It’s not exactly revolutionary to say that Religion and Technology have had an uneasy relationship. Many of my favorite writers on this platform, like
and have, for a time, made penetrating and astute observations about the tensions between the two, part of their bread and butter. It’s a seemingly perpetual problem, one that’s been going on since Adam and Eve were given the first technology (clothes) by God to cover their shame, and a battle that, if we’re honest, Religion, or Humanity more broadly, has always been losing. Simply put, sympathetic as I am to Traditionalist arguments, Tradition is going to lose.That’s the reality.
I mean… just look at that chart. The “Magnificent Seven”, being Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (the new name of Google), Amazon, NVIDIA, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc), and Tesla, combined, have a larger stock market value than any other country, except the one that gets to include them in its own portfolio.
Again, I reiterate, the entire stock market of China is of less monetary value than seven tech companies. Those seven companies have a combined net worth equaling that of The U.K., Canadian, and Japanese markets… combined.
How is “Traditional Values” going to beat that?
Answer: It’s not.
Believe me, I’m not overly gung-ho about this or anything. Within the “reactionary” or “traditionalist” space, I actually think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who’s been more against the blind acceptance of technology than me. I’ve said for years that people should get away from their screens, that tech is inherently dehumanizing, and that almost all of our modern malaise is due to computers. Two years I went without a smartphone… just to show it could still be done. I’ve championed homesteading. Hiking. A return to nature and reconnection with our bodies in the great outdoors.
And yet… I know it’s not going to happen. Not at any kind of scale anyway.
Bringing a moral or spiritual argument to a question of convenience is bringing a pool noodle to a gun fight. God himself could come down and hand a new set of 10 Commandments to a new Moses, and all one through ten of them could be “thou shalt not use IP Addresses” and all that would happen is that humanity would invent a brand-new field of complicated theology that allowed us to ignore those rules whilst pretending that we weren’t. It’s just too easy. Too convenient.
Want something?
Amazon.com.
Click.
Be there by tomorrow.
Computers win.
And because they win, in the future Computers, and the making of accommodations for those Computers, will more and more dictate our lives. This is distressing for religious people because, as we’re learning, a great deal of our “morality” was simply cultural adaptation to technological limitations. Remove the limitation and, suddenly, the morality goes away as well.
Women for example…
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