The Faith Layer: AI as Absolution

Deep Cut #1 in the Radicalization Series

Editor’s Note

This essay begins a four-part Deep Cut series exploring what “Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley” (Jacob Silverman) calls the political radicalization of Silicon Valley, and how that ideology has migrated into the infrastructure of modern media and AI. Across The Faith Layer, The Power Layer, The Control Layer, and The Collapse Layer, I’ll trace how ambition, belief, and technology fused into a single system that continues to redefine what progress means.

The New Prophets

Every new AI model release lands like prophecy. The stage lights, the language of arrival, the unspoken claim that intelligence has come to save us and improve our lives. The crowd claps not for the code but for what it promises: order, clarity, control.

The words have become familiar. Alignment. Safety. For humanity. Each phrase sounds technical, but they carry the rhythm of belief. They’re not describing what AI is; they’re describing what its creators need it to be. And this tone didn’t come from nowhere. Jacob Silverman calls it the political radicalization of Silicon Valley, a culture that turned faith in progress into proof of virtue. Brian Merchant would call it a pattern we’ve seen before. Every machine age breeds its own priesthood, a class that confuses control for destiny.

This is the story of how belief became infrastructure. How the people who built our tools began to treat their ambition as moral law, embedding their worldview deep inside the systems we now rely on. What started as a philosophy hardened into process, a set of defaults that no longer ask for permission.

In Merchant’s history of the Luddites, the factory wasn’t only a site of production. It was a worldview made tangible, progress rendered in brick and smoke. The owners saw it as proof of destiny, and anyone who questioned that order became an obstacle to the future they’d already declared inevitable. Two centuries later, the machinery has changed shape, but the conviction behind it feels the same.

The faith in progress now speaks in the language of optimization. The factory floor has become a GPU cluster and the overseer a dashboard. The bargain hasn’t changed, only the scale. And the people making it no longer think they’re part of the deal.

What comes next looks at how belief turned into infrastructure, and how much of our current AI story was built to keep that faith alive.