The False Gods of Our Feeds

Rohan Routroy writes about myths, movies and meaning on Nothing In A Nutshell, which has become one of my favorite independent blogs (and hasn’t yet been swallowed by the Substack borg, not that there’s anything wrong with that). Rohan led Brand Strategy at Twitter back in the day, and he is the founder of Thirty Eight – a boutique consulting and design firm in NYC.

You can contact Rohan on Twitter.com @iamrrr. As with all of our guest contributors, Rohan’s post may not represent the views of Epsilon Theory or Perscient, and should not be construed as advice to purchase or sell any security.

The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.

G.K. Chesterton

I’ve been thinking about the role of social media in the decline of sacred attention and the rise of false idolatry in our culture. The more I reflect on it, the more I believe the two are linked. If I had to name a starting point for when society began descending into a valley of screen driven loneliness, it would be the fall of 2006, when Facebook announced the News Feed. That was when we began to isolate ourselves from one another, disconnect from our thoughts and reflections, and develop an algorithmic devotion to our screen gods.

It was neither news, nor was it a feed. It was the end of the end. For the first time, media no longer had a conclusion. Magazines had finite pages. We used to gather near the TV every Sunday to watch a show. Going to a movie with your family was a precious ritual. Vinyls had to be turned to listen to the B-sides. But with the News Feed began the era of the infinite scroll. It is not even ironic that the Meta logo resembles an infinity sign.

This endless scroll marked the beginning of our collective descent into the nothingness of internet consciousness. Binge watching, doom scrolling, and the eerie symbolism of the moment when Netflix asks, “Are you still there?”

The answer is no, we are not. We do not wake up to our own consciousness anymore. We wake up to content. Content that is specifically designed to farm our attention for something far deeper than entertainment.

It is devotion. And not the good kind. Because our need for devotion has been hacked into enforced devotion to our screen gods, especially by those who deny gods altogether.

The denial of God is a particularly tricky stage in the development of both individuals and societies. It often masquerades as a rational rejection of a metaphysical idea, when in fact it overlooks something I believe to be true: most human beings are culturally indoctrinated to worship.

Modern branding follows its cues from religion. Worship has merely been repackaged for the secular class, creating its own set of problems. Branding understands the same truth religion has for millennia. People seek belonging, meaning, and identity through metaphors and symbols. Apple stores are designed to invoke reverence. Associating with Nike, named after a goddess, is associating with greatness. Heading to a Supreme drop is akin to a pilgrimage. While the object of our worship may shift depending on socioeconomic and cultural conditioning, the subjective structure of the human being carries an inherent need to worship.

Before we go further, it’s worth pausing to define what I mean by God. Not in a theological sense, but as something more intrinsic. For the scope of this essay, God is the personification of the values we aspire to hold. Jesus embodies agape, love without transaction. Buddha stands for the possibility of transcending suffering through detachment. Shiva, the primordial yogi, embraces chaos in order to arrive at stillness.

These are value systems contained in symbolic figures. Strip away the divine personalities, and what remains are values. And those values, in their symbolic form, once served as a moral architecture for civilization.

In the absence of these healthy and age-old personifications of universally agreed-upon values such as love, detachment, and stillness, we find ourselves in the murky waters of the postmodern hangover: the belief that values are merely social constructs.

This ideology shares the same design flaw as the New Atheist movement. It is fair game to deconstruct, and in some cases destroy, the psychosocial scaffolding that has held societies together since we first worshipped the Sun.

But it is also fair to ask: what did they replace it with?

The answer is a void masquerading as progress. And by that, I mean a reductionist rejection of values, replaced by the nihilistic worship of strongmen and their impulses. The section of society that falls prey to this is significant enough to affect all of us, from well-meaning atheists to devoted believers, all of whom still love their neighbors. This shift in deriding age-old values leads them to seek values from those very men. Dictators become the champions of power. Billionaires become the embodiment of money. Influencers become the symbols of status. These are the implicit values that guide the most influential currents of popular culture and have become the theology of the godless.

Without the scaffolding that held us together for millennia, we are left drifting through our days and through our feeds. God no longer appears in scripture. He appears in our feeds. It is not the holy bell we respond to, but the ping. And it is no surprise that the two strongmen of our times own the very platforms we impulsively scroll. They turn their petty feud into a spectacle that trends for days, capturing our feeds and, with it, our attention. And it is equally telling that the most popular YouTuber today is singularly focused on one thing: attention. And he does that under the moniker Mr Beast. That, unfortunately, is the punchline.

How did we get here?

While the worship of strongmen is not a new phenomenon, the speed at which technology is replacing theology accelerated when we handed our nervous systems to the internet. The conditions for this shift were already present, but the momentum intensified once the medium for human attention changed. It began with the News Feed in 2006 and continues today in 2025, where we doom scroll through feed-based platforms.

An illustration of this is the ever-growing epidemic of doom scrolling, which, in my view, is the nihilistic turn of our intrinsic desire for transcendence.

Let us look at these two gestures.

It is the same repetitive motion of flicking the thumbs – a motion that has been around for millennia. But for the first time in our existence, the rosary bead has been replaced by the endless scroll of the feed, which farms our attention to anoint the gods of our era. While the action might look similar, the desire behind it is fundamentally different. Both actions respond to being alone, but they serve different ends. One seeks self-awareness and a tryst with our aloneness to contemplate the infinite nature of our inner lives. The other attempts to distract us from loneliness instead of investigating it with courage and stillness. One offers a sanctuary to find our grounding in. The other keeps us adrift in feeds, addicting us to our base desires, cheap pleasures masquerading as entertainment, all calibrated to make us uphold the implicit values of these feeds – fame, money, and power.

Contemplating our existential aloneness, and connecting with the vastness of our inner life, is an act of spiritual flourishing. Pulling out our phones when bored or lonely, filling up that silence with the gods in our feeds is a dangerous act of worshipping the nihilism within them.

This is old-school theology delivered through postmodern devices. Or, as Ian Bogost wrote in his prescient essay from 2015, The Cathedral of Computation:

We’re not living in an algorithmic culture so much as a computational theocracy.

My problem with this is that with the old ways of processing our relationship to assumed gods, at least we had a chance at redemption. With the new gods – brittle strongmen, fickle influencers, and status addicts – we are flirting with the annihilation of our agency, and eventually, our sanity.

So where do we go from here?

To channel Marshall McLuhan, who warned us about this moment before we were ready to listen:

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Let the algorithms devour each other. Let the self-anointed gods farm attention for their own worship.

Our work is different. Our work is to become discerning individuals who choose what gets our attention. Not by escaping reality, but by learning how to be in it – attentively, and deliberately.

We begin by pausing the feed. We begin by taking sabbaths from the altars of our screens. We begin by remembering that attention is not a commodity. It is a sacrament.

If you are still paying attention to this essay, consider this. What daily actions are a reflection of loneliness and distraction? And what daily actions reflect a conscious encounter with being alone?

This is not about rejecting technology. Phones can and will be a part of this conversation. Rejecting the infrastructures of our waking moments won’t find us peace, but deeply questioning our relationships with them might. 

If enough of us begin asking these questions, in the right rooms, on the right platforms, at the right tables, we may begin to shift the trajectory. From the subconscious worship of strongmen to the conscious worship of values that help us flourish.

Because the future is always decided by who we choose to worship.