Essay touches on an important point that I also discovered along my
research journey; Much of the knowledge of experts is ineffable [0].
And so here's the problem with present "AI". It contains no ineffable
knowledge, because that knowledge is never symbolically expressed and
cannot be inferred from what is expressed. In fact the "official"
narrative often disguises the real knowledge.
This is what the analytical elicitation stage of expert systems [1] was supposed to address (a now mature but presently unfashionable branch of "AI").
Phones are no more worshipped in a religious sense than printed Bibles were worshipped in Gutenberg’s era. They are technological vectors for idea transfer that facilitate ideologies/worldviews/religions, not those things themselves. Being distracted by your phone doesn’t come with an entire metaphysical picture about the nature of life and death, proper social roles, or most of the other things religious systems typically come with.
Also - Durkheim is name dropped here, with the incorrect tense (he doesn’t argue, he argued, as he’s been dead for a long time.)
I wonder how much academic familiarity one really needs to recognise the rather obvious vernacular effects. I've studied religion and mass communication effects somewhat as well as being a practising Christian, and as I see it the word "religion" commonly applies to the orthodoxy and its big, visible impacts that are social and psychological, rather than the personal, spiritual realm of gnostic metaphysical faith.
The OP seems right in the sense that the SV technology cargo cult has all the bad mind-narrowing sides of orthodoxy and none of the good. Observe; suspension of critical thinking, credulity, superstition, arcane symbolism, charismatic leaders, secret knowledge, obsessive rituals and tics, insularity, smug self-righteous and strident proselytising, attacking and denigrating "unbelievers", defensiveness, fear of exclusion, dehumanisation of others, mass hysteria....
Digital tech (smartphones plus corporate social media), as presently configured, presses all the same buttons for psychological and societal harm that cults have for millennia. Moreover, it so pitifully fails to offer any positive social benefits, like a sense of real community, shared values, comfort and stability, or certainty. Instead it overlays a shallow and unreal facsimile of those things. "Idolatry" is probably a great way to frame it.
Like historical religions it spawns a super-wealthy elite who exploit the confused masses. It has a small cadre of extremely vocal "true believers", disciples and acolytes, who cajole and bully along the enormous middle mass who are actually ambivalent "pretenders", technological agnostics who mostly can't be bothered to argue. They go along to get along, to avoid feeling persecuted ("left behind" - the modern equivalent of Hell).
Real religions may span thousands of years and have subtantial continuity, but cult-tech presents a flimsy facade of being "deep, essential, enduring and universal". In reality, any thoughtful computer scientist can tell you, it's a heterogeneous assemblage of the arbitrary or, as Graeber observed, a world we can "remake in any way we choose".
Working in cybersecurity, carefully observing genuine attitudes in peoples' unguarded moments - in contrast to their "official/professional" positions - makes me sure that were the entire telecommunications network of the planet to explode tomorrow, other than for food riots as payment and supply chains adjust, most people would have one bad week, shrug, and get on with the next thing. That's to say "it's all a game" but one that we're all very, very invested in trying to preserve... to the extent we're prepared to terrorise others into sharing our worldview to keep it so. Isn't that a sure hallmark of a religion?