One of the reasons we struggle to make good judgements about a given technology is that we assume that any good use justifies the technology as a whole. Because our basic assumption is that technologies are neutral—they aren’t—we think that if a good use can be seen then we should assume that difference between good and bad uses is the nature of the human heart and the intent of the user.
I recently heard Matt Hosier teach a brief theology of technology. He outlined that the key question as he understood it is the tendency of the technology. A technology can have a tendency towards the good or towards the wicked, but a good technology can be used for wicked ends, and a wicked technology can be used for good ends. He gave us some good questions to use to assess a given technology’s tendency. He argued that books are a fundamentally good technology that can be used for wickedness, and that smartphones are a fundamentally evil technology that can be used for good. He’s right, of course, but I’d like to make a broader point about why we find that sort of argument challenging to follow.
The argument rests on the telos of the technology in question: its natural end. What does it, without outside intervention, tend towards? If you’ll allow a strangely formed question: what’s its narrative purpose in the plot without characters acting on it?
Our assumption is that all things are neutral. That’s thinking that’s only possible in a world dominated by machines. If we see the world not as a series of things that we made for our use, but rather as imbued fundamentally with the glory of God that brims visibly once we learn how to pay attention, then every thing must have a natural and deliberate end. That goes even for things that humans make. Those ends have been hardcoded into the instrument or device. Technologies are not neutral but good or evil.
This isn’t saying that evil technologies cannot be used; they can be turned to good, but it will require us to work against the ends of the technology in question. We may even decide that such action isn’t always possible.
We need to shed the instrumental thinking that technologies—and by this I mean everything humans have made—are neutral but people perform good or bad acts. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is rhetoric of neutrality. I don’t want to wade into any discourse about gun control, living in a country where very few guns are legal and few people have them doesn’t give me good understanding of that debate in other countries, but we have to admit that the natural end, the narrative purpose, of a gun is to kill something. That’s true of any weapon, though most have a purpose other than warfare, guns included, as they can hunt animals for food (that was, of course, in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels, the reason the Aiel wouldn’t touch a sword, it had no purpose except killing another person).
Technologies are not neutral; they have tendencies in themselves. This doesn’t suddenly mean that the use of something by a person doesn’t matter, of course it does. Even those that tend to the good can be used by humans for wicked ends.
Good use requires knowledge of something’s tendency. Naivety, especially around new technologies, doesn’t serve us well. Chekhov’s Gun—the maxim that if a rifle hangs over the fireplace in the first act of a play, it must go off by the end of the third—is an important real life principle, not just a literary one: sure, it means you can guess the direction of most TV plots by paying attention to what the camera focuses on, but reality runs on narrative logic too. What I mean by that is it is difficult to use things outside of their tendency; not impossible, subversion is also an important literary tool, but it should make us wary.
We should therefore be very careful about how we use things that tend to evil. We shouldn’t give them to children, generally speaking, and any use by children is going to be within strict limits. In the same way you don’t hand a handgun to a child and leave them to get on with it, you don’t give them a smartphone. A teen might perhaps get supervised use as you train them in it, but the nature of the smartphone makes supervised use challenging.
The tide has turned on the smartphone. It seems pretty clear now that while being incredibly useful, they also change us in a number of marked ways. Their use has been connected with a range of bad outcomes for children and teenagers: schools and parents are starting to wake up to this.
The thing we should note, as you read this, most likely on one of those evil devices, is that the distinction is true for you too. Have you noticed the ways that the smartphone tends towards evil in your own life? Have you put specific practices and disciplines in place to lead away towards what is good, true, and beautiful as you use your phone?
I suspect that few of us have gone anywhere near far enough.
Photo by Alex Simpson on Unsplash
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