Silicon Valley has a God complex. The critics are not wrong about that. They are just wrong about which god. Money alone sends you to Wall Street. Power alone sends you to Washington. Something else entirely sends you to a garage in Menlo Park: faith.
Faith in science and reason, yes—but more than that. Faith in creation itself. Silicon Valley is a religious movement. Its central doctrine: no force in history has done more to improve human life than technology, and no institution is better positioned to build it for scale than the company. Not the state. Not the church. Not the NGO. The company, deploying scalable technology, is the primary modern instrument of human progress. Technology represents roughly a tenth of the U.S. economy and has driven a third of its growth over the last decade—and that’s before counting every other industry it now powers.
GDP measures outputs, not lives, some will counter. Fair enough—but look globally at where technology took hold and what happened. China practically skipped the branch-banking era—Alipay and WeChat brought hundreds of millions into the payment economy via phone. Rwanda deployed drones to deliver blood to hospitals, cutting maternal mortality from hemorrhage by more than half at served sites. No-till farming, biotechnology, and precision agriculture made Argentina a top-five food exporter; soy production alone grew roughly fivefold between 1990 and 2010. Those numbers are the scripture.
Like any religion of age, Silicon Valley has its denominations. The Purists hold the orthodox line: the lever is code alone—everything else is noise. The Humanists argue the lever needs society as its fulcrum, or it lifts nothing. The Missionaries believe the lever is only worthwhile when it lifts everyone, although mostly fine with elevating some more than others. The Venture Capitalists believe the lever is only worth pulling if the return justifies the investment. The Narcissists believe the lever exists to elongate their own shadow. The Accelerationists believe the lever must be pulled without hesitation or respite. The Ethicists believe it must be pulled carefully, or not at all. The Determinists believe the lever pulls itself; our role is not to direct it, but to hold on.
On this, the denominations agree: the lever must be funded, but funding is not why you pull it. Elsewhere, these factions argue. They schism. They sometimes ally. People might belong to several sects. But the canon holds: technology is the Archimedean lever of human flourishing. The struggle over how to handle the lever has a way of slowing the pull—and, left long enough, of making us wonder whether we should be pulling at all. Opposition to a faction is not a case against the creed. Reject the Accelerationists, distrust the Capitalists—and still belong to the faith. The faith is big enough to hold the argument. The risk is not that we build too boldly. The risk is that we stop believing building matters—that we trade the possible for the permissible, creation for consensus. The instinct to build, to make, to reach past what exists toward what is possible is not a Silicon Valley faith. It is the oldest human one.
Silicon Valley did not create the urge to create. It inherited it and supercharged it. We are all, at root, homo techne. Tool-users, toolmakers, tool-evolved. The hand shaped the stone, and the stone shaped the hand. Our tools do not make us less human. That fear is as old as tools themselves. Socrates worried that writing would limit memory. And in some ways, it did. And we flourished and became something larger. As each technology wave expands, so can we. We do not lose ourselves. We transfigure.
No other animal has rewritten its own cognitive architecture through what it builds. The printing press did not just distribute information. It restructured how Europeans thought about authority, scripture, and the self. Luther’s 95 Theses spread from Wittenberg across German-speaking Europe within weeks. Within a century, Protestant northern Europe had ridden the press toward the Enlightenment; the Ottoman Empire, where religious authorities suppressed Arabic-script printing for over two centuries, found itself on the other side of a widening gap. Every era has its press, and every era has those who underestimate what it means to let it pass.
It’s easy to get caught up in product releases and cycles, and forget that every technology traces this spiritual arc. You are born into it, converted, or you recede. So it is written. The car, the plane, the personal computer, the mobile phone: each arrived as a disruption and became, within a generation, invisible infrastructure. Amen. Today, more than 4 billion people carry a networked computer in their pocket. The majority of them are in the developing world. They did not get a library or a bank branch first. They got a phone. The phone is the library and the bank.
Technology’s arc bends toward access. But it does not bend on its own. Behold the technologist’s creed: through building to scale, we extend what is possible. Possible for whom has always been the humanist’s question. It is now everyone’s. The more the machines build and scale, the more that matters.
Our creed does not ask for certainty. It never has. Indeed, the real Archimedean levers always involve risk and uncertainty. Instead, the creed asks for the courage to begin. To the builders: unite the grip or lose the lift. To everyone else: no lever in history has mattered more—and it only moves if you reach for it. Hold the lever, find the fulcrum, and rise.
Reid’s first Substack post is highly thought-provoking. Below are few of my reflections from a Chinese perspective selected from my post on China Silicon Valley series.(https://leonliao.substack.com/p/china-does-not-have-a-silicon-valley?r=731anr&utm_medium=ios)
First, from a higher-level perspective, what determines whether a country can keep building is not faith alone, but whether that faith has been embedded into its education system, financial system, industrial system, energy system, infrastructure base, and broader state capacity. Faith itself is not scarce. Almost every country says it believes in innovation. What is actually scarce is the ability to turn “the possible” into something repeatable, financeable, manufacturable, deployable, and scalable. Technological progress is rarely the triumph of entrepreneurial romanticism alone. More often, it is the result of a society that has institutionalized the impulse to create, scaled it, and lowered its cost.
Second, framing the startup as the central vehicle of modern progress is a distinctly American narrative. From the Chinese experience, a more accurate formulation might be that state capacity, infrastructure, industrial organization, and corporate competition together form the main engine of modern progress. Many of the key conditions that determine whether technology can truly diffuse are not things a single company can solve by itself. A payment system depends on clearing infrastructure, smartphone penetration, communications networks, and regulatory coordination. EV adoption depends on charging networks, grid expansion, local subsidies, and supply-chain clustering. The same is true for high-speed rail, solar, drones, and industrial robotics. China’s experience suggests that technology matters, and companies matter, but companies do not perform miracles in a vacuum. More often, they stand on top of a system that has already been organized at scale.
Third, Silicon Valley’s real strength was never just that it believed in possibility. It was that, for a period of time, it was exceptionally good at turning high-risk imagination into a high-return self-reinforcing loop. But that loop is less secure today than it once was. At its peak, Silicon Valley benefited simultaneously from the deepest pools of global capital, the world’s strongest universities and research base, the strongest inflow of global talent, the security umbrella of the American state, and an offshore manufacturing system that was cheap and highly responsive. In other words, its faith was never purely spiritual. It was underwritten by an enormous cushion of globalization gains and American hegemonic advantages. “Faith in the possible” sounds elevated, but without inexpensive engineers, complete supply chains, reliable electricity, ports, roads, land, industrial policy, and a vast domestic market, many possibilities would never be built, let alone scaled.
Fourth, the real question is not whether one believes in technology, but who gets to define what counts as progress. Reid implicitly treats technological diffusion itself as something close to progress. But from a Chinese perspective, and more broadly from the perspective of much of the Global South, progress is not only better software, faster AI models, or more highly valued companies. Real progress also includes cheaper electricity, more reliable transport, lower-cost manufacturing, broader payment access, more stable housing supply, and greater capacity for large-scale engineering deployment. Silicon Valley tends to understand “the possible” as frontier invention. China is more inclined to understand “the possible” as mass deployment. The former is closer to inventing the world. The latter is closer to restructuring reality. In the end, whoever helps define the technological direction of the twenty-first century may be the one most capable of combining both.
Technology is morally neutral.
For all the positives we have witnessed throughout the software, internet, and smartphone age, we have equally seen profound negatives, some tragically unintentional, and others perfectly intended.
Ultimately, the defining question of our era is not about the capabilities of the tool, but the character of the hands that wield it.
For no matter how brilliantly we fashion the tools of our age, we must never lose sight of the fundamental order of reality: we remain the clay, not the Potter.