Digital Nomos and the new world order: towards a theological critique of Silicon Valley

Abstract

Among the dominant narratives that form the ideological substrate of global processes, we can identify powerful deterministic and substantivist mythologies about technology. The most influential of these is the worldview of Silicon Valley, as a producer and exporter of a political theology that holds that the impending civilizational crisis will find a technical solution. This worldview has colonized the daily life of the world, providing a new spatial ordering for our present temporality. Various critical currents have placed the substantivist-deterministic narrative in the context of an intellectual history linked to political theology, a conceptual framework that illuminates several functions of this narrative – chief among these, the function of legitimation. Therefore, the sociology of concepts proposed by Carl Schmitt 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, helps us elucidate the power that the Siliconian worldview exerts. Among other aspects, the framework of political theology highlights the fundamental invisibility of these mythologies, which is proportional to their power of domination, and sets the basis for a new digital nomos of the earth.

Keywords

• digital nomos
• silicon valley
• political theology
• technocene
• posthumanism