An Almost Case Against the Internet

“You just made a case against the internet on the internet— so, yeah, you’re a hypocrite. And an idiot.”

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

I want to offer one last reflection (for now) on the internet and Big Tech and our consumption of it all.

It seems to me that Christian thought and analysis on the merits of the internet is very fundamentalistic and pietistic. We look at this thing (is it a thing? surely the wires and silicon chips are found somewhere on earth?) and ask, What can the internet do for me as a Christian?

On this level of analysis, the internet can do a lot for Christians. Churches can set up very basic to very complex websites promoting their churches. Sermons can be posted online. Theological articles can be “published” and read online. So can the Bible. Christian and Church engagement on the internet seem like they have tremendous upside. It can do a lot for me.

But let’s take a step back and think about the medium itself. That’s the point of the previous posts. Let’s get beyond the matter or the message that is transmitted, and ask foundational questions about the medium itself. Because when you’re dealing with the internet and icon-oriented culture that are heavy on pictures, the medium is the message.

[Verbal media, unlike icon-media, tilt toward the written word— think books. Verbal media, however, are not as old as the older aural and oral media, which are oriented to the spoken and heard word, respectively. Read Neil Postman to get straightened out on all this.]

The question is not, What can the internet do for me? but rather, What is the internet and what has this instrument actually accomplished?

An older Christian generation (eh, boomers? the older Gen-Xers?) may have plausibly argued at some point for something like this: “Internet technology is neutral, it just depends on what you do with it.” Maybe this argument made sense to them because they were the last generations that entered adulthood without the impact of the internet upon their adolescent formation. They had the luxury of having what looks like a “regular” up-bringing with all the normalcy of a fallen world. It’s a cute argument, and I think it’s wrong.

Let’s look at the facts.

The push for the information superhighway in the 1990s came with the promise that the internet and the plugged-in life would improve our lives. We would have access to vast storehouses of knowledge and wisdom (and books!) that were heretofore beyond our grasp. We would be able to have richer relationships with our distant families and long-time friends through the marvel of e-mail and all its subsequent descendants (messaging, video-conference technologies, etc.). We would be more efficient in the use of our time since things that normally took hours or days would simply take a matter of seconds (purchasing a book, booking a flight, research for academic purposes, etc.). With access to all this information, we would be more engaged as informed citizens in our constitutional republic. Of course, not to be left behind (as had always been characteristic), the church slowly but surely signed on to this mirage, seeing only the upside of recorded video and text electronically transmitted and visualized on a computer screen.

Today, all of this seems like a sick joke.

The internet gave us a ton of information but it certainly gave us a ton of disinformation and lies and perversions because it gave us depraved sinners who could now express their sinful hearts in “new and improved!” ways. The internet is not for wisdom, nor is it for knowledge (was it ever?)— it’s for a grotesque consumption of information, it’s for data and bedlam and sensuality. There is no rest on the internet. All is frenzy. All is coveting. All is virtue signaling. All is FOMO. The internet didn’t make us more democratically engaged— it has made us dumb and cynical.

For every truth-teller worth listening to on the internet, there are 100 siren songs that distract us and contribute to our moral stupor. For every Church site or Gospel podcast or Christian blog that exists on the internet to draw us closer to God, there are hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of websites and images that take men’s minds further captive to do Satan’s will.

The internet was made for relativism. It was made for the complete fragmentation of a society. It was made for perversion and pornography. It was made for surveillance capitalism (a real thing), where the seeming innocuous programs you use (think Facebook) monitor your behavior, and then market and sell you ideas and products. It was made for woke capitalism (also very real— just check out the social media accounts of most companies at the beginning of June) that pushes your thinking and behavior into correct-thinking and correct-living. It was made for our current Judges 21:25 kind of situation. And I’m not saying it was made for all of this by some secret cabal of overlords. It’s in the nature of the thing. It was made by sinners for the desired ends of sinners. Why do we think this whole Big Tech story would’ve played out differently? It’s not manichaean nor luddite to say some created things are rife with great downside and have only a pittance of upside in their use.

And let’s be honest, the dark unintended consequences of “information technology” are completely disregarded today. It is a given that everyone will have a smart phone, be plugged-in, and live the perfect American distraction.

How do you fight the onslaught of the internet? That’s like asking, “How do you fight the waters of a tsunami when they reach inland?”

That I’m writing this on a laptop, using WordPress, is not lost on me. I’m that Christian bookstore (“Christian Publications,” and it really did exist) that set up shop on West 43rd in Manhattan. In the middle of the 1980s. In the middle of the Red Light District.

And like that bookstore, I’m here to tell you that you need less information and more wisdom. Really. You need less internet and more reality. Because the interwebs are not real.

You know what’s real? God is real. The Body of Christ is real. You need the Church of Jesus Christ. You need to be engaged in real works of mercy and charity, and less engaged on social media. You need real people, and real creation, and real friendships that develop when you do real things like camping outdoors, or playing pick-up basketball, or helping someone move, or visiting a shut-in in their time of need, or singing Christmas carols in someone’s home during Advent.

You tell me— what has the internet ever given you? Many things— it’s my Precious.

But if I could take the whole of the internet, leaving not wire behind, and throw it all in the fiery pit of Mount Doom, what would you lose? Seriously, how impoverished would your life be? Not much.

But how would I find my way to the supermarket? How would I stay in touch with my family? How would I listen to sermons? How would I learn to do stuff?

Simple. The same way people did these things for hundreds of years before the internet and Big Tech arrived to help you “do you.”

Now go and do likewise.

I get it. Dip your toe in the cesspool of the web to see if an asteroid has hit the Atlantic, or to check the weather forecast, or to see the latest and greatest news, or to make a call on ZOOM, or even conduct serious “9 to 5” work on it. I get it. But I bet you’ll know what you’ll find before you find it: more of the same. Again, don’t have an uninformed, romanticized view of the power and potential of the internet even as you have to use it.

Sure, go see the waters of the tsunami. But, then come back to your real home. And bring others back with you, too.