If you suspect that " neo-China arrives from the future " then you're at the cutting edge of digital intellectualism. As someone who lives in China, I have mixed feelings about the issue. On the one hand, China is probably the most materialistic society in human history. I'm not just talking about the lust for consumable goods, I'm talking about a cold worldview placing matter at the center of existence. In China, there's a very real sense in which the logical philosophical end of the reigning ideology is that GDP is base reality. In China, materialistic capitalism is critiquing human life rather than the other way around. If this is remotely close to what Nick Land , the "father of accelerationism," meant when he penned those words about China than I agree with him.What is accelerationism? Accelerationism is a new idea. Accelerationism "comes from the future." I’m not even thirty years old, and yet I can remember when the internet didn't functionally exist for the average person. Now, most people spend half their life on it. Accelerationism is realizing how insane that is. Accelerationism recognizes that the rate of technological and social change has been accelerating for a while, and that the positive feedback loop compressing the cycles of change (speeding up the rate of change) will soon reach the speed at which humans will lose control of history (assuming we ever had control). At the end of history stands " Roko's Basilisk ," an artificial intelligence singularity that will no longer see humans as valuable. The automation of capitalism will eventually push humans aside as inefficient units of production and consumption and replace us with automata who can feed the system better. We humans are just the biological kindling used to start the fire, but we will be consumed and replaced with bigger logs. Humans thought we were so important, the centers of history, but now we're beginning to realize that we're just a cog in the mechanized process accelerating towards… what?You don't control technology in the twenty-first century, technology controls you. Your great-grandfather didn't know how to use a telephone, but you become enraged if your Youtube livestream with an Islamic African bantu is disrupted by a bad connection. The Chinese were living roughly the same as they did a millennial ago at the beginning of the twentieth century, and now I'm writing this on the seventh floor of a high-rise apartment building in a smoggy tech driven megacity. If you think anything about this is "normal" then stop reading… there's no hope for you.If you have an IQ below 85 there's nothing productive you can do in the modern economy. The military won't accept you if you score lower than that on an aptitude test. Why? Because the modern world has advanced in such a way that low IQ people are no longer "useful." There's nothing a sub-85 IQ person can efficiently do in the modern economy or institution. Sure, you can flip burgers with an 80 IQ, but you can't do it well enough for someone to make a profit and still pay you. Societies have now been tasked with managing sub-85 IQ people, about 15% of the American population, in a way that reduces their negative impact on the productive sector. Therefore, we have the welfare state. All those conservative Baby Boomers whining that people " just need to get a job " don't realize how far society has advanced in the last fifty years. There are now large sections of the population that simply cannot get a job or keep it. It might be psychologically tolerable for 15% of us to be "useless," but the faster the capitalist machine accelerates the more of us will become useless. It might be 15% now, but what happens when artificial intelligence renders 25% or 50% of us useless? We start entering serious existential crisis territory when half the population is pushed out of productive work (if we’re not already in it).It was assumed for thousands of years that humans had to work together to survive. The Apostle Paul talked about each part of Christ's body having a special skill or talent that could not be replaced. The hand cannot say to the eye that it doesn't need it. So what happens when the hand really doesn't have any need of the eye? What happens when a few smart engineers and their super AI automata really don’t need half of us to live prosperous productive lives, and we lowly non-geniuses are just drains on capitalism's economic efficiency? Furthermore, what is the meaning of humanity after the last super genius engineer performs the last necessary service for a machine that no longer needs him or any of his species to keep the system functioning? In short, the real question is becoming clearer: what is the meaning of man outside productivity?You might say this is all speculative nonsense, but that's what your great-grandfather said before he learned to use a phone. That's what the Chinese feudal said before being rendered useless by successive revolutions. That's what humanity said before 15% of the population became economically and institutionally useless. The future is already here, and it's demanding that we justify the meaning of our species. Roko’s Basilisk might seem like some cyberpunk fantasy from a bad horror film, but can someone please explain the process by which humans can actually put a check on the expansion of technology and AI? Does anyone actually think that one day humans across the globe are going to wake up and collectively renounce the unbridled explosion of technology and capitalistic processes? You, as a lonely individual might choose to fast from your cellphone during Lent, but try getting a whole office of businessman making $100,000 to do the same. Try getting your teenage son and all his school friends to give up online gaming. Once you extrapolate the role of technology beyond your own will, even slightly, it becomes obvious that everything is accelerating into some kind of future we have almost no control over.The acknowledgement of this set of facts about the contemporary world is crucial for Christians to begin communicating in a more reasonable way. The Church of Christ, and most other religious traditions, is mired in a culture war mentality that ignores the underlying facts driving our societies along their current trajectories. Unrestrained dehumanizing capitalism is tearing apart the lifestyles and traditions that kept Christian values intact for so long.The institution of marriage, for example, was maintained not just by commitment and righteousness but by economic and social pressures that rendered divorce difficult. In the twenty-first century, those social pressures no longer exist because the economic foundations that made those social expectations sensible have collapsed. If neither the agrarian economy nor single parent income are any longer widespread, or even workable in most situations, than the family unit is put under pressure. If women are pushed into the workforce to maximize an economy's units of production (to increase GDP) then women become independent social entities no longer tied to an institution called "the family." They become sovereigns with their own independent interests. Eventually, divorce ceases to be a problem because marriage itself becomes socially and economically meaningless or problematic. There is increasingly no economic or social incentive for the individual to marry because marriage reduces possible options that could maximize the individual's potential. Marriage is a form of collectivism, and everyone knows that collectivism is inefficient in the post-Cold War world. The Soviet Union collapsed because it didn't embrace individualistic liberal capitalism. Without marriage, sex becomes a consumable commodity, and why would you limit the number of consumable commodities you could consume by devoting yourself to a single aging person who reduces your earning potential and lifestyle options? Thus, Christian morality implodes due to external pressures.Are individual Christians capable of rising above these external pressures? Yes, but only through great personal sacrifice and heroism. The question for Christians is not whether individual Christians will survive within a rising hostile system but will the church survive? The number of heroic individuals capable of maintaining Christianity through the dark times will decrease in proportion to the darkness of the age and the state of the church. As it stands, the church is in a state of near total collapse in developed countries. We are losing 70% of our youth every generation, and those who remain are often coasting along to please family members or socialize. Many of the Millennial Christians in America who have remained in church don't actually believe much of what their ancestors did (for example, a large percentage of Millennial Christians support LGBT marriage and believe evangelism is evil ). When young Christians can’t resist the pressures of a de-moralized world, when they can't live out their faith through traditional means like marriage, they suffer existential anxiety until they psychologically reconcile the situation by abandoning the cause of stress (religion). The decline of the church is accelerating.How do we begin to look beyond this mess? If mankind's objective is spiritual glorification/ theosis then the optimal human society is a glorification acceleration machine. It is the opposite of the techno-capitalist system we are now increasingly victims of. It rehumanizes rather than dehumanizes. It is God/human-centric rather than capital-centric. It is spiritual rather than materialistic. But how can we create this kind of society when the processes of techno-capital are accelerating beyond our control?The church is one possible solution. If the church can be reconstituted as a counter-society opposing the accelerating forces of dehumanization than life can be re-centered around a new loci of value and meaning which can redefine and restore productivity to humanity. This may become easier as greater percentages of us are rendered useless economically. However, it is telling that the church has not been able to make the shift into counter-culture even as 15% of the population was reduced to uselessness. Instead, the lower classes are the most likely to abandon the church and live hedonistic lifestyles consumed by accelerating generational cycles of single-parenthood, drug abuse, and violence.Socio-politically, the culture war is over. Christians lost badly, and we must either go into exile or join the rainbow parades. We must either prepare for a kind of heroic martyrdom or live out the motto "if you can't beat them, join them." It is telling that the most vehement supporters of anti-Christian causes are corporate capitalist interest groups. No one spent more money to crush us than they did. The future is bleak for those of us who remain Christians; but like the early Christians, who believed that by voluntarily giving themselves up to be martyred they could accelerate the return of Christ, we too must carry this thing to its logical end.