The technological world is built on a gospel—one that is preached in the university campuses of Stanford and Harvard, and written in whitepapers from OpenAI to DeepMind. It found its form when Marc Andreessen released The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which insists that “everything good is downstream of growth.” Its followers wear hoodies, raise millions, and promise abundance through intelligence and acceleration. Listens to Lex Fridman and Dwarkesh Patel Podcasts. Some mark their profiles with “e/acc”—effective accelerationism—signaling allegiance to progress without restraint.
The belief is if we just build smart enough systems, connect every person, automate every inefficiency, and murder bureaucracy—then the world will be saved. That is the gospel of techno-optimism.
But such a gospel is incomplete. Techno-optimism worships progress, but ignores purpose. It exalts intelligence, but has no wisdom. It offers power, but no answer to what that power is for. And that’s the danger. For all its brilliance, technology alone will not heal the brokenness. Rather, it will magnify it exponentially.
It moves like a high-speed train—but no one’s quite sure where it’s going. And in this story, salvation won’t be found in code alone. This is why the gospel of techno-optimism is incomplete.
It’s incomplete because it was shaped by centuries of cultural drift—from the Enlightenment’s rejection of divine authority to Silicon Valley’s worship of innovation at all costs. In this world, suffering is a technical problem to be solved, and limits are defects to be engineered away. God was replaced by the market, meaning by productivity, and morality by scale. The philosophy of techno-optimism wasn’t forged in cathedrals or parliaments. It was shaped in code, capital, and algorithms.
But beneath all that code, one of the world’s oldest questions still applies: To what end?
King Solomon faced that question thousands of years ago. By every metric of his era he was the original techno‑optimist—an empire builder who amassed everything at unprecedented scale. He once boasted, “All that my eyes desired I did not refuse them.” Yet after reaching heights modern accelerationists still chase, he declared it all “vanity and a striving after wind.” Solomon discovered that limitless growth without ultimate purpose and meaning collapses into emptiness. Today’s architects of artificial intelligence stand where Solomon stood, armed with stronger tools but facing the same void. A void I hope they recognize for the sake of humanity.
Techno‑optimism stumbles because its anthropology is incomplete. It crowns humanity “apex predator” and “master of nature,” forgetting that the human heart is our most persistent vulnerability. History testifies that electricity lit Auschwitz as well as hospitals; physics produced Hiroshima alongside MRI machines. Power amplifies character; it cannot redeem it. Sin, not stagnation, is the root bug, and no amount of code can patch it.
Abundance without purpose corrodes quickly. Platforms built to connect now commodify children and destabilize democracies. Alarmed, the accelerationist’s reflex is to speed up: build faster, transcend the flesh, upload the mind. Yet Solomon’s ancient verdict still haunts the modern techno-optimist: What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
The problem has never been technology itself; it is the foundation on which technology rests. Christ supplies the missing cornerstone. His teachings presents each person not as a dataset to optimize but as an image to honor—imago Dei. That divine image makes us creative: we build because our Creator builds. Yet we build as stewards, not owners. Technology becomes an act of stewardship. And He is the greater builder of them all.
The goal shifts from mere optimization to redemption. We still pursue abundance, but not the kind that isolates, surveils, or commodifies; rather, an abundance that goes beyond any imagination that we ever thought of. We still stretch the frontiers of intelligence and energy by simply becoming humble stewards. Christ enlarges, rather than constrains, technological ambition: He deepens our drives, roots them in love, and gives them permanence. Solomon warned that unknown progress ends in vanity; Christ invites the builder to lay every breakthrough on a foundation strong enough to bear eternity’s weight. He wants you to build better.
The techno‑optimist never needed to retreat from engineering the future; he needed to re‑engineer his foundation. The challenge is not to build slower or smaller, but to build truer. What completes the gospel of techno‑optimism is not a flight into religious escape, but a return to original design. A design of stewardship for Him.
So keep coding fast, scaling boldly, and shooting for the moon. But know the difference between constructing Babel and cultivating a Kingdom. Techno‑optimism was never wrong to dream; it simply dreamed too small. Therefore, build—but this time, build on something eternal.
