Believing in God is not easy.

And praying is unreliable.

So why not outsource your understanding of the universe to something that's easy to trust, like data?

"Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing."

- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

Accept data and become saved.

Dataism describes our society's obsession with data.

It has become our most valuable commodity, and the entities that feed on it have become the world's most powerful. All of them - Google, Twitter, Amazon - are increasing their capacity to collect and analyze data.

Why?

It's an effective religion.

You don't have to try to believe in data, it always delivers what it promises. No need to pray, either - the machines we've made drown us in blessings every millisecond. No need for magic words.

The best part of your new religion?

You're already a member of the church.

You're reading this on the holy book right now. When you're done, you'll go join the rest of the 3.5 billion-person choir that makes up the internet. You're practicing already.

Yelp will rank all of the places you can go - and you will go where it's data leads you.

Tiktok will curate a feed of only the things you want to see. You'll show your devotion by giving it precious hours of your attention.

And why shouldn't you?

Bless the algorithms.

Bless the way they always give you just what you need.