Matthew Harvey Sanders, you CEO of Longbeard, maker of Catholic AI Products for the world, beloved child of God, you. How you’ve been in my heart this Christmas! I bet (every ounce of Chex Mix still littering my family home) that you are (it pains me to say it) a Good Dude. I further wager (what candied nuts are still in my possession) that you are sincere, kind, and faithful to the Holy Church whose pews you and I both warm, whose confession lines you and I both extend.

I give these post-Christmas caveats because I am about to hold up your lecture in a dark alley, mug it, and spend what change I can lift from its pockets on discount eggnog. I am speaking of your lecture “The Church’s Mission in an Age of AI: an Advent Lecture for the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom at St Patrick’s Catholic Church in Soho, London on 5 December 2025.”

I have struggled with the task, in part because Christmas revels made it increasingly difficult to wake up earlier than my children; in part because your lecture was brave and clear, every sentence occasioning a book that really ought to be written; in part because it felt Scrooge-ish, Grinchy, Cromwellian, Straight Herodic not to give the ol’ “well done” customary among the brethren at (what was) the most wonderful time of the year. But still, I think that your proposed merger of the Catholic catechesis with AI is at once completely understandable and a very bad idea.

With such sentiments, allow me to present a counter-lecture. It selects some points of disagreement, knowing full well that we have more in common than not, that we are destined for communion together, and that we will ultimately come to be “of one mind” as St. Paul commands—here in part, and in that eternal Christmastide we call “Heaven” in full.

Chatbots, generally

To start—and one really must—it would be best to say where I am coming from, and that in a matter-of-fact sort of manner. I don’t think large language models are evil. I think chatbots are evil. I think they are evil because, as a matter of design, they involve the human person in an irrational act: conversing with a thing that cannot converse.

I am deeply unconvinced by the recent argument of Mr. Estep—that no one ever meant to design a chatbot in order to have people chat with it. I am also unconvinced by the argument that knowing that a chatbot is “just a machine” absolves one from the irrationality of conversing with it. (This, for the same reason that I was unconvinced by the Israelite of the Exodus, the one who said, “Yes, and you have good reason to be upset, Moses. I’m hardly going to defend some of the dancing that went on around the Calf! These women of ours—prone to hysterics! But let’s not let the schizoids set the tone, eh? Normal, healthy Israelites know it’s just a statue. How can you say that I have performed an act of worship towards what I know that the Golden Calf is no more than a work of human hands?”)

Human acts have an objective reality, quite apart from what we think of them. The fact that chatbots elicit irrational acts of conversing with non-intelligence from their users is no bueno—even if we know they are just machines, and even if every user is healthy, sane, savvy, knows just how LLM technology works, and only uses chatbots for the best and noblest reasons.

Magisterium AI, specifically

Because it’s bad to chat with robots generally, it’s bad to chat with Catholic robots, specifically. Magisterium AI—the Catholic chatbot that Sanders characterizes as a paver on “the Golden Path”—is bad.

Like pretty much every other AI chatbot, Magisterium AI licenses a commercial-use API from a bigger LLM (Anthropic? OpenAI?) and modifies it to generate Catholic-approved content in response to queries. It is trained on Catholic documents—texts that Longbeard is admirably about the work of digitizing. The “content” may be top-notch—the form in which it is delivered is not. The chatbot’s users receive a specification of the Catholic faith—what we call catechesis—in and through the irrational act of conversing with a machine.

To the great credit of Sanders, his boys at Longbeard, and all my beeping and booping Catholic Brethren (of whom I am the first)—they’re worried about this. Sanders presents Magisterium AI as a solution to the problem of ChatGPT: a healing alternative to its indefinite training on “everything,” its addicting design as a possible companion (and a sexy one, too!), its moral relativism, and its transhumanist bent. Against this diabolical, dimwitted, cash-grab, “Magisterium AI is disciplined,” says Sanders. “It reads the Encyclicals, the Decrees of Councils, the Catechism, and the Code of Canon Law. And crucially, it cites its sources.”

This is good stuff. This is admirable stuff. Sanders (and all technologically-innovative Catholics putting in the blood, sweat, and hours staring at lines of code) should be praised for recognizing the darkness and stupidity currently driving our country to prance about as a nation of datacenters and phone-addicts. Catholic technologists need no other motivation than the one that stirred them to produce Hallow, Truthly, Magisterium AI, and all the rest: to give glory to God and to serve his Holy Church. No quenching, no snuffing is in order here! Let’s fan this motivation, deepen this desire; let’s go further, do more; let’s fast, and in fasting, develop such a voracious appetite for the transformation of the world that we hunger to transform the very form of Catholic AI—not just the content.

Time will tell: perhaps it will prove to have been a necessary first step, this effort to catechize ourselves and the world with a restrained and well-trained Catholic “brain.” But let’s not imagine that evangelization has only to do with content: that the difference Christ brings to a world of men speaking with non-persons on their phones is a remnant of Catholic men speaking with Catholic non-persons on their Catholic phones. Not just the content but our way of life is (and ought to be) a way of holiness. Such holiness cannot include the irrationality of speaking and listening to the probabilistic “generations” of machines designed to be operated as intelligences. The difference between the “dark path” of Silicon Valley and the “Golden Path” of Longbeard’s products should not be dismissed, but deepened to include deleting Magisterium AI.

How different are Catholics, exactly?

Sanders assures us that “Magisterium AI is not an oracle. It is a tool. It points you back to the primary texts. It says, ‘Here is what the Church teaches, and here is where you can read it for yourself.’” Further (and as is customary in the marketing of any Catholic version of a smartphone-centered technology) Sanders says that this app is designed to lead people “off of their screens” and into the real world: “Magisterium AI is designed to be an ‘off ramp’ and not a ‘roundabout.’”

This is confusing as a simple matter of driving. A roundabout is not something one gets stuck driving around and around in—unless one is having far too much fun—and an off-ramp is not a good analogy for an “exit into the real world.” An “off ramp” leads you onto another road. I do not bring that up to nitpick a shoddy metaphor (to do so would expose me to embarrassment) but because Sanders wrote better than he knew. For all the assurances of a profoundly Catholic difference—a Golden Path departing infinitely from a Dark One—the actual experience of using MagisteriumAI is one of all the fakery, silliness, and desperate “personalizing” of ChatGPT, just slower and winding—a two-laner to Sam Altman’s super-highway. Here’s something I wrote, forthcoming in Word on Fire’s Journal of Evangelization and Culture:

Magisterium AI appears to greet me with a friendly “Good morning! What can I help you accomplish today?” When I ask it—with some scruples, I admit—“what does God want from my life?” it “tells” me (in that bullet-pointed prose fast becoming the calling card of the age) a correct-ish generality. It then “tells” its wish for me: “May you find peace in responding to His loving call.” It recommends a prayer: “if you're feeling lost, start with the Examen prayer.”

Now, it is strictly true that no one has wished that I find peace. No one wants my morning to be good. No one is helping me accomplish anything today. No one recommended that I pray. Even if OpenAI’s technology was guardrailed against such unnatural references to an “I” that is not and a “you” not really addressed, no one is answering my question “correctly” when the machine answers “God is love”—because no one is answering at all.

Yes, Magisterium AI is an off-ramp, in the sense that it is an exit from the obvious evil of bringing one’s every question and concern to an artificial intelligence—one which may recommend we kill ourselves. But let’s neither kill ourselves nor fool ourselves: the enticement to “stay,” to “get stuck,” to misdirect acts of conversation towards irrational ends; the temptation to relate to an “it” like its a “thou” does not only come from what the thing says but that it appears to say at all; in the appearance of an intelligence; of a “thou” apparently available, listening, specifying the Holy Faith as an “I” to a “you,” particularizing answers in response to us, offering spiritual advice, and giving warm wishes—things which make us feel known when we are not known, heard when no one is listening, blessed when we are no such thing, and so on. Again, I really only have one point to make: that conversing with fake people is not the Christian form of catechesis.

The problem of the new probabilism

Well, that’s not quite true: I may have three points to make. Magisterium AI specifies the faith probabilistically. It catechizes with the warning: “when in doubt, ask a human.” Sanders writes “We tell every user: ‘Never take an AI’s word on faith alone.’”

By the nature of LLMs operations—somewhat helpfully described as “guessing the next word in a series” on the basis of a numerical pattern superinscribed onto a large body of data—a chatbot can only probably generate the right answer. My point will be instantly misunderstood: I am not saying that MagisteriumAI gives incorrect answers. I am saying that when it gives correct answers it gives them—probably. A dice-roll is still a dice-roll even when it always lands on precisely the “6” you want.

Once again, it is not the content, but the form in which the content is “given” that makes me sad, staring off into bleak midwinter landscapes while so-called homies text me AI “answers” to my sincere questions about the medieval Liturgy of the Ass. I want—indeed, as a little child was led to hope—that the Holy Faith would be definitely given. Catechesis, by which the mystery of the faith was concretely specified to me and my weird little hangups, was salvation from doubt and an invitation to faith. But MagisteriumAI generates the truth doubtfully, signposted with careful warnings not to believe, to consult others—and ultimately, to “exit” this form of catechesis for a more real one. I do not think the Holy Faith should be so probabilistically specified, even when (and especially when) it is correctly specified.

Hearing from no one about God

As a necessary result of its design, Magisterium AI irresponsibly specifies the Catholic faith. This sounds like a diss, but it’s simply the only word I have found that conveys the problem. “Responsible” has the same root from which we get words like “response” and “spouse.” “Responsible catechesis” conveys (for me) not some priggish thing a High Church Anglican prelate might demand from his parish staff, but that someone is bound, espoused, and married to the thing said. In written word or in speech, catechesis gives the faith in the form of witness. However formal the promulgation, however public and magisterial the text, every specification of the Catholic faith is a response of someone—the Apostles, the Martyrs, and (ultimately) the One Holy Catholic Church we call “Spouse”—to Jesus Christ. The Holy Faith is never simply “the right words in the right order,” but a Credo, an “I believe in”—the articulation of someone touched by the Lord, and so always evidence of the reality of God who revealed himself to man, to people who saw and reported what He did and said, down through the ages, unto you.

The fact that, in the pronouncements of Magisterium AI, no one stands espoused to this particular specification of the Holy Faith, no one witnesses to what is apparently “said,” no one gives this answer—all of this would be fine and dandy if Christianity were other than “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1-2). Such a chatbot might work well for Muslims, I mean, and if our Faith was a kind of Koran—but it ain’t.

What Pope Leo has not quite said

Sanders writes “not as a theologian, nor as a philosopher.” Says he, “I leave the deep metaphysical distinctions to the scholars who are far more learned than I. I am a builder.”

Now, a lot of this is just warming up the pan—a guy has got to start a lecture somehow! But “deep metaphysical distinctions” are not the esoteric conclusions of some specialized branch of knowledge, nor a work that can be humbly and respectfully left to a body of experts. The distinctions of metaphysics are basic: children make them. Adults presume them.

Theology and philosophy—thinking about God and the world—are not tasks we should leave behind because they are not tasks we can leave behind. The most thoughtless, tossed-off, hack-job of an action embodies, whether any one would like to or not, a view of the cosmos, a thought about God, and a theory of man. As Pope Leo wrote to Sanders’s “Builders Forum,” “every design choice reflects a vision of humanity.” A Catholic chatbot “says” something about man. Its design presumes a certain kind of human being—its production and use realizes that vision in history. A “builder” does philosophy and theology in and through his building.

An architect and and engineering firm that join hands with the Real Estate Bros to raze a historic neighborhood, shoot a freeway through it, and cobble it all back together as a bunch of strip malls with built-in triple-net leases to Auntie Anne’s and Buffalo Wild Wings—they may not be able to articulate what, exactly, they think about the world. “Metaphysical,” if it has any meaning, indicates the tarot card readers and raki healers who will occupy their store fronts in 10-15 years, post-foreclosure. But there is meaning in the buildings and a vision of man in the strip mall: man is a beast of the field that perishes; a homeless consumer; at war with all others in a cosmos of scarce resources; abandoned by God to seize what he can. This vision of humanity is in the strip mall as its cause and so as its consequence. The Pope asks us to consider “who we are becoming through the technologies we build.” The children born into our strip mall world are formed by it as if by nature—that is, they are born needing to be saved. That the builders “know not what they do” does not mean they have not gone and done it—and need the Father to forgive them for it.

I harp on this point, because it is the chief error of the Catholic technologists (God bless them, keep them, give them good classical education options for their children, etc.) to imagine that the machines they would have us rent (chatbots, mostly) are not already informed by a philosophy and designed according to a particular theology, but are just “tools” which may be turned to Catholic ends and modified to ensure good Catholic content. But it seems obvious that chatbots already represent a distorted vision of humanity; that they promise a banal future for the life of nations and more fake stuff for the world; that, insofar as they are made integral to the Church, they promise a poor show for the Church (see, “SermonAI”).

Still, Sanders takes it that Pope Leo has given him “marching orders”:

We received a message from Pope Leo that perfectly crystallized this mission. He reminded us that we should not view our work with suspicion, but with a sense of sacred responsibility.

(Am I riddled with confessable envy that Longbeard got a letter from the Supreme Pontiff while New Polity settles for a shout-out on Rogan’s Supreme Podcast? Yes, horribly, but I digress.) The Pope is American now. As such, it may well be that he took these, his compatriots and my own, out for chili at a dive with the game on and there, during the 7th inning stretch, warned them against “viewing their work with suspicion.” But it’s not in what he wrote. The Holy Father did ask them to “cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work.” He did invite them “to place technology at the service of evangelization and the integral development of every person.” Sanders is well within his rights to interpret the Pope’s address according to his own lights. (As am I, and so I interpret the Holy Father’s lack of communication with New Polity as a quiet, beneficent, fatherly nod of approval and an unspoken but clear “sic ‘em, boys”—but I digress.) Sanders suggests that viewing one’s own work “with suspicion” is irreconcilable with a “sense of sacred responsibility.” This may be a quibble over definitions, but it would seem to me that regularly viewing one’s own work with suspicion is essential to a sense of responsibility, sacred or profane.

Coming as it does, at the end of an ode to a fruitful synthesis between the evangelical goals of the Church and the AI tools of Longbeard, it’s hard not to read Sanders’s interpretation of Leo’s words as a papal sanction for chatbots. Says Sanders:

He [Leo] wrote that “technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation”. Think about that for a moment.

Alright, I’m thinking about it.

“technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation”.

Still thinking about it, Sanders.

When we write code that serves the truth, when we build systems that protect human dignity, we are participating in the divine act of creation.

Yes—so too when we design and install heated towel racks. But the question is: can a system protect human dignity while being a chatbot?

He [the Pope] challenged us to ensure that our intelligence—whether artificial or human—“finds its fullest meaning in love, freedom and relationship with God”.

Yes, he did.

That is our marching order.

Yes.

We must build the tools—like Magisterium,…

Ye—wait, what?

…like Ephrem—that protect our families and empower our evangelization.

Wait! Go back!

We must digitize our memory so that the wisdom of the past can light the way for the future.

Stop—how are you doing this? Is this an AI power?—how did you derive, from the affirmation that AI “finds its fullest meaning in love,” the practical conclusion that we must have tools like Magisterium AI? I mean it might follow, but only if the chatbot is the form that LLM technology takes when ordered towards love, freedom, and relationship with God. Is it?

The big picture

Longbeard takes the long view that, if the world is going to go nuts for artificial intelligence, we really ought to have a Catholic version of the same, a “brain” trained on the tradition, a chatbot guardrailed to produce “catholic answers” and, like a great “parental control,” to “check” the advice and pronouncements of OpenAI’s language-generating machines: “Ephrem [the machine, not the saint] compares the answer from the secular cloud against the “Catholic dataset”—the 2,000 years of wisdom we have digitized…If the secular model returns an answer that is biased, utilitarian, or contrary to human dignity, Ephrem flags it. It says, ‘This is what the world says, but here is what the Church teaches.’”

This is predicted to be a great boon to the Church; a “tool” to “empower our evangelization.” I would like to make a fairly uncomplicated point: For all that is new and wonderfully new about LLM technology, it shares characteristics with the technological innovations of the last several hundred years: newspaper, radio, television, computers, and, of course, the internet of which AI chatbots are a mode. Like these, AI expands the availability of human thought and creativity and is potentially universal in its scope. Like these, users of the technology are largely passive in their consumption of its offerings. Like all of these things, its advent has been heralded by the Church as both a danger and an opportunity for evangelization and pastoral care.

It’s not the most exciting part of the papal encyclical tradition, but, in regards to all of these forms of pre-AI media, lay people have been encouraged to produce Catholic versions of the same. Have we done it? In America, yes, we have done it. There is a Catholic press. There is Catholic radio. There is Catholic television. There is—obviously—a Catholic use of the internet, and we have been evangelizing what Benedict XVI called “the digital continent” with gusto. And our protesting brethren have done the same. For (almost) everything, a Christian version: for rock music, Christian rock; for rap, Christian rap; for Netflix, Pureflix.

Given this similarity, I think it is fair to ask the question: how’s it been going? We’ve experienced several hundred years of the production of “Catholic versions” of the tools of mass communication. Well, that’s enough time for an informal study. What have been the results?

In America, we’ve experienced the steady loss of faith in every “measurable” aspect: from churchgoing to baptism; from denominational identification to recent survey responses about “belief.” In Great Britain, the same—just faster and worse. On the European Continent—ditto. The modern growth of Catholicism has been driven by precisely those “underdeveloped” places with the least and tardiest access to each new technological instrument of mass communication: Asia, South America, and Africa.

The usual “reasons” given for the explosive growth of faith in this latter continent are decidedly not Catholic radio, TV, internet, or anything technological. After due credit is given to the infinite power of the infinitely loving God, the big reasons that the Catholic Church is now an African institution are always given as: the spiritual fittingness of the Catholic faith to the customs of the peoples of the African continent; the relative size and strength of African families; the long presence of the missionary Church, especially in schools, hospitals, and orphanages. Never (I notice!) the awesome power of contemporary Christian music or the availability of the papal encyclical tradition via smartphone.

Now obviously, the great vacuuming of the faith in our modern “West” is not the fault of our “Catholic versions” of the various media that that same world consumes. “Secularization” may well have been slowed by our faithful participation in radio, television, and the conversion of the “digital continent.” But the fact that the same period in which we busily produced “Catholic versions” of secular media presided over a relative decline, and not an increase, of practicing Catholics, should certainly give us pause. Sanders praises his up and coming “Catholic version” of the AI chatbot, MagisteriumAI, as the “number one answer engine for the Catholic faith in the world….used in over 165, counties and…in over 50 languages”—and presumes that its results will be to “protect our families and empower our evangelization.” This shows great promise: so did the stats and figures for Catholic radio, television, and “the new media.”

It is with no malice that I squint at the proposed Golden Path, but squint I must, for I have the time-worn experience of how badly “Catholic versions” of things suck. Christian rock is goofy. Christian movies are stilted. Christian art trends kitsch. Christian television is best when it’s a three-hour livestream of a pontifical Mass—usually, it’s bad. (Catholic radio is best, absolutely The Best, when I think that the signal has gone dead, only to be shocked to hear the broadcaster say, “And that ends our five minutes of silent contemplation”—but mostly it’s bad.) The social media spaces we spend Christian calories on evangelizing tend to evangelize us far more effectively. There are lovely exceptions, but the net result of our conquistadoring of the digital continent has not been that the natives of Social Media have learned to be Catholic so much as Catholics have learned to succeed at Social Media: enter the Catholic influencer, stage right.

Perhaps this “worldliness” is inevitable—but have we learned anything from the long, slow defeat? We have said, about every new technology, what Sanders now says about AI: “Our mission is to baptize this technology. To claim it for Christ.” I would simply like some singular shred of evidence that baptizing this technology will do what baptizing every other technology has failed to do.

The Charlie Kirk effect

True, the Holy Faith has experienced a resurgence (and even what many are calling a “revival”) among young people—the boys are converting to the Holy Church (and to those stepping stones towards Her that we call, in the business, “Protestant communions”). If it were merely the case that these, our newly occupied pews, were not an effect of Catholic AI, I wouldn’t bother mentioning it—obviously they’re not. But I speculate (intellectually, not financially) that this is an effect (due credit to the unfathomable mystery of grace) of Catholicism Against AI.

Our current revival was sparked, as we have all heard, by the assasination of Charlie Kirk. What is the spiritual value of an assasination? What is happening, exactly, that a conservative commentator is shot in the neck on a Wednesday and young men rush the divine liturgy on that Sunday, converting in statistically notable numbers?

What, shall we say that the culminated weight of the Catholic Screen—the streamers and influencers, Hallow and Longbeard and Truthly and all the rest—finally broke the back of Gospel-resistance and sent young men to Church? Why the bullet through the neck, then? Is it not, rather—and I do believe this even as I ask this—that that bullet, that death, that blood fell onto our screen in a way that broke, at least for a moment, its hold on us? We were consuming—and then we consumed something that made us sick. We were watching, watching—and then we saw something that made us not want to watch any more, to do infinitely less and infinitely more than watch. Blood spilled as something undeniably and terrifyingly real in an increasingly fake universe. Our response could not be more images, more comments, more representations of ourselves within a digital universe—it had to be real. And the Church is the most real thing in the world.

Charlie was not a Catholic. If he was a martyr, it is not by any rigid definition of the term. Still, he was killed, at some level, for being personally present. He was killed by a meme—etched, as I understand it, on the bullet—and this seems horribly fitting. He died debating in-person; making himself vulnerable, in the flesh, and not merely as an image and a representation. He showed up, and “showing up” is a thing increasingly rare and difficult for all of us, in every aspect of life—we who always have the option to live in and through the mediation of a screen. Kirk showed up, got shot, and his death sent people to Jesus.

Ah, but what do I know about these things? Very little, I’m sure. But let us take the broad view: the most effective evangelical tool that the Catholic Church in America has experienced in this, the age of the New Media, has been a gunshot wound to the neck. I do not think that the thing to learn from this is that what we need to “empower our evangelization” is a Catholic-coded chatbot, but something quite radically different than the ubiquitous screen.

The Catacomb Option

Sanders says that “our mission in the Age of AI is not to retreat. It is not to hide in the catacombs and wait for the storm to pass.” But our fathers in faith, the ones who made the catacombs, were not “retreating” therein—they were praying, worshipping, marrying, burying, and growing in sanctity.

To make the catacombs an example of What Not To Do When Confronting AI rather works against Sanders’s splendid, evangelical motivations. Pope Francis called the catacombs a “sign of hope,” and it is a matter of humdrum history that the catacombs actually did what I have yet to see a device of mass media do: grow the faith and convert a pagan empire. It is a basic failure of the imagination to conceive of the field of possible action as an either/or: either we build a Catholic version of the world’s Next Big Thing or we “retreat.”

“The question before us,” says Sanders, “is not whether we should cross this river. We are already in the water. The question is: who will write the code that governs the other side?”

But is this true? Is it true that a competitive China and an imitative America have so totally and permanently disrupted the world that there is “no question” of whether or not we will live in a world in which computers “act as agents in our daily lives?” Forgive my skepticism: perhaps Sanders is right, after all. But I have two reasons for frowning at the idea. The first is silly, but still: the fellow telling me that there is no choice but to write Catholic code and produce a Catholic AI empire is the same fellow asking me to Buy Catholic AI! Just ten questions about the Holy Faith in, and Sanders’s MagisteriumAI “tells” you you’ve used up your free trial. (You want the Golden Path? In this economy?)

When a Little Sister of the Poor (under 5 feet tall, ideally) tells me (in a postscript to her annual Christmas appeal) that, really, we have crossed the “digital Rubicon”; when a church lady puts down her six bags of holy cards outside the adoration chapel to mention that, yes, the Church’s mission must be to produce an AI Intelligence trained on the rigorous logic of the Catholic faith; then, then—well, then I’ll disagree with nuns and church ladies (spiritual disaster). Still, a dose of AI boosterism coming from poverty or piety would go down a lot smoother than what’s currently spooned out by very serious CEOs.

A man in a technocratic society—that’s you, fellas!—is sold every doohickey, device, and detail by predictions of disaster and the power of FOMO. Cryptocurrency and virtual reality; the next smartphone and the newest EV; nuclear weapons (gotta have ‘em) and drone armies (don’t miss out!); food mailed to you in a box (your life will just crumble without our protein), security cameras as doorbells (what, do you want your kids to be murdered?), and expensive underwear (buy now or say adios to your sperm count, brother); all are sold through highly unsubtle assertions that the invention in question is an “inevitable future”; all are sold as Sanders sells AI: by the prediction that, unless you buy, your future will be a box of irrelevance, suffering, and defeat (a prediction given with great knowingness by the people who will profit from your belief that it is true).

Which brings me to the second source of my skepticism. I—locally known as Marc, a great “hello” to the brethren—am surrounded by technological non-adoption. I live in a (highly relative) technological “catacomb”: a community in which most young people (and many adults) don’t have smartphones or (what amounts to the same thing) social media. This is no great source of suffering: their lives are full of social events and institutions and ways of being-together. The need isn’t really there. Were some acned youth to whip out a smartphone at one of our parties, he would be looked on (by his acned fellows) as something anti-social, weird, and above all, up to something unnecessary.

A lack of social life makes smartphones “inevitable”—by which I only really mean “desirable.” The thing sells by offering, as an online commodity, the “social life” one lacks as an offline reality. But build up the missing social institutions—the friendships and average family size, the dances and feast days, the street festivals and the little shops, the theaters and the parish get-togethers, the militias and the book clubs—and the smartphone is to that degree less necessary, the argument of its “inevitability” that much less convincing, and the public use of the machines that much more ill-fit and boorish.

I needn’t go into it. I am sure that Sanders would agree. What I would like to point out is our relative ease with which we refuse to use smartphones and/or deny our children the same pleasure. One might hear of this or that technological non serviam, coming from this or that outpost of Catholic livin’, and imagine the technologically-resistant party as martyrs—as fools, idiots, misguided holy-roller types, but certainly suffering for it.

It would flatter my town to see ourselves so! But, no. No, it’s really horribly bourgeois when you get down to it: Places that have good things don’t need technologies which produce online versions of good things.

Take the basic power of Communicating That An Event Is Happening. In this little sample-sized community of mine, it is not the case that a bunch of Catholics are gritting their teeth, doggedly relying on custom, word-of-mouth communication, and email newsletters to promote their rad parties, all while knowing that they could be more powerful and efficacious promoters by being on social media. Actually, no one is suffering from the lack of Facebook Events. No one is a martyr for resisting the whole regime of paid-promotion, demographic targeting, alarms integrated within a digital social calendar thing. Rather, these technologies don’t work very well within our world. They presume a level of screen-engagement that is not realistic to the territory. They are not efficacious: there is very little coherence between the events people say they are going to attend (via social media) and the events they actually, do, in fact, attend. The once popular idea of an inevitable future of event-marketing through integrated social media is dead as Jacob Marley, dead as Apple Glasses, dead as lab-grown meat (predicted to have taken over the market by now, if anyone cares to recall).

Telling the Right People about the thing, going door-to-door, sending a last-minute email, the sheer, unstoppable power of Having Done The Same Thing Last Year—all of this stuff works ‘round here. The one who suffers would be the doofus who tries to tell us all about an event through X, Insta, or whatever. (Poor fellow! No one will attend his St. Stephen’s Yodel Off!)

So, if I am skeptical of Sanders’s argument for AI, it is because I face the daily evidence of non-participation as a form of power and “inevitably” as a silly marketing ploy. Building a world in which “computers act as agents in our daily lives” is as inevitable as whether people design, sell, purchase, and use computers to act as agents in our daily lives. It is as inevitable as teenagers having smartphones—which is to say that it is quite up to us.