technology
The sirens in our pockets
Three recent books share a common thread, one that echoes concerns anticipated by Marshall McLuhan. What’s at stake, they argue, is nothing short of our humanity.
What a society needs to survive
Yuval Noah Harari’s history of information networks emphasizes two crucial characteristics: truth telling and self-correction.
The all-knowing cloud and the cloud of unknowing
Clouds evoke the sublime. What about the cloud that stores our data and mediates its flow?
Can we build our own future?
Elon Musk’s techno-optimism needs something to temper it. Maybe the dimmer outlook of a companion named Hobbes.
A crushing lack of humanity
Both Apple’s “Crush” ad and Catholic Answers’ AI priest alarmed people. There’s some hope in that reaction.
Welcome to the commodity biopic
These movies about influential consumer objects aren’t really origin stories at all.
A tech-savvy Christian sexual ethic
Kate Ott challenges us to practice erotically attuned love everywhere, even online.
In the dance with technology, who leads?
Jacques Ellul diagnosed the problem. Paul Patton and Robert Woods offer some solutions.
Personhood beyond personalization
Technology can’t give us what we really want, says Andy Crouch.
A robot learns to be a child
The central character of Kazuo Ishiguro’s virtuosic 2021 novel is an “Artificial Friend” with a young girl’s body.
We need our screens right now. But what about later?
Ed Cyzewski’s prepandemic takedown of the digital formation of Christians is still surprisingly useful.
Why climate activist Bill McKibben is concerned about AI and genetic engineering
“It comes down to human solidarity. Another name for solidarity is love.”
Ethical hacks for managing our adolescent technologies
Kate Ott looks at the moral implications of digital language.
Christian humanism in a technocratic world
Alan Jacobs's biography of T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, Jacques Maritain, and C.S. Lewis