A Christian Plan to Save the Internet

As for-profit technology platforms grow, they increasingly transform into representations of what Catholic theologian, philosopher, and critic Ivan Illich referred to as “radical monopolies”—an inescapable infrastructure that dominates every aspect of social organization.

Up against the machinations of platform capitalism, people are conditioned to embrace the faulty idea that their intrinsic value comes from how well they can meld into the profit margins of corporate algorithms operated by the likes of Meta, X, Reddit, and others. Brandon Rickabaugh, writing for the Center for Christianity and Public Life, describes this process of melding as “[t]he liturgy of mechanization, of depersonalization,” where demand for scalability and monetization online outweighs the practice of virtues like patience and generosity.

We know these systems must be changed, but since we can’t escape them, how do we reshape them for our own benefit? Rather than begrudgingly accept dehumanizing liturgies, Christians can reimagine platforms as they currently exist and experiment with alternative digital practices.

The great hurdle of designing new platforms comes from “enshittification,” the popular term coined by author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow, which explains how technology companies deliberately allow digital platforms to deteriorate for the sake of financial gain. In his 2025 book, Enshittification: How Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, Doctorow describes this process as follows:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

This problem of value allocation can be seen most directly across social media sites like Facebook. Originally, Facebook was meant to be a space for users to share personal moments of their lives with one another, but now Facebook—as well as other social media sites—functions as an advertising billboard to hawk products and deliver disinformation for mass engagement.

Enshittification doesn’t just affect infamous apps. It’s quite easy for religious services to fall prey to the temptations of the machine, and frankly, they’re easy targets for plunder.

Prayer and meditation platforms have been criticized for their aggressive use of influencers and celebrity marketing toward the spiritually adrift. Costly “pay-to-pray” subscription models are a primary source of revenue for apps such as Hallow, Glorify, Creed, and Gloo+.

In particular, Hallow and Creed have received millions of dollars of venture capital funding from the likes of libertarian billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Whether these investments are intended to be profitable or exist to seed their extreme ideological agenda, neither outcome seems primed to bring users any closer to heaven.

Platforms that seek to build authentic communities must be centered around creating positive outcomes for their users, not upholding the radical monopolization of the platform itself.

READ MORE: Here AI Am to Worship?

In 2023, artist and internet culture writer Joshua Citarella hypothesized the creation of a “public option for digital communications infrastructure,” which could provide services that today often require internet access, such as “tax filing, claiming benefits, voter registration, official identification,” etc. Citarella referred to this as “StateBook.” This StateBook model would exist to prevent private corporations from coercively scaling digital utilities for profit, much like how the United States Postal Service maintains a universal service obligation to the entire country.

While churches do not have the same need for government control and market saturation that projects like StateBook would require, Citarella’s proposal to create online spaces where for-profit financial incentives do not dictate how technology functions offers us some direction for how experiments with alternate internet models may function.

The author Paul Kingsnorth argues for Plough that one way to overcome the instability of our present moment will be to model resilient lifestyle practices of the past. Kingsnorth identifies that the cultural breakdown of Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire was mitigated by Christian monasteries that preserved ancient manuscripts and knowledge against violence during the period.

Likewise, our goal should be the creation of digital monasteries. Without the fanfare and fluff of exploitative marketplaces that prey on our attention, these spaces should be self-governing and self-sufficient micro-platforms that provide users with a direct connection to their faith communities.

Unlike most popular religious platforms, these digital monasteries must be nonprofit organizations. These “digi-monasteries” should be run by paid and volunteer “techno-abbots,” who are dedicated to cultivating and curating knowledge, resources, and communications for their respective flocks. Their basic terms of service could look quite familiar to the rules of monastic orders. St. Augustine’s Rule emphasizes the importance of the basics of healthy communication: avoiding harsh words, apologizing when damage has been done, forgiving quickly, and asking for forgiveness when necessary. The Rules of St. Benedict and St. Francis ask their adherents to detach themselves from obsession over material goods and reflect on the nature of the work they produce. Replace “goods” with “views” and “work” with “content,” and you’ve developed your own online community guidelines. 

Wikipedia serves as an existing example closer to what I envision. The site remains entirely crowdfunded, and articles are edited by a decentralized network of volunteers. Despite being an imperfect system, their article editing processes are surprisingly rigorous, run under the watchful eye of thousands of pseudonym accounts. There aren’t any incentives to “win” as an editor on Wikipedia. User flourishing isn’t tied to the demands of any algorithm but rather to the objective of ensuring easy public access to knowledge.

Alongside their desire to serve as pastoral caretakers, our techno-abbots should follow actionable principles of digital reform. They need to posture themselves, often and as much as possible, as alternatives to the all-consuming physical and digital data infrastructure of large technology companies and how they monopolize various aspects of life.

The grind of LinkedIn has become synonymous with growing exhaustion across the labor market, all while many companies expect their employees to still build and maintain relationships on the platform. The performance of Instagram influencers has redefined an entire generation’s relationship with their body image and self-esteem. Substack now partners with Polymarket to quite literally gamble on journalism and world affairs. This problem isn’t an accident.

In contrast, digi-monasteries can abide by ethical rules such as the practices of “end-to-end” and “right of exit” that Doctorow details as necessary to combating enshittification. “End-to-end” rules assume users shouldn’t have to work around the constant recommendations of algorithms. You only see the content you choose to see as directly as possible. Likewise, the “right to exit” demands that your platforms and the hardware they use should be interoperable. If you’re not happy with available services, users should be able to re-establish themselves on any other server without sacrificing their existing social connections. People should only connect and communicate with whom and what they want to and be able to move freely between public and private community forums without being coercively tied to existing ones due to market factors, algorithms, and peddlers outside their control. 

We may not be able to free ourselves from all of the radical monopolies Illich feared, but we can gradually replace many of them by making the conscious decision to create networks of authenticity and intentionality. We’ve done this since the very beginning of Christianity. In Acts 4, the apostles shared their possessions so that there was no needy person among them. Ending the enshittification of our digital and spiritual lives requires the same level of spiritual and material discipline to share ourselves fully and structure our systems justly.

Ending the enshittification of our digital and spiritual lives requires the same level of spiritual and material discipline to share ourselves fully and structure our systems justly.

To resist the liturgies of mechanization, Christian communities must make the apostolic choice to live outside monopoly together.