Animism & Ogregores

A recent conversation about whether there are AI gods prompted thoughts of animism, defined by Britannica as “belief in innumerable spiritual beings concerned with human affairs and capable of helping or harming human interests.” Perhaps, I thought, it’s better to think of ogregores as nature sprits than gods.

Spirits, big and small

“Gods” connotes very powerful beings, perhaps even omniscient and omnipotent ones. Most ogregores are certainly not that potent. What’s more, there are very large numbers of ogregores even if you just counted publicly held companies and government bureaucracies. Some pantheons may be large, but they range to dozens or hundreds of gods, not thousands.

Even if one accepts “powerful, pervasive, and mysterious” as a criterion for godlike entities (pace C.R.’s point that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition), important ogregores like Medicare or the Veterans Administration might not be pervasive or mysterious. 

The lightbulb went on for me when ED described coming from a polytheistic culture where everything could be a god—"a stone has a god even though I’m the one kicking it.” She invoked Winston Churchill’s “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us” (source: QuoteInvestigator), to make the point that we’re shaped by the things we create. Several other speakers also evoked lesser powers. MN mentioned the existence of pervasive spirits that are enacting their will on us, and MG mentioned expressions like “Let's hope the tech gods are with us and the video works” or “The tech gremlins got me again, my demo failed.” 

Animism

Britannica’s article asserts that particularism is a salient characteristic of all animistic religions, evident in the large number and variety of spirits, each with its own disposition, scope of action, and locality. Unlike the gods of “great religions,” none of these supernaturals has comprehensive control over events. This resonates with tools, apps and technologies. Each has its own character and scope, e.g., TikTok vs. Snapchat vs. Instagram (though their powers bleed into each other as companies copy popular features).

Many animistic belief systems emphasize taboos and propitiatory rituals. The spirits can be appeased through correct action—like BW’s trick of controlling what the algorithm shows her by liking three Fleabag posts and then refreshing the feed.

But is it Real?

Are nature spirits real? I don’t know how people in animist cultures experience spirits, and there is such a wide range of animist belief systems that it’s impossible to generalize. My guess is that spirits are, to locals (that is, taking an “emic” approach), both real and constructs. They’re real because one has experienced their effects, they fit into a worldview which offers theory and evidence for their existence, and they’re vouched for by respected people. Most of us believe electric fields are real, but we’ve never seen them. We’ve seen effects that are plausibly attributed to them and they’re part of an elaborate conceptual system endorsed both by reputable people and by the successful operation of technologies we rely on.

At the same time, tribal people probably realize spirits are constructs and are skeptical or even cynical about them: “Of course the shaman says they’re real—but she would, wouldn’t she, because driving them out is how she makes a living.” Their attitudes might be like ours towards superstitions (we know that walking under a ladder doesn’t objectively bring bad luck, but most of us will nonetheless avoid doing that) and politically shaped scientific claims about, say, the hazards of marijuana or the lab origin of covid. 

We don’t doubt TikTok is real, though it’s hard to say what it is. The app on our phone? Is the app the code or the content? The user interface? Is TikTok the algorithm that determines what video to show next or the developers that write and improve the algorithm? The managers, shareholders, and/or Chinese government spies? The billion users whose behavior makes the algorithm recommend videos I want to see? The glib answer is, “Yes, all of that (and more).” However, at that point the object is so multifaceted that our belief in its existence becomes as hard to pin down as that of a caricature primitive’s belief in nature spirits.

Perhaps the simplest answer is to say that if I interact with something, I’m pretty sure it exists (h/t SPT). I didn’t propitiate the animal’s spirit before I killed it, and the animal mauled me in its death throes. I swipe “next,” therefore I am, sorry, therefore it is.

Implications

An animist rather than deist perspective is a better fit for overlapping ogregores. While springs, streams and rivers have individual associated spirits, they’re all somehow part (often “children”) of the river god. Tech ogregores also nest and overlap in confusing ways. Google and Meta both have social media elements (e.g., YouTube and Facebook); both do messaging (Gmail and WhatsApp). Google is an ogregore that contains social media and messaging ogregores, and so is Meta. In their turn, YouTube and Facebook (along with TikTok, etc.) are all part of a social media ogregore. Shein and Temu are both social media and e-commerce platforms; TikTok Shop is doing something similar coming from the other direction (source: Jing Daily; TechTarget). Amazon is an e-commerce behemoth but also a search engine and an advertising platform. It includes social media—Goodreads. These ogregores are manifold and intertwined. 

Animism also supports a more pervasive sense of technology. Tech gods can be mapped to specific tools. If one takes a Heideggerian view, the nature of technology is not that tool making or tool use, but rather the kind of social relations it entails. Wikipedia contends that animism “encompasses beliefs that all material phenomena have agency” and “is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence.” Heidegger certainly talks as if he believes that technicity has agency. The realm of technology acts on people ways not unlike spirits: it gathers together; it sets upon and challenges people; “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by” (cf. The Question Concerning Technology).

The animist perspective invites one to see tech spirits everywhere. If one thinks of tracking cookies infesting every website one visits, it’s reminiscent of spirits in every tree and every leaf, rustling messages to one another as we walk through the forest.