Is Technology Neutral? Grok, AI Deepfakes, and Discipleship

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast.

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Speaker 2: I'm Dr. James Spencer.

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Speaker 1: Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian.

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Speaker 2: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer. I'm joined today by Dr. Ashish Varma.

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Speaker 1: And we are going to be talking about amplification. This is the last of our series on the forces and conditions that are really related to the problem of narrowing we've been talking about. And so amplification really is very much tied to technology. Marshall McLuhan, one of his four laws of media, which really do apply into technology, He argued that technologies or media, they amplify or extend certain human capacities. So I like to think about this in one of its simplest forms.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: If you think about eating most of the time, if you were going to eat, like, let's say, a bowl of spaghetti.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 2: Number one, we have a bowl.

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Speaker 1: It's a container. It's a form of technology. But usually we unless we're three years old, we don't eat spaghetti with our fingers.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 1: We don't try to reach in and grab the spaghetti, pick it up and then just pop it in our mouths. What we usually do is we use a fork or depending on your culture, like when my girls and I go out for pho, I use chopsticks to eat noodles. But we have some sort of technology that extends our hands, extends our grip. Right. And we can use to eat that keeps our hands from getting dirty, keeps our hands from getting all that food on it. And so it makes our eating to some degree more efficient. But this is an extension of a capacity we already have. We could eat with our fingers. We prefer not to. And so the fork, the chopsticks, the utensil, whatever it is that we're using, that then becomes an extension of something we could do otherwise, but we prefer not to. So that's just sort of a really simplified case of amplification. It amplifies something that we already have available to us. But the technology allows us to do it in, in this case, a cleaner fashion, let's say. We don't have to get our hands dirty. So that's the sort of thing we're going to be talking about. And obviously, there are a lot of different examples. And I don't know, Ashish, maybe the best place to start is what technology is in the first place. And so I have a couple of thoughts on it, but I'd kind of like to pass it to you and let you start.

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Speaker 4: I do think that's the best place to start.

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Speaker 3: Because I think what's contained in what is technology is recognizing that it belongs to a system or a narrative, however you want to put it, in which you're trying to do something. So you've identified certain goals. You've identified even certain ethics that belong to those goals, right? One of those ethics might be we value cleanliness. And there's a whole history of the rise of cleanliness in American culture and how that became such a prominent part of the ways in which we think about organizing. Well, once you have those ideas in mind of a goal, plus the ethics of cleanliness, let's say, you start to think about what it is you can do to make what you're doing ostensibly easier or ostensibly more efficient. And I say ostensibly because there's plenty written and plenty of studies done on how The more technology intrudes upon us, the more that's expected of us, and it doesn't actually free up our time. But ostensibly, that's the goal, right? So when John Deere was plowing the fields in the Midwest, the root systems were such that the plows that already existed didn't work. So what do we do about that? Well, John Deere says, he goes through his experimentation and he comes upon this steel-tipped plow.

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Speaker 4: What he was trying to do was plow the fields.

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Speaker 3: But what he wanted to do ultimately was to be able to do more faster as well, right? It's not that he couldn't work the ground, till it, and get done what he needed to do, but the idea was bigger and bigger. Well, where you end up with that is more and more technology that comes out of John Deere that gets implemented in farms. I mean, now suddenly you've got these farms that there's no way that a farmer is going to work the amount of land that we see farmers working without this machinery. So you've got those things tied together, but what that does is it ends up creating a certain dependence in the process too, right? Imagine the farmer without the technology. That farmer can't survive. That farmer can't produce the mass amount that he needs or she needs in order to get crops to market in order to then pay for the next round of seed, of technology, of fertilizer, of water, right? So it becomes an intimate part of the cycle that attaches on.

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Speaker 4: To what we are.

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Speaker 3: And I'll put that in contrast to another technology. So now we are thoroughly embedded in a world in which we have touchscreens. And we have generations being born in which they just take for granted the touchscreen. I'll never forget when my kids were really young and we had YouTube up on the screen. and they went to that little triangle play button, and they just tapped the screen.

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Speaker 4: And I'm like, what are you doing?

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Speaker 3: And in their minds, the idea of a screen not being a touchscreen just didn't exist, right? Well, you compare that to previous generations where we would be inclined to use a mouse, right? And for us, the touchscreen... seems superfluous even to the point where i remember back in i want to say this was the 90s my dad came home we had this old ibm compatible computer that ran early version of windows and he came home with this thing that you put on top of the monitor and it made that monitor into a touch screen and he was super excited and i remember looking at him as a child saying why do we need this said you don't need the mouse anymore you can just touch the screen And I said, nobody wants to touch the screen. I have to reach my finger all the way up there to.

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Speaker 4: Touch the screen.

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Speaker 3: With my mouth, I can sit back and just move.

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Speaker 4: My hand lightly.

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Speaker 3: And the truth was that we were both right because that touchscreen technology did not take off. And it's a story, right, of technology doesn't serve ultimately the way that we envision life. So there's an imagination component in there. And then it doesn't do anything. Now, why did the technology of the touchscreen eventually take off? Well, eventually Apple comes back into the game, and this is well over a decade later. And it incorporates the touch technology, but now it makes it something desirable, right? The whole marketing premise of Apple that was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time when it started to get into the market as we know it now was revitalized by the idea of make it look cool. Make us think that we're part of a trend.

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Speaker 4: And there's the.

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Speaker 3: Ethics of it, right? We all had that desire. So that's how they did their ethics, and their goal was ultimately to make money, and this was a technology to serve that purpose. Anyway, the point here is to show that there are different ways in which technology come about, but the idea is they're always doing something, and they always try to conform to a certain internal ethical standard, whether or not we would think of it externally as ethical.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with that. I think... I agree with all that.

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Speaker 1: There's an aspect of this, too, that I want to make sure that we don't lose, which is that technology is an appropriate response to a fallen condition. So, in other words, our relationships are broken post-fall, and I think technology is given as a response to those broken relationships. I would argue that we see this early on in Genesis with the fig leaf. You know, the relationships between man, woman, world creation are broken and they cover themselves because they're ashamed. Then God comes along and gives them better coverings, more suited to them out of the skins of animals. These are early forms of technology that are now necessitated by. a declining fitness for a context in which the world is not functioning as it did prior to the fall. In other words, the human capacity really hasn't changed that much, but the relational dynamics that allowed human capacity to flourish in the garden allowed humankind to name all the animals naked is no longer the capacity that is available.

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Speaker 2: It doesn't work the same way post-fall. And so I agree with you.

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Speaker 1: I think that technology has, it's embedded within our stories. It makes sense within our stories. There is a context in which it makes sense to use, you know, X technology as opposed to Y technology, right?

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Speaker 2: There's a reason.

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Speaker 1: I'm not exactly sure I can articulate it, but there's a reason why people are so fascinated with space travel. You know, there's a reason that people want to, you know, some people appreciate that Elon Musk wants to take us to Mars or create robots that will alleviate us from our hard labor. Like there's an ethic. that makes that make sense. I don't know that I understand that fully. I don't understand why you would want something else doing all that work for you. But you're right. It's embedded within these stories. But I also think that technology has its place post-fall. I don't hear you denying that. I just want to make sure that that point gets out there, that there is an appropriate use of technology within a post-fall world. But that technology that often helps us also creates that dependency you referenced. And I think that dependency is the fruit of our desire to make something other than maybe what God would want us to make of his creation. And then as such, we start to develop technologies and push progress, right? Progress should probably be in air quotes too, that are commensurate with our vision of what creation should be, not necessarily aligned with what God's vision of creation should be. And so we've got this sort of razor's edge on which we balance. Where is it appropriate for us to utilize technology to amplify what might be thought of as something like human flourishing versus when does that so degrade that the technology essentially captures us and we become a reflection of it as opposed to having us utilize it to reflect God's glory. I realize that's really overly conceptual, but let me illustrate it like this. We're having a, we, we have these conversations every week. It's mediated by technology and then we record it. We load it up into another system. It shoots it out via an RSS feed and other people listen to it. I would count that as a good thing. I think it's a good amplification. I enjoy having these conversations. They're sort of life-giving for me. Yes, we could drive the four hours that separate us and talk every week, I suppose.

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Speaker 2: But that's a long trip.

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Speaker 1: An eight-hour round trip to talk and record something isn't as efficient as just doing it like this. And so we've decided collectively that this is actually an okay way to do this, that we don't need to drive the eight hours. to get in close proximity to one another to record or to talk or what have you.

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Speaker 2: We'll save that for special occasions.

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Speaker 1: At the same time, where this is sort of life-giving for us, I think you could go online and find content that most Christians, if not all Christians, would agree is not life-giving. And that, you know, we know there's like an internet pornography problem, for instance. We know that there are issues with scandal journalism and, you know, just ridiculous misinformation online. These are amplifications of our baser instincts that now are unfettered due to technology, where they might have been localized at one point. Now they are distributable online. And that becomes deeply problematic. And so you see the same sorts of technologies being used to amplify something that I would judge as good and something that I would say is not so good.

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Speaker 3: Maybe a distinction here is to discuss the development of technology from the use of technology. When I've had these discussions in class, students like to say, well, we think technology is basically neutral and it's how you use it. And I tend to push back. I don't like quite that simplification of it. I do think what they're getting at on one end is helpful, right? There are uses of technology. As you pointed out, our use of the cameras and the mics and the internet and the computers in order to do this podcast, to have these conversations that are, agreed, very life-affirming. and enjoyable is a great use of it. But we also recognize that the development of these things wasn't so that we could use it to be affirmed in our lives. The development of these things is ultimately part of a progression in which the people who are on top of these enterprises, the technological enterprises, are seeking to find the next way to make money, right? So it's part of this larger technique that we can call capitalism. Capitalism is a technique for making money, but also for making sure that I make the money that I want to make without necessarily the concern for how I go about doing it or for what that might mean for somebody else. And therein we get that technology isn't quite so neutral. So if my goal is to develop a technique in which I can make money at the expense of other people or to the good of my set of people, but no real concern for the other people.

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Speaker 4: That's not a morally or ethically neutral thing.

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Speaker 3: However, in the process of that, we certainly can take this stuff and the people that develop it are more than happy for us to take it and use it for other things that are affirming to us. But those uses, I think, shouldn't be confused with the purposes set forth that generate why the technique was developed in the first place.

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Speaker 4: Is that fair?

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Speaker 2: No, it definitely is.

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Speaker 1: And I think it's a helpful progression of the argument because I would agree with you that I think our problem with the internet, if I could, in technology more generally, especially in a digital world, I would say it's not so much about the misinformation, although that's difficult too. It's a misformation. In other words, these digital platforms aren't neutral. Their development is not neutral and they are cultivating values and habits in the Bordeaux sense of habitus, right? A sense of the way the world actually works. They're cultivating that sense within us as we use them. And so we have to, I think, grapple deeply with How does this technology, how is this technology tempting me to be let go of something that would make me more human? This is where I really love Albert Borgman's distinction between things and devices. In his analogy, a wood-burning stove, he calls that a thing. Now, obviously, a wood-burning stove could be classified as a technology, right? And part of what I like about what he does is he's not anti-tech. But what he's using is more what we might call rudimentary technologies, let's say. And he's calling those things, right? And things don't commodify to the extent that a device commodifies. And so the illustration he uses is this wood-burning stove. And he says, just think about all that has to go into the wood-burning stove. someone has to go out and cut the wood, right? And he tells this wonderful, maybe this is a father and a son who go out and they cut the wood together and they carry the wood back in. And then someone has to cook on the stove, right? So the stove isn't just for heat. It's also about the meal. It's about cooking on the stove. And so now as you're in this house, people start to gather around the wood-burning stove because the heat is going to be It's going to be warmer closer to the stove than it is farther away from the stove. And so you've created this sort of social matrix around this thing that is providing you with something. It's useful to you, but it's also underscoring the deep interdependencies we have with one another, with nature, with all these different aspects versus something like my Google Home thermostat. that uh you know if my wife and i both have our app up we'll you know play a little war on whether we want it cooler or hotter in the house right i mean that's as much interaction as you need to have with it my family and i do not huddle around the thermostat trying to get warm the heat is distributed and this is what borgman calls the commodification of that heat it it gets easy we can just get it by turning a dial, pushing a button, and all of the apparatus that are then used to get that heat are essentially anonymous to us. We don't know who's working in the energy plant, what they're doing. I have no clue where the gas really comes from, like where is that located in my local area. It comes in through a pipe in my house, and that's about as aware as I am of it.

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Speaker 2: And that's what heats my home.

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Speaker 1: And so it creates a distance between us and others, as opposed to a thing which creates connection with us and others. I think that's a really helpful distinction. Not because I want to go back to Little House on the Prairie and have wood-burning stoves and, you know, four strong carriages and those kind of things.

00:20:05
Speaker 2: I like my car. I like my heat.

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Speaker 1: But I think it gives us a way of thinking through these different technologies that remind us that these are not only useful to us, they're doing something to us. They're changing the way we think about the cadence of our daily lives. And they're reshaping us in subtle ways away from one another, as opposed to toward one another. Um, This last thing I'll say, like you'd mentioned, you know, the time element, right? Like it has been shown that all this technology that's supposed to be so much more efficient for us hasn't exactly saved us any time. And my guess is that's because we can tear through higher volumes of work incessantly as opposed to doing the same amount of work we used to in a much shorter time.

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Speaker 2: That would be more efficient.

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Speaker 1: But what we're doing now is we're saying, oh, well, if it only takes me, you know, five seconds to write and send an email and I don't have to write that on a, you know, with a quill and ink and I don't have to, you know, stamp it and, you know, go to a post office to mail it. Look at all this other time. I can do 20 emails in that time. We filled up that time plus more through the technology. And that's what I think we probably want to avoid as we think about technology as an example, is that email really did give us an opportunity to spend more time with others.

00:21:46
Speaker 2: It really did.

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Speaker 1: We just chose not to spend that more time with others. We chose to spend it to be, quote unquote, more productive, right? to dive into the work as opposed to pull away from the work and take what that technology could have given us, a more efficient way to communicate at the rate and cadence we were communicating. But we opted not to do that. We opted to fill up the space. So just as a sort of an example.

00:22:21
Speaker 4: That's helpful.

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Speaker 3: If you don't mind, I want to delve into what exactly is going on, because I think the distinctions you made are worth reflecting on, and I think the way in which you've parsed out the efficiency problem is worth delving into. So maybe I'll take them in reverse order. Regarding the efficiency problem, that kind of gets back to the goal of the development, right? I mean, even now we see leaders in the AI revolution saying that exact thing. This is going to free us up to do all sorts of things. But they know full well that the freeing us up to do other things requires still the capacity to make money. Because money, unfortunately, is the way in which we... It's that storing of energy, right? I can do my job. You can do your job. They can do their job. And we convert all that energy into money, which allows us to then buy the products of someone else's job. or by the products of the farmer's work, right? And that's the commodification. But that is not a neutral process, right? And so now we have a situation in which there's the capacity for some to make more of the money than others, and there's the desire to make more money than others.

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Speaker 4: And this isn't a new desire.

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Speaker 3: The medieval church talked about avarice as one of the seven deadly sins. And it's this love of money for the sake of accumulating it or this love of wealth for the sake of accumulating it. That hasn't gone away. So now when we develop these technologies, it's always with an eye to, can it be fine-tuned in a way in which it's marketable to a mass number of people to convince them to reimagine their lives as worked in and through them so that it becomes inseparable, right?

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Speaker 4: Like the car.

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Speaker 3: And now that it's inseparable, can we, build it in a way in which it enables the constant generation of revenue perhaps that's every year we need to make a new car with a slight addition to it that makes it more desirable right maybe it's a fashion industry that says your clothes aren't good enough even though they don't have holes in them we need to get you to buy new clothes right your computer can that used to be able to be something that you opened up and you added new memory to, or you added a new video card to, or you changed out your hard drive. We got to make them solid state, everything and sealed so that now you just throw it and you can buy, you know, Ram is cheap, but the computer itself is not.

00:25:05
Speaker 4: Now you buy the whole thing, right? And these are the.

00:25:07
Speaker 3: Ethics that sort of drive the innovation. But to me, that's very different in the way that you were describing, um, I can't remember the term used, but the non-commodified version, the wood-burning fireplace or oven.

00:25:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, the thing.

00:25:21
Speaker 3: And I think the thing, the thing, that's what it is, the thing. The way you described it, I think, was helpful in terms of that thing that draws us together. I want to look at it also from another angle and say it's not just that it draws us together. It's an effort and innovation that's meant to guide us into a sense of enmeshing. Enmeshing with each other, but also enmeshing with the earth. The image that comes to my mind that I know you'll laugh about is the way that Tolkien and his illustrators describe the ways in which the elves build, which looks very different. There's something very organic. There's something built into. It's cooperating with. It's meshing with. It's like a co-laboring. It's recognizing life all around them. And I don't know about the wood-burning oven, perhaps it fits in this or not, but for the sake of this argument, let's say it does, that the purpose of it is to help us to be able to better cook our food, right? Perhaps that's the better way to do it within an environment that has an abundance of wood that we can take from without overtaking and taxing the environment. But that's a very different logic from the logic of more. Which is what I'm understanding these other things. The technological logic of more is there isn't enough. I've never reached the place where I've made enough money. Now, perhaps for the working class who are living paycheck to paycheck, that's because inflation keeps happening and things keep rising in price. But why does inflation keep rising? Why is that oil that's in the tank suddenly more expensive? It's because of these other forces that I would argue is.

00:27:06
Speaker 4: It's the logic of more, perhaps the disease of more.

00:27:08
Speaker 3: I must have more. I must have more spending power. I must have more commodity. I must have more influence that the money can get me. I must have the ability to dictate the way things ought to go. And that's where technology in the sense of the modern world sits, right? It sits not with the development of how do we live alongside, but rather, how do I get more? Now, within that is the capacity to say, I use this in a different way. I think there is a biblical parallel, right? You mentioned the fig leaf and the animal skins. I think another version is to think about city. The way that city is introduced in the Old Testament and Genesis, it's not a positive thing. It's in contrast to this organic reality of the garden of life together, right? Where humanity is with animals, which is with plants, which is with The larger environment, the water running in the midst of everything, this is meant to give you an enmeshed idea of life. And the city is inherently, especially in that setting where you're thinking of a walled-off segment, it's meant to separate you from all that enmeshment. But it's not as if the Bible takes that polar opposite image and that negative image that it starts with and it just says, down with city, back to garden.

00:28:29
Speaker 2: Right?

00:28:29
Speaker 3: You now get this image of Zion. And whatever else Zion is, it's an image of city reimagined. And that image of city reimagined keeps getting more and more content. But by the time you get to passages like, I believe it's Ezekiel 36, somewhere late in Ezekiel, and especially the end of Revelation, but you get hints of it in the Psalms and the Proverbs and in these other places, um, You get the image both of a new garden, but also of a new city, and the two are actually two ways of looking at the same image, where it's not a walled-off place.

00:29:02
Speaker 4: It's a life together.

00:29:05
Speaker 3: So I want to say that to affirm that there are ways in which we can begin to take the technology that's designed for one purpose and begin to reimagine it. But reimagining might be pretty radical at times. There's some things that, when they're created out of the disease of more, again, as the medieval church would call it, then you can't just simply redeem the disease of more. However, you can take it. You can take the camera. You can take the microphones. You can take the computer and the internet. And rather than use it for propaganda, purposes that are pretty violent towards people right you mentioned the pornography industry which really is an industry and that says something it's violent it's violent to the people that are in it whether willfully or not it's violent to the people who are placing people in it because it's forming in them the wrong habituses that that reinforce violence, it's violent to the people consuming it. Because it forms within you habituses that shouldn't be there, right? And the ways in which you now begin to look at other people and imagine people, or imagine life revolving and pleasure revolving around yourself. That's a use, and we can, in this setting, agree that it's a wicked use. But we can also speak of a positive use of the same technology for something like this. But again, that's important to recognize that it You can take some of that stuff. You can't take all of that stuff. And that's the discernment process.

00:30:34
Speaker 4: Is that fair?

00:30:36
Speaker 3: It is.

00:30:36
Speaker 2: And I'll throw in.

00:30:39
Speaker 1: So I agree with the avarice and the disease of more. I want to push it a little bit further back and just say, I think so much of that is rooted in our desire to be independent from God. I think that avarice is sort of us saying that I need to be secure in and of myself. I need to have power and influence and a lot of those things you mentioned in and of myself. And this is how I get that. It's a means to an end. And that end is really, I don't want to be dependent on God. I would like to live life on my own terms. Even if I'm giving God a nice little head nod, like, hey, thanks a lot. I would still really prefer to be able to determine what it is that I do, how it is that I do it, and make sure that I am sufficiently safe. in my wealth, in my holdings, in my power, in my influence, that I have a level of quote-unquote control over my own life that is brought about by these things that I can collect through technologies. Now, framed like that, then I think a narrative like David and Goliath can speak to the way.

00:31:59
Speaker 2: We might think about technology. right?

00:32:03
Speaker 1: So your example of the garden and the city, I think is right. I think the city is framed as a negative initially. It's sort of this walling off from the dangers of a world with which we now no longer have a harmonious relationship with. And so we're trying to protect ourselves. So let's build these walls. Let's keep those things out. Let's protect ourselves. That then becomes this sort of image that is has that re-enmeshed vision of the plants and the animals and the people and God all together.

00:32:39
Speaker 2: But initially, it isn't that.

00:32:41
Speaker 1: I think the David and Goliath narrative has something interesting to say to that because David in that narrative is given Saul's armor. He's going to go off and fight Goliath. David is a shepherd at this time. He's just delivering some cheese to his brothers. And he's going to go off and battle Goliath. He didn't have any armor. He tries Saul's armors on and he says, look, I'm not going to wear this. This hasn't been tested. Within the context, what's really going on there, I think, is David is saying, look, I fought lions and bears as a shepherd and God protected me. I didn't have this stuff on. I don't understand how to use it. I never needed it before. So I don't think I'll need it now. Thank you very much. Now, there could have been fitment issues too. Like Saul's armor doesn't quite fit David.

00:33:32
Speaker 2: Sure.

00:33:33
Speaker 1: But I don't think that's primarily what's happening here. I think primarily what is happening here is David is making a choice in the moment not to say Israelites should never wear armor ever. I think in the moment, what David is saying is, no, I'm just going to trust God on this one. I don't need the weapons of this particular arena to fight this particular enemy.

00:33:59
Speaker 2: God's got me. It's not going to be a problem.

00:34:03
Speaker 1: And it's this radical independence from the technology that is ultimately cultivated on David's willingness to depend on God. And in that moment, that singular choice, doesn't say to us, never use technology. What it says is be discerning in your use of technology such that you don't lose dependence on God. And so I think if we sort of reframe that, we can get some interesting angles on, yes, the disease of more, but then we've got this other notion of independence from God and how technology can kind of sharpen that tendency within us. that I think are really crucial as we're talking about not just, hey, let's throw away big tech and go back, like I said, go back to Little House on the Prairie days, right, where we're surrounded with things and we have no devices. I personally would not like that. I don't even like camping, right? So that's not fun for me to think about. But the reality is then that what we grapple with in this moment is are we really, to use your word, and meshed with God sufficient that we're not dependent on these technologies for safety, security, for life, that we're willing to set them aside because we know that as much as the people who produce these technologies might want us to think that this is how the world works, we know this is not how the world works. They don't ever become passive tools. I think they're always sort of formative tools structures in our lives that tend to help us forget God.

00:35:47
Speaker 2: Go back to Deuteronomy 8.

00:35:49
Speaker 1: You're going to inherit a land where you drink from cisterns that you did not dig. You drink from cisterns you did not dig. You live in houses you didn't build. You're going to eat from fields that you didn't plant. There's something about what we have around us that cultivates a forgetfulness of what God has given us. And I think that's part of what technology amplifies in us. It gives us a higher capacity to forget God. And as Christians, we need to be resisting that capacity, that amplification.

00:36:28
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's good.

00:36:29
Speaker 3: And I want to drive into that. The premise here is that this amplification increases the narrowing. And maybe so far it's not immediately obvious how, but I think maybe an example would help. There's a book, and I forget the title, it's a.

00:36:46
Speaker 4: Work of history.

00:36:47
Speaker 3: It's working through how the Germans especially, but other countries were impacted by the American Civil War in a way in which we don't often think about these things. But the impact was specifically that The Civil War being fought over, the question of slavery, and specifically a very ethnically driven slavery towards the objectifying of Black people into indentured servitude, right? Now, one of the primary crops that was coming out of that was the cotton industry, right? The enslaved peoples were having to work these cotton farms, and technology was developed within that, the cotton gin. Now, ostensibly, again, that cotton gin makes life easier. But in reality, what it does is it didn't actually end slavery. It focused slavery. And it focused it in the midst of all these varieties of cotton plants onto a particular kind of cotton plant. And the way the texture.

00:37:56
Speaker 4: That the cotton that's produced from it comes out of it. And I don't remember the details of it. It's been a while now.

00:38:01
Speaker 3: They're just different textures. And that self-selected, in some sense, how the fields were planted. It didn't help people who were enslaved. It self-selected how we chose which plants were planted. And that's vital here, because this is what enters into the conversation how countries like Germany got involved, ancillaries, but still involved in the Civil War.

00:38:28
Speaker 1: Why?

00:38:29
Speaker 3: Well, because you already have a global market, and one of the Well, in fact, the chief, but also there were others, but the chief producer of cotton in the world at the time was the American South. But now there's a disruption of that supply because of the Civil War that affects places, including Germany, but Germany was one of the people groups that decided that they needed to work through this in order to decrease their dependence.

00:38:55
Speaker 4: Upon American cotton.

00:38:58
Speaker 3: Now, they looked at countries like India that also produced a different kind of cotton with a different plant and therefore a different texture, and they saw that in this particular texture that that cotton would not work with the existing cotton gin. So among other things, Germany had to self-select now to further the narrowing of the species of cotton.

00:39:19
Speaker 4: That were out there.

00:39:21
Speaker 3: In order to make it fit what they were doing, or what they needed to replace, because it was far more expensive and far less efficient for them to use that language to go demand more out of the Indian product or the Chinese product. It was far more efficient to them to in some ways replicate what was going on in the American South and that included the narrowing of the species of cotton in order to match the pre-existent technology now that dictated to them what would now survive. Now, there's a lot more to this story. It's a really fascinating book. I can get you the title if you're interested. I've forgotten the title off the top of my head.

00:40:03
Speaker 4: It's somewhere behind me here.

00:40:08
Speaker 3: But the point I want to make from this is that it's very similar to the ways in which our use of technique within ecclesial context that are very shattered. And what I mean by shattered is that we don't have a unified church. We have a lot of different denominations. We have a lot of different sub-denominations. We have those denominations that say they're not denominations. And what this has brought about is a need, and this is what drives the modern enterprise of hermeneutics, the idea of how do we understand the text. It's a desire to to be able to say we've once and for all been able to determine the technique by which we properly interpret the text, and this enables us to get the proper doctrine as second-order discourse that we overlay upon the text to help us make sense as a map of the text. But once you have that technique, and once you have that map that comes from that technique, you've now foreclosed on the possibilities of meaning. So it enables the further delving into these divisions. So whereas the church, one would think from looking at scripture, is a declaration of the unified body of Christ, in practice you have an increasingly fractured and even larger wedges being put between them because of the ways that technique amplifies it. Now don't hear me as saying don't study hermeneutics or that hermeneutics are useless, but understand that the moment we put these techniques into practice, we've now created very clear lines about what is and what is not allowed. And that's how we now get these dynamics in which we begin to see things that weren't previously heresy as heresy, or we get the very narrow ability to declare heresy. Whereas as we talked previously, the early church was very slow to declare heresy.

00:42:03
Speaker 4: It took even decades to declare heresy.

00:42:08
Speaker 1: Yeah. I, I think to, Piggyback on that notion of narrowing. If we think about that in today's digital age and some of the things that we have going on, we're, and I don't want to take this too far, but the reality is that we have friends on Facebook.

00:42:25
Speaker 2: We have followers.

00:42:28
Speaker 1: We shoot for influence and reach. We hope for, you know, tons of likes on our posts or whatever it is.

00:42:39
Speaker 2: As we do that, we're.

00:42:41
Speaker 1: Not simply picking up the capital of the world, right, to gain influence or to do something or to make money.

00:42:49
Speaker 2: Yes, we're doing that also.

00:42:52
Speaker 1: But I think something we've often missed is that we're also saying in some subtle way, I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, I follow Cephas, I follow Christ, as they did in the beginning.

00:43:05
Speaker 2: Of 1 Corinthians.

00:43:08
Speaker 1: Because so much of what we've got now out in the world is the flashiest, the most influential, the biggest audience, the most profound content wins. And that is exactly the sort of tendency Paul is trying to walk back in Corinth. And he's trying to say, look, don't don't get fractured around these. Like, I don't think Paul is saying you shouldn't like Apollos is preaching better than you like mine.

00:43:44
Speaker 2: Right.

00:43:44
Speaker 1: Everybody can have their own personal preference.

00:43:47
Speaker 4: Clearly preaching was more dynamic, obviously.

00:43:51
Speaker 1: But I, I think at the end of the day, what Paul is really saying is look, just because you prefer it doesn't mean we're disunified. It, it, we're still together in this because I didn't, I wasn't crucified for you. Neither was Apollos. Neither was like, nobody else was crucified you, but Christ. And so we're all one in him have whatever purpose, personal preference you'd like, but don't show partiality, right? Stay united and stop this nonsense of thinking that you can splinter Christianity and around personalities. And I think that, and again, it's not like let's demonize the digital age or something like that. That's not what this is. The point is our tendencies pointed that direction and look at where we are now. And I think there's certainly a case to be made that at the very least, some of us have splintered off and decided we're going to be followers of this person as opposed to this person. Just a quick example, I can remember being at one of my past churches and a group of people, I wasn't there when it happened, but a group of people had just left because the elders of the church had made a decision that was in conflict with the teachings of a national pastor with a radio ministry and.

00:45:23
Speaker 2: Lots of books.

00:45:25
Speaker 1: And this group of people were very much committed to that pastor's teachings. And so when the elders of the local congregation made a decision that they perceived to be in conflict with this other pastor's teaching, they left. On the face of it, you could sit back and say, yeah, the local church is never perfect either.

00:45:49
Speaker 2: Agreed.

00:45:51
Speaker 1: The problem wasn't that the local church wasn't perfect here. The problem was that the local church the body of people who had been called on to discern within the congregation and to lead that congregation forward, their authority was being diminished by someone who'd never set foot in the church in his entire life. It had been trumped by abstract content that had been put out and was not wrestling with any of the local dynamics that the elders were actually dealing with. this group had chosen someone they'd probably never met. And if they had met him only in passing, I don't think they were close friends or confidants, right? But they opted for him over these people who had been in the trenches of the ministry of the local church. I think that's sort of a species of what we often see when we talk about this splintering and that lack of unification. So it's just another example of the way that our tendencies tend to be magnified As we interact with technology and the narrowing that can occur because we stop thinking, how is it that we can remain unified within this setting? And we begin to think, who's the best person for me to follow? And those are two slightly different questions.

00:47:18
Speaker 2: They may be related. I don't want to like polarize those.

00:47:21
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, there's something to be said of how do I maintain unity? How do we maintain unity as Christians within this really diversified context in which we have all the content in the world, including this podcast, to listen to?

00:47:37
Speaker 2: How do we remain unified?

00:47:39
Speaker 1: And to some degree, I think it's the responsibility of the people who are putting the content out to make sure that they're pushing people back to the local church to whatever extent that they can. Like, don't be the replacement for the, you know, the things that are going on in your local congregation. But I also think it's on the people who are listening to sit back and say, I'm taking this as an input because I'm interested and I like it. But at the end of the day, I'm still going to participate locally in ways that may be informed by the content I'm listening to, but not in ways that allow the content I'm listening to to trump.

00:48:19
Speaker 2: What's going on in the local congregation. I hope that's clear.

00:48:24
Speaker 4: I think it was. Can I try to drive that a little further?

00:48:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, please.

00:48:27
Speaker 3: Pull together these threads. The silly statement that we have that's actually quite true and meaningful, all roads lead to Rome. And we can join that with when in Rome, do as the Romans. Seem like two separate statements, but I think actually are deeply intricately related because what we mean by that is that when Rome conquered, Rome made sure the infrastructure was built to make sure that it was the center. And the ways in which Romans saw proper acting within that theater is what it means then to say, when in Rome, do as the Romans, right? It's an absorbing into itself or an encircling of the rest of the peoples of the earth and the creatures of the earth and the lands of the earth around themselves, right? that's a technique but in then the development of technologies to make that happen whether they be military technologies economic technologies mechanical technologies to build roads and to build ships and things like that and the same sort of thing we can think of in the modern world right the the act of.

00:49:37
Speaker 4: Global colonialism.

00:49:40
Speaker 3: Entailed the development of technologies to make that possible, some of which already existed to battle amongst themselves already in the European landscape. But it entails the development of more technologies to account for the new landscapes that are being drawn into this, but that then therefore means the building of infrastructure and the building of an economic technique to make all these things possible. All that is precursors to to thinking about how the United States then began to take over the center of that, which then bends the infrastructures, the flights of travel, accordingly, to the U.S., that now made that effect apparent to Germany by the time you get to the cotton gin instance, that they have to adapt. And what had already been narrowed from them now entailed the development of technology that narrowed things further, which meant that the Germans then further narrowed things by working from within these landscapes, right? Which carries within it, undoubtedly, the development of further technologies that further solidify the narrowing. And I think the way that that relates specifically to what you're talking about is you mentioned social media. Social media lives within a situation or an enterprise in which the goal here is ultimately to further the capital for the investors in, say, Facebook and the owner of Facebook, which is why it becomes somewhat morally neutral for them to consider it important when untruths are spread through Facebook via their algorithm. There's been a lot of debate over that and what is the untruth and what is not the untruth. There's no need to get into that just now, but that becomes a conversation because that is a morally insignificant issue to the larger agenda of what a social.

00:51:37
Speaker 4: Media company is.

00:51:39
Speaker 3: But now when you take the sorts of narrowing that's already going through the technique in biblical and theological scholarship that further pronounces the differences between ecclesial traditions, that further pronounces a wedge between ecclesial traditions, and now you add to that this other technology that's morally unconcerned with the way the wedge is get driven so long as you get people more and more interested in the technology to follow the algorithm, to consume more material that drives them further into the bifurcation, further into the divisions. That works alongside as a follow-up technology. It's a Rhodes of sort, right? It's the infrastructure, the building of Rhodes that solidifies what might otherwise have been a helpful, even if over-pronounced conversation in hermeneutics. So now you get the vitriol in it. And what you end up with is a community in the church that unfortunately doesn't look like the church that we see advocated for in the New Testament, even if not perfectly present in the New Testament, advocated for in the New Testament.

00:52:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting. I just wrote a piece.

00:52:54
Speaker 1: So right now, XAI, which is Grok, essentially, it's the company that owns Grok, is suing Minnesota because Minnesota put a law in place pretty recently, actually. I think it was supposed to go in effect the 1st of August. I'm not sure right as I sit here now whether that actually went into effect. The lawsuit was intended, I think, to get a judge to put a hold on the implementation of the law. But the law essentially was this. It was going to hold platforms, apps, the producers of technology, the holders of technology, Liable for giving users the ability to nudify images of real people. Oh, wow.

00:53:44
Speaker 2: And so this has been going on.

00:53:47
Speaker 1: As I look more into it, you find out that people were using Grok's quote unquote spicy mode to create these sorts of images already. There have been many, many of these sorts of images created, including many of children. There's actually a class action lawsuit against Grok because these kids have been images of these children have been created. And once they're created, of course, they can spread around the Internet as much as they'd like. Part of my conclusion in the article was.

00:54:22
Speaker 2: Why did we need any of this? Yeah. I the lawsuit, the basis of the lawsuit was freedom of speech.

00:54:33
Speaker 1: Right? They're arguing that the law infringes on the right of people to speak freely and have free expression. My comment in the article was just because the government has committed to allowing freedom of speech doesn't mean that any given technology platform has to maximize that speech. It doesn't have to maximize that expression. And so there's a, a question that needs to be asked. Why do we need this? What purpose is it really serving? You know, do we really need to drop our marketing costs by 80 to 90% because we can produce AI generated images to such an extent that we're handing deviant people a tool that they can use to create sexualized images of children?

00:55:31
Speaker 2: I'm okay paying more.

00:55:36
Speaker 1: I just find it to be sort of an interesting test case to what we're talking about is that what we've tended to do is we've tended to assume the technology.

00:55:46
Speaker 2: Really needs to be there.

00:55:50
Speaker 1: And then live with whatever negative consequences come out of it and buffer them, create laws and policies that are trying to stop some of these things All while real people are being injured along the way. I have zero idea why you would ever need a spicy mode. It seems unnecessary. Other platforms, as I did the research, they wouldn't allow these things to happen. You'd have to really work to pass their safeguards to get something, anything like this created.

00:56:29
Speaker 2: Grok's spicy mode. pretty much allowed it.

00:56:34
Speaker 1: And so as we think about this sort of narrowing, right, what I see happening is something that Mark Lewis describes in his description of addiction. And he basically says this, an addict's world always gets smaller because they're starting to jettison the people who are saying, whoa, whoa, timeout, you don't need that next fix. They're jettisoning the people who are saying, I'm not going to give you money so that you can just go buy drugs. And they're globbing on to the people who can get them that next fix or who will give them that much more money. And it eventually narrows down so it's just them and their addiction. And I see that tendency in us as we're using these technologies. I see us letting other people be injured. So in the name of progress, in the name of rights, in the name of free speech, And I just sort of sit back and wonder, given everything we've said in the episode, right, that I'm not anti-technology, that I don't think we should get rid of all this stuff.

00:57:40
Speaker 2: But it also seems very, very.

00:57:42
Speaker 1: Clear to me that we're extremely willing, and I use these in the article, we're extremely willing to allow technology companies to let oxen that have gored before just roam around our cities. We're very happy to let tech companies build platforms without a parapet around the roof, right? And those are illusions of these Old Testament laws that were intended to protect people, not retard advancement, right? Not to stop progress, but to protect people within the community. The parapets aren't working. The goring oxes are sort of roaming about the countryside. And you just sit back and you say, how is this not foreseen as something that was going to happen? It's not a possibility. It's not even a probability. It's a certainty that once you give everyday users with absolutely no vetting the ability to make sexualized images of real people, that they are going to produce these things of real people and of children.

00:58:58
Speaker 2: What are we doing? And what are we living with?

00:59:02
Speaker 1: And how is it that this has gotten so out of control that while there will be outrage and I am animated about this issue, I don't see anything stopping the train. This is where I think Christians need to recognize that we're frogs.

00:59:24
Speaker 2: Being boiled in the pot of water.

00:59:27
Speaker 1: And that We really have to be smarter about the way we interact with technology, the way we're formed by technology. And we need to recognize that there are just some things that the progress is not worth it. It just isn't worth it. But we've become so accustomed to that sort of progress. You know, we've had the internet now for, I don't know, it started coming in. I can remember booking my honeymoon. And, uh, you know, the late nineties on the internet, right?

01:00:04
Speaker 2: Dial up modem.

01:00:06
Speaker 1: So we've had this for a while and we've just sort of lived with the downside of ordinary everyday people. This isn't the first instance. Grok is not the first company that's had this sort of thing happen. There's a whole documentary on, uh, I believe it was, I think it was on Netflix on, um, the pornography sites allowing videos to be uploaded of consensual sex acts, but non-consensual uploads.

01:00:39
Speaker 2: And so these women.

01:00:40
Speaker 1: Are out there on the internet, you know, these videos are out there of these women who are having sex and they can't get them taken down. Like we're living with that. it's not all about sex, right? That's just sort of the sensational parts that tend to sort of get our hackles up. It's like that in almost every instance. And I just don't think we've thought through enough. How do we reign this thing in? And I think part of that is because we become too dependent on it already. That would be my concern is that we've become too dependent on it already.

01:01:22
Speaker 2: So, um, I don't know.

01:01:24
Speaker 1: I don't have a whole lot of point to that, I guess. I'll throw a link to my article in the show notes. But that is my concern, is that we've become too dependent on the technology already and that we've just bought into a notion of progress at any cost that is not commensurate with what we believe in our convictions.

01:01:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think what you're saying underscores that. To say that technology is neutral is to miss the point.

01:01:55
Speaker 2: 100%.

01:01:57
Speaker 3: Technology belongs to a system or to a story and is designed for a reason. And what we really need to do is interrogate that story, that system. And I think that's what you're getting at by saying, why do we need this?

01:02:13
Speaker 4: That's right. And we have to carry that through.

01:02:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, why do we need this? Why is it that the people who develop it need this? Why is it that they're so concerned with a certain notion of freedom of speech to make sure that this technology exists? What is it that they're gaining? And we should interrogate within that. I know you weren't meaning it this way. You're using the term more generally, but when we call these things progress and we call what we're moving towards progress, progressing towards what?

01:02:41
Speaker 4: Why?

01:02:45
Speaker 3: And that inherently is not a neutral statement to say we're progressing. You're making a declaration. You're saying something about creation, simply put, that this is a notion of maturity and creation that we are building towards.

01:02:59
Speaker 2: Is it?

01:03:01
Speaker 3: And that's what Christians should push against. And I don't mean this in the sense of, I think very little pushing against stops the stuff from happening. And new normalcies come out of each one of these things.

01:03:13
Speaker 4: And I'm not looking here at results-based discussions.

01:03:18
Speaker 3: I'm not looking at this as it's a failure if eventually this just becomes normative. No, if you don't struggle, that's the failure. We don't ultimately have control over the structures and the architects of a so-called progress and what they mean by progress. But there's no saltiness. There's no it's the lamp hidden under the bushel if it's just simply don't interrogate and just simply accept.

01:03:46
Speaker 2: Right?

01:03:47
Speaker 3: And I think that's what's at stake. And the ramifications for it are that instead of raging against the right questions and right issues and right structures, we find ourselves just infighting because that technology further has amplified our divisions and made of those divisions more than they should have been or needed to be.

01:04:12
Speaker 2: Agreed. And I agree with your, you were reading me right on progress.

01:04:19
Speaker 1: Um, I think it was Chesterton that talks about progress or maybe it was CS Lewis, right? The person who's going to advance down the path. Uh, sometimes the person who's making the most progress down the path is perhaps the one who turns around because he realizes he's going the wrong way. And so progress is always relative to a standard. We have to understand what the destination is to really understand whether we're getting closer to it or not. And I think oftentimes what we're missing in our Christian imagination is, are we getting closer to that standard or not? I think technology can be a part of that. I think it can be a part of living into the pattern that is Jesus Christ. But I also think it can deeply skew our understanding of what it means to be human, to live in God's creation, to love God and to love one another's. And that's what we're really ultimately trying to avoid. I go back to this a lot. We talked about it when we talked about biblical manhood as well. Our technology use should emerge from discipleship.

01:05:23
Speaker 2: It just should.

01:05:24
Speaker 1: And I know that's like sort of ambiguous and maybe a little pithy, but at the end of the day, it's a way of saying we don't retrofit our Christianity to technology. We, we, allow our use of technology to be driven by our underlying commitments to God, to his word, to one another, to creation. That's how we think about technology. Those are the starting points. Those aren't negotiables.

01:05:52
Speaker 2: And so as we.

01:05:53
Speaker 1: Learn to live under the authority of Christ, ultimately we'll have to think through how we use technology and we'll get that wrong.

01:06:02
Speaker 2: But that's what we should be doing.

01:06:04
Speaker 1: We should be thinking through what does it mean to live under Christ's authority as we use this technology? What does it mean to live under Christ's authority? And does that allow me to use this technology? Right? How are these technologies pushing against Christ's authority and how should I be resisting them? All of those sort of questions, I think, is what I mean when I say our use of technology should emerge from discipleship. Our understanding of technology should emerge from discipleship. Um, I oddly think, I mean, we're, we're way over time. We're, we're getting into close to an hour 10. So I'm going to close this off, but I think we just sort of scratched the surface on this issue of technology and, uh, we'll probably circle back to it. I think this is just such a crucial topic and it's one that, um, I think both you and I have come at from completely different ways, honestly. Um, you know, your emphasis on Tolkien and nature and creation and all those kinds of good things really have deep things to say about technology. And, uh, me just from coming out of online education and thinking through a lot of this digital technology that we're interacting with. Um, I think there's, there'll be rich conversations, but, uh, this one's been great. Really appreciated the interaction Ashish and, um, hope everybody enjoyed it. Um, we'll sign off till next time and, uh, thanks for listening and we'll see you on the next episode of thinking Christian.

01:07:33
Speaker 2: Take care.

01:07:34
Speaker 1: Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.