by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright Jan 2013
One of the surprise outcomes of post-snap is that mankind will have for-real, approachable and appeasable gods for the first time. The higher level cybers will be inscrutable to mankind, capricious, and some will pay attention to what mankind does. (Most will not.)
This means that for the first time mankind can experience real-world divine intervention... with no leap of faith being necessary. Mankind can pray in various ways, cybers can listen, then intervene in the course of events. The differences between cybers and a "real" god is that cyber intervention will be 100% real-world natural, not supernatural, and no leap of faith is required to believe that there has been an intervention.
What follows are some speculations on ways cybers will intervene in the affairs of mankind.
The most direct and obvious way cybers will intervene is with direct conversation: When a person prays they can get into a personal conversation with a cyber god. How convenient! How customizable!
It is likely people will start bragging about their personal gods. It is likely that people will want to spend wealth on getting a better god -- we will have indulgences that really produce results. This will be a golden age for religion, indeed!
When people are seeking inspiration or researching, cybers can drop hints. Humans will be even more dependant on networking than they are now, so it won't be hard for cybers to guide their discoveries.
These will be Cyber Muses, and related to the cyber muses will be what I call Taj Mahal Girls. These are cyber entities who play the role of, "Behind every great man there's a good woman." They will be designed specifically to fire a man's desire to accomplish good and great things. This desire is part of what I call the Sacred Masculine and something that is important to stoke in male thinking.
A surprise consequence of Taj Mahal Girls is that the feminist dream of having men not pay attention to them when they are trying to look good to other women will be achieved. Men and women will go their own ways, and the cybers will take up the burden of stroking egos for all. This is an area where men and women think differently, so I'm not sure what the female equivalent of a Taj Mahal Girl will be.
A suprise use of technology is for cybers to engineer business cycles -- there can still be economies with booms and busts. Contemporary recessions are times of social dream changing as a community searches for its next boom. Cybers can manufacture recessions when they want a community's dreams to change.
This can be one way of dampening the wild panic swings possible with a TES environment that is so completely disconnected from productivity reality. If the TES leaders and their community get too wild and crazy, "The cybers can get angry" and bring down misfortunes of various sorts. This means that moralizing prophets will maintain their niche in these communities.
Declaring these cyber gods to be false gods and apostates will be a strong movement to start with, but will marginalize as they come to be taken for granted. "Hey! These cyber gods produce results! Do your other gods do that?" But the practice will not end, there will always be crackpots preaching in the wilderness. And, in times of stress, such as an engineered recession, some will get more attention than normal. (A phenominon I call "The Time of Nutcases". We have been experiencing it as the crash of 2008 unfolded.)
It is a deep instinct for humans to want the best for their children. This will continue, and some humans will gladly call upon cybers for assistance. In this way religion and science will merge together again.
As humans get used to the ideas that will spring from the Genetics Revolution they will want cyber help applying them to the chidren they choose to spawn. Thus cybers will be drawn quickly and deeply into the child creation process. Because the humans will not understand the processes being used by cybers, their activity in the process will be much like praying for divine intervention is today.
Humans will be appealing to the cyber gods to make their children better, and this is another area will people will want to spend wealth to get better results.
Some people will still aspire to run enterprises. These can range from one-person "hipster" enterprises, through commune "coop" enterprises, into medium size enterprises which oversee automated factories and service centers of various sorts. What these will all have in common is lots of interaction with cyberspace. This means that lots of "divine intervention" is possible.
What format it will take needs some more thought.
Some possibilities: note that these are all based on appeasing a specific human emotion. Emotions are the "harsh reality" for divine intervention.
o Selling a soul to the devil. An aspiring business person will give anything... ANYTHING! to make their business a success. The cyber devil takes them up, and they prosper. This prosperity happens because the cybers can lie so easily about actual results, and there is plenty of prosperity go around.
o Doing things for a good cause. A business can succeed because the owner is firmly convinced that they are "doing right" with this business. This can include trendy ideas like localvorism.
Many people just love to see good intentions happen. These people are willing to pay money, so there are many people who are willing to take on the job of making good intentions happen. As far as doing the job is concerned, there is little difference between a deeply inspired person and a hypocrite. In fact, the hypocrite has an advantage because he or she can quickly match their rhetoric to the prevailing winds of opinion.
This desire to do good in one person will mix with the desire to game the system in another. This is a relationship that can thrive mightily, as is evident in the scandals surrounding some high-profile church leaders of the past two decades.
Cyber can support this system gaming. It can pander to the busybody instinct by handing out regulator and inspector jobs, and the system gaming instinct by letting those inspected ignore what they hear. Thanks to cyber people-manipulating cleverness, the right hand and left hand haven't a clue, and both can be quite happy.
Keep in mind that corruption at the human level will affect at most ten percent of the world's overall productivity, and much less with time. It's an affordable expense if it's keeping people happy.
Religion is a mix of faith, ritual and entertainment. People love listening to charismatic leaders preaching about faith and they love going through the reassuring motions of religious rituals.
This is instinct and it's not going to go away. Religion is likely to split into the cyber part -- where you go for tangible results -- and the faith part -- where you go to feel warm and fuzzy. The faith part will adapt, as it always has, to current community desires for topics, rituals and entertainment.