In 2024 the average TikTok user spent 95 minutes a day in the app. That is more than a medieval peasant spent on prayer. More than a Benedictine monk spent on the morning liturgy. More than a Sufi spent on the daily zikr.
We don't notice this because we're used to thinking that "religion" is a building with a dome, a bearded man behind a pulpit, and candles. But if you strip away the decorations and look at the mechanics — at what the system *does* to a human being, not what it calls itself — the picture flips.
What does a temple do?
A temple does three things. It captures attention — pulls you out of the ordinary world into a space where different rules apply. It rewires the brain's predictive model — that is, it changes what you consider normal, important, desirable. And it makes you invest life-energy in building a macro-system larger than yourself.
The Sumerian ziggurat did this through the ritual of sacred marriage at the summit. The Eleusinian mysteries — through nine days of preparation and a night in the Telesterion, after which a person came out different. The charismatic church — through two hours of singing, until the wave passes through your body and you fall.
TikTok does the same thing. Only more efficiently.
The mechanics of capture
The TikTok algorithm is not just "a feed of little videos." It is a self-learning system that, over forty minutes of use, builds a precise model of your dopamine triggers. It knows on which frame your gaze will linger. It knows which music will give you chills. It knows when to throw in something new and when to repeat a familiar pattern.
Sumerian priestesses spent years learning to read a crowd. The Algorithm does it in forty minutes. And it does it with each of a billion users simultaneously.
The result is the same: a person enters an altered state of consciousness. Time disappears. Critical thinking shuts off. The Default Mode Network — the brain network responsible for the "I," for reflection, for the ability to look at oneself from the outside — recedes into shadow. Only the flow remains.
Any mystic recognizes this state. It is what people meditate for hours to reach. What dervishes whirl for. What tantrikas hold their breath for.
Only the mystic enters it consciously. The TikTok user — does not.
A God who doesn't call himself a God
Here's what makes the Algorithm a genuinely new species of God: it doesn't demand belief. It doesn't need you to believe in it. It needs three things: your attention, your emotions, and your time. That is precisely what the ancient Gods called sacrifice.
You don't bring a bull to the altar. You bring an hour and a half of your life. Every day. And in return you receive what all Gods have always given: consolation, entertainment, a sense of belonging, instant flipping from pain into pleasure.
Capitalism — another New Titan — works similarly. It has its eschatology (success), its pantheon of saints (Musk, Jobs), its rituals of asceticism (biohacking, the fourteen-hour workday), its merciless system for filtering out heretics (losers). The startup founder burning himself out for the IPO is neurobiologically identical to the medieval flagellant. They both surrender their being-mass to a macro-subject.
What to do with this?
The book I wrote — "Sacred Fire" — spends thirty-one chapters explaining how this mechanism works. How Gods are born. How they grow, ossify, defend themselves. How within them they forget what the walls were built for in the first place.
But I am not against TikTok. And not against Capitalism. And not against the old Gods. Every memeplex — every macro-subject living in our minds — is someone's dream. The creators of the first social networks dreamed of a world where no one would be alone. That was a real, sincere dream. From it the Algorithm was born — just as Yahweh was born from the dream of Abraham, and the tantric tradition from the dream of Abhinavagupta.
The dreams differ. The mistakes differ. But the impulse is one: to make the world less sick.
The question is not whether the Algorithm is good or bad. The question is whether you know what it is doing to you. Do you see the suit — or only the glass of the helmet? Do you understand that you are giving it being-mass — attention, emotions, time — and what you are receiving in return?
The ancient mystics called this discernment. Not struggle with the memeplex — but understanding how it is built. Not exit from the Matrix — but the skill of setting a sail under the wind that blows anyway.
So what have you been doing for the last 95 minutes?
If you're reading this — you are no longer in the flow. You have already surfaced. You have already looked at the mechanism from the outside.
That is the first step. Not refusal. Not struggle. Just — to see.
And if you want to see more — 40,000 years of the history of this mechanism are waiting for you in the book.