"My Carefully Crafted Anti-Tech Profile is Finally Gaining Traction Online!"

Black Mirror, The Every, and other mixed attempts to critique The Machine

The first script Charlie Brooker wrote for Black Mirror was “Fifteen Million Merits,” an episode that imagined, “What if our Orwellian future ran on Apple software?” In it, Daniel Kaluuya plays a prisoner whose life of meaningless toil is broken up with bouts of entertainment and pornography via screens in his cell. The only possible escape is winning a talent show.

It’s the kind of offbeat premise that made Black Mirror a hit.

In the climax, Kaluuya’s character smuggles a glass shard onto the talent show stage and threatens to kill himself before the live audience. Surprised and impressed, the judges award him his freedom. In the final scene, we see him holding his glass shard to his throat still, only now he’s hosting a live stream from what turns out to be a luxury apartment. His seeming resistance has been commodified and now reinforces the very system he supposedly opposes.

Note the score on the stream in the bottom right.

I was reminded of this episode as I watched the most recent season of Black Mirror. Put simply, Charlie Brooker has lost his edge. The premises have gone from daring and surprising to tame and recycled. The critiques used to cut to the core of what it means to be human. And not only that, they often made you grateful for seeming shortcomings — maybe it is good to have a memory capable of forgetting, maybe it is good to have a spouse with foibles rather than a robotic facsimile, maybe an imperfect authentic relationship is better than a flowery but false one. They were perceptive, disturbing, yet often hopeful, pointing to parts of our humanity we must defend. But Black Mirror has now reached the terminal stage of any successful series — self-parody.

Premises are reduced to callbacks and fan service. And rather than taking on fundamental questions, Brooker is content to poke a little fun at Netflix, the cost of subscriptions these days, throw in a couple gee-whiz gizmos and call it a day. One new episode features a character getting gaslit and bullied by a former high school classmate. In the big reveal, the bully has a quantum necklace that allows her to alter reality with the touch of a button. This is quantum mechanics ex machina at its worst. No self-reflection required. The trend of Black Mirror’s past few seasons is to retain the form of the show while draining it of any substance. Sometimes Brooker even ditches the technology satire altogether.

We now are faced with tough moral dilemmas like: “What if a troubled starlet accidentally became a werewolf, would the paparazzi let up then?” “What if a demon made you kill people for solid social justice reasons, would that still be wrong?” “If two dudes fell in love in a video game, would that mean they’re gay or just same-game attracted?” If you’re only half paying attention, these might cut it (I guess?). But compared to the early seasons, there is an impotence and hopelessness about them. To what standard of humanity is he appealing to? If even the tech critics all say, “I’m as bad as anyone when it comes to tech addiction,” then at some point, how large is the Netflix audience for hard-hitting criticism? Is tech critique now just self-flagellation, a sort of perverse penance where we berate ourselves and others and then return to business as usual feeling slightly superior to the unwashed masses?

Projects like “Removed” where photos remove all phones through CGI might be good fodder to talk about our tech addiction, but are they going to change anyone’s behavior? Source.

Dave Eggers has written two satires of modern tech — The Circle and The Every. The Circle was adapted into a movie with Tom Hanks and Emma Watson, and it took a more indirect approach. The protagonist is an ingenue turned influencer, and thus the critiques are mostly through irony. In The Every, the protagonist is Delaney Wells, a corporate vigilante attempting to bring down Big Tech from within by going to work for a fictional tech company — “The Every” — that basically combines Facebook, Google, and Amazon. As you might guess,The Every is far more pointed.

Under constant monitoring and fear of offense, no new ideas, jokes, or friendships ever emerge organically at The Every. Everything new comes from acquisition. Eggers gives the most forceful lines railing against surveillance capitalism to one of Delaney’s professors, Meena Agarwal. Delaney recalls how Agarwal would hold pro-privacy rallies on campus that didn’t get far:

“If you are being surveilled,” Agarwal was roaring through her megaphone, “you are not free! A human being watched cannot be free!” Students hustled past, earbuds installed. “There is no safe amount of asbestos or surveillance,” Agarwal yelled. A graduate student, studying anthropology, began filming her. “This college has no right to film you, anywhere or anytime!” Agarwal implored. Now students were making a wide berth around her. “Students, I beg you to wake up.” No one woke up.

That is, no one but Delaney woke up.

Agarwal tries to explain her admiration for Delaney in a letter:

You thought about things. You seemed in touch with the ways that humanity was being fundamentally changed — how we were moving from an idiosyncratic species that coveted our independence to one that wanted, more than anything, to shrink and obey in exchange for free stuff.

In the end, though, Eggers imagines that everyone will give in (almost like Jesus’ disciples). Prof. Agarwal takes a research job at The Every, planning to “change it from within.” Delaney’s co-conspirator ends up becoming The Every’s biggest booster. And Delaney herself ultimately succumbs, just for a moment, to The Every’s promises of utopia via population level manipulation. Eggers offers a bleak vision. All fall away.

The Betrayal of Judas, Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy (1304-06).

And you might say that pessimism is unrealistic, but perhaps he had ironies like Charlie Brooker in mind as he wrote it. Can you critique the internet online, or will you inevitably become subservient to the thing you supposedly hate? Some draw a sharp line. Neil Postman didn’t do a TV tour to promote Amusing Ourselves to Death. Antón Barba-Kay has conscientiously avoided making an online brand out of being anti-tech. He wrote A Web of Our Own Making and otherwise keeps his digital footprint minimal. Dave Eggers has no social media, and only accepts fan mail via USPS.

Paul Kingsnorth

,

Peco

and

Ruth Gaskovski

,

Clare Morell

, and others find ways to walk the walk, not merely talk the talk.

The digital is so protean though, it’s hard to take aim at it. It’s nearly impossible to stand outside of it at a critical distance. As

Nicholas Carr

wrote: “Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us.” How do you tackle that?

But perhaps the deeper fear is that you’re being redundant. As Alan Jacobs recently wrote, Paul Kingsnorth appears to be simply repeating the standard critique of technology — The Machine is a new name for what Neil Postman called “Technopoly.” Jacobs concludes, “We keep on re-diagnosing, and describing the same diagnosis in slightly different terms, because we don’t know what to do…We should, I think, be alarmed that our condition was properly and thoroughly diagnosed by a series of important thinkers half-a-century ago — and yet our malady has only progressed.”

While I take Jacobs’ point generally, Kingsnorth has shifted the conversation to a deeper plane. Postman was focused on the breakdown of public discourse and our intellectual capabilities, but Kingsnorth’s critiques are of a Western culture with a spiritual Void at its center. Kingsnorth is less worried that we’ve lost the ability to appreciate the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He’s more worried for our soul.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck (1650).

Thus, his “solutions,” such as they are, are more spiritually oriented. And if the problem is indeed spiritual, then the critique Jacobs made isn’t as damning as it may appear at first glance. After all, we’re still talking about greed, pride, and the human condition after all these years. We haven’t solved those problems either because they’re endemic to our humanity. Likewise, Antón Barba-Kay calls digital technology “a natural technology” precisely because it is so intuitive and we so easily identify ourselves with it. As

Brad Littlejohn

summarized, “No man ever mistook his dishwasher for himself. And yet a man might well mistake his X profile for himself—indeed, many already do.”

We struggle to “solve” digital technology’s problems in part because the root issue is our sinful appetites, something beyond any technocratic fix. If the issue is that these technologies are “dehumanizing,” then Christianity’s aim to restore the image of God in us is clearly relevant. The only trouble is, theosis isn’t a quick fix solution. A friend of mine recently said, “I think if you prayed an hour a day, the screen thing wouldn’t really matter.” I think he’s right, but that’s an arduous path.

Sam Pressler and Pete Davis writing at After Babel ask us to imagine a grassroots community movement that grows exponentially — our little tech resistance could go national. But Jacobs has accepted that he’s writing for the “fraction of one percent of us [who] will be willing and able to choose something other and better…I think we’re living in the aftermath of a slow-motion cultural and moral apocalypse. I really do. I’m trying to keep some beautiful things alive for the people who are willing to encounter them and maybe even to love them.” While I certainly hope there is a movement to hold on to distinctively human ways of being, I find myself wondering, “What if there isn’t?” What if my tiny little resistance remains tiny?

After “amusing ourselves to death” for decades, now

Ross Douthat

warns we’re in an “Age of Extinction.” Whole cultures, family lines, and art forms will be snuffed out. The line from Douthat’s piece that I keep returning to is about how the digital age is killing us softly “by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.”

Obsolete. It’s the same word Christian Smith used to describe how religion now appears to Millennials and Zoomers. There’s no antipathy and there’s no interest. It’s an inert historical curiosity. For all the hubbub about resurgence in interest in Christianity among the young, there is a small group that’s doubling down amidst a broader, ongoing evacuation. Ask any churchgoing twenty-something and you will hear story after story about friends who have walked away from the faith. So there too I must ask, “What if the Christian revival never comes?” Does that make my faith somehow less important or true simply because it’s less relevant or popular?

It comes down to scale, this sense that human sized action is worthless. We are conditioned to quantify, to maximize growth, to leverage our resources. When constantly faced with global problems — the environmental crisis, the fertility crisis, the relationship recession — the intuitive response is to fight back globally. Why tell 5 friends you got a Light Phone when you could post it for 500? Wouldn’t your time be better spent browbeating young women into having kids rather than raising one or two more of your own? What’s the marginal utility of one more kid relative to one hundred more pronatalist posts, anyway?

Of course, the same logic applies to Christianity — why worry about your own conduct when you could focus on global change? The ROI on prayer is immeasurable (and thus meaningless). Ditto for the sacraments. Thanks, but I’ll stick to arguing about how America needs Christianity via extended Twitter threads. Some of us have real work to do.

In The Brothers Karamazov, one man admits, “The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together.” Every day, you can witness digital mobs savage opponents supposedly in service to the greater good.

As to which you should prioritize — humanity in general or in particular — St. Seraphim of Sarov famously said, “Acquire a peaceful spirit, and thousands around you will be saved.” But that seems backwards to modern ears. Shouldn’t we do the thousands first and save little old me for last?

St. Seraphim of Sarov and Mischa by Alexander Prostev. Mischa is the name of the bear St. Seraphim befriended. More here.

Wise men often have frustratingly banal spiritual advice. Pray, participate in the life of the church, read your Bible. No shortcuts, life hacks, or workarounds to be found. Likewise, after Douthat diagnoses the problem of digital extinction, his solution seems rather plain:

Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.

If the spiritual is the real battleground with The Machine, though, it’s a mistake to make it all-or-nothing. It should not be, “I move to Western Ireland with a compost toilet” (like Paul Kingsnorth) or I do nothing. The fantasy of either a quick fix or a drastic change is a natural human temptation. It assumes that the problems are either out there or should be removed without struggle. But as

Sister Anastasia

put it to me, modern technology is often an addiction to stimulation that usurps God’s place in our lives. The root issue is a spiritual void you’re trying to fill, not that your phone needs to become grayscale. And it’s a mistake to expect the spiritual life to be easy. As St. Ambrose of Milan put it, “Trouble comes only to those on their way to glory.”

While it’s easy to fantasize about an exotic pilgrimage, a lot of boring stuff like getting married, raising children, and going to Church are slow, mundane, but time-tested paths toward God. The abundance of information nowadays can imply that you just need to find the right method and then it’ll be easy. But the reality is usually that important things are both very simple and very difficult.

So I ask again, what if your tech exit doesn’t become a movement, your reading habit doesn’t revitalize the book industry, or your good deed doesn’t get reciprocated or even appreciated? It seems it still would be worth it, if only for your own soul’s sake. While there may be hucksters or self-flagellants in the tech-skeptic space, I think there can be a helpful community too. Most of us know few people personally who are on the same page about this, so we often find support in far-flung places (yes, including the internet). Good criticism reminds us of who we want to be and helps us reach escape velocity from the Extinction we are seeing all around us. At least, that’s what I find Kingsnorth and others provide me, and I hope in some tiny way that’s what I can provide too.

Maybe that’s what’s really missing from Black Mirror now. Brooker seems tired and uncertain what he’s holding on to. Kingsnorth’s forthcoming Against the Machine or Clare Morell’s The Tech Exit have vitality because they are grounded in a Christian vision of what it means to be human. Given our sinful state, that vision is one we constantly strive for and often need reminding of, but there is sustenance in having something to aspire to.

I remember at Kingsnorth’s Erasmus Lecture he talked about the idea of “drawing your line.” Maybe your line is owning a smartphone, scanning a QR code, or using X. Whatever it is, you need to decide for yourself and then stick to your commitment. When the talk ended, I asked a deacon there about this idea of “the line,” “How do you decide where to draw your line? Can you really follow Kingsnorth’s example and still function in the real world?”

The deacon replied, “When my prayer life is solid I can tell where the line is and I can hold it.” That seemed like a non sequitur to me at the time.

I get it now.

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