Spirituality online

What it is

The delivery of spiritual and metaphysical material through social platforms, short video, podcasts, subscription communities and direct-sale digital products — and the changes that delivery makes to the material itself.

Astrology, tarot, manifestation, witchcraft, energy work and non-dual teaching all have enormous online audiences. WitchTok's hashtags run to tens of billions of views. Astrology apps have tens of millions of users. This is now, by volume, how most people in the West encounter any of this.

Where it came from

Every previous communications technology reshaped religion — printing and the Reformation, radio and American evangelicalism, television and the megachurch. This is the current instance, and the pattern of the medium selecting the message is not new.

What is new is the algorithmic intermediary. Print gave you what a publisher chose. Television gave you what a network chose. A feed gives you what a ranking system predicts will hold your attention, personalised, with no editor and no accountable selector.

How it is used

Free content acquires an audience; paid tiers monetise it — readings, courses, memberships, one-to-one sessions, certifications.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the access benefits are real and should be stated first. Traditions that were geographically confined are now available anywhere. Isolated people find communities — this matters particularly for practitioners in small towns, in religiously restrictive families, and for disabled people for whom a physical group is inaccessible. Scholarship that was locked in university libraries is readable. Costs have collapsed. A person in Strathalbyn can study with a teacher in Kyoto. None of that was true in 1995.

We can say the format selects against the content. A sixty-second video cannot carry qualification, historical context, or "we do not know". It can carry a confident claim, a striking image and a call to action. The traditions on this site are mostly slow, mostly ambiguous, and mostly resistant to compression — and the compression is not optional if you want to be seen.

We can say the incentives select against the practitioner too. Engagement rewards certainty over accuracy, urgency over patience, novelty over depth, and personal revelation over transmitted tradition. A teacher who says "this is contested and I am not sure" loses to one who does not. This operates on sincere people without their consent; it is not a claim about anyone's character.

We can say the traditional safeguards have been removed. Lineage, initiation, apprenticeship, community accountability and slow transmission were, among other things, quality control and protection. An online teacher typically has no lineage anyone can check, no body they answer to, and no one who can remove them. The questions worth asking about any teacher apply with more force here, not less, and are harder to answer.

We can say the personalisation problem is specific and serious. A feed learns what you respond to and gives you more of it, which means a person drifting toward a belief is shown a world in which that belief is universal. The apparent consensus is manufactured by the ranking system. This is the mechanism behind conspirituality, and it is the reason a practice that begins with tarot can end somewhere very different without any deliberate step.

We can say the survivorship problem is worth naming plainly. The manifestation testimonials you see are from the people it appeared to work for. The people it did not work for do not post, and the algorithm would not show them if they did. Any impression of a success rate formed from a feed is a selection artefact.

And we can say there is a genuine dispute about accessibility versus dilution. Practitioners within these traditions disagree sharply about whether making everything available to everyone immediately is democratisation or destruction — whether a practice stripped of its context, its preparation and its obligations is still that practice. Both positions are held sincerely by people inside the traditions, and this site does not adjudicate it.

We cannot say the internet has been bad for spiritual life; the access is real and the gatekeeping it replaced was not always benign. What we can say is that the gatekeeper is now a ranking system optimising for attention, that it has no interest in whether anything is true, and that knowing this is the single most useful defence a reader has.

Further reading

• Heidi Campbell's work on digital religion.
• Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites (2020).
• Renee DiResta on algorithmic amplification, for the mechanism rather than the subject.