Those Who Make Them Become Like Them

The inside-out idolatry of the digital age

Have you ever stopped, in the middle of checking your notifications for the umpteenth time after some post you thought particularly witty or important, to reflect on how pathetic you must look: measuring your social significance by means of a number next to a heart icon? “137 likes…ooh…138—I’m really somethin’ today.”

Human beings crave social affirmation. There’s nothing wrong with that, on one level; that’s how God made us: “It is not good for man to be alone.” Like all natural desires, it was transformed into an unquenchable thirst by the disordering effects of the Fall, so that we engage in pathological attention-seeking behaviors, from the 3-year-old’s tantrum to the teenage boy’s death-defying-dare to the conquering general’s blood-soaked quest for glory. But buried beneath the often foolish and overwrought expressions of this desires lies a wholesome and very human urge to know oneself as one is known, to be seen and recognized and loved by one’s fellow man—and hopefully to see and recognize and love in return.

But in the digital age, something strange has happened to this fundamental human urge: it has become dehumanized. For human beings, the various means by which we give and receive social affirmation are manifold; indeed, no two are quite alike. I feel a warm glow when I receive tokens of my wife’s love, my children’s affection, my parents’ esteem, my coworkers’ respect, my customers’ satisfaction, etc. But these experiences are not quite reducible to one another, and indeed, we recognize it as a pathology in ourselves when, starved of recognition in one sphere of relationships, we try, leech-like, to suck such recognition out of another relationship—such as when a man thwarted in his workplace demands that his wife make up the difference. But digital technology encourages us—nay, positively programs us—to reduce each of these experiences into one quantifiable interchangeable measure of admiration: a number (or to be precise, two numbers: likes/reactions and reposts/shares). We have traded the infinite shades of qualitative difference between a child’s hug and a colleague’s pat on the back for a simple thumbs up or thumbs down, yes or no, one or zero. We have, in short, computerized ourselves.

As I’ve been reading and reflecting on digital technology over the past few months, a consistent theme has been the ways in which the digital is digitizing us—that is, how our technologies are changing our sense of what it means to be human and remaking us in their image. In debates over artificial intelligence, the question everyone wants an answer to is, “So can we actually create an artificial intelligence that matches human intelligence?” Well, no, we can’t, because human intelligence is always embodied (not to mention ensouled), and thus qualitatively different. There are always two ways of meeting a benchmark, though: you can raise your performance till you clear the benchmark, or you can lower the bar. If we can’t make computers human, we can at least make humans computer-like.

This is a constant theme of Anton Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: even as we make virtual reality ever more realistic, the virtual does not lose its distinction from the real: we know that “Facebook friends” is not the same as “IRL [in real life] friends,” that cybersex isn’t real sex. The danger, though, is that we will decide (indeed, many of us by and large already have decided) that the virtual is “close enough” to the real, not to mention much easier in most cases, and so we accept it as substitute, reducing our expectations and behaviors, and rewiring our perceptions to better inhabit the digital world.

Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism makes a related argument. The initial phases of the internet economy’s race to monetize human attention and human behavior were largely reactive: relentlessly track a consumer’s interests, habits, and decisions so that you knew exactly what she liked and wanted—better than she herself did in fact: then sell it to her. Or, to be more precise, sell your predictions about what she will buy to the highest-bidding advertiser. This model evolved with astonishing speed and sophistication in the early 2000s. But it quickly reached a point of diminishing returns. Why? Because human beings are just too weird, complicated, and unpredictable—too human! Any attempt to algorithmically predict their future behavior based on their past behavior could only get you so far. So what if…we could make them less human? What if we could make humans behave as predictably as algorithms? What if we could design digital architectures and stimuli (and increasingly, real-world architectures and stimuli, with “smart houses” and “smart cities”) that reshaped their habits to become “digital natives” who would act in predictably digital ways?

Which brings us back to that like button. Under pressure to humanize Facebook a bit more, the platform rolled out a range of different “reactions” in place of the simple “like” button in early 2016—but it made sure to still bundle all reactions together into a single “reactions” number to keep us from allowing our emotional experience to become too granular or nuanced. Twitter, likewise, eventually added a “bookmark” as a way to distinguish “Hm, that’s interesting” from “I so HEART this”—but it made barely a ripple, because we were all already conditioned to the simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down voting. Or rather, there is no thumbs-down, just as there is no -1 in binary code. There is either 1 or mere absence: 0. So, for our digitized selves, there is either like/repost or the depressing, soul-shriveling absence of attention.

Thus far, I’ve probably not said anything that many other writers on the digital age haven’t said. But I want to close by suggesting a fruitful theological lens through which to view all this: idolatry. “Oh dear, here we go again with a sermon about how we make idols of our smartphones,” I hear you saying. Well yes, I think we do: they have replaced the Shema as the last thing we attend to before we sleep and the first thing we attend to before we rise. But I’m wanting to make a more philosophical than sermonic point about idolatry.

Although idols in the ancient world took myriad forms, many if not most took as their basic starting point the human form: if we had been made in God’s image, so we made gods in our images. But not our images as they actually were, wrinkly and warty—rather, an image of an ideal humanity, ourselves as we wished we were. And of course, there were many different gods and goddesses reflecting various different human ideals: wisdom, beauty, strength, etc. These ideals were shaped into physical idols that often deliberately exaggerated features of the human body that reflected what worshippers wanted for themselves: so, for instance, many idols were hyper-sexualized with exaggerated breasts or genitalia. In other words, humanity constructed idols that artificially singled out certain real features of humanity to present an idealized (and therefore partial, distorted, and incomplete) image of humanity.

Well, what happened next?

“The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
    the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
    they have eyes, but do not see;
 they have ears, but do not hear,
    nor is there any breath in their mouths.
 Those who make them become like them,
    so do all who trust in them.” (Ps. 135:15-18)

Having shrunken their horizons down to a deaf and dumb physical image of themselves, these worshippers became themselves shrunken in proportion, losing their own capacity to truly speak and truly hear.

We are in danger of doing the same—only we have inverted the ideal. If for most ancient idolaters it was the human form with its physical qualities that represented their highest conception of themselves, for us as moderns it is the human mind, a calculating rationality or unconstrained will, disembodied and stripped of embodied particularity. Pursuing this ideal, we constructed computers in this image—an image of ourselves as we hoped to be. Whereas ancient idols had mouths but did not speak, Siri speaks but with no mouth, and listens without ears. Having made such images and given ourselves over to them, we have increasingly become like them. Bodies we have, but we do not touch one another, preferring the solo simulation of sexuality (increasingly with AI chatbots) to actual human lovemaking, and the Zoom call to the handshake. We have replaced the hug and the kiss and the tender gaze and the pat on the back and the standing ovation with the retweet.

But hey, at least my post is up to 139 likes now. #winning

Recently Published

• “Entire Communities Gone” (WORLD Opinions): I grew up near Chimney Rock, NC, and my daughter wept as we watched the footage of a historic mountain town simply wiped off the map. Western NC will never truly recover from Helene because you cannot put back two centuries of history. More than a lament, though, this column is also a reflection on the yawning gap that is opening up between our technical knowledge-gathering prowess and our capacity to act upon it. Helene was one of the best-forecast storms in history, but the preparation and response were abysmal. Why? This is a theme I’m sure I’ll be writing on more in the coming weeks.

• “More Data Isn’t the Answer” (The World and Everything in It): Listen here for the WORLD radio adaptation of the same column.

• “Hope—Is it Warranted at This Point?” (University Bookman): If you were reading this Substack over the summer, you’ll recall my running commentary on James Davison Hunter’s masterful Democracy and Solidarity. In it he surveys the shared ideals and terms of debate that for more than two centuries provided the cultural foundation for the American polity, and analyzes how that foundation has cracked and fragmented over the past two generations. He is deeply pessimistic about the prospects for recovery, but if there is to be hope, it must begin with a realistic assessment.

• “How to Think About Citizenship” (Holy Trinity Raleigh): The audio of my fourth and final lecture in the “Faithfulness as Christian Citizens” mini-course is now up! In it, I reflect on the passive and active dimensions of Christian citizenship—through the former, we model patient suffering in a world that we cannot control; through the latter, we actively engage in our polity for the sake of our neighbors, using law and the ballot box to hold our governments accountable to praise the good and punish the evil.

Today’s Substack is abbreviated—without the “Coming Down the Pipe,” “On the Bookshelf,” or “Recommended Reads” sections—as we’re busily loading up a U-Haul with supplies for Hurricane Helene victims. You can donate to that effort here.

I’ll be taking next week off for that trip, so look to hear from me again around the middle of the month!