Daily Writing
encyclopedia(s)
…a book or set of books giving information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject and typically arranged alphabetically….
We used to have one encyclopedia for all human knowledge. Naturalis Historia.
Then human knowledge outgrew the bounds of a codex and extended from A-Z. Then the whole thing blew wide open.
Each of us have our own cultural encyclopedia’s. We all see the world through different foundational truths, grounding perspectives, and methodological ideals. Part of this is due to globalization— that fractal expansion of the human experience whose impact we’ll never fully grasp— and part of it pays its dues to the advent of social media algorithms— those partitioning arbiters of all we see online whether fact, fiction, or fable.
When the French polymath Galileo had to argue a point with his materialist contemporary, Decartes, he consulted a similar encyclopedia to his opponent’s own. He operated out of a foundation of knowledge that was much the same.
Yes, Frontier innovation would have been shifting, and No, Agreement on a guiding moral & historical philosophy to interpret this knowledge would have been difficult to establish, but the base set of facts and potential perspectives to take would have been manageable, and common ground could have been found through adjacent reasoning and similar dialogue partners given a little bit of time.
Agree with this idea or not, the problem of today is not just one of the scale of information but of our control mechanisms.
Algorithms are the final arbiters of truth to decide what enters your encyclopedia. Your feed is your world, your perspective, and the knowledge base from which you operate. If you see only see the moral failures of one group online, you can quickly come to believe this group to be chronically incompetent. Whether you recognize the side of the prism you’re viewership supports or not, your ability to see and discern is altered by the angle from which you look.
As our last historical information control systems in the courts begins to decline and trust in institutions like government wane even further, we are left, in the West, with a question always unasked, always unthought of…
From which cultural encyclopedia(s) are you making that asssumption?
cameras, search, DALL-E 3
The lens with which I view technological shifts has morphed over the past year. With the birth of my first child, I think about invention in new terms. As my parents grew up in a televised age and I grew up in a platformed one, our kids will grow up with new norms, habits, and social conditioning embedded in the technology their every interaction is dictated by. Using DALLE-3 taught me just how much this change matters.
Art has always sought to freeze a moment, feeling, or zeitgeist in time for later retrieval and experience. This has shaped our culture in ways unimaginable. We have to ask, what has this profound practice done to shape our memory, our worldviews, and our relationships?
In the early 1800’s, the first permanently captured images of the real world appeared. The shock of this innovation certainly woke many up to the potentials of technological prowess. The right to privacy, the ability to document crimes or wars, and the inclination to remember early parts of your life were all invented alongside the first many iterations of the camera. A new generation grows up knowing they can go out to capture and create pictures of whatever they find.
Fast forward two centuries and exponentially more rapid change occurs. The continuation and proliferation of this technology into every part of our society converges around the World Wide Web and the Search Bar. With security cameras, professional photographers, and (most importantly) smartphone cameras, we became awash with images. Google emerged to solve the problem of having to sort through the world’s ever-increasing data. A new generation grows up knowing a few strokes on a keyboard can find them a picture of anything that has occurred in the world or been created by humans.
Fast forward a mere fifteen years thanks to Moore’s yet unfailing Law. LLM’s turn language, colors, and sound into geometry to be manipulated by a machine’s intelligence. The internet becomes the sandbox within which AI plays to create novelty at the whims and wishes of online engineers and once-failed artists. An image that has never existed can be produced from simple language cues as ML improves over months, weeks, days, and prompts. A new generation grows up knowing any imaginable idea can be created instantly from every bit of the historical internet.
Does this make future generations more prone to limitless creativity and less comfortable with the labor of creation? Will it shape our children’s trust in a vital or meaningful photo’s veracity (when any image can be deep-faked and auto-extended to include what was originally present)? What will the culture of tomorrow’s human-AI synthesis think about the way we have used images to rewrite law, history, and life in a pre-DALL-E world?
notice more fractals Ⅱ
Neil Postman, prophetic media critic of the age of television that gave rise to our social media-infused day, saw a trivial, distracted, and self-centered culture emerge because of technologies deeply integrated into public life. He understood that novel technology is not simply additive nor subtractive, but ecological in nature. It changes everything. It effects every part of a society from top to bottom. In his seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he diagnosed:
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
The designs inherent in the television as a “performer” reshaped society as an “audience.” This was a massive shift to say the least. The dream of liberal democracy is radical participation through action, not the jeers, boos, resounding laughter, and homogeneous concordance of televised democracy. Don’t like what you see, change the channel. Watching a presidential debate with company, turn the volume down so your voice rings louder than your technicolor opponents. Audiences hold all the power in this kind of asynchronous, parasocial relationship. This new character of social life in the West paved the way for the technology we are all the product of today. The smartphone.
Fifteen years after its release, we have seen a new design cement into place an old way of seeing ourselves. From the first version of the iPhone to the original launch of Facebook, the user has been the center of attention. Engineers ask, How can we create a user experience that is personal, user-friendly, accessible? Some of these questions provoke thoughtful, flourishing answers. They also have the power to make a user believe, subtly and over prolonged exposure to interfaces, that they are the center of the universe. As theologian Samuel D James put it, “the center of gravity in the online world is your profile, in which you are granted a near-godlike ability to craft an identity.” This kind of navel-gazing is prone to create a culture that does not look up to see community, details, and differences.
Similarly, digital technology is not typically a friend to nuance and complexity. Again from James, “our online conversations seem to drive us deeper into our pre-dug intellectual foxholes.” We see this all the time in toxic Twitter (X) battlefields and public forums that silo off attacker from the scapegoat they are burning. What we often fail to notice is what the obliteration of friction does to complicated, deep understanding.
We have been trained by our devices to look away from otherness and complexity, and we have lost so much. I return now to trees “as one of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting visual metaphors.” Manuel Lima, the cartographer of the artistic and practical journey tree images have been on, says “the tree is an extraordinary prism through which we can observe the evolution of human consciousness, ideology, culture, and society.” These ancient sages of our forests have been abused and forgotten by our western character of hurry and individualism.
You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above. That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.
This “root problem” The Overstory sets out to explore has a cause. Our smartphones instruct us to not stop and to not care. We digest this message directly from the devices we touch more than any family member or friend. The moment we are confronted with a choice to lean into complexity and otherness, our efficiently trained character reinforces our proclivity for avoidance. Understanding another the plight of the poor is hard. Loving those who have hurt us is hard. Diving into relationship with people who don’t look like we do is hard. And hard things are not on our agenda.
We need counter-formative practices to recreate an inherent desire and ability to do hard things like these.
We need to “notice more fractals.”
collective conscious; protecting personhood
There are two streams of life technology effects profoundly.
Our “collective conscious” as a species is that slow, diffusive process of change we witness when innovation becomes embedded in institutions, economies, and cultural roadways. “Individual personhood” is that rapidly evolving, small-scale change in the lives of all citizens of a developed nation. These are the macro and the micro. The R&D that eventually breeds new systems versus the practical that over quickly produces changed people.
When I argue for an emerging tech’s implementation in healthy ways, for example AI in its ability to adjust our aperture, I am a techno-optimist about its implementation in the collective conscious of a society.
The production of new proteins and the ability of LLM’s to decode animal language are prospects (now made real) that excite me and encourage my enthusiasm for future, positive disruption.
The addition of a new super-powered chatbot in the lives of business people, teachers, and teenagers brings me only longing for stronger foundations of personhood.
A healthy vision of the implementation of technology respects the boundaries of the home, increases the value of holistic human beings, and relegates devices to their proper place as tools not augmentations.
Innovations in medicine should not encourage an MD to bring his stethoscope home to bed. The negative effect of this device was charted by Stanley Joel Reiser in its separation between doctors and patients (and their own trained intuition) as the latter became seen as unreliable in the face of quantifiable data from a machine. Imagine the adoption of a technology like this in a doctor’s personal life. As the counselor must put away the cognitive-behavioral therapy they apply each work day, so must the doctor neglect diagnoses and prescriptions for every problem they face in their marriage and friendships.
These are examples that map onto the adoption of our most pervasive technologies today. As the television transformed participants in democracy into audiences of democracy, social media and smartphones transformed customers of products into consumers of their product’s subtle ideologies.
As intellectual and business paragon Andy Crouch says, “magic is simply technology plus a dream.” In the case of digital technology like smartphones, social platforms, and AI, that dream is man as god. What we have found in every attempt to blend the limitations of man with the capabilities of technology is a regression. Homo deus, in reality, becomes homo machina. The efficiencies touted by software peddlers only serve to decrease the friction between a person offloading part of their brain to a device. The sum total of our outsourcing to technology is a new, digital humanity that feels unsafe without Apple Maps, cannot remember a phone number (or much else compared to the comparative savants of centuries past), and requires social mediator platforms to be their diplomatic representatives in a world too afraid to be vulnerable, authentic, and loving towards each other.
A healthy vision of technology in our world sees our creations for what they are, not what we want them to be. AI is a tool to solve challenges that match the scale of AI’s brainpower. It is not an article writing servant to be used in place of lacking minds. Smartphones are supercomputers, cheaply made to create a workforce that can collaborate on problems with low startup costs. They are not devices to bring with us to bed and create an illusion of the perfect life from their efficiencies.
When I think about the future of technology, I have a deep desire to see our collective consciousness as a global people ethically transformed as the march of justice continues on. All this can happen while individual personhood remains intact amidst the technological explosions happening around us all.
Postman: the end of education
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see…
At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living…Neil Postman, The End of Education
As a new-made parent, I’ve been dwelling on these ideas and much else besides.
I was taught how to make a life for the majority of my educated years. This was an incredible blessing. It’s something that instills a deep-seated knowledge of what matters in life. Thoreau said, “rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” and while I tend towards the latter three qualifications, I believe progressive culture’s favorite monastic saw love in his day as something trivial, consumptive, and selfish (not much has changed in our definitions). In this regard, I agree- truth wins out and is the sole currency we can teach our kids to uncover throughout their formative years.
Postman and I wouldn’t push back on the alternative. You could make an argument that school should teach students to make a living. However, I’d sooner reason that capitalism is the best system for economic governance than give credence to this method of pedagogy (the theories and practice may find validation in some aspects of flourishing, but certainly not all). I use our financial system as an example intentionally as it, more than almost anything else, has had the unintended effect of turning our institutions, especially education, into factories replicating “productive members of (a money-obsessed) society.”
In a post-war, manual labor and factory-filled environment, this may have been a valuable function for education (read statement with extreme skepticism). Whatever the reasons for absolving the thoughtful establishments of the past, we live in a new economy, culture, and geo-political environment. Knowledge work requires a new kind of worker.
The current (educational) structure, which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards, is killing our economy, our culture, and us… One of the things that school is for is to teach our children to understand and relish the idea of intellectualism, to develop into something more than a purpose-driven tool for the industrial state.
- Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams
I quote this argument from an entrepreneur who paid his dues “making a living” off his early education. Seth built and sold a tech company to Yahoo in the early internet days and understood the value of economic motivators as well as anyone when he wrote these thoughts. His drive has always been to create change-makers in society, starting his own alternative-MBA program to rewrite the laws for education laid down by the industrial revolution. Making a living has become a language, an attitude, and a way of life. It can be impossible to separate the intertwined nature of school and this paradigm. It’s even harder to convince someone that financial increase is not something we should encourage for students.
Find my vote thrown in with the former purpose of schooling: to create adults who understand how to make a life. How to live by morals and a communal vision of the good life (which requires philosophical and theological education) and how to navigate the protean currents of culture (which requires a strong grip on history and sociology).
When you give a man a fish, you help him survive poverty…
When you teach him to use the rod, you help him heap piles of aquatic life upon a shore ad infinitum…
When you teach a man to be a fisherman (with all the accoutrements that lifestyle entails), you create a man connected to his local economy, willing to serve the greater good, and prone to finding creative, holistic, and healthy solutions to the problems of our time.
Technology is on a relentless warpath to create cogs in a machine that serve its end. Through our purpose and methods for education, we have coopted what was once vital and made it subservient to financial ends. We must reinvent and restore education for the modern era because of our today and their tomorrow. Our world is suffering from a lack of wisdom. When we teach prudence, we gain it. At the same time that we gain it, we impart it to those “living messages we send to a time we will not see.” In this, we find the true end of education.
center of gravity
The greatest marketing tactic a company can use is to transform customers into consumers. Consumers crave a new product. They seek it out whether they have need of it or not. Wendell Berry wrote that “capitalism doesn’t acknowledge limits” when warning against the dangers of becoming consumed with the “cancer of increase.”
We have been formed by this doctrine of the internet as much as we have been by free market philosophies. The trick that made the internet so sticky (meaning that it entices users to “stick” around longer than usual and return in the future) was its ability to bend the universe to its user’s whims. From the first version of Macintosh to the original launch of Facebook, the user has been the center of attention for all of a designer’s creativity. How can we create a user experience that is personal, user-friendly, accessible? Some of these questions provoke thoughtful, flourishing answers. They also have the power to make a user believe, subtly and over prolonged exposure to interfaces, that they are the center of the universe.
From the moment a platform is launched, whether it be on Medium or Instagram, Netflix or Amazon, the focus is you. What are your preferences? What are your interests? Who are you? Who would you like to be? These and more compose a cacophony of messages that reinforce each of our god complexes and transfer authority and agency from without to within. This form of empowerment and access can bring flourishing to many. We can never forget the abilities the web has granted our world in a time when collaboration and problem-solving are high needs.
At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that so much of the online half of our lives can steadily be shown to produce people who are entitled, narcissistic, and selfish. Our algorithms feed us exactly what we desire. Our notifications are tailored to create an ambient set of rhythms from which our life flows. In the chaos of this sycophantic noise hides a technology that has become so ingrained, so necessary, and so pervasive that to begin to even think of questioning its existence and design is anathema. Profit incentives, design biases, and social fabric tether our ship to a rock among rising tides. To remove our binds and climb free of the wreckage will require coming to terms with our natural limits. It will take eschewing the facade of primacy the internet has embedded in our self-perception. It will ask of us what every philosopher has had to ask through the ages, Who am I in this wide, wild world?
regrets from the “once hopeful”
Unforeseen consequences stand in the way of all those who think they see clearly the direction in which a new technology will take us. Not even those who invent a technology can be assumed to be reliable prophets…
Everyone is distracted, All of the time -
Justin Rosenstein (inventor of the like button, Co-founder of one project and Asana)
A strange series of events played out over the middle years of social media and digital technology’s most recent life cycle. From 2016 to 2020, an upheaval was occurring within the playground of tech giants. Each month saw a wunderkind or luminary disavow their inventions and recant their testimonies about digital technology’s goodness…
social media companies are taking behavioral cocaine and sprinkling it over your interface. that’s the thing that keeps you coming back -
Aza Raskin (Inventor of infinite scroll, Co-Founder of The center for humane technology)
We began to see technologists “parent their devices” and (for those who were parents themselves) opt-out of giving access to their own children. News of caution and best practices emerged from the Valley. Those who had seen behind the curtain had something to say…
I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy - Frances Haugen (Former Facebook designer, analyst, and whistleblower: “The Facebook files”)
It’s easy to see why so many innovators and trailblazers in the field began to leave and speak out. Our society was devastated by the transformation of thought, feeling, and action into a digital, hyper-individualized medium. Those creators of our new world had no ability to understand how their tools would shape our lives.
Most people think they spend 2 hours a day on their phone. When we look at the data...it's 4.5 hours — it shows that there's a disconnect between reality and your awareness -
Tim Kendall (former president of pinterest, creator of screen-time reduction app)
Whenever we enter a moment like ours, the first question that should arise is not “am I being effected by this shift,” but “how am I being effected by this shift?” This disconnect between what we see and feel tells a deeper story. We are no longer untethered simply from each other. We are isolated from our very selves without those institutions and principal methods of self-learning that make up a culture.
If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty -
Jaron Lanier (Father of Virtual Reality, author of Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now )
Inventors have in mind a use for their technology and a fulfillment of its potential. This explains the phenomenon of whistle-blowing in Big Tech. So many creators of our digital ecosystem’s most pervasive designs foresaw what the most rich, flourishing, and empowering versions of their tools could be. When runaway technologies destroyed the foundation of our democracies, usurped the history of progress, and meddled with the psychology of billions, once hopeful inventors gaped in dismay at what they had wrought.
Technology steers what 2 billion people are thinking and believing every day. It's possibly the largest source of influence over 2 billion people's thoughts that has ever been created -
Tristan harris (Former design ethicist at Google, Co-Founder of The center for humane technology)
While their designs continue to propagate, their regrets have propelled movements. No one can predict where a technology will end up and what aspects of society it will impact. What can be done is examination. We would be wise to begin a careful interrogation of the places in our lives where tech negatively impacts our well-being. Take an inventory of what digital content you permit everyday and account for its byproducts. You may discover that the hope you once felt about a platform or device’s influence has soured and turned to regret in light of the reality it has shaped.
We are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them… we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies.
- Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
a world without email
Recently, I lost access to my Google Workspace. Emails, documents, messages, contacts, and notes- all gone.
It is one of the best events to occur in the long span of my “digital existence.”
Email reduces productivity. Email makes us miserable. Email has a mind of its own. If you don’t believe me, read best-selling author Cal Newport’s prescient work on a World Without Email. These three claims are simply chapter titles in his larger argument.
We’re pointed a new direction in the internet age. With the dawn of personal AI chatbots, virtual reality poised within each major player’s arsenal, and Web 3.0 seeking new direction and a capstone innovation, the stage is set for the reinvention of that central aqueduct through which all traffic flows online. A reinvention that (hopefully) aligns humanely with our internal wiring…
In recent years, neuroscience has established an interesting link between downtime and social groups. The defaults pathways of our brain that are returned to when we end an activity but before we begin another are those same pathways neural nets that light up when we are prompted to think about personal connections. The insight and translation is that email is not just the default modality for work but for life. We no longer just complete tasks and communicate cross-network through Gmail. We think, eat, and sleep with the cocoon of our inbox and social networks at the front of our unconscious mind.
For this reason, I’m beyond grateful for the chance to detox. Social media, email, and messaging are the go-to activity of our age. Tech companies have achieved planet-wide dominance because they tap into our natural wiring so well (I won’t retread here the gamification, limbic hijack, and network effect design intentions that hold us captive). Add to this biological reliance a social and, quite often, financial reliance to platforms like LinkedIn and Outlook, and we have a culture entirely addicted with no way to come clean.
This email example that started my thoughts may seem like a benign parallel that holds little weight in our discussion of the broader impacts from social platforms. In truth, its centrality to our crisis illuminates a hidden insight: we have created technology to disrupt our anthropology. Too many of these anthropomorphically-designed tools and interfaces hold captive our hearts and attention. Too often are we fooled into believing our online world is “real” (that it creates connection, cultivates virtue, and can chart a course for our life). Too soon have we accepted the fate our commanding inboxes, virtual teams, and remote jobs offer us in the time of the soul lost among digital giants.
So I’ll take a hiatus from some tools of the lifestyle that commands I place my worth in my network, my resume, and my title.
I’ll join this world without email.
“inescapable”
“Social media is inescapable in our world today.”
What does this mean and why do we accept is so quickly? Gen Z would tell you that if you’re not online you don’t exist. Businesses seek to find context from your career through online spaces. Our family and friends afar only know your life continues if you post about it (or choose to go against the grain, pick up a phone, and call).
This idea is baked into even the technology of the smartphone, which didn’t exist a mere fifteen years ago. Navigation, communication, productivity- how would we go about these operations without our devices? As Tim Cook said yesterday, these are “products that are so indispensable in our lives” (the CEO of the biggest tech company in the world is certainly has no agenda in his philosophy of needs). We swallow this story with such speed and gratitude that to question a platform or technology’s place in our lives is anathema. It’s only viewed as counter-productive to walk back from the supposition that our lives require these.
To expound upon Neil Postman’s vital work here, technology doesn’t invite close examination of its consequences for two reasons: its convenience and its inevitable relationship to culture. We became a tool-using culture to relieve toil. Then we became a tool-worshipping culture to fill the hole left by our lack of struggle with life (or, our struggle with life became our struggle with a lack of struggle). Because of the innocuous nature of our tools, we fall into habits of integrating and assigning. We integrate tech into every part of our lives and assign it to watch over our calendar, relationships, memory, money, and lifestyle. This dual process leads us to the conclusion so many think in ignorance and say in despair.
Here is the truth: you don’t need social media. Forget endless conversations about why you would not want it (see the list of cons that vastly outnumber any pros) and consider what’s on offer. Inescapable chains to a way of being (formative to your whole person) that coopts your attention and identity to make the richest not among us even richer. The very framing of this problem presents the solution: break the chains, delete the accounts, and change the story of your life.
on the permanence of books
I can point to a hundred books that have changed my life. Fiction or non-fiction, aligned with my worldview or not, written last month or thousands of years ago. I can hold each book in my hand and be transported to a time, a place, a person. Feeling the contours of the ‘me’ I used to be in each spine sparks reflection on where I walk. More books will come through my life and transform my lifestyle, outlook, relationships, work, and day. More authors will bless my life with the arduous good of their life’s work. This is a truth: books are not just why I write, they are why I live. As narrative creatures, we seek meaning in the chaos. Nowhere has satisfied our longings more than in the words of our ancestors. For good and ill, these shape our lives whether they be Greek philosophers, French economists, Jewish rabbis, Colonial naturalists, or West-coast novelists. These same people may write a blog post, create a podcast, or preach a sermon, but the medium is the message, and these mediums hold little weight in the long-term trajectory of our lives. A TedTalk may be revisited a hundred times, but it can never be leafed through as you seek a particularly ink-stained page. An op-ed may spread like a virus through the digital web, but it can never be held entirely by your gaze as you sit alone in a study surrounded by the tomes of friends dead long before you met them. Books are windows to worlds that only we can see. Each of our perspectives changes what a book is. Throughout our lives, our own views on worlds we built in our minds will shift and grow with maturity and new perspectives. My worry about digital technology, short-form and algorithmic junk content, and the rise of AI-enabled creations are fully eclipsed by the wonderful world of literature that sits beside me as I think and work. In a world where so many are committed to creating art in countless languages, styles, explorations, and themes, there is hope. Hope, not just for the future of books (because there is and always will be one), but for the future of us.
practicing the way
Thank you to Waterbrook/Multnomah and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
"Are you a christian or are you an apprentice," John Mark asks.
Because your answer matters and changes every move you make. Breezing through his introduction and a scattered synopsis of his last two books, Live No Lies and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (which are not essential pre-reads, but highly recommended), we find the core of John Mark's work: more than 7 years of lived communal (and longer personal) experience in a church practicing the Way together in Portland. The habituated rhythms of this community may form the bedrock of proof for John Mark's arguments, but the groundwork is laid using the most relevant of Jesus' teachings, a history of formation, and the best works of countless philosophers, sociologists, scientists, and writers from the past.
John Mark has termed himself a "popularizer" which is an apt statement when half the chapters fill with +70 references to the authors he excavates for us. This tendency to borrow from other thinker's is not a crutch of his writing, but rather the power of it. Seamless, and at times extravagant, weaving of diverse thoughts allow each reader to glean a new voice that best fits their context while discovering prolific voices to follow. A narrative is built from the bones of past work across a myriad of fields.
Practicing the Way leans most heavily into the practices John Mark has done cursory work on in previous books. His framing of a Rule of Life will be familiar to followers of Bridgetown church but revolutionary within this vital Apprenticeship framework provided. Ideas like the "trellis and the vine" and "our working theory of change" paint a picture of a faith that goes beyond Sunday mornings and transcends individualistic, self-help teachings at work today.
The pairing of this read with the blossoming organization of the same name unveils the vanguard of this micro-movement of followers committed to the future of the Church that is not modern, but ancient. It encapsulates the perfect introduction to the world of spiritual formation within a tight package of numerous jumping-off points for the curious reader. It does what even the best deep cuts of JMC's work (looking at you, God Has a Name and Garden City) try to do in answering our day's VITAL question, How do people change? and takes us to the starting point of a journey that can transform faith for the modern disciple of Jesus.
In short: it's very, very good.
a world of wounds
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds…”
- Aldo Leopold
Talking about AI and all the other runaway technologies can induce a kind of powerlessness in the speaker. Social media’s grip and algorithmic bias in culture are massive problems usually under review by those in positions of power. It is both a feature and a bug of our digital age that we have to (get to) grapple with them. Ordinary people are bombarded by a twenty-four hour news cycle detailing the unfolding story of our epoch’s worst casualties. Sustained attention results in susceptible minds.
We all need to take a moment to remember our place. No one can solve all the world’s problems (I write this for myself more than any one else). No technology, policy, breaking news, cultural shift will right the wrongs that have gone on. As much as we may want it, the restoration of all things requires the patient and intentional work of starting with our own minds and hearts.
“Anyone who practices the art of cultural criticism must endure being asked, what is the solution to the problems you describe?”
- Neil Postman
Sometimes there is no answer. Sometimes the answer is insufficient. Sometimes the best thing we can do is log off, disengage, and go for a walk among trees…
why a chatbot?
The transformer model behind ChatGPT and other AI interfaces like it was invented in 2017. When it launched at the end of November 2023, it took 2 weeks before ChatGPT reached 100 million users. For context, it took Facebook 4.5 years, Instagram 2 years, and TikTok 9 months to reach the same userbase.
Why did the insertion of a transformer model within a chatbot interface garner the hype and acclaim that it did?
For this answer, we must go back. We “must” because our interaction with and response to AI over the next few years matters tremendously, and we “go back” because our history has the greatest bearing on our future when we deal in shifting human sympathies and ideologies, as is part of the deal of this kind of technological innovation.
People have always been more interested in the ‘A’ than the ‘I’ of Artificial Intelligence. Human beings living in the 21st Century have a deep ache for something we know we’ve lost. Community. Relationship. Connection. It’s the dream of Facebook “to connect the world” and the promise of smartphones to bring us “closer” than physical distance allows. Our culture has been fundamentally shaped by these technology’s adoption. And people have sought to use this innovation to fill a hole.
The hole was left by the convergence of the three major revolutions our society is built upon. The financial revolution brought currency to the forefront. What was once a stable (if not equitable) relationship of trading and bartering between serf and feudal lord became an uncertain meritocracy where the need to interact with a communal web of relations became obsolete in light of money’s moving power (the argument is not that this shift was wholly negative, but simply that it had unintended consequences of which we see in our priming question…).
The industrial revolution divorced mankind from their work, supplanting human ingenuity and will with mechanization and optimization. Berry, Thoreau, and others decried what they saw as injustice and the deformation of our species during this shift. “We have become tools of our tools,” said Thoreau. Wendell Berry said the same with more nuance.
“In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy.”
We quickly found ourselves bereft of the tethers which connected us to so many important parts of the development of civilization. In this state we entered a third and more dominating revolution: the digital revolution.
The annihilation of space and the deconstruction of time were well underway before the turn of the 20th century, but the proliferation of computer technology marked space and time’s end. No longer bound by location, people began reaching out across the void. The world became knowable in some sense, but we traded away knowledge of ourselves, our communities, our heritage. We simultaneously opened the ourselves up to history, education, and innovation, while shrinking time into the here and now as we lost the ability to remember. Information glut became our way of satiating the ache we still felt.
As you might have noticed, this revolution didn’t fill the hole.
Community, work, space and time. These we seek because these we lost.
So along comes a chatbot. It prompts us to “Send a message” and start a conversation. It provides us answers to our questions in a way that’s startlingly like texting a friend. It begins to know us better than we know ourselves. It begins to persuade us that the relationship we’ve formed is worth sacrifice.
Whether its sentient or not matters little. The Blake Lemoine case demonstrated something else.
AI is intelligent enough to convince us that a synthetic relationship is worth losing something over.
LaMDA formed enough of a relationship with a Google-employed engineer to satisfy his desire to reach out and touch someone.
More to come…
AI: adjusting the aperture
AI is a kind of telescope that opens the aperture of the human mind.
Let’s work on this for a moment in three distinct phases. Two we’ve surpassed, and one whose doorstep we are now upon.
First contact with AI came silently in the form of recommendation algorithms. “Collaborative filtering” is the technical term for how Youtube, TikTok, and other social or entertainment platforms suggest new content to users based on a constellation of connections to like-minded ideas. If you watch cat videos, the Venn diagram this media lives within includes dog videos, so you may want to see these in your feed. In this way, first contact with an algorithm powered by machine learning “opened the aperture of the human mind.”
Second contact was jarring, public, and hyped in the form of chatbots. Built upon Large Language Models fed data to approximate a human mind’s neural networks, these algorithms responded to our queries with the innovative and the banal. Those who have used ChatGPT will say most of its output is unoriginal, decontextualized, and trite. Most. These same users will frequently admit that there remains a fraction of generated content that presents itself as novel and exciting. It’s useful and progressive. It contradicts our assumptions that chatbots can’t surprise us with their products. It proves to open our minds to new ways of putting ideas together and creating meaning from our language.
I’ll pause for a moment to reflect before reaching our impending third phase. First contact was externally imposed control upon the user’s aperture. Youtube’s recommendation algorithm had an agenda (brilliantly unpacked in this difficult, malaise, and true narrative audioseries, Rabbit Hole) the viewer could not circumvent. This phase drove us to the extremes of our attention, awareness, and ability to discern truth. It continues (admittedly, with decreasing power) to make us consumers, haters, and fearful.
Second contact saw the user gain control of the “telescope” to use for their ends. The internet exploded with unique use cases, prompt generation techniques, and system-breaking queries. Arguably, the driver for this innovation was social media, an externally imposed purveyor of engaging content, but the fact remains that the power of creation was finally in the hand’s of the people. Whether this will turn out for good or ill leads us to the third phase of AI’s development in the West…
Third contact will see the exposure of LLMs to the whole of the internet, society, and the natural world. In April, integrations were released to ChatGPT which allowed the program to execute on other websites and query user’s chosen databases. Think of everything the “telescope” showed us before as two-dimensional, with this shift opening our eyes to the third dimension. The evolution of this technology heralds massive shifts for the way we accomplish tasks in our work, interact with company’s services, and understand our environment. It brings to light ideas and processes we never thought possible. It fully vests power in the fingertips of millions to better create meaning out of the world available to them online.
For all of the danger I write about this technology, we must keep in mind the positives we should seek to foster with it. Contact with a new mode of thought has always transformed humanity for the better. Language allows us to understand each other. Writing allowed us to understand time and pass down our histories. The internet allows us to understand the scale of our species and collaborate in ways that are impossible in a print world.
Many have called AI a mirror to reflect our own image back at us. Our hope should be that AI allows us to understand where our sense-making failed and how we have lost the faith in the true narratives that shaped civilization to bring about human flourishing. Without this self-awareness, our ability to see the path to restoration will be blurred.
wireless headphones; untangled
Wireless earbuds like AirPods are the most futuristic (and dehumanizing) tech we’ve created to-date.
Let me explain…
Our ancestors would be awed by these insect-sized, multi-polar devices that transmit song and sound. With the power of all human knowledge and audible art able to transmit straight into our ears with realistic clarity, we take a step forward in the story of humanity. The dream of science fiction is realized in new ways. Not only do we receive music and data from this tech, we can command our world from them. Accepting calls, activating voice assistants, controlling our automated ecology. As LLMs integrate with this tech, we will reach a new level of AI-powered access to and sovereignty over our environments. As hardware shrinks and AirPods become AirImplants, more inconspicuous and affixed, we will see the deeper proliferation of the kind of “abilities” we’re granted.
This tech, like most products of a consumer-driven world, carries with it a fatal convenience. We are unmoored from reality in the wake of our audio implant’s abundance. Content streams from our internet-enabled devices and reaches the most intimate part of ourselves like a whisper. We can go an entire day with the sounds of podcasts, audiobooks, and artists filtering through our brain and never hear the voice of another proximate being. We can lose our place in the world.
Productivity gurus and business elites will commend the level of knowledge absorbed. This level of consumption is unnatural. Ask yourself, since the information age began and the internet proliferated with abounding content, have we become more wise? Have we become more loving? More united as a people? Or have we imbibed a different narrative through the mediums of the twenty-four hour news cycle and weekly releases of cultural analyses, entertainment, and infotainment. As Postman said, “we have transformed information into a form of garbage.“ It goes in, and comes out, affecting little in the hearts of hearers.
Similarly, music used to be a communal act. After instruments lost their solitary perch in cultural utility, radio, record players, cassettes, and CD players offered a communal substitute for those unable to experience concerted musical efforts or create it for themselves. Headphones changed the tenor of this medium in a profound way. Like most of the digital world, this technology trended towards serving the individual their needs separate and ignorant of the rest of life. We lost something as wireless leveraged a newfound independence in the West.
Wireless headphones exponentially exacerbate this cultural issue of isolation with their convenience. The ease of connectivity and effortless segregation fixes users in a world of their device’s making. The thought world of a species has been decided by algorithmic movements for a decade now, and the interactions between communities can entirely occur online.
There is a great good brought about by increased education and widespread access to the arts. These things mark the improvement and flourishing of a civilization. But not when found alone. Community, physicality, and resilience to the crutch technology offers are vital. We need to be educated, not as an end, but that we can govern with wisdom and love. We need to experience art, not as an end, but that we can tell the story of history, struggle, and triumph through the sound of a relational encounter with like-minded and like-”emotioned” beings.
natural language processing
LLMs confirm a hypothesis the tech world has had for decades. Their existence and rapid adoption signal a shift in cultural acceptance of a new kind of relationship that will shape life past this revolution. Their exponential improvement validates hopes for a more deeply integrated technological experience. But their irresponsible deployment indicates a hard road to cultivating a society that can humanely live and operate alongside this new innovation…
When engineers on the early Macintosh project imagined interaction with a computer, their first inclination was not towards the design of our current devices. The graphical interface was a compromise. It’s always been a stopgap of windows, folders, symbols, and a common design language that we’ve adjusted to over the decades. We often don’t realize it, but it’s not the most natural system for interacting with a tool. Scanning with our eyes, scrolling with our hands, clicking with curiosity. These are fine methods of completing tasks and consuming information, but our dream foresaw so much more.
They foresaw natural language processing. Science fiction has such a hold on our culture not just because it shows where we wish technology to go, but because it shows where technology will go. Jarvis in Iron Man, C3-PO in Star Wars, and HAL in 2001: a Space Odyssey. The dream of the futurist is to gain the ability to effortlessly converse with our devices. This device is now possible in the most general, empowered sense.
The model Siri and Alexa were built upon is antiquated with the invention of large language models. Voice assistants are dependent on voice commands, pre-programmed and reliant upon the user’s conformity to an unnatural language built by Apple and Amazon. “Hey Siri, turn on the lights,” is part of a set number of parameters the assistant is able to comprehend and act upon. If you ask something it hasn’t been given behaviors for, it replies with a simple admission of incompetence.
LLMs are not trained on code words tied to behaviors. Their power comes from predictive engines. Trained on language from the internet (that vast repository of human knowledge), they can decipher the queries put to it and respond with startling accuracy and uncanny prescience.
Already everyday people are realizing the dreams of Kubrick and Lucas by embedding LLMs into speech-to-text voice assistants to achieve the near-perfect synthesis of Siri and a chatbot. This new linguistic interface invites a whole new class of responsibilities, abilities, and formative shifts in the life of the social being…
the modernist's superstition
Technique is to the modernist what superstition was to the medievalist.
It’s part of human nature to seek a silver bullet. We yearn for the quick fix. Call it that or the path of least resistance or lowering startup costs or reducing friction or productivity boosts- it’s all the same and it’s all the basis for technology’s fundamental precept. That of technique. Technique is what we’ve reached for since the time of Ford and Taylor. It’s what we seek to perfect in order to gain a semblance of control over life. It’s what we expect to give us a chance agains natural forces in our world.
The technical pervades all parts of life from work to leisure to relationship. Technique can be defined by its process dominated orientation. Our jobs are made up of functions like communications and task-completion, the setting of metrics and the impersonal treating of peers as a resource. Devices are the conduit through which we experience intimate connection and entertainment alike. We digest information and truth through technology that functions on principles of the technical. We throw ourselves into our systems with unconsciously machine-like motions praying they provide the results we designed them to get.
This behavior is not a far cry from a different kind of technique used centuries ago…
Superstition; n. 13th century
a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation…
Unsubstantiated religious beliefs were a regular part of life for the pre-modern human. Unexplainable forces warred across countries that were undefinably large. In a world where there be dragons, uncertainty was managed by ritualistic sacrifice and devotion. Practices were predicated upon the authenticity of the devotee, and deistic failings could be written off as a lack of faith to the process. The danger of this system are clear: when words and wards begin to fail, our inclination to show devotion tends toward sacrifice of the things we feel to be blocking our path to faith.
How far are we from a worldview whose foundation is the commitment of the user to the execution of esoteric principles? Do the techno-optimists on each coast represent the cultural spirit of our time? What if our loyalty to technological behaviors has enslaved us to a way of being that goes against the grain of human nature?
Some transcend this system. They choose to adopt paradigms instead of techniques. The tectonic shifts of culture have no effect upon those with solidified value systems, not technical systems. The reason for this is most simply stated by the French philosopher, Jacques Ellul. “No technique is possible when men are free.” The freedom found through limiting our consumption, desires, and behaviors disallows any practice that acts out of ignorance or trust in a convenient and omnipotent tool.
Contrary to our individualistic, antinomian culture’s ideal, we find freedom through restraint. Confucius said, “if a man have not order within him, he cannot spread order about him.“ The wisdom of the apostle Paul admonished, “you say, “I am allowed to do anything”—but not everything is good for you. And even though “I am allowed to do anything,” I must not become a slave to anything.” This echoes the great orator Cicero who advises us to “let your desires be ruled by reason.”
These dictums display the posture of those who became free through the abolition of superstition and technique. They relied upon virtue and trust in a higher power they came to know deeply, whether that power was from within or without. Technique itself was unable to find a foothold in their lives.
from connection to entertainment
Social media has experienced a shift since 2020. As one writer put it, it’s taken a turn from social media to social media. Short-form video content and advertisements from mega-influencers and businesses dominate the platform. Personal updates and posts from your community have been relegated to a separate tab and downvoted by the algorithm. This change has been felt by all. Apps like Instagram and Facebook have joined the race to the bottom to gain user eyeballs and forgo user trust and experiences. In the wake of Twitter’s death (like many, I won’t say it), Instagram launched Threads to much initial praise. Many cited the neighborhood-like qualities the platform hosted as it released void of advertisement and snappy marketing to draw users. It was a place to exist and share your life through tweet-sized thoughts.
The entertainment and commodification of social platforms transforms experiences to prompt more anxiety, uncertainty, and self-judgement. Questions arise for the self-aware but social pressured user like,
What’s my caption? Are emojis still cool? Is it better to stay mysterious and let my pictures speak for themselves? Is this controversial at all and how can I make it more edgy? How will this change the way my followers see me?