You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of code. I borrow from William Jennings Bryan and his free silver because his “cross of gold” remains memorable, and we must remember to count the costs of our technologies. For a century now, great thinkers have given us—the West, the inventors, the heirs of modernity—the same warning: that a spirit of technicity threatens our humanity, that all our progress is only so many more steps to turning human beings into more material standing at hand for manipulation.
Take your pick of writers: C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, George Grant, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Romano Guardini, many more; the caution is there. The digital revolution may mark the full birth of yet unnamed post-modernity, but it has only accelerated a trajectory that was obvious to those who had eyes to see. We have not had ears to hear.
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