We were joking about Joe Rogan earlier, but he's a high profile example of this stuff at work. There's a dedicated subreddit specifically for his podcast with over 500,000 subscribers. And it's a little hub for all their interests. They post about cannabis legalisation, politics etc. It's its own little ecosystem, but it all revolves around Joe Rogan and his podcast.
www.reddit.com
Could this be a sort of development of theism? Rather than God dying, God merely disintegrates into a cloud of sparks, that each nucleate and connect in their own divine way? Attracting ever more specific followings and fanbases? A tier of gods that reside much closer to the mundane, rather than a single, mile-high light.
The function that religions serve is met in both ways: either having a transcendent, higher/higher-dimensional god that serves as a center, the trunk of the tree; or a vast cloud of monad-like "crumbs" of the divine, dispersed and differentiated.
The latter may arise from the former in the following way: By "dividing" the divine into ever finer islands, the perspective of the divine is also fragmented.
The divine now sees 50% as clearly, as if a second face formed on the head. And now there are two signals to reconcile, rather than merely dealing with one and not even engage in such reconciliatory practice. But this also allows for twice as much range, seeing as two engines - two subjectivities? - are active now rather than just one. Two farms in an increasingly federalized corporation. What about
7,818,600 farms? A psychic, trans-conscious federation? A
physical one?
But we hold our conception of our self lower than the conception of God, whether or not we think we believe in such infinities, no? How could we we playing the same function? The primary advantage the many-minded has over the single-minded, is the dialectical combustion that ensues between its heads. The heads themselves, in the former, may as well be less advanced than in the latter.
So there is a certain conservation of divinity/energy/order along some hypothetical transition from single-large to many-small. The gross totals are the same, but the many-small builds up to something beyond the sum of its parts, while the single-large is the only part of its sum.
Arguably, this kind of trend may be detectible across cultures, in a sort of meta-narrative, but perhaps it can more cleanly observed, albeit at a lower order,
within a given culture. How might the protestant reformation line up with something like this? What other movements, within what other cultures?
The kind of celebrity/spectacle-incarnate culture might have its own rendition of the play. If God is an opiate, and Dod is dead, and we're in the society of the Spectacle, what might that all say about the permutability of theos? The intensity is being divided, but the extensiveness growing. Instead of an orthodoxy, there is an ecosystem of doxa, perhaps with some kind of established hierarchies, perhaps not.
