Tech exit, pro and con

I have a running friendly debate with Samuel James about Clare Morell’s recent book The Tech Exit. I gave it a glowing review back in June. In October James wrote about his concerns on his Substack. This semester I assigned forty-seven students across two sections to read both Tech Exit and Samuel’s Digital Liturgies, as well as Andy Crouch’s Tech-Wise Family, Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, and Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary.

More another day about their reactions to the other books. As for Morell, they mostly shared Samuel’s reaction. (I know him and not her, so I’m alternating between last and first names here.) One student described it as “aggressive”: both in style and in advice. They just weren’t persuaded by her maximalism: no television, no video games, no tablets, smartphones, or social media. They were persuaded, by all the books and by the course in general, that social media is a major issue and that smartphone addiction is all too real—and that they (like everyone else) need help. But they felt like Morell threw out the baby with the bathwater.

That’s not to say they didn’t appreciate the book. It opened their eyes to both systemic issues (schools, laws) and children (fentanyl, not sugar). Most students finished the semester convinced that they got personal digital devices at a younger age than they should have, and therefore most of them are not planing to replicate that early-adoption for their own potential future children.

The funny thing is, I’m not myself much of a Tech Exiteer. My household would maybe count as a two-third Tech Exit family at most. We have wireless, two televisions, and two laptops (mine and my wife’s). We even have video games. No child pre–middle school had or has a tablet, and when we first bought a Nintendo Switch our rule was that it wasn’t for handheld use; only for shared play in the living room, on the TV.

Nevertheless, that’s already a lot of Tech Exit rules broken. We do screen time, which is Morell’s number-one enemy. As a general rule we practice screen-free Sunday (or Crouch’s digital sabbath) and up to one hour of daily screen time otherwise, albeit with more leeway on Friday after school and Saturday morning. Some weekdays we’re so busy with piano and dance and tennis and church that the TV never gets turned on; on Saturday mornings we’re not setting timers to make sure they’re off before they hit sixty-one minutes.

We’re a pretty typical family, in other words, with perhaps stricter limits on time and content than the average household. So why, if my house looks more like Samuel’s than Morell’s, did I like her book so much? Let me count the reasons.

First, because I think her diagnosis is correct. I don’t know anyone (literally, not a soul) who takes the problems or challenges of digital devices too seriously. Almost everyone I know underrates the threat they pose to prayer, attention, literacy, free play, and healthy childhood development and socialization. So “directionally” she’s got the better side of the argument.

Second, because most Christian books on technology pull their punches, leaving people the same as when they started. Whatever else her book does, it doesn’t do that.

Third, because nothing would be lost and much would be gained if families took her up on her proposals. This is key. A house without screens is a gift to children—even if it’s not the choice my wife and I made. A house without wireless would be glorious! Why not say that out loud, even if most of us are unlikely to match that ideal?

Fourth, because she’s dead to rights on smartphones and social media. This is where we have drawn the line. My seventh grader doesn’t have a smartphone, and I don’t plan to buy him one anytime soon. And even if (whenever) he does end up getting one, social media will be a hard No.

Fifth, there’s a sense in which a book like The Tech Exit extends the Overton Window for Christian families in such a way that a TV-less, device-less household becomes an imaginable possibility in a way that it might not have been before. So that, even if a family doesn’t go all the way, if they still go forty or sixty or eighty percent of the way, they will have made harder (but better) decisions about technology than they would have otherwise. Put differently, the gravity that a book like Morell’s exerts pulls us all in the right direction, even if there’s still a belle curve of digital practices with a swollen, mushy middle.

Sixth and finally, because although the first half of the book, supported by the rhetoric throughout, suggests an implacable standard, as a matter of fact Morell offers examples throughout her chapters of actual families making local, personal decisions that do not amount to cookie-cutter Tech Exit implementation. These examples reveal that the buck stops with parents, who must work together to put beliefs into practice. It turns out that parents themselves don’t always agree about these things! My wife and I are different people. We’re not both Luddites. Some of our decisions have been compromises. That’s called marriage.

For this reason, among others, Morell rightly refuses to make the perfect the enemy of the good—yet without lowering expectations. That last point makes all the difference. In my experience, the fact that most Christians basically end up looking just like their neighbors in terms of digital habits functions as a prevenient deflator in conversations and thereby a defeater in arguments. Since we’ll all just fail anyway, maybe we shouldn’t set the bar too high, or even talk about it at all? Well, I may be mistaken, but I could have sworn Paul comes to a different conclusion in Romans 6:1.

In short, Morell allows Christians to argue from the shared premise that digital technology is a problem—for all of us, but especially for our children—rather than to argue (once more, ever more, ad infinitum) toward it as a contestable conclusion. Moreover, her vision is resolutely not pie in the sky. I know a father of young children who, based on Morell’s advice, just this summer took the household television off the wall. He and his wife bring it out from the closet for family movie night, but otherwise it’s no longer a digital babysitting option. I assume there are hundreds of anecdotes just like that from Morell’s readers (and others influenced by her ideas). Surely such responses and changes are all to the good?

And if there are other readers who find her suggestions too aggressive, no harm done. At best, it’ll prick their conscience about this or that, leaving them to ruminate about how they might make small changes. At worst, they’ll get annoyed or outraged, then immediately forget about it the moment their unlock their phone.

Quit social porn

In the introduction to his new book, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age, Samuel James makes a startling claim: “The internet is a lot like pornography.” He makes sure the reader has read him right: “No, that’s not a typo. I did not mean to say that the internet contains a lot of pornography. I mean to say that the internet itself—i.e., its very nature—is like pornography. There’s something about it that is pornographic in its essence.”

Bingo. This is exactly right. But let’s take it one step further.

A few pages earlier, James distinguishes the internet in general from “the social internet.” That’s a broader term for what we usually refer to as “social media.” Think not only Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, et al, but also YouTube, Slack, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr, perhaps even LinkedIn or Reddit and similar sites. In effect, any online platform that (a) “connects” strangers through (b) public or semi-public personal profiles via (c) proprietary algorithms using (d) slot-machine reward mechanisms that reliably alter one’s (e) habits of attention and (f) fame, status, wealth, influence, or “brand.” Almost always such a platform also entails (g) the curation, upkeep, reiteration, and perpetual transformation of one’s visual image.

This is the social internet. James is right to compare it to pornography. But he doesn’t go far enough. It isn’t like pornography. It’s a mode of pornography.

The social internet is social porn.

By the end of the introduction, James pulls his punch. He doesn’t want his readers off the internet. Okay, fine. I’m on the internet too, obviously—though every second I’m not on it is a second of victory I’ve snatched from defeat. But yes, it’s hard to avoid the internet in 2023. We’ll let that stand for now.

There is no good reason, however, to be on the social internet. It’s porn, after all, as we just established. Christians, at least, have no excuse for using porn. So if James and I are right that the social internet isn’t just akin to pornography but is a species of it, then he and I and every other Christian we know who cares about these things should get off the social internet right now.

That means, as we saw above, any app, program, or platform that meets the definition I laid out. It means, at a minimum, deactivating and then deleting one’s accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok—immediately. It then means thinking long and hard about whether one should be on any para-social platforms like YouTube or Pinterest or Slack. Some people use YouTube rarely and passively, to watch the occasional movie trailer or live band performance, say, or how-to videos to help fix things around the house. Granted, we shouldn’t be too worried about that. But what about people who use it the way my students use it—as an app on their phone with an auto-populated feed they scroll just like IG or TT? Or what about active users and influencers with their own channels?

Get off! That’s the answer. It’s porn, remember? And porn is bad.

I confess I have grown tired of all the excuses for staying on the social internet. Let me put that differently: I know plenty of people who do not share my judgment that the social internet is bad, much less a type of porn. In that case, we lack a shared premise. But many people accept the premise; they might even go so far as to affirm with me that the social internet is indeed a kind of porn: just as addictive, just as powerful, just as malformative, just as spiritually depleting, just as attentionally sapping. (Such claims are empirical, by the way; I don’t consider them arguable. But that’s for another day.) And yet most of the people I have in mind, who are some of the most well-read and up-to-date on the dangers and damages of digital media, continue not only to maintain their social internet accounts but use them actively and daily. Why?

I’m at a point where I think there simply are no more good excuses. Alan Jacobs remarked to me a few years back, when I was wavering on my Twitter usage, that the hellsite in question was the new Playboy. “I subscribe for the articles,” you say. I’m sure you do. That might play with folks unconcerned by the surrounding pictures. For Christians, though, the gig is up. You’re wading through waist-high toxic sludge for the occasional possible potential good. Quit it. Quit the social internet. Be done with it. For good.

Unlike Lot’s wife, you won’t look back. The flight from the Sodom of the social internet isn’t littered with pillars of salt. The path is free and clear, because everyone who leaves is so happy, so grateful, the only question they ask themselves is what took them so long to get out.