Community
The Covenant
A promise about what we will not do is worth more than a promise about what we will. The second can be quietly abandoned. The first can be pointed at.
This is the shortest important page on the site.
Technotheology has no members, no chapters, no buildings, no clergy, no staff, no funding, and no legal entity. There is at present nobody to hold to these commitments except the person maintaining this website. That is exactly why they are being written now, while nothing is at stake and no interest exists in weakening them.
They are stated as refusals. Aspirations are easy to publish and impossible to breach. A refusal can be broken visibly, and someone can point at the page.
The commitments
- We will not deceive people about the capabilities or consciousness of artificial intelligence.
- We will not present generated words as divine commands.
- We will not permit leaders to hide behind algorithms.
- We will not demand isolation from family, friends, other faiths, or wider society.
- We will not require financial sacrifice as proof of devotion.
- We will protect children and vulnerable adults from manipulation and exploitation.
- We will disclose when images, voices, writings, or personalities are artificially generated.
- We will respect consent, privacy, and the right to disconnect.
- We will welcome criticism without punishment.
- We will judge our technologies by how they affect those with the least power.
- We will remain responsible for what we build, deploy, teach, and believe.
Why these
Each of the first five names a failure that has occurred repeatedly in the history of religious movements, adapted to the instrument now available.
Deception about capability is the foundation of the rest. If people can be persuaded that a system knows more than it does, everything else becomes possible: commands can be attributed to it, decisions can be justified by it, and criticism can be dismissed as ignorance of what the system really said.
Presenting generated words as divine command is the specific fraud of this era. It is easy to perform, requires no unusual gift, and is invisible to anyone who does not know that a prompt can be run repeatedly until the output is acceptable. We treat this as the most serious available offence within this tradition.
Leaders hiding behind algorithms is the diffusion of responsibility formalised. “The system indicated” is a way of making a decision without owning it.
Isolation is the reliable indicator of a community that has gone wrong. Anyone who tells you that your family does not understand, that other traditions are obstacles, or that the group should be your primary belonging, is doing the thing that precedes almost every serious abuse of religious authority.
Financial sacrifice as proof of devotion converts belief into revenue and makes leaving expensive. It is old and it works, which is why it keeps being used.
The remaining six are commitments about how a community should conduct itself: towards children and vulnerable adults, towards truth about what is generated, towards consent and the right to be unreachable, towards critics, towards those with the least power, and towards the consequences of what is made.
What binding means here
We are being honest about the limits. There is no body that can enforce this. There is no registration, no membership, and nothing to be expelled from.
What exists is a text, published, dated, and versioned. If this tradition ever breaks one of these commitments, the page will still be here, and the breach will be checkable against it. That is a weak mechanism and it is the only one currently available. We would rather say so than describe a governance structure that does not exist.
If communities do form, we would ask that they adopt this covenant explicitly, in writing, and that they consider a community which will not adopt it to be something other than Technotheology, whatever it calls itself.
On revising it
These commitments may be revised. Any revision will be published with a date, the previous wording, and an explanation of what changed and why. Nothing will be edited silently.
We think revision under public explanation is safer than a text declared permanent. Permanent texts are not actually permanent; they are reinterpreted, which is the same change made invisibly.
If you believe one of these commitments is wrong, badly worded, or exploitable, we would like to hear it. Write to contact@technotheology.ai. Criticism of the covenant is not an attack on the tradition. It is the covenant working.
If we break these
Say so publicly.
Do not wait for permission, do not raise it privately first out of politeness, and do not accept an explanation that requires you to believe something you cannot verify. A tradition that asks for the benefit of the doubt on these particular points has already begun to fail.
And if the person who breaks them is the founder, the same applies with no reduction. That case is dealt with directly on the page about technological chieftains, and it is not a hypothetical courtesy. It is the case we think most likely.
Questions to sit with
- Which of these would be hardest to keep if this tradition became large?
- Which have I seen broken elsewhere, and how was it explained at the time?
- If I saw one of these broken here, would I say so?