Entering the Digital Desert

Recapturing humanity in an electronic world

Mar 02, 2025

The human spirit is restless--always seeking, always eager to stimulate our minds and senses through communication, and even more eager to stimulate our egos through self-expression. That doesn't have to be a bad thing. Ego is the element of the psyche that allows for self-awareness. Only when it becomes centered and exaggerated do we have that sense of "ego-tism," which inflates the self and warps our sense of being.

The benign ego is the part of our self that searches for answers and it seeks our places in the world. The deformed ego has a distorted sense of that self, along with a tendency to impose its place in the world. Electronic communication is intrinsically ego-warping because it allows for none of the natural human feedback available to normal interpersonal contact, and rewards ego-tism even at its most destructive. It lacks the subtle interpersonal checks and balances essential to preventing the descent into a kind of digital narcissism.

Our use of online communication is fraught with pitfalls. It provides an illusion of encounter while imposing a mediating technology that warps everything said. It's as though two people believe they are speaking directly each to the other in a room, but in reality are communicating through bullhorns that add filters and distortions, changing the ordinary meaning of words and expressions while amplifying them.

No one in digital spaces communicates what they believe they are communicating. These very words, found on a Substack page or delivered via email, have a different meaning than they would coming out of my mouth, and even coming out of my mouth they would have a different meaning in front of a class, from a pulpit, on the telephone, or over cheeseburgers and beer.

And yet communication is essential to human flourishing, and in our technologically isolating society people are more lonely and cut-off than ever. Where are we to turn? Technology causes our communities to collapse and traps people in silos of loneliness, and then technology offers us a solution of digitally-mediated community and friendship.

It's as though we have replaced a real thing--with all its difficulties and glories, trials and joys--with a plasticated simulacra that does the same thing on a larger scale, but does it much worse while at the same time eroding essential structures of civilization. We embraced the internet for the many benefits it offered, but now it's turned into a serpent and, laocoonlike, strangles us, our families, and our communities.

An Endless Page

The surfeit of stimuli offered by the internet in general, and online communication technology in particular, can have dire implications for the spiritual life. It is a thief of time, attention, and even willpower. We scroll almost automatically through bottomless pages, willingly choosing a task with no end and no reward. It's merely mindless stimulation and empty calories--rats hitting levers to get the next pellet of food. Perhaps as a respite for a few moments it may be an acceptable way to sooth a weary mind, but it's never really just a few moments, is it?

We may grab the phone to fill an idle moment only to look up from our bottomless pages and find an hour gone. One day we'll look up and find a lifetime gone, evaporated into the either, monetized for someone else's benefit, and nothing really to show for it. Sisyphus was punished with endless, pointless unfulfilled action--we've chosen it, paid for it, and willingly enthrall ourselves to it. We've taken our place in the machine, and surrendered our most precious commodities--our time, attention, and intellect--to the monetization of predatory corporations like Facebook, Xitter, and TikTok.

Part of the allure is the illusion that we can express ourselves in these spaces, with every person now able to amplify a voice that ordinarily might have carried only the distance of a human voice. With some technology, this may in fact be the case. People with something to say can build an audience across multiple types of media--visual, audible, and written. Venues like podcasts, Youtube, and Substack expand the number and variety of voices that can be heard, and if much of the material produced is garbage (and much of it is), well ... 'twas ever thus.

The Social Trap

Social media is a different matter. It seems, at first, to be benign, and indeed it can be. We all have friendships developed through social media. We've all experienced genuine, positive human interactions through it. Even though there is a problematic dehumanizing element found in any technological medium, it would seem that, used correctly, its fire could be wielded to create rather than merely scorch. After all, it's merely a forum for thought: a neutral medium for the exchange of ideas.

But is it? Marshall McLuhan would certainly have suggested otherwise. He probably would have considered social media a "cool" medium, by which he meant one that was low definition and required a higher degree of user participation to interpret what it's communicating. In social media, the individual is called upon to complete a great deal of any piece of communication--indeed, they must complete most of the message, because vast amounts of work must be done to situate interlocutors on countless spectrums.

Social, political, educational, tonal, and many other variables are all drained from the plain words on the screen and must be rapidly built up again by cues ranging from avatar images to likes and biographical blurbs. Great clouds of emojis, GIFs, and other nonverbal clues are routinely deployed to fill in some of this missing data, but that merely adds new, complicating layers to the task of interpretation.

The stream of communication moves so quickly that it neither allows for complex iterations of this process, nor tolerates errors within it. Brevity of communication and the speed of its flow further aggravates the tendency to error. The errors, in turn, compound, sending what might have been a benign Xitter or Facebook thread spiraling off into bitterness and verbal violence faster than the speed of thought. That bad actors routinely weaponize this process for their own ends, while others burnish their egotism through forced and assumed errors, leads to a medium that is intrinsically toxic.

This toxicity is wholly independent of the good will of many people who participate in it. Social media scalphunters, stirring the pot for lulz and kudos, are certainly thick on the ground, but there is no shortage of good people attempting to participate in genuine discourse within these platforms, and benign discourse certainly takes place.

The problem, however, is that the technology is intrinsically compromised and unquestionably destructive. The good intent of the individual user is positioned within the destructive nexus of a machine purpose-built to reward conflict. It's designed to create conflict. Even those who use the media with good intent must admit it requires effort: silencing some people, blocking others, massaging each message, and always aware of the algorithmic manipulation that insists we look at this not that. This is before we even get to the fraught issue of the monetization of attention and individual identity. The individual becomes the commodity, traded by and to unethical shills and data-harvesters, just another link in a chain of global exploitation.

And yet, many richly rewarding encounters take place across some of these media. It would seem foolish for the Christian to abandon a space with so much social power. We are called to evangelize, to always give a reason for our hope, and to walk among the pagans and let them know the truth of the God Unknown.

Is it possible to do this without losing something essential in ourselves? I've seen better men than I driven to uncharity, calumny, harshness, despair, and even madness by their encounters in the social media sphere. A strong inner peace and a radical sense of charity is required to any who would inhabit these places and seek to witness Christ effectively. Even those who succeed must guard against pessimism, which is a genuine danger with technology designed to reward conflict and exploit the individual.

Strangled By Serpents

Earlier, I likened the suffocating stranglehold of technology upon our minds and spirits to the serpents that killed Laocoön and his sons. It was Laocoön who tried to warn the Trojans against bringing the horse, secretly filled with Greek soldiers, within the city walls.

'O wretched countrymen! what fury reigns?
What more than madness has possess'd your brains?
...
This hollow fabric either must inclose,
Within its blind recess, our secret foes;
...
Somewhat is sure design'd, by fraud or force:
Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.'
--Virgil (trans. Dryden)--

Have we smuggled our ancient foe into our homes and our lives because it seems like a pleasing gift? I'm not at all sure the analogy holds, but I'm certain we must give it more thought than we often do.

Laocoön was, of course, right, and he was killed by Minerva because of his protests, a foreshadowing of the fate of the Trojan people. Anyone who has spent time with social technology, "where fury reigns," has witnessed its serious problems and deleterious effects on people.

Some have found a portion of peace with it by limiting exposure or throwing up obstacles to its worst excesses. IBut Lucifer, as McLuhan observed in 1977, is the great electrical engineer: "When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being, it is Lucifer's moment."

Ten minutes on the internet proves this to be true, but the question remains what to do about it, and there is no one answer that fits everyone. It would seem that most of us should disengage and try to find our way back to social intercourse free of mediating technology, or at least turn to mediating technology--phone, email, texts, discussion tools like Discord--that isn't purpose-built for the corrosion of the individual and the exaltation of endless conflict.

If we do need to be in this space--and some of us must be there for work--it needs to be done more intentionally. We need to ask ourselves questions:

Does this thing need to be said?
Does it need to be said now?
Does it need to be said by me?
Does it need to be said in this manner and through this medium?
Does it need to become a fixed tile in the mosaic of my life, this fleeting thought consigned to an unforgiving, unforgetting medium, exposed for all time to the merciless eye of cold machines and subject to retrieval, commodification, recasting, misconstrual?

When the faithful need to find peace they withdraw to the desert. As we enter Lent, it may be time to find that digital desert, and seek the face of God, unmediated by technology.

For some practical steps to digital detox, check out School of the Unconformed Factory Reset: 49 days to restore your human default: