Each year, one week at the end of August, some 70,000 people raise a city on the Black Rock Desert. They burn a towering wooden effigy of a man. The next night they burn a temple. Then they go home.

Among them are the people who built the search engines, the social networks, and the artificial intelligence now reorganizing human life.

Two men have studied this gathering with unusual seriousness. They could hardly be more different.

The first is Fred Turner, a Stanford University professor of communication and one of the leading historians of Silicon Valley's culture. Turner is a secular academic. He wrote From Counterculture to Cyberculture, and in 2009 he published a peer-reviewed study titled "Burning Man at Google" in the journal New Media & Society.

The second is Carl Teichrib, a Canadian Christian researcher and author of Game of Gods: The Temple of Man in the Age of Re-Enchantment. Teichrib has attended Burning Man repeatedly since 2017 to study it. He camps there with a small evangelical team under the banner Camp of the Unknown God, a name taken from Paul's address to the Athenians in Acts 17.

One man works from sociology. The other works from Scripture. They share no worldview, no vocabulary, and no audience. Yet they arrive at remarkably similar places.

Turner explains how Burning Man functions as a religion for the technology industry. Teichrib explains what that religion actually believes.

Put them together and you get a picture that should concern anyone trying to understand where Big Tech, and the AI revolution it is driving, is taking the rest of us.

The Desert Annex

Burning Man began in 1986, when a small group led by Larry Harvey burned an eight-foot wooden figure on San Francisco's Baker Beach. Fewer than two dozen people watched. By the turn of the millennium, the crowd had passed 25,000, and since 2015 paid attendance has been capped at 70,000. More than 100 regional "Burns" now operate around the world.

The technology industry was there almost from the start.