Bonus Sample: You Can’t Do Religion on the Internet

Back in 2011, Ward and Voas wrote that conspirituality was a mainly-online movement, and they were right about that. They didn’t do fieldwork at events. They didn’t attend trainings and rituals. They combed the internet for evidence of what they were looking for. 

They found strange and anxious spiritual themes. But they also found evidence of what the internet does in all of its speed and dissociation, in its invitation to seize attention through contrarianism and amplify jagged anxieties and glittering pieties. 

In finding conspirituality, they may have proven that you can’t do religion on the internet. And maybe, that’s part of why conspirituality exists. 

Religious impulses are ancient and primal, centering communities as campfires do. But they also throw off sparks of narcissism and extremism, which the algorithms must capture to drive engagement. 

Show Notes

MMMEATTT — “A newsletter about things that can’t exist on the internet” by Beau Brink

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