The Internet's New Quasi-Religions | Opinion

Editor's Note: This article is adapted from Malcom Kyeyune's essay in City Journal, "The New Gnostics."

The internet today is full of strange new quasi-faiths, each offering a secret knowledge through which an enlightened few can hope to purify themselves. One under-explored effect of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent collapse of Western society's model sequence for attaining professional success and social esteem (go to college, study hard, get a well-paying job, form a family) has been a privatization of meaning among younger millennials and members of Generation Z.

Many in the younger generation will be materially poorer and less professionally secure than their parents and grandparents. Such monumental shifts in economic reality invariably bring dramatic shifts in people's social reality, as old expectations and beliefs no longer match up with the way things are. In earlier eras of American history, major crises—and the ideological and religious revivals that often followed them—played out in streets, churches, tent meetings, and lodges. Now the process takes shape primarily online, where the new Gnostics preach.

In a two-hour-long YouTube exposé titled "Line Goes Up—the Problem with NFTs," video-essayist Dan Olson explores the consequences of the Great Recession and the features, promises, and problems of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. But he makes a larger point than just identifying the idiosyncrasies and flaws of these technologies—he is interested in the social implications of "crypto" hype.

According to Olson, the crypto world is filled not only with hype but also with professional scammers, broken promises, predatory and antisocial behavior, desperation, greed—and rage. Rage at how the post-2008 world turned out, rage at how the American dream doesn't seem attainable anymore, rage at whomever and whatever could be blamed for robbing the people inside that online world of what they felt they were owed.

Playing out mostly in online chatrooms, forums, Discord servers, and newsletters, the cryptocurrency universe is populated largely by middle-class but downwardly mobile speculators susceptible to confidence tricks and fraud. In these online environments, advertisement for "pump-and-dump" schemes is done in the open, but indignation over how often this seems to happen is accompanied by a sort of blithe acceptance that, yes, someone is getting ripped off; it just shouldn't be me.

This may sound like a sort of hyper-libertarian world, with each economic actor out for himself and himself alone. But the truth is more complicated, as was shown in early 2021, when the stock price of video-game retailer GameStop suddenly exploded. After several large Wall Street players shorted GameStop stock, someone posted about it on online forums. Suddenly, thousands of retail investors were buying the stock, forcing the price up, producing a classic market "short squeeze."

Many retail investors were unconcerned with making a profit on GameStop. They jumped at what they perceived as a chance to "punish" the powers that be. The main force behind the short squeeze, a subreddit called "WallStreetBets," saw an explosion of posts that had little to do with financial betting and much more to do with aggrievement. The short squeeze illustrates the same dynamic Olson observed with cryptocurrencies and NFTs: an ethos of social awareness and anger at an unfair system, coexisting with a sort of dog-eat-dog philosophy.

A proliferating variety of belief systems and fringe political narratives on the web—across a thousand subreddits, a million Twitter accounts, and some barely-read Substacks—promise to make you rich, or successful, or sexually attractive, or healthy. In a striking montage for a FOX Nation special hosted by popular TV host Tucker Carlson called "The End of Men," half-naked men engage in seemingly nonsensical activities. One shoots a high-caliber rifle at a bottle of canola oil; another milks a cow.

What you see advertised is a form of messianic, almost millenarian, self-help. Why is the muscular man shooting at canola oil bottles? Because according to an internet quasi-faith, "seed oils" were never meant for human consumption. By eliminating them, one cleanses oneself of impurity. In this narrative, which the Carlson special echoes, many contemporary young men have been robbed of their true potential due to an environmental toxicity. If the toxicity is removed, a higher, more natural state of being opens up.

This is a modern form of Gnosticism, the early-Christian-era belief system that postulates that humans contain a piece of God or the divinity inside themselves, to which they lose access because of the material world's corruption. Through proper spiritual knowledge, or gnosis, that connection can be rekindled, and the enlightened person can break free from corruption. In one 2022 version of this belief system, seed oils are the great malevolent force. Pasteurized milk, micro-plastics, soy, hormonal runoff in the water supply due to birth control: all can serve a similar function. You can strip away the divine elements of the story and replace them with crude scientism, but the belief system's structure remains unchanged.

Nowadays, many Christians bemoan the lack of religiosity among the young. True, we don't see an explosion of tent meetings and fiery preachers touring the churches of America. But older generations may be missing a religious revival, of sorts, happening right under their noses—or inside their pockets.

Social media have replaced the tent revival as a space for conversion and salvation. Through ritual, through secret knowledge, through purification and removal of the self from the corrupting influence of fiat money, or patriarchy, or the white gaze, or seed oils, the individual seekers hope to find enlightenment. For those hungry for answers—who want a narrative, something they can do, a blueprint that will finally make sense of the world of closed doors and shrinking opportunities they find themselves in—there is really only one rule: as long as you have an internet connection, seek, and ye shall find.

Malcom Kyeyune is a writer based in Uppsala, Sweden, and sits on the steering committee of Oikos, a conservative think tank in Sweden.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.