What gives? Even as the Cloud generates a hyperreal where counterfeit disclosure forecloses revelation upon a crucial, planetary evolutionary threshold, does it still reconstitute the human sensorium and common world as ground for faithful participation in God’s theodrama?
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“When the trouble caused by Satan becomes too great, Satan himself becomes his own antidote of sorts: he stirs up the mimetic snowballing and then the unanimous violence that makes everything peaceful once again.” — René Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, ch. 3 As McLuhan noted, "the Prince of this world, Satan, is a very great electrical engineer." The peculiar, sudden danger is that our lived environment is now being scripted by principalities and powers scaling toward total seizure of the metaphysical faculties of discernment itself. ‘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. 2/ As for Bulgakov’s “victory of good on the path of world-historical tragedy leading to the final separation of light and darkness"? It embraces a harvest of collective consciousness, disclosure and consequence in cyberspace as much as meatspace. We are a unicity, after all.
Open original document@JoshHochschild Klima exposes the anti-incarnational logic of our moment: sever meaning from embodied reality and we get total mediation, simulated coherence, and systemic trust collapse. Ultimately, the consequence is eschatological: a forced separation between what can and cannot be mediated.
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