The Mimetic Machine: What Girard Understood About Social Media That Tech Bros Missed

René Girard has become a Silicon Valley saint. Peter Thiel quotes him in investor meetings. Tech bloggers invoke mimetic theory to explain viral content. Critics fire back with their own Girardian readings to condemn the whole attention economy. Everyone's talking about the same French theorist, and almost everyone is missing the point.

The irony is sharp enough to cut. Girard spent his career tracing how desire spreads through imitation, how rivalry escalates to violence, how communities restore peace by scapegoating victims. He ended up a Catholic convert, convinced that only Christ's revelation could break the cycle. The tech world took his ideas, stripped out the theology, and turned mimetic theory into a framework for "winning."

I came to Girard from a different direction entirely. Not as an intellectual pursuit, not as a business strategy. I was trying to make sense of a depth in the Christian tradition that I'd never encountered in the churches I grew up in. The church fathers, the Orthodox understanding of Scripture, the symbolic reading of reality. All of it pointed toward something richer than what I'd been given. Girard fit into that search.

Two Secular Readings of the Same Theory

Here's what's happening in the current discourse: both the tech bros and their critics are imposing their own interpretive layers on Girard, and both layers are fundamentally secular.

Thiel reads Girard through Carl Schmitt and treats mimetic theory as strategic advantage. Understand what people want, understand that they want it because others want it, and you can position yourself to capture that desire. It's business strategy dressed up in anthropological language. Zero to One gave us the sanitized version.

The critics, like those at UnHerd, push back. But their reading goes through Sartre and ends up in a different kind of materialism. They talk about inner emptiness and identity, about how social media exploits our lack of stable selfhood. Girard himself doesn't use that language. He talks about ontological sickness, which is a related but distinct concept. The critics are adding their own philosophical framework on top.

What neither side touches is what Girard himself kept coming back to: the theological dimension. The man returned to Catholicism because of his own theory. He became convinced that the revelation of the scapegoating mechanism required something beyond human insight. It required divinity. That's not incidental to his work. It's the culmination of it.

The Mechanistic Trap

Both camps treat mimetic theory like the theory of gravity. A mechanism. A force that operates on human behavior whether we acknowledge it or not. Understand the mechanism, and you can either exploit it or escape it.

I don't even accept the mechanistic understanding of the universe as a starting point. The cosmos as created by the uncreated God is relational and symbolic. Phenomenological. Yes, physics describes something real. But every output of every instrument gets mediated through human experience. At the bedrock level, our access to reality is always through the phenomenological reality of our existence.

This isn't mysticism or anti-science. It's just taking seriously the limits of human knowledge. If there's some substrate of reality that's truly inaccessible to human experience, how would we ever verify that? Everything we encounter comes through the filter of being human.

When you read Girard with that orientation, the theological dimension isn't an add-on. It's the core.

What Girard Actually Argued

Girard's central insight about Christ isn't just that Jesus was a victim of the scapegoating mechanism. It's that Christ's death and resurrection revealed the mechanism itself, making it visible for the first time in human history.

Before Christ, according to Girard, humanity couldn't identify with the victim. Everyone identified with the persecutors. The myths that emerged from founding violence always justified the violence, always affirmed the guilt of the scapegoat, always obscured what had actually happened. The community restored its peace through murder, then sanctified the murder through myth.

Christ reversed this. For the first time, the victim was explicitly innocent. For the first time, the violence was exposed rather than hidden. For the first time, humanity could see the scapegoating mechanism for what it was.

This is what Girard means when he says he "sees Satan fall like lightning." The whole system of sacred violence, the entire structure that allowed human communities to manage their mimetic crises through sacrifice, got unmasked. We can even talk about these things now because Christ made them visible.

That theological claim is inseparable from the anthropological observations. Strip it out, and you're left with a description of a disease with no cure.

The Question Nobody's Asking

The tech bros ask: How do I win the mimetic game?

The critics ask: Can we escape mimesis? Are we just empty vessels filled by whatever desires we're exposed to?

Neither question gets at what Girard was pointing toward. The real question is: What kind of models are we imitating, and do they lead to rivalry and scapegoating, or to something else?

Any human model eventually leads to rivalry. Pick any figure to imitate. A mentor, a competitor, an influencer. The nature of mimetic desire means that eventually you'll want what they have. And if you can't have it, or if having it diminishes their having it, you're locked in rivalry. That rivalry escalates. Eventually someone becomes the scapegoat who relieves the tension.

The only model that breaks the cycle is one who can't become a rival. Christ as model works precisely because imitating Christ doesn't put you in competition with Christ. There's no zero-sum game with the divine. You can draw closer to that model infinitely without threatening anyone else's pursuit of the same.

This isn't a clever theological loophole. It's the whole point.

What Gets Lost When You Secularize Girard

When someone asks what's lost practically when you strip the theology from mimetic theory and use it as a self-help framework for "winning," the answer is straightforward: everything worthwhile.

Do you really need another way to win? People have understood how to exploit desires long before Girard came along and described it systematically. The ancient world knew how to manipulate rivalry. Advertisers figured it out without reading French literary criticism. Making the mechanism explicit doesn't change the game. It just makes the players more articulate about what they're doing.

What Girard offered wasn't a better way to win. He offered a path toward something beyond winning. Redemption. Salvation. Escape from the endless cycle of desire, rivalry, violence, and scapegoating.

When you hollow that out, you're left with a perversion. The exact opposite of what Girard concluded his life's work affirming.

And here's the thing: I can't even condemn the people doing this. As soon as I start condemning them, I'm falling into the mimetic trap myself. Positioning myself as superior. Making them the scapegoat for what's wrong with modern Girard discourse. The whole cycle repeats.

What I can say is something closer to compassion. I'm sorry this is as far as the theory has taken you. I hope you keep reading and make the final intuitive leap that Girard himself made.

Reorientation, Not Withdrawal

This is where I should tell you I've figured it out. That the theological reading of Girard has freed me from mimetic desire and I'm writing this from some position of achieved enlightenment.

That would be a lie.

I don't use Twitter or Instagram. Not because I've transcended anything, but because I recognize what those platforms are: mimetic desire factories optimized to trigger rivalry and outrage. The desire for validation hasn't disappeared. The hunger to be seen, approved, affirmed by strangers is still there. What's changed is where I point it.

I use LinkedIn because it serves a purpose for my work. When something I post gets no engagement, the old pull toward disappointment surfaces. The ego wants what it wants. But I'm trying to subordinate that desire to a model who doesn't compete for the same prize. Christ doesn't need my LinkedIn posts to perform. Orienting toward that model doesn't kill the hunger. It just gives the hunger a direction that won't end in rivalry.

This isn't withdrawal from the machine. It's reorientation within it. The difference matters. Withdrawal suggests escape, as if stepping back far enough makes you immune. Reorientation admits you're still inside the system, still subject to its pulls, but feeding a different appetite. Starving the hunger for competitive validation while nourishing something else.

The same reorientation happened with politics. I don't vote anymore. I don't follow current events much. Used to be a guy with a ready opinion on any topic you'd raise. Now when people bring up the latest controversy, I genuinely don't know what they're talking about.

Once you see the scapegoating mechanism in voting, the ritual selection of a new sovereign while exiling the other, participating feels different. All the institutions we've built since Christ revealed the scapegoating mechanism, the judicial system, the electoral process, they're attempts to manage mimetic crises without literal blood sacrifice. They've worked, sort of, for a while. What we're experiencing now feels like their breakdown. The electoral scapegoating doesn't restore peace anymore. Everyone's still at each other's throats the day after.

My response has been to reorient. To focus on controlling my own behavior and trying to act in a more Christlike way. To love the people around me, even my enemies. That's my participation now, and it's not withdrawal into irrelevance. It's pointing the same human need for belonging and purpose toward a model that won't turn me into a rival or a scapegoater.

Whether I'm doing this well is another question. The ego doesn't die quietly. The theological framework doesn't hand you victory. It hands you a direction and a reason to keep walking that direction when you fail. Which is often.

The Only Exit

Social media is a mimetic machine. That much everyone agrees on. The platforms are optimized to trigger desires by showing us what others desire, to amplify rivalry through engagement metrics, to channel collective outrage toward scapegoats of the moment.

The tech bros see this and ask how to profit from it. The critics see this and ask how to protect ourselves from it. Neither question goes deep enough.

Here's the paradox nobody wants to face: we cannot stop imitating. The desire to escape mimesis is itself a desire we've borrowed from someone else. There is no neutral ground. There is no position outside the system from which to observe without participating. The machine is relentless precisely because imitation is what humans do. It's how we learn, how we love, how we become anything at all.

The only question is who we're going to imitate. Every other model eventually becomes a rival. Your mentor wants what you want. Your hero competes for the same recognition. Your influencer guards the status you're chasing. The mimetic cycle grinds forward: desire, rivalry, escalation, scapegoat, temporary peace, repeat.

Christ as model breaks the logic. Not because imitating Christ is easy or because it kills your ego on contact. It breaks the logic because Christ won't fight you for the prize. There's no zero-sum competition with the divine. You can draw infinitely closer without threatening anyone else's pursuit of the same thing.

This isn't a choice for the religious. It's the only logical move for the exhausted. If you've played the mimetic game long enough to feel its futility, if you've won enough to know winning doesn't satisfy, if you've watched the cycle spin and spin and produce nothing but new rivalries and new scapegoats, then the question isn't whether you believe in the theological claims. The question is whether you have anywhere else to go.

The secular readings of Girard stop short. They describe the disease but refuse the cure. The theological reading doesn't guarantee escape. It just names the only exit that exists.

Neutrality isn't an option. The machine keeps running whether you engage consciously or not. You're already imitating someone. You're already pointed somewhere. The only choice is whether to keep feeding the hunger that makes rivals of everyone, or to reorient toward the one model who offers something other than competition.

We cannot win the game. We can only choose a model who won't fight us for the prize.