Human as Information Organism and the Detour into Dataism: Focusing on Transcendence and Machina

The amount and variety of data generated by IoT devices and digital systems has led to a paradigm shift, where data is often considered a new form of wealth similar to religious beliefs. In particular, the concept of ‘Dataism’ is not a widely recognized or established term, but it can be used metaphorically to describe the profound impact of big data and the IoT on our society and the way data is transmitted. This paper aims to understand Dataism as a new religion from a sociocultural perspective and to understand humans as information organisms from an algorithmic perspective. To pursue this goal, the concept of “organisms are algorithms” and “the Data religion”, or ‘Dataism’ proposed by Yuval Harari in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015), will be utilized. First, this paper explores the evolution of Dataism, and then briefly reconstructs the conceptual framework necessary to understand ‘humans as information organisms’ and Dataism as social phenomena. Finally, through an analysis of the 2014 film Transcendence directed by Wally Pfister and the play Machina by Australian playwright Richard Jordan, released in the same year, this paper aims to make predictions about ‘Dataism’ and highlight the tendency to perceive ‘Dataism’ as a problematic threat to humanity