The rise of machine intelligence seems to be pushing people towards spiritualism, maybe because it’s all that’s left?
People who once derived their value from their work or skills are forced to reflect on what actually separates them from machines.
You can already see it in the strange new spiritualities forming online. The Remilia Collective theorise “network spirituality” — treating the internet as a site of spiritual transcendence, populated by “network angels & demons” and persona-egregores recast as hyperreal spiritual entities. A wave of cyber occultism adapts digital sigil magic, memetic warfare and chaos magick to online spaces, imagining the internet as a ritual chamber and algorithms as incantations. And an algorithmic conspirituality has bloomed across TikTok and AI tools — ChatGPT read as tarot or astrology, “Blue Anon” psychic predictions, AI grimoires by the likes of Soda Khan and Alley Wurds.