—How Invisible Code Quietly Took the Throne from Free Will
You wake up.
You check your phone.
Before your body fully arrives in the day, the algorithm is already rearranging your mind.
It tells you what’s trending.
It shows you who’s desirable.
It decides what you should fear, want, envy, scroll past, or click into.
And you let it.
Every day.
Not because you believe in it—but because you forgot you didn’t have to.
The New Religion Has No Name—But It Has Rules
It doesn’t demand faith.
It rewards obedience.
- Pray: through engagement.
- Confess: through oversharing.
- Worship: through attention.
- Repent: when you’re shadowbanned.
There is no priest. No prophet.
Only feedback loops.
You don’t light candles.
You light up the screen—and hope the feed loves you back.
The algorithm doesn’t ask you to believe.
It just wants you to behave.
You Think You’re Free—But You’re Being Profiled
Your god knows you better than your mother.
It knows when you’re lonely.
It knows what ads make you hesitate.
It knows what kind of body you’ll stare at for 1.3 seconds longer than average.
And it remembers.
That’s not convenience.
That’s conditioning.
You don’t “choose” anymore.
You react.
To a curated hallucination optimized to make you feel like the chooser.
This Isn’t Just Technology. It’s Theology.
You refresh for answers like people once drew omens from bird patterns.
You trust the feed to show you what’s real.
You hope the algorithm will reward your effort, your creativity, your voice.
But the algorithm doesn’t love you.
It doesn’t see you.
It scores you.
You are not a person to it.
You are a pattern to be predicted.
Algorithmic Spirituality Is Already Here
You can see it in the rituals:
- Posting at “magic” times
- Cleansing your feed like a digital fast
- Obsessing over metrics like they hold moral weight
- Hoping virality will save you, validate you, crown you
We pretend we’re marketing.
But deep down, we’re begging the machine to see us.
To tell us we’re worthy.
This is not performance.
It’s prayer.
How to Reclaim the Sacred
You don’t need to smash your phone.
You need to remember you have authorship.
That looks like:
- Choosing what you consume with intention.
- Creating things that aren’t optimized, but true.
- Resisting the pressure to post just to be seen.
- Making work that confuses the algorithm—because it’s too human to predict.
Make things the feed can’t understand.
Make things that don’t care about reach.
Make things that sound like your soul—not your strategy.
Because the moment you stop shaping yourself for the algorithm
is the moment you become real again.
The algorithm is your god—
until you remember you don’t need one.
