Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine

by Robin Phillips, Joshua Pauling

Genres: Nonfiction

480 pages, Paperback

Published August 18, 2024

Reviews

[Stacey (Egger) Eising · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent contribution to the conversation about the digital age and how the Internet is eating our brains, co-authored by Josh Pauling -- an LCMS Lutheran, classical educator, and SMP student at Concordia Ft Wayne. Written from an orthodox Christian perspective, the book is able to offer a real anthropological/theological discussion of these technologies rather than just complaining about their results, and is also able to offer real, concrete solutions, since the authors share a concrete vision for human life as it is meant to be lived. It's a bit long, but well-organized for readers that might like to skip around to sections of interest.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I write this, I'm using my smartphone as a paperweight to hold open the book I'm reviewing. Even if you've read all my reviews, you likely wouldn't know I've done this dozens of times. The reason I do this is very pragmatic: my phone is heavy enough that it can hold open a 400+ page book like this one, and the rubber edges of the phone case grip the pages better than any other object I have to hand. Of course, every time I do this there's the danger that I check my phone while writing and get distracted, but to fixate upon that eventuality would be to fall into a fatal flaw that I fear this text perpetuates.

I wanted to start here because technology is not straightforward in its uses or its effects. Sure, having access to the entirety of the internet is too much of a temptation for the average person, but there are certainly people who can handle it. I myself have a love-hate relationship with the internet, but even speaking about "the internet" is too soggy of a concept: which corner of it am I talking about? Goodreads? YouTube? Discord? In previous reviews I've considered how Goodreads encourages certain approaches to books, such as volume over quality, as well as short, witty reviews over the long, thoughtful essays I normally write. However, I think it also has some very positive aspects: it helps me keep track of what I've read, what I've thought about them, and perhaps most importantly, it prevents me from getting lost in an echo chamber. If you have no audience, you can be as nasty as you want. With my reviews being semi-public (not from my profile but from any of the respective book's pages), I can't be too inflammatory. I still say what I think, but I also tone down some of my more sarcastic moments (yes, this is me toned down lol).

But the challenge is that Goodreads looks different for every user, just like YouTube and Discord. I subscribe to a unique combination of channels on YT, and when you factor in the videos I've "liked," my recommended tab (which I've disabled via a Firefox add-on) would look unique as well. Thus, it's perilous to make general, sweeping statements about "AI" or any other technology. You'd have to narrow down considerably what you mean, and in the process you would lose most of the momentum that got you there in the first place.

As I've argued in the past, politics is always the wrong level of analysis for culture and world events; likewise is weighing the pros and cons of AI or any other technology the wrong scope for addressing technology use. Paradoxically, to rightfully discuss technology, you can't directly address the effects of technology. Of course, these authors do much more than that: they make all the "right" moves that I would make if I myself were writing such a book (referencing Byung Chul Han and Neil Postman, integrating theology, etc.). But something rings hollow despite this. The authors tried to remedy the hollowness and obviousness of many of their points by over-elaborating them and/or couching them in unnecessary anecdotes. Removing those two aspects would easily halve the length of this book. Likewise, you do not need two authors to write this book. If Byung Chul Han can write his books in under 70 to 80 pages with considerably more originality and weight, then so can these guys. If we use the media consumption (food) metaphor, Han's works are nutrient-dense superfoods compared to the fluffy-and-only-sometimes-tasty marshmallows of "Are We All Cyborgs Now."

The problem with their approach ultimately is that they try to attack the issue head-on, as I mentioned above. Most of you are probably scratching your head right now. "But that's what they said they wanted to address!" Okay, but what lessons can we really learn from a book speaking about contemporary particulars? You can learn much more about how to approach technology from ancient texts, not modern ones (which of course they reference, but I'll get to that). For example, the problem is never an issue of "How much screen time is too much screen time," but rather "Who is my God or gods?" "What do I worship the most every day?" "If I laid out all the things I 'consume' in a day (literal food, metaphorical media-food, conversations, experiences, etc.), would I consider it 'healthy?'" The best works of philosophy and theology dig under and uncover the starting assumptions in an indirect and roundabout way; our modern tendency is to fixate on means, not ends, on symptoms, not root causes. Thus the crass chapters about sex bots totally miss the boat and don't deserve to even be in the book. Porn already exists, prostitutes already exist, and more relevantly, hookup culture exists. AI hasn't changed any of those; perhaps it has accelerated or magnified them, but it's taking the bait to bemoan sex-bots (something only the upper crust of society will ever be able to afford anyway). But with that last parenthetical, I give in to the same erroneous impulse toward particulars that I fear the vast majority of the book perpetuates.

What's of value in this book has been said better in other places, such as Postman and Han; however, the way that these two authors present that information is disappointing. Rather than a straightforward, anecdote-heavy text with way too many specifics, a more post-modern, and thus more technologically-relevant approach would have been preferable: something akin to the trash-theory of "Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl" by Tiqqun. I love that text so much and reference it so often because it skips over the old-fashioned (in the worst way: dusty, not engaging) approach that authors "think" they must take to "morally" approach difficult topics. I've read quotes from the Tiqqun text to one of my brothers, and despite the text being radically leftist, he, a conservative, was able to resonate with what I was reading. It provided quotes from advertisements, other philosophers, and the faceless collective known as Tiqqun, all with the same seriousness. This radical re-contextualization makes a much more profound point than any straightforward essay could. By contrast, in "Are We All Cyborgs Now," the authors at one point bemoan the fact that e-books allow you to CTRL+F and mark/copy key passages. This was among the most head-scratching moments of the book: have neither of these authors ever taken classes at a university where the lecturer copied extracts from a book? Also, have they never done the same with a physical text? Did they not do exactly that every time they quoted from other authors (an extremely old 'technology' in itself, one which they didn't even notice they were using)? Have neither of them ever skimmed a book/essay to get the gist, instead of reading page 1, then page 2, then...? I'll admit, I'm only recently getting better at looser reading approaches (I practiced my skimming skills on this book!), but a puritanical, absolutist approach helps no one, especially with issues as complex as this.

Certainly it's a problem that students don't read texts, instead relying on summaries, cliches, and half-knowledge; but this has been an issue ever since Spark Notes, and likely always has been an issue as long as crib notes have existed. Thus the problem isn't with any particular technology, but rather with the moral fabric of the students (and by extension their teachers). To bemoan the encroachment of technocrats and techno-utopians is to waste ink; duh, they're unwise fools. I don't need a new text to tell me that; every text in the public domain that's worth its salt tells me that. Sure, it's helpful to remind us that technology is never neutral, that it always carries with it in-built assumptions and worldviews, but such advice is worthless if you don't interrogate your own assumptions with equal fervor (a blindspot us conservatives would do well to remedy).

If you're not careful, you (any author, teacher, etc.) as a person in a position of power risk merely perpetuating your own biases/assumptions onto the reader, rather than telling us anything meaningful about the technology itself. This happens often in the text. For example, they inexplicably assume that "AI girlfriends and sexbots tempt young men with words", when it's the women-dominated Romance (smut) fiction market which really stands to capitalize on this issue. But, because the specter of pornography looms over these authors, they accuse everything of having a pornographizing effect (which I grant, many things do, but really? Augmented Reality like Pokemon Go? Pokimon No). The problem is that they have no faith in the common person's ability to discern reality from fiction, nor to intelligently use tools (even if merely via intuition); by and large, people don't approve of technological replacements for real human relationships, of any kind simply because they aren't the same. This of course is ironic coming from me, because historically I have very little faith in the average person's discernment; however, I do think that people are generally aware of how pernicious excessive technology dependence is. There's a reason why every single one of my students by default wants to write about "social media and mental health."

Though not articulated clearly, students today have a strong moral sense. Say what you will about Gen Z and Gen Alpha, but few young people alive today are so ignorant and arrogant as the insufferable atheistic scientists who were responsible for the loss of life in the world wars. Young people feel anxious and uncertain not because they're wimps, but because they know that things aren't right. They never lived in a time without the internet like I did, but they know intuitively that something is wrong, something is missing. It's like how there's a God-sized hole in ourselves that everyone acknowledges if they are at all sensitive or introspective. Young people today are a lot of things, but they aren't mindless drones. They conform out of a deep need for connection, not out of a moral failing. They scroll on TikTok to escape. It's much cheaper than heroin, and infinitely more socially acceptable. Every day they embody the meta-performative thesis of Shakespeare's plays, and as a result they love him once they get past the language barrier.

If the authors of this text really wanted to connect to the youth who are going to have to grow up with this technology and navigate it the most, then they should have appealed to that strong moral sense in them. I've found success in my own teaching at a secular school, not with any specific moral lecturing, but rather by giving students the tools that Han and Postman outline, then allowing them to find their own path through the maze. It's important for students today to feel a sense of accomplishment via what is essentially autodidactism. I genuinely believe that conscientious curiosity is the answer, not any specific sex of canonical texts. Wisdom trickles down through many different tributaries, and though I have my own opinions about which are "true," I'd rather students be engaged with these moral questions in the first place; their frustration with relativism and extremism will run its course, and they'll end up conservative adults just like their parents before them.

Speaking of which, I don't expect either of the authors to be hardened Marxists, because neither am I, but they don't blame capitalism and its concomitant "virtues" nearly enough. So many of the problems they outline in the text are direct descendants of laissez-faire capitalism's intense competition unfettered by ethical guardrails. This hydra is responsible for the proliferation of technologies that are inherently unethical (such as the LLMs trained almost exclusively on illegally-sourced, copyrighted material). We wouldn't have any of these dilemmas in the first place if engineers in silicon valley had even an iota of a conscience left. This is why I was complaining about them addressing so many specifics which were downstream of philosophical, theological, and sociological assumptions, but I digress.

I am thankful that the authors did address the problem of factory schools, the ramifications of which we probably will be facing for generations, even if we ceased the approach today. In my reviews I always draw a distinction between "scientia" and "sapientia," since a collection of miscellaneous trivia is not even knowledge, let alone wisdom. Educators are too often concerned with specifics, when the corrective is to zoom out and see the bigger picture. In my review for Plato's republic, I argued that Plato's pedagogical ideal for higher ed is to encourage connection-making between disparate topics, rather than mere "mastery" of one topic. What we define as "mastery" is a ghost of what the premoderns considered mastery: our idea of specialization in knowledge was largely unknown to them. All educated premoderns were what we would consider polymaths, being experts in all the domains of knowledge available to them, since they understood that no knowledge operates in a vacuum. The modern assumption that such is possible is precisely the reason why we're having a crisis of technology without ethics.

Ultimately, what I read here was superficially relevant to the topic at hand, but I think it would have benefited greatly from more indirect treatment. I understand that this is probably frustrating for the authors to read if they're reading this (hi Josh, I found this via Wolfmueller's YT channel!), but I think that teachers and authors alike often underestimate the maturity of the souls entrusted to them. If my undergrads can get profound insights from Han and Postman, then don't feel the need to dress them up; let the truth hang on the cross, naked and bloody, in all its paradoxical horror and beauty. That's the way it was meant to be.

[Joshua D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wide-ranging treatment of life in the digital age with practical sections on home life, education, society, the church, and more. One of the most thorough treatments on the topic.