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In Tech
We Trust.

The god-like authority of technology in the modern age — and what it means to set a wiser course

Rufus Pollock, Sylvie Barbier, and Rosie Bell

18 March 2026

secondrenaissance.net
In Tech We Trust — cover art showing praying hands
Part One

The Wisdom Gap

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Our powers keep outrunning our capacity to use them wisely

And the gap is accelerating.

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The Bomb

"Physicists split the atom without any hesitations the very moment they knew how to do it."

— Hannah Arendt
Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, August 1945

The bombing of Nagasaki, 9 August 1945

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The Climate Bet

At the highest levels of climate policy, our plans increasingly rely on future technological breakthroughs that don't exist yet.

We're betting civilisation on faith in tech to fix what tech broke.

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The Experiment on Our Children

We handed addictive technology to entire populations of children.

No experts in the effects on youth mental health existed to consult — because the technology arrived before the expertise.

Person reading on a phone in the dark
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AI

"Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it."

— Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic
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Unleash first, understand later.

Each time the stakes get higher.

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Part Two

Why Does This Keep Happening?

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The Runaway Horse

Technology: from servant to master

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"A person is sitting on a horse, galloping very quickly. At a crossroads, a friend shouts, 'Where are you going?' The man says, 'I don't know, ask the horse!'"

— Thich Nhat Hanh
Ink-brush painting of a figure galloping on a horse, by Fen Zeng
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The Comforting Story

We tell ourselves: a need arises, innovation meets it, rational humans choose what's best.

But we've normalised addiction to our smartphones. We "consume" our world through algorithmic feeds that hijack our attention and sell it for profit.

We don't question it — because the story says we're choosing freely.

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The Sorcerer's Apprentice

We unleash a technology. It creates problems. We unleash more technology to fix those problems. The problems compound.

Each fix creates the next crisis.

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The Zen Master Visits Google

2013. Thich Nhat Hanh is invited to Google headquarters. The conversation turns to addictive apps.

The Zen Master suggests:

"Mobile phones could easily have a mindfulness bell — a sound every quarter hour to interrupt the addictive pattern and recall people to themselves."

The engineer objects:

"But wouldn't we be imposing something people don't need?"

Portrait of Thich Nhat Hanh
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Real Needs and False Needs

"It's not so simple. People's responses can come from real needs or false needs. Hunger can signal a real need to eat. But many people eat to escape their suffering. The same is true with technology. You're often serving sensations to people to conceal their suffering — loneliness, anxiety. You have to help people distinguish."

— Thich Nhat Hanh
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The Objection Is the Problem

"We don't impose — we let people choose freely."

But choice is useless without the capacity to choose well.

We believe ourselves fully rational and fully agentic — and this belief blinds us to the ways technology distorts our agency.

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It's Worse Than That

We don't just fail to control technology — we actively worship it.

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Technology as Surrogate God

  • Mystery and awe: "There's no discernible difference between the internet and an omniscient being. I don't ask how it works. I just switch it on and trust."
  • Salvation: cryopreservation, transhumanism — ideas that evolved "from crackpot to merely eccentric"
  • High priests: tech founders as the most famous, most powerful people in the world — their opinion thought relevant in every matter
  • Blind faith in crisis: facing existential climate breakdown, our best policy plans assume more tech will save us from tech
Praying hands — technology as object of worship
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The horse isn't just running away.

We're worshipping the horse.

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What's Underneath

The modern cultural paradigm

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The Paradigm

These aren't just bad habits. They're deep features of how modern culture sees reality:

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Part Three

The Trap

Why governance alone can't work

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The Race to the Bottom

"Can't we just regulate better?"

"Should we pause?"

The answer is always the same:

"We can't. If we pause, someone else won't."

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"If you had a peaceful civilisation and Genghis Khan wanted that area… your peaceful civilisation was wiped out. The same is true if you want to internalise the cost of carbon: your country gets destroyed by whoever externalises that cost. The thing that has been more successfully dominant, extracted more, grown its violence capability, wins. And that thing plus exponential tech, at planetary boundaries, self-terminates."

— Daniel Schmachtenberger
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The Fort

Imagine defending a fort together.

If everyone stays, some may die — but most survive and the enemy is repelled.

Anyone who leaves may save themselves — provided others stay behind.

But if enough people try to save themselves, the battle is lost and everyone dies.

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AI. Climate. Nuclear weapons.

The fort — at planetary scale.

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The Root

A worldview of separateness

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The Deeper Problem

These aren't coordination failures you can engineer your way out of.

They're rooted in a worldview that sees reality as fundamentally divided: separate individuals competing for advantage.

Every attempt to fix tech governance within this paradigm reproduces the paradigm.

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The Balinese Water Temples

For over a thousand years, the Subak irrigation system in Bali has solved what should be an intractable collective action problem.

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Why Does It Work?

It's not just irrigation — it's a network of water temples.

The whole system expresses a philosophy (Tri Hita Karana) uniting spirit, the human world, and nature. Rice is a gift from god. Water temple rituals emphasise dependence on the living world.

The cooperation didn't come from rational incentive design. It came from shared meaning, shared identity, shared sense of belonging to something larger.

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Part Four

The Takeaway

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You cannot govern technology wisely without shifting the cultural paradigm that produces our dysfunctional relationship with it.

The attempts to regulate, align, and govern technology will keep failing as long as they operate within the worldview of separate, competing, rational individuals.

You can't fix a paradigm problem with paradigm tools.

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Part Five

A Wiser Path

Sketched

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Slowness and Spaciousness

It's difficult to be wise in a rush.

Imagine a moratorium: six months for philosophers, spiritual leaders, technologists, facilitators to ask together — Do we want this? Do we want it now? How do we contain it?

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A Fuller Account of Human Nature

Beyond homo economicus — restoring value to intuition, embodied knowing, emotional intelligence, and the subtle inner senses that help us discern what's genuinely good.

These aren't soft extras. They're essential capacities for wise choice-making that our rationalist culture has systematically sidelined.

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Interbeing

"To be is always to inter-be."

— Thich Nhat Hanh

Nothing exists in isolation. And this contains a simple, devastating insight:

Nobody wins a competition that ends in shared destruction.

When you perceive identity with each other and the world, there are no externalities. Collective action problems become dissoluble.

Cyanotype print of branching network, evoking interconnection
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"The godlike status of technology has become a vicious circle. The more machines empower us, the more willingly we defer to them — rendering ourselves less capable of resisting technological momentum. Restoring wise relationship with technology first requires transforming our impoverished, computational view of what it means to be human."

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A future society that survives will restore technology as servant to what is most human, most relational, and most conducive to life.

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