Scary, I see myself in your words. I am as old as your are and have been thinking about these very things. There is a connection between today's technology and spirituality, Silicon Valley is made from Hippies after all. My parents come from that generation, they have fought for counterculture. Still, I grew up disillusioned, with the conviction that the world has its way and that won't change no matter how idealistic you are. When I finished high school I decided to pursue a very scientific degree. Most of my fellow students ridicule anyone who thinks there is more to reality than what reductionist science tells us. But I think the Internet and modern technology will allow us to unite science with spirituality. It's just missing a valve, a path between the two and then both will be so much more than they are now. I want to dedicate my time to working on this path. Since I saw things this way I have felt the purpose I was longing for before.
I'm right there with you - I majored in Physics, haha. I've always been a scientific naturalist but my view is changing. I think we are starting to see the human race as a source of incredible potential. Information technology is a spiritual development because it allows us to represent far more complex ideas and languages. If you define human life primarily by our ideas (which I think is the best definition. I care far more about ideas and information than anything physical) then the link is obvious. Terrence McKenna has (as always) a unique and well-worded way of describing it.Orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience, towards the psychedelic phenomenon, as a source of information. A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks. Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society, where, in hardware, the unconscious is actually being created. It's as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how "if God did not exist, Man would invent him", and say "if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it" — in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.