FROM THE PRINT MAGAZINE:
This essay was originally published in New Polity Issue 4.1 (Winter 2023). Subscribe for all our best essays.
Social media is a machine for the universalization of Posting, such that all human communication becomes a Post in its exterior form, regardless of the interior intention of the poster. Thus, a grandmother might hold the opinion that “God is love,” but by posting it, she can only be seen to hold such an opinion as a part of an identity which she struggles to represent victoriously over and against her anonymous enemies, as in “God is love, you bastards.” It is obvious that the car preceded social media as its spiritual grandmother, for when people were thoroughly abstracted into four-wheeled representations of themselves and let loose into a war of traffic, they quite naturally developed the habit of posting stickers on their cars to represent their submerged identity over and against all others. The “Coexist” bumper sticker is the most obvious example of pre-digital Posting, for it only ever meant: “I coexist and you a-holes do not.”
Writing directly to People While They Are Posting is bad for the same reason that giving a nail-gun directly to a three-year-old was bad for the patrons of our local Jo-Ann Fabrics. As the saying goes, for the three-year-old with a nail gun, every old lady in the cotton ball aisle looks like a roofing shingle. Likewise, for the twenty-something with a social media account, everything written looks like a possible brick in the edifice of their work of identity-construction; ammo for the war of all against all. Women will try to pretend that it is otherwise with them; that only males are so martial about self-expression, but while women Post differently they still Post—pictures of their children coupled with defenses of their lives as the Real Deal, to the rage and envy of their kind.
Drowning men will grasp at straws, and posting men will grasp at articles, wielding them as aids in an impossible effort: to claim for themselves solidity and fullness of being by way of a medium whose very operation requires them to appear as a pixel. This is why online writing is referred to as content—it is quite naturally seen as the filling, the insides, with which the vacuous online identity must quickly stuff himself to appear whole and complete. After all, the very form of one’s online presence is an outside lacking an inside; a picture, text, or sound that might well have nothing behind it. The anxiety this produces is rather inimical to the work of reading. The one who reads in the mode of Posting is always looking for the ways in which what he reads can help him emerge as something solid within a liquid environment, and so triumph over his enemies. Words are not merely read, they are scanned; scanned for footholds towards possible glory as suitcases are scanned for bombs. Paragraphs that do not appear easily weaponizable in the Great War To Express Oneself are submerged into forgetfulness; the chief Critical Reading Question that short-circuits around the addled, online brain is never is it true?—unless the truth of the thing has the good fortune of answering that other, pressing matter: how will I look if I attach this thing to myself?
Here, within the limitations of paper and ink, we invite our readers to read without Posting, because the chief goal of New Polity is that not that you should post (recall Rule #36: Never Post) but that you should act—walk instead of drive, pray the Office, divest your portfolio and invest in the Kingdom, start an almonry at your parish, have another child, farm common land, collect rainwater, cover the burial expenses of poor people—the sort of stuff that pickpockets real power from tyrants and passes it into the hands of the Church. And the trouble with all this activity is that, being “little less than a god,” we can only do so much of it before we fall asleep. Whenever reading is haunted by Posting, some percentage of caloric energy, some chunk of spiritual capacity, some significant piece of an apostle’s Waking Hours is spent on the Posting part—and this is particularly bad when the spirit of Posting is made manifest in actual, online posting, for this takes time, and thought, and craft, and oh Lord, how often posting “I Do The Thing” feels so much like Doing The Thing that we think, after all, we need not add actually Doing The Thing onto the already onerous work of presenting ourselves as One Who Does The Thing to an anonymous and hostile public. Life is hard enough without having to market it at the same time. Between living and marketing, who can say they’ve never chosen the latter? Not me.
The one who would start or join a conversation finds himself limited by a reality that exceeds his control—by the volume of the bar, by what has just been said, who has said it and what kind of political power he wields vis-à-vis the whole group. Even a comic non sequitur takes its bearing and attains its success on the basis of prior listening. I once made a real social splash by joining a conversation by saying “God hates the stock market,” but it is only on the basis of (a) knowing what people aren’t talking about and (b) knowing enough about what they might talk about that the humor of the interruptive non sequitur actually comes off. You always join a conversation, even when you start one. Indeed, all learning to speak, all kindling of that first flame of conversation, is the careful repetition of talk that is already going on. Babies imitate our sounds and fill them out with meaning later on. If we don’t speak with them, they never learn.
This fact, that we only ever speak in response, has direct theological import, for it tickles the ticklish into asking the question: “And if no tongue lights itself, who set all these tongues on fire?” It is tempting to rest in natural theology, and simply call God the one who first spoke to man, who first addressed him with reality and so gave him something to talk about, but in fact, God addressed man twice; provided the catalytic Word once in Creation and once again (encore, encore!) by his Salvation. God alone can speak a new word, can address Man ex nihilo, can set the tongue on fire without being Himself set on fire (but simply by being Fire!), and so it must be the case, as obviously as the sky is blue, that all of our stupid jokes, blasphemies, and declarations of love, that all these words can only be responses within a chain of responses kicked off by either the Old or the New Testament (literally, the old word or the new word); by God’s talk with Adam and Eve or by the angel Gabriel’s faithful delivery of a new word—“Hail Mary, full of grace” (that's a first!)— and by Mary's faithful delivery of the new Word, Jesus Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection is all His Church can talk about.
Posting does not actually surmount the priority of the ongoing conversation that begins in God. No language could. Even the images and sentences of artificial intelligence can be recognized as images and sentences only insofar as their goofy pronouncements accord with what God has set us all talking about. But Posting poses, postures, and purports to be a mode in which the human person gets to be sicut Deus—able to speak a new word from Heaven. The prompts to Post are abyssal; little empty boxes encouraging us to speak our minds, to dredge up from nowhere—a word. The appearance of Posting is magical: words dropping from nowhere, without context beyond what algorithms can construct. Thus the rat race—unbearable, really—to offer the hot take, the secret knowledge, the not-yet-heard explanation that one has because one is so Real, as opposed to everyone else. Thus the whole tenor and timbre of social media as a demonic opera in which everyone knows more than everyone else; in which everyone gives indications of this godlike plenitude “behind” their particular posts by only ever posting in the style and idiom of “knowingness.”
Of course this is all an illusion. Wherever men appear as gods, you can be sure they detest the fact that they are only men and are busy masking the fact with some mechanism on which they are more dependent than a newborn is on the breast. Nowhere do we copy each other so fervently as in a digital world in which we all must struggle to appear as an original. Nowhere are our words from nowhere so dependent on the prompting of the daily news. (News, by the way, apes the effect of the New Testament by providing man a “new” word necessary for his salvation, though not his real salvation, just his salvation from the his pitiful, hollow, online condition; from the painful effects of silence and the call to act that can be heard therein). Social media relies more heavily on prior conversation in order to fuel the incessant self-promotion which is necessary in a world in which our goodness is placed in doubt. But the way the Poster relies on the reality about which he posts is very different from the way that the one who would enter into dialogue relies on the same.
For if the man joining the conversation looks to reality for his cue; if he listens so as to know what to say; if he reads the room; if he waits to speak; in all of this he is to reality as a lover is to the beloved. Yearning for communion, he first lets the one with whom he would communicate reveal himself. But within the logic of social media, one rapes reality; mines it for content; uses it not for communion but in order to produce an appearance of wholeness that the medium of social media denies to the user. (Rule #687: No raping).
The great gift of social media is one of contrast. We may now take a distinct pleasure in keeping things to ourselves. Not of course, that this doesn't contain its own sort of danger. The one who pridefully does not post, who gains all his satisfaction in not-posting, who recognizes that the only way to be the Most Real is to Get Out Entirely—this one is busy sublimating the Will to Post to new heights. He twitches as much as any addict who cannot resist the constant display of self toward the general gaze. You’ll know such a person because he is always fantasizing about a wide-scale social media recognition of his decision not to use social media. He is like a Desert Father who sends for news of the City’s reaction to his departure: “Do they know how thoroughly my fasting repudiates their excess? Find out, quickly!”
But it would be too cynical to take this negative dependence, this ressentiment, as the norm of the increasingly Ludditical (?) Catholic Church. Lovers take delight in the “just us,” the darkened room, the happy knowledge that some word is for her ear alone, that the events of the previous evening are a treasure of intimacy, known only to God and God's earthly vicar, one's spouse. Yes, love may grow sick with sin and, despairing of the reality of intimacy, seek to reverse-engineer it: making one of love’s finest qualities—the exclusion of the outside— into love itself, into a fetish, as if one was intimate in order to exclude others, as if by acts of exclusion alone, one could arrive at love. In such a case, the lover ends up devouring intimacy, not fostering it, for where love is manufactured by exclusivity, one relies on that which he excludes in order to love.
Such “intimacy” is always the dialectical opposite of exhibitionism. It seems to fuel our identification of sex with dirtiness, with the indulgence of the forbidden, with the need to offend some third party by our antics, to exclude some would-be knowers from our “dirty little secrets” in order for our intimacy to be real. But this is love on a ventilator. Real love is not like this. Such silliness is obviously possible in the pleasure of not-posting; but also possible—and I hope more likely—is the pleasure of intimacy, of something kept between you and me. For reality marries us, approaches us in secret and gives itself to us in a dialogue of World and Mind that is “just for us” and can never be repeated in another, but can only be cherished, once, in the indissoluble bond that obtains between a uniquely created consciousness and its object:
"Do you take this light, shining at this angle off the hood of that Kia, as your lawfully wedded husband?"
"I do."
"And do you take this Mind, who alone constitutes you as this light, shining at this angle, as your lawfully wedded wife?"
"I do."
Of course, one can share reality, but this always means inviting another to shine their own intellectual light upon it. Because we share in one human nature, and because our intellectual light has its ultimate source in the One God, we can know the same thing as our neighbor. But, because this human nature never exists except as an unrepeatable person, this "knowing the same thing" is a phenomenon, not of identity, but of communion. No one ever exhausts the subjective position of another. (“We are Christians,” Tertullian says somewhere, “we share everything but our wives”).
There is an intimacy between consciousness and its object that a culture of vain, universal “sharing” reveals by way of contrast. I would not have thought to praise God for the way this cumin and that cilantro disclosed itself; I would not have thought to thank Him for the way the light from the candle added a shadow to the napkin which conspired with the plate to give me a feast for the eyes before the feast for the stomach. But in a culture which encourages us to share our meals—not actually share them, how gauche—; to post the books we have read; to describe our moods, our reasons, and our accomplishments toward an anonymous sea of judgment; in such an outward culture, a certain accentuation of the joy of intimacy is possible: that joy that says, “let’s let this one be just between you and me.”