There are two ways, one of life and one of death. And great is the difference between the two.
So opens the historically valuable and theologically rich Didache, and its description of the way that leads to life and the way that leads to death. This opening line is beautifully simple: there is a way of life found in Christ, and there is a way of death. Though both ways are full of ebbs and flows, a life lived on one path will be markedly different than a life lived on the other. This is not a philosophy or ideology; life is what is at stake.
When thinking about technology — particularly its role within our society — I would argue that there are three ways. There are three approaches to what technology ought to be for us. And only one of those three ways is “of life.” Only one will enhance the human life we are meant to live. The others will, in various ways, diminish our humanity.
In short, the three ways to understand the role of technology are technology as a Tool, technology as an Everything Machine, and technology as a Human Replacement. There are certainly shades within these three ways, but in general they capture three demonstrable paths an individual or community can take in approaching technology.
This summer, these three ways were captured with shocking clarity in three commercials from different technology companies. Along with many of you, I found myself watching more commercials than I normally do during the Olympics.
And as I did, I was taken aback at how blatantly tech companies are signaling their chosen path. I have no doubts that these commitments have existed all along; plenty of others have pointed them out for quite some time. But this summer, those companies began to signal their Way to a wider audience. And the reactions were not neutral.
Two of the three commercials have faced significant backlash — enough, in fact, for the companies to stop airing them. But the fact that there was no internal backlash within these companies during the marketing campaign reveals the ethos of these companies, and which vision of the technological good life they unabashedly embrace.
First, I think it is worth watching these three commercials, linked here:
For Instacart, technology is a tool. It assists a human in completing a necessary task, so that the human can return to a more meaningful human deed. The tool is there when you need it, but when you have finished using it, you put it down.
According to this approach, our technology tools should work a lot like a hammer. It does one or two things really well, but is meant to be put away and forgotten the second we are done with it. The hammer does not impinge on our lives; we place it back on the tool rack and walk away.
It is easy to talk about technology as a tool, and most folks likely embrace that approach in principle. With the advent of the smartphone and other connected devices, however, it is difficult to embrace in practice. Much of this is due to the reality of the second Way. The versatility of tools offered via multiple apps on a single smartphone would make a Swiss Army Knife blush.
Our phones simply do too much for us to use them as tools, unless we approach them with daily intentionality. This is part of the problem with the second Way, promoted most unabashedly by Apple.
For Apple, technology is an Everything Machine. Apple’s goal is twofold. First, it aims to create devices so seamless that the user begins to forget the device. The push for thinner devices is tied to a desire to free users from devices, to move them toward an increasingly virtual reality.
The second aim is to create devices that replace all other devices. These Everything Machines do anything worth doing in life, and they do it with minimal physicality. You don’t need a paint brush, or a trumpet, or a bookshelf. You only need an iPad.
And then there is Google. For the advertising mogul disguised as a search engine, technology is on the path to replace the most human of activities. It does not free you to perform human deeds; it seeks to do them for you. What Google imagines we will do with our time when computers do all of our human work is less clear, but that computers are being trained to do so is so central to the work of Google that it could not even envision pushback to an ad, aired during the Olympics, that showed AI writing a letter to an athlete so that a 7-year-old didn’t have to. Google is celebrating a world in which a young girl can outsource the task of writing a fan letter to a computer.
As an aside: it is worth noting that Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — combines the very worst of ways two and three. I find Meta’s approach to technology simply egregious. The ways in which it grooms the very young and the old toward this vision of technology should give any parent, pastor, neighbor, aunt, or friend serious pause about the merits of using anything associated with Meta.
So what can an individual do about these things? Instead of offering a one-size-fits-all prescription, I’ll mention a few technological practices that I have embraced in the past 15 years to keep the human element in my use of technology.
- I have removed most apps from my smartphone, including internet browsers and email apps. I have also disabled all notifications except for phone calls. What remains are tools like Maps, Camera, and the Calendar. I find this necessary if I have any hope of putting my phone down after I use it for the one thing I intend to do.
- Gmail and Google Maps are the best personal email and mapping apps available by a long shot. And they are free. This should give you pause. When you do not pay for a service, you are the product. I have deleted all my Google accounts, and am committed to using what I often find to be inferior but non-Google services: DuckDuckGo for search engine, Apple Maps for directions, Fastmail for email, etc.
- I am very engrained in the Apple ecosystem, and have been since 2004. But I cannot get behind the Technology as Everything Machine vision that the current Apple leadership has come to embrace. So what do I do? For now, I am committed to buying only used Apple devices. I have done this now for a few years, and my conscience is mostly clean as a result.
- As one who works throughout the week in a K-12 context, I cannot use any Meta devices or software in my personal life with a clean conscience. I deleted those accounts on the eve of my ordination in 2019, and have never looked back.
What can a community do about these things? A community needs to do the hard work of asking one important question, which requires a bit of explanation on the front end.
Thanks to the popularity of books like The Anxious Generation, many of our churches are increasingly full of parents who are taking a new or renewed interest in the role of technology in the lives of their children. As one who has had an ear to the ground for quite some time on this front, I am grateful that what plenty of others have been saying all along is now beginning to influence a growing number of people.
The school I lead has been phone-free since the first iPhone was released in 2007. The biggest backlash we faced in the first decade and a half after the rise of the smartphone was from parents, not students. Students know they are addicted to their Everything Machines, and as much as they want to remain connected all the time, they are also grateful to be forced to take a break. Parents have forgotten their childhoods, and the fact that they survived without smartphones. They are, in my experience, only now beginning to realize that they are just as addicted as their children.
Now that the tide is turning, parishes and schools should reconsider their approach to technology: Not what they think in theory about the role of technology, but what their practices betray about what they might think below the surface.
Can a family connect with another family in the church without using a smartphone app? Can a visitor find out about an event without scanning a QR code? If a parishioner is committed to living a low-tech life, would it be clear how to become involved, register for special events, or ask someone more about the life of the parish? Or is there a bot being developed instead to assist with these things?
Watching the evangelical world from afar for the past 15 years after being raised in it, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon: evangelical churches try something new, it fails, and they spend years undoing the new thing to go back to what worked well beforehand. But somewhere along the way — usually toward the beginning of the evangelical church realizing that the new thing is failing — a mainline church in the same town discovers the new thing, too, and decides to adopt it. By the time the mainline church has launched the new effort, the evangelical church has abandoned it for good reasons.
My closing concern is this: Are churches just now catching up to fully digitizing their lives through over-reliance on the church website, overuse of social media, and a felt need to embrace artificial intelligence at the same time that parents and parishioners are trying to wean themselves off these very things? Are we trying to push further into the world of technology at the very point that a critical mass of our people is recognizing the need to pull back?
I think the answer is yes.
