “connotes a greater alterity between the text and the author.”48 Since anyone can modify a file once it has been accessed on the internet, regardless of

45 Poster, Mark. “Internet Piracy as Radical Democracy?” In Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice, eds. Dahlberg, Lincoln and Siapera, Eugenia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. p. 215. 46 Poster, Mark. “What’s the Matter with the Internet.” 1998. p. 8. 47 Ibid., 16. 48 Ibid., 8. 28 the content of the file, and can subsequently create their own work through this practice, the notion of a single author who creates ex nihilo is thoroughly undermined by digitality.

The second significant difference between analog and digital works is perhaps the most obvious one—that analog works are physical entities, composed of economically scarce materials and are fixed in time and space, while the latter are not physical but virtual. Binary code, the language of digital information, is highly alterable and leaves “a minimal physical trace.”49 Digital files which are comprised of clumps of this binary code have a similarly negligible physical weight. Digital files merely require enough virtual space, or bytes, and actual physical space “offers no resistance to bytes on the Internet.”50 Unlike the scarcity of physical materials which comprise analog works, the digital reality is “an economy of abundance…[where] there is no shortage of physical space in which to put information.”51 Also unlike their analog counterparts, “digital objects are ‘non-rivalrous’.”52 Digital files are more easily disseminated, and access to these files is effectively universal to all with broadband connection. The implications of this most basic difference between the two types of cultural object reach far beyond cultural assumptions of the role of the creator in artistic production.

Capitalist economies are predicated on the competition which physical scarcity should necessitate in a free market, but the abundance of digital material, combined with the ease of digital manipulation as well as the indiscernibility of digital author(s), seriously complicates the relevance of capitalist industries to cultural production and distribution.

Both the Open Source software movement and the pro-internet piracy movements begin at this point—how best can users experience the free and universal exchange of information

49 Ibid., 14. 50 Ibid., 16. 51 Ibid., 17. 52 Poster, Mark. “Internet Piracy as Radical Democracy?” p. 214. 29 online without facing authoritarian restrictions based in antiquated, capitalist notions of digital

“products”? The development of open source software and peer-to-peer file sharing, as well as more recent campaigns by groups like the ACLU and the EFF to protect net neutrality, represent in many ways the politicization of the cybernetic-rich ethos articulated above. It is important to enter this debate with Poster’s perspective in mind, as his description of the malleability of online identity introduces the complexity of the internet subject. The internet, in this view, is the closed, fully integrated system of cybernetic fantasies, where human and human, human and machine, and machine and machine communicate all at once. Utilizing open source software or file sharing mechanisms demonstrates this tri-focal locus of cybernetic communication, and those in favor of these practices might also agree with Fuller’s sentiment that such interactions produce a subject strengthened by the global internet. The inherently anti-hierarchal organization and ideologies of both of these movements also testify to the thrust of the cybernetic fusion produced in the early 1970s in Silicon Valley. Because the line is blurred between producer and consumer, artist and audience, seeder and leech, the human internet user becomes fully relational within the grand system of the internet, itself just a series of feedback loops. The cybernetic identities of pirates of all kinds of digital materials represent a serious threat to the strictly defined and confined capitalist subject, which Hayles aligns with the liberal humanist individual of yore.

In the following subsection, we will briefly discuss the Open Source software movement, which represent an early articulation of expectations for the free exchange of information on the internet which inspire pirate ideologies. Then, we will move on to the issue of internet piracy, providing a technical overview of what “piracy” actually entails (more accurately, P2P file sharing and torrenting practices). From here, we can better describe and assess the political pro- 30 piracy movement which has grown over the past ten years and beyond 40 countries which now have formal Pirate parties. The critical event for the launch of this political movement, the politicized expression of Open Source beliefs as well as another embodiment of cybernetic theory, was the Pirate Bay Trial, which sparked legal crackdowns on file sharing and torrenting.

This event will be described in detail because it led to the establishment of the first-ever formally registered internet religion, Kopimism, which believes in the sacrality of internet piracy.

Kopimism represents the translation of residual cybernetic concepts into a religious and performative register, and its dissolution laid the foundation for the eventual establishment of

Syntheism. By analyzing first the political manifestations of this ethos, we might gain important insight into its eventual religious articulations.

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The Open Source Movement

In July of 1997, an email was sent out to a LISTSERV of early software developers which contained the first articulation of an Open Source “social contract.” That email and its contents are now referred to as the Debian Social Contract. Debian is an operating system developed in the early 1990s comprised entirely of free software, and the group’s Social

Contract, which contains its “Free Software Guidelines” (DFSG), outlines the basic principles of an Open Source software community.53 It is important for us to understand these principles, which are still popular today and are supported by groups like Software for the Public Interest, because they provide a foundation for the politicized arguments of later pro-piracy groups.

Simply put, Open Source refers to programs developed by computer scientists out of a process of

53 Tiemann, Michael. “History of the OSI.” Open Source Initiative. September 2006. 31 interconnected collaboration and borrowing of techniques. The central idea behind this sharing and openness of information is that it is only through such unrestricted access to all that has been developed previously that new innovations can arise. Initially, Open Source principles prevailed among insular communities of computer programmers who could understand the technical aspects. As computer systems and software were increasingly commodified, however, Open

Source supporters found themselves directing these principles against efforts to restrict and control technological inventions, techniques which include legal patenting as well as software registration and license-restrictions.

We will now briefly define Open Source principles to ground our discussion of piracy.

According to The Open Source Definition, published by a group called the Open Source

Initiative and influenced by the DFSG, “Open Source” does not only refer to unrestricted access to software source code. It also involves ten criteria, which will manifest in specific ways in the political proclamations of internet pirates a decade after these are first articulated. The most relevant criteria are reproduced below:

1. The free distribution of software, meaning that software licenses cannot restrict the trade or sale of software and cannot require a royalty or fee for sale.

2. The program must include source code, or at least a publicly-known means of obtaining the source code so that anyone can access the basic formula (code) for the software involved.

3. Any licensing must allow for the creation of derived works, which allows for modifications of the original program and distribution of those new forms of the code.

…5. The software license must not discriminate against any persons or groups.

6. The software license must not discriminate anyone from using the program in a specific field (business, genetic research, etc.).

...10. The software license must be technology-neutral, meaning that the software is not restricted to a specific technology or interface style.54

Internet “Piracy”

A few years after the establishment of Open Source principles, Sweden experienced a tumultuous and exciting period in the development of what is widely known as internet piracy.

“Piracy” is actually a misnomer which maps a purely digital phenomenon onto an antiquated analog concept of physical property. The term itself is highly contested. In Rethinking Piracy,

Joe Karaganis notes that “Piracy has never had a stable legal definition.”55 Instead of describing specific behaviors which negatively effect the public and thus deserve criminalization, “piracy” is actually constructed retrospectively through debates addressing the enforcement of anti-piracy measures. It is shaped by policy conversations which focus on “strengthening police power, streamlining judicial procedures, increasing criminal penalties, and extending surveillance and punitive measure to the Internet.”56

These discussions often intentionally obscure the differences between piracy and theft in order to justify ever-broadening and invasive enforcement techniques.57 In large part due to immense lobbying efforts by corporate content industries such as the Motion Pictures

Association of America (MPAA), whose monopolies on the reproduction and distribution of cultural products are directly threatened by the cost-free capabilities of the internet, activities like peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and torrenting can be prosecuted as acts of piracy. Restrictive legal regimes produced by their lobbying efforts, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

54 Raymond, Eric S. “Open Source Certification.” Open Source Initiative. June 1999. 55Karaganis, Joe. “Rethinking Piracy.” In Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, ed. Karaganis, Joe. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2011. p. 2. 56Karaganis, Joe. Media Piracy in Emerging Economies. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2011. p. iii. 57Karaganis, Joe. “Rethinking Piracy.” p. 2. 33

(DMCA) and the TRIPS agreement, seem logical and necessary when these acts are construed in terms of theft, and framing the consequences of torrenting for instance as costing a company many billions of dollars in projected profit seems to justify harsh sentences in cases of copyright infringement. The comparison of file sharing to physical theft is blatantly faulty, as well as the fabricated estimations of monetary harm incurred by impossibly wealthy content industries which bolster the legal apparatus reinscribing this false notion.

But what actually is piracy? Rather, what is the physical act enacted online which is labelled, albeit sloppily, piracy? The Pirate Bay will help us to better understand this online activity. The Pirate Bay (TPB) was established in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization “The Piracy Bureau” (Piratbyrån in Swedish). For at least the following decade,

TPB was the most popular website for connecting users to magnet links, which are reference links to files available on P2P networks, from which users can download the content of the magnet link through a BitTorrent client. Torrenting is a form of file sharing in which a file that multiple users (“seeders”) own is shared with another user (a “leech”) in bits and pieces from each. The more individuals seeding the file, the quicker the download for the leech, and once a leech has downloaded the entire file, they are expected to become seeders for future torrenters. If someone wants to download a Harry Potter movie, for instance, they would most likely search for the magnet link using TPB search bar, click the link with the most amount of seeders to increase download speed, and the torrent would begin seeding on a BitTorrent client (a software program specifically used for torrenting). When complete, the leech would now have a full file of the Harry Potter movie, and whenever another future leech wanted to download the file, the first individual would become just another seeder. Torrenting is an extremely efficient method of file sharing because what is being downloaded is not one whole file, but tiny pieces of the file 34 from various people who have downloaded it in the past. This also makes it much harder to prosecute the original uploader of the file for copyright infringement, since the original uploader of the file becomes almost impossible to trace.

I hope it is becoming clearer that in a system where every leech is a potential seeder, and every consumer is a potential producer, Digitality inspires a fundamental shift in the constitution of online subjects. Due to the vast interconnectedness of web-based communications, digital culture is produced and shared, preserved and modified, by “mobile and fluid selves, ones less beholden to the constrains of modern and even postmodern subject positions.”58 The internet is a means for realizing Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality”, in which “books, media, and machines [are] all to be regarded as ‘tools’”59 that develop creative interactions between individuals to produce a heterogeneous, non-hierarchal culture. As practices like P2P file sharing construct fluid subjects engaged in creative processes that significantly undermine non- transparent, scarcity-based models of content industries, the viability of capitalism as a legitimate organizing system for culture is called into question.

Mark Poster asks what he describes as “a political [question]: who shall benefit from the technical advances afforded by digitization?”60 He notes that this assumption that capitalism is necessary for digital culture is “the foundation of almost the entire case for the lack of any public debate on the course—and therefore the privatization and commercialization—of the Web.”61 To counter this course of digital cultural control, Poster argues that the people, not the content

58 Ibid., 224. 59 Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. p. 477. 60Poster, Mark. “Internet Piracy as Radical Democracy?” p. 222. 61 McChesney, Robert. “So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market: The World Wide Web and the Corporate Media System.” In The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, eds. Herman, Andrew and Swiss, Thomas. New York: Routledge, 2000. p. 8. 35 industries or national governments, should benefit from digitization. If content industries are rendered obsolete by the costless reality of digital cultural objects and need to transform or disappear as a consequence, then a system of radical democracy can fill the void they leave behind. Poster’s political line of thought mirrors the establishment of the world’s first political pro-piracy party following the infamous Pirate Bay trial, which provided the perfect catalyst for pirates to organize against capitalist corporate hegemony online.

The original pro-piracy political party is the Pirate Party of Sweden, or the Piratpartiet, which was founded in 2006 by IT entrepreneur Rick Falkvinge.62 The impetus for its foundation came from a law introduced in 2005 which made the unauthorized downloading of copyrighted materials illegal and which taxed broadband access in Sweden.63 Falkvinge created the party due to a lack of political interest in the implications of these reforms, founding the Pirate Party to

“bypass the politicians entirely and aim for their power base.”64 Falkvinge was inspired by the labor and environmental movements in Europe, which spawned powerful parties like the Social

Democrats and the Greens. The issue which concerned the Pirate Party initially, that of restrictive, capitalist copyright regimes which were ill-adapted to digital culture, did not hold much of the general public’s attention, in part due to the highly technical conversations held by the enthusiastic pirates among its earliest ranks. This all changed in the aftermath of the 2006

Pirate Bay police raid.

In many ways, The Pirate Bay trials placed the issue of internet piracy into a political and very public realm. The site was originally established in 2003 by an anti-copyright organization called the Piracy Bureau (Piratbyrån in Swedish), but was run by a separate group of pirates after

62 Anderson, Nate. "Political Pirates: A History of Sweden's Piratpartiet." Ars Technica. 2009. Accessed May 13, 2016. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/02/rick-falkvinge-is-the-face/. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 36

2004. This massive index of links to digital entertainment media and software dominated the torrenting scene for a few years, until the May 2006 police raid of their operating servers. Police officers shut down the website and confiscated TPB servers, as well as all other servers connected with the Pirate Bureau. This action was ordered by a judge influenced by legal pressure from the MPAA, or Hollywood, which published a press release on the incident stating:

“Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal website down.”65 Essentially, American content industry interests forced Swedish law enforcement to enact state force despite Swedish laws not necessarily being broken by TPB’s operations.

Consequently, there was immense backlash and protests after the police raid, and TPB itself revived its operations with a new logo depicting a pirate ship firing cannonballs at the

Hollywood Sign.66 The eventual 2009 trial is described beautifully in the documentary film The

Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard, which shows how the three-year long process eventually ended in the imprisonment of the three architects of the site on charges of “promoting the copyright infringement of others.”67 These charges were incidentally created specifically by and for this trial. Importantly, they were arrested not because of specific acts of piracy, but for the vague, legally undefined act of enabling piracy to occur. The site still operates today, and exists in numerous mirror versions in case the main site is shut down again.

Subsequent media coverage of the pirates’ plight peaked the public interest and Falkvinge suddenly became a public figure. Simultaneously, the Pirate Bay’s visitor count nearly doubled and the Pirate Party tripled its membership in a mere week. Ideologically, the Pirate Party

65 “Swedish authorities sink Pirate Bay.” MPAA.org (Press Release). Motion Picture Association of America. 31 May 2006. 66 Bowman, John. “The Pirate Bay.” CBC.ca. CBC Television, 10 September 2013. 67 The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard. Dir. Simon Klose. 8 February 2013. 37 initially focused its efforts on copyright and patent reform. Falkvinge has stated that “society can go two ways: toward a culturally rich society where everyone participates and enjoys culture or down another road in which culture is locked down and comes mainly from a few multinational companies.”68 The party hopes to “restore the balance in the copyright legislation,” in part by making “all non-commercial copying and use…completely free.”69 They view file sharing and torrenting as activities which should be “encouraged rather than criminalized,” since “the

Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.”70 After failing to win a seat in the

Swedish Parliament in 2006, the party established a youth wing (the Young Pirates)71, focused on gaining a seat in the European Parliament (which they did, receiving two seats in the 2009-

2014 session under the Greens-European Free Alliance)72, and entered the 2010 Swedish

Parliamentary elections (which they lost).73 Despite their inconsistent election performances, the

Party’s total membership surpassed the Green Party in December 2008, the Left Party in

February 2009, the Liberal People’s Party in April 2009, and the Centre Party in May 2009, making it the third-largest political party in Sweden until 2010.74 In 2011, however, Falkvinge stepped down from his position as leader of the Party, and the Party’s political activity has stalled ever since.75

As the spotlight has shifted away from Sweden’s pirate movement, many similar parties which emerged under its initial shadow are gaining prominence in their advocacy. The most

68 "The Pirate Party in English - Piratpartiet." Piratpartiet. Accessed May 13, 2016. www.piratepartiet.se/english/. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Anderson, Nate. "Political Pirates: A History of Sweden's Piratpartiet." 72 "Pirate Party Wins and Enters the European Parliament - TorrentFreak." TorrentFreak RSS. 2009. Accessed May 13, 2016. torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-wins-and-enters-the-european-parliament-090607/. 73 Anderson, Nate. "Political Pirates: A History of Sweden's Piratpartiet." 74 “Result of Verdict for the Pirate Party.” Blog Pirate. 2009. Accessed May 13, 2016. www.blogpirate.org/2009/04/17/result-of-verdict-for-the-pirate-party/. 75 "Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge Resigns on 5th Anniversary - TorrentFreak." TorrentFreak RSS. 2011. Accessed May 13, 2016. torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-leader-rick-falkvinge-resigns-on-5th-anniversary-110101/. 38 obvious case is Iceland’s Pirate party, which almost secured a majority in the 2016 Parliament elections and ended up winning enough votes to be asked to help manage the government after

Iceland’s Prime Minister was ousted in disgrace, implicated in the Panama Papers. It seems no one is safe when information is openly communicated online. The international pirate movement has grown to such a degree that there are now annual General Assembly events held by an umbrella organization, Pirate Parties International (PPI). Although many of the most prominent early leaders of the political pirate party movement have broken away from the PPI, its continued existence represents some spark is still alight.

Witnessing a PPI General Assembly event firsthand is an incredibly enlightening experience, as it makes clearer the challenges of enacting a political organization with an anti- hierarchal mentality. Ironically, the proceedings seemed entropic for such a (theoretically) cybernetic congregation. While it may not have been as dramatic a scene as Weiner’s natural entropy might suggest, the proceedings were unanimated at best and non-directional at worst.

The main tensions revolved precisely around the structure of the organization: German Pirates wish to enforce more top-down policies and stipulations to shape up the PPI into an effective political machine, while the vast majority of representatives from other (mostly European) countries outright reject such management on principle. It is difficult not to draw parallels to the failed commune experiments of the 1960s, in which their own embrace of cybernetic, anti- hierarchal organization inevitably led to the inability of members to put more domineering individuals back in their equalized place. The political pirate project thus raises interesting questions beyond their ideological challenge of capitalist, statist, top-down legal restrictions of the internet. Pirates now also provide a potential litmus strip for the viability of cybernetic, non- 39 hierarchal political organization. Could cryptoanarchism swim where political anarchisms generally sink?

3 Religious Resurrections: Kopimism and Syntheism

At the core of these two cyberreligions is an internalization of the political plight of the

Swedish Pirate Party and the broader, international pro-piracy movement. The very first chapter of the Syntheist holy book, Syntheism, is entitled “Everything is religion”, and politics is necessarily also religion in their view, since “if we ask ourselves what politics really is, the answer is that politics is merely a continuation of religion by other means.”76 Syntheists thus share the view with Kopimists that the secular assumption that politics is not informed by religious values and beliefs, that the total separation of church and state (which Sweden formally recognizes as of 2000), is largely a myth. What is obvious to the pirates who man these cyberreligions is that the legislation which vilifies file sharing and torrenting as acts of piracy and which justifies the prosecution of benevolent entities like the Pirate Bay, as a political and legal action enforced by the state, is motivated by a specific set of beliefs. These beliefs are corporatist in nature, centralize power in content industries gradually rendered less necessary by digitality, and lead to restrictive monitoring and surveillance of what should be an open and unrestricted internet. Thus, resisting such oppression is also laden with moral value for pirates, and the fight for maintaining a free internet despite corporatist greed is raised to the most holy of struggles. When viewed in this light, the foundation of not one but two religious groups by

Swedish pirates might not seem quite as absurd nor as random as it might seem at first glance.

76 Bard, Alexander and Söderqvist, Jan. Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age, Stockholm: Stockholm Text. p. 28. 40

Sweden quite simply has the most political, legal, and cultural experience with these issues, but there are many other reasons for the emergence Kopimism and Syntheism alike.

In this section, we will examine Kopimism, the world’s first officially recognized internet religion which worships (illegal) file sharing. Kopimism represents the organizational embodiment of second-order cybernetic’s concept of reflexivity, as the peer-to-peer structure of file sharing, their most sacred act, creates a relational, anti-hierarchal Kopimist ritual. Finally, we will tie up this loose strand by demonstrating how tightly influenced Kopimist ideology is by a notion of perfect self-replication in a closed system. Next, we will shift our focus to Syntheism, the religion formed by atheists for atheists, inquiring into why exactly such a group should follow the disintegration of Kopimism. Some Kopimists are Syntheists and some Syntheists were also Kopimists, but almost all of them are pirates, and this shared political engagement, animated as it is by a more fundamental cybernetic ethos, relatively informs both religious communities.

While the Kopimists took an established, legal route to gain legitimacy, Syntheists take a more philosophical path and largely reject working within legal structures which reinforce a strict definition of religious belief and practice. In this reading of both Kopimism and Syntheism, one manifests self-reflexivity as internet piracy while the other utilizes an avoidance of entropy as the basis for an internet metaphysics. With this approach, we emphasize yet again the enduring influence of a “metascience” which has lost its explicit relevance for the social sciences for which it seemed, in one brief moment of history, a most promising intellectual attraction.77

The information age does not appear ex nihilo, however, and neither does its ethos. In the total communications system that is historic development, cybernetics is continually self-correcting

77 For more on this devolution of cybernetic’s relevance, read Chapter 7: Cybernetics in Crisis from Ronald Kline’s Cybernetics Movement. 41 through the various feedback loops its creates both in the political sphere, as witnessed above, and now also in the religious sphere, as discussed below.

ù ù ù

The documentary film The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard documents the exact moment which sparked the foundation of Sweden’s first bona fide cyberreligion. While being interviewed about the case she had brought on behalf of the MPAA against the founders of TPB, advocate Monique Wadsted responds to a question about the pirates who support the TPB, the members of the Piracy Bureau. She specifically refers to them as “this Kopimi sect.”78 According to the co-founder of the Swedish Missionary Church of Kopimism, Isak Gerson, this remark sparked a revolution in how the pro-piracy movement was organized up to that point. “If they

[the corporate opposition] considered this a religious sect, why not try to think of it that way?”

He explained to me the process of figuring out exactly what this new religious group would look like in “all these chats and forums, explaining all these technological and philosophical ideas…we developed some kind of theology around this concept of Kopimi.” A couple of years after these conversations began, these pirates figured “why not try to form an organization around it?” Gerson notes they did not have any specific intentions, they “just thought it would be funny to try,” so they met in Uppsala in 2010, founded the Church of Kopimisim, appointed a

“Chief Missionary”, and began the process of getting the church officially recognized as a religious organization with the Swedish government.

78 All quotations from Isak Gerson come from an interview I conducted in August 2016 on behalf of the Royce Fellowship. There is no published account of this interview, only an audio recording which he asked me not release. Although he did permit my use of his statements in this thesis, there is no formal published reference of the interview. 42

The Kopimists drew their beliefs specifically from the conversations and themes already animating the Piracy Bureau and the Pirate Party, as many Kopimists already belonged to both groups. Their central tenet was “to see copying as something holy, the process of copying as something much bigger than what we can theoretically grasp, seeing copying in everything that happens from the splitting of DNA to conversing and giving ideas to each other, to using the internet at all.” In Kopimist theology, “copying is the central processes of life.” As such, the central ritual practice of Kopimism is “mostly copying stuff with each other…transcribing literature, sending files.” In this configuration of central belief, we can tease out the influence of the second-order cybernetic concept of perfect reflexivity as the end-goal of a closed, fully integrated system. Copying, embodied virtually in the act of file sharing and genetically in DNA replication for Kopimists, makes up the elementary fiber of both digital and biological life.

Without copying, there is nothing. Reflexivity is thus taken to its most dramatic conclusion—it becomes an essential factor not just for the eradication of any descent into entropy, but in doing so it becomes the very substance of life itself. By describing copying and piracy in such an elevated register, Kopimists made an important step in the direction of sacrilizing what they viewed as a fact of life—the perfect self-reflexivity of a system which cannot exist without itself.

They thus configure the internet as a space for producing this perfect self-reflexivity, and so piracy becomes a sacred enactment of the upholding and protecting of this perfect state.

Just as copyright reform was the political stance of the Piracy Bureau (at least before the

Pirate Bay Trials), so it is still for Kopimists. Gerson notes that “what has been the goal for the pirate movement since the beginning is ending the bifurcation of producing and consuming.

When you dissolve this distinction, there’s not so many rights to be had.” The welfare of the internet has always been an important topic for Kopimists, and one of the big questions outside 43 of copyright abolition was to better the infrastructure itself. Part of the backlash, however, is that

“there has been such a centralization and corporatization (Apple, Google, Spotify)…a lot of these questions have to be seen in that light, that you can try to change and strengthen the internet, combat the surveillance, but as long as the control of it is in so few hands…” Gerson expressed concern that “a lot of the cultural infrastructure that used to be on torrent sites has moved on to commercial streaming services, also a part of this [corporatist] trend,” and the Pirate

Bay Trials also provide support for his concern. Because it provided a centralized platform for indexing torrentable files, many pirates view even TPB to be too top-down a system for true pirates to endorse.

Although the Kopimists are motivated by these political and social concerns, influenced as they are by the political organizations active in Sweden at the time of the Pirate Bay Trials, they chose to organize not into a political group but an explicitly religious one. To be recognized as a religious organization and be registered with the government, a religious organization must apply and meet four specific requirements. This process was established in 2000 when the

Ordinance on Registration of Religious Communities was first put into practice with the

Missionary Church of Sweden, Sweden’s national church which separated from the state and rendered Sweden the only one of the Nordic countries without an official state religion. The

Kopimists decided to copy the Missionary Church of Sweden’s application, even naming their own group the “Missionary Church of Kopimism”. Gerson describes that “when we wrote the statutes, we just took the complete statutes from the Swedish Missionary Church and just changed the titles a bit to make it more relevant [to Kopimism].” Their first application was rejected, as the board had complained that they did not think the Kopimists could prove the second requirement of the application, namely that they had a religious ritual. Accordingly, the 44

Kopimists made the central ritual of file sharing pass the requirement on their third application draft by saying “that you’re supposed to praise the copying verbally while you do it.” The phrase of praise could be something like “copy+C” or “hail Kopimi”, and this modification was enough to pass their application through the process. On January 25, 2012, the Legal, Financial, and

Administrative Services Agency formally recognized the Missionary Church of Kopimism as a religious organization in Sweden with 4,000 members.

Kopimism received international coverage during this period of official government recognition, with many detractors and individuals outside of the piracy movement claiming the

Church as a “PR stunt”, a political farce, and even a “devaluation of religion.” Their opposition was multi-faceted, coming from “atheists who just despise religion, a lot of aggressive religious people who thought this was a mockery of religion,” and even some suspicion of Gerson’s

Jewish identity, with some wondering, according to Gerson, “What’s this guy doing, with his

Jewish agenda?” The animus Gerson and the group received, he mentions, is “always on the internet, it was seldom sent to me directly, and it was mostly people blogging indirectly.”

Although the foundation and registration of Kopimism sparked interest internationally, with individuals in Israel, Australia, the UK, and even the United States founding their own branches of Kopimism, the Church did not necessarily have any missionary intent or structure(s). In fact, the belief system itself was not very fully developed, and its member count fluctuates frequently

(and, at least in Sweden, is currently in decline), as many pirates do not view a Kopimist identity as necessary to their plight per se.

Although some believed the Church was founded in order to secure some kind of religious protection from the prosecution of illegal file sharing that comprised their primary act of worship, Gerson himself notes how many in Sweden are not actually concerned about the 45 legal repercussions of file sharing. “There hasn’t been any trouble with file sharing prosecution, as there’s about two million people who file share each year, but they only prosecute 20-30 people a year, so slim chances [of getting caught],” he explains. Even when apprehended on piracy charges, many pirates “had an insurance fund where people could pay and then the insurance would pay if they got caught.” The police themselves “are not that active” in pursuing illegal file sharing, and “people generally don’t think it’s a problem, you can discuss it openly [in

Sweden] and no one really cares.” Rather, Gerson describes Kopimism as “an opportunity to question what religion is, to redefine what politics is…people see politics as a separate sphere from everything else…one of the things we thought was what if the boundaries aren’t so clear…that moves you into the sphere of what is [rendered] illegal.”

An important point to note is exactly this political impetus and tie to the Pirate Party which Kopimism more directly represents. Although Gerson describes the foundation of

Kopimism as a kind of thought experiment (“Can this actually be done?”), there could have been a monetary benefit provided to the Pirate Party through Kopimism if it were to also receive the tax benefit provided religious organizations in Sweden. According to the founder of the youth wing of the Pirate Party, Kopimism “was not necessarily trolling, but [it might have been] part of some members of the Young Pirates checking what different government funding there was.”79

They saw “well, there’s funding for churches,” and thus followed the revelation that one could get state funding if only one were to establish and register a church. Although the Kopimists did the latter, they were unable to receive the former. Accordingly, the Pirate Party does not receive state funding, and run only on donations.

79 These quotations are also from my Royce Fellowship research, conducted in Sweden in August 2016. 46

This account provides us with an alternative narrative for the motivation behind founding a church for pirates, one that seems to run beneath the more philosophical justifications of exposing the inherently religious elements of political (and legal) regimes which Gerson provides. Both sides do not necessarily conflict, and Gerson even mentioned to me that once

Kopimism was registered, Kopimists met with a lawyer to discuss a possible application for funding through the European convention. No further effort was made to secure such funding, however, and Kopimism in Sweden mirrored the Pirate Party in that its popularity, support, and even its relevance seems to be declining. Only six years after its foundation and four after its official registration, many of the pirates assembled at the PPI General Assembly in Berlin,

Germany this summer could not tell me much about Kopimism, nor did they think any one even identified as such anymore.

For one, as Gerson notes earlier and despite the infamous Pirate Bay trials, activities deemed “piracy” by international legal regimes are not prosecuted widely in Sweden. Sweden invested extensively in broadband technologies in the 1980s, when such infrastructure was first emerging as a powerful technological advancement. This early attention to securing internet access, alongside a cultural reverence towards so-called “early adopters” of new tech, has influenced the development of a highly technologically literate populace in Sweden. Combined with relatively significant ethnic homogeneity, Swedes benefit in many political realms from combining their economic strength with their Democratic Socialist political and legal frameworks. This is no different when it comes to technology, and so the pirate movement almost naturally found its footing in Sweden. Just as the outcry over the prosecution of the Pirate

Bay founders rendered them martyrs for the cause and spurred political organization 47 internationally, the continued threat of the gradual corporatization of internet services motivated

Kopimists to found a religion to try to protect their political interests.

Interestingly, just as the Piracy Bureau was established by pirates as a reaction to the reactionary Anti-Piracy Bureau, Syntheism was established partially as a reaction to the reactionary atheism prevalent in Sweden. Syntheism is also, more indirectly, a reaction to the failures of Kopimism, although they might share a political heritage. Kopimism very clearly took a politico-legal route of legitimation, in which a group of pirates took a phrase uttered by an

MPAA lawyer and used it to establish a religion for the purposes of possibly attaining state funding for the Pirate Party, exposing the moral valuation animating anti-piracy legislation, and just to see if a church of illegal file sharing could exist as an organization legitimized through the state. To achieve these aims, the group underwent the legal process of applying for recognition from the government and ultimately was registered as an official religious organization.

However, Kopimist beliefs, theology, rituals, and community organization were not really developed beyond this government application document. These elements were not considered crucial to the group itself, although it was registered as a “religion.”

Syntheists, many of whom were involved in the Swedish Pirate Party and some of whom were even Kopimists, reject the hollowness of Kopimism as a religion. Kopimism, by relying on such hegemonic powers as the government and the law for recognition, represents a subversion of these powers but ultimately did not produce much to show for it. More importantly, Kopimists developed a religion only to legitimate it as one under these powers without actually developing a religious belief system with a focus on the spiritual. Syntheists, many of whom (like

Kopimists) are of the culturally-Christian atheists so prevalent in Sweden, were disappointed at the superficiality of Kopimism and yearned for the spiritual fulfillment of a more “religious” 48 cyberreligion. Syntheism represents an attempt at providing the internet with a theology that is actually viable for its users, many of whom see the same existential (corporatist) threats to this sacred infrastructure that the Pirates and the Kopimists did. Syntheism, however, attempts to provide an actual recourse for resisting these threats that is based in digital spirituality, theology, and ethics. While Kopimism utilized cyber practices to form a religious front to further a political issue, Syntheism provides cyberspace its own religion. While copying is merely a holy act for Kopimists, the internet itself is the most holy of entities under Syntheism, and holds within its ethos the foundations of a genuinely new cyberreligion.

(2) The Atheist Theology of Syntheism

“Everything in the world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason…Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this is not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.” –Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency80

“There is no need to show at length, that nature has no particular goal in view, and that final causes are mere human figments.” -Baruch Spinoza, Ethics81

Introduction: Preparing for Theoretical Gymnastics

In this chapter, we will explore together what exactly the Syntheists mean when they claim that they create a “God for the Internet Age.” Syntheism’s ambition is to provide a viable metaphysics for an increasingly virtual landscape of human experience saturated in global interconnectivity, mediated through the internet as well as other incorporeal economic and political forces. The previous chapter attempts to contextualize the technophilic ethos of our burgeoning Internet Age by describing the resilience of cybernetic concepts such as feedback and reflexivity as they appear in pro-digital political and, more recently, religious organizations.

These political and religious spaces, sites for the enculturation of a cybernetic ethos, each construct their anti-hierarchal identities around the immediate capacities of new technologies as well as their future implications. For instance, the Swedish Church of Kopimism, in a sense

Syntheism’s predecessor, modeled their religious ritual on the decentralized practice of file-

80 Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Brassier, Ray. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008. p. 53. 81 Spinoza, Baruch. Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata. From The Chief Workds of Benedict De Spinoza. Trans. Elwes, R.H.M. London: Goerge Bell and Sons, 1887. p. 77. 50 sharing, while organizing formally in order to protect the illegal practice through its (failed financial) connections to the political Swedish Pirate Party.

Understanding this ethos’ cybernetic roots and its continued deployment in contemporary pro-piracy movements will help orient Syntheism, a metaphysical agent of this ethos, as a future- facing religion. In this chapter, we will investigate Syntheism’s theology with bifurcated interest in how the historical advancements of technology have continuously reshaped human societies and social realities, and how these reshaped societies in turn feel compelled to produce new metaphysical frameworks to better describe what is missing from them (deepening disenchantment in order to re-enchant, so to speak). Both paths ultimately tell us more about the future than the past, as we are perceived by the Syntheists to be occupying an opportune moment in humanity’s existential zeitgeist: it is precisely the networked subject of cybernetics, amplified in its virtuality by the advent of the internet, which provides the metaphysical framework for a new theology. Syntheists, who also refer to themselves as “spiritual atheists”, thus produce a theology of the internet which is both in and of itself.

To help make these conceptual connections more comestible, we will first survey

Syntheists’ own descriptions of their project from their text, Syntheism: Creating God in the

Internet Age. Since their main goal is to create God in the Internet Age, understanding why and how they do this will give us deeper insight into the religion more broadly. After providing this brief overview, we will turn to a contemporary philosopher to ground the theoretical gymnastics

Syntheism undertakes in forming a new metaphysical framework (and, ultimately, a

Syntheology). Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude develops an understanding of a kind of metaphysics that breaks free from the trap of correlationalism, bridging the gap between essentializing metanarrative postmodernist deconstruction. In developing speculative 51 metarialism as a metaphysical approach, Meillassoux provides Syntheism a philosophical precedent. Syntheology can be read as an enactment of a kind of metaphysical project that, for the first time, is based on an ontology of absolute contingency. It thus transcends the blind faith that even atheists and scientific rationalists have (in the non-existence of God and the epistemological perfection of science, respectively).

The following section will describe more comprehensively the God(s) Syntheism creates for the internet, mapping out what they refer to as the “Syntheological pyramid” of divinities.

This section will harken to Meillassoux, and we will investigate how his influence shapes their perception of how theology and metaphysics relate, and why they construct their deities as they do. The final section will reference Simon Critchley’s Faith of the Faithless, as well as

Syntheism’s own rejection of modern faith(s), in order to sketch out the edges of a viable post- atheist form of faith. Why, in other words, should the Syntheists, self-proclaimed atheists, need

God(s) at all? And how do cybernetics as well as speculative materialism help ground and develop this desire?

Syntheism ultimately represents a turn away from postmodernism, mimicking postmodernism’s own rejection of Enlightenment-produced, Cartesian ontology. In the conclusion of this chapter, we will attempt to identify what is at stake in this turning away, informed as we will be by an understanding of what an atheist theology can entail. A most apparent tension will be broached but not quite conquered—namely, why should Syntheists turn away from postmodernist “blind faith” only to throw themselves upon another religious metanarrative (albeit one they construct themselves)? What exactly is it about their metaphysical project itself, the creating of a theology based not on the necessity of existence but on its inescapable contingency, one which invents gods only out of recognition of some historic human 52 tendency to do so, that makes this constructed cyberreligion a strong spiritual candidate for contemporary atheists (and even theists)? According to Syntheists, Syntheism is the only credible metaphysical framework for the Internet Age, but is it because of its dialectical construction, its cybernetic totality, or something else? Most importantly, following such a demandingly theoretical chapter, we will ask whether such a self-consciously constructed metaphysics can produce and motivate an enact-able ethics. The next and final chapter will start to articulate what that could look like.

1 Syntheism’s Metaphysical Genealogy

At this point, we have traversed quickly through various fields in order to best contextualize an equally complex subject—the Syntheist movement. We began with an investigation of the cybernetic movement of the mid-20th century as it provides a formulation of basic principles echoed in later political movements and, now, in cyberreligion. These foundational principles, which I have argued inform an ethos inherent to our current

Information/Digital Age, include feedback, entropy, and reflexivity, which are all crucial elements of a holistic, intricately interconnected systems-view of both technology and society.

We have shown how this general systems-based perspective dominates both Open Source and pro-piracy political movements, and how concepts like feedback and reflexivity especially manifest in both groups through their insistence on the free flow of digital information and in their rejection of organizational hierarchies. Entropy in these political contexts represents the isolation of systems produced through legal restrictions on the free flow of digital content, usually enacted and enforced by capitalist understandings of a commodified, scarcity-based internet. Open Source and pro-piracy groups have both internalized these cybernetic conceptions 53 of the digital sphere, articulating counter-narratives emphasizing the total integration of digital networks, and thus the necessity of feedback loops unrestricted by capitalist interests, locating each internet user, both “seeder” and “leech”, as a locus of resistance. Kopimism, the first government-registered cyberreligion, took this position to one extreme by emphasizing the sacrality of piracy, as it represented for them a double-space of strengthening feedback loops to enact perfect virtual reflexivity, on the one hand, while simultaneously resisting corporatist entropy both through the sacred act of file-sharing.

In this subsection, we will attempt to tie these cybernetic strands together in their newest formulation, which represents yet another development in the greater information age ethos, this time towards a digital spirituality. Syntheism, the central focus of the rest of this thesis, represents a project intentionally riddled with contradictions. In the discussion that follows, we will provide a simple outline of their views on religion and their metaphysical lineage in order to ground their later developments of an atheist theology. In doing so, we hope to connect the final dot in a cybernetic legacy which moves from a purely scientific context, through social and political organizations, and finally rests in new, religious re-articulations. We will thus be better equipped to examine just why and how Syntheists create a metaphysical framework for this brave new Internet Age.

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“Syntheism,” co-founders of Syntheism Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist write, “is based on the concept of pure complexity. It is about a complexity which…precedes the production of identity. It is the pure complexity in network dynamics that gives the agents and phenomena their value, not the other way around.”82 They go on to ask, “what is life other than a

82 Bard, Alexander and Söderqvist, Jan. Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age, Stockholm: Stockholm Text. p. 191. 54 cloned, discrete feedback loop that happens to be able to multiply itself?”83 The cybernetic concepts of feedback, entropy (represented here as individualized identity), and reflexivity could not be more distinctly articulated as central to the Syntheist worldview. Crucially, what we experience as “life” is confined by descriptors that individuate experience and in doing imply a sense of concrete causality. What the Syntheists posit is that in actuality, we actively create our own realities within a totalizing network of all possible configurations of feedback. They represent this actuality with the example of a poem which makes the reader feel sadness, asking where, in the poem, does this feeling of sadness physically exist? Of course, an emotion cannot be traced literally to one explicit word or moment for every single reader, but rather “[the author] and we create it together with the aid of that set of social contracts that is literature and poetry, in exactly the same way that we create a multitude of other things…nations, ideologies, communities of various kinds.”84

This process of meaning construction is diffuse throughout a specific audience/network, a very cybernetic perspective, which can characterize both religious and internet “faith.” Currently, both need reform, according to Syntheists, precisely because instead of recognizing the necessity for an integrated, interconnected network system of meaning-production, both religion and the internet as they currently manifest in fact move towards entropy. At the heart of this entropy is an emphasis on the isolation or non-integrated systems produced by an individualistic agent, one informed by the liberal humanist tradition which Syntheists whole-heartedly reject. As such,

Capitalism, the system best-served by such a subject, pushes both religion and the internet in this descent into entropy. Bard holds that “Capitalism’s fixation with exploitation is therefore being followed by informationalism’s obsession with its counterpart, imploitation…a maximization of

83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., 12. 55 the value of information by means of the community’s deliberate delimitation, rather than a naïve openness towards the outside world.”85 Religiously, this manifests in the phenomenon of fundamentalism, which provides a necessarily Cartesian site that gives a sense of certainty to an otherwise contingent reality: “the more bizarre the ideas proclaimed by a religious community or a sect, the more robust the resistance they trigger in the hostile outside world, and the more they strengthen the sense of internal community and the production of social identity.”86

Technologically, this manifests in our current experience of a virtuality which, instead of developing “into one big global village where everyone communicates with everyone else in a way that reflects mutual understanding,” instead, “emerges on the Web…[as] an all too vast archipelago of closed communities without fixed connections between them.”87

In such a context, “we choose our authorities on more or less arbitrary grounds, and we then choose to believe in what they claim without being able to investigate the matter.”88 To break away from this model of inherited meanings, Syntheism emphasizes the need for a new kind of subject—the “dividual” instead of the individual. The dividual, in its indeterminacy, represents the perfect subject for an age increasingly dominated by virtual networks of power and influence which are hard to trace, networks of hegemonic domination (for Syntheists, global capitalism) and of potential liberation (a truly free and unrestricted internet), respectively.

Because “the Universe is basically one large physical network in itself,” the network becomes the ultimate metaphysical metaphor for Syntheists. They view universally entangled phenomena as “the fundamental, not the illusory objects. Nothing occurs independently of something else.”89

85 Ibid., 22. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 21. 88 Ibid., 32. 89 Ibid., 55. 56

Thus, the dividual embodies this reality better than the isolationist individual, because its contingency within a universal network is now quite literally how the subject becomes knowable.

Any meaning produced by this subject must necessarily be immanent, not transcendent, as the latter implies some force outside of what Syntheists regard as a monist universal system.90 With this clearly cybernetic perspective in mind, Syntheism next feels called upon to articulate a new immanent metaphysics, manifest in a new cyberreligion, through which this dividual can create existential meaning.

The fact that Syntheists turn to religion as a mechanism to produce such a metaphysics is crucial. For Syntheists,

…the credible spirituality of our time…can only arise within the confines of the immanent process religion. It is not possible to take other religious and metaphysical alternatives seriously as spiritual projects in the Internet age; they cannot be anything other than guilt-driven nostalgia…or nonsensical superstition.91

Syntheists largely identify as atheists alienated by their previous lack of spirituality. For them, ideally, the internet can be “a god that even those who regard themselves as atheists can devote themselves to.”92 The ultimate goal of the Syntheist metaphysics is to recreate the internet as a god, so they need to justify why exactly religion, which has alienated many in their congregation, is the means to this end. Syntheists try to resolve this tension by simply proclaiming, directly in the title of their first chapter, that “Everything is Religion.” For Syntheists, all humans “are religious, whether we understand it or not,” as at a basic level, “we feel and act religiously…religion is a capacity of sociality, and a socially-constructive capacity.”93 Since they hold that “everything is religion and everyone is a believer…the really interesting question

90 Ibid., 92. 91 Ibid., 170. 92 Ibid., 50. 93 Ibid., 31. 57 which thereby opens up is what to do with God and religion in the Internet age, when all the basic assumptions of our lives and existence are changing.”94 They actively re-define religion, expanding the category so broadly as to make it a universal and essential category, thus carving out a space to re-determine what counts as religion. In doing so, Syntheists hope to push their atheism over its non-creative hump. Atheists, or proto-Syntheists, deny the existence of God and foreclose the artistic and spiritual boon a divine concept has historically provided humanity.

According to their Facebook description: “When you as a modern atheist enter a beautiful cathedral: What makes you so castrated that it prevents you from building something similar?

Syntheism is the answer!”95

It is clear now that for Syntheists, religion, our “capacity of sociality,” primarily “ought to be seen as a social practice.”96 Engendering this drive towards sociality, especially for a diffuse dividual subject, becomes crucial for the new Syntheist metaphysics, which expects this sociality to primarily manifest on the diffuse networks of the internet. “God is no more than the arbitrarily chosen name for the sense of belonging that people seek,” Syntheists claim, and since humans arrived relatively late in the history of all existence, “the Universe obviously needs no preceding divinity in order to exist.”97 “God,” in this view, “is something we humans have created ourselves,” and consequently, Syntheists hold that “we have every reason to expect that the idea of God will undergo additional transformation acts, because social structures continue to change, and because consequently believers will continue to demand more useful things from

God.”98 God is thus a flexible, constructed concept produced in, for, and through shifting social

94 Ibid., 35. 95 “Syntheism.” Facebook. Accessed September 2016. 96 Bard, Syntheism, p. 131; p. 37. 97 Ibid., 186. 98 Ibid., 25. 58 structures over time. Next, we will examine these shifting structures as they appear in

Syntheism’s own metaphysical genealogy of sorts. This lineage of metaphysical transformations is based, fundamentally, on the ways technological advancements have redefined social structures.

For Syntheists, “Metaphysics will always be about power, and it will always use the prevailing symbolic, economic and truth-producing power in these three main roles in the paradigm’s narratives.”99 We have entered a new paradigm recently, the Digital Age or

Informationalism (for Syntheists), leaving behind the capitalist paradigm of the past few centuries. In this previous paradigm, “society clung to humanism and its individualist and atomist ideal right up until the late 20th century.”100 At this point, “the network society emerged with full force and the idea of the network as the new metaphysical foundation caught on.”101

Currently, due to the rapidity with which the world “was digitized, globalized, virtualized, and became interactive,” humans are trapped in a metaphysical space wherein their new virtual constitutions in this network-system is at odds with the tenacious Cartesian ideal of the previous, capitalist paradigm. Thus, the human being must be transformed “from an individual chained to his or her narcissistic ego to an open and mobile dividual in an all-encompassing, gigantic network that is acting more and more like a single…global agent. We call this agent…the

Internet.”102 To justify this view, Syntheists argue that we should “regard all societies in all forms and stages of development as various kinds of information societies,” so that the ultimate

99 Ibid., 47. 100 Ibid., 39. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 49. 59 metaphysical project becomes one of constructing “history as a story of the battle for power over the means of communication.”103

In the Syntheist telling of this particular history, four distinct eras take shape, each with its own “dominant metatechnology” that “plays out its hand regardless of any intentions of its inventor and other serious stakeholders.”104 With communication technologies at their core,

“each and every one of these four information technology complexes has increased the quantity of information available in a given society to a revolutionary extent,” and this information revolution in turn creates “entirely new social hierarchies with entirely new parameters for metaphysics.”105 These four information revolutions are thus described by the Syntheists alongside the social reorganizations they engender, followed by a chart for more clarity:

(1) The tribe’s story is the foundation of paganism and its primitivist power structure. (2) The story of God’s creation and control of the world forms the foundation of monotheism and the feudal power structure. (3) The story of the genesis and perfection of Man as a rational being is the foundation of individualism and the capitalist power structure, while (4) the story of how networks give content and meaning to everything in existence forms the foundations for Syntheism and the informationalist power structure. (1) Paganism uses survival as a metaphysical engine, while (2) monotheism’s metaphysical engine is eternity and that of (3) individualism’s is progress. (4) Syntheism’s metaphysical engine is the event.106

Primitivism Feudalism Capitalism Internet Age Technology Spoken word Written word Printing Press Internet Metaphysical The tribe’s story. The story of The story of the The story of how Narrative God’s creation genesis and networks give and control of perfection of content and the world. Man as a meaning to rational being. everything in *Kant as the existence. prophet of individualism (Syntheism, 85)

103 Ibid., 69. 104 Ibid., 73. 105 Ibid., 70. 106 Ibid., 74. 60

Primitivism Feudalism Capitalism Internet Age Power Primitivist Feudal Capitalist Informationalist Structure

Religious Paganism Monotheism Individualism Syntheism Metanarrative Metaphysical Survival Eternity Progress “The Event” Engine

At first, the only communication technology was the spoken word and the authority it produced in a pagan sphere expressed in physical, enacted socialites. This period is reminiscent of Freud’s description of totemistic religions, but notably less patronizing. The next development is the written word, with which followed the development of laws and a feudalist metaphysics, accompanied by strict dualisms (as between God and Man) which gave these new laws their authority. Next, with the invention of the printing press and further advancements in industrial technologies, came the ideal of the Enlightenment individual who “eliminates God as the cohesive factor for metaphysics…the focus is shifted onto the individual, the idea of Man himself as…the social model.”107 This shift to an intensified humanism provided capitalist development its perfect, progress-seeking subjectivity. This Cartesian shift “requires in itself an unfounded and illogical faith in Man’s innate ability to take in and understand all of life with his limited intellect and imperfect access to information.”108

Finally, with the development and growth of the internet towards the late 1980s and early

1990s, “society is endowed with an environment where holism and generalism are fostered.”

These developments in virtual technologies produced a paradigm “characterized by interactivity as the dominant form of communication, the cyberworld as the geographical arena, attention

107 Ibid., 79. 108 Ibid. 61 rather than capital as the driving force socially, as well as the production, consumption…and social reproduction of media as the main occupation.”109 It is this newest social reconfiguration which requires a clearer metaphysical framework to avoid capitalist-induced entropy, already apparent in the continued dominance of Cartesian, atomized subjectivity, enshrined in neoliberal humanism, in the Digital Age. This virtual hyper-individualization can be evinced by something as benign as someone actively maintaining multiple social media accounts online, which increasingly confers the accounts-holder the prestigious social capital of proven internet savvy.

Syntheism is thus “the logical response to the crisis of humanism. Man cannot replace God, since man is every bit as much of an illusion.”110 As the ultimate post-postmodern narrative,

“Syntheism can be described as one long showdown with all the ideologies that are based on the historical case.”111

2 Quentin Meillassoux: Syntheology as a “speculative materialist” metaphysics

“What is metahistorically radically new in the case of Syntheism—the metaphysics of the Internet Age—is that it is based on contingency rather than necessity as its principle. Syntheism is indeterministic, not deterministic.”112

Before we resume our investigation of the Syntheist metaphysical project, it might behoove us to first examine a philosopher whom Syntheists consider a forefather of their faith.

Quentin Meillassoux is a contemporary French philosopher and former student of Alain Badiou, who provides Syntheism a philosophical precedent for constructing a new metaphysics in Après la finitude or After Finitude. Meillassoux is interested in materialism, specifically in conceptualizing a kind of materialism that could ground a metaphysical narrative without relying

109 Ibid., 81. 110 Ibid., 65. 111 Ibid., 89. 112 Ibid., 73. 62 on the dogmatism and necessity which characterized modern metaphysics, but which also reclaims the power of such a metaphysics in an increasingly postmodern, deconstruction-based field. In After Finitude, Meillassoux emphasizes the necessity of contingency as the foundational principle for this new kind of materialist metaphysics, one which can mediate the problematic modern/postmodern divide. This new “speculative materialism” articulates a metaphysical approach based not on the universal necessity of phenomena dictated by some power and/or singular Truth, as modernism embraces and postmodernism wholly rejects, but on their inherent contingency. Meillassoux’s influence on Syntheology will become more apparent later in this chapter when we describe the latter in detail. Until then, it will be useful to briefly describe

Meillassoux’s most relevant contributions to metaphysical projects, like Syntheism, which attempt to describe abstract philosophical concepts like being, knowing, identity, time, and space with regards to their theoretical origins. We will predominantly use After Finitude, focusing on

Meillassoux’s development of subject/object relationality, his critique of correlationism, and speculative materialism. Each of these contributions directly influences the Syntheological project which this chapter hopes to uncover.

Subject/Object Relationality Meillassoux opens After Finitude at the very beginning of the matter for any philosophical project—namely, with the question of whether thought is capable of outstripping the limitations of its embodiment. Meillassoux writes that “the sensible is neither simply ‘in me’ in the manner of a dream, nor simply ‘in the thing’ in the manner of an intrinsic property.”113 In a reflexive move, what can be thought is not purely a product of the subject or the object of thought alone, but arises from “the very relation between the thing and I.”114 Although there are

113 Meillassoux, After Finitude. p. 2. 114 Ibid. 63 certain aspects of objects which exist without a subject to perceive them necessarily, he takes to task the assumption that subject/object relationality can is inconsequential. The claim that

“thought is capable of discriminating between those properties of the world which are a function of our relation to it, and those properties of the world as it is ‘in itself’,” is a thesis that has become “indefensible, and this not only since Kant, but even since Berkeley.”115 Meillassoux argues that “thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is ‘in itself’ to the world as it is ‘for us’.”116 Thus, even in mathematical determinations, “the relation is primary,” and transcendental knowledge (in the Kantian sense) is inherently fraught.117

Even though thought is inherently relational, however, Meillassoux is not denying that objects can exist without some subject to perceive them. In fact, all he is doing is emphasizing that philosophers are constrained in some sense, as their work is the work of thought.

Postmodern philosophers are particularly aware of this precondigion, and Meillassoux bemoans how “contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers.”118 Being so preoccupied with the limitations of their own subjectivities, philosophers have lost touch with the transcendent, with “that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not.”119 This has grave implications for the project of metaphysical contemplation, as the dogmatism which inspired a Kantian conception of the inaccessibility of the transcendent has ironically resulted in the “denial of a loss concomitant with the abandonment of dogmatism.”120 The Kantian emphasis on what Meillassoux calls

115 Ibid., 3. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid., 4. 118 Ibid., 7. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 64

“correlationism” has produced a skeptical foreclosure on the validity of any metaphysics

(including religious metanarratives) which invokes a transcendental object, or even just any object that can exist outside of the subject thinking it. Correlationism and Meillassoux’s critique of it will be further examined below.

Correlationism Meillassoux offers multiple definitions of this term, and I think that each one provides us a different entry-point into this useful concept. In that vein, I provide a few of these definitions and then analyze Meillassoux’s critique of this trend in post-Kantian metaphysics. Early on,

Meillassoux defines correlation as “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”121 He uses the distinction between primary and secondary qualities to represent the root of correlationism, which is the assumption that “the ‘subjectivation’ of sensible properties (the emphasis on their essential link to the presence of a subject) could be restricted to the object’s sensible determinations, rather than extended to all its conceivable properties.”122 If one sees an orange, for example, one assumes based on their sensory perception of sight that that orange is there, but conditions (or even dismisses wholesale) this knowledge by acknowledging that in seeing the orange, the subject only knows that they have seen it—not necessarily that it is there without their sight of the fruit. Meillassoux describes this correlationist two step below:

If one calls the “correlationist circle” the argument according to which one cannot think the in-itself without entering into a vicious circle, thereby immediately contradicting oneself…[which is as follows:] it would be naïve to think of the subject and the object as two separately subsisting entities whose relation is only subsequently added to them. On the contrary, the relation is in some sense primary: the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world.123

121 Ibid., 5. 122 Ibid., 2. 123 Ibid., 5. 65

Meillassoux offers one last definition:

Correlationism rests on an argument as simple as it is powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without givenness of X, and no theory about X without a positing of X. If you speak about something you speak about something that is given to you, and posited by you. Consequently, the sentence ‘X is’, means: ‘X is the correlate of thinking’ in a Cartesian sense. That is: X is the correlate of an affection, or a perception of a conception, or of any given subjective act. To be is to be a correlate, a term of a correlation.124

Thus, the correlationist circle means never being able to “grasp an object without a subject, but not being able to grasp the subject independently either.”125 This means that relation of object and subject is primary, but in a way that makes any return to a pre-

Cartesian ontology hard to swallow. There arises through Meillassoux’s articulation of correlationism an “impasse between Kantian correlationism and dogmatism” that requires a philosophy which is “after finitude.”126 This philosophy must maintain the pre-

Cartesian sway of metaphysics, salvaging its impact from Kantian correlationism without falling back into its un(dis)provable, transcendence-based dogmatism. Meillassoux is attempting to bridge the gap between meaning received from a transcendent, unquestionable and external authority, and meaning produced only in the immanent, limited knowledge of an object as it can be immediately known. His new approach should create an immanent transcendence, one in which there are no necessarily primary or secondary qualities, nothing which posits a “necessary being” that “must absolutely be because it is the way it is.”127 It is clear that Meillassoux means here Kant’s thing in-

124 Meillassoux, Quentin. From “Speculative Realism: A One-Day Workshop.” Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development. Vol. III, London: Goldsmiths, University of London, 2007. p. 409. Emphasis added. 125Aesthetics After Finitude (Reading Group). “Meillassoux’s Speculative Materialism.” Australia: University of South Wales, 2013. aestheticsafterfinitude.blogspot.com/2013/02/meillassouxs-speculative-materialism.html. 126 Ibid. 127 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 33. 66 itself, the necessary being that is God. Meillassoux’s new way of thinking should thus recuperate a philosophy of the absolute without relying on dogmatism.

Meillassoux claims that “the virtue of transcendentalism does not lie in rendering realism illusory, but in rendering it astonishing, i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic.”128 The Kantian influences on contemporary philosophers has led to the development of “strong correlationism”: “it is unthinkable that the unthinkable be impossible.”129 This strong correlationism, which is an intensification of

Kantian correlationism, is what allows religious belief to go unquestioned, mirroring within theology this shift “from the unknowability of the thing-in-itself to its unthinkability.”130 In this way, even the most atheist of postmodern philosophers, insofar as they maintain strong correlationism, facilitate the end of metaphysics. “By forbidding reason any claim to the absolute,” Meillassoux argues, “the end of metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religion…even atheism…is reduced to a mere belief, and hence to a religion, albeit of the nihilist kind.”131 In this turn of events, “faith is pitched against faith…the de-absolutization of thought boils down to the mobilization of a fideist argument.”132 The extreme skepticism of strong correlationism, meaning the unthinkability of anything as being in-itself, becomes “an authentic fideism…in a form that has become ‘essential’, which is to say, one that has shrugged off every particular obedience to a determinate belief system…it is religiosity as such.”133 Meillassoux thus

128 Ibid., 41. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 44. 131 Ibid., 45. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid., 46. 67 critiques correlationism ultimately as marking the end of metaphysics, one “which, being skeptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics.”134

Speculative Materialism Metaphysics is not dead for Meillassoux. He believes that it can still be a useful philosophical exercise and should be resuscitated, but this requires a reconfiguring of philosophical approach. Contemporary philosophy must move beyond correlationism in order to step out of the correlationist circle and reclaim a metaphysics without dogmatism. Doing so, arguably and ironically, will produce a philosophy that is truly atheistic, in that it avoids fideism in a way that modern atheism, being itself based on belief in God’s non-existence, cannot. Meillassoux’s alternative philosophical method is called speculative materialism. Speculative materialism differs from correlationism because “instead of saying that the in-itself could actually be anything whatsoever without anyone knowing what, we maintain that the in-itself could be anything whatsoever and that we know this.”135 While the correlationist is “incapable of disqualifying any hypothesis about the nature of the absolute,” the speculative materialist

“knows two things that the skeptic does not: first, that contingency is necessary, and hence eternal; second, that contingency alone is necessary.”136

Meillassoux thus moves away from the “facticity” which undergirds Kantian correlationism (the notion that the structures which animate the world can be described but not comprehended), towards inescapable contingency (that physical laws are indifferent to any subject perceiving them, whether that subject exists or not). In this way,

134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 65. 136 Ibid. 68 speculative materialism is supposed to transform correlationism’s ignorance of things in- themselves, the unknowability mentioned earlier, into a kind of absolute recognition that things in-themselves not only exist, but exist outside of reason. They are absolutely contingent, and not just on our ability to think them but beyond this limitation.

Meillassoux thus reconciles metaphysics from dogmatism and correlationism alike, by providing speculative materialism as a means for thinking beyond the “victorious critique of ideologies [which] has been transformed into a renewed argument for blind faith.”137

ù ù ù

Meillassoux’s work, like many of his French philosophical influences, can sometimes be hard to articulate concisely. This is in large part because of the heft of the traditions he attempts to move beyond, as well as their encrustment within the field of philosophy more generally.

There is much in Meillassoux which the Syntheists echo back and this will become clearer as we progress through this chapter. It will be useful now, before moving on to Syntheology itself, to briefly bring the two into conversation. Most notably, Meillassoux extensively criticizes what the

Syntheists call the “correlationist narrative” that leads to the reinscription of Cartesian subjectivities.138 The fideism that Meillassoux views modern atheists and postmodern philosophers as expressing is exactly the same fideism that irritates the Syntheists, so much so that they take it upon themselves to articulate a metaphysical system which utilizes

Meillassoux’s speculative materialism to make immanent the contingency of things in- themselves. God as some external, transcendental, and ultimately unknowable entity is rejected

137 Ibid., 49. 138 Syntheism, p. 101. 69 in Syntheist metaphysics. Instead, the most ultimate thing in-itself, God, is rendered material in

Syntheology, becoming a self-consciously entity.

Since everything is contingent and nothing is necessary (beyond this contingency) according to Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, Syntheists find absolutely nothing wrong with their (a)theological project, and their rejection of dogmatism is reflected in their openness to the rejection of their own metaphysics. Although they describe their project as “the only credible metaphysical system for the intellectual human being of the third millennium,” Syntheists also reject the coercive element of dogmatic metaphysics, one which has alienated Syntheists from

“traditional” religions in the first place. To emphasize again Meillassoux’s influence on this project, I have reproduced the quote from Syntheism which opens this section: “What is metahistorically radically new in the case of Syntheism—the metaphysics of the Internet Age— is that it is based on contingency rather than necessity as its principle. Syntheism is indeterministic, not deterministic.”139

3 Contextualizing Syntheology

“What we now call syntheistic systems assume that all gods are necessary, human constructs; historically determined projections on existence that engender supra- objects that are shaped by and adapted to the social situation.”140

In their own words, Syntheism “stands out as the only credible metaphysical system for the intellectual human being of the third millennium.”141 To understand this metaphysical system, we have to understand what exactly Syntheism is supposed to be synthesizing. To do so, we will begin our exploration of their metaphysics with a discussion of their atheism, especially

139 Ibid., 73. 140 Ibid., 41. 141 Ibid., 101. 70 their belief that Syntheism is not only a theism, but atheism’s “logical conclusion, its historical and intellectual deepening.”142 As a form of “radical atheism”, Syntheist theology strives to take classical atheism a step beyond its pure negation of God (or, more broadly, of a transcendental source of existential meaning), what Meillassoux also decries as atheism’s unwitting fideism, precisely by enacting a productive or creative atheism.143 Next, we will parse out their own definition of metaphysics, using Syntheism as a guide to explore their perception of the current metaphysical landscape of the Internet Age. Syntheists clearly perceive a lack in this landscape, one which results specifically from blind faith in the scientific rationalist, post-Enlightenment individual who eschews the power of metanarrative, especially that of religious identity.

Syntheism tries to inflect the Internet Age by producing this power for it, creating its own metanarrative which converts metaphysics to theology in order to “[take] advantage of metaphysics’ unique opportunity to imagine existence to its utmost limit.”144 Finally, we will turn to the actual construction of a Syntheology, analyzing Syntheist deities and the roles they play in this new, “credible” system.

Syntheism’s Synthesis

Bard calls Syntheism a “radicalized atheist ideology,” which “offers a possibility for the atheist to go further and uncompromisingly deepen [their] atheism.”145 This is an interesting way to describe a religious ideology, one which animates a religious community. Atheism, especially the so-called New Atheism of the most recent era (represented largely by white, male scientists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris), is often assumed not only to be

142 Ibid., 318. 143 Ibid., 96. 144 Ibid., 317. 145 Ibid., 91. 71 rabidly anti-God, but also anti-religion. This kind of atheism, which Syntheism implies is superficial and undeveloped, rejects the metanarrative sway of religious belief as the postmodern/deconstructed subject does, while maintaining the validity of the scientific rationalist, Cartesian individual it has internalized. This tension often produces existential confusion, spiritual alienation, and a disenchanted worldview.

Atheism lends itself dangerously to the illusionary correlationism Meillassoux attacks in

After Finititude, and the replacement of the transcendent God of “traditional” religion with an omnipotent, post-Nietzschean humanism further highlights the illusion. In an excellent lecture entitled Reason, Faith, and Revolution, Terry Eagleton notes that the notion of total self- authorship which followed the subsumption of theology (God) by scientific reason (Man) is actually “the bourgeois fantasy par excellence.”146 Eagleton, like the Syntheists, places the blame for the disenchanted tenor of modern society in an “advanced capitalist system” which is

“inherently atheistic”.147 He argues that “a society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut for the kind of depth where theological questions can even be properly raised,” and he poignantly asks, “What on earth would be the point of God in such a setup?”148

This stark atheist backdrop is not foreign to Syntheists. In fact, Syntheists refer to themselves and their target audience as spiritual atheists. Eagleton can help us understanding why these spiritual atheists rely so deeply on creating a God for the Internet Age when he writes that in this advanced capitalist system, “there are those for whom the spectacular successes of science have rendered religion redundant; and there are others for whom those successes spring

146 Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections of the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series). New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. p. 16. 147 Ibid., 39. 148 Ibid., 39-40. 72 from a fundamental fact…which is itself cause for metaphysical reflection.”149 Like Meillassoux,

Syntheists rely on scientific knowledge not to deny the viability of something beyond, something sacred and “other”, but to confirm its inherent possibility. Syntheists view religion as an attempt at accounting for the “immensity of experience,” an immensity which “has neither shrunk physically nor become any less fantastic as a result of the last century’s overwhelming scientific advances.”150 As such, they believe that “logically, we ought to be considerably more religious now than ever before. The miracle of reality is constantly becoming ever more fascinating.”151

This attitude that increasing scientific knowledge should justify and bolster spirituality leads

Syntheists to attempt their synthesis. “If history is viewed as a Hegelian dialectics,” they posit,

“we see a clear pattern: monotheism is the thesis, individualism is the antithesis, and Syntheism is the synthesis…a consequence of the fact that theism and atheism can never meet.”152 Classical atheism and theism do share one negative quality which Syntheism hopes to eradicate—both have a “negative attitude towards immanent life.”153 Syntheism is, at its most basic account, an attempt to sacralize immanent reality without either relying on the externalized transcendence of theism, or succumbing to the immanent cynicism of atheism.

It is important to note how Syntheism is constantly constructed and referred to as productive, active, and creative while atheism necessarily lacks its own substance. Syntheists claims that “Atheism is of course reactive in nature and a pure negation; it has no content in itself.”154 Thus, where classical atheism “is merely reactive…Syntheist atheism is active and thereby offers an existential substance which classical atheism lacks,” specifically in their

149 Ibid., 12. 150 Syntheism., p. 321. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid., 92. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid., 318. 73 constructed theology.155 This Syntheology will supposedly take atheist cynicism and convert it into “Syntheist affirmation,” since Syntheism “picks up mankind in precisely the immanence where atheism has abandoned him and makes him apprehend the immanent as the truly holy and divine without any nostalgic longing for transcendentalism at all.”156 Classical atheism not only maintains that “God does not exist, it also presumes that God cannot exist.”157 Syntheist atheism maintains that “God might well exist…quite regardless of whether or not there is an internarcissistic human participant in the process [of perceiving God].”158 Syntheism thus “picks up” and “makes” the atheist aware of this possibility, what Meillassoux describes as the contingency apparent when one emphasizes ancestrality above human existence, and in doing so attempts to create a “Lacanian theology.”159 This theology centralizes the imaginary “Other” as it inspires ontological self-definition, utilizing metaphysics’ capacity for producing “hopes, visions, utopias, and alternative worlds” beyond the mirror-self.160 To understand how, we will describe Syntheist metaphysics and its link to theology in the following section.

Metaphysics as Alternative: How Existential Indeterminism Produces Syntheology

Metaphysics means something very specific to Syntheists, and understanding their definitions will clarify much of why they decide to construct their belief system as they do.

Remember that the Syntheist subject is divorced from the modern individual, instead reflecting the contingency and radical interdependence of its constitution as a “dividual.” Relatedly,

Syntheists view metaphysics not as another abstract set of rules or laws which compartmentalize,

155 Ibid. 156 Ibid., 92. 157 Ibid., 152. 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid., 136. 160 Ibid., 125. 74 order, and manage reality, but actually “the opposite of the law.”161 Metaphysics serves only one real purpose—to provide a society with a conceptual space in which the “constant production of hope, visions, utopias, and alternative worlds” can be undertaken in order to better understand reality and provide it a utopic model to work towards realizing.162 “A society without metaphysics,” in this view, “immediately and without resistance submits to the totalitarian law” because it cannot “imagine any alternative[s].”163

Eagleton claims that theologians “are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanation possible.”164 He asks, “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity, and intelligibility come from?”165 According to Syntheism, a truly metaphysical system, which produces infinite alternate realities to highlight the contingency of reality as it stands, foregrounds a truly theological project, which asks the kinds of questions Eagleton poses.

Syntheists use Lacan as a descriptive vehicle for this process, describing how the Lacanian subject identifies with its mirror reflection, developing an “imaginary feeling of overview and control…the subject deifies itself.”166 This is crucial to understand, because they read the reflected “Other” of Lacanian psychoanalysis as “just another name for theology’s God.”167

Accordingly, Syntheism is rendered “the doctrine of how and where we find a pedestal for the other within our own paradigm.”168 They thus refer to their metaphysical system as a “Lacanian theology,” and they argue that ultimately, “The question is not whether we need a Lacanian

161 Ibid. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid. 164 Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, p. 11. 165 Ibid. 166 Syntheism, p. 136. 167 Ibid. 168 Ibid. 75 theology for the Internet age…but rather exactly which Lacanian theology is relevant and credible for the dynamic environment which frames and determines our current existence.”169

Syntheists acknowledge that metaphysics is a constructed framework for meaning- production and, just like God, they view it as a historical necessity, an unavoidable function of human existence. “To put it plainly,” they write, “it is actually impossible to think ourselves past the ego experience.”170 They decry epistemological nativism, or the belief that one does not believe in anything at all “but that they definitely know and base all their decision-making on this knowing.”171 Because humans cannot think past the ego experience, effectively “all people, whether they admit it or not, by necessity are believers.”172 This belief is not necessarily a bad thing; it is actually potentially salvific. “When we finally do choose to accept the ego that we have just revealed to be an illusory trick,” Syntheists hold, “we get access to all the dazzling metaphysics. We believe consciously against our better judgment, and this we do wisely.”173 The ego, like God, represents a productive fiction, one that we can acknowledge as fictive while still gleaming existential meaning through it. “Without a fictive but nonetheless highly functional node…the world view does not hang together,” and thus for Syntheists, the network becomes the newest functional node for the metaphysics of the Internet age.174 Virtual subcultures on the

Internet thus “replace the Church’s and nation’s identity-bearing functions from the previous

[metaphysical] paradigms,” which we discussed previously as tribal, feudal, and capitalist.175

169 Ibid. 170 Ibid., 313. 171 Ibid., 312. 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid., 314. 174 Ibid., 313. 175 Ibid., 89. 76

The indeterminacy and contingency of the Internet, as reflected by its “dividual-driven subcultures in vast quantities,” provides the inspiration for Syntheism’s articulation of the newest metaphysical paradigm within their genealogy. According to them, “every moment in time and every point in space accommodates an enormous number of potential events,” and this universal indeterminism throws causal metaphysics into suspicion.176 Since the universe in this view generates “a steady stream of emergences,” none of which are necessary or essential, a metaphysical narrative which best articulates this aspect of reality must find existential meaning in an equally indeterminate model. For Syntheism, the internet provides this model of the thoroughly contingent nature of the greater universe, as the internet consists of interspersed, interconnected systems which are infinitely expanding with each new “link.” The internet thus provides a structural metaphor in which the Syntheistic dividual is both produced and reinforced, and now requires “a divinity which (naturally) has not created man…but rather a god who in the first instance allows itself to be created by Man only to later…recreate Man.”177

But why do Syntheists feel this need to create such a divinity for the internet? Why should spiritual atheists be the ones to take up this task? Syntheists believe that religion, which they define as “everything”, has served a particular ontological function in every single human society. A religious capacity is an essential human quality for Syntheists, who write that “Man can never be liberated from religion unless he ceases to be human, because humankind produces gods at the same moment that she prioritizes anything at all in existence ahead of something else.”178 Religious meaning or depth, in this view, is akin to enacting a valuation on the indeterminacy of reality—essentially, sacrilizing the immanent without relying on some

176 Ibid., 91. 177 Ibid., 137. 178 Ibid., 138. 77 transcendental source or intervention. When Syntheists are asked if God exists, they are likely to answer that unquestionably, “gods exist in [a] deeper sense.”179 Although they describe

Syntheism as radical atheism, they admit that “the subconscious mind can never accept any kind of atheism.”180 At the same time, the kind of God Syntheists insist exists in a deeper sense, the kind that the subconscious mind in the Informationalist age might produce, cannot be one individual divinity, a concrete and causal God in which “we [can] place the repressed hope of self-dissolution and communion with being.”181

The Syntheist divinity needs to be able to encompass constant “philosophical creation,” embodying various redesigns of “models of fleeting reality in a never-ending flow.”182 When the spiritual atheist does not base their re-theological productions on contingency, when determinism is conflated with God, “we are thus mercilessly cast back into the arms of the pre-atheist god: the patriarchal creator…[and] his necessary creator, and this creator’s creator…but,” in

Meillassoux’s contingent universe, “no such pre-atheist god exists.”183 Syntheists thus try to attend to the inherent tension of their atheism requiring a guiding theology by arguing that

“nothing [is] wrong with or even particularly remarkable about talking about God as an actual phenomenon; not as long as we regard God as a borrowed illusion in the existential equation,” just like the ego.184 In the Syntheist paradigm, “God is neither more nor less than the name of the empty backdrop against which the equally empty ego constructs its more or less functional fantasy world filled with fabricated meaning.”185 This sentiment is not a cynical one but a

179 Ibid. 180 Ibid. 181 Ibid., 139. 182 Ibid., 158. 183 Ibid., 159. 184 Ibid. 185 Ibid. 78 liberatory one—it is through this process of inventing divinity to produce existential substance that the sacredness of immanent life trounces any kind of causal, transcendental, ultimately external intervention. Consciously creating God as a contingent concept, ultimately reflects “the way in which [people] create meaning: we invent it.”186

Theology as “Utopology”

Syntheists chart out the development of human societies in terms of how technological advancements have inspired the production of metanarratives to account for the ways those technologies impact societal organization, meaning production, and loci of authority. Syntheists refer to the internet age as Informationalism, and they elevate the network as its most fundamental metaphysical idea in this newest period of technological development. In speaking of networks in this register, Syntheists argue that they are in fact “theologizing God’s most recent reincarnation in the form of the network.”187 God is not necessary to the network as a metaphysical concept, but it is not incongruous either. “Regardless of whether we introduce divinities or not in Syntheist metaphysics,” Syntheists note, “the actual process is finally about taking advantage of metaphysics’ unique opportunity to imagine existence to its utmost limit.”188

Syntheology takes on a mystical character in this sense, as it tries to imagine the most contingent and yet comprehensive perfection of existence made possible now with the internet. “To convert metaphysics into theology, to think about God, is thus…thinking one’s way forth to the outermost horizon of the time in which one is living.”189

186 Ibid., 315. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid., 317. 189 Ibid. 79

God is not essential to this project, but rather in a Feuerbachian sense serves as “the name of the surface on which to project the meaning and purpose of everything.”190 God as a concept is thus converted into utopia itself, an “imagined backdrop located in the future—a backdrop that nourishes all of humanity’s dreams and aspirations.”191 Syntheology is at its roots a “utopology”, because it strives to leave theology’s “traditional hermeneutic search for a meaning that is externally produced in advance” in order to claim a more “central role as the intellectual engine for Man’s internal production of credible and functional utopias.”192 If Syntheism is supposed to be the only credible metaphysical paradigm for Digitality, it is because it views theology as critically productive, “building longed-for and credible gods centered in, for example, physics, psychoanalysis, and utopianism.”193

Meillassoux’s influence is clear in the Syntheist rendering of theology’s nature and purpose. Utopia is made possible through Meillassoux’s rejection of the “in-itself” of correlationism and his embrace of speculative materialism in its stead. This speculative materialism claims first that there is something absolute that can be accessed (hence

“speculative”), but that absolute reality is an “entity without thought,” and because it exists without thought, it can exist regardless of the limits of comprehension (hence “materialism”).194

Just as Syntheism regards the universe as an infinite series of contingent emergences,

Meillassoux also recognizes “this super-immensity of the chaotic virtual that allows the impeccable stability of the visible world.”195 Meillassoux very purposefully shifts the register from one in which the absolute is regarded as an infinite actuality to one in which the absolute is

190 Ibid. 191 Ibid. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid. 194 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 36. 195 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 111. 80 exactly this immensity of the virtual, this inescapable web of contingent energies and emergences. Chaos for Meillassoux opposes necessity and demonstrates the lawlessness, the contingency in other words, of everything. Recognition of the non-necessity of the absolute impacts how we are able to conceptualize it, lending more credibility in Meillassoux’s view to those metaphysical paradigms which emphasize the contingency of the absolute. Because such a paradigm must necessarily contend with the immensity of the virtual, or the infinite possible configurations of things in a contingent universe, Meillassoux rejects the necessitarian bent of

Kantian, correlationist metaphysics in favor of more consciously self-constructed frameworks.

The Syntheists, who recognize Meillassoux as a Syntheist forefather, are inspired by this openness to constructing a contingent metaphysics, and read Meillassoux as embracing the creative utility of utopia in this endeavor. In L’Utopie et les Utopies, Raymond Ruyer describes utopia as the description of the world but constituted on different principles than those manifest in reality.196 Utopias are constructed on, and thus emphasize, the arbitrariness of the universe as it currently stands, blending the normal with the virtual to make us question the seeming validity of reality as it is while inclining us towards how reality can potentially be in the future.

Relatedly, utopias are not confined or specific, but experimental and inventive. Utopic thinking, the constructing of social and political imaginaries, produces “a sort of social uncertainty, a wavering of social instinct, a lack of polarization of myth.”197 Utopias are not escapist, but constructive: they represent an instability and non-givenness that absolutism usually obscures while fleshing out the coordinates of another possible reality beyond the confines of this one.

Syntheists take this openness to utopia in Meillassoux’s work and run with it. They view him as advocating “the thesis that the constant contingency that characterizes existence must be

196 Ruyer, Raymond. L’Utopie et les Utopies. In Population, 6ᵉ année, n°1, 1951. p. 3. 197 Ibid., 5. 81 regarded as the logical opening for a possible future God.”198 Meillassoux thus offers an alternative direction of “religion’s passions” which differs from atheism: “it is the utopia and not the fall of Man in classical religion that must be won back.”199

Syntheology is thus a practice in constructing a God-as-utopia that even modern atheists can have believe in. “Meillassoux’s God, as a synonym for the utopia,” they claim, “is of course

Syntheism’s Syntheos [their main deity].”200 Religion’s goal has now become “winning back the utopia and turning it into an immanent divinity,” which has become “with contemporary physics’ revolutionary advances, quite plausible.”201 Utopias are constructed, and thus so is God. “By thinking of God as something created rather than something creating,” Syntheists reflect

Meillassoux’s rejection of “classical” religion as well as his future-oriented perspective. Through viewing God as “something that only show itself in the future rather then something that precedes and brings forth existence…for the first time God can be regarded as internal and not external in relation to the utopia, that is as the utopia personified.”202 God needs to be placed forever in the future and yet must be rendered immanent, because utopias are predicated on the features (especially the shortcomings) of our current reality. So, God becomes something “virtual rather than potential; neither possible nor impossible, but contingent.”203

Meillassoux views the demystification or disenchantment of the particularly postmodern impulse towards deconstruction as “paralyzing for mankind, making him incapable of conceiving of the utopia, thereby also incapable of formulating the vision, and in this way cultivating hope

198 Bard, Syntheism, p. 93. 199 Ibid. 200 Ibid., 93. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid., 94. 82 for the future.”204 However, turning back to a transcendental god in the contemporary world is not re-enchanting, but for Meillassoux “the real blasphemy and idolatry.”205 Thus, Syntheists take it upon themselves to try to create exactly the kind of contingent theology that thaws the paralysis of atheism based on deconstruction of God/sacrality, without falling into the trap of upholding a utopia that is ultimately inaccessible because it is transcendent. In the following subsection, we will describe the contours of this new contingent, immanent, and inherently utopic Syntheology.

4 The Syntheological Pyramid: Atheos, Pantheos, Entheos, and Syntheos

In previous sections, we have described how Syntheists view religion as inherently social, and its object of worship, God, as the convergence of three distinct (yet embedded) elements: (1) a metaphysics predetermined by the sociological impacts of technological developments, (2) an anthropomorphic product and projection, and (3) an expression of utopia. Now, we will turn to

Chapter 4 of Syntheism, which describes the God(s) Syntheism produces in their metaphysical paradigm for the Internet Age, in which the cybernetic dividual becomes a Syntheist agent through their belief in Syntheos. First, we will map out the four Syntheist divinities and chart their interconnectivities. Armed with this basic outline of their “Syntheological pyramid”, we will then attempt to describe the kind of faith required in such a system in the following subsection. Ultimately, understanding their own conception of their theological system will help us better comprehend what actions and ethics a devout Syntheist should cull from these divinities

(the focus of the following chapter). The only people who can truly gauge whether Syntheism provides a credible metaphysics for otherwise disaffected, religiously-alienated atheists are these

204 Ibid. 205 Ibid. 83 atheists themselves, and so I will avoid reading Syntheist doctrine through a valuating lens.

Rather, I hope only to illuminate their Syntheology as they describe it in their main text to help us further appreciate this novel (a)theological project.

There are not one but four divinities in Syntheology which each represent “the personifications of the four supraphenomena that surround the informationalist human being.”206

These four divinities, also referred to as “Syntheological concepts”, were crucially created not by a single author but by multiple, virtual authors on the internet. This “ironic polytheism” was developed “in a participatory and intersubjective process in a Syntheist online forum.”207 It thus lacks “an original dividual author…the movement has thus agreed as a collective on these names together.”208 The four divinities of Syntheism are “immanent, finite and mortal, rather than transcendent, eternal and immortal, like traditional gods.”209 This is because Syntheists believe that “mortal creatures in a finite universe can only create mortal and finite divinities,” and so an immortal and infinite god “created by mortals” becomes “an absurdity.”210

These divinites are most simply “named projections of existence,” and thus each one of them maps onto a specific existential experience or quality. Atheos both is and represents “the potentiality”, Pantheos is/represents “the actuality”, Entheos is/represents “the transcendence”, and Syntheos is/represents “the virtuality” of human existence.211 These four projections are

“creative eternalizations of the void, the cosmos, the difference, and utopia,” respectively, and

Syntheists use these categories “for constructing a functional, relevant, and in the deepest sense

206 Ibid., 142. 207 Ibid. 208 Ibid. 209 Ibid., 145. 210 Ibid. 211 Ibid., 142. 84 of the word, credible metaphysics.”212 They are all entirely immanent, because each Syntheist divinity is only a “figment of the brain of some kind, but highly consciously created and creative as such.”213

Each divinity will be further articulated below, as well as its seasonal marker according to Syntheist cosmology. First, it might be useful to describe their relations to one another before expanding on each one separately. According to Syntheism,

(1) Atheos is the void that generates the repetitious drive. (2) Pantheos is the cosmos that generates desire that is always on the hunt and never entirely satisfied. (3) Entheos is the transcendence within the immanence, the engine behind all change, difference and diversity. (4) Syntheos is the divine dissolution of the self in the collective, of the self in the cosmos, the sacred meeting between bodies and minds…[the] healing (whole-making) syntheology.214

Atheos occupies one end of a dialectic, Pantheos the other. Entheos actively navigates the middle ground between the two, while Syntheos represents the top of the pyramid, a utopian space of singularity in which previously dichotomous aspects of existence (like mind/body duality, for example) are subsumed by something greater. Atheos is nihilistic and thus ironically “motivates and drives the religious impulse,” while Pantheos is Spinozist and represents this impulse’s

“horizon” (in which every part of the universe is sacred). Entheos is the religious impulse itself, while Syntheos represents “the moment when the impulse reaches its target and religion is realized as pure religion.”215 Syntheos, in other words, represents “the complete symbol in itself,” drawn by people who “once again in history, unabashed, and this time also consciously, create gods.”216 In its constructedness, its immanence in other words, the most totalizing deity of

212 Ibid., 144. 213 Ibid., 145. 214 Ibid., 154. 215 Ibid. 216 Ibid., 163. 85

Syntheism thus represents “perception’s attempt to convert the chaos of existence into religion…literally the pure religion…religion as religion in its innermost essence.”217

Atheos

“And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Aphorism 146)218

Atheos represents “the god of the void or the black hole.” It is a projection of the “zero position of existence, the existential rather than the physical nothingness.”219 By conceptualizing this element of existence, its emptiness, as a distinct element of existence and not its total characterization, Syntheists guard themselves from the more hopelessly nihilistic tendencies of atheism. Nietzsche’s void is rendered “an anthropocentric illusion,” and naming this void

Antheos, demarcating it and implying its distinction from other aspects of existence, both legitimizes and deemphasizes its existential significance.220 Syntheists describe Atheos as

“Hegel’s god” and they celebrate him “at midwinter…[which] is the celebration of the

Universe’s existential necessity.”221 Antheos thus represents the void, but also the fact that the void is comprehended by something, and thus something (rather than nothing) exists. Atheos ironically represents a life-affirmation in ways that nihilism inherently rejects.

Pantheos

“God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.” -Baruch Spinoza, Ethics222

217 Ibid., 161. 218 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, from Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Trans. and Ed. Kaufmann, Walter. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2000. p. 279. 219 Ibid., 145. 220 Ibid. 221 Ibid., 146. 222 Spinoza, Ethica, p. 62. 86

Starting this section with three Baruch Spinoza quotes is fitting, because Pantheos is

“Spinoza’s god” according to Syntheism.223 Pantheos is similar to pantheism in that it is the divine quality “manifested in the Universe”224. It represents the Universe itself as divine, and so it encompasses God as “immanent rather than transcendent…God is physics and physics is

God.”225 Unlike the perceived distinction between Romantic and scientific rationalist sources of enchantment, there is no distinction within Pantheos—both nature and science are sacred, because they are necessarily linked and interdependent in a contingent universe. Pantheos thus represents “infinite multiplicity beyond infinite multiplicity, the multiplicities as the One.”226

Syntheists celebrate Pantheos “at midsummer, which is followed by the Panthea quarter” of the year.227

Entheos

This projection is arguably the busiest, most multifaceted of the four. It means “the God from within” in ancient Greek, and is supposed to represent how “we are dividuals and not individuals…[it] is the difference as a divinity.”228 This difference among the interdependent parts of a system which produce dividuals (instead of individuated, atomized individuals) is not only a difference in space or embodiment but also in time. Enheos thus also represents “the historical differentiation as divinity.”229 As “the Syntheist agent’s god,” it is the divinity of time and duration, “the name of the constant repetition of the difference itself, that which Nietzsche

223 Ibid. 224 Ibid., 96. 225 Ibid., 146. 226 Ibid. 227 Ibid. 228 Ibid., 147. 229 Ibid. 87 and Deleuze call the eternal return of the same.”230 As an incessantly active deity, Entheos symbolizes the ethical obligations for Syntheists, which will be described in the following chapter. Entheos represents the “borderland between Antheos and Pantheos,” and can also be seen as the “oscillation between Taoism’s yin and yang.”231 As this constant oscillation between the profound emptiness and immensity of existence, Entheos also represents “the divinity of the sublime and of art, [what] Sigmund Freud calls the oceanic feeling.”232 It is also, unsurprisingly perhaps, “the divinity we encounter in the psychedelic experience.”233 The patron saints of

Entheos are “Heraclitus and Lao Tzu,” and Syntheists celebrate it during “the spring equinox…the Syntheist calendar’s new year.”234

Syntheos

This final divine projection of existence is the crown jewel of Syntheology. It is the symbol of utopia par excellence, and serves as the “roof above the Antheos-Entheos-Pantheos pyramid…[it] binds the other three divinities together and completes the Syntheological pyramid.”235 Syntheos represents “the divinity of the collective, humanity, the future, creativity, dreams, aspirations, visions, and utopias.”236 Crucially, Syntheos does not represent one specific utopian vision, but the whole category of utopia. It encompasses as many utopian iterations as can be produced. Syntheos is thus itself infinite and infinitely contingent. Syntheism therefore

“maintains that it is not the content of the utopia but the utopia in itself that is the divine,” applying Meillassoux’s speculative materialism to show that “the need for the divine is divine in

230 Ibid., 147. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid., 148. 233 Ibid., 149. 234 Ibid., 149. 235 Ibid. 236 Ibid. 88 itself.”237 This reconfigures God to become something even atheists can credibly put their faith in: “God is no longer a patriarchal creator of worlds from the past or a longed-for savior on a white steed, but the de facto name of the collective utopia of the collective itself in the future.”238

In its expansion of God as a category, Syntheos symbolizes “theological anarchism, a kind of independent Holy Ghost without either the Father or the Son.”239 Syntheos is a distinctly

Syntheist construction and so it is the god of no philosopher beyond the movement itself.

Syntheists celebrate Syntheos at the autumn equinox as a “celebration of the community as the manifestation of the divine.”240

ù ù ù

Syntheology is a self-consciously constructive project in (a)theological, anti- correlationist meaning production. Each of these divinities do not exist in and of themselves in some external, transcendent capacity removed from existential experience. On the contrary, these divinities are articulated as projections of different aspects of our human experiences of reality, and are thus inherently immanent. The four divinities can be further subdivided by character:

Atheos and Syntheos are “primarily introvert or absorbing concepts,” while Pantheos and

Entheos are “primarily extrovert or expansive concepts.”241 However partitioned, they are ultimately interconnected concepts which are “completely dependent on and include each other…If Christianity is based on God as trinity, Syntheism is instead based on God as quadrinity.”242

237 Ibid. 238 Ibid. 239 Ibid., 150. 240 Ibid. 241 Ibid., 143. 242 Ibid., 151. 89

The Syntheological pyramid is also not an inanimate but constantly shifting metaphysical framework, one in which “movement…goes from the possible in Atheos to the realized in

Pantheos; from the mutable in Entheos to the consummated in Syntheos.”243 As the ultimate symbol in itself, Syntheos is “drawn by people in whose speculative imagination the most essential relations and intensities in existence have been personified,” and these most essential relations and intensities are covered by Antheos, Pantheos, and Entheos respectively.244

Syntheism thus calls itself a “historically and logically consummated Christianity, a kind of monistic and immanent Christianity that accepts both the Father’s and the Son’s death and which welcomes the divine manifestation through the Holy Ghost as their replacement.”245

5 Syntheism as a Faith of and for the Faithless

In this final subsection, we will grapple with Syntheist faith in this intricate but ultimately constructed theological system. Syntheists largely fall under what Simon Critchley refers to as

“the Faithless”, so what kind of “credible” faith can this group produce in their metaphysics of the Internet Age, if at all? And how can Critchley, another philosopher credited as a Syntheist forefather alongside Meillassoux, help us bridge the distance between theory and praxis, specifically the distance between Syntheist theology and Syntheist activism? The latter will be further explored in the following chapter, but this subsection will first attempt to contextualize this Syntheist ethics by reading their immanent theology through Critchley’s political lens. In doing so, we will hopefully move onto the final chapter of this work with some idea of a faith constructed by, of, and for the Faithless.

243 Ibid., 150. 244 Ibid., 163. 245 Ibid., 95. 90

Earlier in this chapter, we touched upon Syntheism as a radicalization of atheism, based on the Syntheist view that atheism itself is spiritually unproductive. Syntheists also define themselves against another group organized around a modernity-produced spirituality.

Specifically, Syntheism is meant to provide a reconciliation as well as a corrective to both atheism and New Ageism. Just as contrasting Syntheism with atheism helped contextualize their atheistic theological project, it might help us now to contrast Syntheism with New Ageism to contextualize what can emerge as a Syntheist faith. Admittedly, there is a neo-Pagan flavor to the

Syntheological pyramid, especially in its alignment of its divinities with specific sections of the calendar year, based off of the beginning (or end) of the seasons. Their celebrations (as well as their rituals, which will be discussed in the following chapter) often emphasize nature or require an excursion into nature itself, and even their deification of immanent elements of reality can be viewed more generally as reminiscent of “Pagan” animisms (although the animal spirit being worshipped in this case is the explicitly human spirit/existence).

Nonetheless, Syntheists take great pains to distinguish themselves from New Age beliefs, which they view as a misinformed return to paganism still trapped under capitalist articulations of spirituality. New Ageism is produced by and thus confined within the capitalist metaphysical paradigm, one which emphasizes (illusionary) individuality and endless progress. New Age beliefs represent an intensification of the worst parts of Pantheos, an entirely irrational over- spiritualization of insignificant phenomena, that rivals in harmfulness the intensification of nihilistic Atheos exhibited by overly scientific-rationalist atheists. Syntheism, being a metaphysical framework for the next phase of historical development, informationalism or the

Internet Age following capitalism, thus “in no way entails a return to paganism, but instead a 91 dialectical further development.”246 In fact, Syntheists view the real return to paganism in the shift from capitalism to informationalism to be “the bewildering hodgepodge of naïve ideas and quasi-religious nonsense that go under the label of new Age.”247 This is a phenomenon that “not without reason, syntheologicians dismiss as theological cultural relativism.”248

So in what ways does Syntheism differ from New Ageism? For one thing, Syntheists view their belief system as a philosophical exercise at its root, one based in rationality over superstition. Furthermore, Syntheism represents something beyond mere spirituality or superstition. In their own view, Syntheism “ought to be compared to art.”249 “Art is merely about pure reflexivity,” and so Syntheism becomes the “end of religion’s historical voyage where, after having investigated everything else in life and having sought the sacred everywhere except in itself, religion finally finds its home.”250 Because Syntheism, like art, is itself an expression of pure reflexivity, it is thus rendered “the metareligion, the religion of the philosophers, the religion about and of religion per se.”251 Syntheism does not look beyond or outside of material existence to finds spiritual fulfillment and enchantment as New Ageism often does, but rather represents a “quest for the religious experience” which is itself “the quest for a life intensity which is so strong that it bridges the gap from the moment to eternity.”252 Syntheism is on a different playing field than both atheism and New Ageism, and thus requires a different kind of faith. What is the texture of such faith in this metareligion of philosophers, especially for postmodern atheists weary of most other metanarratives?

246 Ibid., 90. 247 Ibid. 248 Ibid. 249 Ibid. 250 Ibid. 251 Ibid. 252 Ibid., 154. 92

In his book Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, Simon Critchley attempts to open up the stifling political binary between secular and theological motivations which struggle against each other to dominate modern politics. Crucially, Critchley uses the idea of faith “not as the abstraction of a metaphysical belief in God, but rather as the lived subjective commitment to an infinite demand.”253 This view of faith works well within a Syntheist context because Syntheology, although it is occupied with creating a credible metaphysical narrative, recognizes its own constructedness. Not only this, but the divinities produced in this narrative are themselves merely projections of the subjective experience of human existence. Syntheists recognize that both God(s) and the ego are inescapable yet contingent lenses through which existence can be articulated and animated—nothing more, nothing less. Syntheists, like

Critchley, focus on the lived quality of faith, faith as a commitment to act in the face of some

“infinite demand”. Their syntheology animates their particular kind of faith, and this faith in turn is supposed to animate their Syntheist ethics.

Also relevant to grounding Syntheist faith is Critchley’s emphasis not on the secularity of modernity, but on the unavoidable sacralization of social (and political) developments. He writes that “rather than seeing modernity in terms of a process of secularization, I will claim that the history of political forms can best be viewed as a series of metamorphoses of sacralization.”254

These fictions of political beliefs, “or fictions of the sacred” are “at once diagnostic and normative…what Hume saw as the power of opinion, or what I will call ‘fictional force’.”255 The way that Critchley describes political organization and conviction mirrors the way that Syntheists articulate religious organization and conviction, and this is no coincidence as the former project

253 Critchley, Simon. Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. New York: Verso Books, 2012. p. 13. 254 Ibid., 10. 255 Ibid. 93 informs the latter. Both Critchley and Syntheists are engaged in a philosophical project, and both start from a point of disappointment or dissatisfaction with the myth of modern secularity (or of any kind of modern belief that forecloses on the sacred. Critchley claims that “philosophy begins in disappointment, notably religious disappointment—that is to say, crudely stated the death of

God.”256 This leads Critchley to claim that in this Godless realm, “neither traditional atheism nor evangelical atheism will suffice.”257 Instead, we need a “theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief,” which would “be like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity.”258 This theologically engaged atheism must facilitate “a metamorphosis of the meaning of the sacred, which attempts to retain the theological moment by immanentizing the transcendent within moral theology or the general will (as opposed to an assertion of the secular).”259

It is hopefully clearer to us now how Syntheism attempts to fulfill this role, to become the theologically engaged atheism Critchley thinks modern politics so desperately lacks. Critchley’s articulation of faith does not entirely fit the Syntheists’ own configuration of their faith, however.

More specifically, it does not seem to go far enough in defining what exactly the “infinite demand” is which faith must demonstrate a “lived subjective commitment to.”260 Syntheism also remains vague on this count, at least in its Syntheology, and does not develop it further until it lays out a Syntheist ethics. With what we know at this point, Critchley’s infinite demand, what inspires and sustains faith, could be the utopia of an interconnected, cybernetic community which Syntheos symbolizes. The infinite demand is thus rendered an immanent phenomenon

256 Ibid., 18. 257 Ibid., 19. 258 Ibid. 259 Ibid., 84. 260 Critchley, Faith of the Faithless, p. 13. 94 made possible through our distinctly Digital Age ability to reconfigure human subjectivity and community in a virtual networked system, emphasizing the dividual in lieu of the Cartesian subject from the capitalist paradigm of yore. Returning to cybernetic theory for a moment,

Syntheist faith can be described as a commitment to take whatever actions necessary, in the greater context of the network of humanity, to avoid capitalist entropy. Syntheists note that their ethics “is based on the principle that the agent gives in and of pure joy, without expecting any kind of reward in return.”261

And yet, we still have not fully resolved the question of what kind of faith Syntheism actually requires. It is possible, however that this task is misguided. According to the text,

“Syntheism is not, nor can it ever be, a religion that forces anyone to do anything.”262 This fits well with the kind of new religion Critchley hints at, one which is animated by “an atheist conception of faith [that] should not be triumphalist.”263 Maybe because of this non-coercive quality of Syntheist belief, the only kind of faith which fits this metareligion must be wholly indescribable, or at least non-prescribe-able. “Only a faith without assurances is an authentic faith,” according to Syntheism. Thus ultimately in their own view, “syntheistic faith is the authentic faith par excellence.”264 Just as Syntheology represents the only credible metaphysics for Digitality, Syntheist faith represents the only credible faith in such a metaphysics—one without any assurances whatsoever. Syntheist faith, just like Syntheist (a)theology, must be understood as immanently sacred. It cannot be inspired externally because it is not transcendent, and so it ironically mirrors similarly unassured faith in the transcendent, perhaps best articulated by Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of a leap of blind faith. Only the Syntheist leap is not entirely

261 Bard, Syntheism, p. 317. 262 Ibid. 263 Critchley, Faith of the Faithless, p. 19. 264 Bard, Syntheism, p. 153. 95 blind. It is only limited in its orientation towards a future utopia, one which Syntheism can always approximate but never define explicitly as one specific dream. Syntheist faith is ultimately without any assurances because it is contingent, based as it is on both a present and a future characterized by infinite possibility.

(3): Enacted Syntheisms: An Ethics of Active Virtuality and Virtual Activity

“Therefore the Syntheist temples and monasteries are far more than merely exotic oases for some kind of collective spiritual pleasure. They are, in fact, the necessary points of departure, the revolutionary cells, in the subversive utopian project that goes under the name of the Syntheist Movement…And all this is happening right now.” -Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age265

“I suppose that’s what happens to ustopian societies when they die: they don’t go to Heaven, they become thesis topics.” -Margaret Atwood, “The Road to Ustopia” 266

Introduction: Realizing a Utopology In the previous chapter, we articulated Syntheology as an intentional configuration of

“God” as a utopic compass and metaphysical marker. The concept of divinity becomes a symbol of utopia for Syntheists, embodying an “imagined backdrop located in the future,” which

“nourishes all of humanity’s dreams and aspirations.”267 God does not represent some singular absolute per se in this imagining, but a generative “opportunity to imagine existence to its utmost limit.”268 Because Meillassouxian contingency is foundational to Syntheology, this contingency also influences the translation of Syntheology into action. This translation produces a Syntheist ethics, a certain prescription of “faith”-based action. If we are to understand Syntheism as a utopian project, we must ask what exactly this utopia looks like as it fleetingly appears in material action. The following chapter will not only map out the contours of this enacted techno- utopia, but will also read it through and against alternative, techno-dystopian narratives.

265Bard, Alexander and Söderqvist, Jan. Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age, Stockholm: Stockholm Text. p. 429. 266Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood: The Road to Ustopia.” The Guardian, 14 October 2011. Accessed March, 2017. theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-road-to-ustopia. 267 Bard, Syntheism, p. 317. 268 Ibid. 97

Author Margaret Atwood rejects the binaric separation of utopia and dystopia through her writing, creating instead what she refers to as “ustopic” spaces. These new formulations of reality are at once of and outside of the reality they are produced by and in, formulations in which utopic elements become intelligible against their dystopic underbellies, and vice versa.

“Ustopia” is Atwood’s melding together of the terms “utopia” and “dystopia” as a reflection of this connectivity. This final chapter will attempt to apply Atwood’s attitude towards the

“utopian” project of Syntheism by teasing out the dystopian aspects which lie just beneath its surface. How can this approach impact their ethical pronouncements? What power imbalances are dissolved in their utopia, and which persist?

As a cyberreligious movement which claims to sacralize the internet, Syntheism might have been excused from the expectation of offering a spiritually-inflected ethics to be enacted in the “meatspace.”269 Kopimism, in some sense, stuck to a virtuality-specific notion of ethics, worshipping through the thoroughly cyber act of file sharing alone and elevating this technological capacity to the religious register. Perhaps the political failures of Kopimism and its steady dissolution as a community undergird, if even subconsciously, Syntheism’s insistence on providing an ethics that must be (at least partially) realized in the physical realm. Regardless of its origins, a central tenant of Syntheism’s “utopolgy” which we have already discussed informs the portions of their text which begin to describe an ethical program. Specifically, their metaphysical agent of choice, the Syntheist “dividual” represents the new “intersubject” whose very subjectivity reflects the inter-relationality and, cybernetic reflexivity of a networked society.

This Syntheist agent, who will eventually translate Syntheological utopia into reality, is predicated on the cybernetic privileging of a network-based worldview. Syntheism articulates

269 This term comes from William Gibson’s cyber-punk science fiction classic Neuromancer trilogy (1984), denoting the physical realm as something apart from cyberspace. 98 itself as “the way for an ethics of interactivity,” and the primary motivation for this ethics is “the existence of the Universe, and how this manifests itself for itself by setting people in motion towards and with each other.”270 Syntheist ethics then, both virtually active and actively virtual, depends on the coming together of Syntheist dividuals in a religious community. Syntheism as a religious movement is tied to Syntheism as an ethical project, the physical movement of various components of a universal network. It is thus “precisely in this memory of an ecstasy directly linked to the religious belonging that the Syntheist intersubject is born and grows.”271

Uncovering the exact techno-utopic narrative Syntheism constructs in order to stoke this memory will be our central task in this final chapter.

As we move steadily towards the conclusion of this relatively unorthodox project, it might be useful to view this final chapter as a link between the contextualizing ethos of

Digitality, the admittedly esoteric gymnastics of Syntheological theory, and our academic motivations for expending so much attention to this genuinely eclectic community as a valid subject of religious study. First, we will discuss and question the increasing elevation of technological discourses into the utopic realm. After describing the Syntheist worldview, ethics, and religious rituals and practice, noting their proclivity for what sociologist Majid Yar refers to as “technoromanticism”, we will attempt to point out some dystopian elements in their own account of their utopia-building project. Focusing on the interactions of technology and capitalism, we will attend to dangerous societal implications in their ethical narrative, obfuscated by what Jodi Dean might call their “technology fetishism.”

After complicating the Syntheist utopia in this way, we will finally ask what exactly

Syntheism as an ethical imperative really does. How is Syntheism attentive to the dystopic

270 Bard, Syntheism, p. 418. 271 Ibid., 281. 99 implications inherent in their techno-utopia, and how does its technoromantic tone possibly obscure their ability to resolve these tensions? Probing these questions will help tie this final chapter to our project’s conclusion. There, we will ask why Syntheists, these spiritual atheists, reject the postmodern rejection of metanarrative, returning consciously to religion as the register through which Syntheism seriously attempts “to create a new, credible metanarrative for the

Internet age.”272

1 Technology as an Intimately Ustopic “Instrument” In this section, we will situate our investigation of Syntheist ethics in an ustopic mode that attempts to configure technology not as a tool of production, but as a means of revealing. In his influential work The Question Concerning Technology, philosopher Martin Heidegger concludes that the main mode of understanding technology in modern Western society, as a tool, is misguided. He explicitly claims that “Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing.”273 Media theorist Mark Poster exhibits this Heideggerian view of technology as something beyond pure instrumentality when he describes cyberspace as “an electronic geography that re-territorialized preexisting geographies, opening new social and cultural worlds that are only beginning to be explored but that quite probably are already redefining what it means to be human.”274 Poster holds that “the Internet is more like a social space than a thing,” and so regardless of whether people may feel “more real in cyberspace or more artificial, alienated, disjointed…the Machinic solicitation is to reveal to oneself that one is never oneself and that this is legitimate.”275

272 Ibid., 413. 273 Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. Trans. Levitt, William. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977. p. 12. 274 Poster, Mark. What’s the Matter with the Internet?, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. p. 37. 275 Ibid. 100

Sociologist Majid Yar notes how we now tend to imagine the internet “as a space in which either the unfulfilled promises of modernity might finally be realized (liberation, self- transformation, solidarity, equality) or one in which such dreams find their final dissolution…in a realm of technological hybridization.”276 In this section, we will focus on the former register, what he later calls narratives of “technoromantic utopianism”, in order to provide a foil for our eventual discussion of the latter register.277 We will thus sandwich Syntheist ethics between a layer first of technoromantic technological revealing, then of techno-fetishistic dystopian revealing that fears the loss of the “human” through the descent towards cybernetic transhumanism.

There are three central narratives that we will focus on throughout this chapter, and one main tension which animates each narrative. We will begin with the first narrative, but for clarity’s sake I have explicitly listed each narrative below:

1. Technoromantic Utopianism

2. Syntheist Ethics

3. Dystopias of Techno-fetishism

In this first section on technoromantic utopianism, we will focus on three accounts that each highlight a different aspect of this narrative. Although our main goal is to contextualize

Syntheism’s own utopianism through these accounts, we must also be mindful of the central tension which animates all three narratives listed above. This tension is the question of how technology squares with human agency in determining our social imaginaries. In other words, do people determine technology’s impact on reconfiguring society, as well as pre-existing politico- economic structures and subjectivities, as technoromantics might desire? Or, do the technologies

276 Yar, Majid. The Cultural Imaginary of the Internet. London: Palmgrave MacMillan, 2014. p. 4. 277 Ibid., 29. 101 we produce have the ultimate (and unavoidable) effect of colonizing human subjectivity so totally that humanity itself becomes reified as “posthuman”?278 In this dystopic view of a cybernetic transhumanism, a futurist ideology that views the next evolutionary stage for humans as some form of irreversible technological integration, technology thus “makes [the] human being into something ‘thing-like’, fixing it and foreclosing its existential possibilities.”279 This agential tension plays out not only on the individual level, but also the communal—both the utopian and dystopian potentials of societal internalizations of technology can be traced out through the kinds of communities produced around virtuality. This focus on community is a central ethical principle in Syntheism, and so our discussion throughout this chapter will highlight how each of these narratives contend with virtual and real community.

The Ustopian Caveat Before turning to narratives of technoromantic utopia, we must first establish why exactly we should care about the dystopic elements that temper them. In an essay titled “The Road to

Ustopia”, Margaret Atwood responds to the fury within the science fiction community directed towards her rejection of the “sci fi” label for her own novels. She instead argues that “speculative fiction” is more apt, which she describes as grappling with “things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the author [writes] the books.”280 Quoting author Bruce

Sterling, she notes how this kind of storytelling “does not aim to provoke ‘a sense of wonder’,” but it instead “simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late 20th century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.”281 Atwood’s stories, which are

278 In How We Became Pothuman, Katherine Hayles writes: “As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman.” (xiv) 279 Ibid., 51. 280 Atwood, “The Road to Ustopia”. 281 Ibid. 102 contingent to the extent that their contents are not real but are still possible, contain in them the seeds of ustopia.

Atwood describes “ustopia” as a “world I made up by combining utopia and dystopia— the imagined perfect society and its opposite—because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other.”282 An ustopia is “almost always a mapped location,” but also as “a state of mind, as is every place in literature of whatever kind.”283 In this view, “dystopia contains within itself a little utopia, and vice versa.”284 There is an immense productivity in transcending the limitations of a utopia/dystopia binary towards a more nuanced ustopic perspective. Ustopias bolster Hannah Arendt’s concept of the homo faber, predicating humanness on this capacity for complex narrative creation. Ustopias are neither wholly good or bad—in fact, even in the most hopeless of techno-fetishistic dystopias, Atwood implies that “utopian thinking…never totally disappears: we’re too hopeful a species for that. ‘Good’, for us, may always have a ‘Bad’ twin, but its other twin is ‘Better’.”285

Majid Yar echoes Atwood’s queering of both technological utopianism and dystopianism in favor of a more nuanced attending to the ways technologies “reveal.” In the conclusion of his book The Cultural Imaginaries of the Internet: Virtual Utopias and Dystopias, Yar articulates his qualms with this tendency in contemporary culture to simplistically depict the social, political, and existential potentials of technology only through the extremes of optimistic enthusiasm or pessimistic concern. He argues that “both modes of imagining the virtual realm of the internet are problematic and ultimately unhelpful in shaping our collective dispositions towards the

282 Ibid. 283 Ibid. 284 Ibid. 285 Ibid. 103 electronically mediated world we increasingly inhabit.”286 Our central tension, that question of who gets to control our own social imaginaries—humans or the technologies we produce— relates to Yar’s diagnosis. Both technological utopianism and dystopianism overlook the social embeddedness of technology, and thus produce either the cybernetic utopianism that Adam

Curtis refers to as “the dream of the machine”, or nightmarish transhuman scenarios where humanity is subsumed through an irreversible technological integration. As German philosopher

Friedrich A. Kittler claims in an interview on a similar subject,

Hence, the real connection is not between people but between machines…the development of the Internet has much more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies, of reacting or responding to the demands of the machine. After all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us.287

Yar claims that if we only appreciated the social embeddedness of the internet, we could

“release ourselves from seeing computers and virtual technologies as ‘others’ who ‘do things to us’.”288 We would more fruitfully “understand them, and their effects…as the consequences of the social forces, systems and decisions, institutions and agents that create and shape them.”289

The virtual realm is not, in other words, “a space of transcendence but one of the extension: it is yet another mode or means through which the fundamental organizing features of social life are articulated.”290 These features are naturally “deeply and inextricably entwined with the ‘offline’ environment,” which motivates Yar’s claim that “the internet should not be seen as a u-topia (a non-space, another space), but rather as en-topia, as a space within the social realm we

286 Yar, Cultural Imaginaries, p. 73. 287 Armitage, John. “From Discourse Networks to Cultural Mathematics.” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 7-8, pp. 35-36. 288 Yar, Cultural Imaginaries, p. 76. 289 Ibid. 290 Ibid. 104 inhabit.”291 Thus, the internet reflects the possibilities of our own reality as it stands, just as an

Atwoodian ustopia should. This infinitely productive social contingency is reflected back to us virtually in the internet’s “complexity, ambiguity, and combination of progressive and oppressive elements.”292

Narratives of Technoromantic Utopia Now that we have established an ustopic and entopic perspective, let us turn to one side of the narrative dualism Yar problematizes. This first register is most readily apparent in the

Syntheist project, so we will attempt to describe it thoroughly before turning to Syntheism’s ethics (also aritculated in this register). Yar defines “technoromantic utopianism” as the coming together of “the scientific rationalism of Enlightenment progress and the Romantic critique of modernity.”293 He describes how technoromantics take from the former “the hope that technology is the key to human self-improvement and social transformation,” thus reconciling technological and the moral notions of progress.294 From the latter, they borrow “the aspiration for self-realization and holism that is the hallmark of Romanticism.”295 In this form of utopianism, “the Romantic striving for imagination, creativity and unity is now to be realized not via a ‘return to nature’ or the ‘organic’…but by embracing the technological and artificial.”296

Although many elements of cybernetic theory, the ethos of the Internet Age, can be viewed as technoromantic, technoromanticism has much broader implications. When technoromanticism is elevated to utopianism, it also often authorizes and motivates some kind of active moral reform.

In the view of virtual utopians, thus, “the development of technology offers a pathway to exceed

291 Ibid., 79. 292 Ibid. 293 Ibid., 29. 294 Ibid. 295 Ibid. 296 Ibid. 105 the constraints of morality.”297 This exceeding of moral constraints is directly related to the virtuality of technology and unfolds on the communal level. Thus, technoromantic utopias usually focus on “imagining the creation of new forms of community that exist purely or predominantly in the cyber-sphere.”298

We will now examine three specific technoromantic accounts, parsing out their utopian bent through the specific aspect of technoromantic utopia they each represent. We will begin with a familiar account: returning to Adam Curtis’s series All Watched Over By Machines of

Loving Grace, we will re-examine cybernetic articulations of technoromantic utopianism to provide us an idea of its early articulations. Next, we will take up Mark Poster’s re- conceptualizations of identity construction and subjectivity in the Digital Age. In his book

What’s the Matter with the Internet Age?, Poster describes his utopic vision for the radically democratic political potential of technology against the restrictions and limitations which prevent its current actualization. His discussion of the barriers of capitalist alienation on subject- production and recognition will set us up nicely for Syntheism’s own accounting for the transition from Capitalist to Informationalist subjectivities. The final technoromantic account we will discuss here will be Majid Yar’s description of the virtual utopianism that his project ultimately problematizes. Elements of Curtis’s cybernetic account as well as Poster’s anti-

Capitalist view of technology are both tied together in Yar’s description of community as central to the technoromantic utopia. He points to the normative core of a utopic project, something to keep in mind as we move on in the following section to an investigation of Syntheist ethics as an enactment of their own utopology.

297 Ibid., 45. 298 Ibid., 37. 106 i. Cybernetic Systems as Technoromantic The cybernetic brand of technoromanticism, more than many others, emphasizes the transference of agency in determining social realities from humans to technology. This is because the cybernetic system of organization is all-encompassing and (supposedly) self- stabilizing. As discussed previously, Curtis credits Jay Forrester with one of the first descriptions of the whole world as such a system. By emphasizing feedback, Forrester contended that all systems stabilized themselves in such a way that “every action we take has consequences that feed through the system, then return to shape our actions in ways we cannot see.”299

Technologies rendered these feedback loops visible, and could calculate, according to Forrester’s cybernetic fever dream, the consequences of all human action. In Curtis’s footage, Forrester himself claims that “we’re just part of a system…physical systems, electrical systems, social systems, political systems….”300 Another cybernetic theorist, Buckminster Fuller, expanded upon Forrester’s notions by describing how the individual is no longer at the center of such a global system—in his spaceship metaphor, individuals ceased to be part of political systems, nations, and other hierarchies of power and were instead cosmic actors on a rocket ship called planet Earth. One last example is cyberneticist Stewart Brand, who describes how people felt that

“computers had liberated them, and they thought that they would use computers to liberate society. Civilization…it was going to be power to the people in a very direct sense, and that was an early iteration of the internet.”301

If we return to Yar’s definition of technoromantic utopia as the combination of

Enlightenment’s scientific rationalism with Romanticism’s rejection of an atomized modern

299 “The Use and Abuse of Vegetative Concepts.” All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. Dir. Adam Curtis. BBC. 23 May 2011. 300 Ibid. 301 Ibid. 107 subject, we can see how these cybernetic descriptions fit quite nicely into this definition. On the one hand, the faith that cybernetics has in the world as some entirely self-regulating and totalizing system might be read as a kind of extreme version of scientific rationalism. Cybernetic theory grants this systems-view of the world a kind of regulatory power that goes beyond human comprehension, because we are biologically incapable of measuring the feedback loops which supposedly animate our experience of the world (and the world beyond humans) without some technological intervention on our behalf. Brand articulates a transference of agency from humans to the internet when he describes how computers themselves were supposed to liberate society.

The technologies that animate computers, products of developments made possible by scientific progress sustained by the internalized privileging of scientific rationalism, become so powerful that they in turn empower the people who created them. The other element of technoromanticism, the Romanticism, can be seen in the cybernetic expectation that computers will free humans by modeling a universal organization system that surpasses the limitations of political, social, and economic systems produced by modernity. Cybernetic romanticism thus fulfills Yar’s criteria of aspiration “for self-realization and holism that is the hallmark of

Romanticism,” one that is displaced from nature or the organic onto the technological and material.302 ii. Anti-Capitalist Virtuality as Technoromantic In his book What’s the Matter with the Internet?, cultural theorist Mark Poster asses the internet’s potential to redefine our current configurations of culture and politics. Poster contextualizes his project by describing how current Capitalist regimes of power restrict our ability to realize this reformative potential of the Internet. He notes that “the state and the economy…colonize new media the the culture of instrumentality,” and in doing so they frame

302 Yar, Cultural Imaginaries, p. 29. 108 the internet merely as “something that is useful to them, something that may improve their preexisting practices, make things go faster or more smoothly.”303 The internet is not seen as a revolutionary revelation, but merely a tool “for determining the fate of groups as they are currently constituted.”304 Poster turns away from this inability (or undesirability) to view the internet as more than a social-maintenance tool, and his critique of this limitation as well as his belief in the transformative capacities of the internet reflect the Romanticist element of technoromantic utopianism. Poster wonders, “How may the Internet mediate the transformation of existing cultural figures, or how may new cultural forms emerge that…change [existing groups] in unforeseeable ways”?305 These questions push presumptions of modern subjectivity to their limits, so Poster focuses on the effects of technology on identity construction as a way to shift Yar’s Romantic “self-realization and holism” from the organic to the technological.

Poster pointedly defines identity as “the recognition of the failure of Western culture, a failure inscribed in the massive disasters of the twentieth century.”306 He notes how our shifting technocultural landscape facilitates this recognition, since “new media and humans constitute relations that are different…the subject/object relation changes” in this virtual, simulacral reality.307 “Instead of supporting a stable, centered identity,” Poster claims that virtual subjects are “constituted as diffuse, fragmentary, multiple,” and that this new kind of diffuse subject

“does not sustain its modern characteristics.”308 The internet, importantly, offers us “a more completely postmodern subject or, better, a self that is no longer a subject since it no longer subtends the world as if from outside but operates within a machine apparatus as a point in a

303 Poster, What’s the Matter, p. 2. 304 Ibid., 3. 305 Ibid. 306 Ibid., 12. 307 Ibid., 12; 15. 308 Ibid., 14; 15. 109 circuit.”309 This is because the virtuality of the internet, echoing cybernetic accounts of networked systems, “connects human intelligence from around the globe, installing…a new structure of interaction.”310 The suspension of time and space in virtuality means that identity is no longer defined against some “other”, but through connection to that other facilitated “by the parameters of the communication technology.”311 This more truly postmodern subjectivity is

Romantically holist not in a natural sense, but in a cybernetic one—“the more people who are connected,” Poster writes, “the more value one’s connection has.”312

Most crucial to our later investigation of Syntheist ethics, Poster connects this particular technoromantic reconfiguration of identity to the current powers which restrict its realization.

The principle of vast virtual connectivity as a new identity-enforcer is “at odds with capitalism’s law of supply and demand, in which scarcity, not abundance, is the basis for the determination of value.”313 With this non-Capitalist space constructed through virtuality, Poster now wonders if there can now arise “new kinds of relations occurring within [the Internet] which suggest new forms of power configurations between communicating individuals.”314 Virtuality’s direct solicitation of intentional identity construction and community formation leads to the question of the emergence of new power dynamics within these new constructions, and an ethics could help guide and manage such a development. iii. The Community as Technoromantic We begin and end this comprehensive section with Majid Yar, who so deftly describes technoromantic utopianism in The Cultural Imaginaries of the Internet. Encompassing many of

309 Ibid., 16. 310 Ibid., 26. 311 Ibid., 27. 312 Ibid., 46. 313 Ibid. 314 Ibid., 177. 110 the aspects of technoromantic utopianism already discussed, Yar’s account provides the perfect bridge to our examination of a virtual utopia par excellence—the Syntheist movement. At the heart of Yar’s accounts of virtual utopianism is a sense of “modernity’s failed promises, which impels a new imaginary to emerge: that of a space of transcendence existing apart from a material realm whose redemptive possibilities are seen as ever-more limited and unfeasible.”315

His use of terms like “imaginary”, “transcendence”, “redemptive”, and “apart from a material realm” indicates how “the utopian has been reinvigorated as it finds purchase within emerging discourses about the virtual.”316 The virtual space of the Internet allows our culture, according to

Yar, to project onto and realize within it “the unfulfilled promises of modernity…liberation, self- transformation, solidarity, equality.”317 Such utopic projections are essentially

“normative…bound up with the perennial attempt to imagine ‘the good life’.”318 The good life is configured specifically around combatting the alienation that modern, individualist subjectivities have produced, and thus “central to such imaginaries is an aspiration to restore human connection (and communion, unity) via technological mediation and synthesis.”319

Yar identifies “five modes of virtual utopianism”, which represent “cultural discourses focused upon the internet that envisage its capacity to transform society for the better across various domains of social life.”320 Before articulating them, let us first turn to a quote from cyberlibertarian activist, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and founding member of the

Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow. Barlow (unwittingly) articulates each of

Yar’s five modes of virtual utopianism in this brief statement:

315 Yar, Cultural Imaginaries, p. 4. 316 Ibid. 317 Ibid. 318 Ibid., 5. 319 Ibid., 29. 320 Ibid., 31. 111

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.321

Yar describes these modes more explicitly as: “(1) the dream of democracy, (2) the rediscovery of community, (3) achieving equality, (4) the realization of the self and (5) the transcendence of the human.”322 The immateriality of the Internet ushers in a radical restructuring both of material subjectivities, power hierarchies, and what counts as

“human.” This sense that the non-virtual world is a cite of “dysfunction, division, exclusion, separation, alienation and incivility” allows Barlow to view virtuality as creating a new world which can provide all that is missing from modern life—

“community, solidarity, intimacy, connection, reciprocity.”323

This “rediscovery” of community that virtuality facilitates is actually, in some sense, an even more dramatic intervention by technology on human sociality. In this technoromantic register of the powers of virtuality, the internet actually invents a whole new kind of human community, a totally egalitarian and free one, which not only rectifies the alienation of modernity but reconfigures humanity itself by elevating connectivity to its utmost capacity. In a way, Syntheism represents the codification of this register into an ethical code, one which we can now consider as the newest articulation of technoromantic utopia.

321 Ibid., 30. 322 Ibid., 31. 323 Ibid., 35-6. 112

2 Syntheist Ethics In this section, we turn to Syntheism as an ethical way of life. By examining

Syntheists’ ethical pronouncements and expectations, as well as what embodied rituals, practices, and communities they value, we can begin to see how this very theoretical, virtual movement takes root in physical reality. Every element of Syntheism which has been surveyed so far, including its cybernetic, theological, and utopian contextualization, leads to this critical test for their community’s survival—how do Syntheists translate their belief system into a viable pattern of actions and behaviors? Are their ethical prescriptions consistent with their Syntheology? How do their notions of ethical agency, especially the virtually active and actively virtual subjectivity of the Syntheist dividual, manifest both in the immediate locus of the Syntheist temple and in the global context more broadly? These questions will animate our exploration of the ethical motivations and implications of Syntheism as a technoromantic utopian project.

Syntheists describe their movement philosophically as a synthesis between the scientific pragmatism of the Enlightenment and the transrationalism of Romanticism.324

For one thing, as discussed in the previous chapter, Syntheism views itself as the metaphysical paradigm for a new era in human organization, introduced by the advent of the Internet. The networked subjectivities which the Internet symbolizes characterize the

Internet Age for which Syntheism attempts to provide a theology, as well as an ethics.

Inline with Poster’s account of virtuality working outside of market demands and their atomized identity construction, Syntheists view Capitalism not only as an oppressive power system, but as a vestige of a past era. Technological progress is a catalyst for metaphysical regime change, and the Internet represents a necessary break from

324Bard, Syntheism, p. 309-10. 113

Capitalism. Informationalism is the next power system, and Syntheism hopes to become its prevailing ideological narrative—one which, as a utopia, will produce the best possible societal, political, and economic outcomes for all of humanity. Picking up where

Barlow and Yar leave us, Syntheists view community as the ultimate virtual and ethical paradigm through which their ideology can be strengthened, affirmed, and spread.

This subsection will detail Syntheist ethics first by providing its worldview, what their utopia is responding to and breaking away from. Next, we will discuss their own description of their ethics, focusing on the central roles of agency, activity, and community. We will then describe the physical manifestations of these beliefs as they are literally enacted by Syntheists in communal rituals and practices. In this last section, we will discuss Syntheist attitudes towards chemical liberation as a form of utopian transhumanism beyond technological synthesis with the human body (as in cyborgs, for example). Transhumanism is an ideology that claims that the increasing integration of technologies in human life will usher in a new stage of evolution, one which produces humans that are unimaginably different than we are now. This transhuman element will provide a link between this section and the next, which will poke through Syntheism’s utopianism to the dystopian element which shadow their beliefs. Using Jodi Dean’s framework of “technology fetishism”, we will eventually consider Syntheist ethics in a more nuanced sense as an ustopic program, rather than a perfect path to utopia.

Syntheism’s Worldview: Context for a Syntheist Ethic To understand Syntheist ethics, we must first understand what it is constructed against. In other words, what are the ethical failures of modern capitalist societies which the Digital Age should overcome? Remember that Syntheism is supposed to succeed 114

Capitalism as the Internet age’s prevailing metaphysical narrative—the Internet takes over for the printing press as the newest technological device for social intelligibility and subject construction (see table on p. 56). Capitalism is persisting well into the Internet

Age, however, and this produces what Syntheists refer to as hypercapitalism. Syntheists understand the most immediate battle between hypercapitalism’s remaining influence in our new metaphysical era and its eventual usurpation by Syntheism as one between impending ecological apocalypse and a free, open internet, respectively. The latter struggle is translated from a purely political realm, as embodied for instance by 40+ political pirate parties globally, into a religious articulation of technological utopia. This sentiment is nicely summarized in the following passage from Syntheism:

The metaphysics of the Internet age…must create the hope of the impossible being possible…Naturally Syntheism has no chance of accomplishing this if it were to start from a capitalist perspective, since individualism is just as dead within philosophy as atomism is dead within physics. Syntheism’s utopia must instead be formulated as the consummate network dynamics. And how could a network be consummate, if it were not free and open to the surrounding world and the future in a contingent and relationalist universe?325

Syntheists describe capitalism and hypercapitalism frequently throughout their section on ecological apocalypse. In fact, they tie together seemingly disparate phenomena in this section of their text, including religiosity, ecological apocalypse, the digital integrity movement (which includes open source and free internet activism), environmentalism, and utopianism. They construct certain binaries as they create affinities: politics and religion are enemies, environmentalism and free internet movements are allies. Capitalism and ecological apocalypse are intimately linked, and so are Utopianism and digital integrity. The former and latter in each category, however, are

325Ibid., 280. 115 inherently oppositional. These relationships undergird Syntheist ethics, so we will briefly explore how they are described in the Syntheist worldview.

The utility-view of technology which both Heidegger and Poster reject is produced, according to Syntheists, by hypercapitalism—not merely in the realm of technology, but in human relations as well. “Through the historical extinction of religion,” Syntheists claim, “ideality has namely been lost and has been replaced by a blind and compact instrumentality in all relationships between human beings.”326 In a hypercapitalist society, “all social activities…are assumed to revolve around value- destroying exploitation and never to be about value-creating imploitation.”327 The internet, “suddenly and in a very timely way,” provides for Syntheists a “potential level to achieve the ideality renaissance…it is the Internet that de facto is this revolution itself.”328

Capitalism, the root of the hypercapitalism which persists today, “drives Man away from religion and straight into the arms of alienation,” and it does so primarily by striving “to minimize empathy in order to thus be able to maximize alienation, which increases emotionally compensating consumption.”329 Syntheist ethics attends immediately to this alienation by striving instead “to maximize empathy…[fighting] alienation through actively minimizing the influence of capital inside the Syntheist temporary utopia.”330 The temporary nature of this utopia will be further described in the following subsection, but what is already becoming clear is how Syntheism, as the

326 Ibid., 406. 327 Ibid. 328 Ibid. 329 Ibid., 299. 330 Ibid., 299. 116 metaphysics of the Internet age, “must create the hope of the impossible being possible,” and “naturally Syntheism has no chance of accomplishing this if it were to start from a capitalist perspective.”331

The alienation of hypercapitalism extends to the relation between humanity and its environment, beyond its relations to other humans and to technology. This ecological distancing is not helped but exacerbated by politics for Syntheists, who hold that “It is not possible to preserve human life on the planet with any amount of politics, for politics is subservient to the capitalist death drive.”332 It is not politics but religion which can save the planet, a religion animated “by a utopia concerning a physically functional future for our children and their children.”333 “The approaching ecological apocalypse has emerged as our time’s great and dominant dystopia,” according to Syntheists, and their mission

“receives its eschatological fuel from the approaching ecological apocalypse, which in itself is an unavoidable consequence of a world without faith in a relevant divinity.”334

Since Syntheism self-consciously constructs its divinities based on the metaphysical deficiencies of hypercapitalist persistence into the Internet Age, it is then only “through a new syntheistic metanarrative constructed on the utopian conviction that humanity’s only possible salvation is through its creation of Syntheos,” that the apocalypse can be avoided.335

Syntheism needs first, however, to “defeat the statist-corporatist establishment and its dysfunctional, apocalyptic and hypercynical metaphysics.”336 To do so, Syntheists

331 Ibid., 280. 332 Ibid., 60. 333 Ibid., 60. 334 Ibid. 335 Ibid. 336 Ibid., 283. 117

“must have free and unlimited access to its keenest weapon, the free and open

Internet.”337 Because the modern Capitalist bourgeoisie “with its nation states and major corporations wants to fence in and control information flows,” Syntheists turn to

Foucaultian ethics in order to facilitate a top-down transparentization of information— meaning, in other words, that the common people must be able to expose the digital secrets of the elite, not the other way around.338 Those involved in the digital integrity movement are thus catapulted to the liberators of society in Syntheism’s view, because it is these activists fighting for the free and open internet who vouchsafe this capacity for revolutionary transparency. Syntheists connect environmentalism to the digital integrity movement through the Pirate movement specifically, extending the morality of the former to the latter primarily in their subversion of the scarcity of capitalist exploitation:

Environmentalism is driven by the conviction that nature’s resources are finite rather than inexhaustible…the Pirate movement is based on the axiom that culture and knowledge that is shared without friction between people in a society where information sharing no longer incurs any surplus cost is an infinite rather than a finite resource for the future.339

Syntheist Ethics Syntheists describe their religion as one “that the Internet created.”340 The political struggle for a free and open internet out of which Syntheism was produced is

“based on the blind faith that the network has a sacred potential for humanity,” and

Syntheists thus view the Internet not just as a technology but as a “theological phenomenon.”341 The Syntheist utopia, the ideal which should animate a Syntheist ethics,

337 Ibid. 338 Ibid., 282; 284. 339 Ibid., 287. 340 Ibid., 50. 341 Ibid. 118

“cannot be formulated beforehand,” however.342 It must “be practiced before it is articulated,” and so the most important tenet of Syntheist ethics is that “ideas are freely circulated, because….the Syntheist utopia is first and foremost a society where ideas are free and are not owned by anybody.”343 For Syntheists, the digital integrity movement, which represents the political struggle for a free and open internet, is perceived as “the necessary path to this [utopian] state.”344 In Syntheist ethics, “there is no speculative appeasement, no servility and no sucking up to an external fetishized power.”345 This means that “Syntheist ethics is based on the principle that the agent gives in and of pure joy, without expecting any kind of reward in return.”346 Syntheist ethics is thus inherently active because it is based on a wilful act, a subversion of the restrictions placed on individuals trapped in hypercapitalism’s reliance on “the individualist paradigm and its programmatic atomism, capitalism, and expansionism.”347

Syntheist ethics is predicated on utopia precisely because utopia is the “dream of a sustainable society beyond the nation state and capitalist expansionism,” a dream which has not been realized—yet.348 Syntheist ethics becomes “an experimental practice, oriented towards utopia.”349 Because it is experimental, Syntheist ethics can’t be concretely articulated in a prescriptive manner beyond its active quality. To reiterate, the activity central to Syntheist ethics stems not necessarily from political protest or solidarity, but purely in the act of giving something without any expectation of

342 Ibid., 280. 343 Ibid. 344 Ibid. 345 Ibid., 154. 346 Ibid. 347 Ibid., 282. 348 Ibid. 349 Ibid. 119 recompense. An ethically active Syntheist thinks to them self, “I am doing this only because I am the one who is to do this, without the lightest trace of the traditional religion’s at times appeasing, at times calculating, ulterior motives.”350 Syntheist ethics is thus “a pure form of activism…an activism which in turn is founded on faith; on a faith which through being activated unleashes a truth.”351 This truth is an action “that uses the

[existential] void’s vacuum energy as an engine to revolutionize the world, in order to constantly create the world anew.”352 Thus, according to Syntheist ethics, “it is precisely in the protest against the given conditions of existence and in the human being’s civilizational redirection of history that she makes her imprint as an ethical creature.”353

There is no direct path that dictates which actions will produce such change in the

“given” conditions of existence in which the Syntheist agent finds herself. However, it is

“precisely in this memory of an ecstasy directly linked to the religious belonging that the

Syntheist intersubject is born and grows.”354 In this sense, the Syntheist community takes center stage in the parsing out of an enactable Syntheist ethics. These communities encourage “the creation of living narratives,” and the more narratives pronounced, the better able the Syntheist community is to “create a powerful hegemonization…it is only with the outsider inside the community’s walls that the particular can give life to the universal and the universal can give life to the Syntheist utopia.”355 The figure of the

“outsider” is an important ethical component, for “it is to the outsider that the Syntheist

350 Ibid., 154. 351 Ibid. 352 Ibid. 353 Ibid., 188. 354 Ibid., 281. 355 Ibid., 307. 120 agent reaches out on the free and open Internet, and it is together with the outsider that the Syntheist agent can save the planet…Only thus.”356

It is in this way that “Syntheist ethics also must be relationalist,” and Syntheism thus “opens the way for an ethics of interactivity, based on the entangled, outstretched phenomenon’s quest for its own survival.”357 Syntheists posit that “it is not in ethics and what the subject feels for the other that the primary arises.”358 The primary is instead “the existence of the Universe and how this existence manifests itself for itself by setting people in motion towards and with each other.359” An ethics must reflect this pantheistic quality of “the primary”, the universal experience of existence, and thus must ultimately be active because it is motivated by the arrangement of people moving towards and with one another.

Syntheist Ritual, Practice, and Revolution The considerable vagueness of Syntheist ethics thus far will hopefully be allayed by our following discussion on the actual, material manifestations of Syntheist beliefs.

We will discuss the subjectivity of the Syntheist agent as they interact with the Syntheist community, how Syntheists regard religious rituals and create their own based on the principle of “parcipatoryism”, and lastly how Syntheists view the transition to transhumanism as it relates to entheogenic practices. Although thousands of individuals align themselves with the Syntheist movement, many participate only virtually through the Syntheist email LISTSERV, the Facebook group, or by periodically checking

Syntheism.org. Although there is a Syntheist Node in Stockholm, Sweden, many non-

356 Ibid. 357 Ibid., 418. 358 Ibid. 359 Ibid. 121

Swedish (and even many Swedish) Syntheists have never been inside this space, where

Syntheist rituals as well as more casual discussions take place. The descriptions of rituals and practices described in their text, Syntheism, are quasi-descriptive of actual rituals and practices, but also of ideal rituals and practices that might take place someday, in the

Syntheist temples and monasteries of the future. i. The State of Clarification

Syntheists draw an important distinction between the Syntheist agent in its present subjectivity and its deferred, utopic one. They do this by distinguishing between the concepts of the dividual and the subject. “Informationalist Man is a dividual,” they note, while “syntheism’s ultimate ambition is, based on dividuality, to envelop an authentic subjectivity.”360 The bridge between the dividual and its ultimate, authentic subjectivity is a state called “clarification.” These are the conditions for clarification: “the dividual must be isolated from the surrounding world’s constant distortions…which is enabled through purposeful spiritual work within the Syntheist congregation’s walls.”361 In this “isolated, conscious, enlightened environment,” the dividual can finally develop “genuinely critical thinking” and can enter the state of clarification.362 In this state, akin to deep meditation,

“the mind focuses on a single point in space-time where there is serenity, where all existential tensions are finally released, where the subject creates a tranquility which makes it possible to quite simply be.”363

While clarification occurs on an individual level, it is facilitated by and within the

Syntheist community. For Syntheists, the very point of religion is to create such

360 Ibid., 379. 361 Ibid. 362 Ibid. 363 Ibid. 122 conditions by “bringing people together and giving them an emergent, collective identity that is greater than the dividuals separately.”364 The Syntheist community is motivated by

“the following: the less self-interest the dividual brings to the religious ceremony, the more powerful the spiritual experience.”365 Thus, the community represents “letting go of the ego fixation and allowing oneself to dissolve into the hierarchically higher collective emergence, where the community stands out as something greater than the sum of its constituent parts, as the most powerful agent.”366 Self-love, ironically, is rendered the

“obvious foundation for all Syntheist rituals and ceremonies,” but since the “self is in constant flux…the act of self-love must be repeated time after time after time.”367

One of the practices of the Syntheist community which enacts the purpose of religion, namely to bring people together under a collective identity and purpose, is the

Syntheist sharing circle. In these circles, “the agents bear witness to their innermost thoughts and experiences in front of each other.”368 These sharing circles are organized in order to emphasize “transparentization,” which follows the Syntheist “ethics of interactivity and therefore is carried from the bottom up.”369 This means that, following the Focauldian logic touched on earlier, “those who are the strongest, most powerful, those most established who open themselves up first before the community in a process where everyone shares more and more of their innermost thoughts and emotions for

364 Ibid., 386. 365 Ibid., 381. 366 Ibid. 367 Ibid., 385. 368 Ibid., 386. 369 Ibid. 123 every round of the sharing circle.”370 This is one example of a Syntheist participatory ritual, which will be discussed in greater detail below. ii. Participatory Ritualism Syntheists define ritual as “the religious habit.”371 Syntheist rituals are thus “often or regularly repeated habits with the purpose of strengthening the particular identity of the dividual and social identity within the community.”372 Syntheists create rituals “in order to constantly return to the necessary self-forgiveness, including collective rituals to support the journey towards the insight of self-forgiveness.”373 Their rituals are thus necessarily participatory rituals, and they define “participatoryism” as “a principle which entails the participants meeting in radical equality without any hierarchies whatsoever between them.”374 Participation is also, not coincidentally, one of the ten philosophical principles of the notorious Burning Man Festival; Syntheism co-Founder Alexander Bard actually came up with the idea of codifying a Syntheist ethics “while spending the night lying next to a beautiful naked actress at Burning Man.”375 Also mirroring the anti- hierarchical structure of Burning Man activities, to the extent that the rituals have a leader, the Syntheist leadership “serves the community from below rather than manipulating it from above.”376 The community in which these rituals are continuously enacted becomes a Syntheist family unit, and this family “plays a central role…a living religion can hardly exist without a clear idea of the family.”377

370 Ibid. 371 Ibid., 390. 372 Ibid., 390. 373 Ibid., 387. 374 Ibid. 375 Piesing, Mark. “Is the Internet God? Alexander Bard’s Syntheism paves the way for a new elite.” The Guardian, 7 October 2014. theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/07/god-internet-alexander-bard-syntheism-new-elite. Accessed 1 October 2016. 376 Ibid. 377 Ibid., 393. 124

Syntheists clearly describe their “Syntheist liturgy”, which was formed “as early as during its first years of emergent self-organization on the Internet” through participatory platforms like their collective website Syntheism.org.378 The Syntheist liturgy developed four specific categories of ritual:

(1) Ceremonies that support and confirm transitions in life

(2) Periodic festivals which are connected to the four seasons (which each fall under the purview of a Syntheist deity)

(3) Meditative techniques

(4) Transcendental experience, through structured shamanism and advanced psychedelic practices379

Syntheists situate this liturgy “at the dawn of the Internet age.”380 In this primitive stage of its development, the liturgy “is very much about desecularization, a historically necessary ambition to sacralize capitalist Man’s radically secularized lifeworld.”381 There are other elements of the liturgy which locate its practice and reception in the body—“a collective sound-making…a quiet phase of contemplation and meditation…a listening to carefully selected music…a closing peace salutation.”382 These rituals often take place in the Syntheist Node, as do art and yoga workshops, but some Syntheist rituals take place out in nature or even outside of physical space. The Syntheist liturgy is not bound to a physical space and, befitting of any cyberreligion, its rituals “can just as well be carried out as a virtual ceremony.”383 iii. Chemical Liberation as Transhuman Revolution

378 Ibid., 391. 379 Ibid. 380 Ibid., 392. 381 Ibid. 382 Ibid. 383 Ibid. 125

One particular Syntheist practice, most related to the Syntheology which animates

Syntheist ethics, is the voluntary undergoing of chemically liberatory experiences. The two most effective chemical liberations that have been practiced in almost every human society, according to Syntheism, are sexual and entheogenic ceremonies. The term

“entheogen”, meaning “becoming divine from within” in the original Greek, developed in the 1970s by researchers who wanted to distance their work on psychoactive substances from the socio-cultural “psychedelics” craze of the 1960s. Entheogenic ceremonies refer to psychotropic, plant-based rituals, usually undertaken under the guidance of a shaman, which produce consciousness-altering effects imbued with religious and/or spiritual significance. The centrality of both sexual and entheogenic rituals to the liberation of the mind and, especially, as potentially theological practices is nicely articulated in the following passage from Syntheism:

Most paradigms and societies hate and attempt to minimize and if possible exterminate these two phenomena. The esoteric is equated with the satanic. Only in the syntheist utopia with its theological anarchism can the dream of liberated sexuality be found side by side with the dream of a free usage of entheogens – with the express ambition of realizing the enormous potential for humanity of both of these dreams. For what is the anarchist society if not the very community where human pleasure is no longer restricted? And from the reverse perspective, what is thought control in its deepest sense, if not in fact a quest to control sex and drugs? Or to express the matter as a popular, countercultural t-shirt slogan: Drug control is thought control.384

Syntheists are aware that it is precisely “because of their enormous existential and subversive potential that sexuality and entheogens have regularly become the objects of the most false accusations, the most bizarre taboos.”385 They compare sexuality and entheogen use to the Biblical forbidden fruit, which represents for them “the oldest and

384 Ibid., 400. 385 Ibid., 399. 126 probably best known euphemism for the psychedelic substance.”386 However, Syntheists reject the so-called “myth of sobriety” upon which the construction of these taboos and prohibitions are based: “there is no sober ego: that we refrain from [drugs]…does not mean that a chemical equilibrium prevails in our brain.”387 Thus, Syntheism represents a coming to terms with the chemical alterability and instability of our own minds, collapsing the false mind/body divide upon which Cartesian subjectivities are produced.

Syntheism is rendered “The home where psychedelic practices are carried out responsibly and with creativity with regard to what is best for the congregation…where solid scientific facts meet reported spiritual experiences.”388 This particular melding of scientific rationalism and Romanticism renders “psychedelic practice as an act of faith of the inquiring mind, before which the Syntheist never subordinates herself to the nation state.”389 Finally, at least one avenue of experimental ethical practice becomes clear—the liberation of the Syntheist agent from the oppressive hypercapitalist regime is enacted through “chemical liberation which entails a Syntheist martyrdom.”390

It is precisely because of these spiritually liberatory potentials for entheogenic or sex-based chemical alterations in the brain that Syntheists link them to Syntheology. For

Syntheists, an “excellent theological starting point is the experience ‘the Universe rolled right over and crushed me…and this steamrolling made me both religious and deeply grateful’.”391 This is a typical account of many people who have experienced the ayahuasca rituals of South America or iboga rituals in Central Africa, both of which “are

386 Ibid. 387 Ibid., 397. 388 Ibid., 398. 389 Ibid., 399. 390 Ibid., 398. 391 Ibid., 401. 127 considered the most powerful but also the most traditional psychedelic practices that humanity has developed.”392 These experiences represent what is at “the core of the

Syntheist spiritual experience,” a core that “Takes us the whole way to its practice.”393

This core is the paradoxically unnamable quality of the spiritual experience. Thus, the impetus in Syntheism that individuals feel compelled to experience psychedelic liberation for themselves in a safe, Syntheist context. Because of its link to spiritual awakening and religious experience, Syntheists view “the criminalization of entheogenic substances…as the greatest and most tragic case of mass religious persecution in history.”394 Syntheism accordingly “strives for humanity at long last to have access to complete freedom of religion,” which naturally entails free sexual and psychedelic exploration.395

These chemical alterations are also related, ironically, to the transhuman revolution, in which we have all been involuntarily cast with “the genesis of 21st century human technologies, where even the body is technologized.”396 Spirituality is at the heart of this revolution for the Syntheist, as transhumanism represents “chemical liberation par excellence,” and it is through this liberation that the Syntheist agents can escape subordination to hypercapitalist systems.397 In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine

Hayles defines the first new human form within this transhuman revolution as a cybernetic, posthuman cyborg—some combination of biological human with technological machine. Syntheists, on the other hand, depart from this more common view of posthuman-transhumanism, viewing the newest iteration of humanness not as

392 Ibid., 402. 393 Ibid., 402. 394 Ibid. 395 Ibid. 396 Ibid., 400. 397 Ibid. 128 soulless part-machine, but as more clearly spiritual part-human. The mind-altering chemical capacities of entheogenic substances represent a different kind of technological intervention, one in which an organic substance interacts with an organic (human) subject to bring to fore their inorganic spirituality. It is the awareness of this spirituality which renders someone transhuman in the Syntheist view, because the new frame of mind this experience facilitates allows this particular transhuman to break free from the alienating hypercapitalist narratives that bind them. This chemical liberation par excellence facilitates Timothy Leary’s famous proclamation, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”398

Dropping out from the hypercapitalist web allows the transhuman to seek a newer, better metaphysical narrative—one which Syntheism claims to singularly provide.

3 The Dystopian Within: Syntheist Utopia as Technology Fetishism To be consistent with Atwood’s emphasis on the latent dystopias within every utopia, we can now try to poke through Syntheism’s utopianism too see what dystopias lie beneath it. What are some social, economic, and political realities that Syntheists might take for granted in their construction of their ethics, as well as their trust in technological development as a metaphysical catalyst? By probing their utopian views for hints of virtual dystopianism, we might be afforded a richer, more nuanced idea of what

Syntheism ultimately is striving for and, more importantly, how possible its utopia could actually be. To do so, we will draw on two virtual dystopic accounts which each show that the internet, far from solving modern problems of social and political alienation, “is, in fact, deeply implicated in the extension and deepening of inequality in the world of

398 Leary, Timothy. From the Human Be-In Gathering, San Fransisco, 1967. 129 neoliberal global capitalism.”399 Although Syntheists are aware of the damaging persistence of what they refer to as hypercapitalism in this new, Internet Age, the dystopian accounts provided by philosophers Jodi Dean and Slavoj Žižek complicate

Syntheism’s hope in their utopia’s viability. How do Syntheists unwittingly represent elements of the criticisms Dean and Žižek make of technoromantic utopianism, and to what (hopefully redeemable) extent?

Jodi Dean and “Technology Fetishism” In her illuminating essay “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the

Foreclosure of Politics,” Jodi Dean challenges many of Mark Poster’s assumptions that the Internet and virtuality necessarily reconfigure politics as radically democratic. In fact,

Dean views such a projection itself as an example of when “the fantasy of [virtual] activity or participation is materialized through technology fetishism.”400 She argues that

“far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance,” the global proliferation of and increasing reliance on virtual communication technologies “results in precisely the opposite—the post-political formation of communicative capitalism.”401 As such, instead of a growing an effective affinity between non-hierarchical, radically democratic political reconfigurations and virtual accessibility, communicative capitalism entrenches “a significant disconnect between politics circulating as content and official politics.”402 The oversaturation of virtual communications, instead of increasing solidarity and political support, in fact “relieves top-level actors (corporate, institutional and governmental) from

399 Yar, Cultural Imaginaries, p. 69. 400Dean, Jodi. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics”, Cultural Politics, Vol. 1 Issue 1, p. 51. 401 Ibid., 53. 402 Ibid. 130 the obligation to respond.”403 At the heart of her paper is the question of why exactly this expansion of communication networks has “coincided with the collapse of democratic deliberation and, indeed, struggle”?404

The Syntheist emphasis on action and participation, modeled on and informed by the virtual network, falls into a trap Dean calls “technology fetishism”. She notes how when individuals put express their ideas online, “the believe their thoughts and ideas are registering…people believe that their contribution to circulating content is a kind of communicative action. They believe they are active.”405 This belief especially comes to bear on Syntheism’s emphasis on the virtual translatability of their rituals and ceremonies, as well as the collective authorship of their liturgy enacted online. Dean references Žižek’s concept of interpassivity as a way of configuring this belief as misguided. “When we are interpassive,” she claims, “something else, a fetish object, is active in our stead.”406 Because it relies on the Internet to land our message for us, the circulation of virtual communication is thus “depoliticizing…because the form of our involvement ultimately empowers those it is supposed to resist.”407

This misleading elixir of virtual participation for Dean represents “technology fetishism”, defined as “a deeper, underlying fantasy wherein technology functions as a fetish covering over our impotence and helping us understand ourselves as active.”408

This technology fetishism “covers over a fundamental lack or absence in the social order.

It protects a fantasy of unity, wholeness or order, compensating in advance for this

403 Ibid. 404 Ibid., 54. 405 Ibid., 60. 406 Ibid. 407 Ibid., 61. 408 Ibid., 62. 131 impossibility.”409 When these fantasies are so central to Syntheist ethics, how can

Syntheism ever, in Dean’s critical view, transcend its fetishistic impulse to become a materialized utopia—an actually active, enacted reality?

Dean’s rejection of communicative capitalism and Syntheism’s resistance to hypercapitalism do demonstrate, in part, some affinity between the two accounts.

Communicative capitalism is this notion that “networked communications bring democracy and capitalism together”, particularly through the ideals of “access, inclusion, discussion, and participation…[via] global telecommunications.”410 Optimists of the expansion of these ideals and of networked communications “emphasize the wealth of information available on the Internet and the inclusion of millions upon millions of voices or points of view into ‘the conversation’.”411 Syntheists definitely exhibit this optimism through their emphasis on the digital integrity movement as a path to Syntheist utopia. However, Dean notes that “instead of leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and influence…the deluge of screens and spectacles undermines political opportunity and efficacy for most of the world’s peoples.”412 Presumably because of their intimate access to and knowledge of these technologies, Syntheists are implicated in this critique (at least partially).

And yet, I would like to suggest that understanding Syntheism as a virtual ethics, in other words as a yet-to-be fully articulated and practiced enactment of Syntheist utopology, allows us the flexibility of aligning Syntheism’s aspirations with Dean’s ultimate argument. She claims that technologies “can and should be politicized,”

409 Ibid., 63. 410 Ibid., 55. 411 Ibid., 58. 412 Ibid., 55. 132 specifically through narratives that make them represent “something beyond themselves in the service of a struggle against something beyond themselves.”413 In this view, it does not matter how fantastical Syntheist ideals are currently, nor does it matter how fetishistic their notions of technology. If we view Syntheism as one such narrative, the strengthening of this community and the further development of its practices could very well avoid the same fetishism it might currently represent for Dean.414

Slavoj Žižek and the “Salaried Bourgeoisie” In this brief subsection, I will attempt to situate Syntheists socio-economically by reading them against Slavoj Žižek’s new class category of a “salaried bourgeoisie.” In his essay, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie”, Žižek describes the production of a rising ideal type emerging in the information revolution.415 In the very beginning of his essay, Žižek articulates a particularly familiar recognition of technological production as socially embedded. He writes that the “products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.”416 This type of immaterial production introduces a paradox in the celebration by postmodernists of the seeming transition form material to symbolic production, “from centralist-hierarchical logic to the logic of the self-organization and multi-centered cooperation.”417 Specifically, this paradox, what theorists tends to celebrate as a “unique chance to overcome capitalism” is also celebrated by neoliberal actors who see the information revolution as facilitating “the rise of a new, ‘frictionless’

413 Ibid., 66. 414 Ibid. 415 Žižek, Slavoj. “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie” London Review of Books. Vol. 34 No. 2. 26 January 2012. 416 Ibid., 2. 417 Ibid. 133 capitalism.”418 This newest iteration of capitalism, based in immaterial production, creates a new ideal type: “no longer the entrepreneur who owns his company, but the expert manager…in this new ideal type of capitalism, the old bourgeoisie, rendered non- functional, is refunctionalized as salaried management.”419

There are two interesting ways in which Žižek’s articulation of this new class complicate our view of the Syntheist project—notably, in our characterization of the

Syntheists themselves. Žižek notes how Ayn Rand fantasizes in Atlas Shrugged of

“striking ‘creative capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realization in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’.”420 The new ideal type Žižek describes above “extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists.”421 It is important to note here that both of the founders of Syntheism, as well as many of its members, fit at least two of those categories listed above (specifically, “intellectuals” and “artists”). We must situate

Syntheists largely as part of Žižek’s new “salaried bourgeoisie” who, although they openly reject hypercapitalist forces and the exploitation inherent in Capitalism, are still sustained by these very structures through their “day jobs.” Their balance of spiritual identity and financial occupation is not a new tension by any means in religious subjects, although it is important to keep Syntheists’ positionality in mind when reading their

“revolutionary” beliefs.

The second, less obvious way Žižek and Syntheism converge might actually cast

Syntheism in a better light. Syntheists define a netocratic class, which is “the new upper

418 Ibid., 3. 419 Ibid. 420 Ibid., 4. 421 Ibid., 3. 134 class of the Internet age, the social monsters who call the shots in the digital world.”422

The netocracy is a difficult class to contend with because, just like Žižek’s salaried bourgeoisie, some of its members are using their position of privilege to fight “for power over society against the old and increasingly vulnerable (Capitalist) bourgeoisie.”423 In its earliest stages, the netocrats largely represent the fight for digital integrity that animates

Syntheist ethics, as evidenced by the support of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs for open and free internet access. Importantly, however, some of these netocrats, a Syntheist term for the salaried bourgeoisie which the Syntheists also largely belong to, seek to protect these superficially egalitarian, noble measures in order to control the power dynamics of the new Internet Age. To what extent Syntheism as a religious community, a theology, an ethics, and a metaphysical paradigm can mitigate or even indefinitely postpone this eventual internalization of power is a crucial question Syntheists must contend with. And soon.

Conclusion: The Necessary Ambiguity of Enacted Syntheisms

In his book Digital Mythologies: The Hidden Complexities of the Internet (1999), journalist and author Thomas Valovic presciently proclaims the following:

We might wonder whether the true gift of computers and communications might not be an epistemological one: They have allowed us to question and deconstruct the premises of our sense of reality…We create our own realities…But neither formulaic religion nor spirituality can alone fill the void. What seems necessary for this transformation is a new model for transcendence, a model that takes into account the more arbitrary dimensions of the human condition. In this sense, postmodernism must be seen more as a starting point than as an end result.424

422 Bard, Syntheism, Glossary. 423Ibid. 424 Valovic, Thomas. Digital Mythologies: The Hidden Complexities of the Internet. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1999. p. 211. 135

Valovic comes to this conclusion after reams of text decrying what he viewed as the “mock religion” of cyberculture constructed until his writing. This mock religion, reflections of both Yar’s technoromanticism as well as Dean’s technology fetishism, presented to him “yet another grand quest for the transcendent experience, common in

Western religion,” but this time not “by way of avatars, angels, and other spiritual guides but through machines become godlike with an intelligence to surpass our own.”425 This mock religion is motivated by an internalized “belief that science and technology are primarily responsible for social progress and improvements in quality of life.”426 This simplistic belief, which “mirrors the ‘irrational’ dimensions of religious thinking”, obfuscates from its adherents “the many failures of science and technology from a true reckoning of their worth.”427

The metaphysics of the Net produced by the time that book was written, on the cusp of the 21st century, were insufficient in Valovic’s view because although they acknowledged that “for secular scientism to succeed, it would somehow have to fill the void left by spirituality,” their means of filling this void with existential meaning merely fed back into technoromantic narratives that ultimately forced human agency to take a knee to our new robotic masters.428 “Technological powers and capabilities are only truly successful to the extent that they are fully humanized,” Valovic claims.429 “When the process is reversed and our technologies begin to shape us in their image and likeness,” the transhuman nightmare, “we are heading in the wrong direction.”430 He claims, a bit

425 Ibid., 163. 426 Ibid., 180. 427 Ibid. 428 Ibid., 206. 429 Ibid. 430 Ibid. 136 dejectedly, that “if science and technology are going to provide the ultimate answers to fundamental human questions, they will have to work much harder.”431

As an alternative and more contemporary metaphysics of the Net, Syntheism seems to provide a fuller de-secularization of the Internet than Valovic seems to have had in 1999. As a synthesis of the Enlightenment’s scientific pragmatism and Romanticism’s critique of modernity, Syntheism can be seen in a sense to “work much harder” than the one-sided, purely science-privileging metaphysics which often characterize the virtual utopias Yar problematizes. Still, as our analysis has hopefully shown, even Syntheism’s more nuanced technoromantic utopia is still conditioned by the fetishism of communicative technologies Jodi Dean decries, as well as by Syntheists’ own positionality as poster children for Slavoj Žižek’s new “salaried bourgeoisie” class of hypercapitalists. Many unspoken assumptions of class and economic opportunity motivate their ethical pronouncements, complicating Syntheists’ insistence on breaking out of hypercapitalist systems of control. Their positionality as netocrats, members of the emerging upper class of the Internet Age, mean that they fall on the privileged side of the

“digital divide”—the increasing distance between those with access to and education in virtual technologies and those entirely without. Additionally, their emphasis on chemical liberation through sexual and entheogenic practices imply that all Syntheists must have the money to access these materials, the time to participate in these rituals, and will not be harmed or otherwise socially alienated by partaking in these stigmatized activities.

As Margaret Atwood so clearly articulates through her own work, for every utopia, there is an underlying dystopian element. Parsing out both the ambiguities of

431 Ibid., 210. 137

Syntheism’s supposedly enactable practices in addition to the dystopian realities which their beautiful utopia is entrenched in (and arguably, produced because of) allows us a more critical reckoning with an emergent cyberreligion. Hopefully in doing so, we will be able to push Syntheists to better articulate how exactly their dense Syntheology is best enacted in our hypercapitalist reality beyond a chemical transformation into the transhuman subject. In the final section of this project, we will turn this critical eye towards Syntheism’s attachment to metanarrative as a productive register for their spiritual pronouncements. To what extent is Syntheism a viable metanarrative, especially in an era of disillusioned and disenchanted postmodern cynicism—one in which technology itself produces so much of this societal disillusion and disenchantment?

Furthermore, how can attending to Syntheism with this critical lens demonstrate more broadly an expansion of what it looks like to conduct religious study, especially on an emergent cyberreligion with, it seems, the best of intentions?

138

(In)Conclusions

“As networking dividuals, we no longer produce things, we produce social life itself. The question is who can play the role as the universal singularity during the introductory phase of the internet age. How will this social production influence the emerging classes in the cyber world…will they be lured by the same capitalist temptations that seduced their individualistic predecessors, or will they succeed in seeing through these illusions? Or will they instead fall prey to entirely new illusions?” -Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age432

“I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe we can survive whatever we must survive.” –James Baldwin433

In this experimental undertaking, we have surveyed Syntheism, an emergent cyberreligious movement, within its cybernetic genealogy, through its atheist theology, and against its technoromantic tendencies. Although our study has been conducted in a fairly comprehensive manner, especially as it is the first of its kind, many sections of

Syntheist belief have not made it into the present project. From this thesis alone, for instance, we do not discover why Syntheism calls itself a “process religion”, nor have we examined its configuration of memetic and semiotic theory as tools of Syntheist meaning- making. More generally, I would have liked to have been able to situate the Syntheist

Movement against the various pre-existing traditions and communities it builds off of, attending to the appropriative qualities of Syntheism’s beliefs and rituals. These concepts are just as complex as those examined in this thesis, and have been omitted primarily for their lack of an immediate bearing on the task at hand: merely to make Syntheism intelligible as a valid subject of religious study. Despite the limitations of this initial

432 Bard, Alexander and Söderqvist, Jan. Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age, Stockholm: Stockholm Text. p. 415. 433 Baldwin, James. “The Negro and the American Promise.” Perspectives. 1963. 139 investigation, one question still remains, maybe just as prominently as it did at the very beginning of this project:

Why turn (back) to religion?

In his introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-

François Lyotard defines the postmodern condition as the rejection of metanarrative, motivated by skepticism of its claims to authority through some underlying “transcendent and universal truth.”434 Lyotard notes how “simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”435 Metanarrative can be defined as “a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience of knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a…master idea.”436 One reason poststructuralist theorists like Lyotard consider the postmodern rejection of totalizing metanarratives a positive development is because they tend to systemize or (artificially) reign in the chaos of natural entropy and, Meillassoux might claim, the inescapable contingency of the universe. Another reason to support the postmodern condition is that metanarratives tend to obscure the heterogeneity of human existence. By appealing to some so-called “master idea”, they tend to serve normalizing, top-down purposes.

“Where, after the metanarratives,” Lyotard asks, “can legitimacy reside?”437 Let us return to Syntheism with Lyotard’s critique of metanarrative in mind. Why should Syntheists depart from this postmodern stance, embracing and creating a religious metanarrative in order to re-enchant us in some digitalized, post-postmodern transition?

434 Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Bennington, Geoff and Massumi, Brian. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. p. xxiv-xxv. 435 Ibid. 436 Eds. Childers, J. and Hentzi, G. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. p. 186. 437 Ibid. 140

In their own words, Syntheists emphasize their religious project as a metaphysical striving towards some social, technological, and spiritual utopia—one which necessary does not yet exist. How can a utopia, expressed especially through religious metanarrative, expect to thrive in an academic realm saturated in postmodern skepticism?

Syntheists are aware of this obstacle: “If it was already built into the hyper-hermeneutical state that it would come down to an intellectually sterilizing banning of all metanarratives, how can syntheology respond to the glaring need for the return to utopianism?”438 Syntheists etch out the conditions that work against them, ironically enough as they are embodied and deployed by the “academic-philosophy paradigm.”439

They claim that their “serious attempt to create a new, credible metanarrative for the

Internet age is a highly conscious, logical negation” of this paradigm, which is constricted by its outdated reliance on capitalist models of academic production and valuation.440 Philosophy, according to Syntheists, must be liberated from the restrictions placed upon it by (ultimately capitalism-serving) postmodern deconstruction, and as such it must be able to articulate again a universalizable truth.

Syntheists make a considerable and controversial implication through their own delineation of the Digital Age as a distinct, metaphysical paradigm beyond capitalism. In creating a Syntheology for this new paradigm, they imply that hypercapitalism, the tenacious remnants of the capitalist paradigm well into the new informationalist paradigm, is our currently active theology. Hypercapitalism is profuse and virulently embedded in areas presumed to be “secular”, so how does the dramatic Syntheist claim

438 Bard, Syntheism, p. 413. 439 Ibid. 440 Ibid. 141 that capitalism continues to serve a metaphysical function in our postmodern, virtual era implicate those who claim secularity? For instance, even religious studies scholars

(myself included) often attempt to present a religious theme, community, and/or philosophy in a presumably secular register, usually in order to gain the external legitimation of “objectivity”. We more often than not submit to production-based, market-inspired practices of academia like entering the hamster-wheel of publishing and the endless process of grant-solicitation (and other funding woes, particularly in the

Humanities fields). The normalization of this neoliberal, “marketplace of ideas” approach to academia influences which subjects of study will maximize our payback, and which methodologies will bring us the most professional (read: monetary) glory—whether these internalized standards are consciously enacted or not, they inescapably color what

“counts” as a legitimate topic for investigation. To conclude this slight tangent, I would like only to ask how this thesis might begin to destabilize these assumptions, even as it enacts a fairly standard practice in religious studies (namely, the description of a religious community’s origins, beliefs, and practices, in the form of a research paper). How can attending to Syntheism’s desire to escape a postmodern rejection of identity that, ironically, feeds neoliberal subjectivities help turn our critical lens inward? How does it render religious studies a particularly well-positioned field in which to queer academia’s normativity, just as Syntheists queer our assumptions of religious normativity?

Returning to our original subject, Syntheism is obsessed with creating a return to a pure, non-capitalist philosophico-spirituality through syntheology, which hopes “to create the narrative of how the particular is already the universal.”441 According to

441 Ibid. 142

Syntheology, “once that narrative exists, the universal is made visible through the realization of the generic.”442 Although this all sounds quite vague, even for a “liberated” kind of philosophy, Syntheists are protected in that “since genericism has still not yet been tested, from a skeptical perspective the utopia is also fully possible.”443 As the only credible path towards realizing this utopia which cannot (yet) be disproven, Syntheism provides “something much greater [than metanarrative]: it is instead the step outside of the eternal cycle of mythology production and incessant disappointment.”444 Just as

Syntheism is an attempt to reconfigure religion through its own self-conscious production of religious symbols, beliefs, and rituals, Syntheology as a metanarrative power reconfigures metanarrative itself not only as the specific articulation of some universal truth, but of such an ultimate truth that it can only be deferred, infinitely, to the future.

This is an attempt to create a “pure religion”, at whose heart lies the most impossible of metanarratives: Informationalist utopia. Because we do not know what that looks like, we cannot really articulate the exact path to its achievement. Syntheists nevertheless attempt to articulate some path in the hopes that, with Syntheist faith, it might bring us closer to this bright future.

But what is keeping us from naturally achieving this utopia without any metanarrative whatsoever? Why is religion, especially one so artificially created, considered instrumental to reaching the Syntheist end-goal? Let us reply by examining where we seem to be situated right now, according to Syntheism. By arguing so strongly that Syntheism provides the only fitting theology for the emergent Digital Age,

442 Ibid. 443 Ibid. 444 Ibid. 143

Syntheists heavily imply that (hyper)capitalism is our current acting theology. The damaging prevalence of the old theological paradigm renders our current experience of virtuality a “confused beginning of the Internet age,” in that it maximizes alienation at the expense of empathy. Syntheism attempts to flip this capitalist tendency, and uses religious communion as the main (though not exclusive) means towards this inversion. It is important to reiterate here that religion is defined as “everything” in the very first chapter of Syntheism, but Syntheists view community as the most central, definitional quality of religion, and the one which should be salvaged from both atheist and postmodern rejections of religion.

In summation, here are three final (in)conclusions, meant to stimulate further inquiry and discussion. With Syntheism, there are no answers, only more questions towards our final destination of cybernetic utopia:

1. A cyberreligion which follows an atheist theology and practices a yet-to-be- seen ethics must be treated as a genuine religious movement.

2. Such cyberreligions are a legitimate subject for any scholar of religion, not only through the study of their immediate beliefs and practices, but also in the ways they challenge our preconceptions of what a religion “is”, what religions “do”, and, thus, what it means to “study” religion.

3. The incorporation of these types of religious movements into the discipline can help expand our expectations of the role and function of religious meaning- production (i.e. metanarratives), simultaneously reflecting and queering the norms which undergird academic discourse and valuation. Doing so might combat the exclusionary, disciplinary processes of normalization, “purifying” an increasingly capitalist nature of academic production.

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