The documented substrate is engagement engineering: variable-ratio reward schedules, the same reinforcement design as slot machines, built into pull-to-refresh and infinite scroll, described publicly by former insiders including Tristan Harris (ex-Google design ethicist, 'How Technology Hijacks People's Minds', 2016) and the documentary record around The Social Dilemma (2020). The machinery reliably produces micro-epiphanies, moments of felt connection and recognition, because those moments retain users.
Counterfeit gnosis has a look: dawn-lit quotes, frequency numerology, third-eye thumbnails, and the grammar of 'they don't want you to know'. The aesthetic borrows the authority of the mystery traditions while requiring none of their disciplines, an initiation that costs only attention and pays out only more content.
In classical Gnosticism the archons keep the soul asleep with counterfeits of the divine; the digital-age reading simply updates the personnel: the feed is the demiurge's latest costume, offering the sensation of escape as the mechanism of capture. The test the traditions always proposed, does this knowledge free you from compulsion or feed it, still works.
If the glow of awakening can be manufactured on schedule, how would you detect the real thing?