TikTok as Digital Balmyard: Revival Zion Spiritual Work in AI-Mediated Space

Ruha Benjamin contends that “we are living in the imagination of AI evangelists” who promise “ to guide us into the Future™” while “positioning themselves as Guardians of the Galaxy, even as they engineer the crises against which we must guard” (2024).  As these “AI evangelists” advance an eschatological and redemptive vision for their technology—while obscuring its dystopian propensities— Jamaican Revival Zion practitioners are troubling the exclusionary logics of “algorithms,” “artificial intelligence,” and even the very constitution of “science” and “technology.” Revivalists, and practitioners of other Africana religions, have long grappled with dystopian worlds not made for them, even as they are used as fungible resources from which to create these imperialist futures.  The paper offers Revivalists’ use of TikTok as a digital balmyard, mediated by copresences and seemingly divinatory algorithms, as a case study in the contentious world-building potentialities and “technologies of spiritual refusal” housed within Africana religions (Stewart 2022).