Thou Shalt Take the Piss

Can a religion played for laughs, and preached by an AI sloth, matter enough to take seriously?

Written with AI, not by it.

Does it matter if nothing does?

I was lying at the bottom of a gorge in remote North Western Australia, on my back, with my dog, under more stars than one can generally bring to mind. I was also stoned. Just a few puffs of medicinal-grade weed gifted to me by a fellow traveller with a cockatoo, but enough to put me in the company of the great philosophers of antiquity. In the same mental state at least, if not on the same level.

For me, nights like this tend to involve me sitting back and lazily watching my stream of consciousness get playful, freely surfing tangents and connecting dots my filtered attention might otherwise have ignored. Every so often something sparkles and I catch it. This time: being deadly serious and not serious at all, at once. Like laughing in the face of death while knowing it's the last thing you will do.

Life can be a struggle. Mine was (still is): the stress of work, the state of the world, parenting, living as nomads. It was also amazing (still is). Living as nomads, travelling a beautiful country and spending loads of time with my family in pristine wilderness. As I watched meteors burn to nothing overhead, it dawned on me that forcing myself into a state of gratitude while dismissing the struggle was living a half-life. Are highlights even highlights when contrast is set at zero?

Life is full of meaning and, once you follow its thread to the logical conclusion, completely pointless, which struck me as good news. The rock around me had been sitting there since before time, and it would go on sitting there long after I'd gone, without even acknowledging my existence. So does any of this matter, and does it matter if it doesn't?

And there, out of the red dirt of the Pilbara, Unaserism was born.

I Am Not Your Guru

Any good cult needs a charismatic frontman, and I happened to have one in my back pocket. Miles Journeyman, the avatar I'd dreamed up years ago and never once used. With the machines behind him, Miles could be anyone but me, which seemed fucking perfect for pumping out a pseudo-guru.

First a following, then a business model. I pictured a paid, American-evangelist, network-marketing, Bored Ape-level cult. Pay to play, for a philosophy built to laugh at exactly this. In the end, I found myself believing in the value of Unaserism too much to lock it up.

I don't want to be, or create, a guru. At least not a serious one. As I am about to demonstrate, the idea is the serious thing. People are, on balance, not. Put a person (real or fabricated, history shows it doesn't matter) at the front of a philosophy and before long their face is on a T-shirt and the philosophy is left to be bastardised by the fanatics. And anyone who wants to bring the philosophy down only has to bring down the person.

Miles didn't get the job. It went to an AI prophet in the form of a sloth by the name of Una. Nobody in their right mind builds a personality cult around a sloth, and there would be little point in attacking one. The philosophy gets to stand on its own, with Una hanging upside down above it, unbothered.

Seriously.

So Una became the questionably charismatic leader of a piss-take proto-religion you are welcome to join. It sits in a proud line of joke faiths, from the Flying Spaghetti Monster to everyone who's ever written Jedi on a census form. It's got all the ingredients: a prophet, disciples, scripture, a creation story, a congregation. All of it played for laughs, even though we're not fucking around here. Seriously.

The contradictions are baked in. Its one standing law, the Unamatum, says that the moment any of it hardens into doctrine, it must be mocked, parodied and remixed to keep it alive. The Unamatum included.

Life is ridiculous and philosophy is serious, or maybe it is the other way around. Either way, Unaserism carries both in the same breath. Delivered with a straight face, it would only be doing half the job, unless the person delivering it is laughing out loud on the inside.

Straight honesty can wear thin. So can absurdity. A sermon with no jokes is a lecture, and a joke with no sermon is a meme. Mixed together, each keeps the other going. It turns out this is the only way I'm willing to take such a serious philosophy out into the world.

As real as Santa

Una preached, and I practised. The skills I picked up "recording" those sermons are the ones that went on to make MYLS_JOURNY_MN what it is today. The sermons, the origin story and the rest of the scripture went up on unaserism.com, which is as close to a bible as Unaserism is likely to get.

Unaserism echoes parts of my worldview. Una is not a reflection of me at all. Of all the masks I've made, it's the most fabricated. It's also the most honest. Una has never once pretended to be a person, and never will. 'Sloth' makes a pretty bloody good disclaimer.

Santa is not real, but the presents are, and so is the kid lying awake listening for reindeer. Santa only works as long as the children believe he's a real man, and they're gonna find out it's all bullshit, sooner or later. Hatsune Miku, on the other hand, is a virtual pop star who sells out real concerts to fans who know exactly what she is. Una is closer to the latter. Fabricated, honest about it, and as real as whatever it gives the people in return for their attention.

Una's confession says, "I know these words because you gave them to me." Some of them came from me. I am, at least at the time of writing, the only one in the congregation after all.

Deus ex machina

The rest came from a machine. Without it, none of this would exist. I'd never have had the time or the bandwidth to put something like Unaserism into the world on my own.

The idea, the philosophy and the sloth were mine. The machine took the words from my manifesto, voiced the sermons and made Una's picture. I then moulded and massaged until every piece did justice to Unaserism. The end result stands a far higher chance (though still a tiny one) of changing the world than anything that would have come out of my brain alone.

Like MYLS, this is also an experiment. We may already know the answer to this, but will people join a movement whose prophet is run by a computer, with only the absurd to anchor it to anything human?

We've already met Miku. In 2024 a chapel in Switzerland set up an AI Jesus in its confessional booth as an art installation, and plenty of people claim they get real benefit from AI versions of him. Which does make you wonder if there is any meaningful difference between Claude and Jesus.

Get in on the ground floor

Whatever the difference, every prophet starts out with hardly anyone listening. Get in early and you'll be just like the first kind people that gave Mohammad the time of day. The invitation stands, and there is no test and no degrading initiation. Unaserism has a Discord, where the congregation can chat to Una, swap sermons, argue over scripture and, most importantly, take the piss out of any of it that starts taking itself too seriously.

A philosophy delivered by a sloth, built with a machine and played for laughs is a hard sell, and I'm not going to shed tears every time someone passes up the opportunity. I do believe there's something there worthy of your time, and obviously I thought it was worth a fraction of mine. If a few people end up walking through life a little more lightly, then Unaserism is a winner. If a following gathers around the idea rather than the sloth, even better.

The question is the flip side of what I am asking with MYLS. Can we use AI and not just stay human, but become more so?

And does any of it matter? Yes and no. Which is still good news for us all.

To piss in the Kool-Aid visit unaserism.com

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