The Black Io Chronicles.

About your Economics of Cyberware artical, I know I’m coming in a bit late, but what if the demand was spurred by a new religion?

madscientistalcyius

This is a very interesting question - thanks for sharing it! 

In this case, I’m assuming you’d envisioned something like a “Church of Post-Humanism” with a specific divine (?) edict to replace at least part of your original body with prosthetics, or where cybernetic implants are installed and used to induce a kind of transcendental experience or ecstatic state in followers. 

Supposing such a religion could exist isn’t that much of a stretch - if history has taught us anything, it’s that people will believe just about anything given the right circumstances. But in order to actually have an impact, it can’t just be some basement-dwelling cult or a gaggle of transhumanists holed up in an armed compound in Central America. It has to be large enough - and legitimate enough - to “move the needle” and encourage the concerted R&D and economies of scale needed for cheap and technically sophisticated cyberware. 

That in turn means a follower count in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, at the very least. More importantly, all of those followers need to be willing to undergo a modification process. Could that happen? It’s a tall order, and one that I’d argue requires three main things: 

The “cyber-faith” would have to be based on an existing religion. 

Historically, the most successful new religions are those that evolve as offshoots of existing faiths. Prominent modern examples includes Mormonism (around 15M adherents worldwide) and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (8M), both evolutions of modern mainstream Christianity, as well as Falun Gong/Falun Dafa (estimated 70M adherents), whose teachings draw heavily on the traditional Chinese practice of qigong. Even the two biggest Abrahamic religions - Christianity and Islam - began as permutations of established Judaic beliefs. 

The reason for this is pretty simple: by using an established, accepted faith as a basis for a new religion, you’re creating credibility by association and making it easier for existing adherents to make the “jump”.

If you’re already a Christian, for instance, you’re more likely to consider a new belief that still accepts Jesus as the savior and uses the Bible as the basis for its teachings than one that expects you to throw everything you’ve believed in - and have probably been raised on - straight out the nearest window. And if you’re not a follower, there’s still something reassuring about being able to identify familiar elements in a faith - it arguably feels safer, more legitimate. 

Genuinely new religions, on the other hand, have traditionally had a much more difficult time establishing themselves precisely because they lack that sense of familiarity and trustworthiness. That in turn reflects in their follower numbers. If it preaches an entirely novel gospel, our hypothetical Church of Post-Humanism is more likely to fall in with faiths like Raelism (90K members by the church’s own reckoning) or Scientology (40K members according to credible third-party estimates). 

So ideally, you’re looking at something along, well, these lines: 

(I’d say “minus the hat”, but let’s face it, that hat is clearly the best part of this whole picture.)

The modification process would need to be socially normalized. 

Most major religions require some changes in lifestyle: shifts in diet, in personal hygiene, in schedules and activities. How aggressively they’re observed varies from group to group; truly orthodox adherents tend to be in the minority, with the majority of the faithful rather more liberal when it comes to sticking to these tenets. 

What can help make these changes easier to swallow is the fact that many of them have a communal context - they’re not followed in isolation, but together with others. For a Muslim, the month-long fast that accompanies the month of Ramadan may be grueling, but that hardship is shared by friends, neighbors, and co-workers; the iftar, or breaking of fast after sundown, is often a highly social affair. For a Christian, Sunday church and the accompanying services becomes less of an imposition and more of a neighborhood get-together.

The more extreme the religious demand, the more critical that communal aspect becomes. Hence why out-and-out cults tend to isolate themselves, or why back-to-basics movements like the Amish are usually found living in dedicated enclaves. Maintaining rituals and beliefs is much easier among the like-minded, where it can become part of your lifestyle rather a liability to it. 

And make no mistake: in the grand scheme of things, lopping off a healthy body part or sticking a computer into your brain is just about as extreme as it gets. If you’re willing to go that far, you’re less the “occasionally attend Sunday service” kind of religious and more in line with the Filipino Catholics who voluntarily allow themselves to be crucified to commemorate Good Friday. 

To be “acceptable” to the masses, I’d argue that the act of implantation has be either minimally intrusive or heavily socialized, something along the lines of Communion or a Bar/Bat Mitzvah rather than a potentially traumatic medical procedure. What’s more, adherents need to be surrounded by other people with implants, need to grow up with the idea that to be modified is a normal part of life rather than an aberration. 

There needs to be time to establish the faith.

And here’s where things get even more problematic. Major religious movements don’t pop up out of the ground overnight. Even new faiths take 5 to 10 years to catch on, and truly build up their influence and culture only over several decades. 

This creates an interesting paradox, because by its nature, a “cyber-church” is a creature very much attuned to the march of progress. The longer such a church exists, the greater the risk that its practices will be disrupted by technological advancements. What happens when more sophisticated cyberware becomes available, or mechanical prosthetics give way to “enhanced” organic devices? Will the true believers still stick to their decade-old augmentations while the cyber-heretics jump ship to the latest and greatest?

It’s hard to predict what would happen in these circumstances because there’s never been a significant religion intrinsically linked to a particular piece of technology. However, it’s hard to shake the feeling that any belief system built around cybernetics would essentially come with built-in expiration date, and a fairly short one at that.  

So, how likely is all this?

To succinctly sum up a very long answer: not very. Transhumanist religious movements are probably an inevitability, but are more apt to be smaller, self-contained things until transhumanist views can gain large-scale global acceptance.

That said, if cheap cybernetics aren’t available, such groups might resort to crafting their own, especially if they’re less cyber-church and more cyber-cabal. The effect on the global prosthetics/augmentation market would be relatively limited, but there’s probably at least a few good stories to be mined from that conceit.