Anthony Galluzzo explains the oddly united forms of “biotechnological Prometheanism” on left and right.

@JohnBrady @ablerism “Zuckerberg’s Participatory Panopticon” sounds like something a carnival barker would say. You’d pay your twenty-five cents and step right up! into a tent between Alligator Slim and the Man Eating Chicken. (But maybe, now that I’ve typed that out, that’s just about exactly what it is.)

@JohnBrady ha, srsly

@tinyroofnail I’d love to hear more on that last sentence?

@dwalbert oof, true

@ablerism Ah, calling me out on my off-the-cuff snarkiness? Not cool 🤓

Probably an overstatement I should just take back. But, in lieu of an essay, a few things I have in mind:

• The kind of naïveté with which American Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals have approached technology, imagining the church as an ethical voice or conscience of Third Wave industrialism — e.g., Richard Lovelace’s 1983 Future Shock & Christian Hope in CT — but winding up in what Mary Harrington recently called the New Fusionism.
• Typing this just now, I’m also reminded of Alan Jacobs’s defense of the Harry Potter books and his criticism of Christians who see “magic” as evil but technology as neutral, if not ignore technology’s power all together.
• Worth a lot more attention is the congruity that Felicia Wu Song marked between Rapture narratives, etc. and progress-driven business and technologies.
• It would be difficult to give a history of American Christian fundamentalism/evangelicalism without seeing a retreat from responsible care in the world. The non-life of the mind that Noll wrote about 30 years ago is the same non-life that now looks longingly toward the Trump-Musk regime. And whether they openly celebrate it or shrug and go along, the narrative end is still there I think.

Something like that.

@tinyroofnail Whoa, I needed this. Hadn’t put those all together at all. And it really wasn’t a call out, honest!