The concluding scene in Mel Gibson’s 2006 action-adventure film Apocalypto is one of the most stunning endings in cinema history. Most of the film is a life-or-death chase between a Mayan Indian named Jaguar Paw and servants of the pagan priests who want to make of him a human sacrifice. The chase ends at the beach, when pursuer and pursued are struck immobile by a staggering sight: the appearance of Spanish galleons anchored offshore. In a single awe-inspiring moment, the Age of the Conquistadores arrives, rendering the struggles among the Mayans more or less irrelevant.
That’s how I felt after finishing A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, a new book by American philosopher Antón Barba-Kay. I came to the book interested in what Barba-Kay might have to say relevant to my interest in prospects for re-enchanting, in a Christian way, the post-Christian West. I left it extremely dismayed about the prospect of maintaining our humanity in the digital age, but also resolute about the form resistance has to take.
For all practical purposes, you are what you pay attention to. Whatever commands your attention is what will define your identity, your concept of reality. The philosopher Matthew B. Crawford has argued persuasively for modern people to return to “the world beyond your head,” to cite the title of his 2015 book exhorting readers to pay attention to the non-digital world.
Barba-Kay agrees, I think, but his book is a powerful argument for the inevitability of the digital transformation of the human. To be clear, he does not agree that the future is determined. But A Web Of Our Own Making delves deeply into the unique nature of digital technology, and how it seduces humanity by offering us the apparent ‘gift’ of total control over our selves and over our world. In a stunning echo of the literary prophecies of both Aldous Huxley and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Barba-Kay gives us a coda that lands with the imaginative power of Mel Gibson’s conquistador ships.
The story of humankind is in part the story of technology, and how new technologies changed our ability to move in the world, and our understanding of our place in the world. Why is digital culture so different from other technologies? Because, argues Barba-Kay, it acts directly upon us to capture and control our attention, and promising us that we can control the world by controlling our experience of the world. “Digital technology is a spiritual technology,” he writes. Why? Because “the digital era thus marks the point at which our concern will be mainly the control of human nature through our control of what we are aware of and how we attend to it.”
He writes:
Never has such change been struck so fast. The printing press and firearms were technological watersheds with world-historical implications, but they took decades or centuries to assimilate. Digital technology has, by contrast, so changed human life within a couple of decades that teens are today growing up in an altogether new cultural environment – with different expectations, habits, and standard points of orientation from their parents’. There is now arguably a greater chasm between someone age twelve and someone age fifty (or forty, or thirty) than there ever was between people separated by a millennium of pharaonic rule in ancient Egypt. The fact that we must make a concerted effort to remember how we did things “before” digital technology bespeaks the
abrupt and thorough extent to which it has captivated our imagination of the ordinary.
The digital is the advent of a new religion—not literally, but effectively. We live in a culture that considers technological advancement to be the greatest measure of progress. If we associate perfection with divinity, then, he writes, “digital technology will continue to occupy a role undeniably analogous to that of religion in other ages.”
“If the present technological age has a lasting gift for us,” writes the philosopher, “it is to urge as decisive the question of what human beings are for, what the point of us is at all.”
It’s like this: in ages past, one became a Self to the extent one was like God. In the Christian view, the more like Jesus Christ one became, the more fully human. In the twentieth century, though, Religious Man (to use the sociologist Philip Rieff’s term) gave way to Psychological Man. That is, instead of looking outside the Self for meaning and self-definition, people began to look inside themselves, picking and choosing from strategies that brought them pleasure, or at least relief from their psychological and emotional anxieties.
We have seen the all-too-predictable collapse of authoritative religious traditions, which have been supplanted by pick-and-choose, individualistic bricolages. Now, in the digital age, that approach to identity has become the norm; our most powerful technology reinforces its seeming reality, and the pick-and-choose approach to reality (or rather, ‘reality’).
Digital culture tells you that you can be anyone and anything you want to be—that your will is, or should be, unencumbered by history, materiality, or any unchosen obligation. In this sense, it is the technological expression of liberalism. It is no accident that the phenomenon of transgenderism emerged in the digital era, and is so heavily focused on young people, who grew up in the digital era, and were formed by its standards. They expect material reality to conform to ideal, digital reality, and consider it to be an outrage if it does not.
Many of us who recall the pre-digital world think this is crazy. Barba-Kay’s book implicitly urges a radical re-think. Whether we are aware of it or not, digital culture compels us to think of ourselves, and our realities, as voluntary, as self-chosen, and not bounded by limitations. To someone formed by digital culture, the claims and standards of pre-digital people seem arbitrary, even bigoted. Barba-Kay explains how classical liberal assumptions, and the institutions and practices that grew out of them, are artifacts of a culture dominated by the printing press. They will not survive digital culture, he predicts.
In my own research this past year into the nature of religious enchantment, I have learned that attention is the key factor. Barba-Kay seems to agree—and that, he says, is why the digital is so radical. Through teaching and practice, traditional religions train us to keep our minds attentive to God, and the things of God. Christians who wish to obey Christ’s command to “be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” have to keep in front of themselves a certain idea of perfection to which they feel compelled to conform. This is not a natural state; we have to train ourselves to direct our attention rightly. Someone who is gifted in prayer and contemplation can lose themselves through practicing the presence of God. Traditional religions teach that acquiring this degree of spiritual awareness requires ascetic training, needs self-overcoming.
Religious experiences in which we forget ourselves tend to be the most valuable ones to us. Non-religious experiences that bring about the “flow” experience—that is, the unimpeded connection between oneself and one’s work, like losing yourself playing a piano concerto—are also the deepest and most transformative.
The seduction of the digital is that it offers us a similar kind of deliverance from self-awareness, including the unbearable burden of boredom, with no effort at all. Just point, click, and scroll. We have all had the experience of being in bed at night, deciding to watch just one more YouTube video before lights-out, and then coming to ourselves two hours later, shocked by the passage of time. We may even feel guilt over the waste – something we do not feel when we have been up late reading, or even praying.
Barba-Kay:
The digital thus evokes the experience of total attention while tending to empty it of substance beyond the moment; the satisfaction of being connected overwhelms the significance of its contents. The more we are rewarded, the less we are fulfilled. If undivided attention is a discipline, if attention is the blessing of our care, then the digital teaches us that we are always pulled away from it into the fragments of an absent-minded void.
That’s one way digital culture falsely mimics religious experience. Another is how it turns everything into an Everlasting Now. To be entirely focused on God is to lose, however temporarily, a sense of time. In a religious sense, this is the redemption of time by offering us a taste of eternity, when time and all its suffering are healed. It is not time’s negation, but its perfection.
In digital culture, by contrast, time is neither acknowledged nor redeemed, but effectively denied. The speed of digital culture embodies what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity”: the sense that nothing is solid anymore, that everything changes before it has the chance to firm up.
“When technology forces cultural changes faster than culture can accommodate them,” writes Barba-Kay, “it is destructive to the possibility of culture itself – since nothing in practice is allowed the time to coalesce, to take shape and adapt.”
Worse, if we can’t imagine a past, we won’t be able to imagine a future. The future will come, but absent memories of what came before, and without a felt sense of obligation to it—the same obligations that digital culture has taught us are impediments to our own freedom—we will be powerless to shape our own destiny in a meaningful way. We will be shaped by the algorithms and those who control them, even as they give us the illusion that we have chosen ourselves.
What we face now is an enormous religious temptation. For Barba-Kay, the desire to merge human with machine is “most obviously a dream of total rational control, a desire to render ourselves and the world fully transparent to technical scrutiny. It is for this reason also, as I’ve said, a desire for a unified explanation of consciousness and matter.”
What he’s saying is that the digital offers a counterfeit version of what Christianity calls “the sacramental”: the God-given metaphysical unity of spirit and matter. This is the ultimate spiritual deception.
The history of humankind’s religious quest is in large part a story of humanity’s desire to get back to the Garden of Eden—a metaphor for the desire to live in pure communion with God, with ultimate meaning, and at peace with ourselves and others in a restored primal unity. The Bible teaches that this can only be realized as a gift of God, and by self-abnegation according to prescribed precepts and practices. Whenever man has tried to reach God on his own—the Tower of Babel story from Genesis 11 is the paradigmatic example—is has ended in disaster.
If Barba-Kay is right, then digital is the new Tower of Babel. In his book, the philosopher notes that digital technology is like a religion “in the sense that it now bears the full weight of our yearning for integration, participation, and incorporation in a larger purpose than our own.” Digital speaks to our desires, and offers to fulfill them without any effort. Digital offers to make us into our own gods.
The question, then, for everyone who lives in the digital world, is not, “Will you serve God, or not?” but “Which god will you serve?” This is so even for Christians and believers in other traditional religions. As Barba-Kay says, there’s no reason you can’t worship God and also check your Gmail. The temptation is deeper than that.
Digital technology “trains our view of what is most worth doing.” And it inescapably teaches us that “the ultimate good for us is being empowered to choose, constrained by no one and nothing but the laws of nature. And in holding the exercise of choice to be the good, we are in turn recreating ourselves in various ways.” Digital tech teaches us to regard the Good as what is chosen, and what “works,” in terms of satisfying our desires and adding to our sense of well-being. In the world made by digital tech, there is no authority for revealed religion, for philosophical creeds, or any transcendent truth. Digital culture is the technological manifestation of what Philip Rieff called “the triumph of the therapeutic.”
What’s the solution? Barba-Kay is frustratingly coy on that point. He is a spiritual kinsman of Paul Kingsnorth, in that he urges his readers simply to fight the Machine in any possible way, knowing that the future is not determined, and that any victories will only ever be partial. “Keep watch, hold out, stay a while longer. It’s not yours to finish the work, nor is it to desist from it.”
Perhaps that terse, poetic advice is better than wordier counsel. Still, I would add that my own research has shown that attempting to gain total control of experience can only disenchant the world. That is to say, the greater our command of our environment and our options, the less we feel resonant with it, the worse our sense of alienation from the world. To control something is to empty it of mystery and meaning. The only way out of the digital trap, I believe, is by re-establishing a meaningful, binding relationship with God – the God of the Bible — who by definition exists beyond ourselves and our control.
Barba-Kay does not write in a strictly religious vein, but he does acknowledge that “our most vivid experiences of delight are encounters rather than choices, contact with the world in ways that are not merely up to us.” In other words, we have to train ourselves to look for signs of the world beyond our head, and further, beyond the material. And when we identify those signs, we have to be prepared, at least in theory, to go where they tell us.
The Christian tradition (and perhaps others) teaches that one must submit to God, and conform one’s life to His will. This is hard. This is very hard. The New Testament likens it to death. But there is no other way. The martyred Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer denounced any other way as “cheap grace.” In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s villainous World Controller called the technological and material deliverance from suffering offered by his civilization as “Christianity without tears.”
It requires choosing the hard way.
And that is the problem. Here we come to Barba-Kay’s final chapter, when the conquistadores make landfall. Barba-Kay writes in the voice of an unnamed Silicon Valley big, who speaks in the same arch and condescending tones of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. The fictional Silicon Valley macher has sent an e-mail to Barba-Kay, telling him that all of his writing about the threats to human freedom and identity from digital technology is codswallop.
Why? Because people prefer happiness, or the simulacrum of happiness, to freedom.
“Except people don’t really know what ‘happiness’ is either,” the mogul says.
They never have. So here’s what they do know: they know they want a deal on some nice stuff, they want to be amused, they want to be no worse off than most of their neighbors, they want to feel connected, and they want a bit of attention. Basically, they want to be able to feel pretty good about themselves, comparatively and some of the time. Period. That’s it. End of human predicament.
As the Grand Inquisitor did to Christ in Dostoevsky’s fable, the Silicon Valley big denounces Barba-Kay as the bearer of bad news. We who run the system, he says, have given the people what they want. Indeed, we have answered their ultimate longings.
“Human beings will get used to anything, they will swallow absolutely anything, except meaningless suffering, as you and Nietzsche know, and it’s only when they can hold on to an image of perfection that their suffering can take on that meaning,” Mr. Big says. “We’re the ones delivering that now!”
He means that suffering has meaning not because, as Christianity promises, accounts will be settled in the afterlife. No, suffering today is bearable because digital culture not only relieves much of it, but offers the promise that it can all ultimately be cured by technology. Very few people will choose the hard path to salvation, Mr. Big says. And why should they?
Is this not the highest end? Continually to make the world more equal, more free, more productive all around? To improve safety and health, while reducing suffering? To increase people’s foresight and control over their lives? To add to our objective understanding of how the world actually works? To make life more comfortable for more and more people? To give humans an achievable idea of wellbeing toward which to direct their energies? And yes, maybe even one day – who knows – to become immortal and all that sci-fi stuff.
This is the voice of the devil talking. This is the Big Lie. This is the oldest lie: ye shall be as gods (Gn 3:5). Yet by the standards of today’s world, the Luciferian Mr. Big makes total sense. Any priest, any pastor, any religious believer who wants to keep the faith alive in this brave new world that prefers Christianity without tears had better come to terms with the world as described by this book. The fights among Christian churches over the truths of our various confessions, and between traditional religions over the nature of God – all look small in the shadow cast by the tall masts of the Silicon Valley armada.
I have no idea if the philosopher Anton Barba-Kay is a religious believer of any sort, but with the publication of A Web Of Our Own Making, he establishes himself as a major prophet.
