RT @nick_routledge: @TaraAnnThieke I concur, Tara. And what if maddening media's means and ends simultaneously define their essential, constitutive function advancing us toward an appropriate plot device, the 'Deus ex machina' of, a redemptive, truly planetary Media Event; a propitious, perfect, divine turn?
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Copy of tweet thread here: ‘Thus we Christians today are placed in the most difficult of all situations. We have to repudiate both the spirit of the age and the means that it employs. If we do not, if we yield even a fraction to those forces, we will betray Jesus Christ.’ —Jacques Ellul, What I Believe Our call, in practice, is to confront the simultaneity of the enormous force of the Zeitgeist and its primary, expressive medium. I wonder what Ellul, so presciently alert to the transcendent significance of wedded spiritual and media environments, would have made of the Web Era.
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Copy of tweet thread here: end/ With world-enslavement massively consolidated by an epochal analog-to-digital shift capturing modern experience itself, of course. Which does rather beg the question of its larger, evolutionary significance, doesn't it? What, ultimately, does 'The Web' represent? 1/2 Simultaneously, paralleling its colossal impetus, cloud imperialism's consolidation within and dependence upon an all-aggregating machine-abstraction, reveals the entire ontological edifice as, correspondingly, vastly more ephemeral and exposed than its engineers conceive. Well-noted, Paul. Evil, it is. And whereas it bears noting that the *monetization* of our attention span is, at this juncture, barely distinguishable from its *weaponization*, the 'powers of the air' have, correspondingly, never before represented such a choice, ready target.
@Plough @suzania @MadocCairns @koppsch_a If climate chaos loses its terror and becomes a liberating hope only once its interpretation is fully Christianized, perhaps technology trends can also only be fully understood apocalyptically, that is, from a point of view revealing a meaning different from their literal sense?
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Copy of tweet and quote tweet appearing here: @nick_routledge and @unherd end/ Needs be said, reality's inclusivity is boundlessly vaster than 'the West' and 'Christendom' as Kingsnorth has it. Then again, illumination framed in an essentially occidental, Christian vernacular has its merits. For one, if "everything is religious", This Machine is, too. Quote tweet: I farm. Yes, the Technium cult, largely blind, anthropocentric, diabolically absurd; and Kingsnorth, hands-down, one of our wisest. But he misses a critical, positive, Christological dimension, namely, IT as central to transcendent political intervention at the planetary level.