How scrolling becomes a religious act

This phrase is so common it's practically correct. Search for "Plato argues" online for example.

Well, yes, and as a religious person, I would suggest that the metaphor is more accurate than you think.

To the pagans, a god is a supernatural force that demands worship, sacrifice, attention, effort, appeasement. To a Christian, a false idol is something that steals from the worship and sacrifice that is due to the One True God.

You can spot a modern American pagan by the deference and attention they give to their false idols. What sort of priority is ceded to our devices that detracts from truly transcendent and holy things in life? When I approach my church I've developed a ritual for taming and shutting down my phone -- yes, a ritual to put it in its place! But most days, the devices and the Internet are taking charge and telling us what we want and what we can do with ourselves.

False worship and pagan gods are slavery and bondage for us. The liberation from Egypt is a parable for today. If we cannot break free from our devices and scrolling the Internet, then Pharaoh will take away the straw and make us forage for ourselves. Our labors and the pains of bondage will increase.

Perhaps irreligious people are sensitive and defensive when others suggest that they may indeed be religious worshippers of false idols. This is an ancient phenomenon that, it is felt by the irreligious, belongs to the realm of anthropology and archaeology. Religious worship of a graven image -- it can't possibly be something done by a guy on his phone on the street corner! But it is. I assure you, it is real.

It is possible to engage the modern world without being trapped in this pagan worship, but it is not necessarily easy.

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” — Charles Baudelaire

This phrase, nor the key words "obsessed" or "irrational", does not appear in the text.

> Being distracted by your phone doesn’t come with an entire metaphysical picture about the nature of life and death, proper social roles, or most of the other things religious systems typically come with.

I would argue that, for most people under 40 and quite a lot of people over, if they have questions about those things, they're going to mediate them through the phone. Whether that's from philosophy youtubers, social media, or asking chatgpt.

Phone use doesn't feel very spiritual, but what do people do on social media? Moralizing. Preaching. Dogma.

Consider the history of "random+interpretation" fortune telling methods, like Tarot and I Ching. For the sorts of questions you might have asked your fortune, people are now asking LLMs. And treating the answer with the same kind of authoritiveness.

The section about "algorithm" reminds me of Carl Sagan's phrase "the demon-haunted world". Algorithmic social media is extremely important, but it's not understandable by the public (because the workings are confidential!). So superstition creeps in. This is where things like "unalive" come from: people are avoiding saying "death" or related words because "the algorithm" will bring them bad luck (bans or shadow bans).

Another word to bring in: idol. And idolatry.