“making human life safe for human beings”

November 9th, 2018 | 1 min read

This is a fine essay by James Poulos on the failure of “mass enlightenment” to occur via technology and the urge of the institutional elites to add more technology to fix the problem:

On those premises, the internet arose. By the light of the institutionalists, digital technology — developed and implemented by people intelligent enough to know that humans had to be saved from their humanity — would achieve a degree of automated peace and harmony unparalleled in the history of life on earth. Those who fixed their imaginations on using the newest machinery of enlightenment to build networks of universal connectivity would change humanity to comport with what they imagined.

As some of those institutionalists are now reluctantly recognizing in horror, that is not what happened. Instead of consummating their imaginative project, the internet is disenchanting their imagination. Rather than a new age of universal harmony, automated by machines programmed to critically interpret reality in perfectly authoritative ways, digital technology has unearthed and organized deplorably bad factions, bad individuals, and bad content on an unimaginable scale. And it has caused that innate human malevolence to burst from the confines of the digital realm, re-infecting the real world that had seemed to have been so fully sterilized of threats to health and safety.

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Matthew Loftus

Matthew grew up in a family of 15 children and completed his medical training in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 2015, he and his family have lived in East Africa, where he currently teaches and practices Family Medicine at a mission hospital. His work has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Atlantis, and Mere Orthodoxy and his first book is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press. You can learn more about his work and writing at www.matthewandmaggie.org and preorder his forthcoming book here: https://www.ivpress.com/resisting-therapy-culture

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“making human life safe for human beings”

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