Spirit in the Technopolis

Thin humans, three cities, and a dragon

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1563

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. - Maria Rainer Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I had this globe when I was a kid, and I’d spin it around and close my eyes and wait, then put my finger down and open my eyes to see where I’d landed—Alaska, the Canary Islands, or smack in the middle of the Pacific. I still have this globe somewhere in the house. It’s now old and there’s a chunk missing in the ice of the south pole, so that it’s wobbly on its axis when you spin it around. And that’s one way to describe our own world, I think.

Things are changing, tectonic plates are shifting under our ideological feet, and we feel the instability in our bones. And it isn’t just ideology. As older values and ways of living are increasingly questioned or dismantled, screens and machines are coming to the rescue, and for the most part we are welcoming it.

Just look at how close we’ve gotten to our phones, and lately to AI, and soon, perhaps, to Apple Vision Pro. Our conditioning is almost complete. Most of us have a device-shaped hole in our heart: we don’t quite feel complete without a piece of machine attached to us.

We used to say Jesus filled the hole in our hearts. When we took Communion we were eating the Savior, but now technology, the new savior, does the opposite—it consumes us, dominating more and more of what we do and how we think of ourselves.

“It’s all for the best,” we are told, or something along those lines.

But I sense a shadowy undercurrent, like an unsolved question in my heart, which unnerves me, though I’m trying to be patient with it.

It isn’t in my heart only. It’s the unsolved question of Western civilization.

That question stands before us; the locked room of the future has yet to be flung open to reveal what we are making. But something is under construction behind that dark door, something discernible—you need only put your ear to it to hear the sounds and voices. Enough to catch an intimation of what might be coming.

The airport as a Technopolis

There is a tangible aspect of the Machine that I will call “the Technopolis”. It can be compared to a busy international airport—say, Gatwick airport near London. I don’t want to pick on Gatwick, but it stands out in my mind, because I spent many hours inside it while returning from a trip to Switzerland, and many of these very words, in fact, were written while sitting in the dazzlingly dreary north terminal, or maybe the south—I can’t recall—with luggage and family members huddled or dozing on either side of me, and my coffee precariously balanced on a free edge.     

An airport’s purpose is to help people find a flying vehicle that will transport them hundreds, or thousands, of miles to new locations. In that sense airports are fingers pointing to different spots on the earth, though unlike my childhood journeys, which never took me beyond my fingertip on a globe, airports are fingers pointing to realities: real journeys, real places.   

This miracle exacts a cost. We must leave the little patch of earth we call home, and abandon all things familiar, except for whatever can be stuffed in a box smaller than a grocery cart. Then we journey, perhaps by cab, perhaps through heavy traffic, to the airport building, where we present our ID. Here, in the airport, we are all unique human beings and must be formally identified as such—this particular name, this date of birth, this country of origin—and yet, simultaneously, we are clumped together, as if we’re all the same, as if we are all actually nobody. Then we are shuffled along efficiently with our plastic box, through check-in and through customs, and through a fragrance swamp of duty-free stores, until we emerge in a massive hall of more shops and food courts and a pharmacy and a barren play area for kids with a dirty carpet that would horrify most parents, if they weren’t so resigned and weary.

And swirling through all of this, in eddies and currents, is a crowd of people, perfect strangers from all over the world. In their faces you see every mood, from cheerful to exhausted to hurried. There are people eating BLT sandwiches and getting drunk or laughing, and many are on devices, even myself, and there are bookstores with neatly arranged displays, smelling of fresh ink, recommending narratives of love or horror, or how to succeed in life without giving a f*ck, or how a certain celebrity overcame addiction.

Everything is expensive, yet you are made to feel like a king: it’s all here for you, for your happiness. At the same time, being barely able to afford anything, and toting about your plastic box on wheels, you have almost nothing. In this way the airport foreshadows the WEF promise that you will own nothing and be happy—except, in the airport, you are not really happy, you are more like high, or hyper-stimulated, or tired, or slightly nauseated.

The airport is a Machine Pride event, showcasing not sexuality, but hinting at our future technological city, our hoped-for civilization, promising its many miracles—safety, efficiency, ID systems, fantastic journeys, explorations, endless enticements—laid out in prototype for all to see. Here is a sketch of the Technopolis that might one day overtake urban Western civilization.  

And if you can judge a civilization by its toilets, the place reeks.

The thin identity

In a previous essay I described a Muslim man who parked his car on a roadside one damp evening to roll out his mat and pray on the sidewalk. It was, I suggested, an example of disruptive spirituality, one that creates a spiritual space within the Machine and which, to an extent, counters the Machine’s influence.

While at Gatwick, my disruptive spiritual practice was reading C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, in paperback. Not exactly like flinging out a prayer carpet. Still, it gave shelter to my beleaguered mind, a Kingnorthian cave of wholesome contemplation. But just barely, for I was very tired from having woken early that morning, and a tired mind is a destabilized mind that easily slips off its center and might find itself, as in my case, filled with a sudden hankering for a £ 3.95 plate of French fries.

So a few minutes later I’m greedily hunched over a smeared tray of fries in a packed little eatery, music assailing me from the speakers above. I might be eating a high carb food, the kind that can make people fat, but I sense the future will have the opposite effect, if it’s anything like an airport: it will make us thinner.

Screens and machines are shaking up the world, but I don’t think the outcome will be perpetual instability. Rather, we will transition into a civilization of people who are light and insubstantial. The devices that govern our lives will keep us on the surface of things: the surface of time, by forcing too much hurry and efficiency; the surface of relationships, which will be shallower and more functional; the surface of information, which will keep us credulous; the surface of our own thoughts and feelings, which will keep us alienated from our own depths.

The citizen of the future Technopolis will be an airport species of human, one with a thin identity: as light as luggage, as homeless as a migrant.

Of course some people may like that. It might seem liberating. But there is one thing to remember before offering up your soul for the passport stamp: The Technopolis is absolute.

Already we see elements of absoluteness in the airport, a massive structure that hyper-controls our movements, the possessions we are entitled to carry, where and what we eat, where we can sit, what we can buy. The micro-management is so intense that we can’t even bring our own water, and personal privacy is reduced to a toilet stall, and the slightest suspicion or wrong-spoken word can get you in serious trouble, and there is no nature either, no dandelions sprouting up between the tiles at the Starbucks, no crows perched over the luggage carousel, nothing but miles of pavement and walls and bank posters of middle-aged women in bathing suits, leaping into pools.  

Airports deform normal human functioning, but blessedly only for a few hours. It’s a small suffering in exchange for the miracle of flight.

But what if we had to live in a world like that all the time?

The princess, the dragon, and the three-city problem

Ritter Georg, by Karl Nathan Burckhardt (1878-1923)

It need not be so. A wiser race of humans might choose to subdue technology than to be subdued by it.  In the one version of the myth of St. George, he slays the dragon to rescue a princess, but in another version, he transfixes the dragon with his lance, and then the princess places her girdle around the dragon’s body, which renders the monster docile so that it follows her like a hound.

Could we do this with technology?

In a Wired article last year,

Luke Burgis

proposed that we are facing a “three-city problem” in modern life, a competition between Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, which represent Reason, Religion, and Technology.

Burgis points out that these three cities—representing three very different ways of seeing the world—aren’t getting along very well. With reference to Tertullian, an early Father of the Church, Burgis writes:

If Tertullian were alive today, I believe he would ask: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem—and what do either have to do with Silicon Valley?” In other words, how do the domains of reason and religion relate to the domain of technological innovation and its financiers in Silicon Valley? If the Enlightenment champion Steven Pinker (a resident of Athens) walked into a bar with a Trappist monk (Jerusalem) and Elon Musk (Silicon Valley) with the goal of solving a problem, would they ever be able to arrive at a consensus?

The fact we have three (rather than just two) forces competing with each other—Reason, Religion, and Technology—makes it all the more difficult to figure out the right balance between them, much like trying to mathematically solve for the movement of three celestial bodies orbiting around each other in space, each with its own pathway and center of gravity.

And we are far from solving it:

Our failure to understand the three-city problem is causing many people to isolate in one city or another without realizing it. Academics confine themselves to their academic boroughs and occupy themselves in the life of reason; some Christians are calling for the adoption of a “Benedict option,” the case for communal religious life, with boundaries separating it from the broader culture; and Silicon Valley engineers immerse themselves in the “ecosystem” where capital and contacts flow freely, but where a sandal-wearing Franciscan friar walking down the streets of Palo Alto in a brown robe could easily be mistaken for an eccentric founder. There is little cross-cultural literacy.

Burgis concludes that we need all three cities, and cannot dispense with any of them without losing a great deal. What I would add to his analysis are a couple of observations on how the orbits of these cities might evolve over time. 

One of the unusual things about Reason and Technology is that they can each serve as “absolutes”. Neither implies a God, of course, but people can put their total faith in them, for instance by creating human values based on logic, or by trusting technology to solve our deepest problems, like curing all disease and unhappiness. Reason and Technology can both become artificial substitutes for Religion, in the sense of becoming systems of thought and ways of living that are totalizing and consume the whole of our lives and how we see the world.  

The reverse cannot be said of Religion: it cannot serve as a substitute for Reason, and it cannot serve as a substitute for Technology.

And there is another thing that Reason and Technology have in common: they are mutually reinforcing. A belief that we must lead lives based on rationality and logic tends to move us away from supernatural ideas and toward observable, measurable things. It leads to materialism, invention, and Technology. At the same time, the success of Technology—its ability to solve many problems—reinforces confidence in materialism and the very thing that gave birth to it: Reason.

Returning to Burgis’s three-city problem, it seems that a probable outcome is that Athens (Reason) and Silicon Valley (Tech) will join forces to suppress or destroy Jerusalem (Religion), and to erect themselves as absolutes. They are likely to do this because, as I have suggested, Reason and Technology tend to reinforce each other, and they can also serve as substitutes for Religion as a place to put our absolute faith.

If a natural alliance between Athens and Silicon Valley does take hold, then they will invariably coalesce into a single ruling city—what I have been calling the Technopolis—where governance is split between Technology (which controls people, goods, and services) and Reason, which creates the justification for the city’s ideological values (most likely utilitarian).

Such is the default outcome if we do nothing: if we just wait and watch these two cities, like planets or stars, continue along their natural orbits. In reality, the likelihood of this outcome is even higher, as there are many groups who are in favor of a Technopolis. These groups include:

Investors, who profit from financing tech.

Corporations, which profit from making tech and managing its services.

Political and Institutional Leaders, who wish to use tech to manage human beings.

Transhumanists, who ideologically believe that tech is humanity’s salvation. 

Tech Optimists, who are tech’s natural enthusiasts and cheerleaders, and who don’t often appreciate the dark side of tech.

Youth, whose minds tend to be more impulsive and whose emotions are less well-regulated, and thus can get swept up in technologies that tap into those weaknesses.

Extreme Progressives, who seek to dismantle traditional values and worldviews, and see great utility in the “thin identities” that a Technopolis can foster in humanity. 

A spiritual axis through the heart

By default or by design, we are trending toward a day when the Technopolis triumphs over Jerusalem, a day when most of us or our children will end up living in overcrowded urban centers, continuously ID’d and monitored, bedazzled and regulated by devices, oppressed and enticed by reeks and fragrances, perpetual renters of everything, owners of little or nothing, “progressively” distorted through interfaces with machines, a thin species of human.

This future is already taking shape. The unsolved question of Western civilization is being answered, the locked door slowly opening. But no matter what direction things ultimately go in, we still—at this point anyway—have choices. One of these choices, as I suggested earlier, is to seek out a disruptive spiritual practice that can shelter us. This is not the only choice, but it’s a potent one, as spiritual practices tend to be rooted in transcendent foundations that stabilize our basic values and way of living.

We need un-Machine foundations, as the Technopolis is an absolute: a place where people have invested their deepest faith in Athens (Reason) and Silicon Valley (Tech).

Our world will spin on whatever absolute we give it, like a globe on an axis. If the axis is misaligned, we get a wobble. A true spiritual axis runs through the human heart and into the Eternal. No alignment will be perfect, granted—evil runs through the human heart, too. But some alignments are truer than others. Some, if we live them faithfully, might help nudge the world’s spin toward a better alignment.

A few years before Tertullian wondered what Athens had to do with Jerusalem, the Antonine Plague swept through Rome. Possibly smallpox, it caused about 2000 deaths per day in the city; the total empire-wide death count amounted to about 10% of the population.

Christianity was still a persecuted religion in the empire, but even so, Christians tried to help the sick, evidently obeying Jesus’ command to love our neighbors. The same happened during the later Plague of Cyprian. As one commentator points out:

Nor was it just Christians who noted this reaction of Christians to the plague. A century later, the actively pagan Emperor Julian would complain bitterly of how “the Galileans” would care for even non-Christian sick people, while the church historian Pontianus recounts how Christians ensured that “good was done to all men, not merely to the household of faith.”

This same sacrificial love also ended up converting many Romans to the faith of the persecuted “Galileans”—which is little surprise. Who wouldn’t be inspired by people who were willing to die, if necessary, to heal and save the lives of others? Who wouldn’t ask, How do you do this—and how can I find this love and strength too?

We’ve already had a pandemic in our own time, which is officially over, but the virus of our technological dependence continues to spread, causing a slow, progressive deformation of our lives. If our disruptive spiritual practices are to make any difference in the emerging Technopolis, then they must demonstrate to others one simple thing: they keep us human. They save what is essential to be a person.

The evidence of this might be seen in many ways, but most of all in the sacrificial love at the center of our lives. It need not be perfect; it won’t be. But no other absolute will do; no other axis will stabilize my heart or yours, or a family’s, a stranger’s, an enemy’s.

I’m not saying that the thin people of the Technopolis will be incapable of love, only that, as a whole, the depth and commitment of love in that place will be shallower or warped, as its absolute is wrongly established: on reason and logic, tools and utility.

And the Technopolis is coming. Athens and Silicon Valley are rotating in orbits that are drawing them ever closer, like two stars threatening to collapse into one. If they continue this way, they will usurp Jerusalem’s position, even try to consume it, like a black hole swallowing up a smaller neighbor. There could be hard times ahead for spiritual and religious people, as there were hard times in Rome.

What do we do? The temptation is to be like St. George; the temptation is to fight the dragon and slay it. But the truth is the other way around. We must establish our absolute, and our disruptive spiritual practice, on sacrificial love. We can do more than that, but not less. We must allow our hearts to be pierced with an eternal lance, for the dragon we must confront is not out there, but in here; the fundamental thing that needs to be overcome is not the Technopolis, but within us.

And the lance that runs through us will re-align us with the Eternal, and reveal a hope that others can look to for life.

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A reminder: My new novel, Exogenesis, is available in wide release. The novel gets at the heart of the ideas discussed on this Substack: “Part 1984, part Brave New World…glimmers with hope: Blade Runner meets The Benedict Option. A vivid read” (advance review).

You can get Exogenesis through the publisher Ignatius Press, as well as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other outlets.