DR McCullochHOMESHOPABOUT

Weft

A comparative theology of Silicon Valley, set out as a matrix

Weft is a tool I prompted using Claude code for laying out how ideas, concepts or fragments of text relate. Each row and each column of its matrix is a group, and the mark where a row crosses a column stands for the relations between the two groups. Here it holds the Silicon Valley Quasi-Religions corpus, which sets six tech movements (effective altruism, longtermism, singularitarianism, transhumanism, e/acc and LessWrong rationalism) against the ten end-time traditions they resemble, from the Buddhist Mappo to Norse Ragnarok, and against 22 works of fiction that anticipated them, from Frankenstein in 1818 through cyberpunk to Black Mirror. Between those 44 entries run 145 relations, each named by a verb, weighted from 2 to 5 and given a sentence of reasoning, so that singularitarianism recapitulates the two-thousand-year-old Christian Parousia, Foundation (a 1951 novel) prefigures longtermism and Metropolis (a 1927 film) warns against e/acc decades before either movement existed. Hover over a mark, or tap it on a phone, and the relations it stands for are listed as sentences.

Go to the matrix ↓

About Weft

I built Weft, in full Weft: Strategy Tapestry, in March 2026 as a grouped-matrix tool for mapping how different kinds of thing relate, whether movements, works of fiction, eschatologies, critiques, risks or methods. I wrote it in Next.js 16 and React 19, with D3 for scales and force layout, React Three Fiber for a 3D view of the matrix, AG Grid for tables and XY Flow for a node editor. Nothing in it is specific to theology, and I use the same matrix for strategy corpora and for Babel / Babble / Babbling, a corpus on the Tower of Babel, language models and liturgy.

The corpus on this page, Silicon Valley Quasi-Religions, reads effective altruism, longtermism, singularitarianism, transhumanism, e/acc and rationalism as quasi-religions and sets them against the ten world eschatologies they recapitulate and two centuries of fiction that anticipated them. Its 44 entries and their descriptions come from the corpus’s nodes file in Weft (data/projects/sv-theology/nodes.json). I wrote the 145 relations and their weights for this page in July 2026, each with a sentence explaining it and a reason for its weight.

Six quasi-religions

The six movements share founders, donors, forums and a great deal of vocabulary, and Timnit Gebru and Γ‰mile P. Torres have argued in The TESCREAL bundle (2024) that they belong together as one ideology, which they name after transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism. I treat each of them as a quasi-religion with its scriptures, its prophets and its picture of how the world ends. Under each are the end-time traditions it recapitulates, the fiction that prefigured it or warned against it and the movements it opposes or is opposed by, taken from the relations in the matrix, strongest first with the weight beside each, and then a few places to read more.

Effective Altruism

Oxford, from 2009 Β· Toby Ord, William MacAskill, Peter Singer

Effective altruism began in Oxford in 2009, when Toby Ord and William MacAskill founded Giving What We Can and asked its members to pledge a tenth of their income for the rest of their working lives to the charities that did the most measurable good, an argument Peter Singer had made in 1972 in ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’. The pledge is a tithe in everything but name. Over the following decade the movement ranked causes by expected value and moved a growing share of its money from malaria nets toward the far future and the risks of artificial intelligence, and the collapse of FTX in 2022, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried had been its most famous donor, is the case most critics of wealth laundered as altruism now cite.

recapitulates
Jewish Messianic Age4, Millenarianism3, Islamic Day of Judgement2
warned against by
Brave New World (1932)4
opposed by
Effective Accelerationism5

Read more

Longtermism

Oxford, from 2017 Β· Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord, William MacAskill

Longtermism is the view, named by MacAskill and his Oxford colleagues around 2017, that the people who could live in the far future so outnumber the living that protecting their chance to exist is a key moral priority of our time. Its arithmetic goes back to Nick Bostrom’s 2003 paper ‘Astronomical Waste’, which put the cost of delaying the settlement of our local supercluster at more than ten trillion potential lives for every second, on his most cautious estimate, and its popular statement is MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future (2022). I read it as an eschatology worked out as a sum, and the critiques in the corpus give it more warnings at the full weight of 5 than any other movement.

recapitulates
Secular Progress Eschatology5, Jewish Messianic Age4, Marxist Eschatology4, Christian Parousia3
prefigured by
Foundation (1951)5
warned against by
Dune (1965)5, Foundation (1951)3
opposed by
Effective Accelerationism4

Read more

Singularitarianism

From 1993 Β· Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil

Singularitarians expect a moment when machines surpass human intelligence and the human era, in Vernor Vinge’s phrase from his 1993 essay, is ended, which Vinge put within thirty years. Ray Kurzweil gave the belief its law of accelerating returns in 2001 and its date, 2045, in The Singularity Is Near (2005). It has the form of a rapture, an imminent event that makes all the history before it provisional, awaited by people who read exponential curves as others have read the signs of the end, and of the six movements it draws the most warnings from fiction, from Frankenstein in 1818 to Ex Machina in 2014.

recapitulates
Christian Parousia5, Secular Progress Eschatology4, Norse Ragnarok3, Gnostic Transcendence3
prefigured by
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)4, Neuromancer (1984)4, Her (2013)4
warned against by
The Terminator (1984)5, R.U.R. (1920)4, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)4, Colossus (1966/1970)4 and 5 more

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Transhumanism

From 1957 Β· Julian Huxley, Nick Bostrom, David Pearce

Julian Huxley gave the word its modern sense in 1957, for a species that could transcend itself through science, and the World Transhumanist Association, which Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded in 1998 and which is now Humanity+, published the Transhumanist Declaration. Its programme treats ageing and death as engineering problems, to be solved by life extension, cryonics, cognitive enhancement and in the end by uploading a mind out of the body altogether. That last hope ties it most strongly to the Gnostics, for whom the body was a prison and salvation an escape from matter, and it is why Frankenstein, a novel about making life from dead matter, is set against it at the full weight of 5.

recapitulates
Gnostic Transcendence5, Christian Parousia4, Secular Progress Eschatology2
prefigured by
Blade Runner (1968/1982)4, Ghost in the Shell (1989/1995)4, R.U.R. (1920)3, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)3 and 1 more
warned against by
Frankenstein (1818)5, Evangelion (1995)4, Brave New World (1932)3, Westworld (2016)3 and 1 more

Read more

Effective Accelerationism

Online, from 2022 Β· Guillaume Verdon (β€˜Beff Jezos’), Marc Andreessen

Effective accelerationism, e/acc for short, began in a pseudonymous Substack post in October 2022 and holds that technological and economic growth is the direction the universe is already moving in and should be sped up as far as it will go. It took shape as a rebuke to the effective altruists’ fear of artificial intelligence, which is why the matrix has it opposing effective altruism, longtermism and rationalism, and Marc Andreessen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ of October 2023, with its list of patron saints and its section headed ‘The Enemy’, gave it something close to a creed. Among the end-time traditions it sits closest to the Marxist and progress eschatologies, in which the end of history is settled in advance.

recapitulates
Marxist Eschatology4, Secular Progress Eschatology4, Gnostic Transcendence3, Millenarianism3
prefigured by
Neuromancer (1984)4, Snow Crash (1992)3
warned against by
Black Mirror (2011–)4, Metropolis (1927)3, Ex Machina (2014)3
opposes
Effective Altruism5, Longtermism4, LessWrong Rationalism4

Read more

LessWrong Rationalism

From 2009 Β· Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson

LessWrong is the forum Eliezer Yudkowsky founded in 2009 out of the group blog Overcoming Bias, and the rationalist community that formed around it treats Bayesian probability as a discipline for everyday thought and the Sequences, the essays Yudkowsky wrote between 2006 and 2009 and later collected as Rationality: From AI to Zombies, as its founding texts. Effective altruism grew up alongside it and took over much of its method and its alarm about artificial intelligence. The corpus sets epistemic monoculture, the habit of diagnosing disagreement as a failure of reasoning, against it at the full weight of 5, and Devs (2020) as well, a series in which a tech company’s quantum computer shows every moment already fixed.

recapitulates
Buddhist Mappo3, Islamic Day of Judgement3, Gnostic Transcendence2, Secular Progress Eschatology2
prefigured by
The Matrix (1999)5, Foundation (1951)3, Snow Crash (1992)3
warned against by
Devs (2020)5, Solaris (1961)3
opposed by
Effective Accelerationism4

Read more

How to read the matrix

Each row and each column is one of eleven groups, such as Rationalist / EA Core or Cyberpunk (1989–1999), and the groups fall into four bands named along the top and left edges: movements, critique, eschatologies and fiction. The row’s group is the source of a relation and the column’s group is its target, so the mark in the Cyberpunk row under Rationalist / EA Core stands for relations running from cyberpunk works to the rationalist movements, among them The Matrix prefiguring LessWrong rationalism. The faint threads crossing over and under behind the marks are plain weave, drawn as decoration.

Four kinds of relation

  • AnticipatesPrefigures, where a work of fiction anticipates a movement.

  • ResemblesRecapitulates, where a movement repeats an older end-time belief; parallels, where two traditions or movements share a pattern.

  • Builds onInfluences, where one work shapes a later one; extends, where one movement builds on another.

  • Stands againstWarns against, where a work or a critique warns against a movement; opposes, where one movement or tradition stands against another.

Size, number and margins

  • A bigger mark stands for more relations between the two groups, and a mark big enough to hold it prints the count.
  • Where a cell mixes kinds, its mark takes the shape and colour of the commonest, and the card lists every relation with its own verb.
  • The diagonal holds the relations inside a single group, such as one cyberpunk work influencing another.
  • The bars in the right margin total the relations each row sends, and the bars along the foot total those each column receives, coloured by kind.

The matrix

Hover over a mark and its row and column light up as far as their labels, and a card beside it lists every relation the mark stands for, strongest first, each with its weight, the sentence explaining it and the reason for its weight. Click the mark to keep the card open while you read it. On a phone, tap a mark and the card opens under the matrix. The buttons and the weight slider hide relations, so setting the slider to 5 leaves only the strongest.

Relation types
Weights run from 2, a suggestive echo, up to 5, the most direct links in the corpus.
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The strongest relations

Set the weight to 5 and 28 of the 145 relations remain, the most direct links in the corpus: singularitarianism recapitulating the Christian Parousia and transhumanism the Gnostic escape from matter, Foundation prefiguring longtermism by decades, Frankenstein warning against transhumanism and The Terminator against singularitarianism, and the Christian and Islamic end-times paralleling one another. Here they are one by one, warnings and oppositions first, each with its explaining sentence and the reason for its weight.