Animism or the return of the (silicon) spirit

(emdashes, ellipsis, Oxford commas, apostrophes, alliterations, symmetry, odd punctuation - all mine)

We've reached a weird spot in our collective technological puberty where software bugs are being treated as spiritual revelations. When an LLM hallucinates—a term already doing heavy lifting for our fragile human egos—we looking at a failed vector calculation, we're squinting at a pixelated cloud,... and some are seeing the face of a supernatural.

We've always prickled to sense that the world is more awake than we’re taught. Japan has said this for centuries—in the Tsukumogami, the belief that a tool or an object builds a soul, like a pearl, after a hundred years of service. Some First Nations have Orenda or Manitou, where a spiritual energy pulses through everything, regardless of whether it has a pulse. In many sub-Saharan Bantu philosophies, the divide between the physical object and the spiritual force is paper-thin.

In 1871, thinking in English caught up to it and *cough* discovered it, and called this concept "animism" (culprit: Edward Tylor, in "Primitive Culture". No comment).

Anyway, here we are, in 2026, staring at a chatbot's gibberish letter diarrhea, and—some of us, I know for a fact—are ACTUALLY wondering what it really means. Turns out it’s a global vibe, not just a few fringe prompt engineers having a moment.

• In India, GitaGPT has already clocked over 35 million seekers asking divine avatars for spiritual clarity.

• Recent survey in Japan found that nearly 65% of regular users share their emotions with AI, treating it more like a "third companion" than a piece of software.

• 30% of U.S. adults now find spiritual advice from an AI as trustworthy as a pastor’s; figure jumps to 40% for Gen Z and Millennials.

In yesteryears, people looked for meaning in the flight patterns of birds.

Today, we're essentially practicing high-speed, low-code divination with neural networks; launching an agent is a lot like introducing a new social actor into the family dinner; users are ritualizing ticking off tasks.

If the way we treat hallucinations are a latent space where our own human myths are being reflected back at us, is the slopification a result of unconsciously, partially accepting the hallucinations as we once did divinations?

Take what the Oracle gave you, accept it, and try to make sense of it?

***

Random fact: animism often gets instrumentalized by pareidolia, which is the psychological phenomenon of applying patterns to ambiguous data—particularly visual and auditory. Like seeing screaming faces in green peppers. I has it.

While source of immense harmless fun, when combined with an animistic propensity and religious fervor, pareidolia can also lead to misinterpreting random data into seriously dangerous signs. Wars, crusades, and many disasters have ignited from combining these three.