Luke Burgis has an essay out titled “The Three City Problem.” He leverages the three-body problem from physics to describe a kind of social and spiritual dislocation many of us experience today. The essay is a potent, incisive description that provides depth and color to a problem which is being discussed elsewhere and noticed everywhere. The basic idea is that when we have two bodies in a system, we’re able to calculate their positions and predict their movements and interactions with some precision. Once a third is introduced, however, order becomes chaos and we’re increasingly thrown into incalculable confusion.
In applying this structure, Burgis identifies three poles of our aspherical lives, the three planets of our closed metaphysical system, as Jerusalem, Athens, and Silicon Valley. I’ve heard the first two before used as a tidy metaphor: the two epicenters of civilization, as a kind of left-brain/right-brain of the west, where we’ve come from, what grounds us. But a new regional power has emerged, one aimed towards value rather than God or the truth. Since we’ve introduced a third body into our system, a third locus of control and influence, the relationship between institutions and forces in our lives is cast into frenzied confusion. The introduction of Silicon Valley as a social force, an economic and organizing force, he argues, reorients much of our lives towards the pursuit of value rather than more traditionally explicit goals of faith and reason, and we’re all now paying the price, socially, politically, spiritually.
My goal isn’t to evaluate or restate his argument; I found his essay lucid and stimulating and encourage everyone to read it for themselves. He wraps his arms around our thorny situation, one evident if undefined to all of us, perhaps most of all the chronically online. He offers a solution – not a complete one, but a starting point - that takes a great step in defining the boundaries within which we might live in harmony. So I’m not writing about points of critique or in order to score culture war points, but just to trying and build on a sturdy foundation.
In the first place, one can’t help but find parallels between what Burgis calls the city of Silicon Valley and what some other thinkers have called The Machine. The Machine, in my own words, is a complex web of technological elements that drive and divide our attention, that mechanize and digitize our lives in a spiral of ever-growing complexity. It is aimed yes, at value, but from this orientation flows notions of optimization, efficiency, and the elimination of waste. The Machine is emergent, it is undesigned but always growing. It trades on our wants and desires, a kind of mimetic flywheel; it offers expedient and convenient means to meet these desires in exchange for a (at times vanishingly small) piece of us. The Machine uses us just as much as we use it, and it is deeply tangled in our lives.
I want to be careful not to identify the Machine too closely with what’s often called “late capitalism,” but the logic of capitalism, which Burgis links through the value of, well, value, helps define for the machine its ends.
We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called ‘needs.’ Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always on. We were building a machine to replace God.
Now, I’m also not entirely comfortable with identifying Silicon Valley with the Machine per se. I think there are good people with good intentions working in tech, who provide us with solutions to real problems and make our lives easier and even richer, deeper. And I certainly don’t want to turn away from the promises of technological advancements in medicine or communications or transportation or energy. As I say, I’m relying on the explanatory power of an emergent force, one which goes much deeper than just Big Tech or Twitter or the dreaded online discourse. The Machine can simply provide a bit more depth in explanation of these alienating phenomena. Certainly, an orientation towards value has distorted our relationships to faith, the truth, and ourselves long before the emergence of the internet. It’s this distortion that leads many creative, unique, and capable individuals to feel like they are doomed to work forever in management consulting or investment banking, per Burgis’ mimesis. It’s that distortion that files us away as airplane passengers, job applications, numbers at the proverbial deli counter.
So, while simultaneously providing for us, these technologies can at times seem to rob from us some humanity. There is a sense in which much of the value created (or captured) by Silicon Valley turns us into cogs. People produce tweets, for free, either to be lost in the empty void (speaking as a former reply-guy) or for the meat grinder of public opinion. Our attention is directed for us, our agency with how we spend our time and care easily slips away under the power of Tik Tok algorithms and Netflix recommendations. One can comfortably find themselves lurching from banal curiosity to idle background programming and look up, their day vanished. And as our world grows ever smaller, more interconnected, more optimized, it is easy to feel like another number, or another user, in a vast web over which our own logic, the logic of truth or faith or purpose, seems to hold no power. If bureaucracy puts us in little boxes, the Machine atomizes us into so many bits.
And I think Burgis recognizes these dangers, as he writes in his piece. He’s put his finger on the problem with clarity. And his proposed remedy is, I think, a much better starting point than retreating behind the walls of either Jerusalem or Athens, or standing atop a hill screaming that technology is morally neutral. But his starting point, one of trying to inhabit the land between them, entering each city as we will, is liable to leave us unmoored, floating in no man’s land, and subject to the whims of exactly these forces beyond our control.
One reason for this is that Silicon Valley, or its attendant soldiers and missionaries, manages to insert itself into the pursuits and ends of the other cities, even our own pursuits as we might imagine them living in the unsettled wilderness. Burgis himself notes that we now have technology mediating our religion and our education and even our personal relationships. We see how the tentacles of the Machine, if I can use that term, insert themselves in our every interaction: we invite them in. It might be great to attend your college lecture on Zoom (it isn’t), but that leaves one sitting at a computer with access to every other outlet for idle amusement (or creation, I admit) available to us. It might be great to have QR code menus at your favorite restaurant (it isn’t), but that involves me pulling out the little black mirror from my pocket, which has the potential to facilitate distraction, distraction from a moment to connect with my wife or the opportunity appreciate the spiritually grounding effects of good nourishment.
Perhaps I’m more of a techno-skeptic than Burgis. I merely worry that in trying to live between these cities, we may end up returning always to one, unaware of our feet moving beneath us, out of convenience and ease if for no other reason.
This temptation to drift further arises, in part at least, because there is no king, no Dalai Llama of Silicon Valley. Value as the ultimate good is difficult enough to define in our own lives, let alone when aggregated among billions of disparate people with differing tastes, whims, and goals. So the drive of Silicon Valley, of the Machine, becomes something altogether separate from any individual human, something unutterable and perhaps unknowable. It’s easy to get caught up in our most superficial interests while scrolling with a numb mind. It’s equally easy to find ourselves mad at some person we’ve never met as our reward for compulsively checking Twitter when we wake up, or feeling like we’re being spoon fed a narrative which doesn’t apply to us. While our attention is devoured, we might confuse what’s on our screens for our entire lives.
Athens, for what it’s worth, is thoroughly well-embedded in our world. Its logic drives most of our big decisions, the ones we’d actually bother to sit down and reflect on: where to live, what kind of job to pursue, how to address a problem at work or in our homes. This may be because we’re all sent to school as children; we learn how to read and write and reason, we’re instructed in the scientific method, and we celebrate the achievements of great inventors and thinkers. Attending college is a significant rite and marker of social achievement for many. But the Machine, or the consuls from Silicon Valley, are inside the gates. We’ve welcomed them in because they help us get where we want to go. The danger is we might lose sight of where exactly that was in the first place.
And Jerusalem, in this sociospiritual metaphor, is quite easy not to visit, as we simply shuffle along the worn, desanctified, secular highway between Athens and Silicon Valley. While we’re raised in schools and we willingly strap phones to our hips and smartwatches on our wrists, God, or whatever spiritual peace one could wish for, in my humble opinion must be sought. Or at least welcomed. There’s a reason a certain type of person, the type who tries LSD or goes to Burning Man, is sometimes called a seeker. Spiritual inquiry and search has often been represented as a kind of quest, from Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain to the Buddhist Journey to the West. When our agentic attention is robbed from us, or at least hidden from view, one might never pluck up the desire to begin such a journey, or experience that sweet and rare state – boredom – which might leave one wondering what they’re doing here.
So I want to be careful not to confuse the ends of the Machine, as embodied by the more spiritually destructive tendencies of Silicon Valley, with our own. To be clear, we have power over these decisions, which city we live or walk in or visit or buy goods from. This is precisely what Burgis is asserting. So, I won’t recommend holing up in your city of choice, locking the gate, and calling it a day. Beating a retreat will lead us to death and darkness. I just hope for those of us trying to live between them, as I am trying to, that we take caution for the other humans around us, that we beware of traveling salesmen, soldiers, and missionaries from any of the cities, and make sure we’re walking into, and out of, whichever one we please.