Wielding Technology in the City of Cain
Wielding Technology in the City of Cain
The Tainted Glory of Our Present Age
If you walk through the garden
You better watch your back
Well I beg your pardon
Walk the straight and narrow track
If you walk with Jesus
He's gonna save your soul
You gotta keep the devil
Way down in the hole— Tom Waits, “Way Down in the Hole” (YT)
After Eden, in some strange interlude between the exciting parts of the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve settle in some dull place outside Paradise, which one imagines as something like a sepia-toned, Steinbeck-esque version of Kansas. Here, in between “[working] from the ground”, they find time to conceive their sons, Cain and Abel.
Mary and the Persons of the Trinity set aside, Cain is the most important figure in the entire Bible, because Cain is us. Cain is the ground we’re built on, the force behind our present, and means by which we will shape our future.
The story of Cain is laid out in Genesis 4:2-17
:Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, while Cain was a tiller of the soil. So in the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruit of the soil as an offering to the LORD, while Abel brought the best portions of the firstborn of his flock. And the LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but He had no regard for Cain and his offering. So Cain became very angry, and his countenance fell. “Why are you angry,” said the LORD to Cain, “and why has your countenance fallen? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you refuse to do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires you, but you must master it.” Then Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And while they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. And the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
“I do not know!” he answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
“What have you done?” replied the LORD. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground. Now you are cursed and banished from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield its produce to you. You will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.”
But Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, this day You have driven me from the face of the earth, and from Your face I will be hidden; I will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
“Not so!” replied the LORD. “If anyone slays Cain, then Cain will be avenged sevenfold.” And the LORD placed a mark on Cain, so that no one who found him would kill him.
So Cain went out from the presence of the LORD and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
And Cain had relations with his wife, and she conceived and gave birth to Enoch. Then Cain built a city and named it after his son Enoch.
At the outset, the story tell us the brothers’ professions, which will be important in how they make sacrifice. Cain is already involved in a form of technology: he is a farmer, a tiller of the soil. This soil with which Cain works has already been cursed by God (here, Yahweh) when God discovers that Adam has eaten of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis 3:17-19:
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten from the tree
of which I commanded you not to eat,
cursed is the ground because of you;
through toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your bread,
until you return to the ground—
because out of it were you taken.
For dust you are,
and to dust you shall return.”
As Gil Bailie notes in Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, Cain’s murder of Abel rises out of mimetic conflict, a result of Cain’s failure to properly engage in the ritual sacrifice that wards against limitless violence in a way that would have mediated Cain’s envy of Abel:
“The real issue -- of which the ancients were necessarily more aware than we -- is that blood sacrifices ‘worked’ whereas those that involved no ritual slaughter often did not. In the Cain and Abel story, a bloodless sacrifice failed to resolve the rivalry between the two brothers [….] The purpose of sacrifice is to prevent what happens when it fails. The one thing that can be said with utter certainty is that Cain's bloodless offering failed to extinguish his resentment. Like all sacrifices that fail, it exacerbated the tensions it was incapable of dissolving. In the end, the Cain and Abel story provides a parable of the sacrificial dilemma with which the Israelites would wrestle for centuries and with which we are still confronted. Under the cumulative pressure of the biblical revelation, the sacrificial system fails, beginning with its most abominable form, human sacrifice. But attempts to abandon the sacrificial system too abruptly deprive the society in question of its only effective ritual for curing itself of the tensions to which mimetic desire inevitably lead. When the Bible says that Abel's blood sacrifice was pleasing to God, it means that it was religiously and socially effective, whereas Cain's bloodless sacrifice was not. […]
The story of Cain shows what the history of the twentieth century shows, namely, that if we dispense with the sacrificial structures upon which religion and culture have for so long depended without at the same time renouncing the mimetic passions that made these structures necessary in the first place, then sooner or later we will become murderers. Does this mean that we must tolerate existing sacrificial structures that we find morally offensive? Emphatically not. […] There is ample biblical warrant for believing that humanity can learn to live without its sacrificial apparatus, and it seems to me that the pace at which we should try to do so ought always to be determined by genuine moral or religious promptings. Only in light of such promptings can we be reasonably confident that the effort required to live with fewer sacrificial structures will be made. For if we are to live without such structures, we will have to be able to renounce conflictual desires and abstain from the kind of social melodramas whose worst consequences the sacrificial system averts.”
Intriguingly, the apocryphal book Life of Adam and Eve posits that Adam recognizes the potential for mimetic rivalry between the two sons and works to mitigate it by ensuring they live separate lives.
Attended, as everyone woman in childbirth should be, by twelve angels and two Virtues, Eve births Cain, “a son who shone brilliantly.” The story continues: “At once the infant stood up and ran out and brought some grass with his own hands and gave it to his mother.” Eve then conceives and bears Abel, but has a disturbing dream which she recounts to Adam:
"My lord, while asleep I saw a vision like the blood of our son Abel on the hand of Cain who tasted it with his mouth. On account of this I am pained."
Adam said: "Woe, let not Cain kill Abel, but let us separate them from each other and make separate houses for them."
They made Cain to be a farmer, and Abel to be a shepherd that they might thus be separated from each other.
But even after this, Cain killed Abel. Adam was then 130 years old. Abel was killed when he was 122 years old.
Adam’s work to differentiate the two sons isn’t enough to stop Cain’s envy of Abel. Cain fails to properly mitigate against mimetic rivalry with the participation in the violent sacred: Cain does not slaughter a lamb for sacrifice but offers the bloodless fruits of the cursed ground instead. The Genesis account leading up to Abel’s murder clearly juxtaposes the sacrifice offered by the two men and implies that it is Cain’s inability to “do what is right” that shifts his disposition toward Abel in a murderous vein. Cain’s sacrifice fails to be efficacious enough to eradicate his envy, so Cain becomes “very angry” and his “countenance [falls]”. God notices the change in Cain’s attitude, and warns him, telling Cain, “[S]in is crouching at your door and it desires you, but you must master it.” Cain does not heed God’s warning.
Cain murders Abel, and, continuing the Judaic tradition that breaks with the pagan order of the world, God takes the side of the innocent victim, Abel, whose blood “cries out to [Him] from the ground.” The same ground that God cursed with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, which Cain tilled from, is now haunted by Abel’s shed innocent blood.
God does not kill Cain, however, but he does indicate that Cain can no longer work with the ground stained by Cain’s act of murder. Cain’s choice has changed him and he cannot return to the life of an ordinary farmboy. There is no going back home for Cain: he is now a man on the run, fearful of being a victim of the cycle of violence he has initiated. The story echoes, at a deeper level, the fall in the Garden: as Adam and Eve are pushed out from Paradise by their choice to eat the forbidden fruit, Cain is pushed out even further, east of Eden, by his choice to murder his brother. This reiterates that the choices and actions of individuals matter and have real, meaningful consequences that change the way that they are able to interact with the world. The Bible will brook no nihilism.
Cain is not a fan of facing the consequences of his choices though, a response which makes him shockingly relatable, and seeks to negotiate the terms of his exile with God. Interestingly, it is not clear whether Cain is actually repentant for committing a murder or is just complaining; most commentators believe his attitude is the latter. God never threatens to kill Cain or throw him into a lake of fire, and, absent the modern conception of the prison system, exile seems a reasonable punishment as any for the murder of an innocent. Even so, upon Cain’s complaint, God extends mercy even to the murderer by offering him a level of protection that is essentially infinite, the threat of a sevenfold vengeance for Cain's death symbolically representing totality and completeness in the same manner that Christ's admonition to forgive seventy times seven in Matthew 18:22 is an admonition to forgive endlessly.
God here exercises a trait unseen in any pagan system: the ability to give voice to the victim while also extending mercy to the victimizer.The Meaning of the Mark
Soul, surrendering your soul
The heart in you not whole
For love, but love walked on
Cast into the dark
Branded with the mark
Of shame; of Cain —— Sinead O’Connor & Gabriel Yared, “Lullaby for Cain” (YT)
To cement a kind of covenant with Cain and provide tangible evidence to others of God’s protection over Cain so that Cain himself is not murdered while he wanders about in exile, God gives Cain a mark. While the theory about the actual form of the “mark of Cain” enjoys all sorts of wild speculation, from skin pigmentation to a horn on the forehead to a letter of God’s Name to leprosy, the authors of Genesis clearly believed that was less meaningful a detail than the actual purpose of the mark, which is made very clear in the the text. The purpose of the mark is twofold: to protect Cain from the cycle of violence and to reduce the amount of violence in the post-Edenic world.
The mark of Cain is far from an antediluvian relic, however, and still plays an important role today — and it may even be the second-most important symbol in our world outside the Cross. We can better understand God’s position on marking Cain by understanding how marks function today, in our own world, in a familiar place called the Kingdom of Twitter. Someone on the platform tweets out a statement that is broadly understood as violent or inciting to violence— and Twitter puts on that person’s page the infamous “Account Suspended” statement, which is nothing more than a “mark”. Like God, Twitter does this largely to mitigate against an increase of violence on the platform, including violence that might accrue onto the original tweeter. The mark exiles them, informs the community that they are exiled, and also acts as a kind of stopper to the original act of violent or violent-adjacent speech.
Orthodox icon carver and symbolist Jonathan Pageau notes how the mark becomes a question of a supplement to the ordinary course of human existence, providing identification and knowledge:
“Starting with a mark though, imagine I live in a kind of paradise where there is no danger. For some reason I need to move away from that ideal, into a threatening world. I go somewhere it is cold. I can supplement my body by adding layers and layers of clothing to keep myself warm. In doing so, I am both marking a type of strength, for the supplement will in fact help me face the increased danger, but it also marks a type of weakness (remember how you didn’t like wearing a helmet as a teenager when biking) because wearing clothing in the cold is a mark that you would be cold without them. Like the Mark of Cain, clothing, or a wall are both a consequence of danger while also being a protection from danger. […] We cannot point to a place or time in our world of death where there is no supplement, for our very birth and biological existence are part of this ever-receding memory. Rather we can only point to a nostalgia for innocence and purity, a nostalgia for paradise. […]
Now, what clothing does for your body, and what the city does for the social level, a mark does for identification and knowledge. If you were searching for the origin of writing in Scripture, the Mark of Cain is your best bet. […] The invention of writing, just like the development of technology, is a working out of the Fall and death, a working out of the problem of duality. To put a mark on something is to make it stand out from other things, to separate it from other things. It is akin to a pointing, a calling out of ‘that one’ is what marking inscribes exteriorly. […] Marking is something like inscribing upon the memory of a thing, though not a living memory, an exterior one. The mark acts as a token to the invisible difference in quality which came about by the act of selection.
If I go into a theatre and want to keep my place while I am getting popcorn, I need to mark my seat somehow, leaving my shirt or book on it. All the chairs are the same in appearance. I do this so I can remember, and so others can know that, even though I am not in the chair, this chair, among all the other chairs, is my chair. It has an invisible quality, the quality of being mine at the moment, a quality that the other chairs do not have. I mark it so that this invisible quality can be recognized in my absence. [….] The earliest writing we have, the very early cuneiform tablets, were most often a form of accounting.”
Similarly, Paul Kingsnorth -- an environmental activist turned Christian convert
-- observed:“Pro-technology Silicon Valley writers — like Kevin Kelly wrote this great book called What Technology Wants, which is really good if you want to understand what's going on in Silicon Valley. They have this notion that the machine consciousness [...] it's almost if it's in the ether, and you can tap into it. And at different stages civilizations rise and fall based on how much they've tapped into it. The story of the Tower of Babel is a myth, based on us tapping into that technique and deciding we're going to build up to the sky, and we're going to create this giant thing, and then of course it gets knocked down, because that's what always happens.
Cain is the father of technological civilization, that's the way I see it. [The myth of the Garden] [...] tells us that everything's in communion with everything else. We're walking around in this Garden; God's walking around as well, right, so, you can see God. You're that close to the source of Being, that you can see it. Everything else is there and everything's in harmony with everything else. Nature isn't afraid of us, nothing else is afraid of us, we're not afraid of it. We're all naked; we’re revealed; everything's revealed to everything else in this place.
But we have our choice […] whether we're going to take the fruit of knowledge, and when we take the fruit of knowledge of good and evil then we're rejected from that — or that’s the consequence, right? […] You have to leave your connection with everything else and you have to be in your individual self, and you have to become self-aware. You say, ‘Oh no, I'm naked, I must make clothes,’ which is maybe the first technology, to start covering yourself with clothes, and then you get the first murder. […] It all goes from there, because we chose knowledge. We embrace technology to try and create or recreate the world that we left, to get back to the Garden, all the time. […] You can't get to it that way. But then you look at the way that Silicon Valley guys sell in the Metaverse — I've had conversations with some of these people — and they say, ‘Oh ,you know it's going to be great, you know what we need to do is, we need to start again, because nature's imperfect, right? There's too much death and there's too much misery, injustice, so we're going to rebuild nature and we're going to upload our minds to the cloud so we can live forever and and and you know, there's going to be peace and justice.’
It’s basically a Christian story, right? It comes from a Puritan Christian culture, right? It’s a Christian story, but it’s technological. So they’re trying to create a technological heaven, a technological kingdom, but it's not controlled by God — it's controlled by us. And we get to live forever in the cloud, everything's perfect there's no injustice, nature is rebuilt on our convenience so it suits us. But it's also the devil's work, right? It’s the devil’s offer: ‘God just wants to hold you back so, you know, eat this apple, and you can be the masters.’ The way that we're using technology to rebuild the world in our image is what the serpent offered right at the beginning. That's the way it seems to me. It's that offer again. And we keep trying. It's a digital Tower of Babel we're building now; it’s going to have the same fate. So we're endlessly trying to build our way back to the Garden with our own hands, because the alternative is humbling yourself and following the way of Christ, which is less pleasant, right? It requires you to bow your head to something bigger than you, rather than pretending to be God yourself.”
The mark of Cain — which is invited by Cain because he wants an assurance of protection against retribution — is the second step, as Mr. Kingsnorth notes, after Eden, toward the expansion of knowledge. First, Cain’s parents desire knowledge, and then Cain commits an act of murder, an ultimate act of the knowledge of good and evil, and then is marked in a way that provides knowledge, an accounting for Cain’s existence, a means by which the community can know Cain’s protection. Cain’s obsession with knowledge, though, does not end there, but instead will continue to envelop all of humanity on its path toward technology.
From Genesis to Neuralink
Oh, Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on that day— Nina Simone, “Sinnerman” (YT)
Cain starts tainted with technology — a farmer, manipulating the cursed land — and the murder of Abel together with his subsequent banishment, drives him further into technology. He becomes a builder and founds a city: he is the father of techne. In the city, artisanship will become possible. Economic strata, made viable by the city’s ability to collect grain and account for things, value them, in a kind of science, a technique, and store up treasures, will begin to manifest. The names of Cain’s descendants emphasize his paternal relationship to technology and civilization: there is Jabal, “the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock”, Jubal, “the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes”, and Tubal-Cain, “who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron” (Gen. 4:20-22). All of this architecture of the city of Cain will live in a kind of symbiotic relationship with techne.
In Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus provides a story for Cain's life after the city, which further stresses Cain's relationship to techne in marking Cain as a man who "changed the world into cunning craftiness" and "was the author of measures and weights"
:“And when Cain had travelled over many countries, he, with his wife, built a city, named Nod: which is a place so called: and there he settled his abode: where also he had children. However, he did not accept of his punishment in order to amendment, but to increase his wickedness: for he only aimed to procure every thing that was for his own bodily pleasure, though it obliged him to be injurious to his neighbors. He augmented his household substance with much wealth, by rapine and violence: he excited his acquaintance to procure pleasure and spoils by robbery: and became a great leader of men into wicked courses. He also introduced a change in that way of simplicity wherein men lived before; and was the author of measures and weights. And whereas they lived innocently and generously while they knew nothing of such arts, he changed the world into cunning craftiness. He first of all set boundaries about lands: he built a city, and fortified it with walls: and he compelled his family to come together to it: and called that city Enoch, after the name of his eldest son Enoch.”
Even Cain’s name in Hebrew is related to the word “purchase”, “acquire”, “brought” and this is highlighted in Eve’s comment when she gives birth to him: “With the help of the Lord, I have gotten [or brought forth] a man” (Gen. 4:1). As Jacques Ellul notes in The Meaning of the City, Cain “transform[s] the homo proto sapiens into homo faber.”
But what is rather remarkable is how plain the story of Cain is, this transformation of a farmer working alongside a shepherd to a man of techne. In pagan stories, technology is taken from the gods. The Titan Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to man, an action which earns him an eternity of having his liver perpetually destroyed in punishment. These stories do recognize the divine, magical quality to technology, but they, as pagan stories, distance man from the necessity of developing technology, and technology emerges like a deus ex machina. In the Cain story, however, the development of technology is rather ordinary, and entirely by Cain’s — man’s — own doing. The story highlights, more sharply than any other, how technology is used as a supplement to man’s life, one chosen by man, not given to him from above. As much as rationalist modernists scoff at a childish self-constructed conceit of Christianity with its “sky daddy”, they fail to appreciate how remarkably deconstructionist the stories of the Bible are relative to its pagan contemporaries. The Cain story completely demythologizes humanity’s relationship to technology and allows us to understand it properly.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates shares a kind of apposite story, a pagan Egyptian story on technology, in this iteration, as writing (marking):
SOCRATES: But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing.
PHAEDRUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Do you know how you can speak or act about rhetoric in a manner which will be acceptable to God?
PHAEDRUS: No, indeed. Do you?
SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men?
PHAEDRUS: Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you say that you have heard.
SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
PHAEDRUS: Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.
SOCRATES: There was a tradition in the temple of Dodona that oaks first gave prophetic utterances. The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from 'oak or rock,' it was enough for them; whereas you seem to consider not whether a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from what country the tale comes.
PHAEDRUS: I acknowledge the justice of your rebuke; and I think that the Theban is right in his view about letters.
SOCRATES: He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?
PHAEDRUS: That is most true.
SOCRATES: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
PHAEDRUS: That again is most true.
Orthodox priest Father Josiah Trenham commented on the above passage in a video titled “Tech is Never Neutral”:
“Is that not, dear ones, a commentary on our own information age in which the smartphone has made people dumb? […][N]otice that Plato presents the inventor of a technology, in this case, writing, as a god. How perceptive. That is exactly how we treat the inventors of technology today. All the great men of the world, all the richest men of the world, are the tech titans. We not only use their inventions and have made them rich in the purchasing of them, but we have done so with very little reflection and great cultural appreciation of them. Today, they are the most popular of people, the people who are interviewed, whose word is most influential. We treat them like gods and that evidently is a very ancient human thing to do.
[N]otice that Socrates presents the nature of technology as inherently biased, that there is no such thing as neutral technology. I hear all the time, and have heard for most of my adult life, an attitude that comes from the falling West about technology: that technology is, by definition, good, and the new is good and certainly better, and if we're going to evaluate technology at all, it should be simply on the use of technology, if is it going to be good, used for good, or is it going to be used for bad, but there's no discussion about the fact of the technology itself, is the very creation of this technology, good. […]
One of the things that excites the technological world today is the development of human computer interfaces. Elon Musk has a company called Neuralink in which he is hoping to implant, to drill a hole, in your skull and to place in there a computer chip — that's the size of some four or five stacked quarters — then put your skin back and sew it up and have a direct link between yourself and a computer. He sells this — he enthuses people's hearts about this by saying it might be able to help people who are paralyzed due to spinal injuries use their limbs; it might be able to help blind people to be able to see. Now [...] Elon is very, very, far, his team is very far, from accomplishing that, but notice that he's selling the technology, he's prejudicing the technology, in that it could possibly do wonders in in some very small select cases. He’ll go on to say that the vast majority of the usage won't have anything to do with that at all. The vast majority of the usage will be to enable people to process and think more quickly, to interact with their computers. Now, think about that objectively, not in the usage, not in the particular usage: ‘Well, it could would this be good if we help people who are paralyzed move. Would this be good if we help people who are blind, see?’ Ask yourself the larger question objectively: the idea of implanting a computer chip in the human brain such that there is a direct interface between a person's most intimate thoughts and a computer. Does that sound wise? Is it a wise thing to develop a technology that will allow people's intimate thoughts to be hacked? Think about that. This is exactly the kind of question that Plato is trying to get us to pose. What is the value the meaning of the tech itself, not its usage?
[The form of technology itself], regardless of how it's used, has meaning. That meaning needs to be judged. Before we ever start using the tech, we should decide if the tech is legitimate itself, is it wise? The real and singular question in technology is not about the use of technology, because the reality is, often once you make a certain technology, there's no reigning in its use. We see this, of course, with nuclear technology. Who would have said the ethical thing to do with nuclear technology is not to use it primarily for power, but for destructive weapons whose use violates every principle of justifiable Christian warfare, treating innocent civilians like combatants and eliminating 60,000 of them instantaneously by the drop of an atomic bomb and putting the whole world into a condition of paranoia and fear? [….]
[Thamus says that] writing is actually going to make people dumber — this was the argument. He's not commenting upon what people will write. Certainly, as a king, he's probably concerned that people will use writing to write anarchical political tracks that might lead to the downfall of Thamus. OK, that’s bad if you’re a king, you don’t want that to happen, but that's not what he's saying: he's questioning the idea of writing itself. Plato presents all technologies, no matter how advanced, no matter how wonderful, as a trade-off. […] Something is going to be gained, but something also is going to be lost: it's value-laden. This kind of sober approach to technology is exactly what we do not have today. […]
Plato asserts that the discoverer of an art is not the one who can determine the good or the harm that will accrue to those who use the art. The last person in the world you want to evaluate the good or negative of the use of a new technology is the creator himself. Obviously, he's put his whole life into this. His financial future is completely dependent upon you embracing, with enthusiasm, and telling your friends to embrace with enthusiasm, their technology. […] How have we forgotten this? Is it not ironic that during COVID, the Congress and the Senate both summoned the tech titans who were manipulating the public, aggressively manipulating the public, controlling access to information [to influence outcomes] while at the same time claiming to be a neutral public square. To bring in before the Congress Mark Zuckerberg and ask him about the subject of proper privacy laws and proper ethical regulations for technology — this is the practice of intellectual imbeciles, to bring the inventor of a technology to counsel us about how to properly use that technology ethically, is exactly what Socrates says you never do.
Instead, you bring in someone whose competence you trust, someone whose judgment you trust, a sound moral theologian, an ethicist. [They] articulate the classic moral principles that western society, Christian Western society, has been built upon, and then you measure the technology by those classic principles, and you hold the tech masters accountable to the objective morality. That's how it's done — not vice versa. We don't listen to a lecture about the proper use of a technology by the inventor himself. Tech is not neutral, dear ones. All form has meaning and form drives function. If we don't have a little bit of sobriety and back off, which, of course, requires some slowing down, some distancing, then we won't know what will end up being, because we'll start using technology blindly, as we have, and we'll end up in a horrific situation.”
Father Trenham makes many interesting points here worth considering.
He urges that technological progress should require “some slowing down, some distancing” in order to give time to assess the morality of a technology on its face before its adoption. This is a conservative approach to technology, but not necessarily a Christian perspective. The two ideological camps of political conservatism and Christianity are often comingled or even used interchangeably, but it would be an error for the Christian not to evaluate and better parse out the values of conservatism versus the values of Christianity. Christians are only mixed up today in the West with political conservatism more broadly because Christianity, at present, has had ever so slightly a cultural advantage in the West, even though this is rapidly fading, as any visit to any American big box store in 2023 with its Manifest Your Magic! Journal, 222 Spiritual Awakening Foaming Soap, and Slimming Serpentine-Amethyst Keychain Amulet would show. Everyone becomes conservative once they have power. This is why the Chinese Communist Party frowns upon revolution in its own populace even though it was born and came to power through revolution itself, and its entire mythos and self-understanding drapes itself in revolutionary pageantry. The purpose of the tellingly-named “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” in the nation-state of Iran is to guard the power of the most recent revolution against all other revolutionary attempts that come after it. The revolutionaries intelligent and opportunistic enough to seize power know better than anyone else the old maxim: la révolution dévore ses enfants. Institutionally, however, Christianity’s power in the political sphere is a feature of the past, not the present.
But it seems an open question as to whether Christianity is inherently conservative in and of itself. The pagans of the Roman Empire saw Christianity as a threatening, revolutionary movement against its own continued existence, and quite correctly so — to assume otherwise is to assume that the highly sophisticated political organization of Rome in antiquity was stupid. Similarly, we as Christians never ask ourselves why the Islamist nation-states have an effective prohibition on Christian evangelism, tending instead to take the very Western-centric, Enlightenment-informed view that these people just must be ignorant barbarians who don’t understand how great it would be to put up Christmas trees, baptize their children, and sing “Amazing Grace” at baseball games. But this perspective doesn’t apprehend the Weltanshaaung of the people who live inside these states at all. The Islamist nation-states understand Christianity as a very risky, destabilizing enterprise that creates an easy space for secularism and favors the voice of the marginalized. As a result, they see a very direct line between the proliferation of Gideon Bibles in their countries to their darling Muhammeds and Fatimas donning purple hair and having sexual relationships outside the confines of marriage, possibly even with same-sex partners, which is a whole host of outcomes that they generally do not view as preferable.
Western Christians struggle to let go of their innate instincts toward conservatism, including their conservative attitudes toward technology. This is where the stated preferences of Christians for political conservatism — even to the extent of conserving a post-Christian nation-state in the hopes of clawing back to a golden time in the distant past — and their own unthought knowns about the very destabilizing nature of Christianity come to the fore. Devout Christians fret about the admittedly alarming Book of Revelation, which contemplates a clash between a functional one-world government empowered by technology and the ongoing practice of Christianity. This is why some Christians may prefer nation-states and champion the practice of nationalism, and even conservatism, as a counterweight to supranational structures — although this path seems rife with its own issues as well and seems to require Christians to become inelegantly entangled with the political affairs of the nation-state — and also may be one reason why Christians are so apprehensive and conservative when it comes to technology, because they understandably do not desire to create the technological system that will later be used to oppress them. This prejudice against technology is rooted in the eating of the fruit, the founding of the polis and techne by the murderer Cain, all the way to the Mark of the Beast in Revelation. There is a sense that technology represents some human rebellion against God, a way to achieve man-made progress through means that are imitative, but certainly not derivative, of the divine nature, and this imitation come through rebellion against God in the Garden, in murder, and in the city, the father of techne.
To this point, Christians have taken on as a new hobby worrying about Neuralink, which, as described by Father Trenham above, is a computer-chip brain interface company started by entrepreneur Elon Musk, who needs no introduction; this speculation goes all the way up to questions as to whether Mr. Musk is the Antichrist (he isn’t, even despite the eyebrow-raising symbolism of the Elon GOAT Token Rocket). Strangely, however, this intellectual apprehension of technology makes Christians share the same ideological ground as anti-technological materialist-atheistic environmentalists.
Many Christians would agree, though, that technology is rebellion against God, even as they might read this screed on a small, hand-held computer while flying in the sky, the triple feats of reading, computerization, and airplanes being technologies unknown to ancient man. Even Father Trenham’s video proffers a criticism of the technology of writing as he sits in a library, surrounded by the technological apparatus that is literacy and mass printing. The reality is that ancient man certainly would have anticipated all of this, even if he would be astonished by what we may or may not have accomplished; even Neuralink was contemplated from the beginning, anticipated with Cain’s story in the Book of Genesis. Technology is the compromise we’ve made with our present reality, the means by which we supplement ourselves.
In a recent interview with Lex Fridman, the Artist Formerly Known as Kanye West, Ye, articulated this well:
MR. WEST: The only thing that we really need to teach in school is engineering. We don't need to teach history, we don't need to teach anything that is subjective. It needs to only be engineering taught in school, everything else needs to be recessed. […] I don’t believe in anything, any concept of history, because history was just written by the victors. So if I see stuff happen on the day, that later that day, is reported wrong — how wrong is something reported a thousand years ago? And why would we argue about something that's not in the now, because that's the only thing that everyone can agree upon is that it is now, right now.
[…] The biggest mistake from the past that we keep making is looking at the past too much giving too much value to the past. [We are now] and we are here, we are one species, we are one race, we’re here, and it’s time. The leadership is changing, because you have Elon as a leader, Ye as a leader, and we are the top leaders. We’re more influential than presidents.
MR. FRIDMAN: So you’re a human being with engineering challenges before you with Stem Player, with Parler. What’s the hardest thing in front of you on the engineering front?
MR. WEST: That’s the first sentence that any of our species needs to hear when they're born: “you are a human being with engineering challenges” — I consider challenges to be “opportunities” — “in front of you.” […] I need to write that down. That’s the beginning of our new species constitution.
On the level of physical reality — which is more important than we attend to, culturally — existing as a human is simply a series of engineering challenges which requires technology to supplement, mitigate, and even overcome. The human body must be kept to certain range of temperature, so we must build shelter, find warmth, power our homes with electricity. Organs give out, so transplant surgery is needed. The physical distance of the Earth and our limited ability to travel efficiently across it gives rise to the domestication of horses (a technology in and of itself), the automobile, and the airplane. Measles once decimated populations, vaccines supplement our body’s own ability to respond and allow us to go on living without a concern.
The Strange Bedfellows of Techne and Polis
Cain bought a blade from some witch at the window
Abel bought a bag of weed
And even the last of the brown-eyed babies see
That the cartoon king has a tattoo of a bleeding heart
There ain't a penthouse Christian wants the pain of the scab, but they all want the scar
How every mouth sings of what it's without so we all sing of love—Iron & Wine, “Innocent Bones” (YT)
In The Meaning of the City, Mr. Ellul notes that Cain, in building a city, “carves stones and thereby makes them impure, unfit for use in an altar for God (Ex. 20:25)”. Further: Cain “forces creation to follow his destiny, his destiny of slavery and sin, and his revolt to escape from it. From this taking possession, from this revolution, the city is born.” The sole purpose of the city is to offer Cain protection, because he does not have faith in God’s protection. “For God’s Eden [Cain] substitutes his own,” writes Mr. Ellul, noting that the word “build” is “chanakh”: to dedicate, to inaugurate, to initiate, separate from God’s own act of creation. Cain’s actions echo a deeper pattern, on a larger scale of the revolution against God in the Garden through an act of disobedience, this time a murder, a founding of a city not possible without that murder. Mr. Ellul continues:
“Just as history begins with the murder of Abel — since before death there is no way for us to learn man’s history, and the death that resulted in the fall first manifested itself as murder — so civilization begins with the city and all that it represents. With Cain’s beginning, with Enoch, we have a sure starting place for all of civilization. Paradise becomes a legend and creation a myth.”
Hannah Arendt comments in “On Revolution” about the very close-knit relationship between revolution and violence:
"The relevance of the problem of beginning to the phenomenon of revolution is obvious. That such a beginning must be intimately connected with violence seems to be vouched for by the legendary beginnings of our history as both biblical and classical antiquity report it: Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus; violence was the beginning and, by the same token, no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating.
The first recorded deeds in our biblical and our secular tradition, whether known to be legendary or believed in as historical fact, have travelled through the centuries with the force which human thought achieves in the rare instances when it produces cogent metaphors or universally applicable tales. The tale spoke clearly: whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men have achieved has its origin in crime.
The conviction, in the beginning was a crime—for which the phrase 'state of nature' is only a theoretically purified paraphrase—has carried through the centuries no less self-evident plausibility for the state of human affairs than the first sentence of St John, 'In the beginning was the Word', has possessed for the affairs of salvation.”
The revolutionary character of the birth of the city of man gives way to the relationship between the polis and its progeny, techne. As Mr. Ellul notes in The Technological Society, this relationship is entirely to be expected:
“There is, in any case, one agency which asks nothing better than to intervene: the state. But then the state itself will become technique.
The state was fated sooner or later to come into contact with other methods. Since the end of the eighteenth century it has gradually encountered all techniques and finally the technical phenomenon itself. From the political, social, and human points of view, this conjunction of state and technique is by far the most important phenomenon of history. It is astonishing to note that no one, to the best of my knowledge, has emphasized this fact. It is likewise astonishing that we still apply ourselves to the study of political theories or parties which no longer possess anything but episodic importance, yet we bypass the technical fact which explains the totality of modern political events, and which indicates the general line our society has taken much more surely than some painful revival of Marx ( who was not acquainted with the technical fact) or some spiritualistic theory. These so-called “explanations” are mere utopias and flourish only as utopias flourish.”
Father Trenham, the Orthodox priest quoted at length above on his commentary on Phaedrus, makes an interesting remark, almost as an aside. He notes that the god-king Thamus in the Egyptian story relayed by Socrates might have concerns about the real-world, practical effects of the technology of writing — as in, people may wish to write anti-monarchical political texts that would threaten the existence of the king. Later, Father Trenham then goes onto highlight the case of Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, testifying before the U.S. Congress on Meta, his own product, suggesting that Mr. Zuckerberg is not dispassionate enough a witness on his own company. But the case of Congress and Meta is exactly like the case of King Thamus and writing. If we were so bold as to extend Socrates’ Egyptian story, we might imagine King Thamus seizing the technology of writing to further his own influence, write propaganda about his own rule, and thereby guard against his overthrow by the anti-monarchists. But, at the same time, the existence of writing is a very much a threat to the continued health of King Thamus. Like a vaccine, he must take a small dose of the poison lest he be killed by it. It takes little imagination to extend this understanding to our own present day. Socrates’ story demonstrates that the state has a natural sense of unease about technology, even as it births it and engages with it.
The state, naturally, as every institution and being does, wishes to continue its own existence. Technology supplements the state — the extensive surveillance apparatus of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik in yesteryear and today’s People’s Republic of China being perfect examples. This isn’t necessarily inherently evil: certainly the crime rate in China is far lower than the United States, meaning that, to some extent, the Chinese state has used the supplementation of technology to achieve morally good ends of the state, such as protecting innocent citizens from undue harm. This use helps the state continue its existence because innocent citizens will continue to support a state that achieves intrinsically good ends for its population. Technology can also help the state expand its power beyond its own borders (an action the morality of which depends on one’s perspective) through everything from the atomic bomb to a Hollywood blockbuster Tom Clancy film.
However, in a very real sense, technology can also consume the state. The state is very aware of this — it couldn’t be more aware of it, and this challenging relationship may be a partial explanation for technological stagnation. If technology were to consume the state, that would be a very negative outcome from the state’s position, because, as I’ve said, the state would like to continue to exist. In another sense, technology not only empowers the state, it also empowers the individual, and reduces the individual’s need to depend on the state. The poorest zip codes of the United States that are plagued with crime, drive-by shootings, robbery, poverty, and drugs — places where the state has failed in its duty to maintain social cohesion and order — seem also to be the most armed, not only with largely illegally possessed firearms, but also with high bite-force dogs who are often more effective than a Sig Sauer. So the technology of semi-domesticated animals and firearms comes into play when the state vanishes in the margins and only the individual is left to supplement their continued existence with some degree of technology. There is a very real, strange relationship between the empowerment of individuals by technology versus the empowerment of the state by technology.
This relationship between technology and the state played out well in a remarkable exchange last year between the Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and the junior Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz. Sen. Cruz had made some publicly-aired comments which Mr. Carlson then critiqued on his nightly show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight”. Sen. Cruz then apparently asked to go on Mr. Carlson’s show the following night to “explain himself” (my quotes). The resulting exchange was read out the next morning by CNN anchor Brianna Keilar as follows:
It seemed a strange dialogue, because Sen. Cruz is one of the most prominent sitting members of the U.S. Congress altogether, from one of the most powerful, Republican-leaning states in the nation. Sen. Cruz would be deemed a “Very Important Person” any day of the week, anywhere on the planet. His entire disposition toward Mr. Carlson didn’t seem to reflect this elevated status, though. However, when we understand this through the lens of technology, it is a much more helpful frame. Mr. Carlson’s show draws, on average, half a million viewers each night, in key demographics. This is a politically engaged audience that signs off their evenings with “Tucker Carlson Tonight”, not “The Bachelor”. It is difficult to imagine, outside of the 2016 Republican primary presidential debates, if Sen. Cruz has ever come close to catching so many eyeballs, all at once, let alone doing it solo, five nights a week, for years on end.
Mr. Carlson’s ratings evince him as a person who would have thrived in most ages in whatever professions were available to him. In 2023, however, he has the technology of cameras, air waves, screens, and is able to use his talents to put stories in front of millions of loyal viewers — and potential donor-voters. Therefore, in a very strange way, technology has enabled Mr. Carlson, an individual who is not a representative of the state, to have very significant influence over the access to power that any representative of the state would naturally want.
This strange push-and-pull between the parent-child relationship of polis and techne has very serious ramifications for the polis, both as a standalone entity invested in its continued existence and as a structural being endowed with a purpose in organizing human societies toward broader goals and possessing a monopoly on violence to that end. In commenting on the violence in the U.S. in 2020 sparked by public outcry over police brutality — and I note here that the stated purpose of the police, or law enforcement more broadly, is nothing more than to act a modern extension of the state’s will and exercise of its monopoly on violence — scholar Andreas Wilmes observed:
“My point is to lay emphasis on the fact that technological solutions always generate further issues. I am really trying to imagine what life is and will be like for these police officers surrounded by cameras and guns (for, as a French, I cannot help thinking about the availability of guns in the US). Is adaptation to this technological environment psychologically possible or bearable?
From the case of Rodney King till today, it is striking how images eventually turned against US law enforcement. There is of course nothing symbolic in the recent cancellation of the reality crime television program Cops. The footage of killer cop Derek Chauvin is just the latest in an already long line of videos of police brutality. We gradually moved from the age of reality TV to that of snuff movies. Millions of people watched the video reconstruction of [George] Floyd’s murder. Millions of people watched a snuff movie. I lay emphasis on this because, today, the emotional impact of such videos is often understated; they are like dynamite. In Hollywood movies, directors make us see violence through a specific perspective along with music, film editing and sound editing. The violent movie scene is an imitation of reality which enables catharsis and sometimes (provided the movie is good) even critical distance. Snuff movies are exactly the opposite: they impede thought and provoke only negative feelings. (6) The footage of Floyd’s murder is that of a long agony. For a viewer, the identification with the victim is strong and the video in itself feels like an aggression. (7) And, as we have seen recently with Candace Owens, anyone whose narrative deviates from this fundamental viewer experience is risking backlash. There is potentially contagious violence in footage of police brutality and this, I think, must not be overlooked. It would be timely to reread what Saint Augustine wrote on Alypius’ ‘weakness for the circus games.’ However well-meaning, the fight against police brutality through images and social media is not devoid of pernicious effects.”
In The Technological Society, Mr. Ellul explains further how the state is inevitably consumed by technology, technique:
“It would be unthinkable for us today to leave in private hands really efficient instruments such as atomic energy. In 1949 a report was presented to the Congress of the United States emphasizing the fact that the study and production of atomic energy must remain in the public domain. It would likewise be unthinkable that a private citizen have the radio at his disposal in order to unleash a campaign of agitation on a world scale. In every country the radio is at least under the supervision of the state, whether it is under direct state control or in private hands. No matter how liberal the state may be, it is obliged by the mere fact of technical advance to extend its powers in every possible way.
Whatever the area of interest, problems are raised by technology which demand technical solutions but which are of such magnitude that they cannot be solved by private enterprise: for example, pollution of water supplies and of the urban atmosphere. These phenomena, which have assumed such proportions that they threaten the whole of city life, are of purely technical origin. Only rigorous and authoritarian measures of general control can solve these problems if they are to be solved at all. That is to say, appeal to dictatorial state action is indispensable. These problems all exceed the powers of private individuals. Technique, once developed to a certain point, poses problems that only the state can resolve, both from the point of view of finance and from that of power.
The economy, to a greater or lesser degree, conditions the creation of the nation-state. Alternative explanations— political and intellectual— are given for the creation, let us say, of the Fascist state. But the most profound cause of this phenomenon was the economic impasse in which Italy and Germany found themselves. The nation-state was primarily a response to the cessation of economic evolution.
The economy, with its enormous productive capacity, volume of trade, mobilization of society, and economic techniques which thirst to be applied, is no longer a closed circle, a single activity among others. It engages the life of the whole society and of all men in it. Economic problems are now problems of the whole of society. The relation between the economy and all other human activities can no longer be merely empirical. Liberalism sufficed for the economy of a century and a half ago. Today it has no meaning.”
“At the Still Point of the Turning World”
Recently, a kerfuffle broke out online between conservative commentator-comedian Steven Crowder and the fashion-forward, hip conservative media outlet the Daily Wire. While the background of the story is complex and certainly partially inscrutable to those of us on the sidelines, the gist of Mr. Crowder’s stated complaint (which has not been as stressed in the responses of the Daily Wire side of the aisle) is that the Daily Wire is essentially “enforcing Big Tech’s bidding” (my attempt to paraphrase) in reducing payouts to their talent for any YouTube demonetization or strikes. The skirmish hasn’t quite devolved into a Nick-Fuentes-In-N-Out-Burger-shake-throw, but one side of the argument focuses on the fact that YouTube is such a heavyweight that retaining monetization must be a priority, but of course alternative platforms like Rumble or hosted websites (on Amazon servers, one notes) must be eyed as an off-ramp for a long-term solution once they gain traction, and the other side of that argument appears to believe that any compromise to “Big Tech”, even if on utilitarian premises, represents a betrayal to what some, Mr. Crowder and the Daily Wire included, have called “the movement”.
The entrepreneur-investor Peter Thiel commented that the conservatives are like Star Wars’ “Rebel Alliance”, a ragtag band consisting of Princess Leias, autistic C-3POs, Chewbaccas, and entrepreneurial Han Solos. One could carry his analogy further and note that the Rebel Alliance, USA, appears to largely not only use Empire-owned X-fighters and communications equipment in its stated efforts to destroy the Empire, but also be paid by the Empire for doing so. Perhaps it is an elegant strategy, in the same vein of buying an Antifa shirt on Redbubble, but perhaps not.
At the same time, none of the ketchup-and-chocolate-shake-food-fight, or even the thoughtful Orthodox priest, really grasp the meaning of “Big Tech”. For one, it seems less helpful a frame to assume that Big Tech is simply filled to the brim with anti-Christian, anti-conservative, delete-button-happy staffers chomping at the bit to do the bidding of their boorish, billionaire, WEF-y overlords whose faces are drenched in the same lib tears that float their multi-million-dollar yachts. Instead, it seems like the relationship that Big Tech has not only with political conservatism, but with all of society — and let alone with itself — is much more complicated, and much more challenging, than that.
Gray Mirror explains:
“Facebook is indeed surrounded by enemies, but they are enemies of its own creation. Its business model creates a gigantic stash of power with no real way to defend it. It was keeping big bags of In-n-Out Burgers—animal style—in its tent in bear country. Now the bears are in the tent.
And the same is true of tech as a whole, if we define “tech” as the business model of “pack N users onto 1 giant logical server.” In retrospect, it would seem obvious that some kind of forest beast would want to share any such platform-burger. But, as in any survival experience, mistakes were made and here we are.
Big tech is not being attacked because it is powerful. It is being attacked because it is defenseless—and has a whole lot of potential power that it can’t use to defend itself. Every burger in the bag will be devoured by the strongest, hungriest bear. And once the bag is empty—you’re still in the tent with the bears.”
Following this point a little more, we can see that Big Tech exists as its own entity. Any one entity — Google, Microsoft, Meta, Twitter — is not necessarily solely beholden to its board, its CEO, its shareholders, its advertisers, its users, its political jurisdiction. Instead, regardless of the human apparatus that surrounds any one technological endeavor, it morphs into an organism, even a principality, entirely of its own.
To my knowledge, Gray Mirror’s author remains a rationalist atheist, so he does not necessarily connect the story of technology back to the biblical story of the city. But the Book of Genesis shows us that there is something very peculiar about technology. As Mr. Ellul notes, the city (technology’s father) is a spiritual power of its own. The way God describes Cain’s attitude in Genesis suggests that Cain has some pre-existing attitude of hardness toward his Abel, but that Cain must be careful because sin is “crouching at the door, and its desire” is for Cain. The phrase “crouching at the door” implies a predatory action, a predator waiting for its prey. The text implies that some external force preys upon Cain, and its successful predation is manifested in the murder of Abel, and may even be present in the founding of the city. We might wonder if this same spirit is present in the manifestation of technology itself, and whether it explains why technology acts as an entity at least somewhat independent of us.
We tend toward two major beliefs that keep us from understanding this properly: first, that we have complete and total free will out of which almost all, or even all, of our decisions are made, and second, that we are completely integrated being in the execution of this total free will. Nothing could be further from the truth, but that has hardly stopped the entire engine of our culture from operating on these premises. This modus operandi becomes quite unstable when it reaches to technology, however, which is a reason why the entire question of technology is much more complicated than we would like to think.
Our faulty premises lead us — the Daily Wire and Stephen Crowder included — to believe that the discussion about Big Tech is entirely and only a political conversation about power and which humans have it and what their views are. But that doesn’t seem to be the correct way to understand technology. But we are not integrated human beings, and even all the executives, shareholders, and political interests surrounding Meta do not interact with the users of Facebook as fully integrated people. Instead, they are interacting with a part of a person who interacts with Facebook and is changed in the using of it. The Instagrammer becomes more attuned to the world around them in a photographic sense, the tweep becomes a person attuned to clever stories and punchy lines, the YouTube vlogger to splicing their own daily lived experience into bite-sized pieces of content.
A Twitter personality recently brought this to the fore in a critique of the “Point of View” (POV) meme on TikTok, broadly arguing that it is incorrectly applied (i.e., the person appears in the POV meme, rather than it being from their own perspective) by women, who, the personality argues, are the trend-setters and meme-definers on all social media, and with this power have shaped a meme that is incorrectly used:
One of the replies correctly captured the essence of this meme, though, and explained how it accurately reflects the contemporary human-technological connection:
In her 1977 work “On Photography”, Susan Sontag highlights how technological change does not exist simply as an innocuous, inert fabrication of humans, but rather as an entity completely capable of — if not entirely oriented toward — changing humans, and in so doing, altering the very fabric of society and even the world itself:
“In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity — and ubiquity — of the photographic record is photography's ‘message,’ its aggression. […] From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. […]
A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights — to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed. While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all. […]
Although the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening.”
Ms. Sontag’s comments here are limited to photography, but this narrow scope unnecessarily limits the full import of her argument. Elsewhere in the essay, she makes a weak defense of writing as much more passive in comparison to photography, but writing is hardly passive at all, given that the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440 incited a need to read what is being printed, at scale — and is perhaps the sole reason for the Protestant Reformation that upended Europe and still echoes in very real political and social terms today, more than 500 years later. While Ms. Sontag doesn’t comment directly on photography as a technology, her understanding of photography and its meaning scales up to all technology, from writing anti-Catholic pamphlets to POV memes on TikTok to implanting Neuralink. There is no way in which technology has not changed us and does not continue to change us in ways we are not capable of fully comprehending. It is functionally meaningless to assume we are fully human in the same sense that a shark swimming somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland is fully a shark. The shark has the blessedness of being exactly what it is, but we started well down the path of becoming technological creatures from the moment our ancestors started using tools and discovered fire. On Twitter, machine learning expert Bojan Tunguz commented:
But humans are already very, very far down the road toward merging with the machines. Your phone is more intimate with you than your spouse of three decades. Your entire ability to exist today as the human you see in the mirror is informed by your ancestors cooking meat over fire.
You read English because Indo-Europeans used the technology of domesticating horses. Existential risk factors aside, the pattern is very clear: we will not ever "compete" with the machines. We will only become more and more fully intertwined with them, and they with us.In Medias Res
So what are we, who are haunted by Cain, to do in this strange age, where we live in a kind of Zwischenzeit between Paradise and what may come? The gates of Eden are forever closed to us; we cannot return to the Garden. But it would be foolish too to assume that we will be forever in the thrall of Cain’s techne and polis, with all the questions and struggles that brings for us humans.
Of course, our fate is ultimately determined by the Triune God, but we would also be wrong to believe that Christ will come riding down the heavenly way at the end of days to institute some Butlerian jihad against our thinking-machines and be crowned as worm-king.
But what we can know is that the Lord, forever a kind of friendly trickster, has other plans, yet to be fully manifested and certainly yet to be fully understood, but alluded to in the Gospel of Mark:
And the scribes who had come down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and, “By the prince of the demons He drives out demons.”
So Jesus called them together and began to speak to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, it cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, it cannot stand. And if Satan is divided and rises against himself, he cannot stand; his end has come. Indeed, no one can enter a strong man’s house to steal his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house.”
— Mark 3:22-27
It seems fitting to quote Jacques Ellul here, from The Meaning of the City: “It is of little importance whether this story conforms to factual reality. We will leave to the historians such remarks as, ‘Geographers know of no land of Nod.’ When I first read it, that sentence set me to dreaming. Unknown to geographers! And what kind of place would it be, this Nowhere land, which is not a place but a lack of place, the opposite of Eden, another country unknown to geographers?”
I refer the reader interested in the Lamech post-script story at the end of Genesis 4 to a chapter in Jonathan Pageau’s “Cain and Abel” video which is timestamped at this link.
There is a colorable argument, supported by a midrash and discussed to some degree in the link in the above footnote, that the Genesis 4 postscript is really a story about Lamech, the seventh generation removed from Cain, inadvertently killing Cain — keeping in mind, of course, the extraordinarily long lifespans of figures in the Old Testament which somehow enables Cain to live concurrently with his seventh generation removed descendent — and that God’s reference to the sevenfold vengeance of Cain is simply a prophetic declaration that Cain’s punishment for murder will be, one day, eventually being murdered himself. While this argument deserves consideration, it ultimately does not, in my view, comport with a Christian-Girardian understanding of God’s attitude toward Cain. Similarly, the Book of Jubilees, canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, contemplates that Cain dies when the stones of his house fall on him, "for with a stone he had killed Abel, and by a stone was he killed in righteous judgment […] with the instrument with which a man kills his neighbor with the same shall he be killed; after the manner that he wounded him, in like manner shall they deal with him.”
I would be remiss not to observe that, after Mr. West’s exile from Twitter and subsequent marking of “Account Suspended”, he, like Cain building a city, attempted to shelter himself inside Parler. #SymbolismHappens
Mr. Kingsnorth’s conversion story, written up for First Things in “The Cross and the Machine”, is well worth a read.
Josephus also comments that God does not kill Cain in retribution for Abel’s murder because Cain had at least offered some sacrifice to God. It is remarkable for two reasons that Josephus makes this comment: one, it is not a comment made directly in the Genesis account, and two, Josephus himself was born into a wealthy priestly family whose male members, including his own father, would have been deeply intertwined with the sacrificial business of the Jerusalem Temple (the same one before which Christ has an utterly fantastic #OccupyHerodsTemple moment in Matthew 21:12-13). On another note, The Life of Flavius Josephus begs for a film adaptation.
As Peter Thiel commented recently in response to a question about climate change, “I hear more excitement about wearing sweaters and riding bicycles than I hear about working on thorium plants.”
See Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.