—“You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
The dead internet theory posits that the majority of “users” active on social media are actually bots creating content, making comments, and interacting with each other. It’s easy to see this hive mind on display, as various platforms have their social dogma strictly enforced through repetition, purchased likes, votes, and follows, as well as algorithmic manipulation.
I would like to propose the dead generation theory. We are approaching a time when entire generations have so entirely given over their minds to AI bots that even in person we may find ourselves conversing not with fully formed persons but people reduced to mere biological vehicles for chatbots. “Well, Grok told me. . . ” Unless deliberate action is taken, many will be assimilated into the AI hive mind.
Philosopher Albert Borgmann stated that the purpose of technology and devices is to make commodities cheap, easy, accessible, and ubiquitous. Modern heating brings warmth to every area of the house. Turkey dinner in a box makes food available at the push of a button. The car consumes space with little cost or effort. But with the increase of technology comes an increased emphasis on consumption. People rarely play instruments or sing together because Spotify takes care of the soundtrack for the home—or, more accurately, each individual’s playlist in their earbuds. Leisure time, contrary to the vision of Joseph Pieper, is now to consume media or other commodities. It is not a space for relaxed contemplative production, either of things or thoughts.
Borgmann, writing several decades ago, saw the negative effects of technology and sought to mitigate them through what he calls “focal practices.” Activities that, much like the ancient hearth or focus, draw a family together in productive leisure rather than efficient and rushed consumption. Working at a human pace and a human scale is an increasingly needed warning as the pace of technological development explodes.
Are We All Cyborgs Now?, by Joshua Pauling and Robin Phillips, provides a helpful expansion on some of Borgmann’s claims. Without pursuing a philosophy of technology or the device paradigm in the same manner as Borgmann, their emphasis on communal habits is reminiscent of his encouragement to seek focal practices, and indeed they draw on Borgmann’s work in the book. Contemporary technologies continue to exacerbate fragmentation and atomization of the modern world and are creating a society dependent on cheap goods. These devices are shaping us for a certain kind of life—not one of vigor and joy, but a squalid existence content with pods and bugs provided the Netflix subscription is free. Prison cells are easy to accept as long as you have pot and an AI girlfriend.
I want to elaborate on this central conceit of the book: that the more we augment ourselves digitally and virtually, the less human we become. Phillips and Pauling question whether we are human or cyborgs. We are accustomed to asking how much technology has advanced our abilities, but we should be asking how much our digital age has shrunk our appetites. We no longer yearn for the glory of the heavens but are content to lick the dust of the earth. For all our technological advancements, we are more bestial, compliant with any demands or labor so long as we can consume our media slop. Phillips and Pauling help us to consider new emerging technologies and how we can avoid becoming cyborgs living off grubs and gruel.
Pauling’s chapter, “Technocracy and the Utopian Impulse,” illustrates the divide between the promises of Silicon Valley and its actual results. Sam Altman (OpenAI) believes that technology will lead to phenomenal wealth, scientific advances, and universal basic income (264). Marc Andreessen hopes for 1-to-1 AI tutors that will offer infinite love and be superlative in virtue—a constant companion and guide (264). But children are not enough for Andreessen. He also hopes for every government official or minor leader will follow his AI daemon, leading, of course, to utopia: productivity, growth, higher wages, more good (264-265).
Yet Pauling warns that this increased reliance on AI will undermine democracy and active governance by people. Governance is outsourced to the blackbox of technology rather than to virtuous citizens. We don’t know why it’s telling us to do this but we trust the time vault. Many can recall a road trip where the GPS was confidently giving directions which were profoundly wrong. Apple Maps once tried to send me through some private property on a single lane gravel road because it mapped the main road with a break in it. I remember being confronted repeatedly with the decision, do I trust the invisible guidance of this device or believe my lying eyes—I can’t go this way. It is another erosion of the self-governance required for a functioning society.
Time Magazine has written about ChatGPT-induced psychosis where the users become convinced they are superior and smarter than everyone else. The AI promises access to higher spiritual knowledge and being. People are choosing to take life advice from a souped-up mad-lib generator rather than wise human beings in their lives. They are destroying real relationships with human beings in favor of a machine. When a new version of ChatGPT is released, they behave as if a friend has died. This psychosis echoes the desire of Josh Schrei’s friend to “speak to the most intelligent entity they’d ever met” (quoted on 125). If a man will not be a friend of God, he will be a friend of sand instead.
Phillips, in his chapter “From Calypso to Chatbots,” discusses AI girlfriends and virtual companions as another example in which supposed super-powered technology that should aid human capability and industry is siphoned off to fulfill man’s lust. Why work to win a woman through establishing a household when you can buy an artificial robot who cannot refuse you? It is another vile rejection of God’s image and command to “be fruitful and multiply.” Instead, he siphons off his strength into sterility. Technology offers man a way “to turn from the weakness and vulnerability of human women to the ease and comfort of a virtual goddess.” It is “comfort without effort, reward without labor, connection without courage, intimacy without self-donation and sacrifice” (93). In other words, all of the human characteristics of an embodied relationship are removed. Any chance for virtue and its accompanying reward is stripped from the interaction. There is only appetite and base pleasure. A man who chooses the goddess is little more than a pet.
A similar sterility marks the earlier advent of sexting, which offers women the chance “to experience the excitement of giving her body to a man without ever having to do so, intimately and personally, with him as an embodied person, without having to approach him in all her vulnerability, fragility, and humanness” (95). It is a gnostic conception of the human person, removing all the flaws and awkwardness of the body. Social media and virtual reality have also accelerated this idealizing and filtering and, ultimately, sterilizing of the self.
But we don’t even need these advanced technologies to reduce us to mindless borgs. We are willingly giving up our mental faculties to computers. Consider how many people don’t bother memorizing poetry or even basic facts, confident they can Google or ask AI any of their questions (78). Why go through the hard process of thinking and writing when an LLM can spit out the facts for you? As we willingly give ourselves up to this degraded mind, we are given up to further folly and mental blindness.
MIT’s study on the use of AI and its impact on the brain revealed that use of AI does not merely stagnate development and learning; it stunts it. Users of AI are worse than they were before. Even users relying on Google search to find information fared better than those interacting with chatbots. By relying on AI, users do not form the neural connections produced from “brain-only” research and writing. They remember the work less. Such AI use turns man into a mindless Gollum, parroting phrases without meaning, lifting sentences out of context, and murmuring clauses without thought.
One of the lies of the modern age is that the imperfect gives rise to the perfect. What came before is always worse than what comes after. The son is greater than the father. But the medievals knew differently. They revered the past and knew a being cannot give rise to something greater than himself. God created man. Man creates inventions and devices. But animals cannot supplant man nor can man dethrone God. Further, the lower things cannot make themselves into something higher; they can only descend. If man worships and serves the creature rather than the Creator, he is given over to his basest pleasures and lusts (Romans 1).
Many in the technological arena believe that their work will usher in a new era of humanity, making mankind something more than it was. It will be raised to new heights. AI can self-develop itself at an accelerated pace, becoming superintelligent and the god of Silicon Valley. This is folly and will result in another Babel of man’s hubris. All of these rivulets flow into the central ocean of what Paul Kingsnorth has called “silicon paganism”: “self-creation in a Godless, genderless, borderless, natureless world of tattooed, disposable people and all-seeing living machines” (“Atheists in Space”).
Pauling and Phillips focus primarily on contemporary technologies—AI, smartphones, social media, and the like. Philosopher Albert Borgmann, who died in 2023, did not need to see the devices of our era to issue similar warnings in the eighties and nineties. Technology makes commodities easy and abundant at the cost of labor’s gifts. It breeds detachment and acedia. In order to love the world properly, we need a refined engagement with it—skill. Our detachment and malaise needs a cure in the form of tangible, real-world action, rather than escaping to the digital. In a way, the digital represents a poor simulacrum of the spiritual: a bodiless ideal. But in Christian metaphysics, the spiritual and physical are bound up together. Man is a soul-body hybrid. Physical things communicate spiritual realities. But the machine or device is totally detached from the real. We become less the more digital we are. But how can we resist this degradation?
First, we must not be too hasty to adopt an instrumental view of tools or technologies and its accompanying libertarian policies. Devices are not mere tools; “we shape our tools and our tools shape us.” Thus, any given technology ought not be regarded as an unqualified good and may need to be restrained by specific laws. While this likely strikes a nerve with many—who wants to limit technology in food production, for example?—technology is made for man, not man for technology. If a technology is causing massive economic displacement and disruption, if it is destroying communities and families, if it is ruining the psychology of a generation, we ought to be prudent in our adoption and application of such technologies. Someone who views technology as a mere tool is likely to give their ten-year-old a smartphone and be shocked when he becomes addicted to porn. We don’t yet understand the full implications of emerging AI, so we should be hesitant to give it whole-hearted approval at this stage.
Second, technology is always shaping our approach to the world and if we want to encourage a particular kind of life, we need to limit our technology accordingly. Having dinner around a table shapes family culture in a different way than separating out to each member’s private devices and earbuds. You might choose to practice woodworking with hand tools rather than machines in order to have your kids running underfoot, grabbing screws and nails for their own projects. Such an environment isn’t possible with a screaming table saw, dust collector, and hazmat gear.
Third, we cannot view technology as a neutral thing. The current AI high is demonstrating how ill-equipped we are to understand new technologies. Education is being disrupted at all levels as students expect to use AI for assignments and complain about the difficulty if they can’t. Professors use AI to summarize papers and generate student feedback. Students liken AI to a car—simply a way to get from point A to point B. Teachers use it to create assignments. Stepping back, the whole situation is ridiculous. AI is performing every step of the process from creating, completing, and grading—why do we need people involved at all? Someone writes an AI-generated email which the recipient uses AI to summarize. It is difficult to see how this is a blessing of technological progress, unless we give it credit for the unintended consequence of revealing the utter banality of corporate culture.
Nor can we consider technology as an unmitigated good. Every thing has a cost. Sometimes, that cost is worth paying. But a Faustian bargain is never worth it. We need the courage to reject some technologies which offer great convenience for a price we are unwilling to pay. You may choose to give up the smartphone in order to be more engaged with the world around you and the people you love. You might not own a microwave in order to give more attention to preparing food and the fellowship this fosters. The purpose of this is not to refuse technology for the sake of some a priori commitment to simplicity, but to create space for richer, higher, better things. This will be individual and personal. Sometimes, you want to take the time handcrafting a cherry desk for a loved one; other times, just run the machines and get it done.
Fourth, Borgmann calls us to return to focal practices to break out of the technological paradigm. Prior to central air and gas furnaces, homes were heated by the hearth or focus. This would be a natural gathering place where meals were prepared and shared. Recovering focal practices may look like spending an evening preparing a meal—a process that could take hours—in order to slow down and enjoy the cooking for its own sake. Is a microwavable or ready-to-heat meal faster? Of course, ramen is more efficient. But we need to be willing to enjoy the walk rather than racing to the end. The means and the end become one. The act of cooking gathers a social group together, not merely for the enjoyment of the final product—hiring a chef will get you that—but for the communal preparation.
Carving out space to read aloud together instead of privately, playing instruments or singing together, learning a craft skill—all of these represent focal practices that can bind a community together. Professional readers on Audible are probably better. Your favorite artist has a polished recording and a more pleasant voice. You could buy something cheaper from Temu. But efficiency is not an ultimate end. The most efficient life is a short one. We ought not rush to the end of a thing, but learn to enjoy the process as well, especially if that process fosters truly human ends such as happiness, joy, and hope.
In “Three Prophets from the Dawn of the Digital Age,” Pauling expands on the practical advice of Borgmann by connecting focal practices with liturgical Christian practices (207). Engaging in table fellowship and hospitality transcends the ordinary life and ushers us towards the divine: “The table-fellowship displayed in the New Testament and the expression of hospitality of early Christians is a profound and inspiring example of love, friendship, and life together that causes us to better attend to the permanent things, and better love our neighbors” (207). We need more space for reading books, eating meals together, inviting others into the home, and keeping devices far, far away from such social practices.
Pauling reminds us of Borgmann’s words concerning the goodness of burdens and limits. (208). Much like James Clear’s advice concerning habits, we need to lower the threshold for good activities and raise it for negative ones. Hiding devices or keeping them away from the focus, creating barriers to access like putting phones/game systems away in a drawer (maybe even locked) or putting the TV cord in a separate room add friction to practices we are trying to limit. Conversely, building a home with a comfortable sitting area, books strewn about every surface, or a nice coffee bar can encourage more communal practices.
None of this demands that we reject technology as such. Human creativity has brought us many worthwhile and inspiring goods. But life is more than the easy consumption of merely cheap goods. Technology must be subservient to a grander vision of the good life, one that will not be achieved without effort or sacrifice. It will not be easy, but it will be worth it.
