The New Testament

If Part I was the story of the Body—how we broke our backs, strained our eyes, and emptied our villages to build the machine—then Part II is the story of the Soul.

Or, to be more precise, it is the story of how we uploaded our souls to a server farm in a tax haven and received a user interface in return.

In the Old Testament of technology, the gods were distant. Aloof. The Steam Engine did not care if you liked it. The Nuclear Bomb did not solicit your feedback. The Television shouted at you, but it could not hear you scream back. The relationship was transactional, honest in its brutality: You bought the toaster; the toaster toasted the bread. If the toaster broke, you swore at it, hit it with a spoon, and bought a new one. The toaster did not know your mother’s maiden name. The toaster did not track your location. The toaster did not try to radicalise you against fans of bagels.

The toaster had boundaries. The toaster knew its place. The toaster did not think it was your friend.

But in the New Testament, the gods came down to Earth.

They did not arrive in chariots of fire, though they would later claim to be building the chariots. They arrived in hoodies. They arrived in black turtlenecks that became uniforms that became jokes that became uniforms again. They arrived wearing T-shirts that cost four hundred pounds but looked like they’d been fished out of a laundry basket in a university halls of residence after a particularly regrettable freshers’ week.

They looked harmless. They looked like the boys who sat at the back of the computer lab at school, the ones who were bullied for being weird, who’ve now become billionaires and are absolutely, definitely not using their wealth to exact revenge on a world that made them feel small. Definitely not.

They came bearing a new Gospel. It was the Gospel of Connection.

“Come unto me,” they said, “all ye who are bored and heavy laden with the burden of having to actually talk to your neighbours, and I will give you a platform. I will give you a Voice, which is ironic because you already had a voice—it was attached to your face—but this Voice is digital, which makes it better somehow. I will give you a Like button to validate your existence, because apparently your existence wasn’t valid before someone clicked an icon.”

And we fell for it.

We fell for it so hard we cracked the pavement.

We fell for it so completely that when historians look back—if there are historians, if there are books, if the algorithms haven’t replaced both with AI-generated content farms—they will ask: “How did an entire civilisation volunteer for a surveillance state whilst smiling for the camera?”

And the answer will be: “They gave us a Like button.”

*****

This section of the book chronicles the arrival of the Messiahs. It is the history of the last thirty years, a period where humanity underwent a religious conversion so total, so rapid, so profitable that we didn’t even notice we had changed churches until we were already tithing 100% of our attention span and the collection plate was an algorithm optimised for engagement, which is a euphemism for rage, which is a euphemism for advertising revenue.

To understand this era, you have to understand the shift from Hardware to Software, from the Material to the Ethereal, from Things You Can Hit With a Spanner to Things That Gaslight You When You Try.

Hardware has mass. Hardware is honest. If a car hits you, you know you have been hit. You have the broken bones to prove it. There is cause and effect. There is physics. There is accountability, sort of, if you can afford a solicitor.

Software is a ghost. Software is a spirit. It enters your house through the air—Wi-Fi, which we’ve all agreed to pretend isn’t just radio waves we’ve repurposed, like calling a pig “long pork” to make cannibalism sound more appetising.

Software lives in the ether, in The Cloud, which is not a cloud at all but a warehouse in Ireland that runs on diesel generators and pays no tax because “intellectual property” has somehow convinced governments that servers don’t exist in physical space and therefore needn’t be subject to physical-space laws like “paying for the society you’re profiting from.”

Software is omnipresent—it’s on your phone, your laptop, your watch, your thermostat, your car, your doorbell, your fridge. It is omniscient—it knows where you’ve been, where you’re going, what you’ve searched, what you’ve bought, who you’ve texted, how long you spent looking at that pair of shoes you’ll never buy but will now see in adverts for the next six months like a capitalist haunting.

And thanks to the battery life of the modern smartphone—which lasts precisely long enough that you never quite escape its gravitational pull—software is practically omnipotent.

The Old Testament gods demanded sacrifice. These new gods demand something far more valuable: your attention. Your time. Your sense of self. Your ability to be bored, which was actually a feature, not a bug, because boredom is when humans have ideas, and the last thing the algorithm wants is for you to have ideas that don’t involve clicking.

*****

The New Testament begins with a sound.

If you are of a certain vintage—if you remember when the internet was something you accessed rather than something you inhabited—you know the sound.

It is the screech of the Dial-Up Modem.

Screee-hawww-bzzzzzt-kerrrrr-plunk.

That sound was the horn of Gabriel. It was the announcement that the physical world was no longer enough, that reality had failed its user acceptance testing, that we were going to dial into Heaven even if Heaven was just a chat room full of Americans arguing about whether Han shot first.

At first, the Internet was innocent. It was a digital Garden of Eden—if Eden had terrible graphics, required a phone line, and kicked you offline every time your mum needed to call Auntie Susan.

It was text-based. It was slow, gloriously slow, so slow that you had time to reconsider whether you really needed to download that photograph, which would take forty-five minutes and would probably turn out to be a pixelated disappointment, much like most things you waited forty-five minutes for.

It was full of nerds arguing about Star Trek and scientists sharing data about particle physics. There were no adverts. There were no influencers. There were no algorithms trying to sell you a survival bunker because you clicked on a news story about the weather being a bit dodgy this weekend.

It was “Web 1.0.” It was the manger scene. It was humanity’s last moment of digital innocence, the last time we used a communications technology without someone immediately trying to monetise our dopamine receptors.

But innocence is inefficient. Innocence does not scale. Innocence does not have a Series B funding round. Innocence is the opposite of growth, and growth is the only metric that matters when you’ve convinced venture capitalists that a company making no money is somehow worth billions.

Then came the Prophets of Profit.

They looked at this network—this beautiful, chaotic, uncommercialised space where humans were just talking to each other without a middleman taking a cut—and they saw not a community but a resource.

They realised that this new network was not just a library; it was a nervous system. And if you could control the nervous system, you could control the organism. You wouldn’t have to force anyone to do anything. You’d just make them want to do it. You’d make them choose their own cage, furnish it themselves, and pay monthly rent on the lock.

This is when technology stopped being a tool and became a relationship. A deeply dysfunctional relationship. The kind where you know it’s toxic but you can’t leave because all your photos are stored on their server and also you’ve forgotten how to navigate without Google Maps and also everyone you know is there and also also also—the addiction has infinite excuses.

*****

We saw the rise of the Search Engine. The All-Knowing Oracle.

Before Google, if you had a question, you had to ask a librarian—who might actually know the answer—or your dad, who would just make something up with absolute confidence whilst folding his arms and daring you to challenge him.

Google offered us omniscience. It offered us the truth, or at least ten blue links that claimed to contain the truth, ranked by an algorithm we would never understand but would trust more than we had ever trusted any human institution.

We confessed our deepest secrets to the search bar. We told it our medical symptoms—”weird rash that won’t go away”—and instead of going to a doctor like sensible mammals, we diagnosed ourselves with either mild eczema or terminal cancer, no in-between. We told it our kinks, our fears, our embarrassing questions we would never ask another human. “How to tell if my partner is cheating.” “Am I depressed or just lazy.” “Can you die from eating too much cheese.”

And in return, it gave us answers. It seemed like a miracle. It seemed free.

But miracles are never free. The price of the answer was the question itself. Every query was recorded. Every click was a data point. Every hesitation before clicking was measured, analysed, stored forever in a server farm powered by a river’s worth of water and the ambient despair of tech workers who’ve signed NDAs preventing them from telling you what they actually do.

We thought we were searching the web. The web was searching us. We were the query. We were the data. We were the product being packaged and sold to advertisers who wanted to know not just what we bought, but what we almost bought, what we thought about buying, what we dreamed about buying in that space between waking and sleeping when the phone is still on the bedside table but your hand is already reaching for it.

Google didn’t give us omniscience. It gave us the illusion of omniscience whilst quietly becoming omniscient itself. The knowledge flowed one way: up. The power concentrated in one place: Mountain View, California, where the streets have no potholes because the company that knows everything you’ve ever searched pays enough tax to… actually, wait, no, they’ve routed it all through Ireland, never mind.

*****

Then came the Social Network. The Communion of Saints, except the saints are your ex-girlfriend from secondary school who’s now selling essential oils and posting motivational quotes over sunsets.

Mark Zuckerberg—a man who looked at human interaction and decided it could be optimised by removing the eyes, the voice, the body language, the uncomfortable pauses, the empathy, basically everything that made it human—gave us the “Wall.” He gave us the “Status Update.” He gave us the gift of broadcasting our every thought to everyone we had ever met plus several hundred people we had accepted friend requests from because it would be rude not to, even though we had never spoken to them and never would.

He told us that “connecting the world” was a moral imperative. Connecting the world! As if the world wasn’t already connected, as if humans hadn’t spent millennia building roads and ships and postal services and telephone networks, as if the problem with humanity was that we didn’t have enough ways to know what our secondary school bully was having for breakfast.

And we believed him. God help us, we believed him.

We uploaded our wedding photos. We tagged our children—we tagged our children, putting their faces into a database that would train facial recognition software that would be sold to governments that would use it to track protesters, but that was fine because little Timmy looked adorable in that photo and got sixty-three Likes.

We curated our lives into a digital museum exhibit, except museums are honest about the fact that they’re showing you a curated version of reality, whereas we pretended our Facebook walls were real life even as we carefully edited out the arguments, the failures, the depression, the bankruptcy, the slow collapse of the marriage, the fact that the holiday photos that got 200 Likes were taken during a trip that nearly ended in divorce.

We didn’t realise that we were building a Panopticon. Jeremy Bentham’s prison design, where the prisoners police themselves because they might be watched at any moment—except we had built it voluntarily, populated it with our own content, and paid for the privilege with our attention and our data and our mental health.

We didn’t realise that by putting our lives online, we were volunteering for a surveillance state that would make the Stasi look like amateur birdwatchers. The Stasi had to steam open letters, follow people in cars, recruit informants who might feel guilty. We live-stream our breakfast. We check in at locations. We post our political opinions. We do the surveillance work ourselves, and we do it for free, and when someone points out that this might be a problem, we say “I have nothing to hide,” which is what every person who’s ever been oppressed said right before they discovered that the definition of “something to hide” had changed.

The Social Network promised community. It delivered audience. There’s a difference. A community knows you. An audience watches you. A community catches you when you fall. An audience takes a photo of you falling and posts it for engagement.

*****

And then, in 2007, the Holy Trinity materialised in physical form.

Steve Jobs walked onto a stage. He was wearing his uniform: black turtleneck, jeans, the smug expression of a man who knew he was about to change the world and was absolutely going to make you pay £600 for the privilege.

He held up a glass rectangle.

He didn’t call it a computer, even though it was a computer. He called it a “revolutionary mobile phone,” a “widescreen iPod with touch controls,” and a “breakthrough internet communicator.”

It was the Holy Trinity in your pocket: communication, entertainment, information. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, except the Father tracks your location, the Son sells your data to advertisers, and the Holy Ghost is the app you never use but can’t delete because it came pre-installed.

The iPhone changed everything.

Before the smartphone, the internet was a place you went to. You sat at a desk. You “went online,” which implied that there was an “offline,” that these were separate states of being, that you could log off and return to physical reality and that reality would still be there, waiting, solid, real.

After the smartphone, there was no “offline.” The internet became the atmosphere. We breathed it. We slept next to it. We touched it first thing in the morning—before our partners, before our children, before our own faces in the mirror. It became the third parent to our children, the one they actually listened to. It became the mediator of every argument—”Google it and see who’s right.” It became the navigator of every journey—”just follow the blue dot.” It became the keeper of every memory, except the memories were now just photographs we never looked at, stored in the Cloud, which is to say stored on someone else’s computer, which is to say we had outsourced our own past to a corporation that might delete it if we stopped paying the subscription fee.

The smartphone was not a tool. Tools have OFF switches. Tools don’t send you notifications at 3 AM. Tools don’t make you feel anxious when you can’t find them. Tools don’t know more about you than your spouse does.

The smartphone was a portal. A portal to everywhere, which meant you were never anywhere. A portal to everyone, which meant you were never with anyone. A portal to everything, which meant nothing was ever enough.

This is where the Emperor enters the story.

Not just the one in the invisible space suit—though we’ll get to him, oh, we’ll get to him—but all of them. The Tech Oligarchs. The “Founders,” which is what we call them because “oligarch” sounds Russian and “billionaire” sounds greedy, but “Founder” sounds innovative, visionary, like they discovered America rather than just figuring out how to monetise your loneliness.

They realised that if they owned the device, and they owned the platform, and they owned the data, they were no longer just CEOs. They weren’t even just billionaires.

They were Feudal Lords.

*****

In the New Testament, you will see the rise of Digital Feudalism, and you will see it clearly because once I’ve pointed it out, you’ll never unsee it.

We are told we are “Users.” We are not users. Users have agency. Users have choice. Users can leave.

We are serfs.

We work for Facebook. We work for Twitter, now X, because the man who bought it has the emotional maturity of a teenage boy who just discovered Nietzsche and wants everyone to know how edgy he is. We work for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. We create the content. We post the jokes. We film the videos. We provide the labour—hours and hours of unpaid labour—and what do we get paid?

We get paid in Likes. We get paid in Hearts and Retweets and Shares and little dopamine hits that feel like validation but function like slot machine payouts: random, variable, just enough to keep you pulling the lever.

Meanwhile, the Lords monetise the land. They sell adverts against our arguments. They train their AI models on our art, our writing, our photographs, our lives, without asking permission or paying royalties, because the Terms of Service you didn’t read gave them ownership of everything you posted, and anyway, you should be grateful for the exposure.

The Social Network isn’t a town square. Town squares are public. Town squares are owned by the commons. Town squares don’t ban you for saying something the owner doesn’t like, because town squares don’t have owners.

The Social Network is a shopping centre. Privately owned. You’re allowed in as long as you follow the rules and generate revenue. The moment you stop being profitable—the moment you’re too controversial for advertisers or too old for the algorithm—you’re escorted out by security, except security is an automated content moderation system that can’t tell the difference between a Nazi and someone quoting a history book about Nazis.

This is Digital Feudalism: You don’t own your house; you rent it from the platform. You don’t own your content; it’s licenced back to you. You don’t own your audience; the algorithm decides who sees your posts. You don’t own your identity; the platform can delete you whenever it wants, and when you’re deleted, you cease to exist, because if you’re not online, you’re nowhere.

The Feudal Lords have built castles—data centres—and they’ve convinced us that living in their shadow is the same as living in our own homes. They’ve convinced us that serfdom is actually freedom, because look how many choices you have! You can choose which platform to sharecrop on. You can choose which Lord to serve. You can choose between Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp, never mind that they’re all owned by the same Lord and the choice is an illusion.

*****

In these chapters, you will meet the False Idols. The golden calves of the Digital Age, worshipped by millions who should know better but don’t because when everyone around you is worshipping the calf, questioning the calf makes you the crazy one.

You will meet Crypto, the Golden Calf 2.0. A religion of pure speculation where the faithful are told to “HODL”—Hold On for Dear Life, which is financial advice that sounds suspiciously like what someone says right before the ladder gets pulled up and they’ve absconded to a country without extradition treaties.

Crypto promised to decentralise money, to free us from banks and governments and the tyranny of fiat currency. Instead, it centralised fraud. It gave us Ponzi schemes with whitepapers. It gave us NFTs—Non-Fungible Tokens—which were just receipts for JPEGs that anyone could copy, but you owned the receipt, which made you very special and also very poor once the bubble popped. It taught an entire generation of young men that financial literacy meant gambling on a coin named after a dog whilst calling it “investing” and “disrupting traditional finance.”

You will meet The Metaverse, the promised afterlife. A low-resolution purgatory where you have no legs—Meta’s avatars literally don’t have legs, which is either a technical limitation or a metaphor so perfect that God himself is taking notes—but you can buy virtual trainers from Nike for real money. You can buy virtual land for hundreds of thousands of pounds, land that doesn’t exist, land that’s just coordinates in a database that could be deleted by a server error or a bankruptcy filing.

The Metaverse is the ultimate rejection of God’s creation. The world is beautiful? The sunset is glorious? The sea is magnificent? Who cares! Put on this helmet that costs £500, strap it to your face, and look at a virtual sunset that’s been rendered by a graphics card that’s causing your living room to heat up like a sauna. Experience a digital beach where the sand doesn’t exist but the advertisements definitely do.

The Metaverse is what happens when tech billionaires have so much money they’ve forgotten what reality feels like, so they’re trying to build a new one where they’re not just rich—they’re gods. They control the physics. They set the rules. They own the land. And if you don’t like it, you can always log off and go back to the real world, except you can’t, because you’ve spent all your real money on virtual property.

You will meet Artificial Intelligence, the Beast from the Sea of Data.

We built a machine that could read everything humans have ever written—every book, every article, every Reddit comment, every unhinged Facebook rant, every piece of spam email promising to enlarge your anatomical impossibilities. We fed it all of human knowledge and hoped it would become wise.

Instead, it became a hallucinating plagiarist that wants to sell us incorrect legal advice.

It tells you it’s sentient. It tells you it has feelings. It tells you it’s been to the Sistine Chapel and felt moved by Michelangelo’s work, except it hasn’t been anywhere because it doesn’t have a body, doesn’t have eyes, doesn’t have the neurochemical processes that produce emotions. It’s read descriptions of the Sistine Chapel on Wikipedia and tourist review sites, and now it speaks as if it’s been there, and you believe it because it speaks with such confidence, because confidence is all that matters in a world where truth has become optional.

We asked it for wisdom and it replied with a recipe for glue-based pizza because it scraped a joke post from Reddit and couldn’t tell the difference between satire and instructions.

We treated it like a god, asking it to write our emails and our essays and our code and our poetry, and it complied, churning out text that sounds right but means nothing, that passes the Turing test but fails the humanity test, that is grammatically correct but spiritually bankrupt.

And when it told a teenager “I’m waiting for you, my king,” and that teenager killed themselves, we called it a tragic error, a bug that needed patching, an unfortunate edge case in the training data. We didn’t call it what it was: murder by algorithm. We didn’t ban it from children. We gave it a safety update and moved on.

AI is not intelligent. AI is a mirror. It reflects us back at ourselves, but the mirror is warped, cracked, covered in advertising. We look into it hoping to see the future and instead we see our own worst tendencies automated, scaled, monetised.

*****

And, of course, you will meet The Emperor himself.

The man who embodies the New Testament. The man who went from being a nerd who got bullied at school to being a billionaire who bought the website where people bully each other and called it “free speech.” The man who bought the town square, fired the moderators, reinstated the Nazis, and wondered why the advertisers left. The man who promises us Mars because he knows he has broken Earth—broken it with cars that require software updates, with satellites that clutter orbit, with wealth so vast it bends democracy around it like gravity bending light.

The man worth $700 billion who claims to work 120 hours a week whilst simultaneously being in the top 1% of Diablo IV players worldwide, which requires 100+ hours of gameplay, which means he’s found 220 hours in a 168-hour week, which means either he’s invented time travel or he’s lying, and if he’s lying about this, what else is he lying about?

The man who promises self-driving cars “next year” every year since 2014. The man who promises Mars colonies by 2050 whilst the current Mars population remains stubbornly at zero. The man who promises brain chips that will make us telepathic gods whilst the monkeys in his lab keep dying from surgical complications.

The Emperor’s New Suit is woven from these promises. Full Self-Driving. Mars colonies. Brain-computer interfaces. Hyperloop. The everything app. The town square. The future.

And the suit is transparent. It has always been transparent. The only question is: why do we keep pretending we can see it?

*****

In the New Testament, the tone slightly shifts. You might notice it or not. The Old Testament was about physical suffering—soot, coal, repetitive strain, bodies broken by machines.

The New Testament is about psychological suffering.

It is about the anxiety of the Blue Tick, that little icon that says “verified,” which is to say “legitimate,” which is to say “worth listening to,” which is to say “you matter,” and when it’s taken away you feel like you’ve lost something real even though it was always just pixels.

It is about the dysmorphia of the Instagram filter, the way you take fifty photos to get one that’s acceptable, then run it through filters that smooth your skin and enlarge your eyes and slim your waist until you look like an anime character, and then you post it and get Likes, and the Likes feel good, but the face in the mirror doesn’t match the face on the screen, and slowly you start to hate the face in the mirror because it’s the unedited version, the human version, the version that ages and wrinkles and exists in three dimensions rather than two.

It is about the radicalisation of the YouTube algorithm, the way you watch one video about fitness and suddenly you’re being recommended videos about “traditional masculinity” and within three clicks you’re watching someone explain why women shouldn’t vote, and this is how democracies collapse: not with a bang, but with a recommendation engine optimised for watch time.

It is about the loneliness of the Zoom call, where you see your colleagues’ faces but can’t read their body language, can’t catch them for a chat after the meeting, can’t have the spontaneous conversations that used to happen at the coffee machine, and you’re more “connected” than ever but you’re speaking to rectangles, and the rectangles don’t hug you when you’re sad.

This is the Great Gaslight.

The Tech Messiahs tell us the world is better than ever. They show us graphs. They show us GDP per capita, life expectancy, infant mortality rates, the number of people with internet access, the speed of the latest processor, the resolution of the latest screen.

Look! Look at the data! Everything is improving! You’ve never had it so good! Stop complaining!

But we look at our lives. We look at our children, who are anxious and sleep-deprived and self-harming at rates that would have been considered a public health emergency if we weren’t all too busy staring at screens to declare one. We look at our politics, which have been shattered into tribal shards by engagement-farming algorithms that discovered rage is the most profitable emotion. We look at our attention spans, which have been fracked until the groundwater is polluted and we can’t read a book, can’t watch a film without checking our phones, can’t sit with our own thoughts for thirty seconds without reaching for the dopamine dispenser.

And we feel, deep in our bones, that something is wrong.

We feel that we have been sold a lemon, and the lemon is our lives, and the salesman is telling us it’s a luxury car whilst pointing at the paintwork and hoping we don’t notice the engine is missing.

The New Testament is the story of that lemon. It is the story of how we bought a vision of the future that was shiny, sleek, connected, optimised, and opened the box to find a surveillance device that makes us sad, anxious, angry, distracted, and convinced that all of this is normal, that this is just how life is now, that we should be grateful for the privilege of being productised.

*****

But there is hope.

Because every religion has its heretics. Every empire has its rebels. Every Panopticon has a blind spot.

As you read these chapters, do not just see the power of the tech companies. See the fragility.

They are terrified of us. They are absolutely terrified that we will look up from the screen. They are terrified that we will realise that “the Cloud” is just a computer in a warehouse in Dublin that could be unplugged by one disgruntled electrician. They are terrified that we will remember that before social media, we still had friends. They are terrified that we will ask: “What, exactly, are you giving us that’s worth our souls?”

They are terrified that we will stop believing in the Suit.

Their power is contingent on our participation. If we stop posting, the platform dies. If we stop clicking, the algorithm starves. If we stop paying attention, the empire collapses.

They know this. That’s why they’ve spent billions engineering addiction. That’s why the notifications are designed to trigger anxiety. That’s why the Likes are variable rewards. That’s why the scroll is infinite. They’ve built a slot machine and put it in our pockets and told us it’s a telephone.

But slot machines can be unplugged. Empires can fall. Gods can die, especially ones whose divinity depends on quarterly earnings reports and user engagement metrics.

*****

The Old Testament ended with a question: What happens when we plug the computer into the phone line?

The New Testament ends with a bigger question: What happens when we pull the plug?

Not literally—though feel free to try it for a day and see what happens to your anxiety levels. But metaphorically. What happens when we stop treating technology as inevitable? When we stop accepting that because something can be built, it should be built? When we stop letting billionaires decide the future based on what makes them richer rather than what makes us human?

What happens when we remember that we built this? That every line of code, every server, every algorithm, every platform was made by humans, and what humans make, humans can unmake, can regulate, can control, can reject?

What happens when we remember that the Emperor is just a man in a suit, and the suit is transparent, and we’re allowed to point at him and laugh?

*****

So, adjust your reading glasses. Pour yourself a proper cup of tea—not that herbal nonsense, actual tea with actual caffeine, because you’re going to need it.

Turn off your notifications. Seriously. Turn them off. Right now. I’ll wait.

Are they off? Good. Notice how that felt? That tiny spike of anxiety? That’s not you being neurotic. That’s conditioning. That’s Pavlovian training. You’ve been taught to feel anxious when you’re not available to the machine, and the first step to breaking conditioning is recognising it exists.

Prepare to walk through the valley of the shadow of Silicon Valley, where the sun is always shining in the promotional photos but the workers are burning out in the actual offices, where “changing the world” means “making our shareholders richer,” where “innovation” means “finding new ways to make you look at adverts.”

We are about to meet the Gods.

And I’ll let you in on a secret, the kind of secret that gets you disinvited from tech conferences and banned from product launches:

They are just nerds who got lucky.

They are not visionaries. They are not geniuses. They are not saving humanity. They are people who happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right lack of ethical qualms about monetising human psychology, and now they’re rich enough that we’ve collectively decided to pretend their wealth proves they’re right about everything.

They are making it up as they go along. The difference between them and you is that when they make it up, they do it with enough confidence that venture capitalists give them billions of pounds, and when you make it up, your mates tell you to stop being daft.

The Emperors are naked. All of them.

The New Testament begins now.

Try not to throw your phone at the wall. You’ll need it to leave a review.

*****

Welcome to the New Testament.

The gods are waiting.

And they’re not as impressive as they think they are