The Cult of the Algorithm
Algorithmic cults have similar features to traditional cults, but some new ones as well
For as long as humans have lived in civilizations, cults have been primarily defined by their leaders. The cult leader has historically served as the machinery around which the cult’s beliefs cohere. Jim Jones, David Koresh, Sun Myung Moon—these names are inseparable from the movements they built. The cult of personality is called so for a reason. The personality serves as an adhesive that glues constituent members under belief arrangements and a social hierarchy issued by the leader. However deranged the theology and extravagant the claims, there was always a man—or sometimes a woman—at the center, demanding unwavering loyalty. Today, I believe, that’s changed.
The cults of today are far different from yesterday’s isolated desert compounds. Now, there are self-organizing masses, clustering loosely around conspiracies, aesthetics, or the continuous flow of passing moral panics producing an upsurge of outrage. The Internet, or more precisely its social network sifting algorithms, are birthing cults without leaders.
The algorithm is the hidden and faceless Hobbesian sovereign. It is unfeeling, unknowing, determinant, and decisive. It does not care for belief, but it produces the conditions under which beliefs of any and all varieties flourish, while deciding which beliefs are amplified and which are obscured.1
The features of cults are well understood. There’s insulation, the persisting conviction that insiders see the truth while outsiders remain blind or hostile. Then there’s intensification, the way belonging requires performance, an escalating display of faith and group loyalty to reap rewards and avoid punishment by the leader(ship). There’s the demand of exclusivity, when members are told they must be sufficiently dedicated to the movement or face expulsion or other consequences. There’s enemy-construction, the figure of the outsider whose presence justifies the group’s unity and draws its ire and suspicion.2 Lastly, there’s revelation, the stimulating sense of hidden, secret knowledge spontaneously revealed by the figurehead.
All of these things flourish more so now in the online climate, but, with one crucial difference—they don’t require the demagogic force to spawn them. The algorithm supplies insulation by feeding us more of what we already consume, creating siloization. This increasingly isolates us from our peers, friends, and families, which, in turn, intensifies commitment by instantly rewarding the most clamorous, fevered voices. It also constructs enemies by surfacing provocations finely-calibrated to produce rage. In the wake of any news event, the algorithm will ensure that all of us see the thing that makes us most provoked and likely upset about that event. It creates revelations by endlessly presenting the novel, bizarre, and verboten in an endless stream, but not haphazardly—it sorts them so they find their target groups.
The algorithm has become the great cult leader of our time, though it is utterly detached. It’s not a personality, though it acts like one by doing the work of the personality—only without the person. We all sense this. When we hop online and wonder what on earth happened to normal, healthy, communal functioning, we effortlessly intuit something has changed.
Leaderless movements have existed before. Christianity was very much leaderless in the early centuries, as were the Luddites. History tells of outbreaks of spontaneous millenarianism, ecstatic revivals, even contagious mass panics. In 1518, the dancing plague broke out in Strasbourg, where hundreds danced uncontrollably for days, some to death, without a leader telling them to do so. In 19th-century Europe, rumors of child kidnappings sparked moral panics and violent mobs without any central instigator.
But these movements tended to be fleeting. They either burned out or consolidated around some eventual authority figure, at which point, they’d start acting like ordinary cults or organizations. It’s difficult for a movement to persist without structure, and structure always coalesces around a leader. What makes the algorithmic cult distinct is the algorithm has hitherto unknown permanence—it doesn’t have the flesh-and-blood limitations and vulnerabilities that cult leaders or leaderless movements have always had.
Outbreaks of bad belief, moral panic, and twisted obsession or hatred no longer run their course in a series of weeks. They fester, metastasize and mutate, they morph and reemerge in new forms like a virus mutates to continue infecting more and more people. The virus changed form slightly, but it’s mechanisms and destructive potential remain the same. Thus, one bizarre conspiracy fades to be replaced by another. Even without a cult leader, it seems, the cults now have a generator creating belief in a similar top-down fashion to the cult leaders of old, only those beliefs are harvested from a grassroots pool of devoted followers. It’s an engine that endlessly produces new revelations from the mass. I’ve long said that Internet virality is like a game of playing the Internet lottery, only instead of investing money hoping to gain more money, you invest time hoping to gaining eyeballs.3
There are countless examples of this floating around the internet æther. From QAnon to Flat-Earth Revival, from anti-vaccine movements to COVID misinformation across the pandemic, from crypto meme-coin bros to the Stop the Steal movement, cults and cult tactics can and are now quickly deployed for extremely niche purposes. Like the witchcraft moral panics of old, we could even loosely lump online outrage mobs under this umbrella.
Unlike the old cults, the algorithmic cult has another peculiar novelty. Under its reign, everyone gets to play cult leader, if only briefly and by algorithmic lottery. It’s like a slot machine and the winner gets to be praised by the other members for a short period, offering the illusion of advancement. A post goes viral, a video takes off, a hashtag catches fire—and suddenly a person who just yesterday was invisible becomes the focal point of a movement. For a few days, or a few weeks, they occupy the role once reserved for the cult leaders: the exemplar through which thousands affirm themselves. Then, inevitably, the wheel of fortune turns and the crowd moves on. The self-proclaimed leader becomes just another adherent, another believer engulfed by the feed.
This distinguishes the algorithmic cult from its predecessors. Most cults enforced a severe hierarchy. Advancement required proximity to the leader, loyalty to the inner circle, and a bit of the same luck we have now with the algorithms. But in the digital cult, advancement seems—at least perceptively—open to anyone. It’s based almost exclusively on luck. Climbing the ladder is, or at least seems, possible for all. Scream the message louder, yell it quicker, shout it more uniquely, and one may rise in the ranks, all while the algorithm itself offers instantaneous encouragement: views, likes, retweets, shares. Each number is both reward and proof of cult loyalty. Unlike those dusty desert communes of old, this new cult pays.
Virality carries with it a trickle of real money, and, sometimes, a flood. The rewards are tangible enough that countless aspirants devote themselves entirely to the rituals of the feed, hoping for ascension. Sacrifice your skepticism, your caution, your dignity, and in return you might be compensated—with a group who will bestow you with ample amounts of very conditional love, attention, with followers, perhaps with money. The exchange is brutally efficient, and the Internet has literalized this Faustian bargain for everyone.
In earlier cults, the sacrifice demanded was often more severe: severing ties with family, surrendering possessions, moving to a commune. The algorithmic cult asks for something subtler but no less corrosive: the surrender of one’s critical faculties and capacity for doubt, while never demanding you even leave the couch. The price of entry is low, but the social erosion is deep.
Perhaps what is most unsettling is not the ephemeral nature of these new leaders, but the permanence of the structure that produces them. Jim Jones died; his cult collapsed with him. David Koresh perished at Waco; the Branch Davidians dwindled. But the algorithm does not die. It does not falter nor sleep. It continues to generate new momentary leaders, new schisms, new revelations. A thousand cults may arise and wither, but the cult factory machine persists, inexhaustible. The cult leaders of yesterday may have been fickle, but they pale in comparison to the algorithmic cults of today.
We may still imagine that cults are fringe, that most of us stand outside them. But what if the fringe is now the whole? What if all of us, in ways large or small, are already members—chanting slogans, performing rituals of affirmation and denunciation, sacrificing our time and attention to a god without a face? The algorithmic cult is leaderless, but it is also boundless.
There are no longer the boundary divisions of space demarcating where today’s cults resides. They’re everywhere in the digital sphere. There is no remote, chain-link compound to escape back into an unaffected world. There is only the feed, indifferent, ceaseless, both everywhere and nowhere, endlessly raising up new winners for their brief moment in the sun before thrusting them headlong back into the shadows.4
“There are no meaningful limitations on who can be sovereign and on what sovereigns are entitled to do.”
“The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”
This is a game I’m very glad I do not play under any circumstances.
I never promised “no pessimism”
Nice read, your insights are ahead of the game as always