Richard Martin Blog: God’s Not On Your Smartphone

Writing on The Smartphone Wars, Brian Hall has a post with a surprising title: “Where I Find God." The answers, in case you’re interested, are “running, writing, eating and travelling."

He doesn’t mention sex, but that’s still a pretty good list. The real point of the post, though, is not where Hall gets his transcendence. It’s the dawn of the new smartphone millennium.

“We are, I fully believe, on the cusp of an absolute social, economical and cultural break from our past," proclaims Hall. Our world is about to “be completely remade," including “your job, your wealth, your values and how you pattern your life."

And what’s the world-changing catalyst for this new era? You guessed it.

“It is the smartphone that physically represents, more than any other device, the coming new world. One shaped by real-time, always-on, highly social global connectivity; a worldwide leveling of access and knowledge and opportunity – and wealth."

Umm-hmm. Hey, how ‘bout those Patriots?

I am made uncomfortable by pronouncements like this, and not just because of my congenital discomfort with all overt displays of religiosity. Hall’s outburst follows the long tradition of techno-spiritualism, one that began with Pythagoras and has been nobly carried into the present by commentators like former Wired executive editor Kevin Kelly, novelists William Gibson and Richard Powers, scientists like Carnegie Mellon robotics pioneer Hans Moravec, and the leaders of pseudo-cults like the Extropians.

Techno-spiritualism reached a peak around the turn of the millennia, before Amazon and eBay made it clear that cyberspace was more mall than cathedral: “As a new immaterial space, cyberspace makes an almost irresistible target for religious and spiritual longings," wrote Margaret Wertheim in 1999, in the now-defunct journal Cyber-Sociology.

The problems with this kind of crypto-religious thinking about technology are twofold: One, it tends to raise expectations to impossible levels, leading to inevitable disillusionment; and two, it tends to divert attention from the real-world benefits of new technology to the confused, quasi-messianic delusions of technologists themselves.

Gibson’s novels are primary exemplars of the second tendency. Gibson himself is too smart and cynical to really subscribe to techno-spiritualism, but his characters are often under its spell. The protagonists of two of his early novels, Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive, achieve a kind of apotheosis when their consciousnesses are uploaded into a kind of digital eternality, thus achieving immortality in cyberspace. That kind of thinking also underlies the new sequel to the dated cyber-adventure Tron. If only we could live in cyberspace, all the messy problems of our untidy physical selves would be magically erased.

To return to Hall’s sacred smartphone awakening, he announces that “the smartphone is, in my view, the new wheel." Now I get it: That wasn’t a simple obelisk those apes were cowering before in "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was an iPhone!

A London pastor caught the tenor of the times earlier this year when, rather than elevating smartphones to the sacred realm, he brought the power of the sacred to bear on smartphones. The Rev. Canon David Parrott of St. Lawrence Jewry, a 17th-century church, updated the ancient tradition of Plough Monday (an annual ceremony when churchgoers would bring their farm implements to be blessed) by including smartphones and laptops. Canon Parrott had his congregation hold up their mobile devices and prayed, according to The Times of London, "By your blessing, may these phones and computers, symbols of all the technology and communication in our daily lives, be a reminder to us that you are a God who communicates with us and who speaks by your Word."