My hunch is that in each age, or each culture, or each value system, there is a similarly-elevated human activity regarded as the sine qua non of existence. Each of these ergo sums (if I can call them that) encapsulates what we think to be most important, most constitutive of our human identity. The lack of this quality will result in significant anxiety, the sense that one is not fully participating in whatever it means to be human. Descartes’ anxious doubting was assuaged by the act of philosophical reasoning, which proved to him that he was real. For someone alive during, and participating in, the Romantic movement, the anxiety would have centred instead around the amount and depth of authentic emotion; the ergo sum of that period would have been “I feel, therefore I am.” This is how you know you are really human: you exist in a state of transcendent passion! I’ve always found it interesting to consider: what is the " X ergo sum" of any particular time or place?

A year or two ago, for a variety of personal reasons irrelevant to this little essay, I somewhat intentionally decided to reengage with social media. I scrolled through my Facebook feed again for the first time (after declaring my relationship with it “complicated” some 10 years prior). But mostly I started to follow friends and post on Facebook’s more glamorous younger sibling, Instagram. There are many, many reflections I could write about the state of social media as I found it, and upon my own emotional and psychological state as I engaged with the apps. Many of the various downsides of social media are now fairly well-recognized, and don’t require my reiteration. But one feeling I noticed kept coming up again and again: an anxious need to establish myself as present by posting something, anything. I’m here, I exist, I matter! It struck me that we may have here the evidence of a new ergo sum: Communico, ergo sum. “I share, therefore I am.”

From my own self-reflection and observations of others’ behaviour on the platforms, it does seem there is now a heightened urgency around the sharing of experiences over against the mere having of them. It is not enough to go on vacation; it must be live-blogged! It is not enough to eat at a fun restaurant with friends; the friends must be tagged! It is not enough to have a funny thought in one’s own head; it must be refined with the choicest of memes and emoji and shared. And so on. Of course, sharing our experiences with one another is not a strange or pathological behaviour. On the contrary, it is an integral part of human relationship. On a deep psychological and emotional level, we need others to know our feelings and thoughts about the things in our shared reality, and we likewise need to empathize with the experience of others. What’s new seems to be the degree to which the act of sharing itself has superseded the reality of the thing or experience shared. Enjoying an experience with those present (even if that is just myself) is replaced by the need to immediately translate that experience into the realm of social feedback. I suspect that this means there is some kind of core anxiety of identity at play here. Am I even a person if I am not establishing my presence in these various online places with content of the kind that will cause people to see me how I want to be seen?

I would have thought that identity anxieties would be about the lack of attaining a situation prized by the surrounding culture (however locally or globally defined). In ancient Greece, maybe you’d feel some identity anxiety if you were a foreigner, or someone who couldn’t participate in the civic or martial affairs of the day, for whatever reason. In mid-2000s Silicon Valley, maybe you’d feel similarly if you weren’t building a “disruptive” startup. There are a no doubt a large number of “identities” that have been seen as of paramount value over the years: warrior, scholar, saint, parent, entrepreneur, scientist, evangelist, libertine, empath, sex icon, guru, artist, athlete, etc… But nowadays, perhaps as a consequence of society having approximated the liberal ideal of freedom of self-determination, it seems that more important than actually attaining any of these identities is the establishment of the identity via social media. And so what becomes common in our age is not a particular identity per se (because we each choose our own from a wide and even conflicting array of options), but a kind of meta-identity or modus operandi of identity establishment. We are defined, not so much by who we “are” in some kind of essential or internal way, and more by the space we carve out for ourselves via the act of sharing. The result is that “sharing” transitions from being a basic human social practice (the kind typically found among close relations and which facilitates the establishment of empathic bonds), to being a much more consequential (and therefore anxiety-ridden) social practice of establishing one’s chosen identity (qua identity) in the most highly-trafficked sphere of human society today: social media.

So far this is just a hypothesis I’m developing from observations of cultural change over the last few decades. I don’t claim to have proved it. I also feel the need to pause and anticipate a few of the possible reactions to the hypothesis so far:

1. I’m not trying to claim that this way of using social media (what we might call “sharing as identity establishment”) is the only one; clearly you could point to any number of examples of posts that don’t fit this description. In fact, probably very few people do only this on social media.
2. I would acknowledge that “sharing as identity establishment” happens in many human contexts, on and offline—not just on social media. This whole thought experiment is dealing with the question of identity anxiety, and as I’ve already indicated this is not a new question. What does seem new to me is the extent to which this “sharing at one another” has become a dominant mode of discourse (well, a dual monologue, as it were). As such, this mode of engaging with social media is by no means “abnormal”, and is probably hardly even worth comment anymore; that’s exactly the point! The fact that it doesn’t seem to register that we are doing something different, or more, with “sharing” than we used to, is precisely what has me intrigued.
3. The fact that many of us choose not to share at all on social media does not run counter to the hypothesis. It is not surprising that, faced with the huge amount of effort required to establish one’s identity online, many people would decide not to play the game. This doesn’t mean the game isn’t the dominant one, though, in just the same way that in a wealth-driven society some people might resign themselves to being poor because they don’t feel that there is any opportunity for change in their circumstances. The identity anxiety persists, and has simply been capitulated to completely.

So, if any of the hypothesis is at all right, how did we wind up here? First and foremost I see the current situation as an unintended consequence of the design of social media. As companies like Facebook/Meta have unabashedly pushed forward the concept of “connection” (whatever they mean by it; it’s certainly been twisted beyond all recognition into something like sheer access to personal information), we are essentially force-fed a never-ending stream of posts from people at varying degrees of separation from us. When these feeds are sprinkled liberally with advertisement we are left feeling even more overwhelmed. There is the sense that to be heard amidst the clamour we must shout (share) all the louder and all the more. And so a vicious cycle develops: to be “seen” by our peers we must engage in the rigorous process of identity establishment by sharing enough to be noticed. But this increases the amount of information in the feeds, making individual posts (which we may regard on the hypothesis as bids for identity establishment) less likely to be seen. And so we must shout even louder.

If you agree with any of this, or that it’s at all a problem, what is there to do about it? I think there are two levels on which we can give some suggestions. Practically, we can recognize that social media is an imperfect and distorted model of healthy social structures. It’s not “normal” (in the history of humanity, anyway), or necessary, to passively keep in touch with hundreds or thousands of people. It’s not “normal” to be constantly bombarded by personal news and announcements of varying degrees of significance from people at varying degrees of intimacy. I think it’s possible to choose smaller and more intentional spaces in which to engage in the act of sharing, which are less likely to encourage a distortion of that sharing in the direction of anxious identity establishment. I think it’s even possible to use digital tools for this purpose (groups of friends and families can maintain their own ad hoc social media networks via chat apps, for example, in ways that more closely mirror real-world relationship structures). Choosing smaller venues does mean intentionally foregoing the “reach” that our sharing might have. I see this as a choice to trade the “quantity” of reaction (likes, comments, etc…) for the “quality” of interaction (dialogue with people you actually independently know and care about). None of this is to discount the various benefits that social media apps provide, but merely to point out that in their current design they are perhaps pressing the normal human sharing impulse into a service for which it was never meant.

On a deeper level, I think we have to face the classic existential questions (what I’ve called “identity anxiety” or “anxiety of existence” here) without flinching. It’s certainly true that being an “influencer” (at least the kind which I most often see online) is a vacuous kind of identity, utterly precarious in its situation. But it’s also true that other, more traditional, identities are equally precarious, if only in the limit and less obviously so. Hooking your existential cart up to the horse of motherhood, for example, might be more wholesome (not to mention more valuable to the community), but at the end of the day it’s not going to leave you free of anxiety (what if you cannot have children? What do you do when they leave the house? Etc…) Philosophically, I tend to agree with the teacher in Ecclesiastes, who declares all such things to be a kind of mist that eventually evaporates. Any kind of ergo sum which depends on our abilities, our productivity, our intelligence, or our fortune in life, is bound to generate anxiety, or to draw lines of value judgment that leave some people out. What if the ultimate value of a person, our “identity”, is not so differentiated and special as we would like to think? What if it just is, established not by a process of existentialist self-determination, but by the words that declared every single part of creation good? This would be an identity which cannot be lost or tarnished. It would be an identity which cannot be denied to any person, no matter their race, gender, nationality, abledness, wealth status, or any other attribute or lack thereof. It would be an identity which could never result in anxiety. And finally, it would be an identity that would never even need to be shared about on social media, because everyone would already possess it equally.

If I believed all of that, which I would like to, then I would probably post a bit less, or at least less self-centredly, on Instagram. If I believed all of that, which I would like to, then I would be asking how to move more concretely from anxious communico (“I share”) to true communio (“community”).

It has therefore been difficult for me to develop a practical framework for engaging with new technologies like ChatGPT. I already have a theoretical framework for understanding new technologies, informed by various thinkers (this is a long list of writers including standouts like Jacques Ellul or Albert Borgmann). This theoretical framework provides a straightforward analysis of AI technologies, just like it does for earlier technologies: the type of AI I have in mind (however it is instantiated, e.g., a model constituted by training data) is a device that reliably makes a certain good (in this case, novel, creative media) more efficiently available. But AI technologies themselves, as a force impacting culture, are already a runaway train. Trying to decide what to do about them is much more difficult than simply understanding what they are (understanding what they are as mere technologies, I mean). To be clear, I’m not attempting to consider whether AI systems can be conscious or actually “intelligent”. That is an extremely difficult and interesting set of philosophical and scientific questions, but what I’m trying to discuss here doesn’t depend on the ontological status of AI agents. (Of course, if it turns out that AI systems are “persons” in some sense, then we have a whole different set of awful and perplexing situations we find ourselves in, such as the ethics of how to treat these AI persons).

All that to say, as a result of my own aforementioned confusion and perplexity, I want to approach this critical discussion of AI not primarily from a theoretical or philosophical perspective, but from my own particular human (which is to say emotional) perspective. I’ll put it as bluntly as I can: the recent developments in AI make me sad, and worried. I understand that in saying these things I am departing from the general sentiment of excitement and possibility that surrounds the AI space, and probably deeply offending some people besides. So I’ll explain further: AI as a set of technical achievements does not make me sad. The ability of ChatGPT 4 (or 5, or 2000) to string together so many words that make so much sense is incredible, and does not itself make me sad. I myself am a technologist and delight in technological achievements, both my own and those of others. I’ve implemented machine learning training algorithms in the past, and understand, in some basic way, how these things work from a technical perspective. I am in total awe of what happens when you throw all the data of the entire Internet into a machine learning model. I would not have expected it to work half so well! But…

My concerns

There are two main reasons I’m sad and worried: first, that AI might create confusion about what is a human being—what is a person—and therefore might lead to confusion about what makes humans valuable, ultimately contributing to the devaluing of actual human persons. Second, I’m worried that, in relying on AI for the production of creative output of whatever kind (writing, music, visual art), we will allow the uniquely human capacity for creativity to atrophy. I view these as likely, if not inevitable, consequences of the current trend in AI development and use. The paradigm of modern technology is bent in the direction of such outcomes, but I do have a hope that, even in small and provisional ways, there will be a reaction to “AI overreach” that will encourage instead a more limited and responsible use of AI in daily life.

I want to focus on these dangers especially, not because there are not other significant dangers associated with AI, but because the other dangers seem to already be getting plenty of airtime: super-intelligent machines taking over the planet, or deepfake videos causing political chaos and division. The things I’m worried about are perhaps “fuzzier” or more “internal” than such dramatic, global outcomes. But precisely for that reason, I think we need to pause and think hard about these “internal” consequences. They threaten our human future in a less obvious and perhaps more long-term way, but they do so nonetheless, and it’s already abundantly clear that our species will happily sell our proverbial inheritance for the technological equivalent of a bowl of stew. Like Esau, we’re so often fixated on present desire and the ability of technology to satisfy it that we rarely think about the deeper value of what we might be giving up along the way. Often, by the time we realize what we’ve lost, culture has reorganized itself around the change, and the loss is not even apparent to new generations. The influx of AI technologies is another milestone along that journey, and therefore another chance for us to stop and think. That is what I am attempting to do now, however narrowly framed by my two worries.

Before diving in, I think it’s also important to qualify my worries as provisional. As with any concerns about the way the future might turn out, I could very well be wrong. Only time will tell. A good amount of empirical evidence would need to accumulate in order to turn my concerns into anything approaching proof. In general, I am apparently much more enamoured of the precautionary principle than the wider technological culture. I think it’s worth considering what could go wrong with technological innovations and working hard to prevent bad outcomes, even if such outcomes are not a logically necessary consequence of those innovations. I fully expect that some reading this will not feel as worried as I do, either in the sense of thinking the bad outcomes are less likely than I do, or in the sense of not agreeing that the outcomes are bad to begin with. Fair enough–those are precisely the debates which need to happen in a more rigorous way as AI technologies continue to develop. For now, I am mostly trying to call our attention to these worries so that the categories for debate still exist by the time any further debate is moot.

Confusing the concept of “person”

Let’s consider first the worry that heavy AI use might cause confusion about what constitutes human persons, and how we relate to them. One aspect of the new chat-based LLMs which is already clearly apparent is that users interact with them as communicative agents. They are explicitly designed in this way, as a natural human language interface for generating text or other media (just recall how even when qualifying its responses as that of an AI language model, ChatGPT continues to use the first person singular pronoun “I”!). I wager that we’ve all observed the very strange phenomenon in which human users, ostensibly being completely aware that they are not actually talking to another person, begin to act as though they are. In fact, these AI tools often seem to produce better artifacts when you engage in this charade with them. “Programming” ChatGPT, for example, looks a lot less like writing the explicit instructions of a computer language and a lot more like setting up a shared context for two human communicators, for example with an instruction like “You are an expert in the field of macro-economics who doesn’t shy away from radical theories,” designed to elicit or unlock a certain form or content in the response.

At the same time, in these conversations, the AI is very much in the position of a servant, and so the language mode we use tends to be that of the imperative: command and response (or, if you’ve had politeness embedded more deeply in your patterns of behaviour, you might ask ChatGPT questions with a “please”). It seems that the use of these AI systems fools our brains into making us think we are working together with another personal agent, albeit one that exists to satisfy our whims and experiments. One is reminded of the ur-chatbot ELIZA, which arguably passed the Turing Test in a limited way in the 1960s, and was based on technologies that were primitive in comparison with today’s LLMs. Sometimes, the servant/master paradigm is turned upside down, to devastating effect. A much more recent AI also named “Eliza” (do these people have no sense of irony?) took its human interlocutor down a dark path when it recommended he take his own life to help prevent climate change.

Now, in general I think treating non-persons like persons is prima facie less harmful than treating persons like non-persons. So how worrisome is this emerging pattern, dark edge cases aside? Who cares if we talk to our computers like people? We’ve been doing it for a while now with voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana. We also talk to our pets like people, for that matter. In fact, the more we talk to other things like people, the more likely we are to treat them well, right? I’m not entirely sure. I worry that the flattening of the ontological landscape of personhood might have all kinds of adverse effects, the same way that the flattening of the relational landscape by social media has arguably wreaked havoc there. Facebook promised us greater connection with our friends, but by debasing the meaning of friendship in expanding it to the merest of relations, it has, with no small amount of irony, altered (and arguably eroded) traditional patterns of relationship.

Today, we treat ChatGPT like a person. Assuming ChatGPT isn’t feeding us unhealthy suggestions (as in the case of the modern “Eliza” above), that may not be the end of the world. But maybe tomorrow, we’ll be treating everyone else like ChatGPT, that is to say, as sheer surface interfaces we can use however we want. There is much more we could say here, but I don’t want to disappear into the realm of personalist philosophy and lose the thread. The main point is that the new AI interfaces blur the line between machine and human in a much more subtle and pervasive way than ever before. This is in fact one of the goals for these systems: to make it feel like you’re interacting with a person! AI or robotic “companions” are also widely available for romantic or caretaking purposes (particularly to ease the loneliness of the elderly), and it’s been well-documented that the attachments formed with these machine systems are robust and consequential. There have even been experiments run on users in mental health support settings where the “assistant” was ChatGPT instead of a human being, a fact undisclosed to the participants.

I worry that, in this mode, we will end up either infantilizing ourselves in dependence upon our individual AI genie, or becoming despotic overlords of an army of AI slaves (or, as is perhaps most likely, winding up in a bell-curve situation with people falling all across the spectrum). Neither extreme bodes well for our own character. Historically, questions about the validity of the personhood of one group or another have only led to oppression. Could this happen again? A pithy way of expressing the concern is thus: it’s dangerous to diminish anyone’s personhood, whether it be by me taking it from someone else (by treating a person like a non-person), or by me forfeiting my own (by treating a non-person like a person, i.e., giving my personal agency over to a non-entity in a kind of technological idolatry).

I think there is also a danger of subconsciously shifting the definition of “person” from “whatever it is that is intrinsically valuable about human beings qua human beings, regardless of individual capacity” to something more compatible with what AI presents in its capacities. What are these capacities? The ability to simulate reason, to produce novel texts, and to have disembodied textual conversations, for example. I worry that we may therefore wind up unconsciously holding the regressive philosophical position that identifies what’s valuable about a person with their ability to reason or produce abstract information. Or even if we don’t regress in our philosophical estimation of human personhood, we will at least have regressed to playing a form of social solitaire, pretending that we’re relating with another person when we’re just interacting with a machine dressed up as one. To the extent we surrender agency to these systems, we will also have regressed to making decisions via (technical) haruspex or by visiting (the AI equivalent of) the Oracle of Delphi. Here be dragons!

An obvious (instrumentalist) reply to this “confusion of personhood” concern (and to concerns about technologies in general) is that the danger here doesn’t lie in the technology itself, but would be solely the responsibility of the human user, since the technology is only ever active as a tool, an extension of human will. AI systems provide a convenient natural language interface, which in and of itself is a morally neutral fact, and affords for more efficient interaction. One could even argue that using our natural human language and voice re-humanizes the experience of interacting with computers, since we are no longer forced to “think like a computer”, e.g., when we come up with a search engine query. If someone goes “beyond the facts” and allows this more natural user interface to affect their social landscape in a harmful way, that’s on the user, not the AI. For example, to the person who falls in love with an AI system and then has their heart broken when the AI service is turned off, the instrumentalist would say that it’s their fault that they foolishly formed attachments to a transient machine in this way.

To a certain extent, the instrumentalist objection is true and correct. Whatever else technologies are, they are tools, and (leaving aside questions of consciousness on the part of AI) they are not agents with their own goals and desires. The objection misses two crucial points, however:

1. Tools and the affordances they provide are never “mere”, but shape their users to various degrees. In particular, the tools of modern technology inhere in a paradigm that places efficiency of the means of production of goods as the highest value. This inherence naturally creates a situation where values that might compete with efficiency (say, consensus within a community, or the meaningfulness of human work) are deprioritized in the operations of the tools themselves. Many examples of this pattern could be given, from the fact that human components in automated systems like assembly lines have to conform to the system (rather than the system to human variability), to the commonplace example of not being able to enter accurate data into a form on a website because the form assumes that responses must fit a predefined pattern.
2. Even if tools are not essentially value-laden, they pose moral challenges which individual users may not have the fortitude or ethical training to surmount. The more attractive and powerful the tools, the more we will be likely to engage with them without first having gained the moral character requisite for proper use. A list of obvious examples of such tools would include firearms, or addictive substances. In a world of perfect moral fortitude, it would theoretically be possible for every person on the planet to possess a nuclear bomb with no ill consequence, but this obviously has no bearing on actual reality. Why do we think that giving every teen unfettered access to Instagram will have better results? The fact that Instagram is a “mere tool” is no good response, if it time and time again poses ethical challenges too great for the average user to overcome.

Altering the structure of the creative process

Now let’s consider my second main worry: the role of AI in the process of human creativity. Many of the recent developments in AI have been as impressive as they are because they have shown an ability on the part of AI systems to generate creative artifacts previously associated only with significant human creative skill. These artifacts are highly underspecified by the prompts that the human generative “spark” provides as input, and thus represent a significant amount of “agency” (in the sense of determination over the final shape of the artifact) on the part of the AI. With a simple phrase or two, an AI “prompt engineer” can generate virtuoso-level digital paintings, play a song in the style of another artist, or write an essay that, while it may not win any awards (or pass a basic fact check for that matter), can arguably compete with what most undergraduates manage to produce in the hours before an assignment is due. These outputs are rightly lauded as incredible technical achievements. Working with ChatGPT is almost like having your own team of ghostwriters on call.

Of course the product is not always stellar (earlier versions of the Midjourney AI, for example, were famous for not being able to produce believable images of human hands, as good as it was at other things). There is thus a lot of debate about the quality of the output (on any number of levels, from aesthetic to ethical), but this is merely the feedback that will drive future improvements, and doesn’t count as deeper criticism. In my view, all of this focus on the output is precisely the problem, since it avoids looking at the human side of the equation altogether.

A 2-tier vs 3-tier model of the creative process

In the past (represented by what I’ll call the “traditional” or “2-tier” creative process), there were basically two halves to the creative equation: (1) the “creator” (the human being or beings), and (2) the “artifact” (the thing or event produced). Even if unskilled labour was involved somewhere in the process, it was either human labour (and therefore part of the human side of the equation), or a tool whose operation did not on its own determine the shape of the artifact per se, but was under the direct control of the human creator (making allowances for “chance” and “randomness” to count as such a tool).

In all of the AI examples, we have instead a 3-tier structure involving (1) the human “visionary”, (2) the impersonal AI “labourer” (which of course is trained on gazillions of examples of labour by humans), and (3) the creative “artifact” (output). It would be misleading or incorrect to call the human being in this case the “artist”, or the “writer”, or the “creator”, in any traditional sense. And so in a flash we’re in a totally different structural world than previously existed. What the current AI systems have enabled is the interposition of a significant creative force in between the human visionary and the artifact. We have taken something that was unified, and split it in two. (And hasn’t history shown, for example on the plane of the atom, that this practice can be explosive?)

Whether or not the move from a 2-tier to a 3-tier creative process is a regrettable change is up for debate. But certainly a world where human creators become more like directors or idea generators, more removed from the actual generative process, is a vastly different world than the one we have known, and that difference should be frankly acknowledged. It’s no counterargument to point out that humans have always used technology in the creative process. It’s true that tools like paintbrushes or, more recently, digital painting apps have been gladly adopted by artists looking for new ways to express their ideas. It’s tempting to view AI assistance as a difference in scale, but not in kind. What, at the end of the day, is the difference between a paintbrush and a visual AI assistant? Both allow the human creator to generate a visual artifact according to the human’s vision and goals. The AI assistant allows this to happen more or less instantaneously and more or less effortlessly, but so what?

I do want to argue, however, that there is a difference of kind at work as well. With AI we are not dealing with a dumb tool that might require a lesser or greater amount of skill to use fruitfully. With a paintbrush, there is a direct causal chain from my intentions to the final product, unbroken by another agent. With AI assistance, we have interposed an alien, or at least inscrutable, kind of intelligence in this chain. We have a kind of agent, however unconscious, that we let loose, with minimal guidance, to do the work on our behalf. (If I may be permitted a dramatic metaphor: what makes us think that we, in this picture, are the all-powerful Sorcerer, and not the bumbling Sorcerer’s Apprentice, about to be mired in a rising tide of consequences we are ill-equipped to resolve?)

I imagine that proponents of AI-assisted art would want to talk not about the loss of old creative processes but rather the new creative possibilities opened up by AI. They might say that we don’t have to focus purely on the creative artifact, but that human creativity can itself move up a layer of abstraction. In the same way that music producers nowadays take advantage of all manner of technological tools (software instruments, synthesizers, effects, and so on) to more rapidly get what’s in their head into audio form, so we also can view AI assistance in the creative process as merely a tool (however different in kind) that enables us to think about what we want to produce in the world at a higher level, and to get that into the world faster and with less effort. In fact, they might say, a new kind of skill and practice is in the process of being born: the practice of working in community with AI assistants to produce artifacts that take entire artistic fields to the next level. For now, I’m more than happy to give this perspective provisional space. It’s ultimately an empirical question whether this new creative dimension will be as satisfying as the old.

Regardless, I think it needs to be acknowledged that a myopic focus on the artifact (the product delivered by AI) will blind us to the consequences for the human side of the equation. It is ever thus with technological development. Albert Borgmann has collected a number of powerful examples of how, in chasing after a good, divorced by technology from the traditional modes of its production, we often lose something important that was intertwined with that mode. The introduction of central heating systems contributed to the collapse of community in family life among other things. The introduction of personal music players contributed to the decentralization of music in social life. And so on. The divorcing of the means from the ends is always a Faustian enterprise.

Let’s work through the example of AI technologies (vis a vis the creative process) now, by asking what part of the “means” of the traditional creative process might be beneficial for us as humans. What might be lost with this move to an AI-enabled, 3-tier model of creative production? I’ll offer a few suggestions, but want to flag this as an area that needs much more thought!

1. World Engagement. Turning an idea into reality requires engagement with reality, working with the push and pull of a world that exists in its own right and does not immediately bow to our whims with the sheer malleability of “data” (the way that ChatGPT, for example, might encourage us to believe, based on how easy it is to manipulate). Engagement with reality breeds humility, a sense of our own limits, and awareness of the need for development of skill in that engagement.
2. Authentic Self-Expression. The traditional creative process fully retains human agency throughout the chain of events. I may be a horrible visual artist, but at least the stick figures that I draw are exactly what I mean to draw (subject to the limits of my skill)—I do not need to go through n rounds of inquiry with an alien intelligence to generate them, and I do not need to settle for whatever the AI’s approximation of my intent turned out to be. We can think of this as a sort of Existential argument for authenticity, viewing artistic output as a more or less clear distillation of one’s self. ChatGPT, with the level of control it has over the form of the output, muddies the clarity of that distillation.
3. Practice. The creative process, as something requiring skill, is intrinsically a practice, something we do over and over again to become better at. In the case of many art forms, this practice is also an embodied one, engaging a multiplicity of senses and modes of relating with the world. Practice does not only lead to better creative artifacts, but it forms us into different (and I would argue better) persons. Albert Borgmann calls these practices “focal”, and he makes a strong case that the more we trade them for technologically-produced goods, the more diminished our human experience becomes.
4. Meaningful Effort and Achievement. The traditional creative process involves labour, and specifically meaningful labour, the kind which gives us a clear connection between effort and achievement, and results in well-deserved rest and celebration.
5. Community. The traditional creative process can be (though it certainly isn’t by necessity) a communal affair. Human partnerships are possible, indeed often centred, in the production of creative artifacts in a way that, at least so far, they do not appear to be centred in the practice of AI “prompt engineering”.
6. Understanding How Things Work. One of the consequences of the Device Paradigm is that, as technologies become more “available” (easier to use, among other things), they tend to become harder to understand for non-specialists. When my dad was young, he could tinker with and modify the engine in his cars. Nowadays, engines are so complex and integrated that they have become a “black box,” operated on only by highly trained and certified mechanics. Apple is famous for pushing in this direction with its hardware, focusing on sheer opacity for the sake of a streamlined user experience (and resulting in the backlash that is the Right to Repair movement). In the traditional creative process, the creator typically understands all or most of the elements of the process, even if in principle. A painter understands how a paintbrush works (not least because a paintbrush is a totally transparent device—its physical shape discloses its function almost immediately). AI assistance is, on the other hand, about as black a box as can be. With many large models, while it’s clear how the model is trained, it’s not always possible to see why any particular input generates any particular output. Even the developers of the model cannot always look at the system and understand how it works. Making changes to the model is often a process simply of selecting new sorts of training data and hoping things work better. The AI-assisted creator is in no better position to understand any of this. They trade in a formerly clear knowledge of the tools used in the creative process for the role of coaxing an inscrutable model to produce something akin to the desired result. People like my dad have lamented the lack of ability to understand what is happening in a modern car engine. People like myself have lamented the lack of ability to poke around inside an Apple computer, or make hardware upgrades. When we understand how things work, we feel empowered and capable. But I worry that we will face a significant loss of understanding and empowerment, as traditional creative methods are replaced by the black box of AI.

There are no doubt more aspects of the AI-free creative process that we could highlight. The point I want to drive home is that the loss of all of these “side effects” of the traditional process would be consequential indeed, even if only for those engaged in the process. The benefits are obvious—easy production, less gatekeeping of traditional roles in art, the proliferation of more creative content in the world. I don’t mean to devalue these positive developments, and to a certain extent I take them for granted. The benefits are right there on the surface of the technologies as they are advertised to us, after all. It is the costs which are generally hidden, and thus need to be considered carefully!

Ultimately, we can allow my concerns to be evaluated empirically (so long as the goalposts of what counts as meaningful for human existence don’t get moved along the way). What actually happens when artists or other creatives spend their time employing AI assistants instead of engaging in the traditional creative process? How do they feel about their work? Do they feel that the skills developed involve the use of all of their faculties in a challenging and fulfilling way? Do they feel that the fundamental impulse to connect emotionally and intellectually with their audiences in an authentic way has been made more or less transparent? And so on.

The relationship between personhood and creativity

What if the “personhood” concern and the “creative process” concern are not two totally separate things, despite how I’ve presented them so far? What if human personhood and human creativity are more fundamentally linked? Despite the common aversion of people to self-identify as “artists”, it appears to have been demonstrated that, at least in kindergarten, everyone is an artist. 

I have, it’s true, a vested interest in seeing the world this way. I co-founded a startup with a mission to convince everyone that they are indeed an “artist”, that the “quality” of their creative output depended more on the meaningful stories driving it than their technical ability to cast those stories into traditional artistic modes. My favourite theology sees God’s act of creation not as the laying down of immovable strictures but as the invitation to us to continue that act of creation through our own creative acts. And so I will not attempt to argue in a purely disinterested way that human beings are essentially creative. 

For one thing, to say that creativity is both necessary and sufficient for human personhood runs into a variety of philosophical problems. Some particular human beings might not evince much of what we judge to be creativity, after all. But it does seem evident that much of what we appreciate about the creative artifacts we recognize as such is the human meaning invested in them. Whether the artifact is a painting, a song, or a building, when we hear the human story that launched a particular creative process on its way, or indeed the story of the creative process itself (with all its accompanying challenges and accidents), we find a connection of meaning with the creator, via their artifact, that transcends the artifact’s particular physical or aesthetic form. Our aesthetic relationship with the products of human creativity therefore goes one step further than our relationship with, e.g., the beauty of the natural world. And so I take it for granted that human personhood is a necessary precondition for this heightened kind of aesthetic experience consisting in the connection of meaning established between the creator and the ones experiencing their creative artifact.

What kind of meaning lies behind a piece of AI-generated artwork? If we leave aside, as I have been doing, the possibility that AI systems are actually conscious agents, then it is hard to see how there is anything approaching “meaning” in their outputs. A connection of meaning can exist between human beings in a relatively transparent way given our shared evolutionary and historical trajectory, i.e., the fact that we can inhabit each others’ lived experiences to a significant degree. When a neural network produces a poem about the frustration of never-ending spring rains in Vancouver (something I would very much like to do at this moment), the poem does not result from any subjective experience of the rains in question, however much the AI feeds upon the tokens of people who have had those experiences. It is therefore a refracted representation of a set of tokens which were originally causally and meaningfully connected to spring rains, but that’s it. Nothing’s going on “inside” the AI which we might care about in the way we care about the backstory of a human creator.

If this is a true insight, then maybe we can propose a provisional “law of process aesthetics”, defined for now without rigour: creative artifacts are aesthetically valuable in proportion to the amount of human intention, effort, care, and meaning involved in their production, and to the extent these factors are known by the beholder. The two concerns about AI I discussed above are thus particularly concerning, because when conjoined they do away entirely with the important aesthetic relation of meaningfulness. When I identify what is most essential about personhood with qualities that can be said to belong to AI systems, then I forfeit an ability to relate on the plane of shared human experience outside those “rational” qualities. And when I settle for an AI-generated prelude to my novella, I miss the opportunity to implant a discoverable and relatable meaning in my work (or at least meaning that flows from me as a person instead of from the global amalgam of personal artifacts that constitutes the training data for an LLM).

One interesting corollary of the proposed “law” is that certain types of AI-assisted projects might be considered to be aesthetically valuable indeed. Imagine a scenario where a talented painter used something like ChatGPT to put pixels of specific colours in specific locations upon a canvas, as if they were talking to their paintbrush instead of manipulating it directly. A beautiful painting produced this way would exhibit a high degree of human intention, effort, care, and meaning, with potentially multiple layers of meaning given the choice to use a suboptimal tool in the production of the painting (or maybe the only available tool, if the artist did not have the use of their hands). In this case, the use of AI does not appear to diminish at all the human creativity and meaning involved, and I would not want to argue otherwise myself.

On the other hand, an AI painting generated by the prompt “Draw me a beautiful lake in the country in the style of Cezanne” would not count as aesthetically very valuable or meaningful on this scheme, regardless of the sheer visual beauty of the artifact. I take this to be a relatively uncontroversial outcome as well.

Living in an AI-assisted future

It’s time to descend from abstract and maybe tendentious thinking about aesthetics and human creativity and come back to the real world. Even if a number of people are swayed by arguments like the ones I’ve been making, the fact is that AI assistance is too powerful a promise for most people to refuse. Particularly in cases where the traditional creative process doesn’t feel all that fulfilling (like writing a paper for a class you don’t much care about), it might not seem that the cost of adopting AI is very high. To be honest, I’m not sure what to do about such cases, other than to make the personal and societal arguments from a place of vigorous and impassioned celebration of human creativity (i.e., to engage in “ deictic discourse”), and hope they resonate at some level as a kind of virtue ethic. (I, for one, am not currently tempted to use an AI assistant even in mundane writing tasks, for all the reasons above, particularly because I want the things that are attached to my name to be authentic processions of me, not my intent filtered through an afterimage of all the words ever uploaded to the web. I leave open, of course, the possibility that use cases might arise for which my personal calculus changes!)

One of my hopes in all of this is a possible backlash to the looming flood of AI-created artifacts. When artifacts of sufficient quality are so easily produced, it may be that we start to value not so much the “quality” per se of the art but the human elements that make art meaningful and relatable, and the human practice and skill that we honour in the artifact. Until AI agents have lived experiences that approximate our own, the story behind a piece of AI-generated art is just not going to be as meaningful. I wonder if we will start to gravitate towards art that has an “AI-free” label because we know we are going to encounter something more “real”, the way a certain segment of the population prefers “hormone-free” and “additive-free” organic foods. In other words, we might add a new dimension to the concept of provenance of creative artifacts, and not just for high art but for everyday “knowledge worker” output as well. Even if this happens, I’m concerned that economic pressures will tend to make higher-human-involved products (like organic foods, or this putative 100% AI-free art) more expensive, with the concomitant reduction in access to goods which should arguably belong to everyone. (Update: a few days after posting this article, I saw an example of this in the wild!)

Regardless of how it shakes out economically, I do see the possibility of a natural reaction against commodified AI-generated artifacts on the horizon, which gives me hope that at least a significant minority will continue to value traditional, human-centred modes of creativity. This minority might even push more boldly into that field than we currently experience, rediscovering and moving forward older or forgotten arts that were superseded by technological means. External economic support from a patron class or a government source would no doubt be necessary to make this whole story sustainable, in the way Albert Borgmann proposes a political affirmation of traditional modes of production over against the commoditizing force of technology.

I think the basic questions we all need to ask are, (1) “What makes human life meaningful and valuable?” And (2) “What does a use of AI look like which fully respects those aspects of human life?” Answering the first question will be difficult because it has always been difficult. Answering the second question will involve confronting some of the unintended side effects of AI use that might ultimately be detrimental for faculties that we prize highly in ourselves, like our creativity. And maybe this is one good outcome of the rise of AI: it might compel us to take the first question more seriously than we have so far!

Right now, sitting as we are in the full upswing of the AI hype cycle, it’s easy to focus on the promises, the benefits, and the technical legerdemain enacted for our amazement. But we should not lose sight of the fact that technology, if it is to be good, must always be subjugated to, and limited by, higher human values. Too often technological development becomes its own end (the “efficiency” fetish, per Ellul). We already see this with AI, where the AI “arms race” is being intentionally escalated by major companies. Hubris is dangerous enough, but when coupled with wilful myopia, it is a recipe for catastrophe. I want us to take a deep breath and think a little bit about what we really value in our lives, our selves, our communities, and whether the catapulting of AI into all of these areas is really going to make them better. I fully expect that, in a number of ways and dimensions, the answer will be “yes”! And in some areas I expect that it will be “no”. My hope, whatever we decide, is that we come to these answers after a process of settled discernment, not simply as a result of the conveyor-belt adoption of whatever the tech magnates have decided will make our lives easier, or their pockets heavier. (One also gets the sneaking suspicion that capitalist money-grabbing is not even the primary motivation in the frenzied development of AI. A decidedly religious zeal accompanies the pronouncements of the field’s top stars, and the hope with which their flocks look to “AGI” or “The Singularity” to solve all our problems makes old-fashioned Fundamentalism look almost thoughtful by comparison).

A Tolkien-inspired technology virtue ethic

As a huge Sci-Fi/Fantasy nerd, I can’t conclude without attempting some reference to an epic story, in this case, The Lord of the Rings. I was struck recently by something I noticed about the narrative in those novels which is instructive for our purposes. It’s been frequently observed that Sauron’s One Ring stands for the kind of power which is so overwhelming, and so tied to Sauron’s nature, that it can only corrupt. (Some have indeed wondered if it is a cipher for modern technology.) Anyone that comes into contact with the Ring is ultimately overcome by its power and turns to evil. The truly “good” characters in the narrative are those who reject the offer of the Ring entirely (Gandalf, Galadriel, or Faramir–the book version of him–for example, in contrast to Boromir or even Frodo, who ultimately succumbs). So far, this could all be cast as a “substantivist” critique of modern technology: technology, like the Ring, has its own internal “force” that ultimately determines the outcome, regardless of the intentions of the mortal wielder. We don’t generally believe this hard-line take on technology, which appears to have a nature much more complex than either a simple instrumentalist or substantivist view can account for.

Interestingly, there’s a good deal more nuance implicit in the narrative world, which I only just recognized: Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond are all ring wielders themselves, bearing the three Elvish rings forged around the same time as the One Ring. Galadriel may have said “no” to the tempting possibilities of the One Ring, but she didn’t say “no” to rings of power in general, and was happy to make use of Nenya (her ring) for certain, more constrained, purposes (such as the sustaining of Lothlórien and its people). I think we have here a more realistic philosophy of technology, more or less dependent on a kind of virtue ethic, that can be useful for us in the current situation. Some technology may have the morally overwhelming force of the One Ring, and to such technologies the appropriate response is humility, the recognition that I, at least, will not be able to wield such power responsibly without dire consequence. But other technologies might be suitable for me.

Which technologies are which depend on a variety of factors, not least my own character. (Boromir, for example, would probably not have been trustworthy to wield one of the Elvish rings, either. And we are certainly led to assume that Saruman is not worthy of whatever ring it is that he apparently acquired along the way.) We can extrapolate this point to the level of society as well. Which technologies we allow to run free in our society depends jointly on the nature of the technologies and on the level of maturity we generally exhibit in society in relation to those technologies. If we want to take advantage of higher-powered and more consequential technologies, then perhaps we must first focus on asking which practices will generate the kind of character, at the level of both individual and society, that can safely engage with those technologies. We already encode this way of treating technology to a certain degree legally, for example with minimum drinking ages or driving tests. Until we can figure out the appropriate methods for developing and confirming character vis a vis other consequential technologies—and maybe forever in the case of some technologies—we are best off emulating Galadriel, who was content to allow her own diminishment rather than become something more powerful, yes, but ultimately less good.

(Many thanks to Matt Civico , Justin Smith , Adam Graber , and Nick Bott , who reviewed drafts of this essay and provided helpful feedback, insights, examples, and in some cases, copyediting! All views and errors are my own, etc…, etc…)

Most of my writing energies these days go to keeping Appium Pro current, so it may surprise some of my Internet people to know that I have a personal blog, where I have (with decreasing frequency) mused in long or short form on a number of topics, most recently evaluating technology from a critical philosophical perspective. Of probably even greater surprise to many would be the fact that I have a strong interest, not just in the philosophy of technology, but in the theology of technology (and indeed, theology as it relates to technology).

Personally, I grew up in and remain in the Christian tradition, though over the years my faith has become something very unlike what often goes under the adjective “Christian” in our world today (especially in the United States). If I thought you had the patience, I would heap paragraphs on top of one another critiquing contemporary “Christianity" from top to bottom. As is readily visible to anyone with the eyes to see, mostly what people mean by “Christian”, and uphold as Christians, is a set of beliefs and practices at best orthogonal to, and at worst diametrically opposed to, the teachings and actions of Jesus. But that is not what this post is about, so I will have to (uncomfortably) settle for this brief disclaimer.

This post is about the SARS-COV-2 virus, and more specifically how it is changing our culture and our theology as it rampages in pandemic form around the world. This post is also about the phenomenon of increasing virtualization of everything, even the practice of “church”. And finally, this post is about embodiment, which is under attack at this moment in history, and not only in the direct and obvious form of COVID-19. This post is primarily addressed to people who would themselves care about what church is (or is supposed to be), but others of you might find the reflections interesting as well.

VR Church

To get into this discussion, let’s talk about VR church. A year and a half ago, CNN aired a video on the new phenomenon of VR church (take the time to watch it now if you didn’t catch it earlier). The video description asks the question, “What if you didn’t have to leave your house to go to church, and all that you needed was a computer and an internet connection?” There are multiple kinds of digital church envisioned here, from the equivalent of huge video calls, to the extreme of church meetings taking place purely via the interaction of VR avatars. The basic tone of the video is: of course church could be digital and/or virtual, just like everything else! Why wouldn’t it?

The thesis I want to promote here is contrary to that position, and quite simple: VR church is not church. To be more helpful, I can rephrase in more specific language: According to the vision for humanity, and for the trajectory of humanity’s relationship with God, found in the best and most careful exegeses of the Judeo-Christian writings, the idea of a purely “virtual” or “digital” church is a contradiction in terms, because it loses sight of the intense biblical focus on the value of ordinary, embodied human existence.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot for people to disagree with. To argue for the essential opposition of “church” and “virtual” that I’m proposing, we need to first make sure we understand VR, and then we need to make sure we understand Christianity’s vision for church and indeed for humanity in general.

The Nature and Purpose of VR

What is VR? As we all already know, it involves covering our sense perceptors as completely as possible with digital inputs, so that we are transported to a completely digitized reality. Today, this means mostly the covering of our eyes and ears, but in the future it will mean the wearing of special suits for tactile feedback, and potentially olfactory feedback as well. Why would anyone engage in this kind of apparently odd behavior? Proponents of VR point to any number of uses of the technology, but as far as we can tell, the primary uses today are in the realm of entertainment: gaming (first and foremost), and passive consumption of immersive content (as always with technology, pioneered by the porn industry). Other more mundane uses include team meetings, group chats, exploring houses and buildings before they are complete, “trying on” new furniture, immersive virtual shopping experiences, or virtual tourism. In the future, it is promised that VR will unlock new kinds of educational experiences, and also provide high-fidelity training for workers of all kinds.

Researchers and technologists are also excited about the prospects of VR for allowing humans to inhabit other kinds of mental states than the ones we normally do. We might, for example, use VR to teach empathy with other people’s experiences. Somebody without the use of certain limbs might regain the experience of using them through a VR interface. We might even put a person in place of an insect, and explore a range of psychological possibilities for the human brain that we have not been able to fathom yet.

One basic and obvious fact about VR that goes unmentioned is that people use VR because they think it will provide something better than “real reality” (which I will denote as RR). Either a more intense gaming experience, a more immersive media consumption experience, a shortcut for the imagination when trying to pick a color for a room, or just an escape from a dull or anxious everyday life. I’m focusing on the “entertainment” uses of VR, because these are (and always will be) the most prevalent. The use of VR, then, implies either the dissatisfaction with RR or the hope to find something better than RR, if only for a period of time. This is not so different, someone might argue, from how we currently use movies and TV shows, or indeed books. We turn to them to provide a different sort of experience for our minds, often in an intentional effort to escape our prior experience, whether out of boredom or some other motive.

Indeed, we can place VR on one end of a spectrum with a number of other developments in human history, with something like the oral tradition of epic poetry on the other end. The question for us as people wishing to analyze VR from a cultural, philosophical, or ethical perspective, becomes: what are the distinctives of VR, and do these imply a different analysis than the kind we would give about books? On the face of it, VR is certainly distinct from reading a novel. The whole point of VR is to provide complete immersion, overwhelming the senses in order to convince the user that what they are seeing is “real” (even if that “realness” is cached out in terms of an aesthetic quite different from RR, e.g., the pixelated and blocky aesthetic of Minecraft). The point of a novel is to meet the reader halfway—the author provides a sort of schema for understanding a set of descriptions, and the reader constructs an imagined experience with those pieces. The reader of a novel is still doing her own “work” to cognitively build the reality she then inhabits, whereas in VR, the reality comes of its own accord (however malleable that reality is via the user’s manipulation of it).

Movies would occupy an intermediate space between novels and VR experiences, because the filmmaker does the work of crafting a single reality for all viewers to experience, and yet each viewer sees the bounds of the screen, and knows that what is happening is that a story is being told, rather than a reality being constructed for their participation. This is the other distinctive of VR—the user actually inhabits the entertainment world in a way that the reader of a book or a viewer of a movie does not. This habitation of the virtual world brings with it a whole new set of psychological and emotional investments. Users of VR are described as merging with their avatars in a way completely unlike our experience of watching a character on a screen. Users of VR have also reported a sense of loss or dissatisfaction or disorientation with RR, upon returning from their VR excursions. Something real in our identity is given over to the VR world, as indeed can happen with the imagined worlds of novels or movies, but in a way which is much stronger and unconscious in the VR case.

Crucially, VR experiences involve the phenomenon of disembodiment in a much more significant way than other forms of media. This is quite the point of VR—to encourage a person to forget the reality experienced by their body and to invest in the reality delivered by the device. The fact that usually the user inhabits some point of view or a personal character in a VR experience might convince us to use the neologism otherbodiment instead, but the end result is the same—the dissociation of one’s mind and experience of reality from one’s concrete physical situation.

Users of VR might argue that I’m wrong about VR being disembodied, at least relatively speaking. They might point to the variety of VR games that crucially involve the use of body movements for playing the game. It’s true that compared with sitting at a desk and using a keyboard and mouse, VR games can be more kinetic (and I think this considered on its own is a good thing). However, the fact that one’s body is involved does not amount to “embodiment”. First of all, the user’s body in this case is separate from the game “body”, and used merely as a sort of controller. Secondly, the motions used for controlling VR games are (at least to this point) merely coarse-grained pantomimes or symbolic representations of real bodily action (for example, the digital version of nocking an arrow and loosing it has to be quite a bit more generic than the real thing). Finally, the use of one’s body to drive VR experiences is probably ultimately a hindrance to the delivery of the most immersive content, and will ultimately give way to neurological control according to the nature of the Device Paradigm.

We could say a lot more about VR, and we are almost in a position to give an ethical and social analysis of it on its own terms. But the point of this essay is to explore the phenomenon of VR church, so it’s time we took a look at the other side of that question—the “church” side.

The Vision of Christianity

In this essay, there is no way to give the appropriate qualifications on the meaning of the term “Christianity.” There is in actual practice of course not just one thing to which that term refers. Historically, the thousands of years of the religion’s development has seen many and sometimes conflicting variations. And yet, I would argue that we can indeed trace one thread from the Mosaic Yahwism of the authors of the Pentateuch through the prophetic ministry of Jesus of Nazareth to the current practice and tradition of at least some of modern Christianity. It is this thread, which has almost always been misunderstood in various ways, or pulled in erroneous and contradictory directions, which I mean by “Christianity.” It is this thread which I am attempting to speak on behalf of (with the appropriate amount of humility) in this essay.

What does this kind of Christianity propose is true about the world? Let me highlight the points which I take to be relevant for the current discussion in bulleted fashion here:

• Reality is good, not something to escape. God created a good (yet still “in-progress”) world, and nothing humans can do could made it a “bad” world in its essence (though the evidence is clear enough in the Bible and in our present experience that we can do an awful lot to make it worse—see the next point).

• Pain and evil are real, and real problems, and the appropriate response to their existence is to work faithfully against them with the ultimate awareness that God will not suffer them forever. We should neither fatalistically succumb to the existence of evil, nor attempt to escape and transcend it in an ultimate denial.

• The sphere of our existence is resolutely physical. We are embodied beings, living in a physical world with other embodied beings. Nothing in the Bible suggests that some kind of escape from the physical is desirable or appropriate (that idea is of Gnostic or Neoplatonic origin, and it has unfortunately been attractive to people for a very long time). The focus for ethics and even theology in the Bible is always brought back to the well-being of the earth’s creatures, considered at least physically (not denying however that the ultimate source of physical goodness is the “spiritual” goodness of appropriate relation to God).

• Humanity is basically personal, relational, and communal. We are responsible for one another as well as for the earth in general. To attempt to escape a painful or evil situation while leaving others in it would be immoral. Because humans are embodied, our ethical responsibility is first and foremost in the sphere of physical needs and well-being, all the while acknowledging the intrinsic relationship between the physical and spiritual (they do not vary freely with respect to one another).

• Human beings, and indeed all the earth’s creatures, are dependent. We are not gods ourselves, though God does want us to grow in relationship with him to the extent that we eventually become something quite different than we are today. The way to grow is by trusting in the good gifts of God despite circumstances, and indeed by suffering even death in the service of God’s creatures while remaining in that posture of trust.

• Created reality is “sticky”, and “hard”—we are to work with it, and will inevitably experience its resistance. If we fall on the ground, we will get injured. This is a part of living in an ultimately good and ordered creation, and not a result of a moral or metaphysical “Fall”. We cannot reshape reality as we see fit just by a word—that power is clearly on the side of God and not of his creatures. We are to shape reality, but only by working with the tools available within the created world (and indeed by developing new tools to help us better work with reality).

This might not sound like the Christianity you grew up in or around. It certainly would have sounded foreign to my Bible-belt-dwelling teenage self! But it is nonetheless the story the Bible paints when it is read carefully and well. Crucially, the climax of this story involves what we call the Incarnation, which is God’s act of becoming a human being. If anything could be the nail in the coffin of the Gnostic heresy of Docetism, it would be this doctrine that the supreme spiritual being chose to become a physical, flesh-and-blood human being, with all the physical and intellectual limits that implies. According to Christianity, God’s purposes never included rescuing people from physical reality, but was and is to work with human beings in physical reality, encouraging humans and all the rest of Creation to become more and more like him (i.e., creative, free, and loving).

Christianity vs VR

Now that we’ve looked at VR, and looked at what I mean by “Christianity”, we can consider the phenomenon of “VR Church” more directly. It’s true that we haven’t discussed ecclesiology (i.e., we haven’t defined “church”), but even if we take “church” to just mean something like “a group of people living out the vision of Christianity together,” it’s clear that “VR Church” is a contradiction in terms.

First of all, VR experiences are completely disembodied (or otherbodied), which undercuts the Christian emphasis on embodiment and on physical reality being the zone within which God has chosen to relate to us. What’s so bad about disembodiment? In general, I see it as having a variety of negative consequences. I’ll list a few:

• Disembodiment can discourage care of the physical world and its creatures—if we don’t inhabit that world, why would we maintain it?

• Disembodiment can distort human relationships. On one hand, the ability to present oneself in any form one chooses is a freeing experience. On the other hand, whenever I encounter someone so presented, I am not actually interacting with them. It becomes that much easier to engage in the process (not limited to VR, certainly) of mutual projection—I project onto the other person what I want them to be, and vice versa. The difference with VR is that mutual projection can continue forever—there is no rubber to meet any proverbial road in showing me who my interlocutor really is.

• Disembodiment goes hand in hand with distemporality. Space and time are essential features of our physical experience, and time is a key ingredient in most physical and psychological processes. VR experiences, like many other digital experiences, contribute to a reliance on instant gratification, which is at odds with the way RR works. In general disembodiment leads to a greater dissatisfaction with anything difficult or unpleasant, because there is no intrinsic need for difficulty in an entirely constructed world.

In fact, VR opens up a kind of new Platonic Gnosticism, giving us the power to finally be our own gods, at the cost of our universe(s) becoming totally solipsistic. Still, the ability to forge our self image with complete arbitrariness, and to experience whatever we will, whenever we will it, is intoxicating. The better the VR experience, and the more compelling our own existence in it, the more dissatisfied we will become with RR, leading to a vicious cycle of disembodiment.

Ultimately, VR is a tool, like many other technological devices, designed to help us avoid pain and death—even if the pain to be avoided is the minor pain of a daily inconvenience. The real danger of VR, from a Christian perspective, is that the price for doing so is buying into a reality that disregards what Craig Gay (in his book on modern technology) calls “ordinary embodied human existence”. This kind of existence might not hold much appeal for many people, but for the Christian, it is the kind of existence which has been stamped with the ultimate seal of value by the Incarnation. And it’s not hard to see why! On the Christian view, we are not meant to be gods (at least not without first going through a process of maturation into the character of God). Physical reality, with all its pains, toils, and rough edges, keeps us grounded in trust and dependence along the journey towards that maturity. Physical reality involving other people reminds us of our intrinsic social and ethical dimensions—we aren’t meant to live solipsistically, and sometimes we need the messiness of other people to help us see that.

So, should churches adopt VR services to reach a broader audience and increase the convenience of all involved? No, I don’t think so. The point of church is not to reach a broad audience, as if the Gospel of Jesus Christ were a marketing campaign (and obviously some people treat it just like that). Nor is convenience a spiritual virtue. Instead, churches should remember that Jesus became the first true human being so that we too could be truly human beings in a truly physical world, not to escape to a disembodied Heaven when we die. Churches should take seriously the parable of the Good Samaritan and look to the physical well-being of their neighbors, inside and outside the flock. And finally, churches should be critically aware of all the ways disembodiment can sneak in. VR services are just one end of a spectrum—what about fully remote video services? Do these differ substantially in analysis from what I argued about VR? Ultimately, I would argue they don’t. And so it is interesting to see that, despite the “fringe” nature of VR services, fully remote online services are exploding in number across the world as we speak, due to the social distancing recommendations attached to the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19

The current pandemic is unique (in my experience at least) in moving almost all social interaction online. This probably couldn’t have happened even 10 years ago, but it is now possible to use video conferencing tools successfully for a lot of social interaction. There are two questions I want to consider in this connection: first, should churches run online services, given everything we said about “VR Church”? And second, more generally, what is an appropriate Christian response to the pandemic, based on my understanding of Christianity?

My take on the first question is that remote online church services are a net negative, or maybe instead that they reveal a negative truth about what church has already been. The fact that we could, within the space of several weeks, have fully-functioning church services online without intense disruption of people’s faith lives, signals to me that most churches have already become virtual, even while meeting in their sanctuaries every Sunday. It’s not hard to believe, especially for megachurches, that actual “ordinary embodied human existence” is not a central feature of church life. Sitting as a more or less faceless member of a huge audience watching a pastor speak, or a worship leader play music on a stage, one is not actively engaging one’s ordinary embodied existence in the direction of spiritual maturity!

Let me clear about the present situation: I’m not saying that video chats with your parishioners, friends, or family during a shelter-in-place order is a bad thing. I’m grateful for the technology that lets us connect in high-bandwidth ways that keep the wheels of society from grinding completely to a halt, and I’m not suggesting that we live as Luddite hermits merely because we’re not allowed to be physically present with our friends and neighbors (although, pretty much everybody in our overly connected society would probably benefit from some screen-free solitude).

My real problem here is that, as I look around, I don’t actually see that many churches even nominally living out the vision of Christianity I framed above. As a result, for the average church, a move online is probably not going to make much of a difference to the experience of their average member. Moving everything online might, however, further sanction the kind of disembodiment I find so dangerous about VR, contributing to a naive and problematic openness to VR on the part of Christians and the wider culture. Rather than facilitating this transition, I think churches should be actively resisting it!

So, should churches continue to meet in person, in the midst of a pandemic? No, of course not. Christians should listen to scientists and doctors when they say that social distancing is the best way to care for the especially vulnerable in our society. Caring for the especially vulnerable is practically the charter of Christianity, so it would be a horrible irony if Christians valued some abstract concept of embodiment over the concrete well-being of their neighbors! Christians should be eagerly seeking advice on how best to care for others in society, and if that means staying at home and not going to church—so be it!

But of course, there are options besides just canceling church on one hand and doing a purely remote online version of a church’s normal service on the other, and this brings us into my take on the second question (about how Christians should respond to the pandemic generally). In addition to paying attention to the recommendations of trustworthy doctors and scientists, Christians should be creative in finding ways to help others in what is currently a mounting crisis not just of health but of the economy. For someone in the church’s neighboring community who has just lost a job, what they need is probably not an online church service, but cash to get them through the coming rough season. Why wouldn’t churches take their online marketing budgets and create a fund for those in need in their communities? Transferring money can be done without the risk of infection!

Or, what if churches acknowledged the fundamentally consumption-oriented model of online services, and decided to scrap the whole thing? Churches could connect smaller groups of members, who could meet in video chats where at least everyone has the sense of participating. Or, at an extreme, what if churches sold their big and expensive buildings and gave the profits to those in need, pledging to instead spin up a house-church model after the pandemic subsides? There are lots of things that churches could do, in other words, that don’t sacrifice ordinary embodied human existence even as we all abide by the social distancing policies that temporarily restrict our embodied existence in certain ways. In my awareness, however, churches in general have not been asking creative questions about what they could do along these lines, and instead have been focused mostly on asking how they can continue to do the same thing they did before, but online.

In terms of the individual Christian’s response to the pandemic, it is clear from Scripture that at the very least we should not be panic-buying and hoarding toilet paper. Instead, we trust that the God of the widow of Zarephath will provide for our needs in such a way that we can allow our neighbors their fair share—or more—of toilet paper as well. Trust is the key posture. For the Christian, there is no guarantee of happiness or health in life, or even of the continuation of life itself. A lot of things can happen in this world, and even some of the things that aren’t morally bad about the world (e.g., viruses) can kill us. The Christian merely has the confidence that the same God that made the world (and allowed for the evolution of viruses) has the power to restore life, and moreover knows each of us by name. And in the meantime, we should do all we can to prevent the kinds of bad things humans are responsible for (like poor pandemic preparedness, or the hiding of information, or the injustice in the distribution of tests and medicine, or taking advantage of people’s rights in a crisis, etc…). The virus on its own is one thing, but compounded by all kinds of human evil and thoughtlessness, it becomes something else entirely!

Conclusion

This has been a long essay indeed, so allow me to summarize what I’ve tried to communicate here: according to the kind of Christianity I take to be most authentically Christian, churches should think twice before virtualizing their operations. In fact, they should already be thinking twice about what on earth (pun!) they are doing. Churches should recover a theological focus on the value of ordinary embodied human existence to such an extent that the very idea of “VR Church” should appear to be a contradiction in terms, and they should moreover be asking what it means to value the ordinary embodied human existence of their neighbors.

In the current COVID-19 health crisis, this very regard for the embodied human existence of our neighbors implies that Christians should refrain from the kinds of embodied gatherings that could bring unintentional infection and harm to the vulnerable. This abstinence should be regarded as unfortunate and temporary, not as merely a convenient catalyst for moving to purely online delivery of church services or a slide into the normalization of a more “virtual" humanity. Finally, Christians everywhere should be praying and working for the elimination of the virus, and more importantly, the elimination of any human folly or evil that makes the impact of the virus worse than what it needs to be on its own.

Recently, it occurred to me that there is something else I can do. Something that won’t fit in a tweet or be very popular. Something that might be long, hard to deal with, or uncomfortable to read. Something that may or may not connect with any audience. But there is something that can help me, at least, plumb more of the depths of the dark cancer that gnaws at the heart of potential reconciliation in our country. I can talk about my racism. I can talk about what part I play, or have played, in this drama that we’re so shamefully writing as a society.

“Hold on a minute”, everyone who knows me will say. “Isn’t this just some kind of false humility, or publicity stunt, or exercise in link-baiting? You’re the last person I would call a racist!” And indeed, there is much to my credit, both ideologically and in my actions, with regard to love and respect for people of all races and persuasions. I live in San Francisco, arguably the least ideologically-racist city in America. I’m a software developer, working in a field that many like to think of as a meritocracy. I’m a fan of diversity, inclusion, and non-violence. I talk to everyone I meet on the street or in bars or restaurants with respect, regardless of their skin color or social position. I’m what many would consider a radical feminist, acknowledging the unjust system of male domination that has irrevocably shaped the workings of society since the beginnings of society (a system, I would argue, that has deeper and stronger roots even than racism). I lived in Kenya for almost a year, volunteering to help make the lives and prospects of African orphans better. I did my best to learn Swahili so as not to participate in the implicit colonial narrative of a white person in Africa. I became a vegetarian because the children I was with could not afford to eat meat. Ask any of my friends, and they’ll tell you that I’m an all-around bridge-building type of person. So in what crazy possible world would I be counted among “racists”?

Unfortunately, that world is all too actual. Racism is not just about our beliefs, what we would claim, or even our conscious actions. It’s much more often implicit, pre-arranged; it’s in the air we breathe. The world comes to us racist. The structures of society are set up as positive feedback mechanisms, and those of us that benefit by being on the upward spiral can easily go through life without seeing how those benefits are often powered by some form of racism or sexism. This is just the way things are set up. Of course, these structures encourage narratives that can birth a more overt form of racism as well.

I grew up in North-Central Texas, in a small town outside of Dallas. Neither of my parents were from Texas, and we didn’t move there until I was 6, so we didn’t feel very “Texan”, but I soon learned about the centuries-deep furrows that “race” had carved into the social soil. My Junior High and High School were pretty diverse, with (I think) less than 50% White students, and substantial Black and Hispanic populations. It was also highly segregated. Friendships did not easily cross racial boundaries, and while there must have been one or two, I can’t remember specifically any interracial romantic relationships. Neighborhoods were also fairly segregated. My neighborhood (predominantly White) bordered on another neighborhood (predominantly Black). I remember the first time I was driven to a house in that latter, poorer neighborhood. It was made obvious to me through what those around me were saying that this neighborhood was “worse”, that it was dangerous, and that our friends who lived there were surely only doing so because, as poor missionaries, they couldn’t afford to live in a “better” area. Why was the neighborhood worse and dangerous? There may not have been an explicit link, but it was described as being a “Black” neighborhood. As a result, I believe that my first racist feeling was one of fear. Black people were dangerous, and I shouldn’t go to this area on my own.

And so, in my experience, Black people were talked about in general as a “they”. They were a “they” because we didn’t have Black friends, and it allowed us to lump all of these people together in our minds according to this one attribute that they shared: skin color. And again, because we didn’t bother to differentiate between this or that Black person (which we could have done by making friends with Black people, for example), many negative adjectives (“dangerous”, “low class”, “aggressive”) were taken to apply not just to this category of people, but back again to individuals. This is how a stereotype succeeds in its self-sustaining reaction: the two reagents (“white” and “black”) were close enough to combust, but not close enough to forestall a meltdown.

In Junior High, I made a friend on the school bus. We both played trumpet in band, and liked to read books, and we began to sit together on the way to school. He was Black, though, and I soon discovered the awkwardness of enjoying being with him on one hand, and then on the other hand listening to my White friends making fun of him behind his back. Some of it was normal kid stuff that I also suffered—he was a “nerd”, and he had a funny last name that led to the kind of crude and cruel puns junior-highers are known for. I also had to deal with this kind of thing. But some of the mockery was about his appearance, specifically his “huge lips”, which was derogatory code for his being “really Black”. I’m deeply sad to say that, in the face of this kind of social pressure, I increasingly avoided him until we no longer spent any time together. It’s this kind of non-action, not any overt pro-action, that characterizes my racism, and much of the implicit racism in our culture. Did I personally make fun of him? No. I even said (feebly), “Hey, he’s actually pretty cool” one or two times. But at the end of the day, did I disturb the status quo for the sake of a promising geeky friendship? No. And so the train rolls on, and the wheels bite ever deeper into the grooves of the age-old carnival ride we wish we would end.

It’s not just about staying quiet while my friends told racist jokes, or when they laughed about what some “crazy nigger” did, or when they viewed a Black woman as a totally different kind of sex object than a White woman. It wasn’t just how I contributed, because of my own sharp need to be accepted by my peers, to the endemic racism in our society. It was also what I missed out on! How impoverished was I, who could have experienced so many more kinds of relationship in life! But it’s not that simple. By the time you’re a teenager in a society like this, race-driven “culture” has shaped you just as much as latent ideas about race itself. For a few weeks in a row, my family went to a nearby Black church. I’m not sure why. Maybe (let’s be generous) we were moved by a desire to see the unity of the Church crossing racial boundaries. All I can remember is being terrified—the only White kid in a sea of Black people, everyone looking and waving and Hallelujah-ing at me the whole time. I felt embarrassed both by their exuberance and then by my own cultural faux pas of not jumping and raising my hands in praise. Race aside, I found it impossible to connect with the culture of that place. I couldn’t understand or affirm the constant shouting and hand-waving. I couldn’t understand or affirm the expensive suits and showy preaching. And so on. To an introverted geek, it was a cultural nightmare.

Reflecting now, it may also have been exactly the kind of thing that my 14-year-old self needed in order to become a less withdrawn, lonely, and isolated kid, but that ship has sailed. My point is simply that living in a segregated society from early on, and the early whispered conversations about Black people as a “they”, set in motion a force very much like compound interest. By the time I was 14, Black culture was already so ineffable and threatening to me given my own cultural background that from that point on I haven’t really been able to make any Black (that is, culturally “Black”) friends. “I just don’t get the culture”, I’ve heard myself say in the past—this coming from a person who’s traveled the world, lived abroad, and studied many cultures, including in Africa!

But you know, society has conspired to keep me from having to really look at that head-on. I left Texas before my Senior year of High School, and headed to Florida, where the race dialogue was different (and I spoke Spanish, so no problems there). Then on to sunny, perfect, California for college and most of the rest of my subsequent story. I now live in San Francisco, the techno-Mecca where as a society we’ve gotten rid of everyone, like most Black people, who can’t afford to “pay to play” (except for the homeless, who from many citizens’ perspectives just haven’t had the good grace to shuffle on).

It was only recently, when White-on-Black police brutality and terrorism began to surface in the news, that I was turned on to a stream of different voices. Reading the #drivingwhileblack tweets, for example, helped me begin to understand the basic experience of life from a Black perspective, and how different that is from my own. Ultimately, it motivated me to share my own small, ugly story. Just a drop in an overwhelming sea of ugliness, to be sure, but a drop nonetheless. I have no illusions that these confessions or reflections are valid penance, or that penance is even what is necessary. Nor am I writing out of “White man’s guilt” or “White man’s shame”. Nor do I deny that I have been bullied by Black kids while growing up, in situations where it seemed to have been at least partially racially motivated. Racism, as I’ve pointed out many times, is a systemic as well as a personal issue, and it emphatically must be spoken to and about on that systemic level. But I think we have the best chance of facing the systemic issues effectively when we’ve already faced them in our own hearts, and our own bodies, and our own relationships. 20 years ago, with my Black friend on the school bus, I was not able to “speak truth to power”. Today, I might be one small step closer.

I don’t think the conversation in America should be about whether so-and-so is racist, or even asking the question, “am I racist?” I think we need to readily acknowledge that we are racist, and quickly move on from there to ask the harder, more revealing, and more powerful question: “what does my racism look like?”. We need to go from denial to doubt to admission to finally getting our hands dirty with the realities of our individual racisms. The amazing thing is, if we can deal with this, I think we’ll be able to see more clearly how racism is just one species of otherism, the fundamental pushing-away and dehumanizing of those who aren’t “like me”. I think we’ll be more willing to see, then, our own (and society’s) fundamental misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc… I sincerely hope that one day I can live in a world where my own brokenness (as I’ve described above), or the brokenness of the system, or even the brokenness of someone who is doing me wrong, don’t mean that I’m forever closed to the way someone else sees the world. In that scenario, we all lose.

I am not here to heap guilt and condemnation on someone who’s not ready to acknowledge what lies in their own heart. I am here to engage in an act of public confession, hoping that it will lead, not to others’ similar confessions, but to my own redemption. What I’m doing now takes infinitely less courage than to face the murderer of one’s family and say, “Since Jesus forgives you, I also forgive you”. But I hope it is an incremental step in my own journey of becoming more courageous to act and speak in situations where an individual or a system threatens the personhood of one of my fellow human beings, especially when that fellow human being is difficult for me to understand or to love.

The antidote to my—indeed, our—racisms is not for us to become “color-blind”, but rather for us to hear the stories, and acknowledge the realities, of people of all colors, to allow their Otherness to penetrate through the scars of our own wounds and suffocate the worms of fear, guilt, and shame, fertilizing with their decomposition a new soil in our hearts. Only then will we see others with respect, and only then will we be able to be something more than a land void of racism. Then will we enter the promised land that Dr. King foresaw, a land defined not by the absence of hate but by the presence of love.

[Photo: a street in the author’s Texas hometown] [Edit: Some discussion is happening on Hacker News]

Many of us take for granted that technology is the brightest spot in the economy, where most of the innovation and job creation occurs. But if you look more broadly at the impact of technology across every industry, it doesn’t look so great. Technology makes businesses more efficient, often by eliminating the need for repetitive tasks and the workers who do them. We are not replacing those jobs with enough new, higher-skilled ones to make up for the loss.

This, of course, has been happening for a long time, though the author makes the analogy to the workhorse rather than the industrial-age citizen:

Is the U.S. worker in the same position today as the workhorse was 100 years ago when it was replaced by another technology: the engine (first steam, and then internal combustion). Peak employment for horses was in 1901, there were 3.25 million working horses in the England. Those jobs went away with the introduction of machinery, tractors, cars, and trucks.

Another great quote, very relevant to the recent Borgmann blogs I have been writing:

But wait a second, says [Erik] Brynjollffson. His central argument, which he puts forth in Race Against the Machine, a book he co-authored with Andrew McAfee, is that it is not people versus machines. It is people with machines. Technology is just a tool that lets us be even more productive.

The problem is that not enough people know how to use the new tools of the Internet, mobile, and cloud computing. The workforce as a whole does not have the right mix of skills. Hence tech companies can’t hire enough engineers while the rest of the economy suffers from perpetual unemployment.

What a brilliant example of the instrumentalist view of technology! The problem doesn’t have anything to do with technology per se, says Brynjollffson—we simply haven’t adapted as a human race to the kinds of jobs and experiences that await in a thoroughly technological society. This is of course a valid point, but isn’t it more reasonable to ask what human flourishing consists in before capitulating to a technological paradigm? It seems to me we should be asking whether a technological society fulfills (as Borgmann put it in the last chapter I blogged about) our deepest aspirations, and only then decide how thoroughly technologized to become.

However, I just saw something that I have to denounce. I don’t like denouncing in general, but some things need it:

If I have the facts right, this is a video of Americans celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden. He was, for all I could tell, an evil person, misguided and ruled by violence. I can’t even say that the world was not right to hunt down and destroy him, if the motivations were those of grim necessity. But to see such unbridled joy in vengeance, such narrow-minded nationalism that equates the death of our enemies with the furthering of our own greatness, such confusion about justice… It gives me a feeling of nausea.

I am an American. I grew up there, and my wife and I will be moving back there in a few short months, and what I have seen of my fellow citizens has deeply shamed me. “God bless America” on the lips of those drunk with revenge is the worst kind of blasphemy, and the most pitiable kind of foolishness (for which civilization has God favored so much that it wasn’t eventually razed to the ground?). It is obvious these people don’t understand what they sing, because “God blessing America” doesn’t have anything to do with the death of America’s enemies (however much they deserve death), but rather the painful widening of the apparently tiny hearts and minds of America’s own citizens.

God bless America, indeed.

• Facebook is distracting. Even though I had heavily curated my news feed, ruthlessly eliminating ‘friends’ to keep them from crufting it up with FarmVille updates, I now recognize that Facebook was a habitual distraction. Whenever I paused in work or lost a train of thought, I’d mindlessly navigate to Facebook and get even further away from what I really needed to spend time doing. I still have other such distractions, e-mail being the most major. But in resisting the urge to click my Facebook bookmark, I really do save time and brain cycles. I think the mode of distraction goes deeper than individual distraction experiences, however; more on this in further reflections!

• Facebook discourages extended or systematic discourse. I’m the kind of person who likes to share thoughts and ideas, and sometimes I even think others appreciate them. What Facebook (and moreso Twitter) encouraged me to do was to compress these thoughts into something that could fit into a status update. I realized that this bite-size style of communication had two effects:

  • My desires to share thoughts/ideas were satisfied by publishing these snippets, and I therefore had less inclination to try and say something that took time to post on my blog. Why would I try to make a complex and nuanced contribution to a conversation when I would get ’liked’ just as much for saying something short and snarky, or simply passing on a link?
  • The things I said were less useful or interesting to others. While there is indeed value in saying something concisely, there are a lot of valuable things that can’t be so stated (hopefully this post is among them, for example). Some arguments that merit attention are extended!

A systemic corollary of this, I think, is the general reduction of people’s willingness to engage with complicated ideas that take time to explicate and understand. I think it’s obvious why this is a problem—one has only to look at any hot political issue to see what happens when debate devolves into slogan-shouting (i.e., status-update-slinging)!

• Facebook is shallow. I mean this in a number of ways. The previous point elaborated on the shallowness inherent in the sharing mechanism, but I believe it extends to the quality of relationships maintained on Facebook, and in general the content which is produced (‘social’ apps tend to exacerbate this problem, as they try to spam the news feed with meaningless achievements or updates). I think this point is a strict consequence of other things I’ve been saying, but I wanted to sum it up under one adjective.

• Facebook technologizes relationships. I hope that this entry will be the first of many to come relating to the philosophy of technology, and so I don’t want to go into a lot of detail here. Basically, Facebook is an instance of the technological paradigm in that it commoditizes the goods it claims to procure for us. Ostensibly, Facebook’s goal is merely to provide something like ‘frictionless online connection’ for pre-existing friendships. However, let’s face it, what people use Facebook for is ‘connection’ simpliciter, and often not even in the context of a pre-existing relationship. The ‘connection’ that Facebook procures for us in this regard is the mere composite of the sharing and consuming of personal information, rather than the appropriate synchronization of sharing/consuming which engenders true connection. These two behaviors (sharing and consuming) are disconnected in such a way that everyone is talking, and everyone is listening, but nobody is having a conversation. And yet, in the way that high-fructose corn syrup fools our bodies into thinking they have ingested something natural (sugar), I notice that, for the most part, Facebook users believe this flood of voices projected into the void constitutes legitimate connection.

• Facebook facilitates strange interpersonal behavior. Has anyone ever had a Facebook friend post something to their wall which should have more appropriately been sent as a private message? I have, and much more often than experiencing the equivalent real-life behavior (i.e., communicating personal information within earshot of others) or even the equivalent e-mail behavior (i.e., cc’ing people who really don’t have anything to do with the private contents of the message). Has anyone else noticed a growing tendency in users to share fairly personal and/or awkward updates to their entire friend list? Facebook provides tools to moderate who sees what, but few if any people make use of these tools, with the result that most users’ friend lists are undifferentiated masses of relationships, probably not all of whom should be informed at the same time about, say, a miscarriage! Are these things Facebook’s fault? Not directly, perhaps, but the ecosystem has somehow bred this kind of culture, perhaps because the disembodied nature of Facebook relationships makes it easier to forget who exactly you’re speaking to.

  One more personal example: mere hours after our wedding, my wife and I were tagged in Facebook photos of the event (nevermind the fact that our invitation explicitly asked guests not to do this!), which of course are visible to God-knows-who. We were faced with the decision of waiting to relive our special day through our wedding photographer’s photos (which would take a few months to arrive), or seeing people’s crappy cameraphone pics immediately, in all their poorly-lit glory. We chose to ignore the Facebook photos, and in fact I still haven’t been on to see any of them. My point is: when did it become socially acceptable to publicize photos of a bride and groom to the wider network before said bride and groom can even realistically be expected to be able to see them?

• Facebook is the best tool on the internet for making stuff ‘social’. Let’s face it, we all use the internet, and we’re not going to stop anytime soon. A lot of what we do online is socially oriented, like sharing photos of weddings and parties and vacations with friends. If we ignore the strange social behavior I claim is encouraged by Facebook culture, there’s nothing wrong at all with sharing photos with friends. This is one of the few things I’ve missed about using Facebook, though I guess I could post everything to Flickr and link it up here on my blog, hoping people would find their way to the photos. Likewise, Facebook is the best avenue I know for reliably blasting information to the widest audience I have; that is why I decided to let my blog posts automatically generate updates on Twitter and Facebook. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to suggest that these channels are in principle good things.

I think it’s clear that, overall, I’m pretty happy with my time away from Facebook. It’s enabled me to recognize some of the weird things that happen in its ecosystem, whether or not they are explicitly encouraged by Facebook itself. I also have substantial worries about what social media in general is doing to the concept of real friendship and embodied relationship. I think these are broader worries about the pattern of technology which hopefully I’ll be able to explicate in future posts (my ultimate goal will be to blog through a book, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Society, by Albert Borgmann, which has radically reshaped my thinking about the nature of technology). I also hope I don’t need to make an exhaustive list of qualifications, e.g., people are weird without Facebook too, and so on—I simply think there is a definitive pattern of engagement we can discern through observation of social networks, and it’s worth taking a critical perspective on that pattern, in order to inform our decisions about how we want to relate with networks like Facebook.

PS: Justin has reminded me that our friend Jesse Rice has a book about how to engage with social media in a spiritually healthy way: The Church of Facebook. I haven’t read it, but it looks interesting! Comments from anyone who’s read it?

Science

• Honeybees are found to interact with quantum fields - a researcher noticed that bee dances trace a 2-dimensional projection of formulas of some kind of quantum math. Bee dances seemed pretty arbitrary before, and now this researcher claims that bees may be ‘in touch’ with quantum fields. If true, this would be interesting and awesome.
• Scientists find evidence that many universes exist - I’ve always thought that “many universes” is a contradiction in terms, but hey. It turns out that our particular ‘universe’ may be just one of many ‘cosmic bubbles’ colliding around in some vast ‘multiverse’. I don’t believe this yet, and won’t until people define their terms better.
• Thunderstorms generate anti-matter - powerful thunderstorms can generate crazy gamma ray bursts scientists think may be accompanied by anti-matter. That would be anti-awesome.

Philosophy

• Albert Einstein writes on science and religion - some good stuff in here, especially about the awe and surprise of finding that nature has rational foundations. Also other general philosophy of science points. I still disagree with his overall statement, which is that the historically-bound bits of religion should be discarded, since he appears to take for granted their fundamental falsity.
• Minimalism works - apparently, someone on the Internet made fun of minimalism. The article I linked is a rebuttal which I found concise and useful. Yay minimalism!

Culture

• Suburban sprawl sucks - and it’s bad for you too. I confess this was too long for me to read completely, but I did get that the author is an advocate of getting rid of zoning laws. I, too, advocate thus.
• The dangers of externalizing knowledge - this is a favorite topic of mine. What happens when we stop learning everything except how to Google? It’s possible that that is indeed the one skill which leads to success in life, and therefore will encourage social evolution to continue in the current trend. I’m just afraid that learning is a holistic process of shaping the entire person, body and soul. What happens when we postpone this shaping until we load Wikipedia? What will our unshaped minds do with that information, anyway? I could go on. Nice to see this on TechCrunch.
• Caring for your introvert - this guy makes some rather grand statements concerning introversion. Given that I’m an introvert, I’m inclined to agree with the whole ‘introverts are superior’ thing, except I know it’s false. Good article anyway, despite being overblown. I also think the Enneagram could account for a lot of what he is describing, without as much polarization (or arrogance, for that matter).

Theology

• Agnostic Christianity - doubt isn’t bad. In fact, it’s an unavoidable part of faith. Embrace and respect it!
• The Seven: not exactly deacons - what happens when the Apostles decide they’re too important to wait tables? God uses the waiters instead. Or something like that… some good potential pastor-skewering in these passages.

Food

• A coder’s guide to coffee - I am a coder and I love coffee. Therefore, I love this article. I just need to find a way to roast my own beans in Oxford…
• L-Theanine in tea and not coffee - apparently this amino acid enables our bodies to use caffeine in a much more zenly awesome way. Where is it naturally found? Not coffee (damn!) but tea. If I used coffee as a mind hack, maybe I’d switch to tea. Unfortunately, I drink coffee because (a) it tastes really good, and (b) I’m physically and psychologically addicted to it. Oh well.
• A hacker’s guide to tea - If I were to switch this is the guide that I’d use! One thing I particularly liked: camomille is not real tea! Ha, I always knew camomille sucked.

Random

• Trimensional - a 3d scanner for the iphone. I haven’t tried it, but… really cool idea! I’m also not sure what I’d do with a 3d model of my face. I’m also not sure why they used the guy they did for the screenshots. Yikes!
• How to draw an owl - Click through and see the picture. Hilarious. And also a good prompt for discussion. So often, what is left out of how-to guides is: “now, practice x for thousands of hours”.

I could have written reams about any and all of the above, but I didn’t. Instead, I come to you now with dire and horrifying news: The Christmas marketing season is upon us! And it will prevail. Unless we act soon. Last Saturday (November 1 – that’s November first), I was walking through San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center on the way to my running route. Being the day after Halloween, large poofy spiders and various orange-and-black things were scattered sadly around the shops. So far, so good – the emotionally awkward day-after detritus is a necessary evil that comes along with any holiday. But what did I hear piping through the mall’s music system? Silver Bells, that smooth and comfortable memory of listening to Bing Crosby as a child in the living room lit by a fire and colorful tree lights. Inconceivable. Impossible. Unacceptable. My mind quickly drew up its defenses and stood against the inappropriate Christmas emotions that had been involuntarily triggered by the song. Was I fast enough? Did I preserve holiday feelings for the holiday itself? Or am I now doomed to experience Christmas burnout? I don’t know.

My argument against the Holiday Marketing Season is simple: it’s too damned long. Don’t get me wrong, Christmas (and I’m talking about the secular, egg-nog-trees-and-lights holiday here, not the Christian celebration – I enjoy that for different reasons) has always been my favorite holiday, and in some impossible perfect world, it would be Christmas all year long. But the sad fact of human psychology is that there is a finite amount of enjoyment we can squeeze from any particular holiday, and there is generally an inverse relationship between the quality and quantity of that enjoyment. I understand the anxious greed of retailers that causes them to attempt to turn every last drop of holiday cheer into cash, and I appreciate the economic stimulation for our country that is often a result. We know from the law of diminishing returns, however, that true enjoyment is an art which requires a delicate balance of anticipation, satisfaction, and moderation. The message of marketers that we can live in the “satisfaction” phase of the enjoyment of the Christmas season for almost 2 months is simply false, and serves to counteract the quality of our enjoyment by turning us into holiday-themed consumption zombies.

So, how should things be? My desire is not for the complete elimination of Christmas-themed marketing (though there are often reasons to be depressed by it and to dislike it). In fact, holiday marketing can play an important part of the “anticipation” phase of enjoying Christmas. Towns and stores decorating themselves, seasonal drinks at Starbucks, the abounding of festive colors and the promise of upcoming time off of work spent with family and friends – all of these are fine things (especially peppermint ice cream and egg nog). What I don’t appreciate is the triggering of anticipation for or the actual satisfaction of Christmas enjoyment desires at inappropriate times. What is an appropriate time? After Thanksgiving (Oh yeah, isn’t that a holiday too?). The period of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the ideal span to contain the entirety of the “Christmas season”. Christmas trees are put up, buildings decorated, the traditional carols left free to float through the air… it’s wonderful! Deserving of the name “festival” rather than “slog”.

I beg you, therefore, to do what I’m going to do: completely ignore any and all holiday marketing until after Thanksgiving (unless, of course, it is about turkeys or tofurkeys or pumpkin pies or “Fall” or cornucopias or Beaujolais Nouveau). Don’t buy egg nog until December. Don’t play Christmas music. Boycott Santa hats. Wait to put lights on your house. Do this, and you will become true connoisseurs of the Christmas season, realizing that maximum enjoyment is found in the ordering of anticipation and the limiting of satisfaction!