technology
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The Parade to the Future
Tech criticism is seductive. Pessimism often is. The appeal of it has to do, I think, with the way these critics (people like Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, Albert Borgmann, and others) name the dis-ease we all feel. Yet, as Alan Jacobs comments, even if the tech critics were right, “So what?” Here are some suggestions…
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Leaving Facebook
Finally, after actually months of planning to do it, I deleted my Facebook account. For whatever reason, I was dragging my feet. I didn’t want to figure out the process for downloading photos and videos. I felt wistful about the interactions I’d had with old classmates. I wondered how I would be able to promote…
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Is Not This Thing in My Right Hand a Lie?
I made a video last year in 2023 after reading something in the book of Isaiah that felt weirdly prescient. After all, this was a book written anywhere between six and eight centuries before Christ (depending on who you ask), yet it had passages like this one…
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The One Devices
When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, he made a point of emphasizing that he was not presenting a phone or an iPod or an internet communication device: “These are not three separate devices. This is one device.”
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The Physical Internet
The question, “What is the Internet?”, has meaning because, despite our daily engagement with it, we often have no idea just what constitutes it. We are aware that its superficial reality — what we actually engage with via sophisticated UX/UI — is radically not the same as its physical reality. I have often wondered whether…
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Towards a Handmade Digital Artifact
How artists and designers are applying real world constraints to the digital in order to make something new Bradley Hart creates art with bubblewrap, paint, and syringes. He starts by using a computer to transform an image — the Mona Lisa or a Van Gogh self-portrait — into a series of coloured dots. Once these dots and…
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A.I., Bitcoin, and Cloud
An attempt at a theological ABC in memory of Frederick Buechner Frederick Buechner passed away last week at the age of 96. Arguably one of the greatest Christian writers in English of the 20th century, Buechner was a novelist, essayist, minister, teacher, and more. I first encountered him in Philip Yancey’s book, Soul Survivor, where he…
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A Theology of Barcodes
Mark of the Beast, or Brilliant Human Innovation? (Or both?) I don’t think that I ever actually thought that barcodes were a tool of the Antichrist. When I was a young teenager, still very much in the throes of a passionate interest in eschatology—not unlike a young secular nerd being fascinated with Star Trek—I think I maybe did believe…
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The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites
Seeking a path out of abstraction I’ve read Thomas Thwaites’s The Toaster Project twice and continue to get insights out of it—I’ll cut to the chase now to just say that it is fantastic. As I describe below, Thwaites’s project informs the larger project of The Given World in important ways by exemplifying the kind of analytical approach a theology of…
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