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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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon,
that's what this one is, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
We've also got a book out, it's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories
Became a Health Threat.
It's in print, ebook, and audiobook format, narrated by me.
Okay, so today I'm going on yet another detour for my ongoing Patreon bonus episodes
of The Listener Stories and Conspiratuality and the Imaginary Children.
This one is a lot shorter, and it's more timely in the sense that I'll be reflecting on a number of recent subjects that have brought me to a provisional conclusion stated in my title, which might seem obvious to you all, but I think it's worth thinking about closely.
You can't do religion on the internet.
If you've been listening for a while, you'll probably remember my interviews with Bo Brink in 143 called Trans Reality, Trans Possibility, and then his return as a correspondent for Yoga Drag Race on episode 177.
Well, around the time we were collaborating on those pieces, Bo was also quietly working away on an essay project called Meat on Substack.
The tagline for the project is, a newsletter about things that can't exist on the internet, written by Bo Sterling Brink.
Bo is an SEO expert, a 10-year digital media veteran, and a 20-year queer advocate who researches information distribution online.
Now, the title points to Meat Space, as Beau told me, but it's spelled really oddly.
It's M-M-M-E-A-T-T-T, and Beau told me that this is kind of just a stylization to put it out of the grasp of SEO.
So he basically wrote a substack that almost can't exist on the internet.
So, about that advocacy and information distribution part, Beau explained to me that a lot of his work involved looking at how SEO functions favored good information about LGBTQI people and issues versus how it positioned bad information or hate speech.
And he explained that this project had come about as a kind of visionary response to the psychic wear and tear of laboring in the data mines in one part of his life while maintaining various artistic pursuits in visual arts and drag in another.
There are nine essays in this series now, and I highly recommend them all because they all work through that rare mix of reporting, philosophy, and poetry that can turn these hard screens in front of us into liquid prisms that show us another world.
And in this case, it's a world of things that the internet hides from us.
And I have to say, Bo is also the type of writer who really makes me jealous.
Here are some of the titles of the essays and my little blurbs.
So the first one is called, Authority Can't Exist on the Internet.
And that unpacks the weird fact that Google has no functional definition for authoritativeness in its algorithmic machine.
And the naively hyper-democratic ideals of search rules ironically mean that information and disinformation are granted the same footholds in our brains.
And then he draws out the implications for the marginalized, quote, The internet flattens all ideas, no matter how righteous, ethical, moral, or truthful they are or are not, so that eventually the world's leading research institute on LGBTQ plus issues is ranked as being only marginally more truthful or trustworthy than a glibly titled hate site."
But then standing beside this realization is Bo's chance encounter with a black trans woman who provided comfort at a desperate time and how in real life solidarity is actually a form of authority that doesn't exist on the internet.
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