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Commentary By Malcom Kyeyune

The Internet's New Quasi-Religions

Economics Technology

The internet today is full of strange new quasi-faiths, each offering a secret knowledge through which an enlightened few can hope to purify themselves. One under-explored effect of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent collapse of Western society's model sequence for attaining professional success and social esteem (go to college, study hard, get a well-paying job, form a family) has been a privatization of meaning among younger millennials and members of Generation Z.

Many in the younger generation will be materially poorer and less professionally secure than their parents and grandparents. Such monumental shifts in economic reality invariably bring dramatic shifts in people's social reality, as old expectations and beliefs no longer match up with the way things are. In earlier eras of American history, major crises—and the ideological and religious revivals that often followed them—played out in streets, churches, tent meetings, and lodges. Now the process takes shape primarily online, where the new Gnostics preach.

Continue reading the entire piece here at Newsweek

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Malcom Kyeyune is a writer, podcaster, and member of the steering council of the Swedish think tank Oikos. Adapted from City Journal.

This piece originally appeared in Newsweek