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Annelise Roberts's avatar

I have decided I have two goals for our school year:

1) “waste” more time WITH my children

2) be more easily interrupted (except when I’m taking a nap. We’re really working on NOT interrupting mom’s nap unless there’s an honest to goodness emergency).

I have this sense that my perception of what time is for is being reworked. I feel exceptionally out of sorts because growth is often unpleasant. But I’ve been wondering if technology gives us this illusion of being busy and important, when perhaps it’s mostly an escape from having to pay attention to our real life (insert Wendell Berry quote about the futility of “keeping up with the times” here).

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Linda Morrison Durant's avatar

Superb. This morning I just read two essays from young people whose precious lives were being destroyed:

https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/why-i-traded-my-smartphone-for-an-ax?r=1pg5cw&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

I was also struck by the larger context of The Machine which Paul Kingsnorth has been exploring on his Substack, and the spiritual significance of Mammon which he expands upon in this excellent interview at The Plough:

“[W]hen you worship Mammon, whether that’s the actual worship of a god or a demon or whether it’s the worship of that spirit, you are just accumulating wealth. And that is, again, the spirit of the Tower of Babel. It’s the spirit of Cain. It’s the spirit of the worldly thing that I call the machine, this great technological monster combined with consumer capitalism which is basically ravaging the earth. It’s Mammon. Our entire society is worshiping Mammon. We’ve taken the seven deadly sins and we’ve turned them all into consumer opportunities. Every single one of the seven deadly sins has been monetized and is promoted as a means of economic growth. So it seems to me that we are openly worshiping Mammon.

And the inevitable result of this worship is that we are going to start, and we’re already openly doing it now, trying to create new forms of life, trying to create beings and gods and artificial intelligences, trying to rebuild nature from scratch, trying to make ourselves live forever, upload our minds, all of this kind of increasingly demonic fantasizing that’s going on in Silicon Valley.

It all comes down to the worship of Mammon, I think. The refusal to give away, the desire to accumulate, the desire for power. And it’s the oldest binary I think in Christianity, isn’t it? Those are the two options. You get God or Mammon and you can’t serve both. And that’s why the deeper I go into the Christian journey, the more it seems to me to be almost impossible to live as a Christian in this culture. And I don’t know what that means for me yet, but I have to work it out.”

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/the-technology-of-demons

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