• Sunday School for Cyborgs
• R. John Williams (bio)

It takes no great sleuth to deduce that strange religious things are afoot in Silicon Valley. Massive financial investments, for instance, have been devoted to solving the "modest problem of death"—with immortality hovering just on the horizon. Re-wire the human DNA! Upload your consciousness to the machine! There are architectural signs of a new religiosity as well: Apple's secretive, four-story corporate building, built in the form of a "perfect circle," with a mega-church like auditorium at the center, and monastic cubicles where the smart phones we carry with us everywhere, like digital totems, are lovingly crafted for the masses. Archive.org, which has nowhere near Apple's budget (but all the same religious fervor), took the cheaper route and purchased a now-defunct Christian Science Church building in San Francisco's Richmond District. Visitors are greeted by a temple-like white stone facade adorned with Roman columns. Inside, on the walls of the "chapel," where organ pipes once hummed, archive. org's massive servers sparkle with little blue lights, reflecting against the stained-glass windows like so much digital incense—the churning of data from all over the world, terabytes of zeros-and-ones constantly in flux. Weirdest of all, in the pews of the chapel, curiously still in place, rows of little statues stand unblinking: colorful, human forms made of some kind of plaster or papier-mâché (if you work for longer than three years for archive.org, they commission a local artist to create a likeness of you, which will stand thereafter in the chapel). It feels definitively sacred.

More to the point, a deep quasi-religious fervor burns in the hearts and minds of those who inhabit these techno-Delphic spaces. The "Reformed Church of Google" (Google it; it's real) is probably a clever joke among Valley atheists ("Googlists believe Google should rightfully be given the title of 'God,' as She exhibits a great many of the characteristics traditionally associated with such Deities in a scientifically provable manner"), but there is certainly no shortage of true belief infiltrating the burgeoning field of AI and its massively expanding digital infrastructures. Look at any fictional or documentary portrayal of contemporary technoculture, and you'll find an increasingly cyborg-ish mythos performing the kind of devotional energies formerly devoted to the world's great religions. FX's television series Devs (2020), directed by Alex Garland, of Ex Machina (2014) fame, is only the most obvious example: the big reveal, no real spoiler here, is that Devs doesn't stand for the company's "development" program; it stands for Deus.

For those in the know, flashes of this god-in-the-machine zeal show up in even the most unexpected situations. Late last year, a friend of mine, a coder working at a startup in San Francisco, happened to be standing near a steel grate close to her favorite Sushi restaurant when one of PG&E's electricity transformers exploded underground. It was deeply traumatic. If she'd been standing just a few feet to her left, she could have died (it is common knowledge that PG&E refuses to spend the money necessary to safely maintain its own equipment, hence occasional blow ups and failures). She tweeted about it, hoping to understand what had happened, but she was unprepared for what some of her fellow digerati messaged her: "it's a sign," someone wrote, convinced that the "Singularity" was coming: "you have been prepared for this moment." It was evidence, they insisted, that a new digital "magic" was out there. Put simply, San Francisco has long since become Pynchon's San Narciso; the sacral-synth sounds of Blade Runner's Los Angeles trickle down from every loudspeaker; the techno-priesthood is in place; the apps are our sacrament; [End Page 9] the prophesied forms of Minority Report's (2002) "precog temple," creepily personalized ads, and zoom-screen surveillance are our everyday reality; John Lilly's sensory...

• 半机械人星期日学校
• R.约翰·威廉姆斯（生物）

无需费吹灰之力就可以推断出硅谷正在发生奇怪的宗教事件。例如，大量的金融投资一直致力于解决“适度的死亡问题”-永生不息而逝。重新连接人类DNA！将您的意识上传到机器上！还有一种新的宗教征兆的建筑标志：苹果公司的秘密，四层楼的公司建筑，以“完美的圆圈”的形式建造，中心有礼堂等巨型教堂，而修道院隔间则是我们使用智能手机的地方像数字图腾一样随处携带，是为大众精心打造的。Archive.org与Apple的预算相差无几（但出于宗教原因），采取了更便宜的路线，并在旧金山的里士满区购买了现已倒闭的基督教科学教堂建筑。参观者会看到装饰有罗马柱子的庙宇般白色石材立面。在内部，在“礼拜堂”的墙壁上，曾经嗡嗡作响的器官管被存档。org庞大的服务器闪烁着很少的蓝光，像彩色的数字香一样映衬在彩色玻璃窗上-来自世界各地的数据搅动，千亿字节的0和1不断变化。最奇怪的是，在教堂的长椅上，奇怪的是仍然摆放着一排排小雕像，它们闪烁不停：用某种灰泥或纸浆制成的彩色人形雕像（如果您为archive.org工作了三年以上） ，他们委托一位本地艺术家来创作您的头像，之后将在小教堂中站立）。绝对有感觉神圣的。

更重要的是，居住在这些技术-德尔福空间的人们的心灵深处燃烧着一种准宗教的狂热。谷歌无神论者之间的“ Google的改革教会”（Google，它是真实的）可能是个聪明的笑话（“ Google专家认为Google应该理应被冠以'上帝'的称号，因为她展示了许多传统上与之相关的特征这样的神灵”，但是肯定不缺乏渗透到新兴的AI领域及其大规模扩展的数字基础设施中的真正信念。看看任何关于现代技术文化的虚构或纪录片刻画，您会发现越来越多的半机械人神话体现了以前奉献给世界上各种伟大宗教的那种奉献精神。FX'Ex Machina（2014）的成名人物Alex Garland（2020）只是最明显的例子：最大的启示是，Devs并不代表公司的“发展”计划；而在这里并没有真正的破坏者。它代表Deus。

对于那些知道的人，即使在最意外的情况下，这种机器热心的热情也会出现。去年下半年，当PG＆E的一台电力变压器在地下爆炸时，我的一个朋友（在旧金山一家初创公司工作的编码员）碰巧站在靠近她最喜欢的寿司餐厅的钢格栅附近。这是深深的创伤。如果她一直站在她的左边几英尺处，那她可能已经死了（众所周知，PG＆E拒绝花费必要的钱来安全地维护自己的设备，因此偶尔会发生爆炸和故障）。她在推特上发了短信，希望了解发生了什么，但她对某些迪格拉蒂同伴发给她的消息并没有做好准备：“这是一个信号，”有人写道，确信“奇点”即将到来：“Blade Runner的Los Angeles从每一个扬声器中滴下。技术神职人员已经到位；这些应用程序是我们的圣礼；[完第9页]《少数派报告》（2002年）的预言形式，“令人毛骨悚然的个性化广告”和“缩放屏幕监视”已成为我们的日常现实。约翰莉莉（John Lilly）的感官