A case for spiritual technology

In 2000, CHI held a special interests workshop entitled, “Can we have spiritual experiences on-line?” boldly venturing into relatively unchartered territory, the conference organizers themselves admitting, “Curiously, we have not been able to find any publications relevant to this topic” [paper]. The workshop began from the assumption held by Muller et al. that:

…the dominant design rhetorics of design work in human-computer interactions (command-and-control; constant updates and interruptions of new information; fast-action games; denotative, explicit clarity rather than connotative, exploratory ambiguity) worked against what we called the “inner stillness” of spiritual life [paper].

They report that this assumption was challenged by the numerous anecdotal accounts of participants using technology for seemingly spiritual purposes, e.g. visiting religious websites, communing with people sharing similar interests, comforting one another via email, etc.. Six years later, Genevieve Bell [paper] draws similar conclusions about the potential of technology to facilitate spiritual experiences, citing countless examples of the ways in which religious people have appropriated technological tools to make “being religious” easier: e.g. people texting prayers, ministers uploading podcasts of their sermons, or mobile phones with “mosque” settings that prevent the phone from ringing during prayer times. Bell’s paper suggests that there need not be incompatibility between religion and technology if the latter is designed with the needs of religious users in mind.

Problem solved! Kumbaya! Or perhaps not. This conclusion does seem rather facile considering the weight of the question, not least of all because of the superficial interpretation of what it means to have a spiritual experience (conveniently conflating spirituality with religion to neatly avoid discussion of the less tangible inner human experience). I would argue that while having a phone that allows you to read the Koran might make the phone a conduit of spiritual exchange, that does not make the using of the phone a spiritual experience. Nor does using a word processor to type a sermon make the experience of the word processor spiritual in itself. A useful comparison can be made with the shakuhachi flute. This instrument has long been associated with the spiritual practices of Zen Buddhist monks who perfected their skills (“outer progress”) as a means to “inner development” [paper]. But today, the flute is used primarily for playing secular music with no more spiritual engagement than one would feel in laying down a synthesized rap track. The message to take from this, however, is not whether we use technology as an instrument for spiritual or secular production (this refers more to the objects that technology carries, e.g. the document on the screen), but whether the experience of using that technology is itself aiding inner development.

Another crucial problem with Bell’s interpretation is that she tacitly accepts the notion that technology is inescapably disruptive to spiritual “stillness”, and that we need to design around this tension. A mobile phone that is “sensitive” to prayer times and cleverly does not interrupt only highlights this tension. So does Stuart Walker’s mobile phone design [link]: a phone that comes in pieces in a bag that one must assemble every time one wishes to make a phone call, the idea being this reinforces mindfulness, and the implication being that technology challenges spirituality by producing the opposite. But if we follow this design logic to its inevitable conclusion, we will end up advocating to a return to prehistoric rock and stick technology. This does not seem the answer. Are spirituality and technology really irreconcilable?

The first challenge is to define the spirituality we seek. One interpretation would be to find ways of catalyzing people to invest technologies with a sort of spiritual reverence, as a group of monks did in Ithaca when they blessed the Internet in order to produce greater positive and fewer negative manifestations through its use [book]. But the shortcomings of this approach is that (a) it does nothing to affect the person-to-technology experience, and (b) one can easily see this brand of spirituality degenerating into cult-like worship of technological commodities, such as the iPad (a behavior I would describe as “new totemism” [book]). An altogether different approach is technoshamanism [link], which hails technology as the means to personal transformation through the artificial heightening of our senses. Intriguing, to be sure, but this does not bridge the rift between spirituality and technological engagement in the mundane, non-psychedelic, daily experiences such as sending an email or surfing the Internet.

Perhaps insight can be gleaned from understanding those at the opposite end of the spectrum. Posthumanists, a.k.a. transhumanists [paper, paper], for example, argue that technology has removed the need for the body at all, since a human being “can be understood as a kind of machine” [book]. While this seems to take technological development to its absurd conclusion, such that many would recoil at the thought, sociologists such as Borgmann [book] would argue that technology has become “the way in which we today take up the world;” and by appropriating our world through technology, we begin to manifest the characteristics of our technology, making us ever more computer-like, ever less human, ultimately creating our own artificial intelligence [book] and subjugating – or “reverse adapting” (Langdon Winner, in Borgmann) – our own values to that of the technology we create (e.g. immediacy, simultaneity, contingency, subjectivity, disposability, and speed).

In a manifesto entitled “You Are Not A Gadget,” Jaron Lanier [book] rails against the unintended consequence of certain technological design decisions whose impact was magnified over time, namely that “the deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits.” It is a sad state of affairs that someone must disillusion us from our cultural psychosis whereby we think ourselves to be machines, but it does seem we’ve confused ourselves utterly. Lanier describes our situation thusly: “Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.” He implores us to act urgently, before we face technological “lock in,” when we are both technically incapable of designing differently and mentally incapable of imagining technology can be different. This is in contrast to David Orban’s laissez-faire attitude toward “The Internet of Things,” which he believes will make itself redundant by making the human irrelevant, eventually forming “their own independent social networks,” which will in time free us to once again be human [link]. But this begs the question: is there no hope in the meantime? Are we really resigned to being in limbo for the foreseeable future?

There are profound questions we must ask ourselves as we approach what may very well be a point-of-no-return. How do we want to experience our world? Have we outlived the need for spirituality in our lives? - or have we merely allowed our technology to convince us of this? There has been buzz around the phrase “A Secular Age” [book], as if it describes a state of advanced human evolution beyond superstition . But to deny our spirituality is to deny our humanness, and we should never be so naïve as to think ourselves as fundamentally “different” from our ancestors. I shall conclude with this section with the following poignant quote from novelist Annie Dillard [book]:

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time – or even knew selflessness or courage or literature – but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

See, the reason we must endeavor to make the experience of technological engagement more spiritual, more soul-satisfying, is not because without this human life will become devoid of spirituality; on the contrary, it is because spirituality fulfills an enduring human need, and unless technology begins to address these needs, to make sense as part of our spiritual engagement with the world, it will become utterly redundant.