Soulfood

I’ve finally gotten around to reading this book that I picked up a couple of years ago after first reading one of Tony Reinke’s earlier books, 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You. Reinke is a techno-optimist and I would consider myself a techno-realist with skeptical leanings, so it was an interesting read. I was disappointed that he wrote a whole book on technology without referencing Marshall McLuhan or Neal Postman, but I guess that’s okay. He did refer to Wendell Berry (though generally dismissively) and Jacques Ellul (neutrally) so that’s good.

A couple of questions I typed out in my Notes app (I wanted to say I jotted them down…but I didn’t. I used my iPhone…) as I was reading:

“Is it good for us to grow increasingly dependent on technology to sustain our existence?”

“What about our connection to the land?”

Which “we” becomes the uebermensch? What happens to the rest of us? Life didn’t generally go well for the displaced people who ended up as museum displays…”

These are the sorts of questions Reinke generally avoids. He spends multiple paragraphs praising the development of mRNA vaccines to miraculously combat the COVID-19 outbreak, but only obliquely references that the virus was created by gain-of-function research. And this is the general tone of the book. There are plenty of token acknowledgements of the negatives, but these are always countered (and then some) by the extolling of technology’s virtues.

Some quotes:

(On Isaiah 28:23-29) “This text is about God farming Israel. And he knows what he’s doing. He will not continue to till open his people’s hearts with a scratch plow, and neither will he thresh them continually. He’s the master agronomist, and he’s moving his people toward a goal. He’s husbanding history to bring about a spiritual harvest in his people. And if it feels like God is overfurrowing and overthreshing your life right now, he’s not. His agricultural work in us, though painful, will yield a harvest of righteousness.” (p. 94)

(Reflecting on Ecclesiastes and the nature of human work) “We cannot escape futility. None of our technology will escape the allure of human power over everything. We are blind to our own vanity through the mirage of technological progress. We are not moving forward as much as we are circling around in a loop of nothing-new-ness that cannot redeem us. The honest reality that should govern our aspirations (along with our consumptions) is that all our innovations are ultimately headed to a recycling center or a landfill. They cannot serve as objects of our heart’s enduring hope.” (p. 130)

“Nature disrupts us, and we disrupt her back. We disrupt creation necessarily, and we disrupt creation unnecessarily. And we need discernment to untangle the two. We need scientific debate, dissenting voices in our dialogue with creation, so that over time we learn the pros and cons, uses and misuses, help and harm of our new technologies. As we imagine, make, test, and unleash new technologies into the world, adjustments will always be needed.” (p. 145)

So far those are quotes that I generally agree with. But here’s a particularly “ewww” moment: “The challenges of embracing city life are the challenges of embracing tech culture. So if your conscience approves of living inside a city – among all of its cultural pressures and idolatrous biases – you are simultaneously preapproved to adopt new tech, even to work inside the tech industry.” (pp. 210-211) Umm, no. Some technology is not okay for Christians to use at all. The larger discussion of living in the city (Babylon) is great, but this line is just wrong.

Reinke is at his best when he’s talking about the telos of human innovation, such as here: “The glory of Christ is the epicenter of Christian flourishing in the tech age and any age. His glory is the trans-technological priority for the gaze of our lives, the solid ground for our minds and wills and souls and hearts in whatever social changes have come or will arrive in the future. The church will continue to exist on this earth as a refuge for those who inadvertently break themselves under all the false, dehumanizing promises of self-redemption and self-security in the biological manipulation of the body and in the cyborg-like augmentation of our physical and cognitive powers.” (p. 297)

Reinke never answers my concerns, outlined in the questions above. So it is in the end a dissatisfying read for me. I think that current technologies are altering our view of what it means to be human on a scale heretofore never encountered by mankind. And thus I am much more skeptical and cautious about embracing new tech than Reinke encourages us to be. I agree that God is sovereign over AI – of course! That doesn’t mean that AI is safe for humans to use without being corrupted and co-opted by malicious forces that either hate or scorn humans. I remain a skeptic-leaning techno-realist. But I’m interested in your thoughts!