Cyber Damage

I hurt my back last week. I was carrying a heavy box and pivoted at the waist to try to manuever something else, and my back really didn’t like that. I probably would have been okay if I weren’t still recovering from an earlier back injury that resulted from leaning to move a bag of mulch.

By itself, this isn’t very interesting. “Middle-aged man’s body doesn’t work as well as it used to” is hardly newsworthy; “lift with your legs, not with your back” is not revolutionary advice. What’s more surprising to me is how quickly and easily the injuries happened. The box and bag were heavy but well within the limits of what I thought I could handle, and the actions only took a few seconds each, but the resulting injuries were felt for days or weeks. Engineers design their vehicles, machinery, and tools with safety tolerances to ensure that they’ll be able to withstand the forces upon them, and yet I suspect even a high school physics student could calculate the forces and leverage that I placed on my joints and realize that it wasn’t going to end well for me. It’s surprising how easily my strength to act exceeds my strength to handle the results of my actions.

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Wendell Berry is an American novelist, poet, farmer, and Christian. As an environmental activist, he’s spoken out against nuclear power, coal power, mountaintop removal coal mining, and industrial farming. In his essay “Damage,” he describes one of his efforts to improve his farmland:

I have a steep wooded hillside that I wanted to be able to pasture occasionally, but it had no permanent water supply.

About halfway to the top of the slope there is a narrow bench, on which I thought I could make a small pond. I hired a man with a bulldozer to dig one. He cleared away the trees and then formed the pond, cutting into the hill on the upper side, piling the loosened dirt in a curving earthwork on the lower.

The pond appeared to be a success. Before the bulldozer quit work, water had already begun to seep in. Soon there was enough to support a few head of stock. To heal the exposed ground, I fertilized it and sowed it with grass and clover.

We had an extremely wet fall and winter, with the usual freezing and thawing. The ground grew heavy with water, and soft. The earthwork slumped; a large slice of the woods floor on the upper side slipped down into the pond.

The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge. The fault was mine.

I was careful to get expert advice. But this only exemplifies what I already knew. No expert knows everything about every place, not even everything about any place. If one’s knowledge of one’s whereabouts is insufficient, if one’s judgment is unsound, then expert advice is of little use.

With a palpable sense of guilt, he goes on to reflect on how he caused “a lasting flaw in the face of the earth… that wound in the hillside, my place” that can heal only “in the course of time and nature.” He reflects on how art and culture can make a “map” or “geography of scars” such as the one on his hillside, reflecting the past damage caused by our lack of wisdom, in hopes that future people can learn wisdom and learn their limitations from them. He concludes by quoting poet William Blake:

Blake gives the just proportion or control in another proverb: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” Only when our acts are empowered with more than bodily strength do we need to think of limits…

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture-such as I was when I made my pond-is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

As I sat nursing a sprained back muscle, I questioned Berry’s reading of Blake; I’m not even convinced that I can be trusted with my own bodily strength. But this helps prove Berry’s broader point: if we can’t necessarily be trusted with our own bodily strength, then what makes us think we can handle a bulldozer, a power plant, an industrial farm?

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It’s popular to hate on social media nowadays. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that it’s helped make us “uniquely stupid” and contributed to rising polarization; Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen accused Facebook of prioritizing their own profits and growth over their users’ well-being; recent research provides further evidence that Facebook is harmful to users’ mental health; and so on. And that’s before getting into the more partisan debates and accusations (“They spread misinformation and conspiracy theories!” “They’re censoring our free speech!” “They’re helping the far right!“ “They’re pawns of the far left!“); the constant scrutiny, critiques, and foibles of their tech billionaires founders and would-be owners; or various cybersecurity concerns (such as the recent Twitter whistleblower, Peter “Mudge” Zatko, or concerns over the Chinese Communist Party’s involvement in TikTok).

The root problem might be more fundamental than that, though. On a recent podcast, author Cal Newport describes what he calls “Twitter’s cybernetic curation distribution algorithm,“ with “the effect of all of these individuals making retweet/non-retweet decisions, all pushing and pulsing through a power law graph / topology graph… [that] does a really good job of centering or surfacing things that are interesting or engaging or would catch our attention.” When I hear “cybernetic,“ I’m enough of a sci-fi geek that I start thinking of these guys:

S.C.F., by ptitvinc

In sci-fi such as anime, literature, and tabletop or video games, cyborgs are humans who’ve replaced significant parts of their bodies with high-tech equipment. Sometimes this is done to replace body parts damaged by trauma. Often, though, it’s done to enhance their abilities beyond normal human capacity - heightened strength and durability, electronic senses, built-in weaponry, and so on. (I don’t have much need for built-in weaponry, but a cybernetic spine would have saved me some pain.) In many fictional works, the replacements often come with downsides, such as a reduced sense of touch, or a psychological sense of alienation from other humans; some works do this as part of a Serious Examination of What It Means To Be Human, while more gaming-oriented settings might do it just to discourage players from tricking out their characters with every piece of cybernetic gear possible.

Speaking more realistically and more technically, “cybernetic“ is defined as “control and communication in the animal and the machine“ (Normal Weiner). As applied to Twitter, Cal Newport’s point seems to be that Twitter is the result of interaction between the “animal“ (humans decisions and actions to tweet, reply, and retweet) and the machine (Twitter’s servers sharing people’s tweets with each other and analyzing tweets to decide what are most interesting / relevant / shareable / viral, based on what people have revealed of their interests).

Just like a sci-fi cyborg, the result is strength well beyond normal human capacity: an endless stream of engaging, sometimes addicting, content; the ability to view in real time the shared thoughts of society’s elites, friends, strangers from around the world; the potential to have thousands or millions of people interact with what you have to say. And, just like a sci-fi cyborg, there are downsides: a reduced sense of touch and a sense of alienation from the people on the other side of the screen, as facial expressions and nuance and gestures are stripped away, as complex thoughts and discussions are crammed into 280 characters, as the platform’s incentives push people to forget the humanity of those they’re interacting with and engage in increasingly extreme behavior to get likes, go viral, and fit in with their similarly incentivized online peers.

And, if Wendell Berry is right, if we scarcely have the wisdom to handle a bulldozer or a power plant - if our own musculature can exceed what our strengths can sustain - then what hope do we have of handling the power law graph / topology graph of a cybernetic curation distribution algorithm?

Our online world is changing so rapidly; how can we possibly have a chance to build up Berry’s geography of scars to learn our limitations there?

Plenty of solutions have been proposed: Give up social media, get more government involvement, put the right person in charge. Many of these solutions are, I think, a bit facile. Maybe we should start smaller: Practice the humility of recognizing the limits of our wisdom. Don’t overexert our strengths - don’t do something just because we can. Be sensitive to the damage that our strength may be causing to others or to our environment. Be human more. Be cybernetic less.

The Virtue of Strange Service

Since Queen Elizabeth II’s death last month, I’ve seen countless takes and commentaries on her reign and on the British monarchy.

Royal Diamond Jubilee Visit, by West Midlands Police

On the one hand, she was by all accounts extremely devoted to serving her country and the institution of the monarchy. Commentator David French discusses her lifetime of service, as well as the military service of Princes William, Harry, Andrew, and Philip, and concludes:

There is a tremendous burden tied to that kind of role. As Andrew [Sullivan] notes, when Elizabeth Windsor became queen, she “was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human—for the rest of her life.”…

Duty and honor without power—that’s the role of modern royalty… There is also immense meaning when a monarch lives the values their role demands. Queen Elizabeth lived with honor and did her duty, and in so doing she helped bind together a fractious people. She helped give them a sense of shared identity.

On the other hand, the monarchy - the idea that someone should, simply by accident of birth, be placed into that role for 70 years - is a strange institution, especially to Americans in our belief that all men are created equal. (We even fought a war to end the monarchy - although historian Eric Nelson argues that the early American revolutionaries saw themselves as rebelling against Parliament and weren’t necessarily against the monarchy.)

As part of her role, Elizabeth studiously avoided commenting on political positions. David French explains, “Britain’s constitutional monarchy separates the functions of the head of state and the head of government. The head of state is doing her job when she’s explicitly not political, when she instead conducts the formal affairs of the state and embodies (as well as any human can) certain core national values.” British theologian Alastair Roberts writes, “In resisting entanglement in political conflict and refraining from participation in public political debate, the monarch guards their true character and influence. They stand for something that greatly exceeds political conflicts and party interests, even highly charged ones.”

On the other hand, there are plenty of important political and national issues that may deserve people’s attention. At what threshold does someone with influence decide that something is worth addressing? If the argument is that, in order to preserve your influence for some future need, you must avoid using your influence to address a current need, at what point does that become self-defeating?

Queen Elizabeth was loved by millions of people; the hundreds of thousands of people who stood in queue, sometimes for twenty-four hours or more, in order to pay their respects after her death was a powerful illustration of this. However, the British monarchy and Queen Elizabeth are a reminder and representation of Britain’s history of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery for many others - for example, blacks and Desi who are still dealing with the aftereffects of the slave trade and colonization.

Queen Elizabeth supported numerous charities and helped raise over £1.4 billion for them. On the other hand, she had a personal fortune of roughly $500 million, simply by virtue of her birth, which she was able to pass on tax-free to Prince Charles - in addition to the significant assets of the monarchy itself.

Queen Elizabeth was a devout Christian; in 2000, she said, “For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ’s words and example.” N.T. Wright speaks warmly of her love for and service to Jesus. As “Defender of the Faith” and head of the Church of England in a secular, post-Christian country, she no doubt had an influence for God in her country. On the other hand, as an American Christian, I’m firmly in favor of the separation of church and state: I believe that political power can too easily corrupt the church, and I believe that God gives us free will and we should therefore avoid coercing or compelling others, and there’s an argument that the establishment of religion has contributed to Europe being a post-Christian continent (by allowing Christian churches there to become complacent in government support rather than striving to innovate and reach out).

What do we make of all of that?

If nothing else, Elizabeth’s birth into the royal family reminds me that the American approach of egalitarianism and free individual choice is a relative novelty. Jesus tells a parable which one person might have ten times the gifting of another. Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist were set aside from birth; Moses, David, Jeremiah, Paul, and others were given huge responsibilities with little say in the matter. The obvious counterargument here is that these people were directly and explicitly chosen by God. Elizabeth, in our understanding, was not (except in the general Romans 13 sense of all human authorities existing under God’s control). For whatever reason, though - whether differences in God’s designs and God-given talents, inequalities from human competition and sin, or the vagaries of a centuries-old British institution - the differences persist, often in spite of people’s efforts to address them, and what you do with your own gifts and powers is often more important than comparing where you stand relative to someone else (Jn 21:22).

It occurred to me, though, that a more direct Biblical reference may be the Rechabites of Jeremiah 35. During the last days of the nation of Judah, when the Israelites were practicing empty formalistic public worship of the Lord, mixed with private syncretism and idolatry, Jeremiah fruitlessly tried to warn his fellow Israelites of God’s coming judgment. In a strange story partway through his book, Jeremiah sent a message to the Rechabites, apparently a small ethnic group descended from Moses’ father-in-law who lived among the Israelites, to invite them to the temple. There, he offered them some wine. They refused, explaining,

“We do not drink wine because our ancestor Jonadab son of Rechab commanded us not to. He told us, ‘You and your children must never drink wine. Do not build houses. Do not plant crops. Do not plant a vineyard or own one. Live in tents all your lives. If you do these things you will live a long time in the land that you wander about on.’ We and our wives and our sons and daughters have obeyed everything our ancestor Jonadab son of Rechab commanded us.”

In response, Jeremiah blessed the Rechabites (Jer. 35:18-19) and contrasted their behavior with the Israelites’:

‘I, the Lord, say: “You must learn a lesson from this about obeying what I say. Jonadab son of Rechab ordered his descendants not to drink wine. His orders have been carried out. To this day his descendants have drunk no wine because they have obeyed what their ancestor commanded them. But I have spoken to you over and over again, but you have not obeyed me.”’

The point isn’t that Jonadab’s restrictions were from God or were, in and of themselves, automatically good. The point is that the Rechabites, out of a desire to honor their ancestor and out of a belief that a simple nomadic lifestyle was worth practicing, faithfully obeyed. As a result, their faithfulness to human instruction, given by one person centuries ago, presented a powerful rebuke to the Israelites repeated unfaithfulness to God’s commandments, delivered repeatedly through Moses and the prophets.

I’ve seen a lot of the takes since Queen Elizabeth’s death, but my opinion on the British monarchy isn’t worth much. On this side of the pond, it doesn’t really affect me, and I can’t change anything. But I can appreciate her faithful service to her country (even if it did come in the form of a strange, anachronistic, human-made institution), and I can appreciate her faithful service to Christ.