From 2023 to 2024, I served as a Jesuit Volunteer with the purpose of helping educate high school students. I was repeatedly left awestruck by how easily young people today become dependent on and how effectively they can navigate online spaces.
Growing up amid a gauntlet of web forums and video game guilds myself, I know firsthand how they can shape youth socialization—especially as third places vanish and prohibitive costs make physical activities disappear.
It’s dangerous to assume that the impact of online communities is only confined to the digital world. Digital connections translate into the real-world lives of users. Young people across the world become aware of new perspectives far earlier than their predecessors; they are also increasingly vulnerable to embracing extreme ideologies acquired online.
Over the past three decades, intangible digital platforms have displayed incredible power to transform physical culture. Especially among younger groups, these platforms have become responsible for new forms of group collaboration and political organizing, and their memetic waves have far outpaced traditional media structures. From Twitter’s sparking of the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring movements to the recent Discord-based revolution against government corruption in Nepal, platforms have shown the potential to reshape how people engage with one another far beyond what appears on their screens.
Today, we’re closer to building global communities than we ever were before, and young people are helping lead that charge. However, without the traditional barriers to information once determined by national borders or the ethical codes of media editors, our connections through the complex network of for-profit social media sites, online marketplaces, and digital subscription services—key components of platform capitalism—are mediated by algorithms that manipulate our attention at scale.
In June, Matt Bernico wrote about the “demonic facade” of artificial intelligence, and how the dark temptations of machine learning don’t come from actual possession but rather take the form of exploitation and the waste of our physical, emotional, and spiritual labor.
Building off Bernico’s argument, I would argue that artificial intelligence is the most grotesque form of a wider facademade manifest. It’s the inevitable downstream conclusion to years of developing media and market silos online, controlled solely by tech billionaires who appear more interested in making enough money to escape mortality than paying marginally higher wealth taxes.
In Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, author and technologist Mike Pepi describes the destructive framework of platform capitalism:
“The platform is impervious to judgment of bad outcomes because it suspends any sense of moral or ethical improvement. It is only interested in your content to the extent that it can first efficiently monetize it toward interested external parties, and second, employ its governing algorithms to better train those decisioning and structuring models, however incrementally, to better evaluate subsequent transactions.”
Incentives within online spaces exist to cultivate anything and everything that must, at all costs, be profitable.
In Matthew 4:8, Jesus faces the overwhelming temptation to rule “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” as he stands against the devil in the desert. Corporate platforms provide their users with similar temptations, providing access to global information all the time, anywhere, and all at once.
Jesus faces the overwhelming temptation to rule “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” as he stands against the devil in the desert. Corporate platforms provide their users with similar temptations, providing access to global information all the time, anywhere, and all at once.
Similar to the devil in the story of Jesus’ temptation, platforms demand that we bow down and worship our worst impulses—training their algorithms to center ragebait, trolling, and recurrent controversies while they quietly make off with every bit of revenue they can extract from users.
Recent research from Tulane University identifies how platforms intentionally manipulate the “confrontation effect,” where people are more likely to interact longer with content that outrages them. Users were far more likely to engage for extended periods with posts that promote conflict, so companies intentionally push divisive and confrontational material to increase advertising potential.
Church communities have an incredible opportunity to serve as institutions whose structures can oppose the incentives for resentment that private algorithms create. Even while acknowledging all the issues with social media, there are flocks of people desperate for community who can only be reached through digital platforms. We cannot surrender, as Michael Woolf writes, the “digital town square… our ability to influence our part of it” to evil forces, which will attempt to reach people online regardless.
READ MORE: Meeting God in the Metaverse
So how can Christians reorient our digital spaces toward justice and peace both within—and then beyond—software? Ideally, churches should exist for the explicit purpose of giving mercy and expecting nothing in return. Their capacity for boundless generosity and care is a trait that directly counters the prevailing transactional character of private platforms.
Faith leaders have an acute ability to serve as voices for patience, resilience, and goodwill that can pierce through the noise that turns frustration into a commodity. For example, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ offers clear practices that church accounts can adopt to set boundaries for how they respond to temptations of online hate. They encourage churches to use consistent, values-centered messages that reflect their vision of faith and justice. Instead of wasting time combatting an anonymous troll, platforms should be reoriented toward building connections with wider audiences that will translate the gospel message into daily experiences.
Pope Leo XIV recently warned that “the digital world will follow its own path and we will become pawns, or be brushed aside.” Leo’s comments on the dehumanizing effects of platforms are not only critiques of technology itself but also critiques of the forces that seek to use the digital world as a profitable end rather than a means to promote human dignity.
When new technologies come into vogue that do not promote human dignity or economic flourishing for all, when automated systems reduce the value of human labor and data centers burn through natural resources, the church must speak out against these things.
And while these technological developments should be concerning to all Christians who care about social justice, I do not think it means we should reject technology and digital connections completely. I find great solace in the reflection of Jim Allaire, the founding developer of the Catholic Worker movement’s community website, who made the following observation in 1995 while responding to an article by Sojourners founding member Bob Sabath. Citing the personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, Allaire observes: “But stupidity lies, not in the machine but in those who have asked it for what it cannot give, and are naive enough to expect the machine to be a substitute for virtue.”
Our ability to grasp the successes and dangers of how technology changes our relationship with God and one another increases each day. But considering how technology and digital platforms can connect us, we shouldn’t outright reject these tools. Instead, we need to prioritize our focus and intentionality in how we deploy technology as another tool of community building.
We must seek to use these tools with a virtue that can be cultivated only through community. Shattering platform capitalism doesn’t mean senselessly smashing our machines. It requires smashing the systems that rely on our exploitation and building alternatives that value our inherent dignity.
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