I’ve been told all my life that I have an “old soul,” which comment can function contextually either as a compliment on surprising wisdom or a polite acknowledgement of a tendency to grumble over change. Much as I hope the former has had some purchase in my case, it is certainly easier to observe as I grow older how newfangled technologies in particular often seem novel mainly for their capacity to annoy. My observations would suggest, though, that this phenomenon is far from an exclusive product of my own precociously geriatric disposition, and though I hesitate to apply Cory Doctorow’s widely popular moniker for its crassness (Wikipedia offers “platform decay” as a prudish alternative for the puritans among us), there can be little doubt of the collective sensation that the complex of techno-consumerism in America is broadly sweeping toward lower quality for greater cost — for even while technologies become monetarily cheaper, their psychological, social, and spiritual demands only seem to soar.

Though it seems to be a sentiment which has continually declined since the end of America’s love-affair with the automobile, I rather enjoy driving. It is only recently that I have much noticed this, finding that I frequently and readily volunteer to do so almost heedless of other circumstances, have so far only owned manual-transmission vehicles, and perhaps most damningly have purchased sim racing equipment so that I can enjoy the inimitable thrill of pretending to operate a vehicle. Despite its own quirks, simulating driving a car while at home, in fact, is quite opposite the recent trend in real vehicles designed to simulate being at home. My growing enjoyment of driving has only made more relatively baffling the recent advent of self-driving cars, indeed, cars purpose-built for those who would rather not drive. A modicum of reflection certainly reveals that this development, like all developments, lies at the end of a long history, in this case a history of technological values such as comfort, convenience and ease that have, over the course of rendering the driving experience less and less like itself and more and more like reclining at home, culminated in a driving experience that is literally no longer itself. 

In the course of this recently realized affection, I have also reached the motorist milestone of operating a vehicle old enough to lack power steering — qualitatively far better than my previous achievement of only having driven without power steering in a vehicle designed for it. Without even the aid of a power steering system, it becomes painfully clear that there is only one real degree of separation between the driver and the road. The energies of the terrain’s contact with the machine are mediated to the body directly by the machine itself, and believe me, after a short distance the forearms begin to testify that every bump and deviation in the pavement adds up. Power steering may interfere in some ways in the physical feedback the driver receives, but ultimately it is a technology that serves to compensate for the relative inability of human arms to continue directing the wheels for extended periods or in tight spots. In this way, critically, power steering does not detract from the operator’s agency, but rather augments it by enabling the driver to steer with greater endurance and precision. It simply compounds the input it is already receiving, and thus acts as an enhancement to the machine’s mediation between man and his environment.

This example stands in stark contrast to many of the technologies available in vehicles today, from lane assist and automatic grade-braking all the way up to self-driving functionality. In these consists another layer entirely, another degree separating man and environment: the digital. Rather than negotiating the way by means of the machine, the driver’s relation to the machine is itself now mediated by software, the little ghost living in the machine that actually pilots the vehicle after having taken the driver’s input into duly algorithmic consideration, if at all. This marks the qualitative technological difference between something like a Model A Ford with its forearm-punishing contact between man and earth and something like a Tesla Cybertruck which, notably, is “fly-by-wire,” having no mechanical connection whatsoever between where the hands meet the wheel and where the rubber meets the road. These may seem to those less enthusiastic about driving like very idiosyncratic and insignificant differences, and certainly from an experiential focus it is little different than a snob pontificating on the tasting notes of two indistinguishable vintages, but the superficial, pragmatic fact of point-A-to-point-B travel obscures the more significant leap entailed by this addition of a further degree of separation. Fundamentally, it is a shift from using technology to interact with the world to using technology to interact with technology.

As I read through Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine, the conundrum of technology in service of itself occurred to me as a “Hansel and Gretel problem.” In the famous fairy-tale, Hansel and Gretel are enticed by the confections of a seemingly benign, maternal figure whose provision turns out to be the very means of facilitating their own destruction. This delicate boundary between mother and witch, between provision and annihilation, works well as a formulation for this change in our relationship to technology. At what point does that which feeds us become that which eats us? What happens to turn the consumer into the consumed? The aforementioned shift is worthy of note. As technologies reach such pinnacles of convenience as they have in automotive development, to the point that the human activities they once enabled are actually eliminated, there is a need to address this Hansel and Gretel problem, because at some point the things which empower human agency evidently begin to shift their energies to a usurpation of human agency.

Generative AI makes a good scapegoat yet again in this regard. As many have noted, the promise that AI would free man from drudgery to do the things he actually wants to do has in practice only astounded with regard to how increasingly farcical it grows each day that passes with such AI in the world, robbing us indeed of drudgery and tedium only to reveal how integral these are to the human experience and therefore our knowledge of our place in the world. As Sam Harris insinuated quite asininely in his recent conversation with Ross Douthat, this hope in technological liberation is predicated on the rather stupid notion that greater leisure will invariably lead to greater mental, emotional, and spiritual flourishing. Any dead-eyed doomscrolling zombies in the virtual audience may have laughed at the suggestion if they still remembered how to feel. The devil’s bargain with informational technologies as powerful as those we now have access to has proven to be that the leisure these technologies offer is immediately demanded back by the same. They need our time and attention in order to survive, and the more powerful they become, the more of it they hunger for.

Enter the agency problem. The defining characteristic of all informational technologies, from writing to radio to chat bots, is that rather than augmenting human physicality, they expand mentality, offloading cognitive processes via technical means. Like those who dreamed in black and white during the age of black and white television, modern brains are significantly impacted and altered even below the behavioral level by such informational technologies. With the pipe-dream-or-feverish-nightmare of general artificial intelligence shaping the trajectory of development, the self-driving car of the informational tech-tree is evidently a complete outsourcing of human cognition itself. Modern man has feared for decades the possibility that AI would achieve a human level of autonomy, when the present danger is in fact that humans would lose that level of autonomy. It may be the case that in order to raise his creation to life, Frankenstein must evidently give it his own brain. 

The course of informational technological advancement has, at some point, become a witch in many regards rather than a mother. The internet is a likely suspect as the point at which the attempt to grow the human mind becomes a blurring of the mind’s borders, a smearing and disintegrating of thought into the aptly named “cloud” where AI now lives. The troublesome thing about blurring that border is, put another way, not that it would let the mind roam out of the limits of itself, but that it would let others roam in — especially others who have no compunctions about exploiting that cognitive openness for their own profit, pillaging the powers of the mind to make a quick buck. The written word has always been powerful, and therefore posed the danger of pulling the unwary into all manner of trouble with falsity and guile. This power is augmented by the algorithms which have come to define the internet of the 2020s, an internet in which the danger is heightened from being sucked into a harmful book to not being able to decide for oneself what book to read. The internet does not merely augment the human agent’s ability to give attention to what he wants, but instead begins to usurp that prejudgement. The insidious label of “For You” that appears on virtually every social media app sums this up well. That which gives you everything you want begins to tell you what to want, so that you’ll keep coming back. The witch wants to fatten up your mind under the pretense of your own good. It’s not like “you” are the one who makes billions off the “For You” page.

And yet, there being nothing new under the sun, this danger has indeed always existed. In many ways, it is an expression of a more fundamental reality of demonism. Addiction is not new, manipulation is not new. What is new is the arena of the digital, and therefore the pressing need for awareness that the digital is in fact an arena of spiritual good and ill, and it is one in which the battles are fought at inhuman, breakneck speeds, hyperaccelerated by connectivity and computing power unprecedented in history. Paul Kingsnorth suggests via Simone Weil that having “roots” is the key to preserving culture and identity in this digital-global age, but his thesis misses the very “root” that it itself needs. The primordial facts of metaphysical navigation in this spiritual warfare entail an ontological “rootedness” in the very identity of God Himself. Indeed, in any facet of life, being aware of danger is rarely sufficient to engender safety. Welders need more than awareness, they need masks. Builders need more than knowledge, they need helmets. To know that these digital technologies are a spiritual battlefield of the nous is not enough if the soul is not itself secure through continual abiding in Christ. The mind open to the internet needs the Gatekeeper to protect it.

Demons are real, and they will take any avenue they can to pull God’s image-bearers away from Him. But the possessive, addictive spiritual forces driving endless consumption, fattening up the mind in order to devour it, demanding obeisance from behind the masks of dumb idols, made now of silicon and plastic rather than wood and stone, are not as real as the Power which defeats them. So the discerning Christian must interrogate the internet and AI as she must interrogate all things, demanding to know what direction they are leading her. If they lead her soul into deeper faith, hope, love, if they lead her toward Christ, then she can honor God with their use. If they lead her toward themselves, toward deeper dependence on earthly things than on God, toward anger, jealousy, resentment, bitterness, strife, lust, fear, and the like, then she can spurn them with confidence insomuch as it frees her heart to be with her Lord.

As far as technology is concerned, it should be rather uncontroversial to observe that the purpose of technology in terms of utility is to make life better, that such is in the interest of human agency. But as the Harris/Douthat conversation demonstrates, comparative value judgements like “better” demand a notion of “good” by which they can be measured. Technology cannot by definition make life “better” without assuming an ideal of the good life. Hansel and Gretel, after all, escape the witch and abscond with her loot only by the guidance of the trail of breadcrumbs, the path of sustenance teleologically evocative of home, without which the problem is all but intractable. It seems apparent to many my age that our generation is long overdue for answers to questions about the location of home, that is, what the good life is and how technology can serve it or hinder it. The slop era no doubt represents a kind of bifurcation, a decision point that will separate those who dare to ask these questions in view of the longing and emptiness only exacerbated by techno-addiction and those who will not. And if the poison is truly in the dose, perhaps as individuals we must cut the Gordian knot of technological moral neutrality and embrace an ethic which paints certain technologies as, if not inherently so, nonetheless immoral because of the respective effects they have on each one’s soul. 

I read a tongue-in-cheek article recently about the McRib lawsuit — premised on abstractly reasonable outrage at the disguising of tripe as a finer cut of meat — that defiantly stated on behalf of all Americans, and not without warrant, that We the People do not care what is in our food as long as it is delicious, like eating steak in the Matrix. If it tastes like pork rib, it’s pork rib. But just as a body full of McRib’s is probably not a healthy one, a culture that refuses to concern itself with means is not a healthy one, either. A car that drives itself epitomizes a belief that the destination matters infinitely more than the journey, that means are of no consequence in light of ends, that an ideal world would allow one to skip magically from place to place without having to see or, worse, interact with the world in between. AI generation of “art” espouses the conviction that the product is the only thing of value in the artistic process, which therefore ceases to be a process at all. But the process of creating art, the self-transformation effected in the artist’s interfacing with the external world and crystalized in time, is what makes the product essentially what it is. (As Hilary Lane put it, offloading the cognitive load of art to AI is like letting a robot lift weights for you at the gym.) For the Christian, the trajectory of the resurrection and the life in Christ ahead is inseparable from the incremental transformation that the “guarantee of our inheritance” effects in her now.

The good life does not remain abstract in Christ, but it is nonetheless ubiquitous enough to be adaptable. A life that is ontologically anchored in the mystical union can fit the container of any circumstance without losing its essential shape. Seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you, and you will be able to do all things, endure all things, hope all things through Christ. So, every right relationship to technology will be the only right relationship to technology, which is one that follows from right relationship with God. Whether you eat or drink, do it for the glory of God, for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin, and man does not live by bread alone. Your enemy the Devil is prowling like a lion, even in the world of cyberspace, but He who is in the Church is greater than he who is in the world.

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be enslaved by anything. “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. — 1 Corinthians 6:12-13 (RSV)

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already. — 1 John 4:1-3 (RSV)

As therefore you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so live in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. — Colossians 2:6-7 (RSV)