Stop the Machine
Why do we keep building things that scare us?
This is a bit of an interlude between the longer pieces I’ve been working on about technology and the Christian. It started as a conversation with myself last night as I turned some thoughts and reactions over in my mind — the kinds of thoughts that, even after a night of sleep, needed to be written down.
Usually I don’t share these little freewrites. Honestly, most of them come out as bullet lists and scraps of sentences rather than full pieces. But this one came out in paragraphs and felt like its own thing, so here it is.
Thoughts like this are just part of a wider conversation. I don’t claim originality for the concept of the Machine or for the observations I’ve made. And I’m interested to hear what you’re thinking on this subject, if you’re thinking about it, and how you’re dealing with it in your own life. These conversations need to be had, or we may very well find ourselves in a “Brave New World” we can’t — or don’t want to — escape.
I read E.M. Forester’s story “The Machine Stops” last night at the suggestion of a fellow writer, and it struck me that humanity keeps moving toward, creating, or enmeshing ourselves in the things that most frighten us. Not in the sense that we write or film horror stories or thrillers, but in the sense of actually creating them and remaking our world inside their framework.
And yet, as Forester captured and Kingsnorth has so eloquently written (and as we’re seeing in wider society with the movement among young generations toward embodiment, gathering in person, going back to the tactile or analog, etc.), we seem to know and even crave the value of our God-given physicality and relationality. We miss at least something about it when the capacity to enjoy it is gone or diminished.
Embodiment is a huge deal in spiritual practices of all kinds as well as in traditional societal structures like the church, family, and neighborhood. People want to experience their bodies and be in their bodies, they want to feel the earth, they want to get away from the antiseptic and the ephemeral and instead interact with or create solid things, things that last. They want to be face-to-face with others, to talk without the mediation of a screen, to laugh together and eat together, to hug and to touch.
And yet — here we are. We have built, and are continuing to build, a real version of the Machine that writers and thinkers and other creatives have so long envisioned would come. But a careful look at their work shows how frightened we are of this. Utopias never work out; they always devolve into dystopia or dictatorship. They always involve some kind of loss, some kind of diminishing of our humanity, or some kind of oppression that ensnares. And the people in those stories feel that they can’t get out; they either resign themselves to a new form of reality they despise or embrace its framework and settle into its rhythms. Even in Forester’s story, where at least some of the characters remembered that men built the Machine, they either didn’t want to leave because they’d become so weakened and complacent by its artificiality and all the conveniences it offered them, or they were convinced that the Machine couldn’t be stopped.
It reminded me so much of our view of digital tech and artificial intelligence. Laying aside my thoughts on the spiritual nature and troubles of these for a moment, if you look at the bare bones facts, we — that is, mankind — made these things. We used materials from the earth to build the factories and machines we use to manufacture the hardware. We imagined and built the software. We assembled the infrastructure. We set up the whole system and reshaped our society around it. We plugged ourselves in and adapted our lives to new conveniences never before seen in the history of mankind.
And now we believe we can’t reverse it. Many of us don’t want to. We’ve convinced ourselves that we need what we’ve built, despite the reality that so much of it is empty, pointless, and foolish. Despite the reality that most of us desire to decouple and reclaim what we know we’ve lost in our lives. We, who established the Machine, now believe that, like the characters in Forester’s story, we will die (at least, metaphorically) if we leave it. Even some who are staunchly against the Machine and all its influences struggle to find ways to operate outside of it. But the fact remains that, if we started it, we can stop it. If we went forward into the clutches of our own Machine, we can step back out again.
Some are trying. But someone has yet to actually get up the courage to pull the lever that shuts the whole thing off. We see what our creation is doing to us, yet we continue to allow it to move ever faster, to sweep us along in a current of breathless anxiety where the only real, embodied interaction that most of us have is accidentally bumping into someone else as we stare down at our smartphones.
Perhaps we’re as arrogant and blind as those who built the Tower of Babel, so fixated on their desire to surpass God and rule ourselves that we can’t see the danger that comes along with it. It took God’s intervention to prevent the Babel builders from destroying themselves (Gen. 11:1-8). And perhaps that’s what it will take with us. Perhaps, despite strong voices warning against the dangers, our society will continue to move inexorably toward and further into what fear: a domineering Machine that controls every aspect of our lives and robs us of our humanity.
"And now we believe we can’t reverse it." Exactly!
I don't throw books that often, but one thing that will earn an author's work a light toss across my room is when they let loose a scathing critique of technology and what it's doing to us, then conclude it with a whimpering, "but we just have to learn how to live with it."
Everyone wants to split the difference. Especially in evangelical circles, the idea of technology being neutral is the shibboleth that just won't die. They want to redeem social media, redeem the smartphone, redeem AI. But can all technology be redeemed? Where is the line? Is there a line?
Makes you wonder if, in some alternative timeline, a Cold War-era TGC might have a blog on redeeming the atomic bomb. Come to think of it, "Gospel-Centered Atomic Bombs" might actually make a good name for a punk band.
Alternatively, what if we just stop?
I get it's not going to be easy, it may even be impossible at a societal level, but why is it such a foregone conclusion that we can't reverse course when we recognize we've created a monster? Even if we can't kill the machine, as individuals, can't we at least make some attempt not to be its slaves? Are we really so deceived by the myth of progress?
The almost completely frictionless acceptance of smartphone addiction and now AI in the Christian world has made me realize just how weak our theology of technology is. There's a huge hole in our armor.