In the 1970s, two major advances happened and they led to a renewed desire for the simpler time of folklore: GMO insulin and the Concorde supersonic jet.
Though English activists hadn't invented the term "Frankenfood" or the modern anti-vaccine movement yet, they began campaigns against both faster travel and insulin that didn't come from pig sacrifices.(1) Supersonic travel would raise stratospheric water content by as 100 percent, they told media, and since this was a time when journalists still promoted Paul Ehrlich, Jeremy Rifkin, Ralph Nader, etc. in their wars on progress, the public were easily mobilized. As always, academia jumped at the chance to get in newspapers and an MIT confirmed that, indeed, their models claimed faster plane travel would wreck the ozone layer too.
On the biological war front, Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy led the usual states - Massachusetts, California and New York -against science, declaring GMO insulin a public health threat. And, he warned, any federally-funded scientist who disagreed was losing their grant. Rifkin and his organized protesters invaded the National Academy of Sciences, took over the stage during their recombinant DNA forum, and sang "We shall not be cloned."(2)
What enjoyed a resurgence during this technological advance? Ghosts, witches, and belief in magic. Time and again, technological advances have led to culture regressing into the past. (3)
We are witnessing the same thing today, due to the advent of Large Language Models, colloquially called "A.I." AI is, to literate people, just a fancy autocomplete function but if you think science is a corporate conspiracy you may also believe it is manipulating you. And a secular country like Sweden now believes in the paranormal no differently than a theocratic dictatorship like Arabia.
The groups suddenly in a panic about AI are the same demographic you traditionally see arguing against prisons and science: modern pagans against AI believe the individual determines their own truth. Morality is postmodernism and therefore autonomous and customizable. They are environmental activists, wellness promoters and native reconstructionists. Earth veneration is a different name for Druidic paganism and the unseen power of astrology.
Crystals, tarot, animism, polytheism and the search for ancestral guidance in DNA tests are symbols of the faith vacuum that religion once filled. The less in control people feel, the more they embrace things like witchcraft because, some argue, that is a basic human need. Like "the force" in the "Star Wars" before he realized he had just created the religion he opposed (4)
Nothing makes some people feel less in control than AI. To me, it is no big deal, it is a handy tool to find a research source, but I understand prompts. If you don't, things can go just as badly using AI as it will for an urban activist who hits the woods and thinks they can safely forage for food:
Credit, though I don't know what AI they used to create it so I can't credit them. AI could probably tell me with the right prompts.
India is by reputation a very technological country but they lead the world in beliefs about spiritual energy and astrology. Yet those levels have surged during the last few years.
This is the pattern seen during the Industrial Revolution(5), when stories about ghosts and vampires and all kinds of monsters became the craze. The ascent of the Internet brought with it a surge in TV shows about the paranormal.
They all sought the same goal as people at least subconsciously have about AI today - a way to make the supernatural into something reductionist.
NOTES:
(1) And fast travel also. When they invented the railroad steam engine and saw it could go 25 miles per hour, they tested it using dogs because humans had never gone that fast. That actually made sense. Demanding that pigs and cows be slaughtered so their pancreas could be harvested instead of growing insulin a lab did not.
(2) GMOs are not clones, nor was the Frankenstein monster a GMO, but activists never let science get in the way of a good fundraising campaign.
(2) Unsurprisingly, this was in San Francisco. When he claimed Dionysus found him a house to rent, I was expecting satire. Nope. This is why lawyers wanting people who will believe weedkillers supernaturally cause cancer file lawsuits there.
(4) And adopted a new religion in his prequels - biology. In those films, instead of the force being a hidden natural energy that could be harnessed by anyone, it was a DNA test and if you had the genetic gift you were torn from your family - because the the Midi-chlorian Church was now your family - where you could be properly trained to harness the little parasites in your cells.
(5) But we also got baseball - a pastoral game with no clock played in grass on parks in cities by men who felt life was moving 'at railroad pace.'
