I was going to do the “write a novel in the month of November” thing, only it wasn’t going to be a novel, it was going to be a sort of novelesque memoir where I wrote up my life in the most funny and ridiculous way possible. It was going to be epic. However, I failed to put any words on the page on the second day. At this rate, by the end of the month, I will have to wildly write like fifty thousand words if I am going to catch up. So scratch that. Instead, I’m going to try to blog every day–or not, we’ll see. The main thing is that this clip is great:
This is such a helpful insight–that these big tech companies are “colonizing” our attention. That they have to because they have to make money. It’s a sort of inexorable march toward profit and wealth that simply can’t be avoided. The greater costs to the mind or to happiness, while they matter, can’t possibly be calculated by a dollar amount and so they can’t possibly factor in. YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and TicTok are not engaged in a malign conspiracy to rob you of your joy, it’s just that they’re publically traded, that’s all. If anyone is plotting the downfall of civilization, it is only Satan.
This seems an important point because I don’t really want to otherize the people who own these platforms, nor the people who work for them. I hate being otherized, and so I don’t want to do it myself.
Just as an aside, truly, my favorite words of today are “colonize” and “otherize.” I met and made their acquaintance in the 90s and thought they were pretty charming, but now they are dear friends, and I plan to use them as much as I can while I still have time.
But just to return to my meandering thought, the point is that Satan is the main enemy here. He is the one we should be most annoyed with. See how cunning he is. By use of these very platforms, he increases the feelings of embarrassment people have over acknowledging that he even exists or that it’s possible to be with him forever:
I’ve been muttering this to myself for weeks. Too many people don’t think there will be any consequences for what they believe or how they live. Too many Christians, in particular, say they believe that hell exists, but their actions belie them. If they really thought it was possible to be separated from God for eternity, and that God had some sort of objective, knowable, divinely revealed way of letting them know if they were or not, they would act as though that were true. That so many people insist that what happens now–who you are and how happy you are now–is the most important thing indicates that those people don’t believe in a consequence-laden eternity.
Which, in turn, allows them to fluff on Jesus and who he is. Not believing in eternity makes it possible for you to think that Jesus died on the cross because he “loved too much.” You don’t need Jesus to be God because you don’t really believe that God exists and that what he thinks about you matters more than what you think about yourself. You say you are a Christian, but functionally, you’re an atheist–a colonizing atheist who otherizes believing Christians.
The trouble is, both hell and heaven are real. And, as Lewis so cleverly points out somewhere, the present does matter because of how close eternity presses in. You don’t have to wait for heaven or hell. You can begin living in one place or the other now. If you insist on grasping what isn’t yours, in the publicly traded social media empire way, there will never be enough of anything forever. And, if you insist on redefining the Christian faith, in the manner of progressives, you will always be wandering far out into the wastelands of deconstructed speech and thought, lonelier and lonelier. But if you let Jesus have your whole attention, if you ask him to order your mind and your heart, if you ask him to come close and be your friend, then all the other good and lovely things will be added to you.
So anyway, today I’m going to “colonize” my own house. Whether the people who live here like it or not, I’m going to impose my will and make them do my bidding. Is that what the word still means?
Have a nice day!
