Tag: surveillance capitalism

Being Human — Chapter Eight — Being true-ly human in an age of deception

This is an adaptation of the eighth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

We have covered a lot of ground this series. We have looked at many of the ways we are being disintegrated as humans; pulled apart because we are pulled in so many directions all at once; we are bombarded with images in the spaces we occupy, in ways that shape our desires; our technology allows us to overcome the limits of our bodies, and there are narratives telling us the best thing we could do is leave our bodies behind and become immortal by making ourselves one with the cloud.

We have seen how there is a real sense that as we have shifted from Christendom, where there was a shared story about the world — where God was God, and the King and Queen were the rulers, and everyone knew their place, and you did not change — to a modern liberal democracy, where we are free from forces beyond ourselves; and we have closed ourselves off to those forces, and to the supernatural — in the West. How we now prefer to express ourselves and be authentic as an expression of this liberation. We saw how this means we have lost a great narrative; a story that unites us as humans — to each other, and to God. And this also meant moving away from communion with God — the triune God who is a community of love — being how we understand what it means to be human. We have now become authorities — self-authors of our own lives.

We saw how the world has become not just complicated, but complex.

We are caught in global webs and supply chains we do not understand. We have seen how our technology shapes our brains — through dopamine hits and how this is been co-opted by limbic capitalism — and how what we see is shaped by the algorithms of surveillance capitalism; to sell us stuff based on our desires and addictions and patterns of behaviour. If all this is true, it presents us with a challenge when it comes to knowing what is true — and being able to tell when we are freely acting as individuals — who are meant to be free from powers outside ourselves, and free to express ourselves. How do we know if we are expressing our own desires, or the desires implanted in our head by the machine world?

When we talk about these unseen forces shaping our thinking so we will use our bodies, and our energy, and our money in service of their kingdoms — while telling us we are free — this is what the beastly powers and principalities the Bible talks about look like in the real world. This is how — in Paul’s words in Ephesians 2, we are dead, captivated to fleshly desires, and under the power of the prince of the air. Being truly human is about being liberated from the serpent’s coils, and his lies (Ephesians 2:1-3).

Part of the disintegration happening to our humanity — and perhaps our own individual experience — involves our inability to know what is true because we are not just bombarded with images of the good life that fire up our desires, but with competing ideas about what is true. And if the systems we plug into and play with are not just geared to shape our desires, our beliefs and our thoughts through ‘scripted disorientation’ in ways we cannot see, we are going to find it tricky to know what truth is. This makes the task of building one another up “speaking the truth in love” or literally “truthing in love,” difficult, and makes it likely that, instead, we will be swept all over the place; ‘blown here and there’ (Ephesians 4:14-15).

So as we start tying up these threads — looking at the world that is disintegrating us — I want to suggest that we are made to be integrated; that we are made to be whole; joined up; connected — one — integrated in body, mind, and soul — sure, but also integrated into community — with other people — in the body of Jesus as our reading describes us and united — one — with God. This is the key to being truly human and holding it all together; and what has happened with all the social change we have covered is that these integrities have been pulled apart — because we — together and as individuals — live lives in the world that believe the lie of the serpent.

This is especially challenging in our age of digital propaganda — empires have always used imagery to enforce beliefs in truths within their system — Israel had the temple and sacrificial systems and its ritual life, Babylon had its stories and idols, Rome had its temples and statues and stories and spectacle — but in the 20th century a guy named Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew — drew on his uncle’s insights and applied them to public persuasion — in his book Propaganda.

It was a popular book in the image management project for the Nazis in Germany — but it is also a handbook for modern politics, advertising, and “public relations” — you might know that is the field I worked in before ministry.

In his book’s opening paragraph Bernays says the manipulation of our habits and opinions is foundational to democratic society.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”

Edward Bernays

While we feel free, it is like we are caught in a web by these spider-men who spin their lines so:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

Bernays

And these spider-men — not the friendly neighbourhood variety — are the true ruling power in our societies.

“Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Bernays

There has also been a massive increase in what the academic Harry Frankfurt called bull**** (note, I didn’t use this word when preaching, I called it ‘bullpoo’) — a technical description of deceptive speech that is not outright lies, but does not bother trying to be true.

Frankfurt reckons we are surrounded by spin, by misrepresentation, by bull****, which he says is a type of speech “… unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about…”

He suggests it arises from “the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.”

He has just described Twitter (now X); but also the animating forces of fake news and troll machines and the outrage industry, and the spiders spinning political speech who cannot speak straight sentences but use what George Orwell called doublespeak.

Like surveillance capitalism, and limbic capitalism, these propaganda machines are unseen forces manipulating and shaping our beliefs by spinning webs of half truths — the powers and principalities in our world propping up empires built on spin and idolatry and deception and that bull****.

If these forces are at work in our world how can we know what is true? How can we live truly? Especially if it is all fragmented and now there are multiple spiders spinning multiple webs — all offering their own truths according to our interests — like in a democracy — there is a reason people say we live in a post-truth world. Part of the shift away from God has involved separating big-T truths — facts — about earth from our spiritual values — personal little-t ‘truths’.

The author Nancy Pearcey borrows a picture from Francis Schaeffer of a two-storey (and two-story, pun intended) house to describe this shift and the way it plays out on modern questions of truth about our bodies, and our lives — in this metaphorical house, empirical objective truth — the scientific realm — is one storey, the facts, that shape public life, and beliefs about God falling into the subjective storey of private beliefs — values — where what is true for you is not true for me.

But what if those areas — morality and theology — are areas where there is actually capital-T truth that should shape not just our lives, but society?

And — to be fair — part of what led to this fragmenting was a lack of integrity on the church’s part — historically, with the corruption that prompted the Reformation. The Reformation created multiple ways to be Christian; it made multiple truths imaginable in Christendom — but it is happening presently too, where the church, which is meant to teach us truth, has acted like the powers and principalities — using our power to abuse and force people to conform while claiming to represent the capital-T Truth — and then employing spin and propaganda and cover-ups — people have inevitably — as they have walked away from those abusive institutions — walked away from the truths they proclaimed.

This has led a bunch of folks my age and younger towards deconstruction. This might be where you are at — right now. Now — I am all for deconstruction when we are deconstructing falsehoods and abuses in the church — both church traditions here are children of the Reformation; and I am all for recognising the way abusive institutions have caused wounds that intersect in damaging ways with the truths we have been taught by those institutions — and I recognise at times it can be super tricky to separate God from the church… but our deconstruction also has to extend to the powers and principalities corrupting the church — to seeing if these behaviours are true — if they are godly — and the risk with deconstruction is where we find ourselves “did God really say” and being drawn by those same powers to grasp onto things God says are bad for us. Deconstruction will only get you so far — it becomes disintegrating and destructive without reconstruction being part of the picture; without some sense that truth exists and that to be fully human is to live a life of integrity — one that is true.

If we want to be truly human — well, our origin story has something to say here — not just Genesis — but the Gospel — and Ephesians 2-4 (the Bible reading for the sermon) — unpacks what it looks like to find our life in that story, rather than the propaganda pulling us back into the serpent’s coils.

We do not live in a two-storey universe where there are facts related to the material world and values related to the spiritual side of life; if the same God is the creator of heavens and earth then — sure — there are two storeys — but there are truths in each; that we split them is a product of a disenchanted world where we get rid of the heavens and spiritual thinking, and see it having no bearing on reality.

And then ultimately we see that the Bible tells one story of the two storeys being brought together. Jesus turns up to end the exile — from Eden and Israel — as the tabernacle-in-the-flesh who brings heaven on earth — who comes to save us from homeless life in non-places — and he does not do this by restoring the temple to its former glory — as heavenly space — you might remember as we worked through Matthew’s Gospel that our origin story — the Gospel — is the story of heaven and earth coming together as the heavenly human brings the kingdom of God. To be truly human is to get our facts straight about heavenly life; about God and who he created us to be as we reflect heaven on earth as his image-bearing people.

We also live in a two-story world — in the narrative sense — we are either living in God’s story, or the serpent’s. The serpent was the first creature to introduce uncertainty about facts when it came to the upper storey — the heavenly realm — he got humans questioning ‘did God really say’ — questioning ‘is God really good’ (Genesis 3:1). He was a propagandist… putting the ‘pagan’ in pro—pagan—da. And since that lie worked so well he has been using this same deception to devour others. To disintegrate us — using powers and principalities — elemental forces — to shape the world and so shape our beliefs.

Humans became captives to deception — to deceptive idolatrous systems that harden our hearts into stone — like the people of Judah (Jeremiah 17:1). Idols and sin rewrite and rewire so that our hearts are “deceitful above all things” and “beyond cure” (Jeremiah 17:9). We need new hearts — with truth written on them by God, rather than idolatry inscribed on them by us — so we will see what is true (Jeremiah 31:33).

Which is what Jesus came to bring — the Word of God from the beginning — God tabernacling in the world (John 1:1, 14), as he came to liberate us from the father of lies — the devil — and those — like the Pharisees — who would build systems of deception to pull people away from God (John 8:44-45). Jesus used his “I am” statements through John to identify himself with the God who created the world and he describes himself as the way, the truth, and the life — the one in whom both storeys — the heavenly or spiritual — and the material — are held together and expressed as one integrated truth (John 14:6-7). And he calls us to find life in him — and John says he writes so that we might believe this true human is the path to true life (John 20:31).

So that we might — as Jesus puts it — find life in oneness with the triune God, being drawn into the eternal communion of love — through him (John 17:20-21),

as he provides hearts that point us to the truth by giving us the Spirit — the Spirit of truth (John 14:16-17, 16:13).

What is interesting in John — given the way he sets up deception as devilish and truth as found in Jesus — is how he reports Pilate’s words at Jesus’ trial — here Jesus is up against the face of the bull machine — Rome — in Jerusalem; the deceptive idolatrous regime that claims to be bringing heaven on earth, and is full of spin — and Pilate looks at Jesus, who claims to be king — not Caesar — and that is the charge against him — Jesus says he has come on the side of truth; to testify to the truth, that everyone who listens to truth — two-storey truth — listens to him (John 18:37), and Pilate says “what is truth” (John 18:38)?

We are all Pilates now…

Pilate does not recognise truth when it is standing in front of him. He becomes wrapped up in the serpent’s schemes, and the schemes of his children: the Pharisees. Jesus is executed. And in that moment — as the serpent strikes his heel, the serpent is crushed (Genesis 3:16); his grasp on humans — built through deception — comes unravelled as he is exposed; and as God’s nature — his love — is exposed for those who can see the truth — we were dead — in our sins — following the serpent’s story (Ephesians 2:1-2), but now, God who is rich in mercy has made us alive… by grace (Ephesians 2:4-5).

If you sit here and you are convinced by the evils of a world built on deception and manipulation and what that does to our humanity in a world where we have walked away from God — that is the serpent — that is the same force at work in the world that is exposed as a deceived world kills God’s son. Come out. Believe the truth. If you are tempted to deconstruct, or disintegrate — to proclaim one truth and live another — come back to Jesus. Away from death.

Not only is the serpent diabolical — literally — God is good and loving and shows that in the way Jesus radically refuses to use his power to manipulate and deceive; to the length he goes to in order to not be coercive, so that he dies, humiliated, on a cross to make a way to life with God, and expose us to the truth about God.

Jesus — the way, the truth, and the life — offers the pathway to the integrated life of communion with God, and others, we were made for — and the path away from the deception of the serpent, and our deceitful serpent-like hearts. He reconstructs us.

Paul talks a couple of times in his letters about people having been bewitched — and enslaved — to the elemental spiritual forces of the world — who are opposed to Jesus (Galatians 3:1, 4:3). He talks about these forces built on hollow and deceptive philosophy, rather than on Jesus — the fullness of God in human form (Colossians 2:8-9). He says we died to those with Jesus, and so we should stop living by their scripts (Colossians 2:20). It is interesting that in both cases he is talking about people who want to operate as though we are under law creating rules as truths to live by — not grace — but there is a pattern where spiritual forces are being used to pull people away from truth. Away from oneness with Jesus.

In Ephesians 4 he describes what this looks like — what it looks like to be one with Jesus. One with each other. In communion — as one body and one Spirit (Ephesians 4:4-6). He describes a life grounding ourselves in the truth, and speaking it to each other — whether that is through particular speaking roles in church; or speaking to one another as the church — the goal is that we be established in the truth of the Gospel and united and mature in Christ, so that we are not infants tossed around by the deceitful scheming of people in the world who are serpent-like (Ephesians 4:11-14).

Paul’s antidote to a poisonous post-truth world hell-bent on our destruction is being people who “truth in love” — that is the literal translation — in the body of Christ — living integrated lives grounded in truth as we grow together… built up in love. This “truthing” in love certainly includes speaking the truth — because Paul is going to come back to that — we are to avoid lies — and, I would suggest — as much as possible propaganda and that bull (Ephesians 4:25).

Paul talks about the same heart-hardening that the Old Testament sees as a product of idolatry (Ephesians 4:17-18) — and that is part of the picture for us in a world where we are bombarded with lies and images that shape our hearts — so that we give ourselves over to greed and indulgence (Ephesians 4:19). Paul is describing their world — and ours.

But we are people who are committing to be taught in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus (Ephesians 4:20-21); putting off the selves shaped by deceit, that spin our webs of deceit even as we are caught in them — to become new people shaped by the truth, and committed to speaking it in a world of deceit as we become like God again, reflecting his righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:22-24).

And that is hard. Because deceit is hardwired into our world — and — without the Spirit — it is hardwired into our hearts. And we have to learn this. We have to learn to hear truth, and we have to learn to speak it — and speak it in a way that makes it plausible in our disenchanted two-storey world where this stuff is ‘value’ rather than fact — and where the institutional church has often been complicit in propaganda and that bull and abuse… and where we are formed to have — and voice — quick opinions about everything.

I am going to suggest two ways we might change how we approach truth, as people — how we work towards integration rather than disintegration — that will hopefully make us more likely to speak truth and less likely to spin that bull.

If what the Bible says — what Jesus says — not what the church says — if it is true, then Jesus is truth — and the truth about Jesus operates both in the material world — the world of facts — and the spiritual world — the world of values — in fact, he integrates the two; and so should we. We should reject the idea that we have a public and a private self — or that there is no truth — we are all going to pick a framework to work out truth from anyway; and none of us is free from powers beyond ourselves — so we are not losing anything if we choose to start with God — the creator — being the one who gets to declare what is true — and with Jesus’ claims that he is the way, the truth, and the life — and God in the flesh — as a starting point for assessing other truths.

I want to suggest the first real act of pursuing truth is contemplation — prayerful contemplation — the philosopher Hannah Arendt — whose intellectual project was trying to figure out how people in Germany came to believe the lies of the Nazis — she reckons we can only know truth; and live truly, if we stop moving and speaking — if we cease — if we be still and know that God is God. We have to free ourselves from the webs that entangle us.

“Every movement, the movements of body and soul as well as of speech and reasoning, must cease before truth. Truth, be it the ancient truth of Being or the Christian truth of the living God, can reveal itself only in complete human stillness.”

Hannah Arendt

Contemplating truth will mean listening to God — making headspace and time to engage with God’s word and pray that God’s living and active Spirit might guide us, through his living and active word, push us outside of the forces at work in our world against God, and towards God.

We will look more at this next week — but there is a trick to reading God’s word in conversation with other humans — within traditions that might need deconstructing — it is not always easy to separate our experience of people using the Bible without love, from the truth the Bible contains — and there is a whole internet industry geared towards deconstruction that basically sounds like people asking “did God really say”… but I reckon one guide is to read the Bible the way Jesus did — as one story — that testifies about him so that we receive Jesus as God’s truth.

True speech is actually going to require listening — to God — first of all — and to others — before we run around with our opinions. This sort of contemplation is not just an individual act — it is one we pursue as we engage in “truthing in love” together. I reckon the modern church is too geared towards actions and words — and online hot takes — that bull — without truth because we do not live contemplative lives.

Part of this contemplative life is going to involve cultivating the humility to recognise your limits; that your access to truth is limited by your brain, and your body, being stuck in a particular time and space — so you invite other people to speak the truth in love to you — and — as much as possible, receiving that truth without being defensive — this is something I am working on, personally — but if you are subjected to powers outside yourself, and told you are free — and that you have your own truth — you need someone to burst the bubble; we are not in a good position to be objective about ourselves, or the world — our standpoints, our experiences — the forces that have worked us over — we cannot see them, but others might be able to — especially older folks who have been through a bit — and older folks — I think I can still speak on behalf of the younger folks — we need you. But, there is a flipside where older folks might have been stuck in bad traditions so long a younger perspective can be helpful too — this is where the “in love” bit comes in to our truthing — so younger folks, let me embrace middle age and tell you we need you to speak truth to us older folks too; calling us to repent; to deconstruct and reconstruct our lives around the truth.

C. S. Lewis reckoned we should also listen to dead people — not in a spooky way — but by reading older books from outside our time — books from our time are a product of our standpoint, but in the words of older, dead, Christians we might find ideas that critique our take on the world.

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”

C.S Lewis, in his prologue to a translation of Athanasius ‘On the Incarnation’

In the olden days there were monastic folks who would withdraw from the city and go live in the desert — these desert mothers and fathers had a totally different perspective on their time — and the practices of the church — and listening to voices outside our experience; and outside the norm — might be part of proper humble contemplation. Read less white men. Listen to the people who are deconstructing because of the way the church has bought into lies, and contemplate how we are part of that picture as the church; the body of Jesus.

This contemplation might liberate us from forces we cannot see in our own time, and our own hearts — it might help us deconstruct lies in order to reconstruct our lives around truth. It might help us actually speak truthfully, rather than speaking that bull. We need that sort of truth in our lives.

The second practice is integration — it relates — but if we have this capital-T truth about God and humanity that truth should be true in every sphere and integrated into our lives and our actions and our other beliefs. It can be tempting in a world built on lies to embrace scepticism about all claims — but I wonder if integration — starting with a foundation — is a more hopeful posture — where, rather than being suspicious of voices that do not conform to our experience — our standpoint — we ask ourselves “how does this fit with what I know to be true because I know Jesus?” We are kind of perfectly positioned in how we are meeting together as two traditions to humbly recognise that different human traditions have limits; that there will be truths we have been blinded to by our traditions, and to humbly seek to reform and integrate those truths into our lives — our habits — and our beliefs as we seek truth together. Real truth is truth that is embedded into our lives — and a community — that is how “truthing in love” is about more than just words — but speaking truthfully to each other also requires the work of both contemplating and being able to integrate the words we say with true things about the world, and about God.

Part of the disintegrating nature of spin and that bull is that it is almost never substantial or integrated with deep traditions — with ideas beyond itself. Spin, or bull****, emerges from a lack of expertise, rather than expertise. The writer and academic Karen Swallow Prior has this great advice she gives her students about the pursuit of truth being about integrating deep knowledge, rather than creating totally new thinking, built off an old story by Jonathan Swift about a spider talking to a bee…

“This story within the story consists of a discourse between a spider (a “Modern,” who symbolizes for Swift the worst of modern subjective thinking) and a bee (an “Ancient,” who symbolizes the best of traditional classical learning).”

Karen Swallow Prior

The spider has spun a deadly web built from within itself, just to entrap others — and the bee, facing its death, points out that the spider brings darkness and death — it produces nothing but excrement and poison from its work; it is disconnected to anything beyond itself, while a bee builds a nourishing house of life-giving sweetness by connecting the life it builds to a community and to a structure it puts together from outside itself. She reckons our approach to finding and speaking truth — in her case it is about students being “bees, not spiders.” Integrating knowledge in their essays is about avoiding spin and building knowledge from good sources outside ourselves, but she sees her task in a post-truth world as, increasingly, helping people spot the difference between the poisonous lies of the spider, and life-giving truths — nectar.

“I see now that the challenge is increasingly to better equip students to distinguish between poison and nectar, to build from strong materials rather than to create airy edifices which, like spiderwebs, are easily swept away once their lethal work is done.”

Karen Swallow Prior

She, like Paul in Ephesians, sees the key to not being swept away, or sweeping away others, as being firmly planted in the truth of the Gospel, and having it integrated into the other truths we believe and speak.

Be bees. Not spiders. People committed to living truthfully and in love together; one with God and each other — and to speaking truthfully to each other and the world as we bear witness to the true human who is the way, the truth, and the life.

September 8, 2025 Add Comment

Being Human — Chapter Three — Made to be Makers (and to be re-made)

This is an adaptation of the third talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

Last ‘chapter’ we imagined life in an old village. This time I want you to imagine you are living in a monastery in the thirteenth century.

Here is a picture from the dedication of an altar in a monastery in France.

These seven candles on the altar were not just lights; they helped you mark time. You knew roughly — not exactly — how far a candle burned in an hour, so the daily schedule of prayers and meals was not “by the clock,” but “by the candle.”

The rhythms and rules — the daily prayers, weekly rhythms, and the Christian calendar — provided an enchanted framework for life in space and time. These candles were a technology that helped.

They are an echo of the lights in the menorah — a candlestick that held seven candles, seven bowls of oil with wicks that lit up Israel’s holy place.

Israel’s priests had to keep these lights burning from evening till morning every day as a “lasting ordinance” — a picture of space and time to teach Israel its story (Exodus 27:20–21).

The lampstand was made like a golden fruit tree, and people connect it to the tree of life (Exodus 25:31–32).

And the lights were shining in front of the curtain, which separated the holy place from the most holy place, as a picture of the barrier between heavens and earth, with shining heavenly beings — cherubim — embroidered on it (Exodus 25:3, 26:31, 35).

The word for the lamplight is used in Genesis 1, and then repeatedly in the instructions for these candlesticks. It is used for the lights that mark sacred times and days and years, in the vault between heavens and the earth. These are reproduced in Israel’s mini-heavens-and-earth space, to teach people to live in a certain rhythm that reinforces their picture of the universe, and of God (Genesis 3:14; Exodus 27:20).

The act of crafting this lampstand, and keeping these lights alight, is an act of making. This lampstand, and its lights, are a technology that shaped Israel’s physical environment, in the temple, and their understanding of the world (Exodus 25:31–32).

Making things — making technology and art and objects that teach us and shape us — is part of being human; being made in the image of God, to represent him (Genesis 1:26).

The author Dorothy Sayers wrote about this in her book The Mind of the Maker. She says all we know about God when he says we are made in his image is that he makes things:

“When we turn back to see what [the writer of Genesis] says about the original upon which the ‘image’ of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, ‘God created.’”

Dorothy Sayers

So a characteristic we have in common with God is “the desire and ability to make things.”

To be human is to make things from the world he made, even the gold in it (Genesis 2:15) — to represent and worship him. The task of cultivating and keeping a garden, and then a temple, required tools and technology. There are even instructions in the laws about the wick trimmers; tools made of gold (Exodus 25:38).

We can make temple furnishings that teach us about God and his world. Or, like bricks in Babel and Babylon, we can make things to push beyond our limits against God. Or we can make golden calves:

“He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.”

Exodus 32:4

That is the tension for us today. Being human means having the capacity to make technology that shapes the world, shapes how we see the world, and shapes us. That technology will either extend our function as image bearers, or deform us as we make idols. Both these truths are true and we have to hold them together.

And, just for fun, when Jesus is introduced as “the carpenter” in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 6:3), it is the word tekton — a word for craftsman — from the root for our word “technology.” The true human is a tech-maker.

So, back to our monastery, and these candles that taught people about life in the world: light and darkness; life in rhythm with God; as limited people located in space and time. Neither space nor time was split between secular and sacred; it was all God’s. This rhythm of praying the hours, marked by candlelight, provided a framework for life — one that was a little inexact. And if you were a stickler for rules, like some monks, this was a problem.

So in 1283 some monks at a monastery in England, who wanted more regulation, installed a mechanical clock, right above the pulpit in the chapel. That is when people started complaining about preaching going too long…

Historians reckon this might have been the first mechanical clock. It is likely they were invented in a monastery.

Marshall McLuhan is a bit of a hero of mine. He is the guy who said “the medium is the message.” His point was that we think we are changed by ideas — the content of a message — but those ideas are first shaped by the technologies — mediums — we use to understand things. Like with the candles: when we believe we are thinking things, changed by ideas, we neglect how our bodies interact with the world — how what we see and touch and smell and use shapes our thinking, and what we love.

Lots of his thinking about technology was actually built from two Biblical ideas. First, the idea that we become what we worship, and that we shape our tools — technology — and thereafter technology shapes us.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Marshall McLuhan

And second, the idea that the incarnation of Jesus is the ultimate communication:

“In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message. It is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”

Marshall McLuhan

He believes the clock in the monastery changed our view of time, and space, and was the start of “natural man” giving way to “mechanical man.” The monks’ need for synchronised action in communal life, with a clock regulating prayer and eating times, introduced ways of seeing time that changed what we behold. Time was seen as mechanical, and not observed in sensory and tactile ways.

He says when missionaries brought mechanical clocks to Asia they replaced not candles but burning incense sticks, so time became disconnected from our bodies and senses.

And when mechanical clocks — invented by monks — were installed in town squares they regulated the workday, and brought a new world order, and a new story about the world. Working with factories and engine-driven public transport — like trains — to get whole cities or communities running like clockwork, or like an old-fashioned wind-up robot, an automaton.

“By the nineteenth century it had provided a technology of cohesion that was inseparable from industry and transport, enabling an entire metropolis to act almost as an automaton.”

— Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan traces how this changed how we view space as well, shifting us from an enchanted cosmos to a mechanical universe. During this time, because machines were a powerful model of things working, people started talking about God as a watchmaker. The universe became clocklike.

And this would have been impossible without the clock embedding itself in our image-creating capacity — our imagination. You cannot imagine God as a clockmaker without clocks.

“The mechanical clock, in short, helps to create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Humans moved from thinking about God as a triune communion of love, whose love overflows into the world and in creation, to thinking about God as a distant engineer, because we do not just think, but we are people who live in time and space with our technology.

C. S. Lewis’s first public lecture as chair of medieval literature at Cambridge was about the difference between the world in the stories he loved, and the modern world.

He believed Pharaohs in Egypt had more in common with Jane Austen than we do. The enchanted pagan world had more in common with the enchanted Christian world than it does with the post-Christian world. And the big difference is the rise of the machine.

Especially the way with the machine we get a mythology that comes with technology: the idea that the newer and more efficient is always better.

“… a new archetypal image. It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy…”

C. S. Lewis

And while I would not want the medical technology of any time before now, I wonder if this is where the furious tension gets broken. Where we slip into an idolatrous belief that human technology will fix the world. That all change is good, even if it breaks us by pulling us past our limits with false promises that dehumanise us.

Lewis saw this with the car. When people did not have cars they were stuck in the village we imagined last chapter. Their church was the church in the public square. Their neighbour, who they were called to love, was their actual neighbour. Where clocks regulated village life, cars fragmented it, as people could go rapidly beyond the limits of being a body in space.

C. S. Lewis wrote about the car annihilating space. He had this idea that distance is a good gift from God in a vast world, that our limits are actually a gift from God.

“The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space.’ It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given.”

C. S. Lewis

Technology will always extend or break our limits. That is both a feature and a bug. It is where we end up in Babel-like idolatry, or making tools to feed people more effectively.

But despite the idea we often believe — that technology is neutral and where it takes us is about how we use it — McLuhan has a great line about this idea, calling it the “numb stance of the technological idiot.” Technology is not neutral. It is ecological. It always brings change to our environments, and so to us. If it does not, it is not really a technology.

“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”

Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan’s work was trying to help us think through not just the obvious enhancements brought by technology, but the unseen forces — even at the level of myths and images — that change us and the world.

The monks did not imagine that, rather than regulating time with God, the clock might change how people thought about time and space and God. And maybe, like them, we do not think about how our technology is not just regulating our lives, but changing our imaginations and providing a mythology — a story — we inhabit.

There has been a technological revolution since the mechanical age that has already altered our picture of reality — our mythology — mostly in a closed-off universe. This has been about how we think of ourselves and the universe. People once talked about our brains as machine-like. Now we talk about them as though they are computers — programmed, wired, dependent on data. And people model human relationships as networks, while picturing the universe as a giant super-computer.

Elon Musk already believes we live in a computer simulation. There are more people who think if we are not already, that is the path to immortality.

Remember Yuval Noah Harari from chapter one — the guy who ‘annihilated space and time’ by giving a TED talk as a hologram? The thought-leader who believes we are on a tech-fuelled trajectory to become gods?

“…having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”

Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

He believes engineers — geeks in a lab — not Jesus — will lead us to overcome death:

“We do not need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.”

Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

Now, most of us are not going to buy that obvious idolatry. And even if we were, Harari makes the point that most of us could not afford to, even if we wanted to.

But our lives — as individuals and in community — are shaped by digital technology, and often the devices in our pockets; these tools.

Now it is easy to think these are not just neutral, but good. Try to imagine life without one, and the apps you love, and they feel embedded and almost impossible to uproot. They are genius pieces of technology that feel like they make life easier.

It is much harder to uproot a technology you have adapted to than one you have not. But what if these are disintegrating our humanity? Could you do it? Could you walk away from your phone tomorrow?

When we talk about digital technology it is not just hardware, is it? It is software as well. But this technology is pushing us beyond our limits like never before.

It has its own disenchanting mythology, and view of the future we can buy into. Even if we do not want to digitise our consciousness, becoming one with the machine — we will look at that more next time — there is a future we are all actually living in that wants to see everything connected; a picture of the future where every surface is a touchscreen, and where all our devices — starting with the fridges — are connected to the internet, and watching us.

A smart fridge that auto-orders your groceries by anticipating your desires based on your TV viewing might seem exciting. I want one. But it is also kind of terrifying.

We do not just live in a secular age. Shoshana Zuboff describes the world we live in as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

She says there is another tech myth out there — that we are the product. But we are not. We are the patch of ground they buy a mining license for:

“We are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for Google’s prediction factories. Predictions about our behavior are Google’s products, and they are sold to its actual customers but not to us.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Here. I have made a meme for you… the medium is the message.

It is not just that tech is not neutral. It is not just “if you are not paying for it, you are the product.” We are being mined, and our thoughts and actions sold to companies who want to exploit us.

Data is being continuously collected from our phones, cars, homes, shops, smart watches, airports, loyalty cards, Amazon searches and purchases, our Netflix stream, our search history — where we tell Google our inner thoughts — and our status updates — what we project to the world.

And not just to sell us the stuff the algorithms know we want, but also to start changing what we see and interact with, so tech companies can change how we think about the world and whatever cause they like, in what she calls long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mould us.

“Personal information is increasingly used to enforce standards of behavior. Information processing is developing, therefore, into an essential element of long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mold and adjust individual conduct.”

Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism

Our brains have become the software, programmed by others so our hardware — our bodies — act accordingly. McLuhan also said “the medium is the massage” — our communication forms form us. But this is next level, especially when companies outsource this massaging of our brains to machine learning: to algorithms designed to maximise their efficiency.

You might be worried about technology because you have noticed its impact on your well-being — whether that is the way you are addicted to screens, to doom-scrolling, to games, to porn, to whatever is giving you a dopamine hit. Lots of the tech we are addicted to is designed to grab and keep your attention using the same chemical reward cycle stimulating techniques as poker machines — designed to addictively link your brain chemistry and the machine.

You might have recognised that technology promises connection, but is objectively leaving users lonelier than ever.

But are you worried about how the algorithms that drive lots of machine-learning processes are racist, or amplify the bias we find in human behaviour? Not just chat bots that learn from Twitter, but the algorithms programmed by experts? You should be. Google sacked its internal expert on this stuff, and she has gone on to start an independent think tank on tackling racism in artificial intelligence. That said, Google just sacked another engineer who believed the bot he had been working on had become human…

But that is not all. Machines can now — with human help — make stuff that leaves us constantly having to question what is true and what is real. Whether that is deepfakes, where content can be generated using audio clips and videos to make anybody do or say just about anything, or randomly generated human faces, like this person — who does not exist — just like the lady in our series graphic.

These images can be used in just about any way. You could use AI to make a person who does not exist do or say things in a video.

And, of course, there is fake news. Not just the way people within our democracy might flood social media with disinformation, but how foreign troll farms are dedicated to flooding social media with memes geared to fuel destabilising polarisation.

Technology is not neutral. It can be disenchanting — like the clock. It can deny our limits — like the car, or the hologram, or the screen. It can make us less God-dependent, and more dependent on ourselves. Not just modern medicine — which is great — but the idea we can use tech to become immortal in the clouds — which is not so great.

Idolatrous technology distorts the way we live in the world, and ultimately it is part of what is disintegrating us — our societies, and our own lives — as we are pulled beyond our limits and in thousands of directions all at once. Sometimes the pull is from algorithmic sources we cannot see or understand, and sometimes it is just our own chemical dependency fuelled by our addiction. Often it is both at once.

And this comes back to Jacques Ellul’s diagnosis of modern society as a technological society built on the myth that technology and technique — the machine — always produces progress. He published this the same year as Lewis’s lecture. This is the idea that living right is about picking the right technology and techniques to maximise efficient outcomes. Think about the way, at about this time, machines were producing maximally effective fast food. He believed this was fragmenting us then, in 1954:

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence.”

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

Just imagine what happens when we bring this story about technology and technique into our lives as disciples of Jesus, and into our life together as the church.

We do not have to imagine that — many of us have lived it, and we are recovering from the feeling of being part of a machine; fast-food church. Some of us have followed the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, basically the story of a church that was a technological society, fully embracing technology and technique in a digital world, to pursue limitless numerical growth, whatever the cost.

The fast-food church idea that a church should grow to 10,000 by building efficient systems, or should go global by streaming one man’s — it is always a man — one man’s preaching into auditoriums and lounge rooms around the world, where no questions get asked about that because the technology allows it… That is this technological age, and this is when tech turns idolatrous.

And so — what is the way forward? How do we be truly human — image bearers who create as people made to create? Who make tools and technology that can either connect us to God and his story, or become gods that disenchant the world? How do we resist technology that pushes us to deny our limits, distort the way we live in the world, create dependencies in our brains and bodies, and ultimately disintegrate us? All while digital Babylon — the world of surveillance capitalism — wants to use the magic of technology, and its promises, to disciple us, and exploit us while they build their towers?

Are we facing a looming disaster?

In the nineteenth century there was a collective of English textile workers who recognised the way the mechanical loom was reshaping life not just for them — taking jobs — but the way mechanisation was going to change life as they knew it. They got together and called themselves the Luddites. You might have heard of them. They tried to destroy mechanical looms wherever they got their hands on them.

I know some of you are thinking “OK boomer” when I talk about technology like this. But maybe you should be thinking “OK loomer.” Only, it is not that simple.

There are people who believe we should go back to monastic life to escape the power of technology. But that misses the fact that we are made to make — to make the world more like Eden.

I do wonder if we should be a bit more Amish. They are not anti-tech, just really slow to embrace new technology. They embrace limits, and carefully consider the changes technology will bring to their lives as individuals, and as a community, changing slowly and carefully, to resist the patterns of the outside world.

It is too late for us, though, right?

We have embraced so much of this technology and become addicts who are chemically wired into the machine.

And maybe there are some technologies we have embraced that are dehumanising us, that we need to walk away from like recovering addicts. There are new technologies we can resist, when we see forces of surveillance capitalism at play, and the risks involved in a smart toilet… or a hyper-connected world.

And yet, perhaps we Christians could also be at the cutting edge of technology if we thought about it deliberately, and built things according to our understanding of the world, and of being human. What if we made technology, or embraced techniques that reminded us of our limits, and of our place in an enchanted universe, pushing back against universal black glass and smart toilets?

And look: this would all feel abstract if a bunch of you were not super-genius tech and maths geeks at the start of your careers. Or in the middle. Or the parents and grandparents of people who might be. Or if some of you were not working out how to hack and redesign medical machinery to solve problems in the developing world.

This is the stuff of everyday life. Technology is inevitable. It is part of being human, because we are tektons made in the image of a tekton. The catch is we have the furious opposites thing going on, where tech can either make us more human, for the glory of God, or dehumanise us through idolatry. And we have to ask about the story technology teaches us — both medium and message — and how we connect ourselves to God and his creative work in creation and redemption.

Following Jesus the tekton — the creative Word who became flesh; coming as a user and maker of tools and technologies — who worked with his hands making things for thirty years, before taking part in the rebuilding project of bringing his heavenly Father’s kingdom to earth. Restoring us as images.

There is a cool thing in that bit from Ephesians we read. Paul says that we are God’s workmanship, his handiwork (Ephesians 2:10). This is a word that only turns up in one other place in the New Testament — in Romans 1:20, which talks about how we were meant to know God from what has been made — his handiwork. We — the church — we are God’s creative act, created in Jesus, to show the world what God is like as we do the good work — including the technology-making and the techniques we adopt — that reveal his nature to the world. We are saved by the work of Jesus the tekton, not our work, so God’s making is on display in our making.

We are re-created by a creator to do good, and that means creating technology and techniques — ways of being — but also living differently to the people in this world who are ruled by the prince of the air. That is the devil (Ephesians 2:1–2). Which means resisting the idolatrous mythology that surrounds technology, and the way some of that idolatry is aimed at making us like God. Just like the bricks in Babel, pushing us beyond our limits — time, space, even death — that will ultimately destroy us. Figuring out where technology is pulling us towards idolatrous self-sufficiency, and away from God’s work, will require big-brained discernment: knowing what technology can do, spotting myths and destructive patterns in our personal lives, and in our life together, and in the world. We can become like automatons united in a machine, or parts of a living body united by an animating Spirit. We have to work out together when technology is good to embrace, good to resist, and what is good to create. That will take wisdom.

What Paul says a bit later in Ephesians brings us full circle — back to the candles — the idea that God is light and life and that we should live as children of the light (Ephesians 5:8). And he does not mean backlit glass screens, but those who see the world as the workmanship of the God who said “Let there be light.” Paul says be wise and careful in how we live (Ephesians 5:15), which certainly includes thinking about technology. He says the days are evil; there is a prince of the air out there, making the most of every opportunity — or literally “redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:15–17). Life on the clock tells one story about time. But we are called to occupy time differently; seeing our days as days lived before God, doing his work.

And maybe that means we need more candles — technology that pushes us back against the particular technological idolatry of our time. Tish Harrison Warren talks about how we are trained — discipled even — by our use of technology to spend more time on screens, a world away, focused on the trending and distant, so we miss the small and close features of embodied life:

“We are creatures made to encounter beauty and goodness in the material world. But digitisation is changing our relationship with materiality — both the world of nature and of human relationships… We are trained through technology (and technology corporations) to spend more time on screens and less time noticing and interacting with this touchable, smellable, feelable world.”

Tish Harrison Warren

She believes just as people have resisted fast food by turning to slow food, patterns of eating that are less about technology and technique, and more local and connected, we should embrace slower life in order to reconnect with our bodies, our limits, our community, and our God.

“Just as people have worked to revive slow, unprocessed and traditional food, we need to fight for the tangible world, for enduring ways of interacting with others.”

Tish Harrison Warren

Which raises the question: if some versions of church have been the equivalent of fast food — triumphs of pragmatism, technology, and technique — what does it look like to embrace slow church; church life that teaches us our limits?

We are certainly a bit minimalist, deliberately, as a church when it comes to technology. And we have tried to bring in some ancient stuff to resist modern patterns. Paul describes some mediums — techniques — that will keep us connected to God, and to each other. They are ancient techniques we still use in our life together: as we sing God’s truth to each other, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5:18–20).

August 29, 2025 Add Comment

Dear Facebook. Please un-kill Bill.

It’s fair to say that I’m not on Bill Muehlenberg’s Christmas Card list (and nor is he on mine)…

In fact, in the past, Bill described me as a “spineless wonder” and my writing as “mainly all waffle, bubble and froth,” where I “foolishly run with all the sorts of things which we expect the homosexual militants and atheists to say,” also calling me things like a “craven, carnal, men-pleasing shepherd” (in case you’re wondering if he’s actually talking about me here, he provides a link in the comments when pressed on what sort of pieces raised his ire).

So, you might expect me to take great delight — schadenfreude even — from Bill’s removal from Facebook for violating its terms of service. But I don’t.

I do find Big Tech, or woke capitalism’s, activist streak problematic.

I don’t like cancel culture.

I don’t think silencing loud and potentially damaging voices like Bill’s actually serves the human project — the pursuit of truth.

I believe we should be contending for truth; that truth should be made public, and that part of the pursuit of truth requires airing views that fall outside an acceptable status quo and that should be debated (publicly).

The idea that ideas and even criticism of a status quo should be limited or restricted because of the damage those words might do does seem like a fast path to totalitarianism.

Though my friends on the left find the spectre of ‘cancel culture’ raised by the right problematic (especially with Bill’s inevitable comparisons to Hitler and Stalin), and will no doubt point out the paradox of tolerance, and that speech has consequences and private media companies do not have an obligation to host Bill’s bigotry — and though I agree with them that virtuous speech is costly, not free — the ability for ideas to be fully and frankly exchanged seems fundamental to our shared pursuit of truth and goodness.

Facebook is not the ‘public square’ — it is a private square, and yet, almost every example of a ‘public square’ has been privatised thanks to late modern capitalism and the digital age.

If Big Tech, and the broader woke capitalist agenda have landed on the objective, capital T, truth — then ideas that criticise such truth should not be a threat, but a chance for that truth to be demonstrated in conflict. It seems more likely that capitalism (or these media corporations) has simply harnessed a series of social agendas and the challenges to this orthodoxy threatens to undermine their money and power.

Bill said:

This is all part of the censorship and leftist tyranny that Tech Giants with near-monopoly powers like Facebook operate with.

And as I have often written about before, most of the other groups are just as bad, be it YouTube or Twitter or even online booksellers like Amazon. They are all singing from the same hardcore leftist song sheet, and conservatives and Christians really are not wanted.

Woke capitalism isn’t a ‘lefty’ agenda out to get us, singing from a lefty songbook; it’s a capitalist agenda out to make as much money, by creating as much power, as possible. Here’s a piece from The Atlantic that outlines the “iron law of woke capitalism,” a development of what was the “iron law of institutions” — that claimed that senior individuals in institutions would inevitably act to preserve their own power, rather than the institution, the piece titled “How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture” is worth a read beyond just this paragraph.

That self-preservation instinct also operates when private companies—institutions built on maximizing shareholder value, or other capitalist principles—struggle to acclimatize to life in a world where many consumers vocally support social-justice causes. Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool.

But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival.

Ross Douhat, who described woke capitalism in a piece for the NY Times, said the problem with this new corporate strategy is that “it encourages cultural conservatives in their feeling of general besiegement, their sense that all the major institutions of American life, corporate as well as intellectual and cultural, are arrayed against their mores and values and traditions.” It’s not that these corporations are left-aligned by conviction, it’s a corporate strategy.

These companies (and their founders) will act in their own self-interest and serve us, the consumer up, with whatever they think protects that self interest; it’s commercial pressure that shelved Israel Folau, not ideological pressure (which is why Qantas will partner with Emirates, from the UAE, where homosexuality is illegal, but not with a footballer whose performance threatens their bottom line).

When it comes to these big tech companies, the real threat they pose isn’t in what they choose to censor as part of a political agenda, but how they commodify our attention and relationships — and us — and the way they manipulate us and our social interactions not from a political agenda but in the pursuit of their golden god. In his stunning piece Worshipping the Electronic Image, Chris Hedges wrote about this risk:

“Those who seek to communicate outside of digital structures to question or challenge the dominant narrative, to deal in ambiguity and nuance, to have discussions rooted in verifiable fact and historical context, are becoming incomprehensible to most of modern society. As soon as they employ a language that is not grounded in the dominant clichés and stereotypes, they are not understood. Television, computers and smartphones have addicted a generation and conditioned it to talk and think in the irrational, incoherent baby talk it is fed day after day. This cultural, historical, economic and social illiteracy delights the ruling elites who design, manage and profit from these sophisticated systems of social control. Armed with our personal data and with knowledge of our proclivities, habits and desires, they adeptly manipulate us as consumers and citizens to accelerate their amassing of wealth and consolidation of power.”

It’s not the political elites pushing a lefty agenda I’m particularly worried about here, it’s that our ability to engage in discourse and the pursuit of truth is manipulated by corporate agendas who operate from utter self interest, censoring views that might cost them a dollar or two and claiming that the censorship is motivated by protecting the vulnerable.

Hedges provides a solution to the breakdown of the public square.

Intellectual historian Perry Miller in his essay “The Duty of Mind in a Civilization of Machines” calls us to build counterweights to communication technology in order “to resist the paralyzing effects upon the intellect of the looming nihilism” that defines the era. In short, the more we turn off our screens and return to the world of print, the more we seek out the transformative power of art and culture, the more we re-establish genuine relationships, conducted face-to-face rather than through a screen, the more we use knowledge to understand and put the world around us in context, the more we will be able to protect ourselves from the digital dystopia.

This isn’t to say that Bill should be happy not to be on Facebook anymore, and to have the opportunity to build real world relationships (though it might do him good not to be, and public discourse good if more of us were having discussions elsewhere) — but rather, that, in his anger, he’s tilting at the wrong windmills. And maybe he should be calling for a decoupling of capitalism and public discourse, rather than left-wing politics.

That might not serve his narrative though — or his culture war. It might, however, help in the bigger and more pressing need — the shared pursuit of truth. That sort of pursuit requires voices being heard, not suppressed though — which is why we shouldn’t celebrate the power of big tech to mute the microphones of the uncivil voices. All revolutionary voices and ideas challenge civility and the status quo. By nature.

If we keep attacking Facebook, or other big tech companies, as though the ‘left agenda’ is the root cause of the problem, we’re missing the mark. The problem, perhaps, is that so many of the hard right are so embedded in capitalism that they can’t see how the problem is with the soil all that discourse — and life itself — is planted in… remember, when we talk about Facebook, we’re talking about a company that has monetised self interest built around algorithmically understanding and grabbing your attention, with a newsfeed philosophy expressed by Mark Zuckerberg’s theory that “a squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

The problem with big tech companies deciding which views they want to connect to their worship of mammon is multi-faceted, it has knock on implications for all of us when they operate as mediators (or priests) for the sort of public imagery and religiosity that is acceptable.

Media platforms work best when they are hosting conversations that serve the pursuit of the common good; commercial media platforms are almost immediately distorted (though you don’t hear Bill and friends complaining about Sky News). These priestly mediating companies do provide a song sheet — but it’s not one that is designed to form us into lefties, but into consumers. Facebook is a giant advertising beast harvesting your data to sell you more things, and to sell you to more companies.

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer a public square that is free from the manipulative power of the market — such a square is probably an ideal that has never actually existed; even the literal public squares of old were formed by physical architecture (including statues and temples) that articulated and shaped a ‘social imaginary’ — providing a coherent worldview that would ground dialogue between parties who disagreed on small things but agreed on the foundational vision of the world. Our physical public squares are as bombarded with imagery and noise (like outdoor advertising, branded buildings, and pop up marketing events) as the old ones, so the answer to this very modern dilemma is not just to start holding discussions (or protest groups at ten paces) on village greens.

I (also) fear that pushing people out of public squares — whether online or in the real world — forces them into ghettos and echo chambers (Facebook’s algorithms do just this too, which is doubly concerning). This is why religious freedom is something the government should take an interest in, because ‘banning’ a religion (or even shadow banning it, to use some social media terminology for a ‘soft power’ ban) doesn’t stop people holding such beliefs, it stops people publicly holding problematic beliefs and sends them into these ghettos with a victim narrative. It’s a path to radicalisation.

Ask yourself if Bill will be more or less radical without Facebook’s terms of service looking over his shoulder (though, let’s face it, Bill’s not the kind of person who moderates his language for the sake of others or because of platform ‘rules’ anyway)? Ask yourself if he’s going to do more or less harm without a wider market offering pushback on his views.

I worry, too, that cancellation is a form of martyrdom in the culture wars — that it actually takes Bill’s views too seriously, and means he now joins his account to a litany of complaints from those who are simultaneously perpetually angry at the victim narratives they see driving society into the pits while taking every opportunity to position themselves as victims.

And look, I will say that I find it fascinating that those who call out against cancel culture the loudest — whether that’s the leader of a political movement with the slogan “truth made public” who censors voices critical of their positions on their own platforms (like a Facebook page — and, in an update, I’m not just not able to comment on Marty’s page now, but unable to view it while logged in… I’m actually blocked, and the featured image on this page is what I get when I try to visit), or the editor of an online publication that publishes regular screeds against cancel culture are the keenest to cancel voices who are critical of their positions not only on platforms they control, not just via blocking, but also by writing to church denominations seeking to have church employees who are critical of their positions defrocked and/or disciplined, while simultaneously threatening court action. The same outlet is happy to post Bill’s opinions on his cancellation with no sense of irony.

So Facebook, please un-kill Bill. Even if there’s no dollar in it. At least he’s more interesting to some of us than a dead squirrel. Just.

June 10, 2021

The Technological fallacy: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you ought (Lessons from Jurassic Park, and some more thoughts about church and technology in a Covid-19 world)

“I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fàfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.”

Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

I’ve decided I want to be a dinosaur.

The more I watch technology be uncritically embraced — not simply by the church in Covid-19 lockdown, or even by society at large, but by myself, the more I wonder what we’re inviting into our lives in the name of progress.

I fitted multiple rooms in our house with Google Homes, and that wasn’t enough. We have Alexa devices in the kids room to read them bedtime stories. I spend hours staring at backlit black glass. I’ve been blogging for longer than I’ve been married, and on Facebook for almost as long. I registered domain names for my kids when they were born. I’m not quite a digital native, but I’m very close… I love technology. And yet. I’m convinced there’s a dark side to technology — that we become what we behold, that technology is not neutral. Marshall McLuhan once said:

“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”

McLuhan, Understanding Media

Neil Postman, a student of McLuhan’s, suggested that unless we can see the impact technology has had on society and culture in the past, we shouldn’t be allowed to set rules for adopting new technologies — or to assess their potential.

“A sophisticated perspective on technological change includes one’s being skeptical of Utopian and Messianic visions drawn by those who have no sense of history or of the precarious balances on which culture depends. In fact, if it were up to me, I would forbid anyone from talking about the new information technologies unless the person can demonstrate that he or she knows something about the social and psychic effects of the alphabet, the mechanical clock, the printing press, and telegraphy. In other words, knows something about the costs of great technologies.”

Neil Postman, ‘Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change.’

I wonder how many churches who have jumped to livestreaming broadcast media style services (rather than social media services, or gatherings) have thought about the impact the clock had on the human psyche, or the printing press (let alone the alphabet). I wonder how many people have paused before Zooming off into livestream meetings. And how many of us, then, are surprised by the developing phenomenon of ‘Zoom fatigue’ and the interesting reminders it provides, as we assess that phenomenon, that we’re actually creatures created to live in time and space, not be broken up into pixels like Mike Teavee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and beamed across space to be put together in tiny pieces on someone else’s screen? Curt Thompson has a great piece on how to push ourselves back into our bodies for those struggling with this phenomenon.

I’ve seen lots of conversations from church leaders about technology; what to buy, how to solve issues, how to engage those checking out your service with technological follow up… questions about technique, that all assume we’re doing what we should be doing by jumping to technology to extend us from one space to another, without asking what happens as communications technology annihilates space and time the way C.S Lewis described the car ‘annihilating space’ — and bemoaned its impact on village (and church) life as suddenly we were empowered by the choice not to go to our local church, but to find other options, including the option of not going to church at all. How much more is this true of our incredible capacity to drop in on a seemingly infinite number of churches from around the world through their digital platforms; never having to physically visit in order to consume church. And look. We don’t have much choice at the moment; technology has to be part of our solution if we want to love our neighbours and obey our government.

I read one piece that suggested churches have, or are now needing to, reinvent themselves; where once we were ‘event organisations’ suddenly we’re ‘media organisations’ — what happened to community organisations, or relationship networks, or any other descriptor that might provide a different approach to how we be the church in this time; this pivot expresses the way that we uncritically participate in what Jacques Ellul described as the technological society, where we solve problems by finding the best technique using the technological tools at our disposal; because thats’ what we think we ‘ought’ to do.

Maybe one of the things that makes me want to be a dinosaur is that I spend a significant amount of time playing the augmented reality game Jurassic World Alive, think Pokemon Go but with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are great.

The thing about every Jurassic Park movie ever is that it explores a particular question about our relationship with technology. Sure. Dinosaurs are awesome. But just because we can do something with technology, doesn’t mean we ought, no matter how awesome we might think the results are or could be, there are always unforeseen circumstances that come from unleashing the raptors, or in the case of Jurassic Park, the T-Rex.

There’s an old fallacy — the naturalistic fallacy — that says you can’t infer an ought from an is, just because something is the way it is, doesn’t mean it ought to be that way. Think about, perhaps, a human propensity to dishonesty or violence — just because those come naturally, doesn’t mean we ought to enshrine them as virtues or the basis of our society. The technological fallacy we’re too quick to fall for in our desire to see all progress as good progress is that because we can do something with technology, we ought to. I think we’re seeing an outwork of this technology in the way the Aussie church is responding to Covid-19 with some ‘technological advances’ — just because you can bring TV style production to your church service, or make your kids church a TV show that can be watched from the lounge room at any time, doesn’t mean you ought. Just because you can create algorithms that generate a more accurate understanding of a person’s desires and behaviours than a person’s spouse has of them (and this was in 2015) doesn’t mean you ought, just because you can deploy meme generating tweet bots to skew elections or opinions in favour of your perspective, even if you believe that perspective is good and true, doesn’t mean you ought. A Philosopher of Technology, Robin K. Hill, has dubbed our propensity to take an ‘ought’ from a ‘can’ as the Artificialistic Fallacy. It’s not necessary that any use of tech is the result of the fallacy; but any assumption that technology will necessarily solve our current situation or make things better, is a fallacy. I wonder if we’re better off, as the church, now because we have technological solutions that weren’t around during the Spanish Flu, our countless other crises and pandemics, than the church living through those times were; or than the New Testament church that got by in various forms of danger or isolation with a few letters from the Apostles (letters themselves being a technology that their own writers acknowledged were limitations — like John saying he’d rather be face to face in two of his letters, and Paul expressing the same idea frequently).

We have a problem with technology and technique as moderns. We accept it, and its extensions of our personhood, almost uncritically — or we don’t engage our critical faculties until it is too late, and the technology has already been incorporated into our ecosystem. Like dinosaurs escaping their enclosures in a dinosaur zoo. Loose, hungry, and destructive.

Here’s a fun fact. I wrote some of this post and left it open in a tab in my browser. I have not typed the phrase dinosaurs are awesome anywhere but in this tab. This morning when I opened Facebook I had some new ads in my feed.

I’m not sure a framed picture of our family as dinosaurs is going to cut it for Mother’s Day, but it’s creepy that Facebook’s algorithm either knows me well enough to coincidentally decide that this is something I’m into, or that my as yet unpublished text in a browser has given them more data to mine in order to sell me a solution. This is what has been called ‘surveillance capitalism’ — the sort of economic world we buy into through our uncritical participation in technology; our falling for the fallacy that just because we can (and companies can), we should (and they should).

Much as I love technology, and much as its introduction into our ecosystem is hard to keep safe, and much as uncaging the beast causes massive changes to our safety and day to day lives; I do want to be a dinosaur. Maybe this is part of Tolkien’s “desire for dragons” — maybe I want to live in a world of enchantment, a purer world where technology isn’t linked up with the Babylonian impulse to dominate the natural world, and other people, to secure prosperity for me (or the companies that are part of the fabric of this technology shaped society). Maybe I want to live in a world where it’s easier to sense the presence of God because the way our idolatry has seeped into the construction of our society makes it harder; it’s not that there was an age free from systemic corruption because of sin (see Babel, and then Babylon, and then Rome)… it’s just that it’s hardest to see that in our own age, because idols blind us; and technology plays part of that role in our lives now.

I want to try to reclaim some of what life was like before technology impacted the way we live and relate; and I’m certainly cautious about what sort of devastating impact unleashing the technology dinosaurs into the mix (and the very mixed metaphors) of Covid-19 and family life, and church life, and my own life. Much as I might seek escape into the world of augmented dinosaur battles on Jurassic World Alive, exploring a map littered with digital beasties to capture — I’m in real danger of being conformed in the image of a digital beasty myself.

C.S Lewis, in his inaugural speech at Cambridge, De Descriptione Temporum, suggested that technology — specifically the introduction of the machine — was the major contributing factor in a move from an enchanted to a disenchanted world; the thing that pushed the de-Christianisation of the west faster than any other phenomena. He says our belief in progress — specifically the good of technological advance and our ability to do new things by taking new technology and chucking old stuff, basically forms what Charles Taylor would later describe as our “social imaginary” — the building blocks of our imagination, especially how we understand life in the universe and so how to approach living in the universe. This image of ‘the good’ being ‘technological progress’ means that we often uncritically adopt new technologies and turf old ones. Lewis says this is bigger for our belief in progress, even, than Darwin’s theory of evolution… this is what he calls our ‘new archetypal image’ of how life works.

“It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones. For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy. And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated. For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances. From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage.”

C.S Lewis, De Descriptione Temporum

He ended his speech with a note of apology to his students; knowing, even then, that he was speaking to those in post-machine world as a non-native. The man didn’t even use a typewriter because of the impact he thought its machine like rhythms would have on his writing. He said people in a tech-obsessed world should listen to him like they’d listen to a freak — because his critique — from a different world to theirs — might help them look with fresh perspective on their relationship with technology. His approach to medieval literature and the idea that there was an image of the universe in the medieval world closer to the truth than the image we replaced it with when we discarded enchantment (the subject of his academic work The Discarded Image) allowed him, he believed, to see the dangers of the present age differently, even if it meant his students might have to view him as a dinosaur. He was prepared to embrace being a dinosaur.

I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.

— C.S Lewis, De Descriptione Temporum

Interestingly, his intro essay to Athanasius On The Incarnation encouraged people to read old books — not just books from our time — because their concerns would reveal some of the folly of our concerns and practices. There’s a way to become a dinosaur that doesn’t involve virtual reality, but digging in to old books from the past. In Surprised By Joy he talks about the sort of chronological snobbery that helps us jump from the naturalistic fallacy to the artificialistic fallacy via our changed imaginations; we think technology is good and necessary and that we ought do what it allows us simply because we think we’re much more sensible than those who came before us; we’re more highly evolved and have made progress in all areas. Lewis calls this ‘Chronological snobbery.’ Avoiding that might require being a dinosaur, or at least walking with them…

Maybe we need more human dinosaurs before we unleash the technological dinosaurs on our ecosystems anew. Charles Taylor saw ‘excarnation’ working alongside ‘disenchantment’ as the causes of secularity in the modern west. He said this was produced, historically (via the Reformation and its emphasis on the brain/knowledge rather than embodied practice) by “the steady disembodying of spiritual life.” How much faster is that happening via technology? Alan Jacobs, in this fantastic piece Fantasy and the Buffered Self, talks about technology as ‘Janus faced’ — he says our economic and cultural structures are produced by a ‘technocracy’ (the sort of structures present in telco and techno companies and their advertising right now), and this technocracy, through its various institutions, “speaks dark words of disenchantment with one mouth, and the bright promise of re-enchantment with the other.” Technology offers itself as the man made solution, from within a disenchanted frame — a world without God — and we buy it because it lets us be gods, even while it becomes a new god for us; an idol.

Whether we buy the pessimism about the potential danger of letting the T-Rex of Tech loose in in our church ecosystems, or we think we can put the tyrant back in his cage once this pandemic passes, we need to be aware that our jumping in to swim with the tide of technology puts us in a stream that has an ‘end point,’ and connects us with artefacts (technology) that aren’t neutral because they carry their own myth, their own anthropology, and their own eschatology. I’ve been struck, for example, by how much television advertising in night time pandemic viewing has pivoted to telcos and tech companies showing the ‘magic’ of technology; the way technology has transcended space and time to bring us together and keep us creating in this moment.

Amazon Prime is now advertising the show Upload, an alternative Good Place, that looks like it has humanity escaping to the cloud; not the heavenly one with angels, but the digital one. Becoming one with the machine (and hey, Elon Musk reckons we’re already there. That we are digital figments existing in some strange computer game). There’s a whole cultural apparatus pushing us to the idea that the future is digital; the eternal future even. Like the gnostics of old, they see technology freeing us from the meatflesh existence of our bodies (think cyberpunk fiction like Gibson’s Neuromancer). The idea that we might be saved from our bodies and from death and decay by becoming one with the machine is one legitimately explored and advocated by technologists; and celebrated in our advertising (like Telstra’s ‘magic of technology’ ad).

This all follows a trajectory identified by Lewis way back in his first speech in his role at Cambridge, and by Jacques Ellul in the same year, 1954, with his publication of The Technological Society. Ellul was both pessimistic and prophetic about the impacts of technology, and the belief in technique as the path to the good, on our humanity (in the same way McLuhan was later).

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”

— Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, 1954

It’s really hard to step back from the impact technology has on us — to unwind its impact on the deepest recesses of our humanity. To undo the ecological impact technology has on us where, in the words of another of McLuhan’s students, “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” The egg can’t be totally unscrambled. And the making of technology is a deeply human task — part of our call to ‘cultivate’ the earth as God’s image bearing people who can imagine and create artefacts; but just because we can doesn’t mean we ought and sometimes we need human, biological, dinosaurs to step back and point out the impact artificial dinosaurs are having on the world we live in; lest we be eaten while on the toilet, or participating in the life of the church.

My hunch is that one of the ways back is less time in man made worlds that rely on technology, and that we interact with using technologies and techniques honed for us by the technocracy, and more time rediscovering the enchanted world we live in; the view those ‘dinosaurs’ from pre-modern times had, and part of that might be walking through the same forests, or looking at the same stars, that they did, or engaging art and stories that throw us into fantasy worlds away from ‘augmented reality’ — the stuff Jacobs advocates in the piece linked above, or Tolkien in On Fairy Stories, the thinking that helped Lewis produce Narnia.

I wish clever technology could do that for me more (and perhaps it can if the tools we create are extensions of our life as creatures created by a creator and we receive them with thanksgiving as gifts from God (1 Timothy 4), the technocracy works to blind us to that ‘enchanted’ dimension of technology; and technology as idol often pulls us away from, rather than towards God… Augmented reality dinosaurs, where my fantasy world, created by clever programmers (who want me to spend money), is mediated to me by a screen, in a way that makes me beastly, don’t do for my imagination or “desire for dragons” what imagining the trees in the bushland up the road from me as living, breathing things that speak to the goodness of my creator does… and yet, that’s what trees are for (Romans 1:20).

“He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.” — C.S Lewis

April 26, 2020