On Identity in the Hyperreal Internet Age [No.1]

[Postmodern Lore] The New and Improved Identity Machine

I remember when I first encountered New Atheism’s arguments in college. My freshmen roommate was big into it. Thinking back, one of the first labels that she presented as her identity was one of being a “humanist atheist.” In fact, that entire year, she never failed to try and engage with me on questions of faith (as she knew that I was a Christian). Over the year, I managed not to harp on my Christianity as much as she did on her atheism. I distinctly sensed that I should not engage with her on that question as I had just begun to take my faith seriously, beginning to read the Bible from beginning to end by myself for the first time (took me 4 years to complete my first run through). Anyway, I think that disposition served me well. I truly believe that I heard from Holy Spirit in that regard in the earliest part of my faith walk. Following through seems to have served me well.

However, in one of these attempts to engage with me and pull me into the endless speculation, doubtless prognostication, autistic clarification, and eternal circumlocution common in New Atheism, she brought up a ridiculous question that I ignored at the time. It was something like: “If the Bible tells you everything about the world, why doesn’t it mention the internet or other world-changing inventions?” I’m sure many of you have heard this question. It quite blindsides believers for the simple fact that we understand that the Bible tells us about the nature of God primarily and, secondarily, the nature of man (tertiarily the nature of darkness, fallen angels, and demons), and from this, all other outcomes and understandings can be derived. Trying to explain that is difficult, and since I had the sense not to engage with her, I’m pretty sure that I just shrugged off the question. I bring it up now for one purpose: to explain how irrelevant such a question is to the nature of reality.

Technology does not use itself. Currently, it cannot create itself, and even if it becomes able to do that, built into it are the metaphysical substrates that its creators put into it. Beyond that, like all matter, it is constrained by the fundamental truths of reality just as human beings are. In other words, technology is subject to human nature as we are its creators. Even if it were to act on its own, it would act out of a metaphysical understanding that sits upon the understandings that the technology itself is built upon. To summarize: the deepest darkness of technology is the deepest darkness of humanity. It’s enough for the Bible to talk about the sin nature of the flesh with regards to Man because technology is simply a shiny gloss over the deepest darkness of Man.

In these times—when A.I. programs are making art—people have begun to describe some of the creations of these programs as “inhuman” and “disturbing.” This isn’t wrong, but what people fail to understand is that the deepest darkness of humanity is also inhuman and disturbing. Transgenderism, the most obvious and accepted form of transhumanism in society today, is an example of an inhuman and disturbing creation of humanity. It tears at the fundamentally human understanding of sex and the resulting roles thereof. It rips identity away from children and steals from them the freedom to be innocent and ignorant of society’s pressures at an early age.

When a child should be playing and enjoying life, it tells them that they must fit into an archetype of the opposite of the inherent nature of their sex. They become forced to live under unnatural expectations of “passing” as the opposite sex in pursuit of peace for their tormented souls when they were more than capable of having peace by simply living as the sex in which they were born (and overcoming the insecurities that were engendered by outside sources about their bodies).

Transgenderism is a deep perversion of human nature, but it’s also a direct derivative of the technological age in which we live. In the technological world, physical form is separate from identity. In the earliest forms of the internet, people began being known by avatars and aliases. Both screen names (usernames), images, and combinations thereof have been used to represent the identities of human beings within the virtual. The unintended consequence of these identities is the psychological, physiological, and spiritual distance that develops between the owner of the identity and the physical human underneath.

Never in human history have human beings spent so much time disassociated from their physical selves as they do in the internet age of today. These days, as phones and tablets are given to children to passify them, the disassociation begins early on in life. Nowadays, children begin life trying to understand themselves through a machine, a technology. Instagram is one of the social media sites that is the most pernicious. Though people post “real” photos of themselves and their lives, these photos are also fake. Oftentimes, they can be edited and filtered in such a way that the real human in the photo becomes a caricature of themselves. The image that they present to the world through the site is both real and fake at the same time. A site where people post photos of themselves becomes a site where people post an ideal version of themselves instead, an ideal version that doesn’t truly have a physical counterpart.

Soon the gap between the physical form and the caricatured or avatar’d form widens as the young interneter begins using this tech. A kind of all-consuming madness develops as the disassociation between their real self and their virtual self grows. Eventually they don’t recognize the actual physical form as themselves, they begin to form a schema about their life that is beyond the real, a strange amalgamation of the original and the ideal. The natural result in the long run is a hatred of the constraints of the physical and the turning of the heart towards a perverse, unreachable ideal. When the you online is so much more interesting than the you in person (as interpreted by one’s lack of self-worth), why not become the you online in the physical?

Transgenderism is one manifestation of this perversion, this lie of the enemy. It stands in direct opposition to the Truth of one’s identity as fashioned by God, your Creator, your “identity in Christ” as we Followers of Christ like to say. This pathology of hell is rampant on the internet but becoming more common in the physical realm, especially among education “professionals.” Groomers abound ready to snatch your pre-adolescent child into the hell of this disassociation between the physical and the burgeoning perverse ideal of becoming the opposite sex (or some other unnatural perversion of identity—there are many such identity perversions and the amount keeps growing).

Back when I once worked at a coffee shop, I would engage in conversation with my extremely cool manager, an older woman. One day, we began discussing the R. Kelly alleged grooming controversy. She had watched one of the documentaries on the subject, and she mentioned that there was a parent that actually allowed his or her daughter to go to an R. Kelly concert even though he or she was aware of the rumors. The parent thought that, since he or she would be there, that nothing could happen between R. Kelly and his or her daughter. During the concert, R. Kelly got the daughter to come up on stage, and later, she became an alleged victim of his, at least from the parent’s perspective. My manager said that she had trouble having sympathy for the parent because the parent essentially, from her perspective, gave his or her daughter to R. Kelly by allowing her to go to the concert in the first place (even if the parent went with her). I agreed.

In many ways, the postmodern mental and emotional pathologies of today are sparked or inflamed by exploration of the digital world with or without supervision from a guardian. Parents unthinkingly introduce these technologies into their children’s lives without understanding the depth of darkness that their child could and most likely will be exposed to within the hyperreality of the virtual world. I feel very sorry, even empathetic towards these children. As a child of gen-xers but also a millennial (most millennials are children of baby boomers), I too was allowed an undue freedom to explore the internet to the detriment of my own identity.

Through it, in my innocence of exploration, I’ve encountered the worst perversions of this age without ever desiring to find them, but somehow, they found me. It’s even worse now for the up-and-coming generations. When I was growing up, no parent could be expected to understand this, but parents should understand by now the desolation that the internet has brought to society, especially in regard to protecting new generations coming up. Still, many don’t understand, and worse off, they are the ones introducing their children to these technologies at earlier and earlier ages, this technology that their child’s underdeveloped brain isn’t ready to handle in any capacity.

Unbeknownst to them, when their child is most mentally and emotionally vulnerable, their child finds themselves in a chat where groomers abound. Unbeknownst to them, their child, who is without antibodies to these pathologies, become subject to them under the hand of one of these groomers. Then, one day, out of the blue as far as the parent or grandparent is concerned, your son or grandson “James” wants to be called “Jessica.”

Suddenly, you start asking yourself, “how did this happen?”

“We didn’t raise you to be like this,” you say to your son or your grandson.

The truth is yes you did when you gave them over to a technology that not even you understand. You gave permission to this technology to expose your child to all kinds of perversions as an afterthought. It raised your child. It spends more time with your child than you do.

You gave your child over to it.

James desiring to be called “Jessica” is the natural result.

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Now, all Followers of Christ should remember that you are not subject to the natural world, but in Genesis 1:26, God gave rulership of the natural world to you. Then Jesus got that rulership back from the enemy that your ancient ancestors gave it to. So, you must remember that YOU ARE PART OF A HOLY LINEAGE THAT WILL NEVER DIE.

Thanks for reading!