Faith & the Machine Series – Part 4

There was a time when commandments were carved in stone. Clear. Visible. Immutable.

You knew where morality stood, even if you chose to ignore it.

Today, commandments arrive quietly. Not from mountaintops, but from interfaces. No thunder. No prophets. Just a soft tap, a gentle scroll, a perfectly placed button that feels harmless, because it does not look like a rule.

But rules don’t need to shout anymore. They only need to be designed well. We aren’t forced into obedience. We slide into it.

Code has replaced scripture more efficiently than divine authority ever could. A priest once interpreted the will of gods. Now the interface interprets the will of the system. It decides what you see first. What you see next. What you forget. Where your finger goes. How long your attention stays. Design doesn’t argue. It nudges. And nudging, repeated long enough, turns into habit.

Habit becomes belief. Belief becomes obedience. And obedience becomes invisible.

We think we’re free because we can choose. But we hardly realize that our choices are curated. A menu of illusions, arranged within invisible boundaries.

“Accept cookies.”

“Allow notifications.”

“Tap to continue.”

You don’t question these instructions. You simply comply because compliance is frictionless. The path of least resistance always feels like free will. In truth, the system doesn’t demand obedience. It designs it.

Morality shifts too, not through debate, but through updates. We no longer ask whether something is right or wrong. We simply look at what the platform permits. The algorithm decides who should be heard. The interface decides how much. The guidelines decide what is unacceptable.

We have outsourced conscience to code. But code cannot feel shame, compassion, remorse, or wisdom. It can only calculate. And what can be calculated can never replace what must be felt.

The punishments have changed as well.

No eternal fire. No divine wrath. Just the silent disappearance of your voice. The shadowban. The downrank. The post that dies quietly. The comment that never appears.

A modern discipline: clean, efficient and emotionless.

The system doesn’t need to warn you. It simply turns the lights off. And all of this, strangely, is global. Code is written for scale, not for culture. Developers don’t build for a nation, a region, a religion, or a social temperament. They build for everybody and for nobody at the same time.

An app coded in San Francisco enters a home in Delhi without knowing what the family believes, what the society fears, or what the country must protect.

The software is neutral. Its consequences are not.

Only when the app becomes viral do governments wake up. China bans what threatens its social fabric. The United States bans what threatens its influence. Australia bans social media for children under sixteen. A good idea in theory, a porous barrier in practice. Any child clever enough to download an app is clever enough to fake an age.

Regulation becomes a suggestion. Vulnerability remains untouched.

And beneath all this lies the greatest crisis of the digital age: narratives. Entire national moods are now shaped by meme accounts. Public opinion by deepfake voices. Political identity by algorithm-curated outrage. A country’s emotional temperature can rise or collapse because of posts made by anonymous profiles with no allegiance to truth, stability, or sanity.

This is not information. This is psychological warfare carried out through humour, distraction, exaggeration and noise.

Confusion has become a tool. Destabilization a product. Misinformation a currency. The world no longer needs armies to influence nations. It only needs engagement.

Governments try to keep up. But technology moves like wildfire, and policymaking moves like a committee meeting: slow, cautious, five years too late.

How do you maintain social balance when teenagers with VPNs have more informational freedom than elected leaders with constitutions?

How do you protect a society when threats are invisible, instant, and infinitely replicable?

How do you impose boundaries when the map has no borders anymore?

The digital world does not respect geography. But human beings still live inside it.

We need solutions, not hopeful speeches. We need stricter laws that understand technology instead of merely reacting to it. We need smarter governance, led by people who grasp digital power, not fear it. We need screening systems that evaluate apps before they cause damage the way airports screen luggage before boarding. We need global accountability for tech giants who operate across countries but answer to none.

And we need to stop giving innovation a free pass simply because it arrives wrapped in excitement. If their influence is global, their responsibility must be global too.

But beneath all the regulation, all the fear and all the governance, something quieter remains: Obedience has become normal. We follow not because we’re forced, but because it’s convenient. The danger isn’t that machines tell us what to do. The danger is that we stop noticing when they do. Because once code becomes commandment, obedience doesn’t feel like obedience anymore.

It feels like living.