Towards a theological-political critique of Silicon Valley's worldview

Abstract

Among the dominant narratives that form the ideological substrate of global processes, we can identify powerful mythologies of determinist and substantivist technology. An example is the Silicon Valley worldview as a producer and exporter of a political theology that proposes that the imminent civilizational crisis will find a technical solution. This worldview has colonized everyday life in the world. Various critical currents have situated the substantivist-determinist narrative in the context of an intellectual history linked to political theology as a conceptual framework that gives meaning to various aspects of this narrative, whose main function is legitimation. This is also the main function of political theology. Therefore, Carl Schmitt's sociology of concepts allows us to identify the contradictions present within these contemporary narratives. Political theology, seen as the study of the structures and sources of political legitimacy, opens the doors to elucidate the power of domination that the Silicon Valley worldview exercises and to understand it as a political theology whose fundamental characteristic is its invisibility, which is proportional to its power of domination.