Episode 25: Transhumanism and Faith, with Meghan O'Gieblyn

Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guest is one of my favorite writers working today, Megan O'Giblin. And actually, I want to explain how I encountered her work because I think that that is going to explain why I wanted to bring her on the show. When I was writing More Everything Forever, I realized that I was at a disadvantage. There were a lot of echoes. between transhumanism and the sort of extreme science fictional philosophies that I was dealing with in the book and, you know, sort of examining critically and taking apart. There were a lot of echoes and similarities between those philosophies and certain Christian esoteric traditions. And I knew a little bit about some of that. I knew that there were connections, for example, to a late 19th, early 20th century esoteric Christian movement in Russia called Cosmism. But I didn't have a good handle on the wider connections to Christianity because I'm not Christian and never have been. I'm Jewish. I was raised Jewish. Every one of my family is Jewish. So I didn't really understand Christianity. what was going on with that stuff. And I knew I needed to find some way of understanding it and talking about it, especially toward the end of the book, just because that's the way that it was turning out and also because it seemed important. And a friend of mine pointed me toward Megan's work. And it's really quite remarkable, not just because of the depth of her thought on this, but also the quality of her writing. And so this episode, we're not just going to talk about connections between the sort of spiritual needs that Christianity fulfills for a lot of people and the spiritual needs that transhumanism fills for a lot of people. We're also going to talk a bit about craft and writing and what that looks like these days. Because I think that she is... a really great pro stylist. So without anything further, here is Megan O'Giblin. Megan, thank you for joining us here on Dreaming Against the Machine.

Thanks so much for having me.

I guess to introduce you, I think of you as... Just a brilliant writer and author and essayist and a very clear and careful thinker around questions about religion and spirituality and its connection to technology and modernity.

Thank you. Yeah, I sometimes worry there's not a lot of coherence to my career or my thoughts. I've been writing for a long time about Christianity and evangelicalism, especially I grew up in a fundamentalist family. Left the faith in my early 20s after studying theology at a very conservative college, Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. And, yeah, I had always had this sort of private fascination with technology and started writing some tech criticism, you know, around my late 20s, early 30s. And, yeah, I just really felt like there was this weird, you know, I kept seeing all these parallels between the... religious narratives that I was immersed in through much of my life and studied, and these narratives about emerging technologies, particularly about AI. And this was around the time, I think it was around the time of the deep learning revolution, so maybe 2017, 2018. where I started noticing all of