Behind the Scenes: The Cult of Technology, From Railroads to AI.

I’m alive! It’s been an unconscionably long time since I posted on this blog—ten days without an article, and without a pre-planned hiatus. But I think you’ll forgive me, since I spent that time working feverishly on my latest deep dive historical YouTube video, which is called “The Cult of Technology: From Railroads to AI.” It premiered on my channel yesterday (December 19, 2025), and has been doing extremely well both in terms of views and audience reception. It’s customary for me to do a “behind the scenes” article on video release day, but as this one’s a day late and I haven’t posted in such a long time, I’m making this one available to all the Garden members. Watching a video embedded in an email isn’t the most optimal situation, but it is below and you can get the link from it to watch later if you like.

“The Cult of Technology” is a slightly different type of video than most of my recent ones. It’s not straight narrative history, but rather a video essay with my thoughts on how human society has conceptualized and dealt with technology for about the past 170 years, specifically, how people have put unjustified faith in the institution of tech. My thesis is that the more unqualified society’s faith in the positive transformative power of technology is, the harsher the historical correction tends to be. Throughout the video I examine a number of case studies that I think are instructive to analyze our societal fetish for technology: the transcontinental railroads in the United States in the last decades of the 19th century; the Titanic disaster of 1912; the psychological impact of World War I and its technologically-driven horrors; the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb; the relationship between the Apollo moon shot of the 1960s and the Vietnam War; the dot-com boom and bust; cryptocurrency; and our current AI bubble. This is a lot of ground to cover, and I have to move fast through these examples, but even at that the video is three hours in length, among the longest I’ve produced.

Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with my thoughts on technology in general and AI in particular. It’s been a constant subject of my longer and more introspective blog pieces during 2025, especially this one about AI, and the follow-up about how I think the modern tech industry is completely exhausted of ideas and has nowhere to go. Artificial intelligence is a scam, perhaps the biggest and most expensive one in history. Firms like OpenAI and Anthropic have scarfed up billions of dollars and delivered a technology that’s buggy and unreliable, that steals people’s intellectual property, puts people out of work and exacerbates the climate crisis. In “The Cult of Technology” I don’t even get to AI until the video’s final half hour, because there are plenty of other examples of misplaced faith in technology throughout history.