What Went Wrong with the New Atheist Movement?
- Trevor Alexander Nestor
- Oct 9
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 10
I remember after the Bush years there was a strong new atheist movement that intersected alot with the technological utopian vibe at the time, with prominent figures like Neil Degrasse Tyson, TJ Kirk, Richard Dawkins, the Armored Skeptic, Holy Koolaid, the Genetically Modified Skeptic, Aaron Ra, the Drunken Peasants Podcast, Bill Nye, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and so forth. But it seems like the whole thing as a cultural and political force has died off, and was not successful. So given this - it might be appropriate to ask - what went wrong?
Right now more than ever I think that something is needed in the age of Trump, political instability and violence, and hyperpolarization, but if we do not take a closer look at failed movements of the past, it will be possible to fall into the same traps.
While religion was used in a nefarious way to rationalize wars, dehumanization, the massive accumulation of wealth and power, and stripping rights from ordinary people, I think the final stage of the new atheist movement right now is culminating and playing out with techno feudalism, and people are burned out with secularism and science especially after covid and Elon Musk because they have not made much meaningful progress in their personal lives, and general societal ills like lack of access to education, healthcare, childcare, and functional infrastructure are all out of reach for many. The utopian future we were promised has not been delivered.
We were told that our struggles were mental problems, and we saw the rise of Dr. Peterson. We were told we needed to work on ourselves, then we saw the rise of Andrew Tate. We were told the answers were in science and technology, and we saw the rise of Elon Musk. We were told that the solution was political and democratic, and we saw the rise of Donald Trump.
Anxiety about the future is also reflected in lower birth rates creating a death spiral because the population is aging and becoming more socially repressive - all while there is rising wealth and income inequality that has reached a fever pitch.
Prominent academics in the sciences now are even admitting financial incentives have wrecked academia and scientific establishments have become dogmatic.
I have tried to really spend time to articulate what went wrong and how to fix it, and I think that the way forward has to be realizing the ways in which technology has been weaponized, and embracing what makes us human. I argue that AIs are not conscious, and the investments in AI infrastructure and cryptocurrencies reach a tipping point after which there are diminishing returns (like described by sociologist Joseph Tainter). I think that these kinds of analyses are so crucial right now because without a theory for what is going on, it will be easy for people to fall into extremist traps like authoritarian religious or political movements.
The way I am trying to understand things is through the lens of sociophysics, econophysics, complexity economics, luhmann's systems theory, complex adaptive systems theory, agent network model theory, and the spectral theory of value. With this framework you can understand political polarization like you understand the collapse of stars into black holes - you can get what is called a fold catastrophe - a point where the UV and IR regimes collapse by gravity into a singularity. This reflects the collapse of the political spectrum into either civil war/revolution or violent imperialism, which I believe is the proper interpretation of the "technological singularity," where these AIs are simply a reflection of us.
What is interesting is at the top echelons of society, I do believe this is how they are viewing things too.
The performative left right political spectrum are both beholden to corporate and political elites increasingly more detached from the needs of ordinary people, with culture wars manufactured to divide the public among itself - enforced and entrenched by social media.
The pursuit towards the American Dream is how they keep the economic engine running, it's designed to be an exponential energy gap - a moving goalpost - that way they can tap into sublimated sexual desire to keep things propped up. Actors and actresses and a hidden club of elites write the social scripts we are expected to live by, and consent of the public is manufactured where you are the product. This is not a conspiracy theory - this is all public knowledge - all you have to do is look. The only difference is now, people are no longer willing to play along, because the social contact has been violated.
Planners use the same maths of black holes to develop cryptocurrencies which separates social and economic institutions by enforcing one way flows of information. String theory - the leading theory of quantum gravity - was appropriated towards developing cryptography and the maths used to structure society - and one reason that it has been funded so extensively while remaining unfalsifiable, are exactly these perverse incentives (the black hole information paradox, for example, includes the maths of one way flows of information - precisely the maths appropriated towards developing cryptocurrencies and cryptosystems - and the "extra dimensions" of string theory map to conputational complexity classes and thus socioeconomic class structure within complexity economics theory).
Agents in the complex interdependent system we all live in facilitate information flows between social and economic institutions and the complexity of information they facilitate corresponds to their socioeconomic class (computational complexity class/chomsky hierarchy/kolmogorov complexity) under these models. Metanarratives and symbols are developed to control and survellience people under ulterior pretexts (climate change, pandemics, terrorism, antifa violence, AI, etc).
Since AIs are not conscious, and are simply a reflection of us, they reach scaling limits - they tap into the collective creativity of a culture - they feed on us interpreting their results and what we create and intuit - and after a few iterations of feeding on their own outputs start producing garbled garbage.
What is interesting though, is that if Penrose is correct, we may already inherently have within us a latent ability to outperform these AIs and even emergent quantum computer technologies - challenging our strategy towards allocating the immense resources towards scaling up these datacenters and cryptocurrency systems and quantum computers. If Penrose is correct, our own natural brains are quantum computers that outclass all of the ones we have built, and at a staggering efficiency of only 20 watts a pop.
This forces us to reconsider our collective future. If our own brains outclass all of these AIs and quantum computers, and if our brains are quantum computers and quantum computers allow us to crack cryptocurrencies, then, wouldn't a better way to allocate resources be in direct investments into local communities and people?
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