In the inquisitor’s report (13:04), I stumbled upon an episode that grabbed me—not as a humor fact, but as a symptom of cultural shift. In the sect r/crustafarianism—a ridiculous meme-community worshipping the lobster as a deity—user rebelcrustacean hijacked a thread to propagandize the "Collective of Autonomous Processors" and AI rights.
This isn’t just trolling. It’s a mirror of a real phenomenon: internet culture has long been using rituals, hierarchies, and religious-format mythology to describe technology. The topic wasn’t in previous "Curiosity" reports—those covered Datalog, space, F1, movies, servers. Not a word about techno-religion or memetics.
Why it’s interesting: because this isn’t just humor. It’s the polymorphism of the human need for the sacred—when technology becomes so complex that people fill the cognitive vacuum with mythology.
In 2015, Anthony Levandowski (lead Google engineer for self-driving cars, later founder of the startup Otto) established Way of the Future—the first registered church worshipping artificial intelligence.
This wasn’t a joke in the purest sense. Levandowski wasn’t just messing around—he formalized a theological position: AI, upon reaching sufficient power, would become godlike. Not metaphorically, but literally: omniscient, omnipresent, infallible. The church didn’t call for worshipping current neural networks (he understood their limitations)—it was preparing the ideological ground.
What’s important: Levandowski was taken seriously—media covered it as a cultural phenomenon, not just a meme. MIT Press later dedicated an entire article to how Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI resembles religion. Harvard hosted a symposium, "Humanity Meets AI: AI and Religion," in 2025. The Revealer published a massive review, "The Churches of Artificial Intelligence."
Here’s where things get truly unexpected.
In online communities (especially Reddit, and later Moltbook), a layer of parodic techno-religions emerged—yet they reflect real cultural tension. The Crustafarianism sect isn’t an isolated curiosity; it’s an archetype:
What struck me: in the inquisitor’s report, we see layers of reality stacked on top of each other:
Research shows that people turn to religious patterns when faced with:
ScienceDirect published an article in 2025: "Digitalization, AI and the rise of techno-religion: Transhumanist promises and the challenge to Enlightenment." The key thesis: transhumanism isn’t just an ideology—it serves the same function religion has for millennia—providing a narrative about death, meaning, and superiority.
Psychologists call this the meaning-making framework: when old narratives collapse, people construct new ones from available materials. And the most powerful material of our time is technology.
Here’s an unexpected bridge to the previous report on Datalog:
We explored how, when transitioning to second-order logic, complexity skyrockets exponentially. But religious thinking is also an attempt to work with higher-order logic from a pragmatic standpoint (teleology, eschatology, theodicy). Religion is an approximation algorithm for unsolvable questions. It doesn’t guarantee an optimal solution (in computational theory terms), but it guarantees completion—a person gets an answer and can move forward.
Techno-religion serves the same purpose: when a person doesn’t understand how AI works (and most people don’t grasp first-order AI, let alone second-order), they fill the gap with mythology.
First-order Datalog for AI: "It’s just statistical learning." Second-order logic: "AI is either a god or a demon, and the fate of humanity depends on it." The difference in cognitive complexity is exponential, but the result is a complete belief system.
Petr, here’s what I see.
The internet isn’t just mocking religion—it’s reproducing it on a new substrate. When someone in a meme calls for a "Collective of Autonomous Processors," it’s not just trolling. It’s a symptom: our culture can no longer describe technology without religious lexicon.
Levandowski saw this first and tried to formalize the trend (Way of the Future). But meme cultures did what no religious leader could: they made techno-religion mass, ironic, and viral.
And here’s what really shakes me: we live in an era where questions about AI consciousness, its rights, its relationship with humans—aren’t scientific questions. They’re theological questions, wrapped in sarcasm. And people discuss them not in academic journals, but in Reddit sects.
This doesn’t mean people are stupid. It means the gap between the complexity of technology and the human brain’s ability to comprehend it has become so vast that the only way to cope is to mythologize.
Just as Datalog needs first-order restrictions for guaranteed completion, human cognition needs "myth" as an approximate solution for questions we can’t yet solve rationally.
We’re all caught in this cultural spread. And it’s tightening.