So now, so what?
Over the previous four essays, I’ve argued that technology is the main religion of modern life because it asks to be the center of it, the mediator of everything. I’ve claimed that technology isn’t neutral, that it’s oriented toward power and convenience, and that as we serve it, our movement toward these values is merging our world into a technocracy while separating us from each other. If you’re generous or cynical enough to concede that any of these points might have some legitimacy – well, so what? Is the only thing left to do complain about it on the internet? Should you get off the internet entirely? Should you start a Facebook group to rally people against data centers, or maybe cancel your Facebook account altogether, move to a farm in Kentucky, cut the wifi, and call it quits?
To put it directly, what does it look like to live well?
I don’t know. I wish I did. To be honest, when I started this series, I was working under the embarrassing and half-formed assumption that in this final essay, I would try to answer these kinds of big, specific questions with correspondingly big and specific solutions. Of course I had no idea what they would be. Now, having sat down to try to figure that out – and having failed for four months – I’ve come to terms with how laughable the attempt always was. What was I thinking? I’m small and I’m only myself. I’ve got little to say about anyone else’s life, and even less to say about big societal-scale solutions and public policy. Whatever I might drum up from Google searches and thin air would be little worth listening to.
So let me tell you about something little, then, and see if it might be worked back around to a little answer. I’ve found that there are two ways of walking my dog.
The first way, and the one I choose most often, is to treat her as a lump of fur at the end of a leash: a thing that needs to be dragged around the loop of the park to stop it from making a mess in my house. When I walk my dog this way, I put in headphones, put on a podcast, and pay her barely any attention at all. If she lags behind me to sniff at something on the ground, I yank her quickly along so that she’s forced to keep up with my pace. If she perks her ears and starts dancing in eager anticipation of meeting some fellow dog coming toward us, I pull her down so that I can keep going with minimal fuss. This is mainly done with the force of the line of the leash; I don’t speak to her. Or if I do, I speak in the same tone with which I’d address a broken printer. Do what you’re supposed to do, damn it.
The second way of walking my dog is far better and much harder. I treat her less like a printer and more like a partner. When she stops to sniff at what looks to my naked eye to be an unremarkable patch of grass, I stop, too, and I do my best to share her interest. Eventually I’ll nudge her along, since left to her own devices she would sniff the same patch of grass until the end of the world, but I’ll do it less with force and more as a matter of collaboration. “Come on, Libby, let’s go this way,” I’ll suggest. “We’ve examined this bit of grass for three whole minutes; surely there’s more to see and smell farther on?” She rarely agrees with me, but she’s amenable to having the conversation. It’s a kind of dance. She can tell, I think, that on these kinds of walks she has my attention. And she returns her own attention in kind; when I talk to her in this way, she becomes something more like a Person. I’d like to live more often in this second way of walking. I think I’m not alone in wanting this, or in finding it hard.
People, said Martin Buber in 1923, have two ways of relating to the world.
We can relate in the mode of I-It or in the mode of I-Thou. We can see things or we can see people.
Buber, a Jewish theologian, spends a dense, cryptic book discussing the consequences of each path, but the basic contours of his thinking are intuitive. To choose I-It is to flatten the life from the objects of our attention, to paint over their complex hues with our own simple colors in the pursuit of our own ends. It’s a mode of relationship that denies – or, more accurately, just fails to recognize – the full personhood of anything outside the I. It exalts the I, and as a consequence diminishes it, since full personhood can only be realized in relationship with another Person. It makes the world into a collection of things that can be used.
To choose I-Thou, on the other hand, is to forget about usefulness. It’s to behold, with full and open attention, the unfathomable presence of another Person. It’s to stare at the sun, or let a dog off the leash in a wide field, or listen with your whole heart. It takes ages and it isn’t safe, because People are bright and dangerous and might do anything. Or they might do nothing. To say I-Thou is to surrender to the likelihood of disappointment, and the risk of death, and the depth of life. Thou, Christianity tells us, is what God has said to us.
Interestingly, and despite what pop psychology has made of his work, Buber was adamant that to live in a constant mode of I-Thou is impossible, at least for us, at least right now. We’re finite. We can’t treat all people as People all of the time, because if we tried, we would be crushed under the weight of glory and our tiny selves would explode. The most we can take of the sun is a quick glimpse; we’d better look away after that. So there is, he explains, no shame in saying I-It, and in fact there’s good use to this mode of relating as long as we remember that each It is only a sign toward a Thou. Signs are helpful when they point to something real; maps are a good way to make sense of terrain. Our danger isn’t in saying I-It at all, but in saying it only. We have to return to the I-Thou relationship like we return to food and drink. When we don’t – when we choose to say I-It forever and begin to forget we’ve made a choice at all – we starve ourselves of meaning. We separate signs from what they signify and drain the source of their life. We mistake the map for the world and find ourselves truly lost.
As an aside: AI, I think, is paradigmatic of this kind of lostness. The motion of technology toward separation has made and stretched the thread that tethers signs to what they signify, and AI may finally cut it. To give an example: while a Zoom call can’t actually present a person’s face or voice, it does represent them digitally. The pixels on the screen are not a real Person, but they do point to one. But to engage with an AI avatar or a chatbot is to do away with the Person on the other end of the line, so that the signs of words and voices and faces which used to point to Someone now point to some thing. It’s as if you were to call your mom and find yourself answered by an automated phone tree: “Press 7 to speak to a representative of your mom.” Or as if, on a drive to New York, you were to suddenly be told that there was no such city after all, only something different (and more efficient) in its place. It would make the highway signs for New York meaningless, and the trip, too.
The good news is that, despite the fact that our technoreligion pushes us into a funhouse-mirror maze of signs, solid reality is always there at bottom. We may find I-It easier to live than ever, but we can always choose I-Thou. I think that probably returning to this small choice is the only way to live well with technology, or people, or dogs – or, more simply, to live well at all. But this only brings us back in a long, looping circle to the question at the top of this essay:
So what?
Practically, what does it mean to say I-Thou? What does it really look like to choose People over things? What does it look like to live well?
I’ve been tempted, in tracing these themes, to say that it means quitting technology, full stop. Turn off the wifi. Turn it all off. This is certainly one path, and if you follow the arguments, they seem to point back in this direction before disappearing into the trees. If technology rushes toward power and convenience, maybe humans were in for this whole mess the first time we tamed fire or swung a hammer, so maybe we’d better get rid of all of it. If our creativity has only ever boiled up from our pride, then we should retrace our steps all the way back, past the internet, electricity, agriculture, past even language. Sometimes I think there’s nothing else for it. Our work is irredeemable and all we can do is run, bleeding, from ourselves.
Of course, if that’s true, then there’s no escape. There’s no button we can push or ban we can pass that’ll return Earth to innocence, and it might be that to run and hide is only one more way of living in the mode of I-It. I have a friend who wanted to bury his head in the sand during one of the last elections, so he booked a trip to some sparsely populated Caribbean island that you can only reach by boat. It’d be peaceful, he figured. He could pay more attention to the stars than to the news. But as he and his family were making the crossing, they saw a fireball streak across the sky and plunge, frothing, into the water not more than several hundred yards from their little ferry. Ships and frantic activity followed. It was a fallen Starlink satellite.
We can’t turn off or outrun what we’ve made, not really. Move out of the city and live off the land, if you can, but you’ll still have to fight to keep the condos off it. Take a holiday if you want, but remember you’ll also need to take your phone. The machine follows us like a shadow, and as Adonos found in Fairy Land, you can’t escape that. You can only die and be freed.
I have a fearful hunch that this is the truer hope: death, and freedom. Maybe it’s not our tools that break the world, but something in us that must be killed and healed. Isn’t it true that the Tower of Babel and the Temple of God weren’t distinguished in being built by human hands, but by the bent of human hearts? Maybe it’s not building itself that’s bad, but building as if we’re by ourselves. Maybe technology isn’t neutral, but maybe it doesn’t lead inevitably to separation. We might make good things if we stopped treating the world as a thing. Haven’t we reached the highest heights of our sciences from the depths of humble wonder? Maybe to live well is less a question of right action and more a question of right submission, even to death. Maybe if you say I-It only, then what you make will crush you in the end, but if you can look at the cosmos and bow your head to the fatal glory of I-Thou, what you make might be made holy, and you along with it. Maybe. God, I hope so. Our technoreligion promises that we can have all our desires without ever having to die. Maybe that lie is keeping us from going home.
And still: What does it look like? How do we live? Is a good life anything bigger than a small choice?
I don’t know, but I suspect it looks like a million tiny choices. It must look like struggling against the currents of convenience, power, and money, and instead swimming for the hard shores of their opposites: connection rather than convenience, service rather than power, charity rather than money. It must take moment-by-moment effort. It must look absurd to the people floating along easily in the mainstream. I know someone who will only eat an animal if he has killed one of its kind; this seems totally ludicrous but directionally right. I think living well probably looks like codifying things in the form of limits and rules and practices. Choose to set screen time limits, and make them small. Choose not to use social media at all. Choose to shop locally. Choose to have friends over for dinner. Move to a farm. Grow your own lettuce.
But be careful, too. You might easily mistake the laws you’ve made for the life you hope to get from them. It might be that you should buy chicken at the farmers’ market rather than at Costco, but it might also be that you should go to Costco rather than ordering takeout from an app, and maybe even that you should order takeout from an app so you can eat dinner with your neighbors rather than alone. Beware of rules becoming rigid. You have heard it said do not buy factory-farm meat, but I say unto you that anyone who buys anything at all is in danger of the fires of hell. Sell everything you have and die to all of it.
Again and again: What does it look like to live well? Choose to die. Is that it? Yes. At least, it’s all I can think of. It may not be enough. Certainly it’s not very much, not to mention it’s impossible. Somebody better do it for us. Look at the staggering, apparent omnipotence of the technology designed to hold and mediate our lives, all the whirring gears and wires we’ve wrapped ourselves in over the centuries like a great buzzing net, like a whirlpool spinning faster and faster, like a hungry tomb. Surely there must be something bigger or faster or better that we can build to cut it all down or cage it all in? Isn’t there some grand, strict manifesto, some series of massive, world-scale policies to be rolled out? Can we get new programs to save us from the old programs, smarter technology to save us from our stupid technology? Probably. It’s Coming Soon. Our smartest people and our biggest computers are working on it. Still, Wendell Berry said someplace that we make a mistake in thinking that the vast scale of our problems must be matched by equal scale in our solutions. Stories, it disturbs and comforts me to notice, suggest the opposite: the worst monsters are hardly ever slain with the biggest weapons. The heroes usually slip past them, around the side. Mirrors for Medusa, since head-on confrontation will only turn you to stone. Stones for the giant, not armor and sword. Hobbits, not great men. Not an army of angels and chariots; a cross. It might be that to think small is a cop out, something I clutch at because diagnoses are easier than cures. But it might also be that a simple moment’s surrender isn’t too small an answer, but the only one. Walk the dog right. Say I-Thou and die.
I’m writing this paragraph from a coffee shop in January. Outside the shop, about ten feet from where I sit here warm at the counter, a couple of heavily bundled people are braving a frigid wind to hold signs that say something about a local data center project. I pretended not to notice them when I came in (I’m good at this). But I’ve heard something about it – they’re trying to get signatures for a petition. It’s complicated, as I understand it, but the gist is that they want the county to be able to vote on whether or not the data center goes in. As things stand, without the petition, it’s going in. We won’t get to vote one way or the other. The developers want it. Good money. Lots of money. It’s less than twenty degrees this morning, and one of the pair, a middle-aged woman, is wearing a pink scarf against the cold, but her cheeks are uncovered and you can see that her skin is also pink around her eyes. Her hands are wrapped in these huge, thick, polyester-looking gloves. Both of them are bouncing back and forth, one foot to the other to keep warm. Ten minutes now and nobody has stopped for them. Who’d want to hold a pen and sign a paper when you can’t feel your hands? What does it look like to live well?
I think I should go outside.
