As readers of First Things well know, more and more examinations of the threat of technology to common humanity are appearing in print, along with appreciative studies of a non-digital lifestyle. Here are some interesting books on that theme.
Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World came out last fall and continues to draw attention. The book illustrates how habitual use of tech devices affects everyday behavior. Rosen turns to such mundane situations as pedestrian mores in public space and waiting in a doctor’s office, describing how they have changed for the worse. It’s a readable and illuminating mix of anecdote, personal experience (Rosen spent a week in a monastery), empirical research, statements by tech experts, and disinterested observation by the author. The extinction she highlights is real, and the warning should be heeded.
While most books critical of technology focus on the individual, Carl Benedikt Frey focuses on the nation. How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations is a hefty study of how inventions and the role of the state in their development—or non-development—changed the course of mighty nations. (Frey’s bibliography alone runs to fifty pages.) Why did Silicon Valley take off and produce one breakthrough after another, while the Soviet Union’s copycat project, Zelenograd, stalled and ended? Why has innovation slowed in China? (It doesn’t help, Frey says, that “the Party exists outside the legal system.”) Why has it slowed in the United States? (One reason: When small tech companies succeed and grow, they hire marketers and public relations teams, start giving to politicians and parties, and buy up competitors.) Resistance to innovation can also come from below, from ordinary people, who increasingly find that Silicon Valley’s latest marvels do not improve their quality of life or create better jobs. Frey ends with a 2023 survey showing that “52 percent of Americans are now more concerned than excited about the growing use of artificial intelligence, while only 10 percent say they are more excited than concerned.”
Vicki J. Sapp is a veteran college teacher whose career runs, she says, from “the time between no internet and pretty much all internet.” Her book, Paradigm Lost: Learning and Literacy in the Digital Divide, gives firsthand experience of the difficulties a print-oriented instructor faces in a classroom of screens and kids attached to them. She recalls getting a message from a colleague informing everyone in her department about an expert at UCLA showing teachers how to teach media literacy to freshmen. Meanwhile, almost 50 percent of the attendees in freshman comp don’t earn passing grades. She feels like she’s always wandering between two worlds, the old and the new. She loves Dante and Borges, but is told by composition theorists: “Writing today means weaving text, images, sound and video—working within and across multiple media, often for delivery within and across digital spaces.” It’s overwhelming for her. Sapp creates courses that explore the problem, copes with pointless professional development tasks, listens to adults and students peddle utopian talk of digitized learning, discusses four “classroom cyber crimes” (for example, “The Case of the Sexting Schoolkids”), and knows not where it’s all headed. High school and college teachers will feel her pain.
Libraries of the Mind, by William Marx, is a curious little book that, while not anti-technology, brings up so many pre-digital elements of writing and libraries that I include it here. Marx talks about oral tradition, scrolls and codices, and card catalogs. Marx declares, too, the limitations of digital methods: “Far from being unified, the digital world is fragmented into isolated communities, where social networks shuttle individuals back to their own narrow echo chamber, reinforced by algorithms designed to solidify preexisting views.” More important, however, may be the opportunity costs of screen time, that is, the loss of what the new mores replaced. They include habits such as browsing through the stacks, poring over those deep drawers in the card catalog by subject or by author, or even the bare act of entering an old library, which is equal to “stepping into a different mental landscape.” Every person should have a library of his own, Marx says, one in the mind, which is the first tool of intellectual growth and flexibility, not to mention an escape from parochialism.
Finally, we have Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life, which isn’t explicitly an anti-technology book, but it does hold up a pre-tech society and culture as a moral model for the present time. Grace Hamman returns to the Middle Ages, long before modern inventions changed everything, to find ways toward a higher happiness. The medieval image of the Tree of Vices and the Tree of Virtues is a better guide to a good life than anything found on Spotify or Instagram. What pre-modern writers say about pride, greed, and so forth, applies to our wayward hearts better than promises of liberation and even immortality. We need more medieval talk of gluttony and abstinence. Hamman looks to Julian of Norwich, Hugh of St. Victor, the Pearl poet, St. Augustine, Margery Kempe, St. Catherine of Siena, Aquinas—men and women of moral wisdom who bring peace and wholeness, conditions ever more fleeting in a screen-obsessed population.
