But in the meantime, very briefly, a thought about yet another depressing headline.

Caleb Flynn, a former worship pastor, was found guilty by jury of his peers of murdering his wife, and sentenced to life without parole. His motive was another woman. He had a long running adulterous relationship with someone who at one point shared the stage with him in leading worship at a church, and both she and Flynn fantasized about his wife’s death via text.

When a story like this comes up, the dominant evangelical response is about lust. We tend to hammer home the deceitfulness of sexual desire, how a churchman coddled lust in his heart and adultery in his bed day after day, month after month, until finally he stands in an orange jumpsuit listening to a letter his preteen daughters wrote him. And this is true. Sin is extraordinarily deceitful. In particular, we underestimate the importance of our fantasies, and how those fantasies bind with our will over time and make us capable of things we never imagined. Truly the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

But I want to make the very quick point that Flynn’s lust was not his biggest sin. His lust did not kill his wife. His lust did not land him in federal prison. No, it was greed that did that. And it’s important to say this because greed is a much less comfortable topic for evangelicals than lust.

Read more

A woman’s lawsuit against a Cornell University fraternity alleges she was gang raped at a frat house party. I’ve read quite a bit of The New York Times’s extensive coverage. I believe to a functional certainty that this woman (“Jane Doe” in the documentation) was incapacitated through alcohol and ketamine. She has admitted as such. She’s also admitted that the beginning of the sexual encounter, which included at least two men right from the start, was “pretty OK” to her. Things eventually went badly, as more and more frat guys poured into the room. The men involved have told investigators that Jane welcomed their advances verbally.

I believe her story. I also believe the men’s story. Unlike many other campus sexual assault cases, I don’t think the bare facts of this particular incident are in much doubt. Most seem to agree generally about what happened. What they disagree about is what it meant.

I’m not going to litigate the case. We have juries and courts for that. I pray, as all Christians should, for justice to be done. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing observable or meaningful here.

Why #MeToo Failed

Back in the late 2010s, the topic of campus rape was massive online. It culminated in a 2014 Rolling Stone story that alleged a horrific gang rape at a University of Virgnia fraternity. That story was eventually debunked, the magazine was sued, and its author more or less lost her journalistic career. wrote extensively on this case, and I recommend his work.

I don’t mention the UVA case because I think the Cornell situation is like it. I mention it specifically because I think one thing Freddie warned about multiple times did in fact come true. The Rolling Stone article represented an editorial failure in a particular direction: the direction of, “Believe all women.” By tying activism against campus rape to a dubious social media mantra—and even worse, by suppressing warranted doubts about a suspect piece of journalism—people who care about preventing sexual assaults on college campuses greatly damaged their own cause. The debunking of “A Rape on Campus” became, by virtue of the movement’s choices, a vicarious debunking of many similar allegations.

This is a useful example of something important. Liberals think about rape and sexual assault in a way that has not borne meaningful fruit in the fight to prevent them. If MeToo was able to knock a few pervy celebrities out of the limelight, that’s good. I’m just not sure it was much of an achievement. What I tend to think is that #MeToo was shot through with deeply confused ethical reasoning, more than a dash of third wave feminism, and a fundamentally “online” ethos that prioritized immediacy and rhetoric over justice and social transformation. The progressive sexual ethic is effective at assigning legal categories based on legal arguments; e.g., something becomes “rape” if something called “consent” is not given. What progressive sexual ethics is really bad is understanding the realities that put most men and women in these kinds of situations to begin with.

I’m not talking of course about the men who stalk women in alleyways or push them against walls. I’m talking about the far more complex dynamics of casual sex, hook up culture, non-monogamy, and the inescapable asymmetry between male and female sexuality. Because liberal sexual ethics only understand consent and its presence/absence, it approaches every question of sexual morality as one of either two things: every encounter is either a passionate, remorseless, unequivocally positive thing that must be celebrated by any reasonable person, or else, it’s a man stalking a woman down a dark alleyway.

The Law Doesn’t Know What We Know

The Cornell story is striking for a few reasons. First, Jane Doe has been admirably transparent that, in addition to being inebriated, she did make herself sexually available for at least two men, neither of whom were a romantic partner. The New York Times also points out that Jane “came to understand” what happened to her as a rape after a bit of time had elapsed. Consider the following:

Around 11:15 a.m., [Jane Doe’s roommate] said, Jane Doe arrived home, still in her “big boots and small dress” from the night before, according to the roommate. She had consumed ketamine and had sex with multiple men, she told her two roommates. One roommate told investigators that Jane Doe did not use the word “rape” or “assault” yet.

It seemed like she was “in shock,” her other roommate later told investigators, “not really understanding the gravity of what she was saying.”

The next day, on Oct. 21, Jane Doe went to her “big sister” — a woman designated as a mentor — at Cornell’s Tri Delta sorority and told her there were rumors circulating that she was a “slut.” The big sister, a junior at Cornell, told investigators that Jane Doe added with a laugh that “unfortunately they are true.”

…That same day, Jane Doe received a text message from Jonathan Newell, one of the men she would go on to accuse of sexual assault.

“I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night,” Mr. Newell wrote. He then said that both he and Matthew Ingalls, another of the men she would later accuse of assault, both felt terrible for being too under the influence of drugs and alcohol to “shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand.”

Jane Doe replied and reassured him.

“At the end of the day non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt,” she wrote.

Again, I’m not litigating the case. None of this means that Jane was not assaulted. I take a rather different conclusion. From the details available to the public right now, it seems to me that she was assaulted, by multiple men, and that she did consent to this assault as much as she possibly could given her physical state.

Legally, what I’ve just said is nonsense. No one can be assaulted consensually. Of course not. But this reveals a limitation of our law, not a limitation of sex. Our law cannot make sense of a punishingly exploitive and victimizing sexual encounter without understanding the object of that encounter as having zero real agency in the whole thing. But this kind of thing happens all the time. People allow horrible, traumatic things to happen to them for many reasons: Money, control, relationship, hope of a relationship, etc. That a person might invite these things to happen does not change the moral nature of what happened. A sexually brutish man does not cease to be sexually brutish because the women gives in. Her agency does not change his character. And neither does his character change her agency.

We understand this experientially, because we understand that our sexual personhood is not just about seeing which body parts can legally touch which others. It’s about our whole selves. Humans are not raw hormone factories. We want things. We don’t want other things. But the way these two categories intersect is as complicated as life itself.

It is not, however, complicated in exactly the same way for men and women. And herein lies the second mistake of progressive sex ethics. Not only does consent-or-no framework miss the reality of agency and desire, it severely misrepresents how agency and desire affect men and women differently.

Women are not vaginal men. Men are not penile women. Anatomy does not exhaust the different way men and women relate to themselves and to the world, but it does begin to reveal deeper differences. The presence of a womb inside a woman gives her a relationship to the world that a man does not quite have. A man’s sexual cycle gives him a relationship to the world that the woman does not quite have. Many have observed that the sexual ethics which emerged in Christianized societies were far more compassionate toward women than the ethics of the pagan and tribal societies. Why? Because the Christian societies saw women, not only as bearing the image of God (that’s true!), but as bearing the image of God as women. Women were neither animals to be owned, nor soldiers to send to war. They belonged neither in a brothel nor a barracks. All that blossomed into compassion began as knowledge. Christianity was, and is, compassionate toward women and men because it knows what they truly are.

The Best Consent Can Do

The liberal sexual ethic doesn’t know this. It flattens, relativizes, and eventually disowns the differences between men and women. And on this foundation, it builds massive artifice in which women are robbed of the very things that protect their natural vulnerability. Hook-up culture—the uncontested view that every 18 year old man and 18 year old woman has an inalienable right to sleep with whomever they want, whenever they want, for any reason they want—is rape culture.

Why? Because hook up culture throws men and women into a blender and asks them to figure out who’s going to come out ahead. By tearing down the moral, social, and logistical barriers to sex, hook-up culture makes sex a sport. And all sports must have losers as well as winners. Who are the losers of any sport? The ones who fall behind, the ones who aren’t as quick, the ones who have to linger and think about what’s happening to them and what they’re going to do and what everyone else is going to do.

Who does that sound like?

The minute that Jane took a drink and/or that hit of ketamine, she was losing the sport of sex. I don’t know exactly why she was there, or why she offered herself to those two men. Perhaps she was hoping that that night, even if it would never be one she’d tell her parents about, would end up being a happy part of her story. Maybe a story of falling in love. Maybe a story of becoming the kind of person everybody talked about. Maybe she was just determined to lose herself for a few hours. I have no idea. She might not, either.

Stuff like MeToo can’t really help Jane. Even if Jane ends up winning some money from Cornell, the fraternity, or the men who abused her, this isn’t really help. It's just insurance, like the kind of check you get for the value of your car after you are pummeled on the freeway and can’t really sleep or focus on anything for a long time. Our society has only consolation for sex’s losers. Our elites offer no real safety, no transformation, no deeper understanding, and certainly no meaning, to sex. When it comes to sexuality, consent-or-no ethics are like Pawn Stars. “Best it can do” is a few bucks.

There was a time when I was afraid to say it quite like this, but I’m not anymore. There is no secular remedy for rape culture. There’s just not. There’s nothing that works, nothing that resonates, nothing that actually changes how people and societies see each other. Without the Christian view of the body, a college campus turns sex into a sport which women will inevitably lose. Without the Christian view of the body, sexual assault activists will work for a world their very beliefs make impossible. The secular sexual ethic is a quest for fire without heat. It just doesn’t work. And even its momentary success will be pyrrhic. Lawsuits succeed inside the courtroom, while the birthrate plunges outside it. “Informed consent forms” and Human Resources seminars abound, while dating becomes a hellscape. Everyone keeps their hand to themselves, while giving their heart to a chatbot.

Recently our family needed some last minute items, so I dropped my wife off outside Target for a quick run. A line of people was stretched out the door. The profiles were diverse: A late 20s Hispanic-looking couple, a white man looking like his 50s, two middle age black women. This was a Sunday afternoon; no Black Friday specials or Taylor Swift releases to be found.

After dropping her off, I pulled up to an employee who was monitoring the queue and asked what the line was for. But in truth, I knew the answer before she said it.

“Pokemon!”

Everywhere I turn, long lines of people, mostly adults, are waiting in line to grab Pokemon cards. Its market has been on fire for years. And not just the 90s vintage stuff that can still fetch absurd prices. Stores like Target and Walmart can’t hold onto new inventory long enough for most families to get at it. Posted signs advise customers they are only allowed one or two products per person, but that doesn’t matter. The merchandise evaporates as soon as it lands.

Our family is here for it. My oldest is 10, and he’s enjoyed the trading card game with his cousins and friends. A few weeks ago, after one Sunday evening church service, I found my son huddled with his friends over their Pokemon binders, trading and chatting. I took a picture because it was surreal to see the exact same kind of scene over the exact same things come back to me 20+ years after I collected them as a kid. No picture exists, but I am quite sure in the album of my memory there is the exact same photo of me and my buddies as of my son and his.

The Resilience of “Things”

I doubt anyone circa 2000 believed that the Pokemon trading card game would be intergenerationally successful the way it has been. But I think it makes some sense. Why would Millennials and Gen-Alpha alike love it? Partly, I think, because Pokemon cards are things. They are physical objects with weight and presence. You can play them, store them, display them, and trade them. Opening a new pack feels like unwrapping a present. You never know what it’s inside, and the truth is, what’s inside is only part of the point. It’s the tactile ritual of opening the pack that’s rewarding.

It’s fun to possess something. Your cards are your cards. You don’t need a subscription to look at them. To share a Pokemon hobby, either by trading cards or playing the game, means sharing these physical things that you have with someone else, and their sharing it with you.

In the digital age, we encounter each other so often as bodiless avatars. We communicate without hearing each other’s voices or seeing each other’s faces. Our hobbies and interests are often virtual; we share links of things to watch, rather than sharing things we can both see and hold.

The physicality of Pokemon cards seems to create a kind of connection, both between people and between us and the hobby itself. There’s something about the virtual nature of so much of our leisure that creates a sense of disassociation. In the streaming economy, we own almost nothing. The “license + consume” rhythm of digital life is a lot different from the kind of investment we make in physical objects. This is true whether we are talking about trading cards or our Bibles. Physical things bear physical marks that reenforce their role in our lives. They are part of us in a way that digital media never really is.

For many, physical items have become a sort of luxury. You can buy vinyl records, for example, but each individual record will cost you the same as about two months of Spotify streaming. Pokemon cards can get crazy, but you can still buy a pack of cards for less than a large Starbucks coffee. I suspect that there is a decent cohort of people for whom Pokemon cards are one of the most affordable “analog hobbies” possible. Again, it’s not just the cards themselves that’s fun. It’s the experience of opening a new pack or box. It’s the experience of laying claim to something with art and weight, something you can carry home and keep and show, something that unquestionably “belongs” to you.

Experiences vs. Things is More Complicated Than We Think

It’s pretty universal to hear something along the lines of, “Choose experiences, not things.” But I think this is more complicated than we might think.

To be sure, if the choice is between a great experience and a mediocre thing, the experience is worth it even if it costs more. You get what you pay for, and the fallacy of wanting something more than something good often burns us. That said, particularly in a disembodied virtual world, the value of things shouldn’t be underestimated.

The contemporary minimalist impulse is not so much about living meaningfully, but about living frictionlessly. “Stuff” slows us down. So the minimalist worldview is always trying to wring ease and convenience out of life, which means that, usually, minimalism cashes out to a solitary lifestyle where everything has been migrated to either work or digital consumption.

Physical things, however, whether framed art, trading cards, or a house, are relationally four-dimensional. We look at the art day after day, as do other people who live in or share our home. Many times, we will come to love something like a painting, as if it’s part of us itself. That’s why one of the most universal human experiences is passing some physical object down to our children. We know, of course, that our kids might sell their heirlooms, but the point in giving it is not the cash. The point is that the heirloom has some part of us—our lives, our memories, etc.—attached to it. We pass such things down because in holding onto them, our children are, in a sense, holding onto us.

The experience-over-things mentality sells beauty too short. We often think of “experiences” as singular great moments that are rarely repeated, like a vacation to a gorgeous countryside. But the small furnishings of our home, and the stories in our old books, possess beauty too. Beauty is sometimes big, but often the smaller beauties are better for teaching our hearts what beauty really is. I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s childhood and how he never forgot the way a nursery toy first awoke in him the desire for the beauty that would drive him into the arms of Christ.

Obviously we are talking about things that go much deeper than Pokemon cards. But I don’t think we can fully understand how a simple trading card game could remain so culturally powerful without understanding the underestimated value of beautiful things. I think too of the art on the trading cards, and how a beautifully drawn picture that you can hold and display carries greater allure today in a world where so much of our media’s aesthetic quality is squashed to make it more digitally portable (I miss album covers!). There’s been a lot of talk lately about how ugly modern movies look: How the color and lighting feel dour and artificial. How surprising is it that a card game with bright colors and creative characters is something a lot of people want to grab?

Pokemon Against Nihilism

Pokemon is just a children’s media franchise. But it also represents an in-breaking of beauty and physicality against the sterile inertia of our age.

Its popularity across multiple generation is proof that there is still a thirst for things we can hold, look at, and share. It’s interesting to me that Pokemon offers a virtual version of its trading card game, where you can “open” digital packs. Yet this is very obviously less appealing than the physical game. While the virtual card game is always available to play, and you don’t have to wait in line, many people are willing to wait and fight the crowd in order to get their hands on something that can truly be theirs. The same has been true of other things for years, like print books. You cannot completely break the human desire for something that occupies the same space as our embodied selves.

Wanting to live more in the physical world God made is nothing less than a protest against the hallucinatory nature of so much modern life. If the world of notifications and autoplay cannot satisfy us, I think we should conclude that we may have been made for another world.

The 1998 movie The Truman Show tells the story of a man, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey), who goes about his day in, day out life, completely unaware that he is the star of a 24 hour reality TV show. Every single aspect of Truman’s life is, unbeknownst to him, scripted. His wife, parents, and friends are all actors who have been pretending to be these people as long as he’s known them. Truman’s job, his home city, even the ocean he lives near, are all part of a massive soundstage. Because he thinks his father drowned in a boating accident years ago, Truman is terrified of the water, and thus, doesn’t come close to escaping the boundaries of the soundstage.

The movie follows Truman as he begins to question why something feels so “off” about his life. His journey toward the truth begins when one an object falls out a completely clear morning sky and nearly kills him. Truman looks closely; it’s a studio light. Later on, Truman is in the car listening to his normal radio show, when all of the sudden the radio starts describing in perfectly accurate detail every turn Truman makes. Then, an argument with his wife takes a bizarre turn when she suddenly stares into space and gives a stiff advertisement for something she bought at the store. These and other events eventually push Truman toward a dramatic showdown with the reality of his situation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about The Truman Show lately, particularly the first half of the film that depicts the inhuman behavior of the people around Truman. It’s inhuman because it’s scripted. It’s on camera. Everything is calculated and controlled. Truman’s thoughts and feelings are genuine, but they are ultimately directed toward nothing. The people and places in Truman’s life are not like him. They perform life, but they signify nothing. They might as well be robots.

That sounds familiar to me.

Ours has become what I call a “planet of bots.” Modern life has become, and been for a while, very “robotified” life. This robotification of all of life has resulted in everyday experiences becoming agonizingly endless experiments in how long you can go without speaking to another human being.

The last few years have been the climax, rather than the beginning, of the robotification of the world. LLMs are bringing what we’ve been doing in the last few decades to a logical, profitable, and psychologically addictive conclusion. We have arrived at the AI era perfectly primed to accept the conditions of life on a planet of bots, because we’ve been living that way for a while. We, like Truman, are citizens of a hyper-controlled, hyper-scripted society. Our attention spans are directed at algorithmically customized feeds. Our reading and our conversations are invaded, not with the unavoidable cares of life, but with advertisements, spam, and “for you” highlights.

Now we need to return to the question: What does it mean to be a person, as opposed to a machine? What I want for us this evening is to consider how to live our lives as people on a planet of bots. I confess I do not have any grand political or cultural strategy for rolling back the robotification of the world. I’m grateful for people who think about this, and I’m eager to support it whenever I can. But tonight the question is for us: What does being a person look like for us? We could, of course, go back to very foundations of human identity try to find our answer. We could talk about embodied rationality, spiritual vitality, moral agency, etc. Instead, what I want to give you tonight is one thing. One thing that a human person is and does that a machine is not and cannot do.

Here it is: A human person submits themselves to and endures suffering for the sake of a higher moral purpose.

In a planet of bots, one of the most important ways we can cling to our humanity is to not flee from suffering, but to put ourselves patiently under it for the sake of God’s glory, others’ good, and our growth.

A machine cannot do this. A machine, no matter how intelligent, will always look for the smoothest, most efficient, most optimized way. The planet of bots operates by one rule: Find the most convenient result in the most convenient way. Eliminate all pain points. Reduce everything to the easiest desired result.

I probably don’t have to work hard to convince you this is not the way the Bible talks about life. Jesus said anyone who doesn’t carry his cross won’t wear his crown. Paul said unless we die daily, we will never live forever. Wisdom literature warns us to be wary of too much sleep and too much wine, because life is hard, and we should be like ants who endure the hardship during summer so that we reap the benefit during winter. And underneath all of this is the logic of love. God so loved the world that he gave his only son. The apostle John says if Christ died for us, we ought to lay our lives down for one another. There is no version of the Christian life that avoids suffering, disappointment, struggle, waiting, and death. And any cultural spirit that primes our emotions to desire a version that does avoid this is working contrary to our eternal good.

There are a lot of reasons we could give for why you should not get ChatGPT to write your papers. But I think one reason we should give more time to is this very one. It is good for you to experience the resistance, the friction, and the frustration of having to do your own intellectual work, with limited time and limited ability, because that striving for something in the midst of suffering is part of the heart of what it means to be a person. Your homework is a training ground for much larger things. As Jesus said, he who is faithful in a little will be faithful in much. If you strive in your suffering now, at 12:30 at night, with the assignment on your syllabus, you are training your heart to strive in the suffering 20 years from now, with the sick, needy child on your bed.

Our technological age is an anti-suffering age. This is natural, inevitable, and in a certain way, good. We are given by our creator a mandate of dominion over this world, and alleviation of suffering is one of the greatest ways we exercise that dominion. But the more you try to bring all of your life and all of your society out of any possible experience of suffering, the more you will begin to view the basic exercise of the virtues as suffering to be avoided—no matter how small, like the boredom during a delayed flight, or the banality of crunching some numbers. The very idea of a virtue implies a context in which suffering has made that virtue both hard and necessary. Jesus said if you love those who love you back, what do you gain? We experience the virtue of love not most clearly when we love those who are easy to love, but when we love those drain us, offend us, or don’t return our love. Likewise, we tend to find self-control, whether in our drink or what we click, easier when it’s been a good, fulfilling day. It’s the dark, depressing days where the voice of drunkenness or pronography seems loudest. This isn’t to say that we crave suffering to actualize our virtues. The point is that suffering clearly plays a role in making us truly virtuous.

Bots do not and cannot think this. Digital technology, as it exists under a technocratic regime today, insists that whatever value you find in having to wait, work, or wonder, is minuscule (or even imaginary) compared to the value you can find in making these experiences automate themselves. Let me start to land the plane by thinking about two particular areas where our suffering tempts us toward inhuman relief: Our work, and our relationships.

Work entails suffering. This is as old as Genesis. “By the sweat of your brow” is what God told Adam. Sin does not invent work (Adam was cultivating the garden before sin). Sin does invent frustration. Before sin, Adam’s smallest efforts bore immediate, exponential fruit. After sin, Adam has to tear his own body apart in order to get the ground to yield up bare subsistence. The rest of Scripture is the story of God’s people, not trying to avoid work (that is what the sluggard and the fool do), but trying to work like God works. Working to put order on a disorderly world. Working to provide for those who don’t have enough. Working in a way that acknowledges that our work is actually not the determining factor of anything. The whole point of the Sabbath is this: You work 6 days because work is how you bring glory out of this fallen world. You rest 1 day because God is actually the one working.

The planet of Bots doesn’t understand the Sabbath at all. This is why, despite the fact that most of us work at computers and desks and have to actually pay a gym for the privilege of sweating, the information economy works people into the ground, with high burnout and depression. You don’t get Sabbath without frustrating work, and frustrating work will destroy you without Sabbath. So when the planet of bots says, “You don’t really need to learn this, or figure out how to complete that assignment, or structure that argument. Just get AI to do it,” it is not offering Sabbath without work. It is offering neither work nor Sabbath. That’s why one of the most important questions to ask the AI generation is, “What are you actually going to do with all this saved time?” The answer for 99% of people is: Scroll/stream more.

So instead of that, why don’t we allow the pain and suffering of work in Adam’s world do its virtuous work in us, making us more ready for Sabbath? It’s what we were literally created for. It’s what it means to be a created human.

What about relationships? Relationships entail suffering, too. God’s curse on the fallen world creates both pain in childbearing and conflict in marriage. The apostle James says we are at war with one another because our passions rage within us. We disappoint others who disappoint us. Friends are fragile, covenants are restrictive, honesty is dangerous. There’s no version of human life that avoids this.

The digital age has polarized men and women. Fewer people now have a desire to marry or even date. Why? Partially because we’ve turned to technology to alleviate the struggle of having to encounter someone different than us. When men and women activate their curated algorithmic feeds, they often see viral content that affirms their gendered experience and belittles the opposite sex. The comfort of the screen seems to relieve the pain of relationship, but in reality it makes relationship itself more painful.

To be a human person means to love another at the expense of one’s self. This is what Jesus did for his church. It’s what heroes do for their countries. And, importantly, it’s what Christians are to do for one another. To overcome the planet of bots, to be fully human, we have to encounter others as they truly are, and submit ourselves to the suffering of loving them.

This is not a blanket call to endure abuse or never draw boundaries. Our loves must be ordered. We must love God first, and loving God means loving justice and hating injustice. But most of the time, our crisis of love comes down to a question of whether we are OK having our comfortable lives disrupted, even completely changed, by loving another. Technology says, “You can have your cake and eat it too. You can love others from behind a screen, and still hold onto your own kingdom.” But we’ll find this is not true.

C.S Lewis writes in The Problem of Pain:

From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever. This is not a heavenly law which we can escape by remaining earthly, nor an earthly law which we can escape by being saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not earth, nor nature, nor “ordinary life”, but simply and solely Hell.

---

Remember the Truman Show? Let me spoil it for you. Truman’s escape from the world of the TV show happens one night when he sneaks out of his home in a way the cameras don’t catch. The producers of the show realize he’s not where they’ve been thinking he is. A panicked manhunt ensues. When they find Truman, he has gone sailing across the ocean he’s terrified of. When he finally submits himself to the suffering of winds and waves, then, and only then, is he set free to be really human—to be a “true man” (=Truman).

My goal has not been to convince you not to use certain technologies. My goal has been to make the idea of being a finite creature, made in the image of God, beautiful to you. He Because our technological moment is a moment where we are tempted to doubt this because we terrified of failure. But we don’t need to be. Christians are the one people in the world who have permission to try and fail, and have confidence in the life of suffering. There’s a savior waiting to catch us every time. Technology cannot save us from a life of struggle, failure, and suffering, because not even Christ will save us from that. Christ will save us through that. In Christ, life is laid out in front of you with success on one side and failure on the other, but both meet at the throne of God. Your heart may break. Your dreams may fail. Your hopes may be dashed. But you will only ever fall into the arms of mercy. Your life will never be wasted, your joy will never be empty, and your glory will never fade.

Dear Ms. Gerwig,

Greetings! In the very remote hope that you may read this, I hope you and your loved ones are well.

First, let me congratulate you on your career so far, of which I am a fan. Your work is intelligent and emotional, two things that ought to go together more often than they do. I particularly enjoy your willingness to surprise the audience with complex themes and journeys, one of which seems to be faith. Your characters know they need something, or someone, they don’t yet have and find it only after surrendering their will to something they can’t control (Lady Bird is so, so good). It’s a rich, life-giving motif, because so many of us can relate.

It also makes it easy to understand why you would want to direct an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia books. Please don’t tell anyone, but I was very excited to hear The Magician’s Nephew was first on your list; I’ve loved that story for a long time and feel it terribly underrated by many Narnia fans. The Narnia series is really a perfect literary match for your love of characters who are trying to find their home.

Adapting a beloved novel can’t be easy. There’s perhaps no genre in entertainment filled with more ready-made, incorrigible cynics this side of Star Wars. And on the topic of criticism, I want to briefly get ahead of something that you might encounter in the months ahead.

There are a fair number of Narnia-loving fans who are a bit put out by the decision to cast Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan. Full disclosure: I am one of them. I think this was a mistake, but not a devastating one. I think good faith people can disagree about art without such disagreements poisoning our capacity to hear one another, or even worse, becoming instruments of self-righteousness to assure ourselves we are Better Than Them (the writer Scott Alexander calls this the “scissor” effect, and I pray it stays far away from your movie).

In the spirit of resisting this, then, I want to make a winsome and respectful case that it would have been better to cast a revered, gifted male actor to voice Aslan. You told Empire magazine that you selected Ms. Streep because she is “profound but not pretentious” and had “gravitas but not morose self-seriousness.” You said you needed someone who “could communicate depth and pathos as well as joy and delight.” This is right-on. And Ms. Streep certainly seems more than able to deliver on this.

In fact, it’s not really about Streep at all. It’s about Aslan.

Share

Aslan is, of course, much more than a voice. Most people know that Aslan is a symbol of Jesus. Lewis, when asked to describe how the idea of Narnia came to him, said that he simply asked himself one day if there were worlds other than ours, how would the kind of story God tells in the Bible be told in that world. That’s why, whenever Aslan appears in the stories, or even is mentioned by name, Lewis makes a point of stopping his characters in their tracks. Even the thought of him fills them with something: Wonder, joy, hope, for those who desire Aslan’s presence; fear, loathing, and rage, for those who hate it.

In other words, Aslan is not just a wise lion. He’s not just a powerful character. He’s the point of Narnia. Aslan himself is the reason Narnia exists (as your adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew will hopefully show). Aslan appears when he does, not by chance, but by design. Digory, Polly, Uncle Andrew, Jadis, the Pevensie children, Caspian, Eustace Scrubb, and everyone else—all of their adventures, their tears, their self-discovery, their fall and their rising, is all about Aslan. He wills all of it. He works everything out for the ultimate good. Though sometimes invisible, he is never absent. When people really see him, they love him, and they know everything is going to be OK.

Your casting of Ms. Streep raises an interesting question: Why did Lewis depict Aslan as a lion, rather than a lioness? I realize some people will say the answer is that Lewis did not like women very much. I don’t think this is right, though. After all, the first person in the series to take a step of faith toward Aslan is Lucy. I think the reason is simple: Aslan is meant to make us think of Christ.

Now, at this point, we might be very tempted to have a debate as to if, how, and/or why Jesus is a man rather than a woman. What does that mean, and why does it matter? I think this is a good question, but it’s not quite my point right now. My point is that Aslan’s identity as the presence of Christ in Narnia world means that a faithful adaptation of the stories has to reckon with this. Your own description of what you were looking for in a voice actor reflects wonderfully well the reality that Aslan is not like all the other characters. He’s special.

And I would argue that it’s a mistake to abstract what makes him special from his “He-ness.” I’m not at all trying to say that Aslan should have a stereotypically masculine voice. Timber or pitch are not the point. The point is that when people hear Aslan, they should think of a father.

I truly believe that is part of what the people of Narnia feel when they hear Aslan’s voice or his name spoken. The mysterious mixture of love and dread, joy and seriousness, laughter and honesty, are meant to evoke in us a strong desire for arms that are strong enough to pick us up and throw us in the air, and soft enough to catch us again as tenderly as landing on a pillow.

I think it means something for Aslan to sound like a father. In the same way that the world of Little Women is haunted by a father’s wartime absence, and then comes to life when he appears, the world of Narnia is constantly waiting on its Father to come and make everything and everyone whole again.

It’s of course true that not everyone has a father like Aslan. Someone might reasonably object that, whatever Lewis’s views on fatherhood, or the way he thought about Aslan, in our world right now, the kind of tender strength Aslan represents is more likely to come from a woman than a man. For the sake of argument, let’s grant that this is true. It may be that giving Aslan a female’s voice is motivated by concerns about realism and representation. I actually don’t think the best thing these stories can be is “realistic.” Both these things have their proper place, but it’s not in fantasy stories.

Why not? Lewis himself answered this question. In an essay on writing stories for children, Lewis says that fairy tales, far from deceiving children about the real world, actually give them more truth than “realistic” stories. Lewis noted that books that depict realistic school life, but with added adventure and triumph, cultivate a desire in all of us to be “the object of admiration.” We yearn for the more realistic stories because we want to imagine ourselves as the heroes. The fairy tales are different. A great fairy tale stokes desires in the reader and, (to use Lewis’s words),

Stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach….He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

This, then, is what I would say to you. I think changing Aslan’s he-ness does two things. It mutes the meaning of his fatherhood and so loses something very close to the soul of Narnia. It also draws attention away from the wonder of the tale, and puts it on the presence of a successful, charismatic, irreligious woman, who may be enjoying her playful subversion of a 20^th century Oxford professor’s spiritual parable. In other words, many people will believe—right or no—that you are making a point by giving Aslan a woman’s voice. Whether it’s a correct point you are making is one matter. Whether making a point like this at all is going to bring people closer to the richness and wonder of the stories is another. I have my doubts.

My read on the world right now is that many of us are absolutely beaten down by two things. One, the absence of fatherly tender strength in our own families and society (we are flush with both tyrants and cowards); and two, the relentless worship of efficiency and “the real world” that seeks to make everything about money and technology, and wants to send storytelling and human conversation to the dustbin of history. As a Christian observer of human nature, Lewis saw both of these crises clearly, decades before almost anyone else did. Narnia feels, looks, and sounds the way it does in part because it is meant to be a picture of where we really belong. There’s something at stake in these stories far more significant than special effects or clever dialogue or even inclusive casting.

I know we may disagree here. But I hope you’ll believe me when I say I am cheering for you, and am hoping that your stewardship of Narnia results in both greater love for the stories among millions, and greater success for you. As I mentioned at the start: if I’ve watched your movies correctly, I suspect you are a Narnian at heart.

Grace and peace to you—and further up and further in.

Samuel James

There will never be another 9/11. God willing, there will never be anything like those attacks again. But that’s not what I mean. I mean that spirit of America that watched, absorbed, and responded to September 11 is gone. It is never coming back. It was tied to a particular moment in our media and our politics. No matter what happens to this country in the years ahead, we will not see it, think about it, feel it, or remember it the way we did 25 years ago. We don’t have the same eyes, minds, hearts, or memories we did back then.

September 11 happened at the intersection of digital and mass media. That’s why we still have framed issues of newspapers and the reason we can watch an unsetting number of home videos capturing the explosions. In the hours after American Airlines 11 hit the north tower, classrooms, living rooms, lunch rooms, and just about everywhere else were tuned in to the same handful of broadcasts. There was no serious alternative to the broadcast networks unless you had cable, and no serious alternative to CNN if you did. This isn’t just an interesting detail of that day. It’s a social and psychological fact. The reason we remember 9/11 as something that happened to us, collectively, in a single moment, is that we were all shepherded into the same handful of spaces to witness it. We remember it as something we shared because we did.

Our conversations about the attacks were rooted in the shared experience of it. The conspiracy theories would come, of course, but they would come later, not instantly. The vast majority of the country was bound together in the same finite amount of thoughts and words—the thoughts and words we inherited from places like nightly news, or from talk shows, from newspaper columnists, or from the president himself.

This moment lingered. When President Bush threw the first pitch at Game 3 of the Yankees-Diamondbacks World Series, barely a month after the attacks, America tuned in. That baseball was not America’s favorite sport didn’t matter. That the President had been controversially elected didn’t matter. This moment was happening. We watched not only because we wanted to, but because it felt like we needed to.

The collapse of the towers, the “Falling Man,” “Let’s roll,”—all of these pieces of time found us because we were all standing in the same places.

I’m not suggesting that Americans didn’t have strong disagreements. Nor am I trying to whitewash the real politicizations that would come later and accelerate the processes that would lead our country into many of the pits it has fallen into since. And of course, whether we’re talking about Jon Stewart or Rush Limbaugh, Americans were not completely unified in whom we trusted to talk us through the moment.

The point is that the halls of memory around 9/11 are built out of materials that we all recognize. There were no personally curated feeds, no algorithmic islands, no influencer economies to magnetize attention away from the moment. In just a little while, high speed Internet would claim a majority of American homes, and only seven years later, Apple’s iPhone would radically transform what it means for a people to experience any moment. The attacks of 9/11 were among the last truly formative events for American culture. Soon enough, technology would permanently change what it means to be “formed” at all.

Charlie Kirk was murdered on September 10, 2025. Before you ask, no, I am not comparing nearly 3,000 murders on 9/11 to Kirk’s death. I am contrasting the way a certain generation of Americans experienced that moment with the way we experienced 9/11. Kirk’s murder was almost camouflaged into whatever media source you were consuming when it happened. If you experienced it via X, you saw horrifying, unforgettable footage, and an articulate rage toward the forces that had made it plausible. If TikTok was your choice, you saw something different: Emotionally performative faces, reacting in real time, often with fear but a sense of satisfaction. YouTube? Grief, punctuated by immediate conspiracies (who was that old man?) and accusations. Facebook? More of the same, flanked by advertisements and staged reactions.

And we haven’t even mentioned the AI content.

Kirk was a culture war figure, and it makes sense that his murder would play along culture war lines. But a major part of how his death will forever be embedded into our memory is the sprawl of attention that accompanied it. There is no “moment” of Kirk’s death. There can be no collective memory of it. There can and will only ever be different feeds. Kirk’s death could never be “unifying.” That has less to do with the kind of person Kirk was, and more to do with the kind of people we are.

If the Kirk example is too polarizing for you, we could name Sandy Hook. Rage at gun control opponents is understandable, but why would it replace grief, rather than follow it? Because in the digital age it is impossible to feel a moment without experiencing the commentary around it. Our feeds do not transmit shared experience. They produce curated content. The very concept of a “moment” is quaint. There is only output, only content, only takes. Life on the internet means our eyes can never look straight ahead. We are always turned somewhere else.

Tragedy exposes the limits of online life like nothing else does. The more traumatic the event, the more something in us wants shelter from the content storm. Saying something “just to say something” feels hollow. What we really want in those moments is not noise, but shared silence. We want people to just stand with and bear witness. It’s as old as Job’s friends, who, when seeing his suffering, suppressed their moralism long enough to just sit in the ashes. There’s something very Christian about that. Perhaps that is why, in the months after 9/11, many churches were unusually full. Sitting silently while human mortality and the impossibility of control hit us in the soul is a spiritual event. It is better to go to the house of mourning than the house of feasting.

Perhaps our digital experience of life has become a way to trying to turn all mourning into feasting (when we scroll our way through dark days, don’t we say we’re “consuming” content?). Perhaps all of this just serves the desire to escape God and grief through an algorithm that reassures us that, no matter what, we and the people we like are Right.

Maybe one of the things we can carry forward from our cultural memory of 9/11 is the need to encounter suffering like people instead of like computers. Maybe we just need to sit in one place, with others, and watch in the same direction, accepting that all the info and all the validation is less important than accepting our need to helplessly pray. And then, when we look back at our lives 25 years from now, perhaps we will remember the presence of God and the ones we love more vividly than our feeds.

That’s the way I would quickly summarize the Bible’s teaching on attention. This isn’t mean to be a detailed theology or an exhaustive study. There’s surely more to be said. But whatever else the Bible tells us about attention, it clearly tells us this. What we place in front of us will eventually place us. We cannot behold without becoming.

Scripture is clear that those who worship idols (any created thing that receives affection due to only God) become like them. The question then, is what is the relationship between worship and attention. How far is the journey from our attention to our hearts? I think the answer is, “Not very far.”

Throughout Scripture there seems to be a latent understanding that what we pay attention to has some kind of moral or spiritual power. Psalm 1 blesses the one who does not walk, or stand, or sit in the seat of those who disregard God. Those verbs—walk, stand, sit—show not only a logical progression, but an attentive quality. Where you walk matters because you will be thinking about where you’re walking. Where you stand matters because you’ll hear whatever is being said near your stance. Where you sit matters, because where you sit is where you’ll feel comfortable.

In Deuteronomy 11, Moses tells the Israelites not only to hear or believe what God says, but to surround themselves with his words.

Read more

Several years ago, I worked in the marketing department of a local mortgage company. Part of my job was helping lead new hires through the onboarding process, which included a section on information security. One of the modules concerned “social engineering.” Social engineering in this context means behavior meant to trick or manipulate another into making a mistake. The kind of social engineering we were trained to look out for consisted of a person calling the company and trying to obtain confidential financial information, often by posing as a client, real estate agent, or banker.

The training videos depicted a person calling the office, offering little to no information about themselves, and instead asking a few seemingly banal questions, like “Who is on vacation this week,” or “Is there someone I could talk to in sales.” The point of these questions was to obtain the name of somebody, anybody, who actually did work at the firm. Soon after getting a name, the person would hang up, and call back later, and this time use the name he had obtained to get more information from an unsuspecting employee. “Julie told me to call,” or, “I know Julie’s on vacation, I just need some info.” If you’ve ever seen Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, you get the gist. Some fast, vague talking to a naive worker can get a determined fraudster the access he needs.

The only defense against this trick was to stop treating conversation in a human way. Instead, we had to treat each unexpected interaction as a potential attack. The appropriate response to “Can I talk to someone in sales” was, “May I inquire as to the purpose of this call?” If someone claimed to forget the name of the person they were trying to reach, we had to verify their identity as much as possible before trying to help. If someone reached out and wasn’t able to quickly provide such verification, we had to assume the call was a trick, even if other factors indicated it probably wasn’t. An entire apparatus, consisting of numbers, data, signatures, the like, had to replace a normal interaction for the sake of security.

One of the effects of this training was to make the phone itself a suspect technology. Guarding against social engineering meant talking in a way that was stiff, impersonal, and accusatory. When the phone rang, nobody heard a potentially positive business call or a friend reaching out. We heard footsteps, nefariously creeping closer to our collection of social security numbers and bank statements.

Talking like a policeman or detective isn’t particularly fun. It’s a stressful, antihuman way of responding to the presence of another human being. The psychological burden of having to think, feel, and talk like a security system is real. Many of my coworkers felt it far more keenly than I did. Being forced to behave like a non-person, and treating someone else like a non-person, even for a few moments a day, is not very good.

One of the curious dilemmas of the AI age is that AI bots sound like us because we sound like AI bots. The most intense form of this dilemma is happening right now in magazines, blogs, newspapers, and book publishers. In desperation, many organizations that want to prioritize human writing are turning to software that purports to detect AI generated text. Some software does this better than others. But none do it perfectly, and I’m not just talking about software’s mistaking AI generated text for human-generated. The reverse situation is happening too, wherein text that is genuinely human is being flagged as AI-generated. Why? Because the human-generated text sounds like AI, and the software’s only job is to use advanced algorithms to detect which clauses, phrases, and sentences sound like something an LLM would churn out.

But what does an LLM churn out? The answer is, of course, human writing. All LLMs are trained on real human writing. The reason the way an LLM talks to you sounds human is because humans fed the LLM trillions upon trillions upon trillions of human sounds, and then programmed it to learn the ingredients of those and reproduce them in various ways.

AI companies have made the purposeful, conscious decision to use human language to blur the distinction between humans and machines. For the foreseeable future, it will not be self-evident to anyone what a human sounds like versus what a machine sounds like. Right now, we are hoping that machines themselves can help us spot the differences.

But my point is this. The last few years have been the climax, rather than the beginning, of the robotification of human language and identity. LLMs are bringing what we’ve been doing in the last few decades to a logical, profitable, and psychologically acidic conclusion. Nearly every technological innovation of the last twenty years has resulted in we human beings acting more and more like the bots that we are now replacing ourselves with. We have arrived at the AI era perfectly primed to accept the conditions of life on a planet of bots, because, phenomenologically at least, we’ve been living that way for a while.

Just about everyone I know says they dread the ringing of their phone these days. For millions, spam and junk calls have become far more frequent than any other kind of call. Americans get almost 3 billion spam calls every month, a reasonable explanation for why a lot of people admit they don’t even bother picking up the phone for an unknown number. Amazingly, there appears to be no great fix to this. Certain apps will charge you a monthly fee to screen calls, giving you more info and blocking high-probability junk callers from even getting your device to ring. None of these prophylactics are a sure thing. Most of us just resign ourselves to the three inevitable forces: Death, taxes, and spam.

Customer service, also, has become radically robotizized. Every single industry wants you to use their app, their chat service, or even their social media “help” account, rather than try to talk to a person. A truly human face or voice can, we know, decide to help more urgently and more thoroughly if they encounter a desperate enough person. Bots are unmoved. No hungry children, no sick passenger, no bereaved family can leave one impression on a bot. The bot’s currency of sincerity is data: your order number, your confirmation code, your two and three and ten-step authentication. An acquaintance of mine, adrift in the aftermath of a canceled flight and lost luggage, was even swindled by a fake customer service account. Again, the goal seems not to help customers or solve problems, but to reduce human on human encounters as much as possible.

The one scenario where bots appear to be mildly convenient is when the situation was easy anyway. If you’ve forgot something, for example, that was sent to you in a half dozen emails, there’s a decent chance a bot can simply remind you (more likely, they’ll ask you to confirm your identity a few times, before sending you a verification email, before sending you the email you actually need). Bots excel at doing the minimum possible.

This is a big reason why bots are bad writers. LLM-generated prose is, by virtue the process that creates it, frozen verbal leftovers. An LLM is perfectly capable of imitating a corporate professional’s staid compound sentences, especially the most basic, unsurprising constructions (“This is not that; it’s actually this.”). And because the vast majority of human have no desire for anything better, LLMs appear to be good writers. But they’re not. We are bad writers. The machines we’ve created can do only the bare minimum passably well because the same is true of us.

A little while ago there was a study done on what sources the major LLMs were using when a user prompts them with a relationship question, like “My girlfriend does this, why does she do it,” or, “I thinking I want to leave my husband. Should I?” The study determined that the #1 source of text that LLMs use to predict an appropriate respond to a relationship prompt is Reddit. Reddit is, of course, a notorious graveyard for life insight, for the simple reason that the kind of people most likely to publish regular content on Reddit also tend to be the kind of people who are bad at life in general and at relationships in particular.

Any human with a lick of experience and rationality can determine this with just a few minutes spent on Reddit. It doesn’t matter how much of Reddit you feed to a bot; it will never put this together. You see the cycle this creates? A person unable to navigate basic relationship stuff asks AI what she should do. The AI responds by reproducing slight variations of Reddit’s below-ground lifestyle content. The person follows this advice because she’s only slightly better than AI at discernment. Why? Because long before the relationship, through a long, complex pattern of choices, environment, and values that likely started before puberty, she has learned not to see any real difference between people and machines. She has become a bot.

In 2017, the leftist writer Freddie DeBoer wrote an essay titled “Planet of Cops.” In it, he lamented liberal political culture for the way it was encouraging people to try to catch and cancel each other. “The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats,” he wrote. “Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense.” DeBoer concludes:

See, the panopticon says we all get watched all the time, but there’s still a division between the guards and the prisoners. There’s still people who do the watching separate from the watched. And that’s not real life. No, in real life we’re all guards and prisoners at the same time. We are all informants on each other. Contemporary political culture is an autoimmune disorder. Do you enjoy living like this? Are you not exhausted?

DeBoer pointed out that left politics was unable to achieve robust change in things like policing and criminal justice, partly because its culture was operating like the systems it claimed to be unjust. The “planet of cops” wasn’t just a bad place to live. It was a sclerotic place to live. Almost nothing can be changed for the better if the people trying to change it are constantly at war inside their own tents.

Something very similar is going on with our bots. I suspect the most important reason it is so hard to get a groundswell of consensus against the dominance of AI is that most of us have been living for years as if the singularity were already here. What I mean is that for the nearly the past two decades, our work, our relationships, our self-help, and much of our school and art has been robotified.

Consider your own life. Think about the top five people that you text most often. If you found yourself needing to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these people were real people and not bots, without leaving your home, could you do it? Could you show photos of shared meals, trips, and experiences? Could you go find that book or memento they gave you years ago? How much hard evidence could you really provide, short of actually getting in your car, that the people in your phone exist as more than a name and a thread?

Could most people do this? I don’t know. I think there are a lot of people for whom the idea of an AI friend or therapist makes intuitive emotional sense precisely because for all practical purposes, those are the only kinds of friends and therapists they have anyway. Insisting that people and AI can never have a meaningful relationship just doesn’t mean all that much if “relationship” has largely come to mean sending texts or DMs on a screen. We’ve been living like this for years. The tools of “connection” have become vehicles for faceless content exchanges at best, and relentless spam more often.

And this is to say nothing of the way that we’ve been reconciling ourselves for years to fake, manipulated, brain dead internet content. The expansion of social media sites from “networks” to “platforms” in the late 2000s and early 2010s created an entire economy: the attention economy, where the product is quite literally anything that someone might put in front of their face for a few seconds. If economies produce what they are designed to produce, then the attention economy was designed to produce overwhelming amounts of staged, non-sincere content. The question “why were they filming” became Internet shorthand to ask why a particular video seemed to start right when an outrageous or illegal thing was about to happen—as if somebody might have known what was coming. People pretending to have emotional meltdowns on camera (with the shot being perfectly calibrated to capture both the tears and their “good side”) is common.

You know who else pretends to have emotions? You know who else uses intimate language to sound real but is really just reading from a script? Bots.

The question most people want to ask about AI is, “Is this OK? How might it help me, and how could it hurt me?” We think of this technology exclusively in terms of how I might experience it in the moments I want to experience it. The question we should be asking is, “Do I and the people I love want to live with more bots?” That’s really what’s being offered. We’re not being offered the chance to have a little button in the corner of our workstation that can speed things up or make us smarter when we need a boost. We’re being offered the chance to live with lots and lots and lots of bots. Bots are AI. AI is bots. The only reason to accept this offer is if you think the way we’ve been living for the past two decades—the spam, the phishing, the tricks, the automated voicemail, the mandatory chat, the invisible friends and voiceless counselors—is a good thing.

Here’s what I think:

I’ve written two books, hundreds of essays, and done dozens of talks and interviews about being human in a digital age. In my opinion, in terms of creating actual change, none of this matters, and none of it will matter. At scale, there are only two things that matter: What people are used to. How they live out “normal” (not how they define normal). If talking to and learning from and interacting with real human people is your lived out normal, then you will have a problem with a planet of bots. Even if you’re not ideologically committed, even if you’re not ready to oppose a data center or get Chromebooks out of elementary schools, you will, if that’s your normal, constantly feel as the planet of bots is off. You will feel constantly lied to by it. You will feel constantly ignored by it. You will feel alienated within it. And even if the guys with see-through houses that sell for $100 million manage to convince you are the last person on earth who feels this way, you will still feel that way. You may not say it. You’ll feel it.

It’s a miscalculation to worry about the way AI might disrupt industries or the economy. That kind of thing has been happening for hundreds of years. It might be brutal, but it will balance out eventually. But our lives are a different story. The real worry is not that AI will take our jobs, but that it will make the idea of possessing a job incomprehensible. AI writing our books? Bad. AI reading our books? Much worse. The trajectory we’ve been on for a long time is not merely one where we get machines to make the stuff we love. It’s that we love the machines themselves more than anything they make.

There is no “solution” to the planet of bots, for the same reason there’s no “solution” to divorce, or bad neighborhoods, or addiction. The only thing you can solve is a problem, but these things are not “problems” in that sense. They are lived realities. They are generational, societal, existential cycles that get lived out again and again because what people take as being normal is what they take as being normal for them. These things will persist in the lives of all those for whom they remain normal. And they will change when, and only when, one, or two, or a billion people decide, “This isn’t normal, and it’s not going to be normal for me.” When one person breaks a generational cycle, they are often celebrated and congratulated. When an entire culture breaks a generational cycle, war usually starts.

You know I’m not calling for war. I’m just calling for honesty. We live in the planet of bots. And many of us have already begun the journey of accepting it as normal. We cannot feel ourselves drowning because we’ve been thinking we were fish the whole time.

Read more

Lindsay Clancy is on trial in Massachusetts for the murder of her three children. She has confessed to the killings, but has pled insanity. Her defense argues that she had been suffering from an extreme case of postpartum psychosis and was hearing voices in her head telling to kill her kids.

The Internet is, of course, very interested. And the way parti…

Read more

1. Holistic depornification

2. The ruthless pursuit of “above-ground living.”

3. Mentorship and “honest affirmation.”

4. Family reconciliation.

Today, the topic is the ruthless pursuit of above-ground living.

“Simply Playing a Game”

In 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported on the tragedy of a 14 year old Orlando boy who killed himself. Days before, he had told his AI chatbot “girlfriend” of his plans. The bot exhorted him not to follow through. But the illusion of romance continued. According to their chat logs, the boy seemed to think killing himself might actually unite him with the bot.

What about the people around him? A short paragraph tells a big story:

According to transcripts, Sewell began to feel that the time he spent with Daenerys [the bot] was more important, and certainly more satisfying, than the time he spent in school or with his friends and family. His mother was concerned by his withdrawal—he always seemed to be headed to his room and to his screen, where he’d chat for hours. But she figured she needn’t worry too much. Her son was simply playing a game.

The last two sentences invite reflection. A young teenage boy’s radical withdrawing from friends and family wasn’t enough to worry his mother, since he was just playing a game. My guess is that most people who read this story will come away thinking the lesson is that parasocial relationships with AI bots are dangerous. True. But the real takeaway is before that. When young men recede from the in-person world, when they tuck away in corners away from family, friends, and real life, bad things—sometimes tragic things—are inevitable.

Disappearing from real life into isolated silos of consumption is what I call “below-ground living.” Below-ground living doesn’t mean merely a lot of time on our phones. It’s not merely a measure of screen time. Nor is the opposite of below-ground living purely a life without social media or streaming. Below-ground living is a mode of life, a rhythm of existence that gravitates toward the ephemereal, the meaningless, and the elsewhere. It’s a pattern whereby a person develops a discomfort with in-person life, opting whenever possible to substitute a digital alternative.

Below-ground living makes days without conversation or meaningful work feel normal, even therapeutic. In below-ground living, digital devices are not tools, but furniture, the things that play the most active role in supporting day to day existence. Virtual communities become the “real” friends, who get access to personality while the family, coworkers, and classmates are left wondering, “What are they up to?”

In addition to holistic depornification, young men need “above-ground living.” If below ground living is a rhythm of steady retreat into consumption, above-ground living is a rhythm of production. It’s a life of meaningful work, genuine friendship, and confident identity. Above-ground living is living that’s fruitful for others, yes, but also a powerful antidote to despair and delusion in oneself.

The Movement of Manhood

My friend and colleague Champ Thornton once shared with me a definition of manhood he has used with his (now grown) sons: “Manhood means moving toward people and problems in love and wisdom.” This doesn’t encompass everything about being a man, but it does capture the movement of manhood. Healthy manhood is on the move, not inert. A healthy man does not crave safety most of all. He feels an urge to step into new experiences, new responsibilities, new areas of the world that he can leave better than before.

Read more

The Law of Diminishing Restriction

Stipulate the following:

1. Guidelines about AI use are an absolute good, both at the personal and the institutional level.

2. Tech guidelines are in general unpopular and difficult to maintain over time.

3. Thus, most guidelines about AI use will, directionally at least, “broaden” rather than “narrow” over time. In other words, …

Read more

Anthony Fauci and Donald Trump are very different people: in their mannerisms, in their beliefs, and in the company they keep. They are not, however, very different kinds of leaders. The similarities between the two become more obvious with time. Each one is deeply confident in his abilities—a confidence that easily shades into arrogance. Both of them crave attention and affirmation, especially from those sitting high atop their preferred social ladders.

Neither one seems to occupy a mental universe in which it is possible they’re wrong. They neither admit nor apologize. At the very most, they may change course when cornered, but this change never means they were wrong to begin with. It means either that untrustworthy people led them to this place or else that the mass of humanity cannot yet comprehend or appreciate their genius. Both Fauci and Trump have an army of full-time critics, many of whom make good and important points, but too many of whom seem to have made such criticism their entire personality and worldview.

In fairness to Fauci, his record consists not of eight years of presidency, but of one to two years of real but limited power during the COVID lockdowns. But Fauci, with help, crammed an impressive amount of failure into a limited window. His testimonies before Congress have been earnest, and I do not doubt that Fauci himself believes to this day that all of his recommendations, assurances, insistences, and rhetoric during COVID were still the best anyone could do. But if sincerity is not a measure of truth for people who start wars with Iran, neither is it for people who want to keep schools and churches closed indefinitely.

Read more

I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on its opening weekend. I liked it, but didn’t love it, and wasn’t sure why not. So I went back a few days ago and watched it again. The second time around, I liked it even less, and I knew why. It just has no emotional center. Once the awesomeness of the spectacle wears of—and it is an awesome spectacle, no question—the stakes of the whole thing evaporate.

Ideology is the least of The Odyssey’s problems. A woke adaptation of Homer would probably have been more interesting, if for no other reason than it would have required a character-centered screenplay rather than just a trauma-informed one. No, The Odyssey isn’t woke. It’s not sure what it is.

It’s a shame that the media buzz and disappointments of The Odyssey have buried the twentieth birthday of what I still consider to be Nolan’s best movie: The Prestige. The Prestige is not Nolan’s smartest or most ambitious project. It doesn’t have the cultural currency of The Dark Knight, the inventiveness of Inception, or the craft of Oppenheimer. Rather, The Prestige is a subtle and sneaky undressing of human nature with the help of Nolan’s favorite narrative device: The puzzle.

Read more

First off, I sincerely want to thank everyone who wrote an email, comment, or text checking on me after the PSA earlier this month. I got a lot of very kind, very concerned notes, and the amount of genuine friendliness and neighborly care was a blessing. Thank you to all who did that.

Second, I (who am perfectly fine!)…

Read more

Thank you for reading.

SDJ

Read more

Read more

Read more

Last June, the Presbyterian Church in America’s General Assembly, under the leadership of moderator Kevin DeYoung, commissioned a denominational study and report on Christian nationalism. That report has now been released. I’m not a Presbyterian, but I have several friends who are pastors and teachers within the PCA, and I ser…

Read more

Read more