spent a lot of time thinking about how to live on in people’s memories after I died. My third grade class was into illustrated historical biographies, the kind that featured luminaries like Benjamin Franklin or Eleanor Roosevelt and the indelible marks they left on society, which carried the suggestion that lives of exceptional accomplishment could never be totally erased. I applied myself to a few dozen hobbies in response, hoping that I was prodigiously gifted in at least one area. To hedge my bets if I had no gifts worth remembering, I kept a small and boring journal about daily life in the 1990s—if everything else failed I could at least try for immortality by placing myself on the historical record.
Self-mythologizing was hard and uncertain work. I accomplished nothing extraordinary, and even on the rare occasions I excelled at something, like a childhood piano recital or a high school paper, there were few people around to see or care. In addition to being exhausted by the sheer difficulty of the task, I was troubled by the spiritual incoherence of what I was doing. Why was I working so hard to impress people? Why did I even want the things I wanted? Was any of this okay? All these questions were about to be answered by the burgeoning social internet.
Within my evangelical and charismatic Christian circles, that optimism was especially pronounced. Most of us interpreted the scriptural mandate to make disciples of all nations as an invitation for the Church to pursue the kind of cultural dominance that would make the Gospel inescapable and irresistible, and because social media seemed to put this goal within our reach, we spent time online for what we considered to be spiritual reasons.
In 2010, Zadie Smith argued in the New York Review of Books that we were mistaken in seeing the social internet as a set of neutral mediums that merely digitize the ways we exist offline. Building upon Jaron Lanier’s idea that representing reality via information systems always requires users to simplify their understanding of the world
Smith and Lanier’s critique assumed technology could only simplify — reducing identity to graphs and data points. But what if online presences could represent ideals rather than reductions? Technology is “squishier” now than it was in the age of social graphs: more capable of nuance, more responsive to the particular. The question is whether the medium has caught up to the complexity of the self. ecology-of-technologySmith says there is no way for our online personas to exist as true representations of our selves; she cautions that we are always translated according to whatever rubric is favored by the creators of our platform.
If the platform’s rubric were a prompt rather than a fixed architecture, the degree of customization would determine how faithfully the self is represented. For consumer products this is difficult — simplification is the business model. But challenging the assumption that online personas must be translations rather than expressions is a worthy design motive.In 2016, as the presidential inauguration approached and the levels of outrage on my social media feeds pitched higher and higher, I scrolled through my phone and thought about how indistinguishable my posts had become from the posts of my friends, and how all of us were looking less and less distinguishable from the ads selected for me by the algorithm.
but simply refracted my own views back to me as if every person I knew was merely an accessory to my opinions? How had I convinced myself this kind of myopic self-affirmation was a good thing? And how had I missed the fact that the self-absorption encouraged by my online environment was a form of advertising, and that I had fallen for it completely?
When I finally got around to reading Smith’s essay, it occurred to me that our lives were being shaped and stored in formats based on the minds of men like Evan Osnos and Kevin Systrom. I had partially accomplished my childhood goal of staving off death’s erasure by living on in someone’s memory.
The overestimation of one’s imprint on society runs parallel between physical and online life. A city reminds you that you don’t matter; the internet does the opposite, inflating significance through metrics. The corrective may be the same in both contexts: being true to the dynamics that are good for living, rather than optimizing for being remembered.Now, however, she argues that social media is making our relationship to the market claustrophobically intimate. It monetizes our attention spans, harvests our personal data, and rewards its most compelling users with the privilege of becoming “influencers”—living advertisements. Tolentino concludes, “today, there is nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self.”
once tasted, on a very small scale, what it is like to attract attention on the internet for my faith. One of my Instagram posts was referenced by a Christian podcast, and in the days that followed it was shared and re-shared enough for me to open my feed and see my own face propagating itself down the endless scroll. It felt wonderful. It was perversely life affirming to find my image embedded in the grids of strangers as if I was multiplying myself, colonizing spaces that were usually reserved for other people’s lives. In this one instance I had excelled at performing the kind of life that Instagram’s users and algorithms recognized as good, and now they were reproducing me.
We clearly need to change the world we have built online, but without considering why we created it in the first place, I think the impulse to make the world over in ways that distort our importance within it will emerge elsewhere. If social media is analogous to the Bible’s descriptions of idolatry, the impulse behind it is analogous to its descriptions of empire. From Cain’s murder of Abel to Egypt’s enslavement of the Israelites to Rome’s conquest of surrounding nations, scriptural narratives are older variations on our current theme: we are prone to devouring the world in the name of our own expansion. The question I wrestle with now is how to confront not only the destructive systems we’ve built, but how to dismantle the impulse that led us to think they were in any way desirable.
Social media’s premise is egocentric — devouring the world in the name of self-expansion. But the underlying desire is to connect, and the impulse toward empire is not the same as the impulse toward communion. An ecology of technology might serve the connective desire without feeding the imperial one, if it can distinguish between systems that expand the self and systems that relate the self to others. ecology-of-technologyIn the second one my husband and I are standing on the California coast at nightfall, watching shadows sweep across the cliffs until we are enveloped in darkness. All we can see is a faint glow at the horizon outlining the curvature of our planet. Beneath our feet we feel faint, rhythmic tremors from waves thudding against the rocks we stand on. I can sense how negligible we are to this landscape: if we die right now, I think, nothing here will notice.
I want to retract myself, not in self-loathing or terror, but in deference to the vast, bracing loveliness of the world around me and the presence of its Creator.
The desire to retract — not from self-loathing but from deference — maps onto the “dark forest” theory of the internet: retreating from public forums where identity is performed, toward smaller communities of knowledge where one can be present without being visible. The retraction is not withdrawal but a reorientation toward what is vast and lovely rather than what is loud and self-referential. ecology-of-technologyBeing stored indefinitely in a human-made platform used to appear to me as a form of immortality, but it is mere entrapment in comparison to being known by the God who generated the world.
As technology becomes easier to create, a counterintuitive movement emerges: toward insignificance rather than permanence, toward ephemerality rather than storage. Something in human design ushers toward the ephemeral — the recognition that being stored indefinitely in a platform is entrapment, not immortality. The desire for ephemerality may be the technological expression of a deeper desire to be known by something larger than a database. ecology-of-technologyWhile the internet gave me the unwelcome sense of living in the heads of various tech founders, the creation narrative makes me think that I am living in the mind of God. He originated me, and I existed in His mind before I existed anywhere else.
A future format of technology — ephemeral rather than archival — might free people to feel known without needing to be stored. The design goal shifts from living in the heads of tech founders to living in a space that reflects one’s smallness honestly, and makes that smallness feel like freedom rather than erasure. limitsunderstanding us as he understands the rest of his own creation, which He formed to be expansive and mysterious and dauntingly beautiful. In him we live and move and have our being.
