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Salvation through the internet
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Yi Ning Chiu
My lifetime of social media addiction can be traced back to a childhood memory: in third grade, I stole a parenting magazine from my dad’s home office because it contained a cartoon drawing of gravestones, and the illustration style led me to assume the accompanying content would be child friendly. It was not. It was a piece about the necessity of speaking to children about death, and about how understanding human transience can be helpful for giving children an appropriate perspective about their limited time on earth.
I did not yet have a perspective on my mortality but I soon developed one. Because I loved my life and didn’t want it to be forgotten, I hated the idea that all human beings, including myself, were destined to pass into obscurity. I wanted to find ways to escape this fate. If time on earth was limited, then I had better get to work making sure my days were as memorable as possible so that I could have the last word over death.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how to live on in people’s memories after I died. My third grade class was into illustrated historical biographies, the kind that featured luminaries like Benjamin Franklin or Eleanor Roosevelt and the indelible marks they left on society, which carried the suggestion that lives of exceptional accomplishment could never be totally erased. I applied myself to a few dozen hobbies in response, hoping that I was prodigiously gifted in at least one area. To hedge my bets if I had no gifts worth remembering, I kept a small and boring journal about daily life in the 1990s—if everything else failed I could at least try for immortality by placing myself on the historical record.
Self-mythologizing was hard and uncertain work. I accomplished nothing extraordinary, and even on the rare occasions I excelled at something, like a childhood piano recital or a high school paper, there were few people around to see or care. In addition to being exhausted by the sheer difficulty of the task, I was troubled by the spiritual incoherence of what I was doing. Why was I working so hard to impress people? Why did I even want the things I wanted? Was any of this okay? All these questions were about to be answered by the burgeoning social internet.
I switched from a simple phone to a smartphone in the mid 2010s, back when the mood around social media was still generally optimistic. Within my evangelical and charismatic Christian circles, that optimism was especially pronounced. Most of us interpreted the scriptural mandate to make disciples of all nations as an invitation for the Church to pursue the kind of cultural dominance that would make the Gospel inescapable and irresistible, and because social media seemed to put this goal within our reach, we spent time online for what we considered to be spiritual reasons.
Seeking to become known and seeking to elevate the Gospel were indistinguishable pursuits. The Christian figures we imitated commanded enormous audiences online; our favorite worship musicians had enough social media clout to hold brand sponsorships, and a few ministers we admired became such credible Instagram celebrities that when they offered an influencer seminar titled “Glow Up for Jesus,” a few of us booked flights to attend. The social internet intertwined spiritual devotion and personal gain. I loved that social platforms made me feel like I could be seen and known forever, and that I could pursue this feeling in Jesus’ name. Social media seemed like a boon to all of my existential anxieties, and, amazingly, it was free.
In 2010, Zadie Smith argued in the New York Review of Books that we were mistaken in seeing the social internet as a set of neutral mediums that merely digitize the ways we exist offline. Building upon Jaron Lanier’s idea that representing reality via information systems always requires users to simplify their understanding of the world, Smith describes social media platforms as sites where we participate in referendums that limit how a person should be. She writes, “Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can only be one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a ‘life’? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: films, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)”
Smith says there is no way for our online personas to exist as true representations of our selves; she cautions that we are always translated according to whatever rubric is favored by the creators of our platform. Her essay, which began as a response to the Mark Zuckerberg biopic The Social Network, concludes by saying the film works best not as a portrait of Zuckerberg but of users of his platform—“500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.”
If I had read this piece at its time of publication, its arguments would not have registered. I was convinced that being online to advance the Gospel protected me from most of the internet’s pitfalls; furthermore, I was busy writing pensive Instagram captions about faith or cavorting on Snapchat to show that I could love Jesus and have fun too, and wasn’t interested in critiques of how I spent my time. In retrospect, though, it’s clear that Smith was already attuned to how profoundly all of us were being shaped by mediums we hadn’t given much effort to understanding.
In 2016, as the presidential inauguration approached and the levels of outrage on my social media feeds pitched higher and higher, I scrolled through my phone and thought about how indistinguishable my posts had become from the posts of my friends, and how all of us were looking less and less distinguishable from the ads selected for me by the algorithm. I had been responding to those ads, and while the purchases they nudged me towards were fine—a book on first century Christians, a seminar on politics and faith—thinking about the steps I took towards those purchases distressed me.
During the election year, I had posted frequently in the name of bearing faithful Christian witness to a polarized moment, and noticed that with each post, the content on my screens shifted to mirror and intensify what I was thinking. I always put away my phone feeling validated enough to continue posting about my beliefs online, and sufficiently threatened to continue explaining my opinions to imaginary detractors. Whether or not my posts did anyone any good is unclear, but the purchases I made during this time are reminders that my activity made me so transparent to advertisers that they were able to persuade me of the urgency of my own opinions, and to convince me that I needed physical products to affirm the persona they were helping me create online.
How had I embedded myself in platforms that promised connections with other people, but simply refracted my own views back to me as if every person I knew was merely an accessory to my opinions? How had I convinced myself this kind of myopic self-affirmation was a good thing? And how had I missed the fact that the self-absorption encouraged by my online environment was a form of advertising, and that I had fallen for it completely?
A few months later, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, suggesting that the internet was not merely a marketplace for goods but a marketplace for ideological loyalties. I started thinking about fissures in my social circles, the sudden radicalization of a few friends, the recurrence in our conversations of arguments or pieces of information with no discernible source, and considered that there were worse things than being persuaded by an algorithm to buy texts on the early church. When I finally got around to reading Smith’s essay, it occurred to me that our lives were being shaped and stored in formats based on the minds of men like Evan Osnos and Kevin Systrom. I had partially accomplished my childhood goal of staving off death’s erasure by living on in someone’s memory.
This was not a good thing. By now it is generally understood that social media is hilariously misnamed; its primary nature is not relational but transactional. As Smith points out, we are appraised and remembered on the internet not because we are so beloved as people, but because everything we disclose as consumers is too lucrative to forget. Writing in Trick Mirror a decade after the publication of Smith’s essay, Jia Tolentino describes where we are now, living in a reality where Facebook is no longer a novelty but a defining institution of our time. Mark Zuckerberg, she says, “understood better than anyone that personhood in the twenty-first century would be a commodity like cotton or gold.”
Tolentino allows that humanity has been dealing with the market’s encroachments upon our consciousness for a long time. Billboards began advertising to travelers on public roads in the nineteenth century; television and radio began advertising to us in our homes in the twentieth. Now, however, she argues that social media is making our relationship to the market claustrophobically intimate. It monetizes our attention spans, harvests our personal data, and rewards its most compelling users with the privilege of becoming “influencers”—living advertisements. Tolentino concludes, “today, there is nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self.”
The internet as described by Tolentino and Smith—a place where we are held in the gaze of a constant watcher, circumscribed by the imagination of a distant and authoritative mind, consumed by the attentions of something intent on taking everything we have to give—is like the profane equivalent to how Paul describes God to the Athenians. “In him we live and move and have our being,” says Paul, and while he was speaking of the Lord, in our cultural moment this phrase could be mistaken for a dark and concise summation of the internet.
I once tasted, on a very small scale, what it is like to attract attention on the internet for my faith. One of my Instagram posts was referenced by a Christian podcast, and in the days that followed it was shared and re-shared enough for me to open my feed and see my own face propagating itself down the endless scroll. It felt wonderful. It was perversely life affirming to find my image embedded in the grids of strangers as if I was multiplying myself, colonizing spaces that were usually reserved for other people’s lives. In this one instance I had excelled at performing the kind of life that Instagram’s users and algorithms recognized as good, and now they were reproducing me.
I was being memorialized in ways I had only fantasized about as an existentially anxious child: my face implanted in people's memories, my ideas veined into their conversations, a version of myself preserved somewhere on Meta’s database. Yet receiving exactly the kind of attention I craved made me uneasy. Online I could live forever, but if Lanier is right in saying that information systems require us to reduce reality to a simpler form, I could only last on these platforms as a reduced version of myself. Based on how people were interacting with the rest of my profile, it was becoming clear that I could prosper online by hawking a cocktail of orthodox Christianity spiked with ethnic specificity and progressive politics. Would it be wrong for me to hone in on these parts of myself and form them into a brand? I had a feeling that the answer was yes, but because I liked the attention I tried anyway.
I spent more time on my phone than I had before. I posted frequently, and when I wasn’t posting I was surveying my life and my thoughts for fragments that might be salable online. Were my spiritual epiphanies on-brand? Did I look good in the accompanying images? The ads cycling across my screens kept pace with these questions, churning out names of Christian influencers I could learn from, and, pragmatically, beauty and clothing recommendations that might make me look better in pictures. I only stopped trying to capitalize on my fifteen minutes of internet fame because I realized how much work it required to hold anyone’s attention. Propping up an internet persona, even one that I had ostensibly created in Jesus’ name, required a scaffold of anxious, spiritualized narcissism that I was building even when I wasn’t online.
The internet is not a spiritually neutral structure. In Smith’s assessment, social platforms are constantly asking the question of how a person should be; in Tolentino’s assessment, they are asking to what ends a person should be used. These are spiritually fraught questions, and every time we use social media we are interacting with something that is trying to answer them for us. Even Christian communities, in which many of us believed in the internet’s capacity for good, are now reckoning with how we have been shaped by tools we originally thought ourselves to be in control of. How should a person be? How can a person be used? It is hard to look at the history and structure of the social internet and imagine its answers to these questions will be godly ones.
Christianity Today’s audio series, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, includes a reckoning with the megachurch’s early adaptation of podcasts and Twitter, and how its senior pastor’s virtuosic performance on mediums that highlighted his gifts as a speaker and writer helped obscure the growing toxicity of his leadership. In the concluding episode, Nick Bogardus, who served as Mars Hill’s public relations director when the church was at its most powerful, describes the dissociations between self and image that occur for ministers who constantly labor to maintain compelling public personas. He identifies this as part of the exchange Mars Hill agreed to make—intact personhood given up for aggressive expansion. Reflecting on Mark Driscoll, whose personal tumults helped devastate his organization, Bogardus says “it wasn’t just the story [of the church] that was shaped by the media, it wasn’t just the people that were shaped, it was Mark that was shaped.” Mars Hill successfully used internet mediums to form as large an audience as possible, and in return, those mediums formed the church.
Whether we are operating as megachurches or as individual Christians getting the glow up in Jesus’ name, it is hard to look at our recent history and ignore the costs that accrue to anyone who builds a platform online. Even in my single Instagram experience of note I could feel that a sacrifice was being demanded of me, but I was open to delivering it as long as I received what I wanted in exchange.
Should I have found all these things surprising? The Old Testament is, among other things, a meditation on our propensity towards idolatry, but it used to make me roll my eyes. I found it ridiculous to believe that people could be persuaded to make offerings to gods of their own making. Now I cannot think of a more accurate depiction of our behavior. On one of the last Sundays before the pandemic put a temporary end to in-person gatherings, I looked around my church and was embarrassed to see how many of us were on our phones. Our hands were scrolling and posting and liking under the pews as if these acts were components to a liturgy, each conducting our own set of prayers, probably to ourselves.
There is a rich discourse already at work to identify systemic and individual responses to what Tolentino calls the cannibalistic tendencies of our lives on the internet. Legal scholar Timothy Wu, popularly known for coining the term “net neutrality,” has produced an extensive body of work focused on policy solutions for a more civil world online. Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing advocates for lifestyle choices that resist the internet’s most destructive tendencies, as does Jaron Lanier’s bluntly titled Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Their Christian counterparts might be Justin Earley’s The Common Rule, which includes a strong argument for limiting technology usage in order to better love God and people, and Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary, which invites us to reconsider all our daily habits as acts of worshipful devotion. There are plenty of ideas for how individuals and societies can live more humanely in the internet age. What remains for me is the question of what continues to propel us down our current path even as the warning signs abound. By now, critiques of the social internet are mainstream, so if we know these platforms are harming us, why are we still here?
Revising a flawed system is both necessary and not enough. When Zadie Smith wrote about Facebook’s reductive vision of the world, she was issuing a warning, but the attribute she criticizes is the one I think we find irresistible in every form of social media. Perhaps the best encapsulation of Smith’s critique and social media’s continued allure is the hashtag #maincharacterenergy, which has launched a million TikToks framing their creators’ surroundings as mere backdrops to their personal dramas, and positioning the creators as the only protagonists on set. Even if we all know the shrunken, egocentric nature of social media to be terrible for us, why wouldn’t we choose it for the sake of our own immutability?
We clearly need to change the world we have built online, but without considering why we created it in the first place, I think the impulse to make the world over in ways that distort our importance within it will emerge elsewhere. If social media is analogous to the Bible’s descriptions of idolatry, the impulse behind it is analogous to its descriptions of empire. From Cain’s murder of Abel to Egypt’s enslavement of the Israelites to Rome’s conquest of surrounding nations, scriptural narratives are older variations on our current theme: we are prone to devouring the world in the name of our own expansion. The question I wrestle with now is how to confront not only the destructive systems we’ve built, but how to dismantle the impulse that led us to think they were in any way desirable.
When I try to imagine what an opposing impulse would feel like, I think of two memories. In the first one I am alone in my room, and at some point I sense that I am no longer the only person present. There are eyes resting upon me, filled with compassion. I am being watched by someone who remembers me from a time before I could remember myself. I begin thinking about the Genesis narrative, in which the Spirit of the Lord hovers over the deep while the earth is still formless and void, and have the fleeting impression of my self, like the rest of Creation, being conceived in the mind of God before being born into the world.
In the second one my husband and I are standing on the California coast at nightfall, watching shadows sweep across the cliffs until we are enveloped in darkness. All we can see is a faint glow at the horizon outlining the curvature of our planet. Beneath our feet we feel faint, rhythmic tremors from waves thudding against the rocks we stand on. I can sense how negligible we are to this landscape: if we die right now, I think, nothing here will notice. Our surroundings are terrifying and sublime, and eventually they become overwhelming so we take shelter in our car. I feel like Elijah hiding in the cleft of the rock so that the vision of God will not annihilate him.
If social media encourages the impulse towards expansion and self-aggrandizement at any cost, these moments, which seem like holy visitations, do the opposite. When I think about them, I want to fall prostrate. I want to retract myself, not in self-loathing or terror, but in deference to the vast, bracing loveliness of the world around me and the presence of its Creator. These are the kinds of moments that make even the most complex virtual realities seem like dust. Being stored indefinitely in a human-made platform used to appear to me as a form of immortality, but it is mere entrapment in comparison to being known by the God who generated the world.
In the year after I deleted most of my social media accounts, I read Genesis repeatedly. While the internet gave me the unwelcome sense of living in the heads of various tech founders, the creation narrative makes me think that I am living in the mind of God. He originated me, and I existed in His mind before I existed anywhere else. He unfurled the universe out of His imagination, and the world still surges forth upon the words He uttered in the beginning.
He comprehends aspects of humanity that are not translatable or salable or legible to our cultures, the parts that none of us would bother documenting for one another, understanding us as he understands the rest of his own creation, which He formed to be expansive and mysterious and dauntingly beautiful. In him we live and move and have our being.
Most of our lives will be invisible to all but the eyes of the Lord, and while not being watched or recorded by the internet can seem in our culture like a form of death, I often think about the moments that were suffused only with His presence, and how standing before Him felt like standing on the precipice of eternal life.
Yi Ning Chiu
Writer & Teacher
Yi Ning is a writer who has contributed features to Relevant and Teen Vogue. You can find more of her work here: yiningchiu.com
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This was an excellent piece and I identified tremendously with it. I too get lost pondering the billions of people that get lost in history and struggle with wanting to "matter" through art or literature or whatever other means. And not making that happen seems to be such a waste.
And I too pour over the lives of those in the old testament. We know all these men and women now, but I don't think they had posterity in mind, certainly not down through the centuries to where we are now. They wanted to be successful in their time, but like us they had no idea what God's plan entailed, and they had no idea what echoes through eternity they would make.
Of late I have been comforted by Paul's advice to the Thessalonians, make it your ambition to lead a quiet life. Your ambition should be anonymity. Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.
While I did NOT like the piece's title, the writing itself quite awesomely burst that titular bubble. Deep and true words.