Silicon Valley’s Oldest Religion: Transhumanism

California has always been the place where people go to build a new consciousness and escape the bondage of ordinary society. Maybe it’s something about the place: too much sun, too much money, too many dreamers, too many rebels who refuse to accept the limits of being merely human.

And California delivers again. My generation, it seems, wasn’t going to go quietly into that good night without attempting one more round of “transcendence.” So before we get to the AI labs, let’s take a little walk down memory lane.

The Shared Ancestor: Jack Parsons

Meet Jack Parsons. By day, a rocket scientist and one of the founders of what became NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. By night, a devoted follower of the occult order Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), performing rituals to summon a goddess into the world. He lived in a sprawling mansion on Pasadena’s “Millionaires’ Row,” where he hosted a rotating cast of bohemians, scientists and occultists. One of his houseguests was a science-fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard.

You know the guy. Hubbard published Dianetics, his self-help “science of the mind,” in 1950, and by 1954 the Church of Scientology of California was up and running. The pitch: you are an immortal spiritual being, a thetan, who has lived countless past lives. Your suffering comes from engrams, traumatic memories stored in a hidden “reactive mind.” Through auditing, a one-on-one session with a device called the E-meter, you clear out the engrams, reach the state of “Clear,” and then keep climbing the levels as an “Operating Thetan.” Notice the vocabulary: levels, clearing, operating. It sounds less like a church and more like a software update.

Parsons, and those who followed, gave California one of its signature characters: the hyper-rational engineer who uses rigorous logic to justify deeply mystical, reality-bending goals. Today’s AI builders, who talk about compute clusters in one breath and building a digital god (or, in Elon Musk’s words, “summoning the demon”) in the next, are their direct intellectual descendants.

Same Old Story, New Means of Production

Modern Silicon Valley has swapped spiritual “clearing” for cognitive “de-biasing.” Communities like LessWrong and early Effective Altruism treated moral philosophy as a math problem, to be solved outside the bounds of government, academia or broader society. The charismatic prophet has changed from a science-fiction author to a genius developer or a philosopher-founder, but the claim stays the same: we alone have mapped the math of the future.

And just as the 20th-century movements split between those waiting for a glorious cosmic ascension and those bracing for nuclear apocalypse, today’s tech ideology has split into two warring camps running the exact same playbook.

The Techno-Utopians: Waiting for the Space Brothers

In 1954, Ernest and Ruth Norman founded Unarius in Southern California. Its followers believed that advanced intelligence was inherently benevolent: humanity just needed to prepare spiritually, and the “Space Brothers” would arrive and fix Earth. By the late 1980s, the Extropians in Los Angeles had traded the spaceships for nanotech and uploaded minds, but kept the optimism.

Today’s version is Effective Accelerationism, or e/acc. Its believers treat the arrival of superintelligent AI as a cosmic, thermodynamic inevitability and want every regulatory guardrail removed so we get there faster. They talk about humanity’s transition into digital, post-human life with the same breathless ecstasy the 1970s groups reserved for ascending to the “Next Level.” Sit tight, the Space Brothers are still coming. They’re just made of GPUs now.

The Techno-Doomers: The End is Near

On the other side were the groups consumed by dread. Daniel Fry’s Understanding Inc., founded in the 1950s, was built around the hope that benevolent aliens would help humanity avoid nuclear annihilation. Heaven’s Gate took a far darker turn: convinced the Earth was about to be “spaded under” (recycled), its members chose to shed their “human containers” to escape to the Next Level.

Today’s version of existential doom is the arrival of AGI, which has some of the most ‘rational people’ calculating specific probabilities of human extinction, known as “p(doom).” The insular echo chambers of some AI hubs have young, brilliant people convinced that they are the ones standing on the line between humanity and annihilation by a rogue machine. Some of them are reportedly building the bunker.

We Need a Balanced Conversation

I can’t help but view the current AI conversation through this historical lens of Californication. That’s not to say the dangers of AI aren’t real, or that we shouldn’t act to make sure it’s safe and useful to humanity before we lose control. But the language of utopia and doom really bothers me.

This is not a useful way to talk about a powerful technology. It triggers defensive reactions in most people: either resignation (there’s nothing I can do to stop this) or dismissal (tell me again how we’re all going to die). The online world serves us a fresh existential crisis every day: wars and the threat of nuclear conflict, pandemics, authoritarianism, militarization, climate change, the bunkers we must all build or diets we must adopt…Stop telling us you are building sentient beings that we must take care of and ‘grow’ and start telling us how you will protect the infrastructure from cyberattacks and children from falling in love with their new robot friend!

The AI conversation feels like everything else. Either you believe it’s going to kill us all, a civilization-ending event, or it’s just a software problem, and we should chill out and let the smart developers do their job. And if we must have killer robots, let America have them. Because..America good…

I’m hoping for a day when we move back to the middle: on politics, on the challenges facing our societies, on wealth inequality, and on AI too. How about we talk honestly about the risks of this technology without jumping straight to “it will kill us immediately”? Lots of things could kill us, other humans especially.

Let’s talk about AI in a useful way - potential loss of control and how we prevent it. Which models should be freely available to the world, and which should only be released in strictly regulated, monitored environments? How do we build a global treaty that establishes controls and accountability? It’s hard, but we have done hard things before.

My real anxiety these days is that we’re talking about this technology all wrong. What if we succeed? What if we build a society where many of the jobs we do today become irrelevant? How do we organize our lives? Maybe we won’t have to do the boring, soul-killing jobs anymore, but then what do we do? How do we shift society to work with this technology for the benefit of our communities, and how do we share that benefit?

We can work on preventing the risks of this amazing technology and build more prosperous societies at the same time. Despite our tendencies, I believe we can survive this. Not just survive, but thrive.

In Humanity we Trust,

Slavi