Cultivating a less tech-reliant life can be an act of rebellion—and of worship.
By Hannah Lane
In an article in Vice, culture writer Eloise Hendy related the following anecdote:
I once lived with someone who had a two-year-old god-daughter. Occasionally, this wee lass was allowed to play on an iPad. One day, my housemate saw her god-daughter spot a butterfly fluttering outside the window. Her tiny toddler hand reached out, and her thumb and forefinger made a sort of pincer movement. At first my housemate was baffled, but then she realized. Her god-daughter was trying to zoom in on the butterfly.
The story sounds shocking—and to an extent it is. But it’s also a tangible example of something that’s happening in more subtle ways in many facets of our lives: we are evolving around our screens.
Even if smartphones aren’t being linked to any species-level changes of the Darwinian variety, the impacts of tech reliance are being reflected in our bodies. Teens and adults are developing “smartphone pinkie” (a bend in the pinky finger caused by resting a phone on it for an extended period of time), “texting thumb” (stiffness and arthritis in the joints of the thumb), and “tech neck” (muscle pain and spasms in the upper spine from looking down for hours per day). Younger children and even toddlers are developing near-sightedness from focusing on phones and tablets at length. Everyone who spends extended time on screens is at risk for less and lower-quality sleep due to blue-light stimulation, decreased physical fitness, and even brain gray-matter reduction.
According to findings published in the research journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, excessive smartphone use has high “comorbidity with depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD and alcohol use disorder… difficulties in cognitive-emotion regulation, impulsivity, impaired cognitive function, addiction to social networking, shyness and low self-esteem.” Less clinically, “nomophobia” (the fear of being without your phone) has even the most grounded among us desperately patting our pockets and experiencing that sinking feeling when we find ourselves in a doctor’s waiting room, in line at the DMV, or at a party where we don’t know anyone.
Plenty of previous innovations have made our culture unrecognizable in comparison to previous eras. Things we take for granted now—like indoor plumbing, acetaminophen, and airplanes—might very well have seemed like magic to someone who lived one hundred and fifty years ago.
But the ways that smartphones are changing us aren’t just the incidental growing pains of progress. There is a movement in Silicon Valley that would frame our slumped shoulders and crooked pinkies as collateral damage in the march toward a world where everyone’s body will be modified to accommodate technology that is medically attached to us at all times. Transhumanism, brain implants, and cyborg upgrades aren’t just the stuff of sci-fi anymore; they are making their way to us. And though you might not be able to envision you or those around you getting them now, there was likely a time when the concept of unlocking your phone with a scan of your face would have sounded like science fiction, too.
Billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen, who helped start the Internet as we know it, wrote in a blog post called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” “We believe that advancing technology is one of the most virtuous things that we can do.” This might sound good, in theory, but Andreesen has identified himself as something of a “TESCREAList”—which means he believes in creating a race of “post-humans” by extending human longevity and enhancing human cognition with technology. Dr. Timnit Gebru, the former technical lead of the ethical artificial intelligence team at Google, along with philosopher Emile P. Torres, coined the term to describe what Torres calls “a new secular religion.”
Entrepreneur Peter Thiel, another billionaire, wrote in 2009, “I stand against… the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” He has since invested millions into research that attempts to “solve” the problem of aging. Meta’s founder, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, is currently working to create a “full general artificial intelligence” that is public and available to anyone.
AI analyst and cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute Eliezer Yudkowsky summed up why the mindset of those working toward big breakthroughs in powerful AI tends to be as reckless as it is ambitious: “Many ambitious people find it far less scary to think about destroying the world than to think about never amounting to much of anything at all.”
For those seeking to dominate the universe by way of technology, the subordination of human nature is not only possible, or potentially helpful, but morally imperative. So, if the people controlling most of the wealth in the world are intent on finding ways to blur the lines between technological innovation and biological disruption, what are we supposed to do? Is the answer to be afraid, to recoil from microchips and motherboards alike and start trying to get really good at making fire with sticks—just in case?
As Christians, we know that one of our chief instructions is not to fear. The Earth is the Lord’s, and anyone who tries to claim His throne is on a very dangerous path indeed. We have no need to fear anything or anyone. No human, no spiritual being, and certainly no android can wrest eternity from the hands of its Creator.
The remaining question, then, is how we live in the space we inhabit now.
The human body is sacred to God. Those who treat the body as unholy have been called heretics throughout history. Physicality matters to the God who made us.
His Son took on our flesh, and our salvation is accomplished by His bodily resurrection; His human body died, and His human body rose and now stands undying in heaven. We remember His redemption through a meal that nourishes our bodies as much as it does our souls. The relationship between Christ and His Church is like that of a married couple, the most intimate physical relationship that exists.
To deny the holiness of the body is to blaspheme the Lord who declared it good. To purposefully exchange our physical connections, our in-person relationships, our presence with the world and the people and the bodies we inhabit with technological substitutions is, then, sacrilege. If that sounds intense, that’s because it is intense.
Transhumanists and intentionally anti-body tech move us toward a world where our human forms, in their beauty as well as their brokenness, can be done away with. Not innovation that brings life to the bodies we have, like mobility accommodations and medical advancements, but programs aimed to replace our bodies entirely.
Knowing this, we can understand an embrace of our embodiment to be nothing more or less than a radical and radically worshipful act.
To spend time holding a friend’s hand and wiping their tears as they grieve a loss: radical worship. To dance late into the night celebrating a wedding: radical worship. To carefully bandage the scraped knee of a toddler and kiss their forehead to comfort them: radical worship. To bend creaky knees in prayer, to share coffee in the church lobby with as much love as taking the Eucharist, to call on the God who made us with the confidence that we are designed, that our design matters: radical worship.
When there are powerful forces seeking progress for progress’ sake regardless of the monetary or ethical cost, putting down the techy distractions that separate us from one another and leaning into the messy beauty of our relationships, our bodies, and our human lives is nothing more or less than a revolutionary act of faith.
As parents, that’s a revolution that becomes a legacy as we pass the faith on to our children. It’s a framing that our kids might find appealing and maybe even inspiring. When we ask them to put their phone away during dinner, we’re not out-of-touch luddites asking them to choose boredom over entertainment. We’re inviting them to rebel, to fight back, to reject the narrative of anti-humanity. Inviting them to enjoy the gift of this life that is as ephemeral and lovely as the flutter of a butterfly’s wings—and just as inspiring of worship and awe.
Hannah Lane is a writer, researcher, content creator, and podcaster at Axis. She has worked as a research fellow for the Billy Graham Special Collections Library, pioneered the Humanities as Science research initiative at Wheaton College, and has written for faith-oriented literary publications since 2015. She loves helping parents and teens understand one another through the lens of culture, and believes that peace is found in the common ground of the gospel.