In his perceptive review of Christine Rosen’s important new book, The Extinction of Experience, Robert Bellafiore puts his finger on the fundamental challenge of tech criticism in an age of techno-euphoria: is it doomed only ever to preach to the already converted? “If you know that vlogging your morning makeup routine or fleeing to the Metaverse is no way to go through life, you know. And if you don’t know—if you, like Johnson’s philosophical adversary, have fooled yourself into thinking the unthinkable—you probably can’t be helped.”
Rosen, he thinks, is trapped on the horns of a dilemma: either simply appeal to common sense in defense of our physicality (in which case, why does such sense seem so uncommon these days?) or else cite reams of sociological research on why too much tech makes us unhappy (anyone who prefers such data to the testimony of their own senses is probably beyond help anyway). Although I share some of Bellafiore’s reservations about the limits of Rosen’s arguments, I’m not quite so sure that this limitation is intrinsic to the genre. Witness for instance the massive success of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which marshals a similar combination of appeals to intuition and data to make the case that our civilization should stop experimenting on the brains of our youth. Persuasion, it seems, is possible.
But why, Bellafiore asks, is persuasion needed? This, he says, is “the scandal of tech criticism”—the fact that we even ask for arguments to “convince us of what we have incredibly managed to forget—the fundamental facticity of our physical selves.” What is it, he asks, that “has made it possible for us to live in ways that deny the most basic truths about ourselves”?
The answer, in fact, is not hard to seek. Indeed, Bellafiore mentions it in passing, observing that “Saint Paul lamented that ‘the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do’.” The scandal of tech criticism, I would submit, is simply the scandal of sin.
Now, this sentence will seem a scandal to many readers—in two opposite directions. For some, any use of such a puritanical word as “sin” is out of place in such a conversation: am I really saying that too much poasting on X or preening on Instagram is sinful? That seems much too moralistic and judgmental. For others, such language trivializes our problem: sin we have had with us always, but dehumanizing digital addiction is something new and uniquely disturbing. Let me address each set of critics in turn.
To the first, I should emphasize that the category of “sin” has not always connoted a divine finger-wagging at a naughty child. The Greek word, hamartia, means something more like “missing the mark,” conveying the sense that somehow we human beings, for all our fitful good intentions, just manage to blow it more often than not. We do things that are stupid, that are bad for us and those around us, and that frankly, are beneath our dignity as human beings. We act against our own nature, or at least in ways that fail to make the most of it. This is what it means to sin.
And surely this is an apt enough description of how we are behaving in the digital age. We walk around, hunched over our devices, ignoring friends, neighbors, and co-workers. We obsessively pose for the perfect selfie on the beach and forget to actually look at the sunset. We scroll mindlessly through porn videos—whether actual porn or its more respectable but still vaguely pathetic cousins—“cabin porn,” “disaster porn,” etc. We ask AI to do our work for us, and pass it off to teachers and bosses as our own. Is this what the pinnacle of human achievement looks like? Let’s hope not. We are not getting happier, we are not getting healthier, and we are losing the capacity to engage in the most essential human behaviors: getting married, having kids, creating art, and articulating truth. Collectively, we are letting ourselves down as a species, and if we feel a bit ashamed of ourselves, we should.
But why are we forgetting so badly what it means to be human, Bellafiore asks. The question is another form of “Why do we sin?”—a question that, according to the Christian tradition, is in some sense always unanswerable. If a rational answer could be given, it would render sin itself rational, but it is not. It is the very absurdity of our rebellion against nature that makes it sin in the first place. Still, we may answer the question in part by pointing to the power of custom.
Because we are social beings, we generally take our moral compass from those around us. If just one trendsetting individual does something foolish, soon he will have a dozen imitators, and before long, a crowd of followers, who will assume it couldn’t be irrational if everyone’s doing it. As Richard Hooker wrote, “perverted and wicked customs—perhaps beginning with a few and spreading to the multitude, and then continuing for a long time—may be so strong that they smother the light of our natural understanding, because men refuse to make an effort to consider whether their customs are good or evil.” In a meeting where everyone else is tapping away on their phones rather than attending to the speaker, I am apt to conclude that this is socially acceptable and do likewise.
Still, there is more to say about why our digital deformation in particular has been so hard to escape; there is perhaps something unique about our present condition. Let me highlight four features in particular, two of them philosophical and two of them technical.
First, we are the victims of our own success. Technology has had a truly extraordinary track record over the past two hundred years: almost eliminating death in childbirth, eradicating diseases that were the scourge of humanity, uniting the world through instantaneous communication, and sending probes to Mars. Faced with so many triumphs, naysaying feels foolish, ungrateful, and disloyal—like betting against the home team when they’re on a 16-game winning streak. In a civilization dedicated to the cult of progress, there is scarcely any worse insult than “Luddite.”
Second, although we have begun to suspect that there might be some point of diminishing or negative marginal returns to further experimentation upon our world or ourselves, we lack any principled basis for identifying that point, having long since banished both faith and metaphysics from the public square. Appeals to “human nature” in 2025 feel about as passe as William Jennings Bryan’s appeals to creationism did in 1925. In the midst of our regnant relativism, it is easiest to silence gnawing doubts about technology with a shrug of the shoulders.
Third, as Anton Barba-Kay observes in A Web of Our Own Making, there is something about digital experience that seduces us into silencing conscience, tempting us to think that nothing of consequence is at stake in our digital decisions. The medium is virtual, not real; each action there seems to take up no time at all; and every deed can, it feels, be undone with the click of a button. The effect is to lull us into the sense that nothing much is at stake in this particular digital diversion, pornographic binge, or social media shouting match, even as we deplore the cumulative impact: “while no single thing we ever do online seems momentous, dire effects emerge from aggregates of our collective use.”
Finally, there is the simple biochemical dimension. As a growing number of books and articles highlight, digital interface hijacks our brains, which were designed for the slow-moving, low-stimulus world of the farmer or hunter-gatherer. For most of human history, sudden new arrivals in the visual field demanded immediate attention, signaling a high chance that you were about to score a meal or become one. Our brains are thus wired to reward novelty with a rush of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that, in unnatural quantities, can produce powerful addictive feedback loops. Many of our algorithmically-optimized digital experiences are now nearly as irresistible as powerful opiates.
So then, perhaps there is not much mystery as to why we find ourselves trapped in unreality, why we need common-sense reminders like Rosen’s book.
The proper task of such works, like the arguments of Socrates more than two millenia ago, is not to convince us, but to remind us, enabling us to fully awaken to and embrace something that we already knew in some measure, but had suppressed out of a sense of guilt or impotence. Our problem, in other words, is not that we are a society of techno-optimists who need to be argued out of our fervent faith in our devices. Such ideologues do exist, to be sure, and some may be beyond help, as some ideologues always are. Many of us, however, are already unsettled—often quite deeply so—about what our technologies are doing to us, and what we have lost in our Faustian bargain with them. But we have trouble putting our finger on the problem, or we are ashamed to admit the depth of our own addiction, or else we wonder if we’re the only one who feels this way, and don’t want to be weirdos. We need to be given permission to sit up, take notice, and take action.
If our problem is one of sin, then we might gain wisdom from the traditions of moral philosophy and moral theology, which have historically offered four main ways of seeking to awaken people from folly to wisdom. The first is an appeal to intuition or aesthetics, prodding sleeping consciences awake by appeals to common sense and highlighting the shame and ugliness of the behaviors we allow ourselves to fall into, as Rosen does frequently in The Extinction of Experience. The second is consequentialism, pointing out the long-term implications of our behaviors on ourselves and others around us. Nowadays, we often make such arguments through appealing to sociology and scientific studies, as does Rosen. The third is to appeal to teleology and rational consistency: what ends are we really aiming at, and are our actions consistent with those ends? Rosen starts to develop such arguments at points, but rarely camps out on any one issue long enough to convincingly develop such a case. Indeed, it is the book’s propensity to bounce from one observation to another in rapid succession—ironically like the digital experience she decries—that is perhaps its chief weakness.
The final way of arguing someone out of sin and folly, which of course is nowhere to be found in The Extinction of Experience or much of today’s tech criticism, is by reference to divine command. Such claims have often been caricatured as arbitrary appeals to the inscrutable will of the deity. For much of our civilization’s history, however, divine command was understood to express the natural law; God tells us to behave in the ways that he has already designed us to behave, and warns us only against conduct that is irrational and self-destructive. So great is our propensity to self-delusion and to follow the madness of crowds, however, that reason alone may not suffice to wake us up; we may need a divine kick in the shins.
If there is a scandal of tech criticism today, as Bellafiore suggests, perhaps it is its pretense of secularism. Appeals to human nature can and will gain traction with many, especially when the empirical consequences of our follies are plain for all to see. But without some higher warrant for why we should take our nature as normative, we are liable to lethargically shrug off such worries, trusting that perhaps our current malaise can be solved simply by delving yet deeper into the Metaverse. However, with a growing number of public intellectuals in recent years, from Jordan Peterson to Niall Ferguson, daring to reintroduce God-talk into public debate as an antidote to the woes of our civilization, perhaps it is time to speak more openly about the spiritual dimension of our tech troubles.
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