The greatest threat facing the church today

In my latest piece for Christianity Today, I propose the following thesis:

The greatest threat facing the church today is not atheism or secularism, scientism or legalism, racism or nationalism. The greatest threat facing the church today is digital technology.

That’s a controversial claim for many reasons, and I’m not dogmatic about it. It could be wrong. Moreover, it’s not self-evident that there is a meaningful hierarchy of threats facing the church. Perhaps there are a handful, all on the same level; or a variety that are incommensurable. Finally, a year or two back Alan Jacobs and Andy Crouch took me (ever so kindly) to task for a claim like this one, proposing instead that Mammon, not Digital, is the principal threat; and, further, that Digital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mammon.

With those caveats in place, what are the candidates for this particular category? What are the most significant threats facing the church today? By what measures should we judge them? And which church, or churches, or regions and cultures of the world, should we have in mind?

The range of answers would at least need to be large enough and systemic enough to threaten millions of believers at once, and in insidious and powerful ways difficult to suss out and extinguish. In the excerpt above I mention some “isms” that people are worried about. Let’s expand that list:

• Capitalism

• Progressivism

• Liberalism

• Secularism

• Atheism

• Scientism

• Legalism

• Racism

• Nationalism

• Imperialism

• War-mongering

• Industrialism

• Environmentalism

• Utilitarianism

• Individualism

• Nihilism

• Anti-natalism

• Technophilia

• Thanatophilia (i.e., the culture of death)

The important thing to see is that the nature of the threat doesn’t consist in discrete events or even types of events—famine, plague, poverty, war. These are evils and cause mass suffering, but they aren’t threats to the church, at least not in the way I’m using the term. These and other trials the church will always have her. They’re part of the way of the world, the world we long for God to redeem. They aren’t systems or structures or ideologies perpetrated by human beings (except when they are—but they are rarely reducible to ideology or policies, for the simple reason that they are insoluble, perennial problems of finite, mortal existence in a fallen world). More to the point, in the midst of great suffering the church sometimes rises to the occasion in service, courage, and sacrifice. In the face of danger, damage, and pain the church can fail, falter, or flourish. But she can’t be what God calls her to be if she isn’t prepared—if, that is, her foundations are so eroded that she forgets her own reason for being.

It is the question of what enacts such erosion that I am naming with the language of “threat.” A major threat to the church would snuff out its life whether it was the best of times or the worst of times; it would silence the gospel before anyone could hear it or live it out at all.

Another way to put it would be to ask, as I did recently, what idol or idols a given generation or place or people worships, and why, and what counterfeit blessings it receives in return, and how its worship and what it receives in turn shape and form it in the image of said idol(s).

I’m far from dogmatic on this question, as I said at the outset. If I had to pick five, I suppose I would choose technophilia, individualism, utilitarianism, capitalism, and progressivism. But then, how many of these are birthed from or contained within liberalism, understood as the ideology developed and advanced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Not to mention scientism, which arguably is concomitant with both liberalism and utilitarianism and, later, with the love of the future that finds concrete expression in progressivism and technophilia.

And is Mammon then the devilish father of them all? I leave the question open for others to chime in.

Update (seconds after pressing publish): I realize that I did not specify that I am here thinking exclusively about exogenous threats—if I were put on the spot about internal threats, I might say that church division is the single greatest threat to the church’s integrity and to the credibility of the gospel she proclaims to the world. Not in view here!

My latest: a plea for screen-free church, in CT

I’m in Christianity Today arguing for screen-free church; here are the opening paragraphs:

Some years ago, author Hal Runkel trademarked a phrase that made his name: screamfree parenting. It’s a memorable term because it captures viscerally what so many moms and dads want: parenting without the volume turned up to 11—whether of our kids’ voices or our own.

I’d like to propose a similar phrase: screen-free church. It’s a vision for an approach to Christian community and especially public worship that critically assesses and largely eliminates the role of digital devices and surfaces in church life. But the prescription depends on a diagnosis, so let me start there.

Consider the following thesis: The greatest threat facing the church today is not atheism or secularism, scientism or legalism, racism or nationalism. The greatest threat facing the church today is digital technology.

Rest the rest here.

Boys and video games in different stages of life

Update: I’m told this entire post is the subject of Mere Fidelity’s August 27 episode with Andy Crouch (called “Put Social Media in Its Place”). Hand over heart, I had not listened to it when I wrote this piece and still have not listened to it. The relevant question now is whether my friend had listened to it or whether, more intriguingly, he is the next Andy Crouch. My bet is on the latter.

*

A friend made a remark the other day that I want to expand on here.

He commented that there’s an important difference between teenage girls’ relationship to social media, on one hand, and teenage boys’ relationship to video games, on the other. In the former case, social media both creates and exacerbates all kinds of antisocial problems: friend drama, FOMO, anxiety, depression, loneliness, eating disorders, body image issues, lack of self-esteem, and the rest. In the latter case, there appears to be very little of this sort of thing; the effects are, on the whole, neutral or benign, especially if the boys in question have a relatively healthy home life and a diverse “activities” portfolio: sports, reading, board games, outdoor exploration, camping, rough-housing, sleepovers, church, school, youth group, and more.

At the same time, much of our public discourse about technology, gender, and social ills focuses—rightly—on video games. Why?

Two reasons. First, video games can absolutely become an addiction, a mono-activity that swallows up all the other options in the healthy array listed above (together, that is, with YouTube and pornography). Second, video games’ antisocial effects play out in disordered male lives not primarily in preteen and teenaged lives, but when boys grow up: in their twenties and thirties.

As a matter of fact, my friend pointed out, so far as he could tell, his sons’ gaming habits were embedded in and reinforced a broadly healthy network of social relationships. It didn’t pull them out of friendship and face-to-face activities but further into them.

I think he’s right. It’s not something I’d considered in depth before, though, so a few thoughts.

First, this resonates with my own experience. I played Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation from early elementary through the end of high school, and they were for the most part heavily social experiences. Even when the game was one-player, I either played while buddies watched (and vice versa—always providing running commentary) or consulted constantly with friends who were also playing the same game at the same time (The Ocarina of Time, say, or Metal Gear Solid). I even subscribed to multiple gaming magazines, which means that my gaming habits encouraged the regular reading of print media!

Second, this view resonates with my observations of my own boys. What they want to do above all is play with their friends, whether their friends are in the room (Smash Bros or Gang Beasts) or online (Fortnite or … Fortnite). When they see their friends, they talk about when they played together the day before and immediately plan times to play with one another later that day or weekend. When they have birthday parties, they all congregate in the same room and find ways to play (Deo volente) for hours on end. I recall a middle school birthday party when I did the same thing, with a house set up with multiple TVs and a round robin NFL Blitz tournament. Again: social, not antisocial.

Third, the key component here is that gaming time isn’t unlimited and doesn’t descend into the dark abyss of late nights and endless, lonely play. You don’t have to tell me that there are households with no limits on screen time. But assuming there are limits, and the limits are real, and the boys in question really do spend much or most of their waking hours not gaming but swimming and jumping on the trampoline and playing Risk and reading epic fantasy and playing foosball and climbing trees and riding bikes around the neighborhood and walking the dog and shooting hoops and, and, and … then I’m just not that worried about the presence of video games in the lives of boys in middle and high school.

Fourth, however, life doesn’t end at eighteen or twenty-two. What my friend’s remark also brought to mind was that the challenge of video games and young men in our culture is not pre- but post-graduation (whether graduation here refers to high school or college). That doesn’t mean that no adult man in his twenties or thirties should play video games—although, cards on the table, I will admit that I’ve not seriously played a video game since my freshman year of college. (I recall it fondly: Beating Half-Life 2 over the Christmas break. Probably the only thing that could ever pull me out of retirement would be a third entry finally getting made.) That was a full twenty years ago. I have buddies who’ve continued gaming to various degrees since college, but I can’t relate. It lost its luster a long time ago.

So with that caveat in place, it seems clear to me that the pressing social question for (present and future) adult men in Gen Z and Gen Alpha is what role, if any, video games should play in their lives. In my perfect world it would be nil, minus the occasional nostalgic afternoon or competition with one’s nephews, nieces, and children. Since that’s not this world, the practical question becomes: What is healthy gaming for adult men in the 2020s and 2030s? What types of game? Within what limits? And do the answers change based on the man’s employment, marital, or paternal status?

I’m not in a position to give universal, much less concrete, answers, except that my suggested limits would be predictably strict. More to the point, if it is true that the more one games the less likely one is to eat well, exercise, have good friends, go to church, find a spouse, and/or have and raise children in the home, then it would seem obvious that as a society we should desire the least gaming possible for men in their twenties and thirties. Gaming as a child and teenager and even young adult would, by the time boys leave the home, go the way of bunk beds and cooties, curfews and driver’s permits. The axiom would be Pauline: When I was a child I gamed like a child; when I became a man, I put away childish things.

That rhetoric is strong, I admit; I freely allow that, as a non-gamer, I’m biased against gaming in a way that may not let me see how it could find a small but meaningful role in a balanced adult life. If it can, the onus is on those who think so to make the case and display it in their lives. At the moment, video games and adult men don’t mix well, for themselves or for the rest of society.

More screens, more distractions; fewer screens, fewer distractions

It’s a simple rule, but I repeat it here because it is difficult to internalize and even more difficult to put into practice, whatever one’s context:

In any given physical space, the more screens that are present, the more distractions there will be for people inhabiting that space; whereas the fewer screens, the fewer distractions.

So far as I can tell, this principle is always and everywhere true, including in places where screens are the point, like a sports bar. No one would study for the LSAT in a sports bar: it’s too distracting, too noisy, too busy. It’s built to over-stimulate. Indeed, a football fan who cared about only one game featuring one team would not spend his Sunday afternoon in a sports bar with a dozen games on simultaneously, because it would prove too difficult to focus on the one thing of interest to him.

Now consider other social spaces: a coffee shop, a classroom, a living room, a sanctuary, a monastery. How are these spaces usually filled? Given their ends, how should they be filled?

The latter question answers itself. This is why, for example, I do not permit use of screens when I teach in a college classroom. Phones, tablets, and laptops are in bags or pockets. In the past I have used a single projector screen for slides, especially for larger survey/lecture courses, but for the most part, even with class sizes of 40 or 50 or 60, I don’t use a screen at all, just markers and a whiteboard. Unquestionably the presence of personal screens open on desks is a massive distraction not only to their owners but to anyone around them. And because distractions are obstacles to learning, I eliminate the distractions.

The same goes for our homes and our churches.

At the outer limit, our homes would lack screens altogether. I know there are folks who do this, but it’s a rare exception to the rule. (Actually, I’m not sure if I have ever personally known someone whose home is 100% devoid of any screen of any kind.) So assuming there will be screens of some kind, how should they be arranged in a home?

1. There should be numerous spaces that lack a permanent screen.

2. There should be numerous spaces in which, by rule or norm, portable screens are unwelcome.

3. There should be focal spaces organized around some object (fireplace, kitchen island, couch and coffee table) or activity (cooking, reading, playing piano) that are ordinarily or always screen-free.

4. What screens there are should require some friction to use, i.e., a conscious and active rather than passive decision to turn them on or or engage with them.

5. Fewer screens overall and fewer screens in any given space will conduce to fewer distractions, on one hand, and greater likelihood of shared or common screen usage, on the other. (I.e., watching a movie together as a family rather than adults and children on separate devices doing their own thing.)

There is more to say, but for those interested I’m mostly just repackaging the advice of Andy Crouch and Albert Borgmann. Now to church.

There are a few ways that screens can invade the space of public worship:

1. Large screens “up front” that display words, images, videos, or live recording of whatever is happening “on stage” (=pastor, sermon, communion, music).

2. Small screens, whether tablets or smartphones, out and visible and in active usage by ministers and others leading the congregation in worship.

3. Small screens, typically smartphones, in the pockets and laps of folks in the pews.

Let me put it bluntly: It’s often said that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. In a different vein, it’s equally true that Sunday morning may now be the most distracted hour in America.

Why? Because screens are everywhere! Not, to be sure, in every church. The higher liturgical traditions have preserved a liturgical celebration often, though not always, free of screen colonization. Yet even there parishioners still by and large bring their screens in with them.

Certainly for low-church forms of worship, screens are everywhere. And the more screens, the more distractions. Which means that, for many churches, distraction appears to be part of the point. Those attending are meant, in a twist on T. S. Eliot’s phrase, to be distracted from distraction by distraction—that is, to be distracted from bad distraction (fantasy football, Instagram, online shopping) by good distraction (cranked-up CCM, high production videos, Bible apps). It is unthinkable, on this view, to imagine worshiping on a Sunday morning in a screen-free environment. Yet a screen-free space would be a distraction-free space, one designed precisely to free the attention—the literal eyeballs—of those gathered to focus on the one thing they came for: God.

I hope to write a full essay on this soon for Christianity Today, laying out a practical vision for screen-free worship. For now I just want to propose it as an ideal we should all agree on. Ministers should not use phones while leading worship nor should they invite parishioners to open the Bible “on their apps.” Do you know what said parishioners will do when so invited? They may or may not open their Bible app. They will absolutely find their eyes diverted to a text message, an email, or a social media update. And at once you will have lost them—either for a few minutes or for good.

The best possible thing for public Christian worship in twenty-first century America would be the banishment of all screens from the sanctuary. Practically speaking, it would look like leaders modeling and then inviting those who attend to leave their phones at home, in their cars, or in cell phone lockers (the way K–12 schools are increasingly doing).

I’m well aware that this couldn’t happen overnight, and that there are reasonable exceptions for certain people to have a phone on them (doctors on call, police officers, parents of children with special needs). But hard cases make bad law. The normative vision should be clear and universally shared. The liturgy is a place for ordering our attention, the eyes of the heart, on what we cannot see but nevertheless gain a glimpse of when we hear the word of the Lord and see and smell and taste the signs of bread and wine on the Lord’s table. We therefore should not intentionally encourage the proliferation of distractions in this setting nor stand by and watch it happen, as if the design of public space were out of our hands.

More screens, more distractions; fewer screens, fewer distractions: the saying is sure. Let’s put it into practice.

It costs you nothing not to be on social media

Consider this your friendly reminder that signing up for social media is not mandatory. It costs nothing not to be on it. Life without the whole ensemble—TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and the rest—is utterly free.

In fact, it is simpler not to be on social media, inasmuch as it requires no action on your part, only inaction. If you don’t create an account, no account will be made for you. You aren’t auto-registered, the way you’re assigned a social security number or drafted in the military. You have to apply and be accepted, like a driver’s license or church membership. Fail to apply and nothing happens. And I’m here to tell you, it is a blessed nothingness.

That’s the trick with social media: nothing comes from nothing. Give it nothing and it can take nothing from you.

Supposedly, being on social media is free. But you know that’s not true. It costs you time—hours of it, in fact, each and every day. It costs you attention. It costs you the anxiety it induces. It costs you the ability to do or think about anything else when nothing exactly is demanding your focus at the moment. It costs you the ability to read for more than a few minutes at a time. It costs you the ability to write without strangers’ replies bouncing like pinballs around your head. It costs you the freedom to be ignorant and therefore free of the latest scandal, controversy, fad, meme, or figure of speech that everyone knew last week but no one will remember next week.

Thankfully, social media has no particular relationship to what is called “privilege.” It does not take money to be off social media any more than it takes money to be on it. It is not the privileged who have the freedom not to be on social media: it is everyone. Because, as I will not scruple to repeat, even at the risk of annoyance or redundancy, it costs nothing not to be on social media. And since it costs nothing for anyone, it therefore costs nothing for everyone. Unfortunately, the costs of being on social media do apply to everyone, privileged or not, which is why everyone would be better off deleting their accounts.

Imagine a world without social media. It isn’t ancient. It isn’t biblical. It’s twenty years ago. Are you old enough to remember life then? It wasn’t a hellscape, not in this respect at least. The hellscape is social media. And social media hasn’t, not yet, become a badge of “digital citizenship” required by law of every man, woman, and child, under penalty of fine or loss of employment. Until then, so long as it’s free, do the right thing and stay off—or, if you’re already on, get off first and then stay off.

Here’s the good news, but tell me if you’ve heard it before: It won’t cost you a thing.

The best books about technology

are not about technology. They’re not about the latest innovation or invention. They’re not an intervention in the news cycle, much less punditry about A.I. or the internet or digital or television or motion pictures or radio or the automobile or the printing press. They’re not dated the moment the car rolls off the lot.

The best books about technology are about humanity—about what it means to be human and about life well lived and urgent threats to the good life. Because technology is essentially a human thing, good writing about technology is good writing about human things. A doctrine of technology is only as good as its doctrine of man; indeed, not only depends upon but is a doctrine of man. The technologist is an anthropologist, from first to last.

Which is why, incidentally, the best technologists are philosophers and theologians. In Calvin’s words:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. In the second place, those blessings which unceasingly distill to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain.

What, then, are the best books (not) about technology that I have read? A short list would include Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath; Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos; François Mauriac’s The Eucharist; Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir; Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture; Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope; Stephen King’s On Writing; Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans; Pascal’s Pensées; and many more.

These are my models for good technology writing: not because they talk about technology but because they comment—uniquely, stylishly, with voice and perspective and courage—on the human condition. Today’s apps are yesterday’s fads, but the human condition isn’t going anywhere. Write, therefore, when you set out to write about technology, about what it means to be human today; seek the latter and the former will be added unto you.

I joined Micro.blog!

After years of hearing Alan Jacobs sing the praises of Micro.blog, I created an account this week. Not only that, I’m able to host my micro blog on this website’s domain; so instead of eastbrad.micro.blog, the URL is micro.bradeast.org. In fact, I added “Micro” as an option on the header menu above, sandwiched in between “Media” and “Blog.” In a sense you’re technically “leaving” this site, but it doesn’t feel like it. In this I was also following Alan’s lead. Thank you, ayjay “own your own turf” dot org!

Now: Why did I join micro.blog? Don’t I already have enough to do? Don’t I already write enough? Isn’t my goal to be offline as much as possible? Above all, wasn’t I put on earth to do one name thing, namely, warn people away from the evils of Twitter? Aren’t I the one who gave it up in June 2020, deactivated it for Lent in spring 2022, then (absent-mindedly) deleted it a year later by not renewing the account? And didn’t regret it one bit? Don’t I think Twitter and all its imitators (Threads, Notes, et al) unavoidably addict their users in the infinite scroll while optimizing for all the worst that original sin has to offer?

What, in a word, makes micro blogging (and Micro.blog in particular) different?

Here’s my answer, in three parts: why I wanted to do this; how I’m going to use it; and what Micro.blog lacks that makes it distinct from the alternatives.

First, I miss what Twitter offered me: an accessible public repository of links, images, brief commentary, and minor thoughts—thoughts I had nowhere else to put except Twitter, and thoughts that invariably get lost in the daily shuffle. I tend to call this main blog (the one you’re reading right now) a space for “mezzo blogging”: something between Twitter/Tumblr (i.e., micro writing and sharing) and essays, articles, and books (i.e., proper macro writing). I suffer from graphomania, and between my physical notebook and texting with friends, I still have words to get out of my system; minus all the nonsense on Twitter, the reason I stayed as long as I did was that. (Also the connections, friends, and networking, but the downsides of gaining those things were and are just too great, on any platform.)

Second, I am going to use my micro blog in a certain way. I’m not going to follow anyone. I’m not going to look at my timeline. I’m not going to let it even show me follows, mentions, or replies. It’s not going to be a place for interaction with others. I’m not going to dwell or hang out on it. In a sense I won’t even be “on” it. I have and will have no way of knowing if even a single soul on earth reads, clicks, or finds my writing there. It exists more or less for one person: me. Its peripheral audience is anyone who cares to click from here to there or check in on me there from time to time.

What am I going to be doing, then? Scribbling thoughts that run between one and four sentences long; sharing links to what I’m reading online; sharing books and images of what I’m reading IRL; in short, putting in a single place the grab bag of “minor” writing that pulls me daily in a hundred directions: email, messages, WhatsApp, even Slack (once upon a time). E.g., right now I’m enthralled by the NBA playoffs, but not only does no one who reads this blog care about that; my thoughts are brief, ephemeral, and fleeting. But I have them, and I want to remember what they were! So now I put them there, on the micro blog.

I don’t, for what it’s worth, have any kind of organizational system for note-taking, journaling, or any such thing. I do keep a physical journal, but it’s mostly a place for first-draft brainstorming; it’s not much of an archive. I don’t use Drafts or Tot or Notes or Scrivener or even an iPad or tablet of any kind. Nothing is housed on the cloud; nothing is interconnected, much less interoperable. I’ve always toyed with trying Evernote—I know people who love it—but it’s just never appealed to me, and I don’t think I’m the type who would benefit from it or use it well. My mental habits and ideas and writing instincts are too diffuse. At the same time, I love the idea of a one-stop shop for little thoughts, for minor scribbles, in brief, for micro blogging. That’s how I used Twitter. I ultimately just got fed up with that broken platform’s pathologies.

So, third, what makes Micro.blog different? In a sense I’ve already answered that question. It’s not built to do what Twitter, Threads, and Substack Notes are meant to do. There’s no provocation or stimulation. There’s no hellish algorithm. It doesn’t scale. It’s not about followers or viral hits. It’s self-selecting, primarily because you have to pay for it and secondarily because it’s not a way to build an audience of thousands (much less millions). It’s for people like me who want a digital room of their own, so to speak, without the assault on my attention, or the virus of virality, or the infinite scroll, or the stats (follows, like, RTs) to stroke or shrink my ego, or the empty promise that the more I post the more books I’ll eventually sell. No publisher or agent is going to tout my Micro.blog to justify an advance. It’s just … there. For me, and max, for a few other dozen folks.

And anyway, I’m giving it a 30-day free trial. No commitments made just yet. I already like it enough that I expect to fork over $5/month for the privilege. But we’ll see.

Either way, this is all one long way of saying: See, I’m no Luddite. I use Squarespace and Instapaper and Firefox and Spotify and Libby and Letterboxd and now Micro.blog. I might even get to ten whole quality platforms one day.

Clearly, I don’t hate the internet. I’m just picky.

A.I., TikTok, and saying “I would prefer not to”

Two technology pieces from last week have stuck with me.

Both were at The New York Times. The first was titled “How TikTok Changed America,” a sort of image/video essay about the platform’s popularity and influence in the U.S. The second was a podcast with Ezra Klein called “How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?,” an interview with Ethan Mollick.

To be clear, I skimmed the first and did not listen to the second; I only read Klein’s framing description for the pod (my emphases):

There’s something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It’s clear we’re witnessing the advent of a wildly powerful technology, one that could transform the economy and the way we think about art and creativity and the value of human work itself. At the same time, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to use it in my own day-to-day job.

So I wanted to understand what I’m missing and get some tips for how I could incorporate A.I. better into my life right now. And Ethan Mollick is the perfect guide…

This conversation covers the basics, including which chatbot to choose and techniques for how to get the most useful results. But the conversation goes far beyond that, too — to some of the strange, delightful and slightly unnerving ways that A.I. responds to us, and how you’ll get more out of any chatbot if you think of it as a relationship rather than a tool.

These two pieces brought to mind two things I’ve written recently about social media and digital technology more broadly. The first comes from my New Atlantic essay, published two years ago, reviewing Andy Crouch’s book The Life We’re Looking For (my emphases again):

What we need is a recommitment to public argument about purpose, both ours and that of our tools. What we need, further, is a recoupling of our beliefs about the one to our beliefs about the other. What we need, finally, is the resolve to make hard decisions about our technologies. If an invention does not serve the human good, then we should neither sell it nor use it, and we should make a public case against it. If we can’t do that — if we lack the will or fortitude to say, with Bartleby, We would prefer not to — then it is clear that we are no longer makers or users. We are being used and remade.

The other comes late in my Commonweal review, published last summer, of Tara Isabella Burton’s book Self Made:

It may feel to some of us that “everyone,” for example, is on Instagram. Only about 15 percent of the world is on the platform, however. That’s a lot of people. Yet the truth is that most of the world is not on it. The same goes for other social media. Influencer culture may be ubiquitous in the sense that most people between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five are affected by it in some way. But that’s a far cry from digitally mediated self-creation being a universal mandate.

Even for those of us on these apps, moreover, it’s possible to opt out. You don’t have to sell yourself on the internet. You really don’t. I would have liked Burton to show us why the dismal story she tells isn’t deterministic—why, for example, not every young woman is fated to sell her image on OnlyFans sooner or later.

The two relevant phrases from these essay reviews: You really don’t and Bartleby’s I would prefer not to. They are quite simply all you need in your toolkit for responding to new technologies like TikTok and generative A.I.

For example, the TikTok piece states that half of Americans are on the app. That’s a lot! Plenty to justify the NYT treatment. I don’t deny it. But do you know what that claim also means? That half of us aren’t on it. Fifty percent. One out of every two souls. Which is the more relevant statistic, then? Can I get a follow-up NYT essay about the half of us who not only aren’t tempted to download TikTok but actively reject it, can’t stand it, renounce it and all its pomp?

The piece goes further: “Even if you’ve never opened the app, you’ve lived in a culture that exists downstream of what happens there.” Again, I don’t deny it or doubt it. It’s true, to my chagrin. And yet, the power of such a claim is not quite what it seems on first glance.

The downstream-influence of TikTok works primarily if and as one is also or instead an active user of other social media platforms (as well as, perhaps, cable news programs focused on politics and entertainment). I’m told you can’t get on YouTube or Instagram or Twitter or Facebook without encountering “imported” content from TikTok, or “local” content that’s just Meta or Google cribbing on TikTok. But what if, like me, you don’t have an account on any of these platforms? What if you abstain completely from all social media? And what if you don’t watch Fox News or MSNBC or CNN or entertainment shows or reality TV?

I was prepared, reading the NYT piece, to discover all the ways TikTok had invaded my life without my even realizing it. It turns out, though, that I don’t get my news from TikTok, or my movie recommendations, or my cooking recipes, or my fashion advice(!), or my politics, or my Swiftie hits, or my mental health self-diagnoses, or my water bottle, or my nightly entertainment before bed—or anything else. Nothing. Nada. Apparently I have been immune to the fifteen “hottest trends” on TikTok, the way it invaded “all of our lives.”

How? Not because I made it a daily goal to avoid TikTok. Not because I’m a digital ascetic living on a compound free of wireless internet, smart phones, streaming TV, and (most important) Gen Z kiddos. No, it’s because, and more or less only because, I’m not on social media. Turns out it isn’t hard to get away from this stuff. You just don’t download it. You just don’t create an account. If you don’t, you can live as if it doesn’t exist, because for all intents and purposes, for your actual life, it doesn’t.

As I said: You really don’t have to, because you can just say I would prefer not to. All told, that’s enough. It’s adequate all on its own. No one is forcing you to do anything.

Which brings us to Ezra Klein.

Sometimes Klein seems like he genuinely “gets” the scale of the threat, the nature of the digital monstrosity, the power of these devices to shape and rewire our brains and habits and hearts. Yet other times he sounds like just another tech bro who wants to maximize his digital efficiencies, to get ahead of the masses, to get a silicon leg up on the competition, to be as early an adopter as possible. I honestly don’t get it. Does he really believe the hype? Or does he not. At least someone like Tyler Cowen picks a lane. Come join the alarmist train, Ezra! There’s plenty of room! All aboard!

Seriously though, I’m trying to understand the mindset of a person who asks aloud with complete sincerity, “How should I incorporate A.I. into my life ‘better’?” It’s the “should” that gets me. Somehow this is simultaneously a social obligation and a moral duty. Whence the ought? Can someone draw a line for me from this particular “is” to Klein’s technological ought?

In any case, the question presumes at least two things. First, that prior to A.I. my life was somehow lacking. Second, that just because A.I. exists, I need to “find a place for it” in my daily habits.

But why? Why would we ever grant either of these premises?

My life wasn’t lacking anything before ChatGPT made its big splash. I wasn’t feeling an absence that Sam Altman could step in to fill. There is no Google-shaped hole in my heart. As a matter of fact, my life is already full enough: both in the happy sense that I have a fulfilling life and in the stressful sense that I have too much going on in my life. As John Mark Comer has rightly pointed out, the only way to have more of the former is through having less of the latter. Have more by having less; increase happiness by jettisoning junk, filler, hurry, hoarding, much-ness.

Am I really supposed to believe that A.I.—not to mention an A.I. duplicate of myself in order (hold gag reflex) to know myself more deeply (I said hold it!) in ways I couldn’t before—is not just one more damn thing to add to my already too-full life? That it holds the secrets of self-knowledge, maximal efficiency, work flow, work–life balance, relational intimacy, personal creativity, and labor productivity? Like, I’m supposed to type these words one after another and not snort laugh with derision but instead take them seriously, very seriously, pondering how my life was falling short until literally moments ago, when A.I. entered my life?

It goes without saying that, just because the technology exists, I don’t “need” to adopt or incorporate it into my life. There is no technological imperative, and if there were it wouldn’t be categorical. The mere existence of technology is neither self-justifying nor self-recommending. And must I add that devoting endless hours of time, energy, and attention to learning this latest invention, besides stealing those hours from other, infinitely more meaningful pursuits, will undeniably be superseded and almost immediately made redundant by the fact that this invention is nowhere near completion? Even if A.I. were going to improve daily individual human flourishing by a hundredfold, the best thing to do, right now, would be absolutely nothing. Give it another year or ten or fifty and they’ll iron out the kinks, I’m sure of it.

What this way of approaching A.I. has brought home to me is the unalterably religious dimension of technological innovation, and this in two respects. On one side, tech adepts and true believers approach innovation not only as one more glorious step in the march of progress but also as a kind of transcendent or spiritual moment in human growth. Hence the imperative. How should I incorporate this newfangled thing into my already tech-addled life? becomes not just a meaningful question but an urgent, obvious, and existential one.

On the other side, those of us who are members of actual religious traditions approach new technology with, at a minimum, an essentially skeptical eye. More to the point, we do not approach it expecting it to do anything for our actual well-being, in the sense of deep happiness or lasting satisfaction or final fulfillment or ultimate salvation. Technology can and does contribute to human flourishing but only in its earthly, temporal, or penultimate aspects. It has nothing to do with, cannot touch, never can and never will intersect with eternity, with the soul, with the Source and End of all things. Technology is not, in short, a means of communion with God. And for those of us (not all religious people, but many) who believe that God has himself already reached out to us, extending the promise and perhaps a partial taste of final beatitude, then it would never occur to us—it would present as laughably naive, foolish, silly, self-deceived, idolatrous—to suppose that some brand new man-made tool might fix what ails us; might right our wrongs; might make us happy, once and for all.

It’s this that’s at issue in the technological “ought”: the “religion of technology.” It’s why I can’t make heads of tails of stories or interviews like the ones I cited above. We belong to different religions. It may be that there are critical questions one can ask about mine. But at least I admit to belonging to one. And, if I’m being honest, mine has a defensible morality and metaphysics. If I weren’t a Christian, I’d rather be just about anything than a true believing techno-optimist. Of all religions on offer today, it is surely the most self-evidently false.

Screentopia

I’m grateful to Alan for writing this post so I didn’t have to. A few additional thoughts, though. (And by “a few thoughts” I mean rant imminent.)

Let me begin by giving a term to describe, not just smartphones or social media, but the entire ecosystem of the internet, ubiquitous screens, smartphones, and social media. We could call it Technopoly or the Matrix or just Digital. I’ll call it Screentopia. A place-that-is-no-place in which just about everything in our lives—friendship, education, finance, sex, news, entertainment, work, communication, worship—is mediated by omnipresent interlinked personal and public devices as well as screens of every size and type, through which we access the “all” of the aforementioned aspects of our common life.

Screentopia is an ecosystem, a habitat, an environment; it’s not one thing, and it didn’t arrive fully formed at a single point in time. It achieved a kind of comprehensive reach and maturity sometime in the last dozen years.

Like Alan, I’m utterly mystified by people who aren’t worried about this new social reality. Or who need the rest of us to calm down. Or who think the kids are all right. Or who think the kids aren’t all right, but nevertheless insist that the kids’ dis-ease has little to nothing to do with being born and raised in Screentopia. Or who must needs concern-troll those of us who are alarmed for being too alarmed; for ascribing monocausal agency to screens and smartphones when what we’re dealing with is complex, multicausal, inscrutable, and therefore impossible to fix. (The speed with which the writer adverts to “can’t roll back the clock” or “the toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube” is inversely proportional to how seriously you have to take him.)

After all, our concern troll asks insouciantly, aren’t we—shouldn’t we be—worried about other things, too? About low birth rates? And low marriage rates? And kids not playing outside? And kids presided over by low-flying helicopter parents? And kids not reading? And kids not dating or driving or experimenting with risky behaviors? And kids so sunk in lethargy that they can’t be bothered to do anything for themselves?

Well—yes! We should be worried about all that; we are worried about it. These aren’t independent phenomena about which we must parcel out percentages of our worry. It’s all interrelated! Nor is anyone—not one person—claiming a totality of causal explanatory power for the invention of the iPhone followed immediately by mass immiseration. Nor still is anyone denying that parents and teachers and schools and churches are the problem here. It’s not a “gotcha” to counter that kids don’t have an issue with phones, parents do. Yes! Duh! Exactly! We all do! Bonnie Kristian is absolutely right: parents want their elementary and middle school–aged kids to have smartphones; it’s them you have to convince, not the kids. We are the problem. We have to change. That’s literally what Haidt et al are saying. No one’s “blaming the kids.” We’re blaming what should have been the adults in the room—whether the board room, the PTA meeting, the faculty lounge, or the household. Having made a mistake in imposing this dystopia of screens on an unsuspecting generation, we would like, kindly and thank you please, to fix the problem we ourselves made (or, at least, woke up to, some of us, having not been given a vote at the time).

Here’s what I want to ask the tech concern trolls.

How many hours per day of private scrolling on a small glowing rectangle would concern you? How many hours per day indoors? How many hours per day on social media? How many hours per day on video games? How many pills to get to sleep? How many hours per night not sleeping? How many books per year not read? How many friends not made, how many driver’s licenses not acquired, how many dates and hangouts not held in person would finally raise a red flag?

Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice.” A friend of mine says the same about our society and Brave New World. I expect people have read their Orwell. Have they read their Huxley, too? (And their Bradbury? And Walter M. Miller Jr.? And…?) Drugs and mindless entertainment to numb the emotions, babies engineered and produced in factories, sex and procreation absolutely severed, male and female locked in perpetual sedated combat, books either censored or an anachronistic bore, screens on every wall of one’s home featuring a kind of continuous interactive reality TV (as if Real Housewives, TikTok, and Zoom were combined into a single VR platform)—it’s all there. Is that the society we want? On purpose? It seems we’re bound for it like our lives depended on it. Indeed, we’re partway there already. “Alarmists” and “Luddites” are merely the ones who see the cliff’s edge ahead and are frantically pointing at it, trying to catch everyone’s attention.

But apparently everyone else is having too much fun. Who invited these killjoys along anyway?

All together now: social media is bad for reading

We don’t have to mince words. We don’t have to pretend. We don’t have to qualify our claims. We don’t have to worry about insulting the youths. We don’t have to keep mum until the latest data comes in.

Social media, in all its forms, is bad for reading.

It’s bad for reading habits, meaning when you’re on social media you’re not reading a book. It’s bad for reading attention, meaning it shrinks your ability to focus for sustained periods of time while reading. It’s bad for reading desires, meaning it makes the idea of sitting down with a book, away from screens and images and videos and sounds, seem dreadfully boring. It’s bad for reading style, meaning what literacy you retain while living on social media is trained to like all the wrong things and to seek more of the same. It’s bad for reading ends, meaning you’re less likely to read for pleasure and more likely to read for strictly utilitarian reasons (including, for example, promotional deals and influencer prizes and so on). It’s bad for reading reinforcement, meaning like begets like, and inserting social media into the feedback loop of reading means ever more of the former and ever less of the latter. It’s bad for reading learning, meaning your inability to focus on dense, lengthy reading is an educational handicap: you quite literally will know less as a result. It’s bad for reading horizons, meaning the scope of what you do read, if you read at all, will not stretch across continents, cultures, and centuries but will be limited to the here and now, (at most) the latest faux highbrow novel or self-help bilge promoted by the newest hip influencers; social media–inflected “reading” is definitionally myopic: anti-“diverse” on principle. Finally, social media is bad for reading imitation, meaning it is bad for writing, because reading good writing is the only sure path to learning to write well oneself. Every single writing tic learned from social media is bad, and you can spot all of them a mile away.

None of this is new. None of it is groundbreaking. None of it is rocket science. We all know it. Educators do. Academics do. Parents do. As do members of Gen Z. My students don’t defend themselves to me; they don’t stick up for digital nativity and the wisdom and character produced by TikTok or Instagram over reading books. I’ve had students who tell me, approaching graduation, that they have never read a single book for pleasure in their lives. Others have confessed that they found a way to avoid reading a book cover to cover entirely, even as they got B’s in high school and college. They’re not proud of this. Neither are they embarrassed. It just is what it is.

Those of us who see this and are concerned by it do not have to apologize for it. We don’t have to worry about being, or being accused of being, Luddites. We’re not making this up. We’re not shaking our canes at the kids on the lawn. We’re not ageist or classist or generation-ist or any other nonsensical application of actual prejudices.

The problem is real. It’s not the only one, but it’s pressing. Social media is bad in general, it’s certainly bad for young people, and it’s unquestionably, demonstrably, and devastatingly bad for reading.

The question is not whether it’s a problem. The question is what to do about it.

A tech-attitude taxonomy

I’ve been reading Albert Borgmann lately, and in one essay he describes a set of thinkers he calls “optimistic pessimists” about technology. It got me thinking about how to delineate different positions and postures on technology, particularly digital technology, over the last century. I came up with eleven terms, the sixth one serving as a middle, “neutral” point with five on each side—growing in intensity as they get further from the center. Here they are:

1. Hucksters: i.e., people who stand to profit from new technologies, or who work to spin and market them regardless of their detrimental effects on human flourishing.

2. Apostles: i.e., true believers who announce the gospel of new technology to the unconvinced; they win converts by their true faith and honest enthusiasm; they sincerely believe that any and all developments in technology are good and to be welcomed as benefiting the human race in the short-, medium-, and long-term.

3. Boosters: i.e., writers and journalists in media and academia who toe the line of the hucksters and apostles; they accuse critics and dissenters from the true faith of heresy or, worse, of being on the wrong side of history; they exist as cogs in the tech-evangelistic machine, though it’s never clear why they are so uncritical, since they are rarely either apostles or hucksters themselves.

4. Optimists: i.e., ordinary people who understand and are sympathetic with thoughtful criticisms of new technologies but who, at the end of the day, passively trust in progress, in history’s forward march, and in the power of human can-do spirit to make things turn out right, including the challenges of technology; they adopt new technology as soon as it’s popular or affordable.

5. Optimistic pessimists: i.e., trenchant and insightful critics of technopoly, or the culture wrought by technology, who nonetheless argue for and have confidence in the possibility of righting the ship (even, the ship righting itself); another term for this group is tech reformers.

6. Naive neutrals: i.e., people who have never given a second thought to the challenges or perils of technology, are fundamentally incurious about them, and have no “position” to speak of regarding the topic; in practice they function like optimists or boosters, but lack the presence of considered beliefs on the subject.

7. Pessimistic optimists: i.e., inevitabilists—this or that new technology may on net be worse for humanity, but there’s simply nothing to do about it; pushing back or writing criticism is for this group akin to a single individual blowing on a forest fire; technological change on this view is materialist and/or deterministic; at most, you try to see it for what it is and manage your own individual life as best you can; at the same time, there’s no reason to be Chicken Little, since this has always been humanity’s lot, and we always find a way to adapt and adjust.

8. Pessimists: i.e., deep skeptics who see technological development in broadly negative terms, granting that not all of it is always bad in all its effects (e.g., medicine’s improvement of health, extension of life spans, and protection from disease); these folks are the last to adopt a new technology, usually with resentment or exasperation; they hate hucksters and boosters; they are not determinists—they think human society really can make social and political choices about technology ordered toward the common good—but know that determinism almost always wins in practice; their pessimism pushes them to see the downsides or tradeoffs even in the “best” technological developments.

9. Doomsdayers: i.e., it’s all bad, all the time, and it’s clear as day to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear; the internet is a bona fide harbinger of the apocalypse and A.I. is no-joke leading us to Skynet and the Matrix; the answer to new technology is always, therefore, a leonine Barthian Nein!; and any and all dissents and evidence to the contrary are only so much captivity to the Zeitgeist, heads stuck in the sand, paid-for shilling, or delusional “back to the land” Heidegerrian nostalgia that is impossible to live out with integrity in a digital age.

10. Opt-outers: i.e., agrarians and urban monastics in the spirit of Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, and others who pursue life “off the grid” or at least off the internet; they may or may not be politically active, but more than anything they put their money where their mouth is: no TV or wireless internet in the home, no smart phone, no social media, and a life centered on hearth, earth, family, children, the local neighborhood, a farm or community garden, so on and so forth; they may be as critical as pessimists and doomsdayers, but they want to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, and most of all they don’t want the technopoly to dictate whether or not, in this, their one life, it can be a good one.

11. Resisters: i.e., leaders and foot soldiers in the Butlerian Jihad, whether this be only in spirit or in actual social, material, and political terms (IRL, as they say).

Cards on the table: I’m dispositionally somewhere between #7 and #8, with occasional emotional outbursts of #9, but aspirationally and even once in a while actually a #10.

Quit social porn

In the introduction to his new book, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age, Samuel James makes a startling claim: “The internet is a lot like pornography.” He makes sure the reader has read him right: “No, that’s not a typo. I did not mean to say that the internet contains a lot of pornography. I mean to say that the internet itself—i.e., its very nature—is like pornography. There’s something about it that is pornographic in its essence.”

Bingo. This is exactly right. But let’s take it one step further.

A few pages earlier, James distinguishes the internet in general from “the social internet.” That’s a broader term for what we usually refer to as “social media.” Think not only Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, et al, but also YouTube, Slack, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr, perhaps even LinkedIn or Reddit and similar sites. In effect, any online platform that (a) “connects” strangers through (b) public or semi-public personal profiles via (c) proprietary algorithms using (d) slot-machine reward mechanisms that reliably alter one’s (e) habits of attention and (f) fame, status, wealth, influence, or “brand.” Almost always such a platform also entails (g) the curation, upkeep, reiteration, and perpetual transformation of one’s visual image.

This is the social internet. James is right to compare it to pornography. But he doesn’t go far enough. It isn’t like pornography. It’s a mode of pornography.

The social internet is social porn.

By the end of the introduction, James pulls his punch. He doesn’t want his readers off the internet. Okay, fine. I’m on the internet too, obviously—though every second I’m not on it is a second of victory I’ve snatched from defeat. But yes, it’s hard to avoid the internet in 2023. We’ll let that stand for now.

There is no good reason, however, to be on the social internet. It’s porn, after all, as we just established. Christians, at least, have no excuse for using porn. So if James and I are right that the social internet isn’t just akin to pornography but is a species of it, then he and I and every other Christian we know who cares about these things should get off the social internet right now.

That means, as we saw above, any app, program, or platform that meets the definition I laid out. It means, at a minimum, deactivating and then deleting one’s accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok—immediately. It then means thinking long and hard about whether one should be on any para-social platforms like YouTube or Pinterest or Slack. Some people use YouTube rarely and passively, to watch the occasional movie trailer or live band performance, say, or how-to videos to help fix things around the house. Granted, we shouldn’t be too worried about that. But what about people who use it the way my students use it—as an app on their phone with an auto-populated feed they scroll just like IG or TT? Or what about active users and influencers with their own channels?

Get off! That’s the answer. It’s porn, remember? And porn is bad.

I confess I have grown tired of all the excuses for staying on the social internet. Let me put that differently: I know plenty of people who do not share my judgment that the social internet is bad, much less a type of porn. In that case, we lack a shared premise. But many people accept the premise; they might even go so far as to affirm with me that the social internet is indeed a kind of porn: just as addictive, just as powerful, just as malformative, just as spiritually depleting, just as attentionally sapping. (Such claims are empirical, by the way; I don’t consider them arguable. But that’s for another day.) And yet most of the people I have in mind, who are some of the most well-read and up-to-date on the dangers and damages of digital media, continue not only to maintain their social internet accounts but use them actively and daily. Why?

I’m at a point where I think there simply are no more good excuses. Alan Jacobs remarked to me a few years back, when I was wavering on my Twitter usage, that the hellsite in question was the new Playboy. “I subscribe for the articles,” you say. I’m sure you do. That might play with folks unconcerned by the surrounding pictures. For Christians, though, the gig is up. You’re wading through waist-high toxic sludge for the occasional possible potential good. Quit it. Quit the social internet. Be done with it. For good.

Unlike Lot’s wife, you won’t look back. The flight from the Sodom of the social internet isn’t littered with pillars of salt. The path is free and clear, because everyone who leaves is so happy, so grateful, the only question they ask themselves is what took them so long to get out.

A decision tree for dealing with digital tech

Start with this question:

Do you believe that our, and especially young people’s, relationship to digital technology (=smartphones, screens, the internet, streaming, social media) is healthy, functional, and therefore good as is? Or unhealthy, dysfunctional, and therefore in need of immediate and drastic help?

If your answer is “healthy, functional, and good as is,” then worry yourself no more; the status quo is A-OK. If you answered otherwise, read on.

Now ask yourself this question:

Do the practices, policies, norms, and official statements of my institution—whether a family, a business, a university, or a church—(a) contribute to the technological problem, (b) maintain the digital status quo, or (c) interrupt, subvert, and cut against the dysfunctional relationship of the members of my institution to their devices and screens?

If your answer is (a) or (b) and yet you answered earlier that you believe our relationship to digital technology is in serious need of help, then you’ve got a problem on your hands. If your answer is (c), then well done.

Finally, ask yourself this:

How does my own life—the whole suite of my daily habits when no one’s looking, or rather, when everyone is looking (my spouse, my roommate, my children, my coworkers, my neighbors, my pastors, and so on)—reflect, model, and/or communicate my most basic beliefs about the digital status quo? Does the way I live show others that (a) I am aware of the problem (b) chiefly within myself and (c) am tirelessly laboring to respond to it, to amend my ways and solve the problem? Or does it evince the very opposite? So that my life and my words are unaligned and even contradictory?

At both the institutional and the personal level, it seems to me that answering these questions honestly and following them to their logical conclusions—not just in our minds or with our words but in concrete actions—would clarify much about the nature of our duties, demands, and decisions in this area of life.

The tech-church show

A week or two ago a clip went viral of a prominent pastor lecturing his listeners, during his sermon, about treating Sunday morning worship like a show. I didn’t watch it, and I’m not going to comment about the pastor in question, whom I know nothing about. Here’s one write-up about it. The clip launched a thousand online Christian thinkpieces. A lot of hand-wringing about churches that put on worship as a show simultaneously wanting congregants not to see worship as a show.

Any reader of my work knows I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t want to pile on. I want to use the occasion to think more deeply about two issues it raises for the larger landscape of churches, public worship, and digital technology.

First: Should churches understand themselves to be sites of resistance against the digital status quo? That is, given their context, are churches in America called by God to be a “force for good” in relation to digital technology? And thus are they called to be a “force opposed” to the dominance of our lives—which means the lives of congregants as well as their nonbelieving neighbors—by digital devices, screens, and social media?

It seems to me that churches and church leaders are not clear about their answer to this question. In practice, their answer appears to be No. The digital status quo obtains outside the walls of the church and inside them. There is no “digital difference” when you walk inside a church—at least a standard, run-of-the-mill low-church, evangelical, or Protestant congregation. (The Orthodox have not yet been colonized by Digital, so far as I can tell. For Catholics it depends on the parish.)

In and of itself, this isn’t a problem, certainly not of consistency. If a church doesn’t think Digital’s dominion is a problem, then it’s only natural for Digital to reign within the church and not only without. You’d never expect such a church to be different on this score.

The problem arises when churches say they want to oppose believers’ digital habits, dysfunctions, and addictions while reproducing those very habits within the life of the church, above all in the liturgy. That’s a case of extreme cognitive dissonance. How could church leaders ever expect ordinary believers to learn from the church how to amend their digital lives when church leaders themselves, and the church’s public worship itself, merely model for believers their own bad habits? When, in other words, church members’ digital lives, disordered as they are, are simply mirrored back to them by the church and her pastors?

To be clear, I know more than a few Christians, including ministers, who don’t share my alarm at the reign of Digital in our common life. They wouldn’t exactly endorse spending four to eight hours (or more) per day staring at screens; they don’t deny the ills and errors of pornography and loss of attention span via social media and other platforms. But they see bigger fish to fry. And besides (as they are wont to say), “It’s here to stay. It’s a part of life. We can live in denial or incorporate its conveniences into church life. It’s inevitable either way.”

Personally, I think that’s a steaming pile of you-know-what. But at least it’s consistent. For anyone, however, who shares my alarm at the role of Digital in our common life—our own, our neighbors’, our children’s, our students’—then the inconsistency of the church on this topic is not only ludicrous but dangerous. It’s actively aiding and abetting the most significant problem facing us today while pretending otherwise. And you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a problem and you face it head on; or it’s not, and you don’t.

Second: Here’s an exercise that’s useful in the classroom. It helps to get students thinking about the role of technology in the liturgy.

Ask yourself this question: Which forms and types of technology, and how much of them, could I remove from Sunday morning worship before it would become unworkable?

Another way to think about it would be to ask: What makes my church’s liturgy different, technologically speaking, than an instance of the church’s liturgy five hundred years ago?

Certain kinds of technology become evident immediately: electricity and HVAC, for starters. In my area, many church buildings would be impossible to worship in during a west Texas summer: no air and no light. They’d be little more than pitch-black ovens on the inside.

Start on the other end, though. Compare Sunday morning worship in your church today to just a few decades ago. Here are some concrete questions.

• Could you go (could it “work”) without the use of smartphones?

• What about video cameras?

• What about spotlights and/or dimmers?

• What about the internet?

• What about screens?

• What about computers?

• What about a sound board?

• What about electric amplification for musical instruments?

• What about wireless mics?

• What about microphones as such?

This list isn’t meant to prejudge whether any or all of these are “bad” or to be avoided in the liturgy. I’m happy to worship inside a building (technology) with A/C (technology) and electricity (technology)—not to mention with indoor plumbing available (also technology). Microphones make preaching audible to everyone, including those hard of hearing. And I’ve not even mentioned the most consequential technological invention for the church’s practice of worship: the automobile! Over the last century cars revolutionized the who and where and how and why of church membership and attendance. (In this Luddite’s opinion, clearly for the worse. Come at me.)

In any case, whatever one makes of these and similar developments, the foregoing exercise is meant to force us to reckon with technology’s presence in worship as both contingent and chosen. It is contingent because worship is possible without any/all of them. I’ve worshiped on a Sunday morning beneath a tree in rural east Africa. The people walked to get there. No A/C. No mics. No screens. No internet. Certainly no plumbing. Not that long ago in this very country, most of the technology taken for granted today in many churches did not even exist. So contingency is crucial to recognize here.

And because it is contingent, it is also chosen. No one imposed digital technology, or any other kind, on American churches. Their leaders implemented it. It does not matter whether they understood themselves to be making a decision or exercising authority. They were, whether they knew it or not and whether they liked it or not. It does not matter whether they even had a conversation about it. The choice was theirs, and they made it. The choice remains theirs. What has been done can be undone. No church has to stream, for example. Some never started. Others have stopped. It’s a choice, as I’ve written elsewhere. Church leaders should own it and take responsibility for it rather than assume it’s “out of their hands.”

Because the use and presence of digital technology in the church’s liturgy is neither necessary nor imposed—it is contingent and chosen—then the logical upshot is this: Church leaders who believe that digital technology is a clear and present danger to the well-being and faithfulness of disciples of Christ should act like it. They should identify, recognize, and articulate the threats and temptations of digital dysfunction in their lives and ours; they should formulate a vision for how the church can oppose this dysfunction, forcefully and explicitly; and they should find ways to enact this opposition, both negatively (by removing said dysfunction from within the church) and positively (by proposing and modeling alternative forms of life available to believers who want relief from their digital addictions).

What they should not do is say it’s a problem while avoiding dealing with it. What they should not do is leave the status quo as it is. What they should not do is accept Digital’s domination as inevitable—as somehow lying outside the sphere of the reign and power of Christ.

What they should not do is look the other way.

Quitting the Big Five

In a course I teach on digital tech and Christian practice, I walk through an exercise with students. I ask them to name the Big Five (or more) Silicon Valley companies that so powerfully define and delimit our digital lives. They can also name additional apps and platforms that take up time and space in their daily habits. I then ask them:

Supposing you continued to use digital technology—supposing, that is, you did not move onto a tech-free country ranch, unplugged from the internet and every kind of screen—how many of these Big Tech companies could you extract yourself from without serious loss? Put from another angle, what is the fewest possible such companies you need to live your life?

In my own life, I try to implement a modest version of this. I like to daydream, however, about a more radical version. Let me start with the former then turn to the latter.

In my own life, here’s my current entanglement with the Big Tech firms:

Meta: None whatsoever (I don’t have a Facebook or Instagram account), with the exception of WhatsApp, which is useful for international and other types of communication. Recently, though, I’ve been nudging those I talk to on WhatsApp to move to another app, so I could quit Zuckerberg altogether.

Microsoft: I use Word (a lot) and PowerPoint (some) and Excel (a bit). Though I’m used to all three, I could live without them—though I’d have two decades’ worth of Word files I’d need to archive and/or convert.

Google: I’ve had the same Gmail account for fifteen years, so it would be a real loss to give it up. I don’t use GoogleMaps or any other of Google’s smartphone apps. I use GoogleDocs (etc.) a bit, mostly when others want to collaborate; I avoid it, though, and would not miss it.

Amazon: I’m an Amazon originalist: I use it for books. We pay for Prime. We also use it to buy needs and gifts for our kids and others. For years I threw my body in front of purchasing an Alexa until my household outvoted me just this summer. Alas.

Apple: Here’s where they get me. I have an iPhone and a MacBook, and I finally gave in and started backing up with a paid account on iCloud. I use iPhoto and Messages and FaceTime and the rest. I’m sure my household will acquire an iPad at some point. In a word, I’m Apple-integrated.

Others: I don’t have TikTok or any other social media accounts. My household has a family Spotify account. I personally use Instapaper, Freedom, and Marco Polo. I got Venmo this summer, but I lived without it for a decade, and could delete it tomorrow. I use Dropbox as well as another online storage business. We have various streaming platforms, but they’ve been dwindling of late; we could live with one or two.

Caveat: I’m aware that digital entanglement takes more than one form, i.e., whether or not I have an Amazon or Gmail or Microsoft (or IBM!) “account,” I’m invariably interacting with, using, and possibly paying for their servers and services in a variety of ways without my even knowing it. Again, that sort of entanglement is unavoidable absent the (Butlerian/Benedictine) move to the wireless ranch compound. But I wanted to acknowledge my awareness of this predicament at least.

Okay. So what would it look like to minimize my formal Big Five “footprint”?

So far as I can see it, the answer is simple: Commit exclusively to one company for as many services as possible.

Now, this may be seriously unwise. Like a portfolio, one’s digital assets and services may be safest and best utilized when highly diversified. Moreover, it’s almost literally putting one’s eggs in a single basket: what if that basket breaks? What if the one company you trust goes bust, or has its security compromised, or finds itself more loyal to another country’s interests than one’s own, so on and so forth?

All granted. This may be a foolish endeavor. That’s why I’m thinking out loud.

But supposing it’s not foolish, it seems to me that the simplest thing to do, in my case, would be to double down on Apple. Apple does hardware and software. They do online storage. They do TV and movies. They do music and podcasts. They’re interoperable. They have Maps and email and word processors and slideshows and the rest—or, if I preferred, I could always use third-party software for such needs (for example, I already use Firefox, not Safari or Chrome).

So what would it take, in my situation, to reduce my Big Tech footprint from five toes to three or two or even just one?

First, delete WhatsApp. Farewell, Meta!

Second, switch to Keynote and TextEdit (or Pages or Scrivener) and some unknown spreadsheet alternative, or whatever other programs folks prefer. Adios, Microsoft!

Third, download my Gmail archive and create a new, private, encrypted account with a trusted service. Turn to DuckDuckGo with questions. Turn to Apple for directions. Avoid YouTube like the plague. Adieu, Google!

Fourth, cancel Prime, ditch the Alexa, use local outlets for shopping, and order books from Bookshop.org or IndieBound.org or directly from publishers and authors. Get thee behind me, Bezos!

Fifth and finally, pray to the ghost of Steve Jobs for mercy and beneficence as I enter his kingdom, a humble and obedient subject—bound for life…

Whether or not it would be wise, could I seriously do this? I’m sort of amazed at how not implausible it sounds. The hardest thing would be leaving Microsoft Word behind, just because I’ve never used anything else, and I write a lot. The second hardest would be losing the speed, cheapness, and convenience of Amazon Prime for ordering books—but then, that’s the decision that would be best for my soul, and for authors, and for the publishing industry in general. As for life without Gmail, that would be good all around, which is why it’s the step I’m most likely to follow in the next few years.

In any case, it’s a useful exercise. “We” may “need” these corporations, at least if we want to keep living digital lives. But we don’t need all of them. We may even not need more than one.

Tech bubble

Lately it’s occurred to me that I must live in an odd sort of tech bubble. It has two components.

On one hand, no one in my context (a medium-sized city in west Texas) lives in any way “free” from digital technology. Everyone has smartphones, laptops, tablets, and televisions with streaming apps. Most little kids have Kindles or iPads; most 10-12-years olds have phones; nearly every middle school has a smartphone. Women are on Instagram and TikTok, men are on Twitter and YouTube. Boys of every age play video games (Switch, XBOX, PS5), including plenty of dads. Adults and kids alike are on their phones during church, during sporting events, during choir performances. Kids watch Disney+ and PBS Kids; parents watch Max and Netflix. Screens and apps, Amazon and Spotify, phones and tablets galore: this is just daily ordinary life. There are no radicals among us. No slices of life carved out. I don’t know anyone without a TV, much less without wireless internet. I don’t know anyone without a smartphone! Life in west Texas—and everywhere else I’m aware of, at least in the Bible Belt—is just like this. No dissenting communes. No screen-free spaces. I’m the campus weirdo for not permitting devices in my classroom, and doubly so for not using a Learning Management System. Nor am I some hard-edged radical. I’m currently typing on a MacBook, and when I leave my office, I’ll listen to an audiobook via my iPhone.

In other words, whenever anyone tells me that the world I’ve just described isn’t normal, isn’t typical, isn’t entrenched and established and nigh unavoidable—I think, “Okay, we simply live in different worlds. I’d like to come tour yours. I’ve not seen it with my own eyes before.” I’m open to being wrong. But I admit to some measure of skepticism. In a nation of 330 million souls, is it meaningful to point to this or that solitary digital experimenter as a site of resistance? And won’t they capitulate eventually anyway?

But maybe not. What do I know?

Here’s the other hand, though. Everyone I know, tech-addled and tech-saturated though they be, everyone agrees that digital technology and social media are a major problem, perhaps the most significant social challenge, facing all of us and especially young people today. No one thinks it’s “no big deal.” No one argues that their kids vegging out on video games all day does nothing to their brains. No one pretends that Instagram and TikTok and Twitter are good for developing adolescents. No one supposes that more screen time is better for anyone. They—we—all know it’s a problem. They—we—just aren’t sure what to do about it. And since it seems such an enormously complex and massive overarching matrix, by definition a systemic problem calling for systemic solutions, mostly everyone just keeps on with life as it is. A few of us try to do a little better: quantifying our kids’ screen time; deleting certain apps; resisting the siren song of smartphones for 12-year-olds. But those are drops in the bucket. No one disputes the nature or extent of the problem. It’s just that no one knows how to fix it; or at least no one has the resolve to be the one person, the one household, in a city of 120,000 to say No! to the whole shebang. And even if there were such a person or household, they’d be a one of one. An extraordinary exception to the normative and unthreatened rule.

And yet. When I read online, I discover that there are people—apparently not insignificant in number?—who do not take for granted that the ubiquity and widespread use of social media, screens, and personal devices (by everyone, but certainly by young people) is a bad thing. In fact, these people rise in defense of Silicon Valley’s holy products, so much so that they accuse those of us worried about them of fostering a moral panic. Any and all evidence of the detrimental effects of teenagers being online four, six, eight hours per day is discounted in advance. It’s either bad data or bad politics. Until very recently I didn’t even realize, naive simpleton that I am, that worrying about these things was politicized. That apparently you out yourself as a reactionary if … checks notes … you aren’t perfectly aligned with the interests of trillion-dollar multinational corporations. That it’s somehow right-wing, rather than common-sense, to want children and young people to move their bodies, to be outdoors, to talk to one another face to face, to go on dates, to get driver’s licenses, to take road trips, to see concerts, to star gaze, to sneak out at night(!), to go to restaurants, to go to parks, to go on walks, to read novels they hold in their hands, to look people in the eye, to play the guitar, to go camping, to visit national parks, to play pick-up basketball, to mow the yard, to join a protest march, to tend a garden, to cook a meal, to paint, to leave the confines of their bedrooms and game rooms, to go to church, to go on a picnic, to have a first kiss—must I go on? No, because everyone knows these are reasonable things to want young people to do, and to learn to do, and even (because there is no other way) to make mistakes and take real risks in trying to learn to do. I know plenty of conservatives and plenty of progressives and all of them, not an exception among them, want their kids off social media, off streaming, off smartphones—on them, at a minimum, much less—and want them instead to do something, anything, out there in the bright blue real world we all share and live in together.

I must allow the possibility, however, that I inhabit a tech bubble. There appear to be other worlds out there. The internet says so. In some of them, I’m told, there are tech-free persons, households, and whole communities enjoying life without the tyrannous glare of the Big Five Big Brother staring back at them through their devices. And in other worlds, running parallel to these perhaps, tech is as omnipresent as it is in my neck of the woods, yet it is utterly benign, liberating, life-giving, and above all enhancing of young people’s mental health. The more screens the better, in that world. To know this is to be right-thinking, which is to say, left-thinking: enlightened and progressive and educated. To deny it is right-thinking in the wrong sense: conservative and benighted and backwards.

Oh, well. Perhaps I’ll visit one of these other worlds someday. For the time being, I’m stuck in mine.

Local church bans smartphones

Just kidding. But why not? The headline of the latest Atlantic piece by Jonathan Haidt reads: “Ban Phones From All Schools.” The updated version now says: “Get Phones Out of School Now.” (Another one, from earlier: “Phones at School Are a Disaster.” Indeed they are. But why all these different titles for the same piece?)

My question: If smartphones are so bad for school-aged kids, K–12, isn’t it likely they’re just as bad, if not worse, for kids in churches? And not only for 18-year-olds and younger, but for everyone?

What if churches took the lead here, instead of serving once again as a lagging indicator for the wider culture? What if the one place in America where screens and devices, smartphones and social media were not ubiquitous—were not even present at all—was your neighborhood congregation? Humble and out of fashion and perhaps deplorable, that congregation, but not, adamantly and openly and unapologetically not, part of the technological crisis afflicting our society?

Granted, no church is going to ask for your phone at the door. No church is going to frisk you for an iPhone. No church is going to require handing over your Android as a condition of entering the building.

Short of that, churches could do a lot to discourage parishioners from using phones in their buildings or even bringing them inside.

They could begin by not making it a requirement. For parents of young children, having a phone has become a nonnegotiable; you’re expected to be reachable at any moment, given your child’s behavior or needs during worship or Sunday school.

They could begin by not making smartphones an assumption. For example, by placing physical Bibles in (ahem) Bible classes as well as the sanctuary. By not using QR codes. By not inviting people to “get your phones and open your Bible app” in order to read along with the passage from Scripture.

They could begin by not featuring smartphones within worship. For example, by reading from physical books or programs or print-outs rather than from one’s personal device. By not texting during worship—ever, at all, for any reason. (If you’re someone who is on call, a physician or police officer or what have you, you’re an exception here; at the same time, if you get a call, then step out and take it!) By not, God help me, letting your child play games on your phone during the liturgy. By not, God grant me strength, playing them yourself.

They could begin by communicating, clearly, gently, but directly, that the church has a vision for the role of digital technology within the life of Christian discipleship and that it is the job of the church to form and educate the faithful in accordance with that vision. Not in the service of scrupulosity or works righteousness. In the service, rather, of equipping followers of Jesus to be strong and resilient believers in the face of the greatest challenge facing this generation—especially its young people. And given that vision and formation, it follows that within this community digital technology in general, and screens and smartphones in particular, are not “anything goes.” Not “no holds barred” or “live and let live.” That would be irresponsible. Instead, the church is to be on the vanguard of resisting billion- and trillion-dollar corporations’ bald-faced attempts to suck our souls, our wallets, and our attentions dry. How, after all, can we disciples be wise and patient and alert and unanxious women and men of prayer, who dwell in the word of God, who know how to be still, who listen for the voice of Christ’s Spirit—how can we be any of these things if every second of our lives is fixated on our screens, eyes scrolling indefinitely and infinitely for the latest image, the latest scandal, the latest outrage? How can we be different from anybody else if here, in the midst of God’s people, on the Lord’s Day, gathered to worship in the Spirit, we can’t let go of our digital addictions for even one hour?

Ban devices, I say, from all churches. Beat the schools to it. Show the world we see the problem. Show the world we want to fix it in ourselves before fixing it in others. Show the world we mean business. Get smartphones out of churches now. Show Prof. Haidt proof of concept. Leave Apple and Google and Meta in the car. Be blessedly free for ninety minutes (or more!). Give God your all. Model it for your kids. Demonstrate that it’s possible.

Is it? Could it happen? In your church and mine?

All I can say is, the Lord has done stranger things before…

A.I. fallacies, academic edition

ChatGPT is here to stay. We should get used to it.

Why? I’m not used to it, and I don’t plan on getting used to it.

ChatGPT is a tool. The only thing to do with a tool is learn how to use it well.

False. There are all kinds of tools I don’t know how to use, never plan on using, and never plan to learn to use.

But this is an academic tool. We—

No, it isn’t. It’s no more an academic tool than a smart phone. It’s utterly open-ended in its potential uses.

Our students are using it. We should too.

No, we shouldn’t. My students do all kinds of things I don’t do and would never do.

But we should know what they’re up to.

I do know what they’re up to. They’re using ChatGPT to write their papers.

Perhaps it’s useful!

I’m sure it is. To plagiarize.

Not just to plagiarize. To iterate. To bounce ideas off of. To outline.

As I said.

That’s not plagiarism! The same thing happens with a roommate, or a writing center, or a tutor—or a professor.

False.

Because it’s an algorithm?

Correct.

What makes an algorithm different from a person?

You said it. Do I have to dignify it with an answer?

Humor me.

Among other things: Because a human person—friend, teacher, tutor—does not instantaneously provide paragraphs of script to copy and paste into a paper. Because a human person asks questions in reply. Because a human person prompts further thought, which takes time. ChatGPT doesn’t take time. It’s the negation of temporality in human inquiry.

I’d call that efficiency.

Efficiency is not the end-all, be-all.

It’s good, though.

That depends. I’d say efficiency is a neutral description. Like “innovation” and “creativity.” Sometimes what it describes is good; sometimes what it describes is bad. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which, at least at first.

Give me a break. When is efficiency a bad thing?

Are you serious?

Yes.

Okay. A nuclear weapon is efficient at killing, as is nerve gas.

Give me another break. We’re not talking about murder!

I am. You asked me about cases when efficiency isn’t desirable.

Fine. Non-killing examples, please.

Okay. Driving 100 miles per hour in a school zone. Gets you where you want to go faster.

That’s breaking the law, though.

So? It’s more efficient.

I can see this isn’t going anywhere.

I don’t see why it’s so hard to understand. Efficiency is not good in itself. Cheating on an exam is an “efficient” use of time, if studying would have taken fifteen hours you’d rather have spent doing something else. Fast food is more efficient than cooking your own food, if you have the money. Using Google Translate is more efficient than becoming fluent in a foreign language. Listening to an author on a podcast is more efficient than reading her book cover to cover. Listening to it on 2X is even more efficient.

And?

And: In none of these cases is it self-evident that greater efficiency is actually good or preferable. Even when ethics is not involved—as in killing or breaking the law—efficiency is merely one among many factors to consider in a given action, undertaking, or (in this case) technological invention. The mere fact that X is efficient tells us nothing whatsoever about its goodness, and thus nothing whatsoever about whether we should endorse it, bless it, or incorporate it into our lives.

Your solution, then, is ignorance.

I don’t take your meaning.

You want to be ignorant about ChatGPT, language models, and artificial intelligence.

Not at all. What would make you think that?

Because you refuse to use it.

I don’t own or use guns. But I’m not ignorant about them.

Back to killing.

Sure. But your arguments keep failing. I’m not ignorant about A.I. I just don’t spend my time submitting questions to it or having “conversations” with it. I have better things to do.

Like what?

Like pretty much anything.

But you’re an academic! We academics should be knowledgeable about such things!

There you go again. I am knowledgeable. My not wasting time on ChatGPT has nothing to do with knowledge or lack thereof.

But shouldn’t your knowledge be more than theoretical? Shouldn’t you learn to use it well?

What does “well” mean? I’m unpersuaded that modifier applies.

How could you know?

By thinking! By reading and thinking. Try it sometime.

That’s uncalled for.

You’re right. I take it back.

What if there are in fact ways to use AI well?

I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?

You’re being glib again.

This time I’m not. You’re acting like the aim of life, including academic life, is to be on the cutting edge. But it’s not. Besides, the cutting edge is always changing. It’s a moving target. I’m an academic because I’m a dinosaur. My days are spent doing things Plato and Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas and John Calvin spend their days doing. Reading, writing, teaching. I don’t use digital technology in the first or the third. I use it in the second for typing. That’s it. I don’t live life on the edge. I live life moving backwards. The older, the better. If, by some miracle, the latest greatest tech gadgetry not only makes itself ubiquitous and unavoidable in scholarly life but also materially and undeniably improves it, without serious tradeoffs—well, then I’ll find out eventually. But I’m not holding my breath.

Whether or not you stick your head in the sand, your students are using ChatGPT and its competitors. Along with your colleagues, your friends, your pastors, your children.

That may well be true. I don’t deny it. If it is true, it’s cause for lament, not capitulation.

What?

I mean: Just because others are using it doesn’t mean I should join them. (If all your friends jumped off a bridge…)

But you’re an educator! How am I not getting through to you?

I’m as clueless as you are.

If everyone’s using it anyway, and it’s already being incorporated into the way writers compose their essays and professors create their assignments and students compose their papers and pastors compose their sermons and—

I. Don’t. Care. You have yet to show me why I should.

Okay. Let me be practical. Your students’ papers are already using ChatGPT.

Yes, I’m aware.

So how are you going to show them how to use it well in future papers?

I’m not.

What about their papers?

They won’t be writing them.

Come again?

No more computer-drafted papers written from home in my classes. I’m reverting to in-class handwritten essay exams. No prompts in advance. Come prepared, having done the reading. Those, plus the usual weekly reading quizzes.

You can’t be serious.

Why not?

Because that’s backwards.

Exactly! Now you’re getting it.

No, I mean: You’re moving backwards. That’s not the way of the future.

What is this “future” you speak of? I’m not acquainted.

That’s not the way society is heading. Not the way the academy is heading.

So?

So … you’ll be left behind.

No doubt!

Shouldn’t you care about that?

Why would I?

It makes you redundant.

I fail to see how.

Your teaching isn’t best practices!

Best practices? What does that mean? If my pedagogy, ancient and unsexy though it may be, results in greater learning for my students, then by definition it is the best practice possible. Or at least better practice by comparison.

But we’re past all that. That’s the way we used to do things.

Some things we used to do were better than the way we do them now.

That’s what reactionaries say.

That’s what progressives say.

Exactly.

Come on. You’re the one resorting to slogans. I’m the one joking. Quality pedagogy isn’t political in this sense. Are you really wanting to align yourself with Silicon Valley trillionaires? With money-grubbing corporations? With ed-tech snake-oil salesmen? Join the rebels! Join the dissidents! Join the Butlerian Jihad!

Who’s resorting to rhetoric now?

Mine’s in earnest though. I mean it. And I’m putting my money where my mouth is. By not going with the flow. By not doing what I’m told. By resisting every inch the tech overloads want to colonize in my classroom.

Okay. But seriously. You think you can win this fight?

Not at all.

Wait. What?

…

You don’t think you can win?

Of course not. Who said anything about winning?

Why fight then?

Likelihood of winning is not the deciding factor. This is the long defeat, remember. The measure of action is not success but goodness. The question for my classroom is therefore quite simple. Does it enrich teaching and learning, or does it not? Will my students’ ability to read, think, and speak with wisdom, insight, and intellectual depth increase as a result, or not? I have not seen a single argument that suggests using, incorporating, or otherwise introducing my students to ChatGPT will accomplish any of these pedagogical goals. So long as that is the case, I will not let propaganda, money, paralysis, confusion, or pressure of any kind—cultural, social, moral, administrative—persuade me to do what I believe to be a detriment to my students.

You must realize it’s inevitable.

What’s “it”?

You know.

I do. But I reject the premise. As I already said, I’m not going to win. But my classroom is not the world. It’s a microcosm of a different world. That’s the vision of the university I’m willing to defend, to go to the mat for. Screens rule in the world, but not in my little world. We open physical books. I write real words on a physical board. We speak to one another face to face, about what matters most. No laptops open. No smartphones out. No PowerPoint slides. Just words, words, words; texts, texts, texts; minds, minds, minds. I admit that’s not the only good way to teach. But it is a good way. And I protect it with all my might. I’m going to keep protecting it, as long as I’m able.

So you’re not a reactionary. You’re a fanatic.

Names again!

This time I’m the one kidding. I get it. But you’re something of a Luddite.

I don’t reject technology. I reject the assumption that technology created this morning should ipso facto be adopted this evening as self-evidently essential to human flourishing, without question or interrogation or skepticism or sheer time. Give me a hundred years, or better yet, five hundred. By then I’ll get back to you on whether A.I. is good for us. Not to mention good for education and scholarship.

You don’t have that kind of time.

Precisely. That’s why Silicon Valley boosterism is so foolish and anti-intellectual. It’s a cause for know-nothings. It presumes what it cannot know. It endorses what it cannot perceive. It disseminates what it cannot take sufficient time to test. It simply hands out digital grenades at random, hoping no one pulls the pin. No wonder it always blows up in their face.

We’ve gotten off track, and you’ve started sermonizing.

I’m known to do that.

Should we stop?

I think so. You don’t want to see me when I really get going. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

The take temptation

There is an ongoing series of essays being slowly published in successive issues of The New Atlantis I want to commend to you. They’re by Jon Askonas, a friend who teaches politics at Catholic University of America. The title for the series as a whole is “Reality: A Post-Mortem.” The essays are a bit hard to describe, but they make for essential reading. They are an attempt to diagnose the root causes of, and the essential character of, the new state of unreality we find ourselves inhabiting today. The first, brief essay lays out the vision for the series. The second treats the gamified nature of our common life, in particular its analogues in novels, role-playing games, and alternate reality games (ARGs). The latest essay, which just arrived in my mailbox, is called “How Stewart Made Tucker.” Go read them all! (And subscribe to TNA, naturally. I’ve got an essay in the latest issue too.)

For now, I want to make one observation, drawing on something found in essay #2.

Jon writes (in one of a sequence of interludes that interrupt the main flow of the argument):

Several weeks have gone by since you picked your rabbit hole [that is, a specific topic about which there is much chatter but also much nonsense in public discourse and social media]. You have done the research, found a newsletter dedicated to unraveling the story, subscribed to a terrific outlet or podcast, and have learned to recognize widespread falsehoods on the subject. If your uncle happens to mention the subject next Thanksgiving, there is so much you could tell him that he wasn’t aware of.

 You check your feed and see that a prominent influencer has posted something that seems revealingly dishonest about your subject of choice. You have, at the tip of your fingers, the hottest and funniest take you have ever taken.

1. What do you do?

a. Post with such fervor that your followers shower you with shares before calling Internet 911 to report an online murder.

b. Draft your post, decide to “check” the “facts,” realize the controversy is more complex than you thought, and lose track of real work while trying to shoehorn your original take into the realm of objectivity.

c. Private-message your take, without checking its veracity, to close friends for the laughs or catharsis.

d. Consign your glorious take to the post trash can.

2. How many seconds did it take you to decide?

3. In however small a way, did your action nudge the world toward or away from a shared reality?

Let’s call this gamified reinforcement mechanism “the take temptation.” It amounts to the meme-ification of our common life and, therefore, of the common good itself. Jon writes earlier in the essay, redescribing the problem behind the problem:

We hear that online life has fragmented our “information ecosystem,” that this breakup has been accelerated by social division, and vice versa. We hear that alienation drives young men to become radicalized on Gab and 4chan. We hear that people who feel that society has left them behind find consolation in QAnon or in anti-vax Facebook groups. We hear about the alone-togetherness of this all.

What we haven’t figured out how to make sense of yet is the fun that many Americans act like they’re having with the national fracture.

Take a moment to reflect on the feeling you get when you see a headline, factoid, or meme that is so perfect, that so neatly addresses some burning controversy or narrative, that you feel compelled to share it. If it seems too good to be true, maybe you’ll pull up Snopes and check it first. But you probably won’t. And even if you do, how much will it really help? Everyone else will spread it anyway. Whether you retweet it or just email it to a friend, the end effect on your network of like-minded contacts — on who believes what — will be the same.

“Confirmation bias” names the idea that people are more likely to believe things that confirm what they already believe. But it does not explain the emotional relish we feel, the sheer delight when something in line with our deepest feelings about the state of the world, something so perfect, comes before us. Those feelings have a lot in common with how we feel when our sports team scores a point or when a dice roll goes our way in a board game.

It’s the relish of the meme, the fun of the hot take—all while the world burns—that Jon wants us to see so that he, in turn, can explain it. I leave the explanation to him. For my part, I’m going to do a bit of moralizing, aimed at myself first but offered here as a bit of stern encouragement to anyone who’s apt to listen.

The moral is simple: The take temptation is to be resisted at all costs, full stop. The take-industrial complex is not a bit of fun at the expense of others. It’s not a victimless joke. It is nothing less than your or my small but willing participation in unraveling the social fabric. It is the false catharsis that comes from treating the goods in common we hope to share as a game, to be won or lost by cheap jokes and glib asides. Nor does it matter if you reserve the take or meme for like-minded friends. In a sense that’s worse. The tribe is thereby reinforced and the Other thereby rendered further, stranger, more alien than before. You’re still perpetuating the habit to which we’re all addicted and from which we all need deliverance. You’re still feeding the beast. You’re still heeding the sly voice of the tempter, whose every word is a lie.

The only alternative to the take temptation is the absolutely uncool, unrewarding, and unremunerative practice of charity for enemies, generosity of spirit, plainness of prose, and perfect earnestness in argument. The lack of irony is painful, I know; the lack of sarcasm, boring; the lack of grievance, pitiful. So be it. Begin to heal the earth by refusing to litter; don’t wish the world rid of litter while tossing a Coke can out the window.

This means not reveling in the losses of your enemies, which is to say, those friends and neighbors for whom Christ died with whom you disagree. It means not joking about that denomination’s woes. It means not exaggerating or misrepresenting the views of another person, no matter what they believe, no matter their character, no matter who they are. It means not pretending that anyone is beyond the pale. It means not ridiculing anyone, ever, for any reason. It means, practically speaking, not posting a single word to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or any other instrument of our digital commons’ escalating fracture. It means practicing what you already know to be true, which is that ninety-nine times out of one hundred, the world doesn’t need to know what you think, when you think it, by online means.

The task feels nigh impossible. But resistance isn’t futile in this case. Every minor success counts. Start today. You won’t be sorry. Nor will the world.

Deflating tech catastrophism

There’s no better way to deflate my proclivities for catastrophism—a lifelong project of my long-suffering wife—than writers I respect appealing to authorities like St. Augustine and Wendell Berry. And that’s just what my friends Jeff Bilbro and Alan Jacobs have done in two pieces this week responding to my despairing reflections on digital technology, prompted by Andy Crouch’s wonderful new book, The Life We’re Looking For.

I’m honored by their lovely, invigorating, and stimulating correctives. I think both of them are largely right, and what anyone reading Crouch-on-tech, East-on-Crouch, Bilbro-on-East-on-Crouch, East-on-tech, Jacobs-on-East-on-tech, etc., will see quickly is how much this conversation is a matter of minor disagreements rendered intelligible in light of shared first principles. How rare it is to have more light than heat in online (“bloggy”) disputations!

So thanks to them both. I don’t want to add another meandering torrent of words, as I’m wont to do, so let me aim for clarity (I would say concision, but then we all know that’s not in play): first in what we agree about, second in what we perhaps don’t.

Agreements:

1. Andy’s book is fantastic! Everyone should buy it and do their utmost to implement its wisdom in their lives and the lives of their households.

2. The measure of a vision of the good life or even its enactment is not found in its likelihood either (a) to effect massive political transformation or (b) to elicit agreement and adoption in a high percentage of people’s lives.

3. Digital is not the problem per se; Mammon is. (Both Jeff and Alan make this point, but I’ll quote Alan here: “the Digital is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mammon.” I’ll be pocketing that line for later use, thank you very much.)

4. We cannot expect anything like perfection or wholesale “health”—of the technological or any other kind—in this life. Our attempts at flourishing will always be imperfect, fallible, and riddled with sin.

5. Christians are called to live in a manner distinct from the world, so the task of resisting Mammon’s uses of Digital falls to us as a matter of discipleship to Christ regardless of the prospects of our success.

6. Actual non-metaphorical revolutionary political change, whether bottom-up or top-down, is not in the cards, and (almost?) certainly would bring about an equally unjust or even worse state of affairs. Swapping one politico-technological regime for another turns out to mean little more than: meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A difference in degree, not in kind.

7. What we need is hope, and Christians have good grounds for hope—though not for optimism, short of the Kingdom.

8. What is possible, in faith and hope, here and now, is a reorientation (even a revolution) of the heart, following Augustine. That is possible in this life, because Christ makes it possible. Jeff, Alan, and Andy are therefore asking: Which way are we facing? And what would it take to start putting one foot in front of the other in the right direction? Yes. Those are the correct questions, and they can be answered. And though I (I think defensibly) use the language principalities and powers with respect to Digital, I do not disagree that it is not impossible—check out those negatives piling up one on another—for our digital technologies to be bent in the direction of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Which is to say, toward Christ’s Kingdom.

Now to disagreements, which may not amount to disagreements; so let us call them lingering queries for further pondering:

1. For whom is this vision—the one outlined above and found in Andy’s book—meant? That is, is it meant for Christians or for society as a whole? I can buy that it is meant for the church, for some of the theological premises and commitments I’ve already mentioned. I’m less persuaded, or perhaps need persuading, that it is one that “fits” a globalized secular liberal democracy, or at least ours, as it stands at the moment.

2. Stipulate that it is not impossible for this vision to be implemented by certain ordinary folks (granting, with Jeff, that Christians are called not to be normies but to be saints: touché!). I raised questions of class in my review and my blog posts, but I didn’t see class come up in Jeff or Alan’s responses. My worry, plainly stated, is that middle-to-upper-middle-class Americans with college degrees, together with all the familial and social and financial capital that comes along with that status, are indeed capable of exercising prudence and discipline in their use of digital technology—and that everyone else is not. This is what I meant in the last post when I drew attention to the material conditions of Digital. It seems to me that the digital architecture of our lives, which in turn generates the social scripts in which and by which we understand and “author” our lives, has proven most disastrous for poor and working class folks, especially families. They aren’t the only people I mean by “normies,” but they certainly fall into that category. It isn’t Andy et al’s job to have a fix for this problem. But I do wonder whether they agree with me here, that it is not inaccurate to describe one’s ability to extricate oneself even somewhat from Digital’s reach as being a function of a certain class and/or educational privilege.

3. In which case, I want to ask the practical question: How might we expand our vision of the good life under Mammon’s Digital reign to include poor and working class families?—a vision, in other words, that such people would find both attractive and achievable.

4. If pursuing the good life is not impossible, and if it begins with a reorientation of the heart to the God we find revealed in Christ, then it seems to me that—as I believe Jeff, Alan, and Andy all agree—we cannot do this alone. On one hand, as we’ve already seen, we require certain material conditions. On the other hand, we need a community. But that word is too weak. What we need is the church. This is where my despairing mood comes in the back door. As I’ve written elsewhere, the church is in tatters. I do not look around and see a church capable of producing or sustaining, much less leading, prudent wisdom in managing the temptations of Digital. I see, or at least I feel, abject capitulation. Churches might be the last place I’d look for leadership or help here. Not because they’re especially bad, but because they’re the same as everyone else. I mean this question sincerely: Is your local church different, in terms of its use of and reliance on and presumptions about technology, than your local public schools, your local gyms, your local coffee shops? Likewise, are your church’s leaders or its members different, in terms of their relationship to Digital, than your non-Christian neighbors? If so, blessings upon you. That’s not my experience. And in any case, I don’t mean this as some sort of trump card. If our churches are failing (and they are), then it’s up to us to care for them, to love them, and to do what we can to fix what’s ailing them, under God. Moreover, the promise of Christ stands, whatever the disrepair of the church in America: the gates of hell shall not prevail against his people. That is as true now as it ever was, and it will remain true till the end of time. Which means, I imagine my friendly interlocutors would agree, that we not only may have hope, but may trust that God’s grace will be sufficient to the tasks he’s given us—in this case, the task of being faithful in a digital age. Yes and amen to all of that. The point I want to close with is more practical, more a matter of lived experience. If we need (a) the spiritual precondition of a reasonably healthy church community on top of (b) the material precondition of affluence-plus-college in order (c) to adopt modest, though real, habits of resistance to Mammon-cum-Digital … that’s a tall order! I hereby drop my claim that it is not doable, along with my wistful musings about a Butlerian Jihad from above. Nevertheless. It is profoundly dispiriting to face the full height of this particular mountain. Yes, we must climb it. Yes, it’s good know I’ve got brothers in arms ready to do it together; we don’t have to go it alone. But man, right now, if I’m honest, all I see is how high the summit reaches. So high you can’t see to the top of it.