There's something you touch upon but don't elaborate on in your essay - the idea of tech as a religion/cult, especially in the comparison to Islam and through the story of Johnson leaving Mormonism and replacing it with a new, material worship.
Thank you for reading! I wanted to connect how the fear of the unknown and a rejection of the metaphysical inevitably lead to an obsession with the material. Johnson, having left Mormonism without replacing it with any deeper belief, is now so afraid of death that he genuinely believes he can escape it. You can see this tendency throughout the tech world—where everything, even beauty, is treated as something that can be measured and optimized. But beauty and death alike reveal the limits of that kind of thinking.
There's something you touch upon but don't elaborate on in your essay - the idea of tech as a religion/cult, especially in the comparison to Islam and through the story of Johnson leaving Mormonism and replacing it with a new, material worship.
Fascinating piece, thank you for writing it.
Thank you for reading! I wanted to connect how the fear of the unknown and a rejection of the metaphysical inevitably lead to an obsession with the material. Johnson, having left Mormonism without replacing it with any deeper belief, is now so afraid of death that he genuinely believes he can escape it. You can see this tendency throughout the tech world—where everything, even beauty, is treated as something that can be measured and optimized. But beauty and death alike reveal the limits of that kind of thinking.