Sara Reinis

The Texan Ideology | Fred Turner The Texan Ideology reflects a century-old fusion of the oil industry and millenarian Christianity.

“Today, as Silicon Valley leaders turn to the right, and particularly when they migrate to Texas, many are embracing the simultaneous celebration of entrepreneurship and Christian discipleship.”

Brilliant

The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since.

Taking a brief break from sporadically posting photos of my pitbull to shout this into the void:

I’ve spent the last seven months thinking about the Antichrist, and now those thoughts are published over at @wired.com.

www.wired.com/story/the-re...

‘It’s prime time for rapture talk’: TikTok gets its first ‘world is ending’ moment Evangelical Christians on #RaptureTok are warning others of doom on 23 or 24 September – and sharing how they’re prepping

Also chatted with The Guardian about the phenomenon! www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Are you Rapture ready? The attention economy goes apocalyptic

There’s a frenzy (from believers and nonbelievers) about the Rapture happening today. The content reveals a lot about our attention economy with its focus on self-help, revealing secret knowledge, and the difficulty parsing through earnest vs ironic engagement. open.substack.com/pub/holyscro...

How #ChristianTikTok Users Understand and Utilize the Platform’s Algorithm

Are you seeing this post? It might be because of divine intervention. A study by @sarareinis.bsky.social and @corrinalaughlin.bsky.social shows the many ways the #ChristianTikTok community conceptualizes and makes use of the TikTok algorithm:

Despite the veneer of placid smiles and pastoral bliss, tradwives operate from a place of rage—forming a distorted “mirror world” response to many issues traditionally taken up by feminists. This and more in my latest publication with Sarah Banet-Weiser: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.

this exists it is called thinking

Thanks for reading and sharing!

Despite the veneer of placid smiles and pastoral bliss, tradwives operate from a place of rage—forming a distorted “mirror world” response to many issues traditionally taken up by feminists. This and more in my latest publication with Sarah Banet-Weiser: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Some thoughts on the nature of “reality” in the gen AI age and a brief look into the booming genre of fake Christian worship music videos.

open.substack.com/pub/holyscro...

When I let ChatGPT manage my social life for a week, AI texted my friends and picked my outfits. It was strange but helpful. When I first turned to ChatGPT to run my social life, I felt weird. But AI made me a better texter and I became someone who actually planned hangouts.

Life is a continuous series of burdensome choices. True freedom comes when you give yourself over to the algorithm.

no, your post was my first glimpse! Worth a pilgrimage though

It’s perfect

Some thoughts on the nature of “reality” in the gen AI age and a brief look into the booming genre of fake Christian worship music videos.

open.substack.com/pub/holyscro...

Opinion | A.I. Is Fueling a ‘Poverty of Imagination.’ Here’s How We Can Fix It.

"AI is not that novel. It is not that potentially revolutionary. It is in a long continuum of technologies that promise to transform education, starting with the TV, the typewriter, VCRs, tablets [and] Chromebooks."

- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...

The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die Families and funeral directors are using AI obituary generators to more efficiently memorialize the dead. What happens when they get it wrong?

New: A few weeks ago, when my father-in-law died, the funeral home asked if we wanted to use AI to write his obituary. So I dug into it and found that it's the biggest new trend in "death care." Tens of thousands of AI obits have been made already. Often the families don't even know wapo.st/4okuxIg

How to Read an "AI" Press Release — Sonja Drimmer Every so often someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman will dribble out some unadorned text in Times New Roman font, announcing with stentorian certitude the advent of a new world that their latest...

Zuckerberg farted out some nonsense today, and since most media outlets refuse to report critically any time a tech CEO offers them some a pseudoserious press release, I've decided to do it for them.

sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/7/30/how-to-read-an-ai-press-release

Thank you for reading!

Brilliantly said

An OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Having a ChatGPT-Induced Mental Health Crisis Bedrock co-founder Geoff Lewis has posted increasingly troubling content on social media, drawing concern from friends in the industry.

These seemingly trite trends ease the way for AI to enter more and more deeply personal layers of our lives. This feel particularly concerning as more stories such as the below emerge futurism.com/openai-inves...

ChatGPT, What is My Curse? What does it mean to feel seen by a machine?

Users on TikTok are asking ChatGPT what their "curse" is. What does it mean for us to want surveillance? To crave it? To feel comforted by being intimately known by software?

open.substack.com/pub/holyscro...

My latest academic publication is out! After watching 3,000+ manifestation videos on TikTok, I dive into the ways platform features are shaping modern spirituality.

🔮🙏🏻 share this post to claim your blessing ✨🪽

Open access here: ijoc.org/index.php/ij...

Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared. ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis is the most detailed look yet into a rise in life-threatening complications for women experiencing pregnancy loss under Texas’ abortion ban.

Dozens more pregnant and postpartum women have died in Texas hospitals since the state banned abortion, our analysis shows.

As the maternal mortality rate dropped nationally, it rose in Texas by 33%.

AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality Generative AI spammers are brute forcing the internet, and it is working.

My latest: Generative AI is enabling a brute force attack against the algorithms that control reality. AI slop is taking over every algorithmically controlled social media platform and search platform, and the tech platforms are helping:

www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a...

the creator presidency can promise only two things for certain: engagement and pain

love this

Taking The Life Out Of "Day In The Life" | Defector 11:59 a.m. The tiny clock at the bottom of the screen counts down to the top of the hour, and like a bizarre bell chime from a digital clocktower, large pink text overtakes the Whitney Museum’s websit...

Maya Man's digital piece on "day in the life" vlogs at @whitney.org prompted me to think about the internet content that renders the ordinary uncanny. (also, the AI slop historic pov videos and the humans-imitating-AI-imitating-humans videos that made me spiral 😵‍💫)

defector.com/taking-the-l...

How #ChristianTikTok Users Understand and Utilize the Platform’s Algorithm

Here is a more general summary of the research findings for those interested: www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/...
(also happy to share PDF of original article as well!)

thanks so much!