“Silicon Valley immerses us in full techno-religiousness”

Pierre Musso is an honorary university professor, associated with the Telecom Paris engineering school, a specialist in technological imaginations. He brings his philosopher’s gaze to virtual reality.

Will the metaverse materialize “the philosophy of networks” of the thinker of the industrial society Saint-Simon [1760-1825]what are you inspired by?

The metaverse illustrates an innovation – or an aggregate of technologies – meant to represent or herald a cultural revolution. For, nowadays, utopias or dystopias are realized in the form of messianism or technoscientific catastrophism. Silicon Valley, with the help of Hollywood studios, continues to stage “revolutionary” technological promises in fictions that are often global blockbusters, such as Matrix Where Minority Reportto promote cyberspace and artificial intelligence [IA].
“Metavers” is a new portmanteau word that Silicon Valley has the secret to, like “star wars” or “information highways”, intended to produce a grand narrative and build an imaginary around existing technologies, or in development, and to present them to the public as a new “revolution”.

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You wrote “The Religion of the Industrial World” in 2006, then “The Industrial Religion. Monastery, factory, factory. A genealogy of business” in 2017: are we heading towards “virtual religion”?

In our secularized and hyper-technologized societies there remains a desire for divinities, because no society can do without the myths or founding beliefs that hold it together. A technical society will logically seek its divinities in technoscience. Thus, references to the sacred and to God are omnipresent in Anglo-Saxon culture, particularly in the temples of Silicon Valley, which has adopted a “technico-mystical ideology”, heir to the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener. And let’s remember: the death of Steve Jobs [1955-2011] was greeted in 2011 with the words: “god”, “prophet”, “messiah”, “pope”, “icon”, “apostle” or “guru”. From now on, the invocation of the divine, immortality and transcendence is supposed to bring an additional soul to the proliferation of techno-discourses surrounding AI or transhumanism. We are immersed in full “techno-religiousness”.

Read also the tribune (2011): “In Steve Jobs, the era mourns a guru of the religion of technology”

Has Europe already lost this new virtual reality battle?

There is no virtual or digital revolution today, but combinations of technological innovations resulting from a major breakthrough in the middle of the 20th century.^e century, which is computerization creating a new technical system, like the XIX^e century was that of mechanization. Europe can and must regain its industrial power in this sector, there is no fatality to decline.

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