It’s personal.
You can’t make it otherwise. The very fabric of Creation itself is personal because that’s how God makes it and remakes it every day. It wasn’t made and then allowed to run on without Him; it continues only because He very actively holds it together. This is the hardest thing for Westerners to grasp: Nothing about our existence can be objectified. That it appears we can is largely the result of seeing things through a very dark mythology. If your daily existence appears randomized and impersonal, it’s because you don’t have your consciousness connected to all your faculties. Life is very personal because life is the process of dealing with the Creator. You cannot objectify Creation away from Him. It’s not subjective in the typical sense of the word, but personal.
In one sense, the single greatest failure of Western Civilization is the obsession with objectivity, to the point it depersonalizes everything. Worst of all, it dehumanizes people made in God’s image. God is not mocked. In accordance with His ineffable wisdom, He has turned the tables. Do you imagine He is not actively involved in things? He works daily to enforce His own character in human existence. That includes the Internet.
The ultimate dehumanization of mankind results in the paradox of destroying the force that drives it. The ultimate weapon for commoditizing people behind a screen of devices and assigned numerical identities with time and space indexing is at the same time the ultimate democratization of the power and authority.
For centuries of human history, the one distinction of the elites was the first the talent for violence, and secondly the means to make violence more effective. At the dawn of human existence, anyone could pick up a rock, but only those with skill and talent could make it deadly with any consistency. But as weapons technology advanced, the matter of skill slowly declined as the cost in resources climbed. Any fool can shoot a gun, but they are still fairly expensive. So it required body armor and even bigger and better guns for government to retain the monopoly on the use of force. Eventually the arms race collapses because the fanciest high-tech weapons become useless.
Have you noticed that nukes have become nearly impossible to use? Think about it. There is virtually no realistic scenario under which they’ll be employed any time soon. Anyone who decides to push the button now will be a fool with nothing left to lose. All the bullshit saying otherwise is sheer propaganda from those with a vested interest in keeping us subject to the secular state government system, but that system is dissolving before our eyes. And even as higher tech weapons appear with price tags climbing out of sight, there is no meaningful field of battle for them. Today the greatest threat to any government is the thing government invented for its own convenience — the Internet. That’s because governments can no longer govern without it.
Nothing has been more democratizing than the Internet. The barriers to exercising technical proficiency are almost non-existent. We look back over history, particularly European history as the core of Western Civilization, and see how great shifts in the human condition came with the democratization of things. When meat became a commodity, it leveled the playing field greatly between the elite and the commoners. I’ve already mentioned firearms as another democratization factor. Movable type? How about democratization of the printing press, and then typewriters? Now it’s the Internet.
It’s more than democratizing communications and weapons used on the Internet, but the thing itself. Every element of it is within easy reach of any fool with discarded equipment and very little instruction. The Internet is now the very fabric of a new civilization and precious few people in this world can’t get a device that connects to it in one way or another. Given just a little more time and technological advancements, we’ll see a network that no longer requires cables and routers, because mesh networking is already old hat. Most people simply have no clue what’s coming.
What we consider today as the mainstream media, regardless of the means of delivery, is the last vestige of middle class structure. Facebook and Twitter don’t represent the new civilization. They are the result of Boomer habits imposed over the Net. Understanding this new world is not going to be that easy. All this carping about how socially unacceptable it is when folks bury their attention in their cellphones misses the point. Something in that much-maligned trend is the future of humanity. Boomers and those still under the Boomer influence don’t bother to understand what they don’t like and can’t at least pretend to control with money and prissy middle class social strictures. When the Boomer influence dies is when we’ll see the new social fabric.
Stop carping and start understanding. There is a social structure, but the new geek culture depends on an entirely different kind of social glue. It breaks all the rules and categories to which Westerners are accustomed. Inasmuch as the West can’t comprehend previous civilizations, it is even more bewildered by the future one.
It matters. For those of us who cling to God’s calling and the demands of His glory in our lives, we have to see where God is directing things. Sure, there will always be a segment of society that prefers Facebook, and we have to keep our witness active for them. But they will never be the shapers of tomorrow, and their numerical weight will shrink considerably. Granted, the boundaries are very hard to see, but that’s part of the fundamental necessity for being ready to touch the future with our Father’s love. The old categories won’t work because the geek world ignores them entirely, blending across the boundaries. The new boundaries will remain invisible unless you back out of the blind alley of middle class Boomer thinking.
Part of what I do here with a virtual church and DIY religion is trying to meet that rising social structure. I’m hoping to reach the geeks where they are. Something in how humans are learning to relate over the Net is fundamental to where humanity is going, and the glory of God requires we think about religion in radically different ways. On the one hand, I’d love to meet each of you and give a hug and let you look into my eyes to see His love. The power of that isn’t going to die away, but if we don’t figure out how to share our faith and even our religion without that physical encounter, then it won’t be a religion that speaks to the Networked Civilization.
However flawed the future civilization may be, God will ensure there remains a path to keeping it personal.
