This piece by Arthur Berman on the entropy fee is a great article describing the limits of technology in view of entropy and its irreversible arrow over the long term. In short, our energy base is deeply reliant on non-renewable fossil fuels, which provide us with cheap concentrated energy that allows us to do work, but this process is irreversible due to the inherent nature of complexity and energy, and the non-renewable nature of fossil fuels. Renewable sources of energy are useful in that regard, but they are far too unreliable and low in concentrated energy to allow us to maintain the industrial processes of the modern world. Our complexity comes at a physical cost, not merely a monetary cost, and that is what he calls the entropy fee, which nothing, no matter how clever we become, can reverse in the long term.
If there is anything that remains from modern science after the collapse of our times, such that the concepts of entropy and energy as we understand them today makes sense to them, this will be seen as utterly obvious. Of course complexity cannot keep increasing forever they will say, there has to be a cost somewhere, and empirically they will know that the empires (yes they are empires) of the 21st century eventually collapsed.
And yet the idea of the inevitability of the decline (not necessarily collapse) of our dear technological complexity cannot even be voiced in many circles, which still shout to the top of their lungs that the march of technological progress is inevitable, and that we are well on our way to conquer space and become an intergalactic civilization in no time. (if we don't destroy ourselves with AI or nuclear warfare)
Meanwhile in the real world, people struggle more and more to afford the basics of living, not just because of economic and financial gimmicks that make the rich even richer, but also because fundamentally, cheap and abundant energy is utterly necessary for any post-industrial society, and most of that energy still comes from fossil fuels.
I don't want to spend more time on arguing why that is the case. At this point people either agree on the fossil fuel situation or they don't, and they will look for whatever argument convinces them to back up their side. Whether we can find something better than fossil fuels, or if we can't, how quickly the decline will settle in are secondary questions of predicting the future, which are certainly important, but irrelevant if we cannot even agree on the basic reality of dependence on fossil fuels.
If you are not convinced that fossil fuels are utterly necessary in our world to this day, check out some of the articles from the Honest Sorcerer 1 on Substack, such as:
Okay, now the people who think that the fossil fuel thesis is stupid will have clicked away from this piece, leaving only the ones who agree with it to continue. The questions that will occupy me for the rest of this piece are: why can we simply not admit that fossil fuels are necessary to our modern civilization, and that our era of progress might simply be behind us?
As you can expect from the title, my answer is that modern civilization is still deeply religious in its worldview, but this time having put technology as its central deity, instead of the pantheon of Gods of the Romans, and the monotheistic God of the Middle Ages. There are several reasons why the Machine has replaced the Gods of the past.
Firstly, technology provides tangible, reliable results at scale in a way that religious faith or magical rituals do not. This is indeed the ultimate ground of science: not the fact that it gives us the unadulterated Truth of Reality, nor the fact that it makes us more virtuous and better participants in our relationships with Reality and one another, but that it works.
Think about the despair that came with the fall of the Roman Empire, or the Black Plague in Europe, and you can easily imagine how quickly people can stop believing in the zeitgeist of their time as soon as societal problems overwhelm their living situation. The priests that tell you to believe in the Christian God suddenly don't seem all that powerful when they too suffer at the hand of the Black Plague, and when they are unable to contain such a massive wave of deaths and suffering.
Right now we are witnessing something similar in that the faith in the religion of technological progress is under serious scrutiny, because evidently it is failing to deliver on its materialistic promises. Technology is supposed to lift everyone out of poverty, yet is is perpetuating poverty in many places of the world, and even in first world countries, while the rich keep getting richer. Technology is supposed to make us better at solving problems, but in reality it keeps creating bigger and bigger problems that we seem more at a loss as to how to solve: climate change, soil erosion, microplastics, dependence on non-renewable resources, without mentioning the whole host of social and psychological issues which are far more subtle and difficult to notice. And technology is supposed to be for the benefits of people, and yet it is overwhelmingly helping the most corrupt amongst us get ahead in the system, and the rise of so-called "AI" puts into serious question who is even in charge of all of this. 2
Thus we are seeing a flight back to religion, what Spengler called the Second religiosity, because the current set of beliefs and myths are not cutting it out for most people. There are many problems with this second religiosity however, because it no longer has the innocent and vigorous faith of the past, but this is for another discussion.
Point one brings an important question however: why are civilizations in general religious? If even our modern world is inherently religious in the faith it places upon technological progress, why is religiosity so inherent to human civilizations?
My answer focuses on two major roles that religions fulfill: firstly, the coordinating role that it provides to a large society, the way that having a common set of descriptions of what is valuable, what makes a person good, what Reality is, and where we are (roughly) headed as a collective provides cohesiveness to a collective. A less cohesive collective will be out-competed by a more cohesive one, so we can expect that over time, various strategies that bring cohesion to a group will arise, and thus we have the common explanation that religions provide a sort of short-term advantage in the "natural selection" of civilizations.
This explanation is incomplete however, because human beings and societies are not merely interested in competition, they experience wonder at Reality, love for one another, a sense of awe and respect for people they consider good, and so on. Writers tend to get stuck at the first level of religion, the utility it provides to groups, which makes them blind to the fact that there are often many reasons for why certain patterns in human groups and individuals show up again and again.
A second reason for why religions are so pervasive in human societies is what we can call the metaphysical dimension, the fact that human beings are innately curious and want to understand Reality at its roots, and are what we could say "sacrificial" or "ritualistic", the fact that we want to live for something more than just ourselves, we want to live in a collective that is bigger than us, and that feels meaningful to us.
From this we get the more social forms of horrors that Kafka and many of his successors have explored: the idea of being born and stuck in a society that puts totally nonsensical, and even alien demands onto the individual, with seemingly no way out. This stirs a sense of horror in us because deep down we want to belong in a collective that shines with love, goodness and freedom, and provides people with meaningful work that makes them want to contribute to the society in question. We are not merely content with survival and self-preservation, whether of ourselves or the collective, and this is what religions point to, or at least, are supposed to point towards, the aspects of life beyond the self. "Supposed to" because indeed religions are one of the first things to get co-opted by ego dynamics, whether individual or collective.
We could say that technology has won over as the most recent version of God because it is the one most aligned with the self, the vehicle we use to navigate Reality and that allows us to understand it through our mind, and manipulate it according to our will. Religions of the past tended towards repression of the self in favor of the group, hence the dogma of the church, or the self-softening rituals of indigenous tribes, or the general demands of fitting inside one's society.
The self is not very groovy with surrendering its agency to a group however, unless that group is completely aligned with its self-interests, which is why the developments of liberalism, the so-called Western 'enlightenment', and of rationalism were inevitable. Those are not ideologies that sprung up for seemingly nowhere, they are the reflection of the perpetual drive of the self when it is unable to take part in something greater than itself: more control over its environment, more choice, more power, less constraint, less friction. Thus it is not just technology that has become more powerful and less constrained, it is the self too, because the former is merely an extension of the latter. The first tool that became a machine was the self, and then and only then did physical machines come about.
Modern society thus does away with much of the conformity and social demands that religions and societies of the past were characterized by, because it is aligned with the self first and foremost. This is especially noticeable with the society of the screen, which has given people an unprecedented amount of convenience in the hands of its users—you can order essentially anything through online stores—and an unprecedented form of social atomization as well.
Money and technology seem to empower the individual, in the sense that they aren't directly reliant on others to get what they might want, but it is very misleading to say that people become sovereign individuals through modern technology, because evidently the demands to fit into the technological system are enormous, and also because people become entirely reliant on centralized, complex technologies to live and do anything they might fancy, even to the point of relying on LLMs to think.
Modern technology doesn't empower people, but it certainly makes their self harder, a process which compounds itself over time. People in the 19th and 20th century might have been more selfish than their predecessors, and in many ways had to in order to fit in the industrialized world, but this is nothing compared to our times, where the individual lives on a solipsistic screen (including the screen of his mind) making him unable to partake in a Reality beyond its self.
Thus as Darren Allen points out, the God of modernism with its dreams of utopia and promises of control over Reality lulls in the self, but nowadays it is the God of postmodernism, with its total annihilation of Reality that has won over, turning every atomized individual into its own (insane) God, and every belief into a personal religion.
Progress is so prevalent as an ideal because it is a way to create a direction at scale without the need for a metaphysical God, or any sense of "good", without constantly pushing against the status quo. "Progress" is the ideology of solving every problem through addition, (of complexity in our case) and this is done because compromises require vision and decisions. The system on the other hand operates through decentralized processes, which can only operate under a very homogenized view of "good", hence maximizing money and always pushing towards technological growth.
Another way to view this is that if you wanted to promote let's say a simpler lifestyle, this inevitably comes with certain trade-offs which might rub people the wrong way. Some people are very attached to their comfort and will not go alongside your choices, which is fine if your movement is content with being smaller, but at the scale of society, the most scalable and thus accommodating movements are what win in the long term. Hence, democracy, and the decentralized nature of technological progress, which does everything it can to make the metaphorical pie bigger for everyone, which means that trade-offs and (fundamental) decisions aren't required in the short-term, though it makes the far worse trade-off in the long-term of sacrificing sustainability (and I might add, being compatible with human values).
Thus my point is that progress is much deeper than a mere idea, it arises as a structural necessity, of having a collective that can have a coherent direction (because those with a direction out-compete those without one), under the constraint of no longer believing in a metaphysical God (the death of God as Nietzsche called it), and without any sense of virtue that can stir it.
A way to rephrase the last point is that progress is the hollowed out, purely quantitative version of what it means to be a "better person". Because personal development and what constitutes as a virtue is a contested topic, many different groups will inherently have a radically different idea of what constitutes a good person, meaning that it cannot be the basis for the direction of a large-scale society, though it can be perfectly fine for a smaller one. Hence my aphorism that "money is the corpse of value", of qualitative value that is.
The roots of the religion of technology are very deep. They are not mere "ideas" or "narratives" as some contemporary writers might say, which is why we cannot simply invent new stories to get us out of this mess, the same way that an addict cannot simply believe in new fancy, more "optimistic" beliefs about himself to rid himself of his addiction. It is no exaggeration to say that the technological system has been in the making for thousands of years, even going all the way back to the agricultural revolution.
The foundation for the religion of technology is the self-worship of self of itself, the way that it only understands self-preservation and self-expansion, even if it costs him everything else in the long-term. Self, by itself, has no sense of limits, which is why the system as a whole is totally unsustainable. Limits however cannot be dictated from an ideology or an institution, in a top-down manner, because this only creates conflict in the self against another self, the same way that someone might feel conflicted between exercising, or staying inside and eating junk food.
The way out of the inner conflicts of the self and the system it creates lies in the ability to softly experience Reality, to 'step out' of the hard self and allow something 'beyond it' to inform its experience and decisions. But here we reach a fundamental impasse, which is that this cannot be formalized into a system, nor can it be captured by any method or technique, or scaled through an ideology. All of those literal forms are extensions of the self, which is why 'spirituality' as it is often conceived merely adds more to the self, in the form of esoteric beliefs and exotic techniques, but never fundamentally changes the self.
We could speak metaphorically and say that the solution to the problems of the self, lie in 'surrendering to God', but such a formulation is obviously riddled with connotations about the literal versions of God that past religions present us with: the pantheon of the Romans, or the God-in-the-sky of the Church, (which wasn't the God that Christ spoke about, spiritual masters and the institutions that follow them are always very different in essence), or in our times, the religion of technology.
The enigmatic Truth that is 'beyond' the self cannot be captured by non-fiction, which can only speak of general concepts, it has to instead be expressed in a form that convey it metaphorically, through the artistic truth of a novel for instance. Thus we see a fundamental asymmetry of the self-deception at the heart of our times: what augments the self (and the system) can be described literally, through concepts, metrics and so on, but what is beyond the self, what we truly crave as human beings, cannot be.
What comes after the religion of technology will be not quantitatively better than it, meaning that it will be systematically rejected by a world that can only understand quantity, and by those who defend such a system. Here we must stop, for the obvious fact that such a future cannot be prescribed, and cannot be captured in literal frames, its main impetus will come from the qualitative Reality that living people will partake in with one another, not a dogma to believe in.
1 Other good sources (also on Substack) are Nate Hagens (The Great Simplification) and Arthur Berman. All of those people have collaborated with one another recently, so you might say that they are not independent from one another, but before the recent years that have made societal collapse and the energy situation quite obvious as a problem, they used to be (and still are, it's just that Nate Hagens invites many people to his podcast). Any case, you can find lots of peak-oil adjacent writers if you dig for them, but of course, you can find anyone backing any crazy theory if you are willing to dig for it, so whether that says anything depends on whether you trust me or them I suppose.
2 I do not believe in the mythos of sentient "AI" taking over the world and subjugating us, but it is a pervasive myth that a lot of people believe in, and makes them question the relationship between humans and technology.
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Peakoil Entropy Mythprogress Selfunself Religion
2026-09-19