What is Technology Good For?

What is technology good for?

For the Christian, the answer cannot be everything or nothing. If technology is good for everything, then the pursuit of the good life moves us further and further away from the simplicity of Eden. If technology is good for nothing, then how do we make sense of God’s great use of it, from the detailed engineering of Noah’s Ark to the intricate architecture of the new Jerusalem?

Whenever I talk to church members about the use of technology or it comes up in the pulpit as a point of Scriptural application, there is a tendency to hear only extremes. 

This is the most common perception I get in the pews: that to faithfully follow Christ in a technological world you must either embrace and utilize or deny and repudiate. Tech Bro or Luddite; the middle is too murky and ripe for hypocrisy. People want to know where, that is, in what areas of life, they can freely use technology, but often find few nuanced answers. The difficulty of the median position is categorical in nature. We simply are not trained to contain our use of technology into specific spheres of our life. This is true for at least a few reasons. 

First, it is difficult to find a middle-ground for technological use because technology is readily advancing and evolving into an all-pervasive reality. In his book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly calls this reality “The Technium.” No longer are technologies separate techniques for distinct purposes. Instead, due to economic realities as well as the choices of technologists, most technology has now been blended into an interconnected mess of chips and screens and data. Tech builds on other tech, advancing at a multiplicative rate that it begins to take on a kind of autonomy that is very difficult to escape. 

Writes Kelly: “At some point in its evolution, our system of tools and machines and ideas became so dense in feedback loops and complex interactions that it spawned a bit of independence.” The middle ground of technology is murky because it requires not just a discernment of one technology, but a discernment of the vast, autonomous technium. The reason why it seems like the best strategy against the technium is to pull the plug entirely is because we cannot imagine a world where its individual parts are able to be parsed out and powered down. Very few of us are competent enough to take apart a hard-drive, how much more a billion inter-connected hard drives? 

Second, it is difficult to find a middle-ground for technological use because tech companies create products bent towards greater degrees of dependence, which in turn incentivize everyone else toward greater reliance on technology. Consider an older man whose entire life savings is in physical gold, housed in a secure deposit box. His only form of communication is a phone landline. It seems like his life is quite secure, and yet it would be impossible for him to sign up for so much as a rewards account at Chick-Fil-A because he could not pass the online verification process without an email and cell phone. The technium wants you to become fully dependent on it, because that is how it grows larger and more influential. Becoming only slightly dependent on technology is like trying to ride a tsunami: better to get swept away or get out of the way. 

Thirdly, it is difficult to find a middle-ground for technological use because doing so is tiring. In his essay The Burnout Society, philosopher Byung-Chul Han observes how the modern west has moved from a “disciplinary society” to an “achievement society.” We are no longer defined by what we cannot or shouldn't do, but what we can and should do. Our life is not guarded by restrictions but by freedoms, and the greatest freedoms in life are offered by technological advancement. The promise of the technium is that we can go faster, know more, and achieve greater accomplishment with less and less to hold us back. The result of this thirst for achievement and freedom to achieve is greater rates of burnout, despair, and disillusionment with life. Fighting against the current of achievement society requires training, discipline, patience, and often real suffering. 

Even as I am writing this, Google’s AI assistant offers to overcome the stress of formulating a new sentence with a few simple keyboard commands. “Help me write,” it says, as if it assumes I am quite incapable without its vast knowledge base and unparalleled processing speeds at my fingertips. Should I see what it has for me, trusting in my ability to sift through its content generation and use it towards my ends? Or should I chuck my expensive laptop at the nearest wall and hope I never have to deal with un-solicited AI prompts again? Surely we can do better. 

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of enjoying a retreat at Laity Lodge entitled “Staying Human in an Age of Acceleration” with Andy Crouch and Sho Baraka. Worth the price of admission was Andy Crouch’s categories for technological use. Building off his work in The Life We Are Looking For, he helpfully aimed to help us answer the question “What is Technology Good For” by examining its usage in three different spheres of life: preservation (protection), production, and formation. His talks are available online, but I’d like to offer my agreement and commentary on his thoughts as a way forward through the fog and towards a middle ground of technology use. 

The Green Light: Preservation

What is technology good for? Crouch argues that it has an inherent good when it is tied to the preservation or protection of life, beauty, and culture. Seat belts save lives; we should not boycott them. X-Ray machines give us helpful diagnoses, and are built for the expressed purpose of preservation. In fact, most of the advanced technology we find at a hospital or clinic fits into this category, reminding us that the pursuit of medicine is a common grace of God, who is the great healer and preserver of life. 

Throughout human history, technology has been used to advance the preservation of society and culture. The previously mentioned Ark of Noah served this purpose: to preserve a remnant of creation from the wrath of God. What Noah saved was not just genetic material, but also the human story, the soft goods of culture passed from him to his offspring after him. 

The reason that technological advancement aimed at protection and preservation can be more readily embraced is because, in Crouch’s language, it leads to the innovation of instruments, not devices. Whereas devices remove human input and interaction—offering immense power at the push of a button—instruments extend human input. 

The world needs both more instruments and more musicians, which means every Christian should aim for an embrace of technological advancement which leads to the development of more and better instruments. This kind of work can begin in the church. Inasmuch the church of Jesus Christ is, as the Fathers argued, the “ark” where the remnant of God remains safe from the raging chaos of the world, the church also embraces technology to construct itself into a safe place for both life and culture: stone buildings, bound bibles, intricately made pianos, and well-printed hymnals. 

The Yellow Light: Production

The second space into which we naturally invite technological advancement is that of production. The earliest and most simple of technologies are bent towards this purpose. When Adam was called by God to “work the ground and keep it”, perhaps in his pre-fall condition he only needed to harvest ripe fruit with his bare hands. But it’s difficult to imagine him working the ground, full of the thorny curse of Genesis 3, without a shovel or rake. In many ways, productive technologies are human and life-giving, increasing our capacity for hard work and the strength of our own bodies. 

Technology can also be part of the God-given grace needed to reduce the load of work, and therefore in turn lead to the ability to produce art and culture. In his renowned work Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Joseph Pieper argues that the ability for a society to cease from work is necessary to create anything truly lasting and worthwhile. “Leisure” says Pieper, "is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preservation of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.” If this is true, then the ability provided by certain productive technologies to allow for normal, working class men and women to rest from their labor is a kind of cultural good. If two men are given only one day and two shovels to move a huge mound of dirt, how can they hope to find rest? But if two men are given a skid-steer loader, they can both accomplish the task before them in the allotted time and get off work early to boot. 

But by accomplishing in one day what two men with shovels would take one week to do, the skid-steer teaches us to depend on, and in fact expect or even yearn for, its superior efficiency. A society that replaces the virtue of patience with that of efficiency in turn replaces rest for empty leisure. As Crouch argues, empty leisure is a cheap rest that depends on other’s hard work and only medicates the despair we feel from lives filled with empty toil. This is why the Christian must be very careful to bring technology into the sphere of production, lest he find Pharaoh demanding more and more bricks with less and less straw. 

The Red Light: Formation

Whereas the latest technology used to be reserved for the hospital and the assembly line, now it is tested in the places of moral, spiritual, and intellectual formation: the home, the school, and the church. Formation spaces are not where things are made, but where people are. It is in the home, the school, and the church where we learn our morals and values, take up our first ideas and projects, and discover the good, true, and beautiful. And it is these spaces that are in most danger of being invaded by the technium and producing a kind of counter-formation. 

The reason formative spaces cannot be short-circuited with technological power is that they require resistance training. Just as muscles must be torn and stretched in order to grow back stronger, so must bodies and souls. If the promise of devices is easy power, then to continually utilize them in formative spaces is like, in Crouch’s words, “taking a forklift to the gym.” At first, it’s kind of fun, maybe even impressive. But eventually it’s boring, and it never results in making you more physically strong. Many of our formative spaces have lost the ability to produce young people who become persons of weight: someone who has a mind and a soul that is strong enough to bear the difficulties of life and persevere to the end. 

When technological power invades the places of formation, it tends to make disciples after its own kind. Short-form videos breed short attention spans, consumeristic algorithms birth vapid consumers, and easy-solutions produce thin wills. We all know that phones and laptops in school have not led to greater educational success. It’s obvious to all of us that exposing children to more and more screentime is harming their development. Is anyone really arguing that using AI to write college essays is anything other than intellectual stagnation and academic dishonesty? And yet, the rolling stone is hard to stop once it has been pushed downhill.  

I believe it can be stopped in the church. The people of God must be stalwartly devoted to breaking any dependence on technological power in their spiritual formation. It should be their joy to meet the trials that come with being less efficient and more human, because, as James says: “you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” Our ministry to children should be slow, embodied, personal, and focused on exposing the beauty of the Lord. Our ministry to youth should be over dinner tables and backyard games. Our formation of the soul should be less content and more conversation, less solution and more shoulder to cry on. 

In order for Christ to be formed in the hearts of his people, we need more Christian leaders who are committed to the slow “anguish of child birth” (Galatians 4:19). Sometimes spiritual formation takes decades, and it is never without birth pains. Who is strong enough to wait it out? After all, our Savior did not take any short cuts. In re-forming the world towards the bent of justice and redemption, the only technology Christ utilized was the torturous cross. 

The options before us in the technological world do not have to be between adoption and abandonment. We can maintain our humanity—limitation, relationship, purpose—without removing ourselves from the world completely. But it takes intentional choices, and the commitment to slow, patient formation in the way of Jesus.