1 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 3 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). 4 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.