Last Friday, my wife Melissa and I welcomed our daughter Miriam Jane Gravley into the world. I wrote a Substack note about how well it went compared to when our firstborn son Moses was born in 2024, and I would commend Bonnie Kristian’s recent piece in Christianity Today about birthing centers, where I was happy to provide a father/husband’s perspective. But, in short: Mel and Miriam are both doing great, and Moses loves his little sister.

I am accepting that newborn sleep-deprived delulu is setting in, which is causing me to punt on the piece I intended to write this week (or perhaps pitch it to a proper publication). Instead, I want to write about coffee and AI. I know those two things don’t normally go together. Maybe they don’t and I shouldn’t write again until after I’ve slept some more. But I think there’s something here. You be the judge.

Miriam was due on April 4. The next day was Easter Sunday. For Lent, I decided to fast from coffee. I recognize that does not make me a very good Presbyterian, and in this instance, I do not care. It was a good and necessary fast, and I am thankful for the Spirit’s work in my life through it. But, since even the holiest of fasts are tainted with sinful motives, there was a pragmatic angle as well: whenever Miriam was born, I wanted coffee to be helpful again. I was drinking too much on a daily basis. I was twitchy and irritable. Instead of a helpful boost, it became a new baseline to get through the day. Coffee addiction gets a wink and nod in evangelical circles when it ought not to, and I was verifiably addicted.

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For the past several years, pour overs were the primary way I made coffee at home. But last summer, facing a potential financial downturn, we bought a basic coffee pot and switched to pre-ground bulk coffee from Sams. We started small. We kept it to one cup per person a morning just like we had with a pour over. But then it became two cups. At some point it became three. Mind you: this was just at home. This was not counting coffee at the office or local coffee shop. By the time the day was over, I could’ve had anywhere from three to five cups–far too much caffeine for one day.

Halfway through Lent, I connected a very important dot: the coffee pot did not encourage restraint. Its very design nudged me to one more cup, one more cup, just one more cup. And if I wanted to get my coffee consumption under control, I had to get rid of the coffee pot.

But the coffee pot isn’t an addictive substance, you may be thinking. No, it isn’t. It’s a delivery mechanism, a means to an end. But two sides are necessary to make a coin. Coffee–be it beans or ground–doesn’t become drinkable until you’ve brewed it. To do that, you need something to brew it in, and not all brewing methods are created equal. Some brewing methods trade quality for quantity. Others emphasize quantity to the point quality is optional. A coffee pot maximizes quantity and, by design, finds its greatest joy in making lots and lots of coffee regardless of how good it actually is. No, a coffee pot is not synonymous with caffeine, but it is synonymous with “as much caffeine as you want.”

Pour overs are inconvenient. To do one right takes about eight to ten minutes from start to finish. With a one-week-old and a soon-to-be-two-year-old, making a single cup (either for myself with a Kalita or for Mel and I both with a Chemex) feels like an irresponsible waste of time. But the friction is a safeguard. With a coffee pot, I can brew six or more cups in ten minutes. With a pour over, I can only do one or two in ten minutes. If all I have is ten minutes, all I get is one cup. I only need one cup. Pun intended, the grind of making a pour over gives me only what I need and nothing more.

AI is a coffee pot. Whether it’s a chatbot or an agent, it does not encourage restraint. Its very design is to nudge you to one more prompt, one more question, one more hit to your desire to not have to read that thing your friend sent you or crunch some numbers you don’t want to look at or write an email you’re dreading having to send. Before you know it, that one time you helped yourself to AI assistance on your thinking and creating now becomes every time. You used to be able to get by with just one or two requests, and now you risk an AI-withdrawal headache on the first day of going without. Nobody willingly chooses addiction. Nobody willingly chooses to deskill themselves or develop AI psychosis either. The design has an end, and the end is getting you and keeping you hooked.

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But AI isn’t an addictive substance, you may be thinking. No, it isn’t. It is a delivery mechanism, a means to an end. But unlike coffee, the ends contain multitudes and they’re not created equal. The only common ground the near-limitless uses of AI share is the promise of getting something that you want or need much quicker than you would if you did it on your own. To do that, you need something to brew what you’re after, and not all brewing methods are created equal. Some brewing methods, or ways we work, trade quality for quantity . Others emphasize quantity to the point quality is optional. AI promises both. Sometimes it delivers both. But if it can’t deliver both, like your favorite coffee pot, AI finds its greatest joy in giving you as much knowledge or grunt work as you can give it regardless of how true that knowledge is or good the work being done. No, AI is not synonymous with an addictive substance, but it is synonymous with “as much of this as you want.”

This analogy is not perfect. Sometimes you do need a coffee pot. For just my wife and I, a twelve-cup pot is overkill. But for a breakfast, book group, or game night with half a dozen people? You bet I’m bringing the coffee pot out of the closet. I’ve been thrilled at how Claude Cowork has taken some ministry admin busywork (the kind most writers writing about AI are unaware of unless they’ve been in vocational ministry) and given me back several hours to pray Evening Office and read Bavinck with consistency. Coffee pots are great when you genuinely need a lot of coffee. AI is great when it truly can save you hours of tedious inhuman machinework that you can reinvest elsewhere. The good and proper use of a thing does not justify its misuse, but the misuse of a thing does not negate the good and proper use of a thing either.

Not all inconveniences are aesthetically pleasing. Even if inconvenience results in better quality, aesthetic inconveniences are certainly not morally superior as to be a conscience-binding law. Efficiency for efficiency’s sake–and inefficiency for inefficiency’s sake–are equal and opposite ditches of poor stewardship. There is a time and place for both, and sometimes you do not get to choose. Countless Americans today are experiencing the equivalent of having their entire vocational futures judged by how much coffe–I’m sorry, how much AI–they can incorporate into their roles. A lot of them hate it. Use does not always indicate approval.

But insofar as you do get to choose, efficiency has its side effects. The path of least resistance shortchanges you in moments where additional time and effort yields deeper rewards. Moses is fascinated watching me make coffee now. He loves getting his little kitchen-stand-stool and bringing it to the coffee bar and watching the coffee drip into carafe. The friction and inconvenience of it all that goes into a pour over creates curiosity and wonder that the coffee pot never did. So it is with all our human endeavors of thinking and creating. It takes longer. It’s messy and imperfect. You may even make mistakes and have to start over. But when the work is good, human work, there are intangible benefits that efficiency cannot replace.

Thanks for reading. If this is nonsense, please just say so. If this is pretentious millennial hipsterism disguising itself as an attempt at meaningful thought, also just say so. You’ll never take my ever-growing vinyl collection from me, but I’ll gladly hand over my bad takes.

Remember: together, we are passing through Digital Babylon.

Austin

On March 25, a California jury delivered a landmark verdict against Google and Meta, finding both companies guilty of knowingly, and negligently, making their products addictive to minors. The court ordered both companies to pay a young woman named Kaley, who argued both were responsible for her childhood addiction to social media, $3 million dollars in compensatory damages and another $3 million in punitive damages. Meta will foot 70% of that bill, Google the remaining 30%.

I had been following this case (and a smaller parallel case in New Mexico) closely. Both were decided within a day of each other, and both came down along similar lines. Having sat on the news for a couple weeks, here are ten thoughts I have about this case and what I think comes next.

1. Whatever comes from the appeal phase of the trail, it is a significant development in a growing anti-social media movement. For the first time, a jury of regular Americans–not tech writers, educational activists, or government watchdog groups–have confirmed something that has been obvious to anyone who works with minors for the past fifteen years. Even if the appeals process overturns this result, the fact that it happened at all is turning point. Two of the most powerful Empires of Digital Babylon were held to account, at least briefly, by the rule of law of the nation both companies operate from.

2. $6 million dollars in damages makes for great headlines, but for Meta and Google, this isn’t even pocket change. Both companies regularly pay court-ordered penalties magnitudes larger than this as a routine business expense from lawsuits that are less interesting to the public. In the New Mexico case, the jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for unfair and deceptive practices; for a company that blew more than $80 billion dollars on a futile VR endeavor and is treating it like a write-off, $375 million is also too small to treat as pocket change. As two of the biggest empires of Digital Babylon, Meta and Google can take these kind of hits over and over again and not even blink. The scale of these companies is unfathomable, and verdicts like these do not hurt them in the slightest.

3. Given how these verdicts came down, plaintiffs with similar fact patterns can have good hopes for similar outcomes. While those outcomes are not guaranteed, the sheer volume of cases currently being filed and yet-to-be filed could prove more damaging to both companies than any monetary penalties themselves. Both companies have weathered tougher legal situations that this, but neither have had to deal with this many cases at once. The process is the punishment, and even with nigh-unlimited resources at your disposal, a swarm of hundreds of lawsuits could have a much greater impact than the verdict of any single case.

4. Both companies can survive without their social media products. Meta and Google both have diverse product portfolios and while losing their cash-cow social media products would leave a serious wound, both companies could recover. Admittedly, Google is in a stronger position here than Meta. Between its single-handed grip on Internet search, G-Suite line of software, and the countless Chromebooks created to run them, Google does not need YouTube to exist. Meta, with their quietly-growing success in pioneering a new field of hardware with their Ray-Ban smart glasses, is shoring up their ability to survive if one of their three platforms were lost to them. Again, the scale and complexity of these companies is truly incomprehensible. Especially in Meta’s case, while they deal in nothing less than social media, both deal in much more than social media alone.

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5. The critical argument in the California case was that Meta and Google were knowingly and negligently operating like the social media equivalent of Big Tobacco. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement saw the nation come together to hold the four largest tobacco companies in the United States for many of the same actions Meta, Google and others take with social media, including knowingly targeting minors with a product designed for maximum addiction and burying information about known risks and dangers. The comparison is apt. Big Tobacco is itself a sub-entity of Babylon the Great and Meta and Google as representatives of Digital Babylon is no different. But, I think the comparison is flawed in ways I expect Meta and Google to both take advantage of. I’ll explain why in points 6-7.

6. Meta and Google want you to believe that you are powerless. They want you to believe you have no control or choice about whether you use their products. At one level, this is true. This Substack is called Passing Through Digital Babylon for a reason! But the Big Tobacco analogy concedes the very thing these companies want you believe: you couldn’t help it. You didn’t have a choice. You are helpless. You will do what we want. In both instances, the first lie they want you believe is that you are fundamentally incapable of saying “no” and paying the price that comes with it. Admittedly, that price is often steep. It is far higher and painful than most want to pay. But wanting to say “no” and being able to say no are two different things, and both Big Tobacco and Big Tech want you to believe you are not able to say “no” no matter how much you may want to say”no”.

7. The Big Tobacco comparison works for how Meta and Google are *acting*, but the differences in the *product* are significant. I may write more about that in a following piece. Where that differences matters here is 1) how both groups targeted minors and 2) the role parents played in giving their children an addictive product. Cigarettes are insidious because they are small, easy to give to children, and easy to hide from parents. A playground, bus stop, field trip; a child can get them quietly and easily without their parents knowing. In contrast, most children were willingly “exposed” to Instagram and YouTube *by their parents*. Who needs a D.A.R.E. program for social media when the call is coming from inside the house? Painting Meta and Google as an equivalent of Big Tobacco leaves their largest consumer base unscathed: the Millennial, Gen-X, and Boomer addicts who, while railing against how dangerous social media addiction is, are unwilling to practice what they preach. Just like the tobacco industry today, it can take a substantial hit among younger generations (although these trends are slowly starting to unravel) and still be incredibly lucrative by older generations who will take these addictions to their graves. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube (and X, for that matter) stand to be no different.

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8. This verdict is more than enough for every school board across the country to enact Jonathan Haidt’s recommendations for smart phone use in public schools. To carry the Big Tobacco analogy further one more time: you wouldn’t let someone peddling cigarettes or other tobacco products set up shop on school property. Treat the phones like you would any other drug vector and kick them out.

9. It will likely take two or three years for the ramifications of this case, and all the other cases like it waiting in the wings, to play out. But if what is happening in Europe is any reliable indication, it is possible for the cure to be worse than the disease. Freya India–easily one of the best voices on the harms of social media on Gen Z (and I am very eager to read her upcoming book this summer)–recently warned in a piece for The Free Press that in Britain, her home country,

“the solutions being pushed by the state are causing a new kind of harm. . . . Meta should feel this heat; they deserve what’s coming. But I worry about what’s coming for us, too. Because if I’ve learned anything from years of writing about what’s happening to young people, it’s that everything can and will be capitalized on and exploited—especially a generation in crisis.”

Digital Babylon knows how to fight, and hard as it is to believe, the next theater of conflict may be worse than this one.

10. This is an important plank in building the legal and regulatory “floor” of the anti-smartphone and social media movement. There are more planks yet to be added and all the momentum is in this direction. But the point of building a floor is to support a ceiling. Supporters of this movement have a vision for what that ceiling is. The question remains whether other can catch that vision once the enthusiasm for building the floor has passed. The pro-life movement finally caught its white whale at the Supreme Court in 2022, and support for abortion is now the highest it’s ever been. Laws and court rulings are important. Changed hearts and a desire to live well in the world God has made is even more important.

11. Bonus: Zuckerberg was an idiot for trying to bring his Meta Ray-bans into the courtroom. That move will backfire on him spectacularly.

To be clear: I am happy at this verdict. It is correct and, like I said, a significant event regardless of what comes next. But it is one event, one victory, among other victories and defeats yet to come. Christians must be sober minded, rejoicing in what is worth celebrating in proportion to the bigger picture. In the rule of Digital Babylon, this is an important event. But the empires remain powerful, and the epoch of life on their glowing shores is not ending anytime soon.

Thanks for reading. As I put the finishing touches on this piece, we are waiting with baiting breath for the arrival of my daughter Miriam into the world. She is now four days late and my wife, Melissa, is very eager for her to get here. Please pray for a safe and smooth delivery for us. Regardless of when she arrives, I look forward to publishing something next week,

Remember: together, we are passing through Digital Babylon

Austin

A week ago at Mere Orthodoxy I debuted my inaugural State of the Internet report. This is a new project for Mere Orthodoxy that I will be contributing to on a yearly basis. They came to me with the idea and I couldn’t have been more eager to say “yes” to it. I was also thrilled to be able to apply a basic version of my Digital Babylon framework to this question, and deliberately frame the report around the categories of Event, Empire, and Epoch.

With a title like “the state of the Internet”, one would imagine it to be a very technical, statistic-driven report. And yes, it does contain some technical data and statistics on big-picture Internet trends. But, that isn’t the point. With this report, I am hoping to accomplish three things:

1. Make “the Internet” a category in people’s minds again. When most people think of “the Internet”, they think of social media. This is understandable, but the Internet is much bigger than social media! In the Internet’s next chapter, social media will not be where the growth and change occurs. All the rest of the Internet, and the parts we take for granted, are due for a remodel.

2. Give pastors and church leaders a starting point for thinking about how the Internet–again, not just social media–shapes their local ministry context.

3. Center Scripture as our starting point for making sense of this situation and what lies ahead. Concepts like “Technopoly” or “The Machine” can be helpful, but the Bible has more to say here than most Christians realize. I am not convinced we have hear all the Lord has to say to us through his Word regarding this situation and intend to keep bringing Scripture to bear as our starting point.

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I used to be able to keep up with what was happening with the Internet. I can’t anymore. There is too much happening in too many places. As has said, the only way to now keep up is now to slow way, way down. That’s what I intend to do with this report–not just for my sake, but for others as well. As I say near the end of the report,

We want readers to be informed without requiring staying atop every single piece of breaking news. We want readers to be advised without inducing panic. We want readers to both think and live with confidence in the sovereign power of God and courage to pursue creative and imaginative ways to love God and neighbor in a new season of turmoil and chaos-and to make those ways as widely accessible as possible for others to put into practice in their own lives.

You can read the report either on the Mere Orthodoxy website or here on Substack. A Mere Orthodoxy subscription is free and lets you read in both places. I have been very encouraged by the results they’ve seen on Substack and would commend any other Christian media organization to consider what they’re doing. You can try to get people from Point A to Point B, or you can take Point B and meet them in Point A. As the Internet changes, being able to do the latter is more important than ever.

I have some other pieces in the works that I am eager to share with you soon. But until then, remember that together we are passing through Digital Babylon.

Austin

2025 was a bewildering year. As I briefly allude to in my review for my Album of the Year, it was a year of some of the lowest lows and highest highs that I’ve ever experienced. I do not know if I will ever write about the lows publicly (other than what I allude to at various places in these reviews), but the highs are worth celebrating. Simply put: this was my most successful year of writing on the Internet in the fifteen years I’ve been doing it, by far, and it isn’t even close:

• "This Brick Gave Me My Life Back (From My Phone)”, my first viral Substack post.

• “What Churches Need to Know About Smart Glasses”, my debut for The Gospel Coalition.

• “Pastors Need Wisdom to Navigate AI Well”, an unexpected second piece for The Gospel Coalition (with another on the way in early 2026!).

• “Welcome to Youth Ministry! Time to Talk about Anime”, my debut for Christianity Today.

• “How the Mere Orthodoxy Discord Helped Me Quit Twitter”, my debut for Mere Orthodoxy.

Being able to say I had a hat-trick in professional writing debuts was not something on my bingo card for 2025. I also did not have it on my bingo card that would have such a successful year as a steadily growing podcast, or that I would begin making bi-weekly appearances on The Reconnect with , which is where the majority of my tech/media work has been channeled (pun intended) these past several months. I may not be working in social media anymore, but the Lord continues to give me new avenues for speaking on the greatest discipleship crisis of our day.

But as is tradition, it is time for my annual best-of-the-year list. This is truly one of my favorite things I do all year as a writer, and similar to what I did last year, what follows are all my Instagram micro-reviews collected into one place. An important distinction to keep in mind is that all of the albums are 2025 releases, while the books are not. If you’ve got a best-of list that you wrote and published somewhere, put it down in the comments below and I will check it out.

As I put the finishing touches on this post in my new office, in a job I had long given up thinking I’d ever have, I feel a sense of disoriented gratitude. I am still trying to get my bearings on some things, but even amid the “what in the world just happened?”-ness of 2025, there is a deep, abiding well of joy. Passing Through Digital Babylon is not going anywhere. In fact, because of what the Lord has done this year, 2026 may be its biggest year yet.

See you on the other side!

In 2025, I listened to 25 classic albums from bands I had never heard before. One of those was Deftones’ landmark “White Pony”, which proved revelatory in tracing where most of my metal tastes originated from. “private music”, Deftones’ highly anticipated new album, is not “White Pony”, but it’s hard to imagine a better straight line from discovering Deftones for the first time to experiencing one of the best metal albums of 2025 from a band who has always influenced you without you knowing it.

“private music” is precisely curated in offering a diversity of Deftones’ range and versatility. At a crisp 42 minutes with 11 tracks, Deftones draws back on the sounds that first put them on the map (opening track “my mind is a mountain” channels “Change (In The House of Flies)” without feeling like a cheap knockoff), reaches for some djent-ier riffs (“souvenir”) and earworm choruses (“infinite source”, “milk of the madonna”, “~metal dream”), and even re-invigorating a nu-metal vibe that doesn’t make you immediately cringe (“locked club”, “cut hands”). As an 8-string guitarist, “private music” has provided several new staples in my repertoire that are accessible, fun, and *heavy.* And while I can’t necessarily commend some of the lyrical content of the album, I’d be lying if I said songs like the aforementioned “my mind is a mountain”, and especially the closing track “departing the body”, didn’t supply some timely words for expressing an unexpected and turbulent transition in my life (“Lift your eyes/ surprise, surprise, we made it / and raise your eyes / surprise, we’re finally through”).

My only criticism here is that I just wish there were more. Good metal in the commercially-accessible vein of Deftones is hard to come by these days. And yet, to ask for more would risk bloating an album that has struck the Goldilocks zone on nearly every single point. Focused without being repetitive, “private music” confidently reminds you that good metal does not need cheap TikTok gimmicks or elaborate virtuosity to be worth your attention and appreciation.

What does it mean to be human in light of the fact that the Word, the second person of the Trinity, took on a human nature to his divine existence? If we truly believe that there is “nothing new under the sun”, then what does the fundamentals of the Christian faith have to say in the face of AI chatbots, robotics, and technological transhumanism?

Rather than reacting real-time to assaults on what it means to be human, “Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology” goes back to the past to retrieve and explore truths Christians urgently need in order to live in the future. This is exactly the kind of project that we should be pursuing at this turbulent cultural moment. While Wilkinson does not give direct answers to the topics that frequent our headlines and social media feeds, he does pour a massive cornerstone of a foundation that can support answers that others may come along with. That cornerstone, of course, is Christ, incarnate of the Virgin Mary, both fully divine and fully human in one person. This mystery, Wilkinson contends, is not just doctrinal and doxological; it is also practical and ethical. We have barely scratched the surface of everything this mystery means for questions of artificial intelligence, sexuality, human flourishing, and more. Drawing from the riches of other disciplines is vitally important, but as Wilkinson powerfully displays here, theological studies has far more to contribute to making sense of present-day challenges than it often receives credit for.

My only criticism is that the book can be repetitive at points. Part of that comes with the territory; Trinitarian and Christological studies require careful attention to “the pattern of sound words”. Still, it may feel to the reader that you are treading ground you just covered a short while ago, a feeling that grows more frequent in the pentultimate section of the book. But for those willing to be patient, “Crowned with Glory and Honor” will give you one of the richest feasts of historical and biblical theology you could delight in, all aimed at helping Christians more fully understand what it means to be–and live–as humans created in the image of God.

Few joys are more precious to a music writer than when a band you don’t “get” finally “clicks”. I remember exactly where I was ten years ago when prog-metal titans Between the Buried and Me released “Coma Ecliptic”, and after years of trying to “get” one of the hottest metal bands in the industry at the time, the lights came on at last. Two equally-enjoyable releases later, and BtBaM has helped me “get” them all over again with their most polarizing album to date, “The Blue Nowhere.”

It’s hard to write about “The Blue Nowhere” without reference to “Coma Ecliptic”. While not a *formal* sequel, it is clear that “The Blue Nowhere” channels the bands Coma-era sound more than its Colors or Parallax-era sound, and improves upon it in every way. It is at once the band’s heaviest (“Psychomanteum”, “Slow Paranoia”), most straightforward (“God Terror, “Door #3”), and most courageously experimental album they’ve ever released. From the funk-driven lead of opening track “Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark”, the bluegrass-radio-show-turned-dreamscape adventure of “Absent Thereafter”, and the soaring chorus of the radio-friendly pop rock title track (truly one of the boldest choices the band has ever made), BtBaM is firing on cylinders many had thought would never fire again, especially after the dramatic loss of one of their two long-time guitarists. While fans of the band’s heavier sound may wish for a higher ratio of chugging-to-non-chugging, fans of “Coma Ecliptic” recognize the potential of that album finally realized in “The Blue Nowhere”.

While I would not say the album is bloated, it is still quite long at 71 minutes, and the middle section can feel a bit awkward in its transitions. But in the face of what BtBaM has accomplished here, those are minor nitpicks. “The Blue Nowhere” is one of the freshest prog metal albums in years from veterans who keep finding ways to reinvent the wheel long after countless others give up trying.

Is it ever acceptable to deceive for the sake of the greater good?

Asking that question in a vacuum is one thing; asking that in the face of World War II is another. For Sefton Delmer, the British propagandist whose led numerous “black propaganda” radio stations aimed at destablizing German soldiers and citizens, his question takes a different angle: what if you tapped into the desire for safety and community that we all share, and used that as a launch pad for exposing authoritarianism and its abuses?

Unlike his counterparts pursuing information campaigns based on righteous virtue, Delmer’s programs tapped into the quiet fear of German listeners and gave them cover to revel in their worst impulses about themselves and their own leaders. Detailing how exactly Delmer accomplished this would take reading of his exploits in “How to Win an Information War”, but suffice to say: he was tremendously successful. Delmer’s understanding of Hitler (who he personally interviewed several years prior) and his influence allowed him to create something the Germans wanted even as they knew it was British propaganda. They knew they were being lied to, and they didn’t care. They wanted it because it gave them a belonging different from their normal German life during the war, and they would believe anything for the sake of community.

But Delmer’s tale is a cautionary one. As he theorized, his “black boomerang” eventually came back to him, and the lies he seeded to sow discord among the Germans eventually became accepted as truth in the aftermath of the war. The ethics of wartime information campaigns are messy, and while he considered this a necessary side effect of the greater good of defeating Nazi Germany, he could not escape reaping what he sowed. His short term gains came at the cost of challenges he would have to deal with for the rest of his life.

“How to Win an Information War” is one of the most engrossing WW2 historical books you’ll ever read. It is a fascinating case study of human psychology and our susceptibility to forsaking truth for lies–a tale as old as the garden and a warning as urgently needed as ever.

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Coheed and Cambria’s wholesome-dad arc is a truly remarkable rebrand. Where the band’s sprawling and increasingly incomprehensible comic book space opera was once driven by the often violent narration of its accompanying soundtrack, C&C are now two albums in a row of featuring the story of a miraculous child and the lengths his parents go to see him born and kept safe. With “Vaxis III: The Father of Make Believe”, it’s also the band’s strongest serving of emo-tinged metal they’ve dished up since 2005.

It’s hard describe what a reinvigorated band sounds like; you just know it when you hear it. 2022’s “Vaxis II: A Window of a Waking Mind” was showed signs of life in a band struggling to escape a creative rut, and three years later it is clear Claudio Sanchez and co have entered a new golden age for their straightforward jams (”Goodbye, Sunshine”, “One Last Miracle”, “Someone Who Can”), ballads (”Meri of Mercy”, “Corner My Confidence”), and in-your-face thrashers (”Searching for Tomorrow” and the masterful “Blind Side Sonny” into “Play the Poet”). That would be praiseworthy enough by itself, but the band saves the best for last with the four-part “The Continuum” suite, which is easily and without question the band’s best multi-part composition. What begins with one of the heaviest tracks on the album (”Welcome to Forever, Mr. Nobody”) moves into twisty prog-rock (”The Flood”) into an triumphantly anthemic stadium celebration (”Tethered Together”) only to close with some The Dear Hunter-esq country-tinged rock (”So It Goes”). It takes a lot for me to listen to an album and be stopped dead in my tracks, especially from a band I am well acquainted with, but over and over again “The Father of Make Believe” left me speechless–and thrashing my head and belting out “We’ll all sing together!” at the top of my lungs–all year long.

I was not prepared for the gargantuan leap forward “The Father of Make Believe” ended up being three years after the band’s promising 2022 release. Coheed and Cambria could phone it in for the rest of their career if they wanted to. Instead, three decades later, they’ve released their best album to date.

Blessed are those who criticize their own tribes. When so much of our understanding of ourselves is determined by opposing “them” and what “they” believe, those willing to stand up and say “we” have problems we need to confront will be rewarded–often, at first, by suffering, and later by vindication. When Richard V. Reeves published first published “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, And What To Do About It” in 2022, he felt the wrath of his fellow progressives. Three years later, many of those same institutions now recognize Reeves was ahead of the curve–and the problem is much more severe than even Reeves realized.

Reeves’ thesis is simple: the only way to truly secure meaningful, lasting gains for women is to make sure men don’t fall behind. Treat the issue as a zero-sum game and both men and women lose. To back this up, Reeve’s brings the reciepts. An unbelievable amount of receipts. More receipts than I’ve seen for a book of this relatively-short length. His familiarity with data on questions you didn’t even think existed, deftly combined with crystal-clear prose, creates a tour-de-force of an argument that the progressive political and cultural project has utterly failed men of all races and threatens the stability of American society–including women–as a result. To be clear, he has some sharp criticisms for the ways conservatives have failed here as well, but Reeves pulls no punches when confronting his own tribe about the ways in which progressives have uniquely contributed to this current predicament.

Thankfully, most (if not all) of his solutions are ones that both sides of the aisle ought to find agreement on. The situation is dire, but not without hope for meaningful steps forward. There are some lesser observations and recommendations that I vehemently dissent from, but a couple bad trees does not ruin the compelling vision of the forrest. As a father to a son, and director of a youth ministry that currently has more boys than girls, I want to see the future men in my life thriving, and Reeves is a voice that I will be listening attentively to in the years to come for guidance on how to do just that.

I have to be careful with this one. Even writing about it tempts my mind to go to dark places. Sometimes an album arrives at too precise a moment in life, and “Alunea”, from the deathgaze pioneers of Kardashev, is the sound of hope–and what happens when that hope falls apart.

Correcting from the truly what-were-they-thinking? production choices of 2022’s “Liminal Rite”, “Alunea” maintains Kardashev’s signature death metal brutality and post-rock soundscapes with a level of clarity that powerfully reinforces Kardashev’s status as one of the best metal bands in the world. Every kick, lick, and delay-drenched strum is crystal clear and balanced as to passively rebuke the band’s so-bad-it’s-a-masterpiece previous album. Unifying both styles together is lead vocalist Mark Garrett (of Kardavox Academy on YouTube), a man with a vocal versatility so breathtakingly vast it would take a dozen men to replicate the number of clean and harsh vocal styles he brings to the album. Whether in English or the fictional language that occasionally appears as part of the album’s story, the technicality of Garrett’s vocal range convey an emotional range equally as broad, and in 42 minutes covers an entire feature length film’s worth of feels. The final section of the pentultimate track makes me cry nearly every time I hear it; even untranslated, it says everything I want to say with a gut-wrenching yearning and grief I now know far too well.

“Alunea” is dense, so much so it took nearly a month of repeat listening for it to truly click. Where “Liminal Rite” was certainly bloated (among other problems), Kardashev have perhaps overcorrected a bit too far in the opposite direction, shaving off some some of the meat in the name of aggressively trimming the fat. Even an extra five minutes to give some of the beautiful sections of the album more time to breathe would’ve gone a long way. But as it stands: if I had known, as I left my Indianapolis hotel room at 2AM queuing up “Alunea” on the day it released, that I was listening to the beginning of the end, I would have made my goodbyes the day before truly count.

I have been reviewing things (mostly music, but books as well) on the Internet for fifteen years. Usually, by the end of November, my list(s) for the year are set. I have never once had something that I began in early December and finished on Christmas Day so powerfully impact me that I re-write my list to make room for it. But with “Perelandra”, the second of C.S. Lewis’s oft-overlooked Space Trilogy, I just could not help it. It is unlike anything I have ever read, and to say it lives up to its reputation is an understatement.

“Perelandra”’s story is straightforward, but tantalizing: what if humanity had a chance to prevent the Fall in a Garden on another planet? The spellbinding planet Perelandra is in the state of pre-fall innocence and Dr. Ransom, after his adventure in “Out of the Silent Planet”, is being sent there to make sure another Fall does not occur (I’m being deliberately simple here as to avoid spoilers). What follows is a beautiful, enthralling, terrifying, and truly majestic piece of fiction that only a master in multiple disciplines could have produced. Lewis’ portrayal of the character who comes to embody the Serpent is one of the most horrifying characters I’ve ever encountered in any medium, and while “Perelandra” will never be adapted into film for some very obvious reasons (the handful of characters are nude the entire time), Lewis’ portrayal of demonic horror goes much further than anything modern, secular filmmaking could possibly capture. Screwtape and his dear nephew have nothing on the Un-man.

I’ve heard it said that the Space Trilogy is Narnia for adults, and while I’ve only barely cracked the third book in the series, that could not ring more true. As with Narnia, Lewis’ faith is on full display (and arguably some of the strongest and clearest you’ll ever find it), but unlike Narnia, “Perelandra”’s depths have yet to truly permeate Christian thinking and discourse the way it ought to. And while perhaps not as powerful out of context, I can think of no better statement to have living rent-free in my head as 2026 turns the corner: “Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad.”

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“Bewildering”. My personal pick for a 2025 Word of the Year can barely capture just how truly, deeply, exhaustingly bewildering the year actually was. If you had told me this time a year ago what 2025 had in store, I would not have been able to believe it, much less bear it. A year of the highest highs and lowest lows you’ve ever experienced would leave even the most convicted of men disoriented, and I’d be lying if I said I weren’t still trying to get my bearings on some things.

But then John Van Deusen, that criminally underrated and overlooked psalmist of the soul, comes along and strikes a lightning bolt of clear signal amid the noise of the storm with “As Long As I Am In The Tent of This Body I Will Make A Joyful Noise Pt. 1”. It has been 11 years since an album by a Christian artist has occupied my Album of the Year selection (KingsKaleidoscope, “Becoming Who We Are”, 2014), and with “As Long As…” it is one of the easiest decisions I’ve made in a long time. Words fail to describe what JVD has accomplished here. It is a monumental leap from his 2018 magnus opus “Every Power Wide Awake” , a worship album so gushingly, explosively creative it would make “A Collision”-era David Crowder Band proud. Picking a single track to showcase in such a short space would do the entire album injustice: each individual song is drenched in the dew of a man worshiping the Lord with the full prowess of his songwriting gifts. I can guarantee you, if all of Christian music you know if of terrestrial Christian radio, that you do not have a category for an album like this. Trust me, and verify for yourself.

As I was working on this review in my new garage-study, the mailman brought a package–one so perfectly timed as to be the perfect visual companion to the song playing in the background, a divinely-orchestrated proof that at the end of such a bewildering year, all is as all should be:

“Even in this moment, I know

You sustain my breath, I know

Every day before me, I know

From conception to death, I know

Is in your hands

Is in your providential plan

This is everything I know.”

I did not like this book at first. To get my only criticism out of the way up front: it is a very slow burn. The first third of the book feels like kindling for a fire, but when it starts to burn, it burns like a supernova–a purifying, life-changing supernova. When it was over, it was easily my Book of the Year.

Every Protestant Christian, at some point in their faith, gets “frustrated by a religious culture that, at its worst, can seem superficial, shallow, and almost wholly disconnected from the ancient faith that once inspired men and women to bravely go to the lions” (pg. 5). The question, then, is what to do about that. For many, the first impulse is to look beyond their Protestant heritage–to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or even pagan spirituality–for the tools their lineage supposedly lacks. But as Bingham convincingly argues, this is not the only option. Another option is the “Reformation Triangle”, the “nexus of Scripture reading, meditation, and prayer” (pg. 191). This Triangle becomes a foundation for other practices that are helpful to growth in Christ, but not practices you can sustain your faith on by themselves. While Bingham is solely focused with individual spiritual formation (leaving corporate formation in the preached Word and sacraments to be treated elsewhere by others), the simplicity of his program provides decisive clarity amid an ever-expanding list of proposed practices for how believers can grow in Christ. Our God routinely uses what is weak to shame the strong, and while the simplicity of Scripture reading/meditation/prayer may appear unimpressive by the extravagant disciplines of the “spiritually strong”, the Lord is pleased to accomplish his mightily powerful purposes through conversation with his people via his Word and our words back to him in prayer.

James K.A. Smith and John Mark Comer all have wonderful and helpful things to say about how to grow as a Christian, but there are even deeper treasures to be found, and Bingham has just barely scratched the surface. This is one of the most important books I’ve ever read as a Christian and a book I will eagerly read again, and again, and again, for the rest of my life.

—

If you made it all the way down here, thank you so much for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

- Austin

Digital Babylon refers to the sudden and rapid ascent of immensely powerful technology and media companies (an event), the cultural, political, and spiritual forces those companies and their tools/services exert on us individually and collectively (an empire), and the period of time where individuals, families, and churches must live as wise and faithful exiles amid God-ordained cultural and spiritual opposition (an epoch)1.

This past Thursday, on The Reconnect with , we discussed “The AI Genetics Revolution is Coming” from The New Atlantis. I want to analyze this situation described by this essay through the three categories of event, empire, and epoch to see how Scripture can help us make sense of this development in AI–a development with significant long-term consequences.

Event

As Bill Drexel explains, while everyone is distracted about questions about AI superintelligence and the antics of celebrity CEOs, true breakthroughs in AI are quietly happening in genetics. What LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude have done to language can be easily applied to the language of life–a language that, up until now, has remained mostly undeciphered. Says Drexel:

[AI] is likely to be to genetics what calculus was to physics, providing the tools necessary to harness the full power of biology and making earlier efforts appear primitive by comparison. The large language models that power chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT demonstrate how machine learning techniques can crack entire human languages with great sophistication and minimal oversight. That tremendous feat, in principle, is transferable to cracking the language of genomics in ways that were previously inconceivable. Related techniques have already been used to decipher lost human languages that had long stumped linguists. And AI excels in exactly the sort of ultra-complex, multivariable pattern recognition needed to disentangle the meaning of genetic sequences — which are a non-human language whose combinatorial complexity would have remained impenetrable using conventional methods.

The applications of this breakthrough are diverse. Existing technologies such as CRISPR, the scissor-like process of modifying genetic code to remove abnormalities, are getting a tremendous boost in capability, while other institutions are deploying it to advance new methods in reproductive technologies, such as in vitro gametogenesis (or IVG). IVG, in contrast to in vitro fertilization, “can create egg and sperm cells from, say, skin cells or other ordinary cells in the body. Already successfully used to create healthy offspring in mice, there is the obvious prospect that IVG could allow prospective parents to create industrial quantities of viable embryos, nullifying the difficulty that has characterized harvesting human egg cells. On top of this, AI’s increasing illumination of genetic information could dramatically improve the power of genetic screening.”

But as with any major event in Digital Babylon, there are usually ripple effects that trigger other events. While Drexel is concerned about what the kind of technological development may lead to (for both good and ill), Drexel’s larger concern is China’s involvement in pushing the boundaries of this technology far beyond what America and the West may be comfortable with. Thus, there are two events here: the use of AI to rapidly advance the field of genetics in new directions, and China’s deliberate use of this development as part of its AI arms race with America.

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Empire

The Digital Babylon framework is mostly concerned with powerful economic empires. But economic empires like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Bytedance do not exist in a vacuum. Every major Big Tech empire is connected to a particular nation and is influenced by that nation’s laws and cultural priorities. Normally that relationship is self-contained, especially when it comes to American companies. But in this case, not only do we have competing economic empires, those economic empires are outposts in an even grander conflict between two global superpowers.

China’s human rights abuses, as long and easily documented as the rising of the sun each day, provide an avenue for genetic experimentation in the way that America would never consider. While the FDA has already approved some measure of gene therapy for severe and existing conditions, such as sickle-cell disease, ethical debates and regulatory red tape go hand-in-hand in slowing down both the speed and direction of American innovation in this area. China, on the other hand, does not care about any of that:

China has long taken advantage of this openness while also aggressively seeking access to international genomic data through illegal channels, and while compiling data on its own citizens, particularly its Uyghur minority, and on millions of women around the world via Chinese-built prenatal tests. . . . The Chinese government is actively supporting an expansion in biological experimentation on primates, while similar experiments in Western countries are declining due to animal rights concerns. For example, one Chinese lab in 2019 inserted a human gene related to brain development into the genomes of several macaque monkeys. Of the eleven monkeys, six were euthanized, aborted, or otherwise died; the researchers found the others to exhibit increased cognitive performance. Western observers were scandalized at what one anthropologist called “an ethical nightmare,” while the Chinese lab claimed its experiment “values the use of non-human primates in understanding unique human traits.”

The differences in approaches is underscored further by the economic empires at the forefront of this innovation. In America, the emphasis is largely on genetic screening for mutations and character traits (at least for now). The same technology being used to combat cancer is the same technology that could potentially spare future children lives of disability or disease. Chinese companies are also pursuing this, but instead of being driven by the individualistic emphasis of the American family, China’s goal is something different: “population quality”. Look no further than the actions of the president and co-founder of China’s largest genomic company:

According to a publication of the state media company Shanghai United Media Group, the president and cofounder of BGI forbids his employees from having children with birth defects, which he says would be a “disgrace” to the company. Not one of the 1,400 children born to employees has had serious congenital diseases, he says.

While it may take several generations to bear fruit, all of the guardrails necessary to hold China back from experimenting with the creation of genetically enhanced humans at scale. For China, the relationship between emerging AI genetics and fulfilling its nationalistic aims is a straightforward one. Economic success is not enough; true victory comes in transforming the Chinese population in ways America and the West would find horrifying.

Epoch

As with many of the events and empires that make up life in Digital Babylon, the question of “how then shall we live” involves accepting a hard truth: individually, there is little anyone can do to stop the domino chain of consequences from continuing their course. While we do not need to adopt a dispassionate stoicism towards these developments, we need to recognize that for the average individual, life in Digital Babylon will force us to reckon with developments beyond our control.

Prayer, of course, is the most important thing any one individual could participate in. Like other circumstances in Digital Babylon, the impacts are not equally distributed. Some people will feel the impact of the AI genetics revolution more than others, and it should be made clear that some of those impacts may be positive. We can and should gladly welcome new medical breakthroughs that allow for treatment of genetic conditions previously thought impossible to deal with even as we sharply denounce the use of this same technology to rebuild humanity for nationalistic purposes. Prayer is the nexus of thankfulness for God’s providential gifts in new treatment possibilities and intercessions for rulers and leaders to be steered away from the temptation to play god like never before.

Pastors and parents need to begin discipling their congregations and children on the fundamentals of what it means to be made human, including the goodness of God’s design in our limitations. Genetic engineering cannot undo the curse of sin. Whatever tinkering China or other nations may do to future humans, every human is born under the curse of sin and doomed to physically die. But humanity is not some unoptimized jumbled mess waiting for scientists to optimize our features for maximal strength, knowledge, or health; the fact that humans have limitations is not part of the curse, and those limitations are not a threat to the goodness of God. Strong preaching and teaching about the goodness of humanity, and the goodness of humanity under the stewardship of God as our Creator and Sustainer, is important to counter the inevitable pressure to go beyond merely healing disease towards augmentations that serve the ends of corporations, markets, or nations.

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Putting It All Together

In the Old Testament, specifically 1-2 Kings, the people of God are regularly besieged by their enemies. Sometimes these events are temporary, but other times, these empires leave lasting impacts. Assyria’s destruction of the nation of Israel was an event that brought one empire to an end and created a new epoch for Judah. Though Assyria later fell to Babylon, the scepter of Babylon soon fell over Judah as the Lord disciplined Judah for the same idolatry for which he disciplined Israel–only instead of full destruction, the Lord allowed his people the mercy of exile in Babylon. Israel’s destruction was permanent. Judah’s was not. The Lord was clear Judah would one day return to the land, even though things would never be the same.

Whatever empires may emerge as a result of this growing new sector of genetic health, one thing is undeniably true: this is a monumental event with permanent, epoch-inducing consequences. Some events in Digital Babylon are more significant than others. Some empires in Digital Babylon may seem influential for a season but, like Assyria, are doomed to give way to something even more dangerous. But in the face of the possibility of generations of genetically modified humans–for any reason, good or ill–it is impossible to overstate the magnitude of Digital Babylon’s influence in creating a future once thought to be science fiction, and to do so within our lifetime. And just as the walls of Jerusalem were eventually destroyed by Babylon, the walls of tinkering with the fundamentals of life itself are besieged by Digital Babylon.

Only the Lord knows what awaits us in this area, but what was true of Judah’s exile into Babylon is the same of ours as well: no kingdom of man or machine can stand against the Lord, and no counsel of technological-economic conglomerates can thwart his eternal plan to reconcile all things to himself through Jesus Christ. If the Lord should purpose that we live to see the worst horrors of AI-driven genetic engineering come to pass, it is not because of his slack oversight or carelessness. In the face of such a future, we ought to renew our confidence in the power of God and the goodness of his purposes and plans. The Gospel of Christ will continue to go forth as the kingdom of God advances into the world regardless of Digital Babylon’s attempts to stop it, and Christ will return to judge the living and the dead. If our hope is in stopping these worst-case scenarios from materializing, we are betting on disappointment, but if our hope is based on Christ, Christians and the Church can courageous endure whatever comes next.

This is a follow-up to my appearance on The Reconnect with Carmen LaBerge on Thursday, November 6. My bi-weekly segment is live every other Thursday (next one is Nov 20) at 6:08AM CST wherever MyFaithRadio is carried, online, or in the podcast version released later in the day.

For my next newsletter, I am aiming to provide some pastoral and parental guidance on the single most horrifying thing I’ve ever read about the internet: the Harper’s Magazine essay on gooning. I don’t even know how I will do it, but it needs to be done. Christians need thinkers and researchers on Internet culture, especially when it comes to the formation of our boys and men.

Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon.

Austin

Earlier this morning, my review of Todd Korpi’s AI Goes to Church was published on The Gospel Coalition. You can read the review here, but as the TL;DR–it doesn’t always live up to its own ideals, but it’s a good read when playing to its strengths.

Korpi’s book is not the first book on AI and the church–other books on this subject include The Church and AI (which I have skimmed, but not fully read) and AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep (which still remains my go-to recommendation even after reading Korpi’s book). There will be a cottage industry of AI-and-church type books emerging at some point over the next several years just as there was with social media. Most of these books will end up being forgettable, but despite my criticisms of his book, I don’t think Korpi’s book will be one of them.

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AI Goes to Church is ambitious in its scope–almost too ambitious at times. When Korpi tries to bite off more than he can chew in a single chapter, he resorts to quickly telling you what to think (or indulges in speculative opinion) in contrast to his stated goal in training you on how to think. But in the parts of the book that fulfill that goal, Korpi’s insights have remained with me long after I finished reading and annotating his book. I look forward to engaging directly with some of his sharper insights over the coming months.

The biggest thing that I appreciated in his emphasis that the church is more prepared to deal with AI than we realize. Unlike with smartphones and social media, we do not have to be reactive to the environment around us; we can proactively theologize about AI with an aim towards longevity in our thinking. My Digital Babylon framework was largely born as a reactionary analysis, but while I’ve not written much on the framework as of late, I’ve found the categories of event, empire, and epoch are excellent starting points for helping me think through AI in my own ministry. In addition to applying lessons we’ve learned over the past twenty years to AI, we have more resources at our disposal to meet the needs of the moment and speak with distinctly Christian voices on this issue, and not simply contextualize secular media ecologists and experts.

Should you read AI Goes to Church? It depends. If you’re in pastoral ministry, my default recommendation remains AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep, which has proven far more helpful to me in on-the-ground pastoral ministry than Korpi’s book. But if you’re interested in Christian theologizing about AI, Korpi’s book will be worth your time. While he is generally pro-AI overall, his unique contributions and emphases are ones that those of us who are more AI-skeptical will find illuminating even if there is disagreement along the way. Writers are at their best when they are thinking through blind spots raised by others, and Korpi is a helpful partner to that end.

Thanks for reading this newsletter (and, hopefully, my review). Next week’s newsletter will be based on my segment on Carmen LaBerge’s show earlier that morning (likely on AI Genetics, but not certain), and then the week after that I will be writing about the single most disturbing thing I’ve ever read about the Internet and what it means for discipling young men.

Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon.

Austin

“Do you prefer your porn with a lot of abuse and human trafficking, or would you rather talk to an AI?”

That is not a hypothetical question–that is a direct quote from Steve Jones, who runs porn.ai. Jones is one of several individuals profiled in a recent piece from The Guardian entitled “‘Obedient, yielding, and happy to follow’: the troubling rise of AI girlfriends” as part of a rapidly exploding sector of the AI chatbot market: “delegates [to an adult industry conference in Prague] noted a sharp increase in new websites offering users the chance to form relationships with AI-generated girlfriends, who will remove their clothes in exchange for tokens purchased by bank transfer.”

The fact that AI is being used to expand the porn industry is not surprising. This was only a matter of time. What is surprising is the amount of anti-porn talking points that are being co-opted by these new porn companies as part of their sales pitch. Here is the full quote from Steve Jones:

“Do you prefer your porn with a lot of abuse and human trafficking, or would you rather talk to an AI?” Steve Jones, who runs an AI porn site, asked. “We hear about human trafficking, girls being forced to be on camera 10 hours a day. You’ll never have a human trafficked AI girl. You’ll never have a girl who is forced or coerced into a sex scene that she’s so humiliated by, that she ends up killing herself. AI doesn’t get humiliated, it’s not going to kill itself.”

I read shocking things about the Internet and digital technology frequently, and I confess, when I read that quote in preparation for my bi-weekly radio segment on Carmen LaBerge’s program, I was shaken in a way I’ve not experienced for some time. The problem here isn’t that Jones is wrong (although, to be clear, there are several problems with his statement). The problem is that anti-porn messaging about the evils of the porn industry was successful - so successful it is now being co-opted by pro-porn businesses to leverage AI for innovating the porn industry.

Limits of Cooperation

The anti-porn movement is a shining star of co-belligerency in an era where disagreement ends in division, not cooperation. People of all walks of life and every point on the political spectrum were willing to come together against the porn industry by raising awareness of the evils of the industry and providing support for individuals addicted to porn or looking to escape working in the industry. But co-belligerency requires trade-offs, and the greatest strength of the anti-porn movement is about to become its biggest threat.

The message that led to such passionate cooperation between Christians and non-Christians, conservatives and liberals, and other disparate groups is that the porn industry is a human trafficking industry. Whatever each group may say in addition to that, this is the one drum everyone will beat: the porn industry is an industry that coerces and kidnaps women for the purpose of degrading them as much as realistically possible for exponential profit from addicted individuals. To be clear: this is a true and very effective message. In a culture that breathes the air of “it’s fine as long as you don’t harm someone else”, the messaging of the anti-porn movement struck precisely at the fact that porn does harm someone else, namely countless women who are exploited, consumed, and discarded.

But coming together to rally behind one message, however strong that message is, has an inherent strategic weakness: you are rallying behind one message. What will you do if your opponent can successfully counter that one message?

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The emerging AI porn industry got the message loud and clear and intends to turn that message around in their favor. As Amelia Gentleman writes in her piece:

Developers of the new businesses claim they represent an improvement on web-cam businesses, where real women undress on camera and talk to men, because they remove the potential for the exploitation seen in parts of the industry. They also argue that AI performers do not get ill, do not need to have days off, do not get exhausted at the end of a shift, or feel humiliated by the demands made by clients.

In deploying AI to alleviate concerns of exploitation in the porn industry, the porn industry concedes the biggest talking point of the anti-porn movement: you were right, this industry is exploitative. But instead of taking that conclusion and winding down their operations (as anyone who hates porn would wish to see), the porn industry is taking that conclusion and saying “AI is helping us fix that problem, and so porn isn’t bad anymore!” Setting aside the fact that AIs trained for pornographic use will still be trained on real images and videos of real women (and that degradation of real women will still be in demand by many), this messaging will provide a very powerful justification for those who want to consume porn but want to do so with a “do no harm” approach. If the woman on the screen isn’t actually a real, live person, then where is the harm?

The co-belligerency of the anti-porn movement can and should continue despite this new challenge. Christians, however, have the opportunity to advance the uniqueness of Christian position on this subject and speak to something a co-belligerent movement cannot speak to: sexual immorality as a sin against the self.

Advancing the Christian Response

“Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18 ESV). In a “do-no-harm” culture, Paul’s theology of the body and sexual immorality leaves no room for the possibility of indulging our lustful desires without harming someone along the way: ourselves.

Christians must draw a firm and clear line in the sand that AI chatbots are not real people, no matter how “human” they appear to us. AI chatbots are created by man in the image of man to glorify man; while AI girlfriends may be trained on content including real women and made to imitate real women, the chatbots themselves are machines and algorithms, not flesh and blood. Christians also need to firmly press the point that when it comes to AI porn, it is irrelevant that AI girlfriends or porn stars are not real people. The porn industry may tempt you to think that you can indulge in your sexual fantasies in a “safe” or “humane” way, but “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Gal 6:7 ESV). Taking your sexuality and sexual desires beyond what God has created you and those desires for will ruin you. Indulging your fantasies with machines and algorithms instead of real women will still ruin you. You sin against your own body regardless if you sin against the body of a real person at the same time. The lies of the AI porn industry must be countered with Scripture’s clear teaching that our sexuality–along with every other aspect our lives–does not belong to us to do with whatever we judge good and right, but to God, who created us to glorify him and enjoy him forever.

Of course, Christians must also breathlessly preach that there is no limit to the forgiving and cleansing power of the blood of Christ. Nobody who is in the grips of sexual addiction–whether by porn with real women or porn with AI girlfriends–is beyond the saving power of Christ to take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh that love God and want to obey his commandments. Amid our warnings of the dangers and evil of the porn industry in its old and new forms, the Christian message cannot only be a message of judgment. “Do better” and “Stop it” is not the Gospel. The Gospel is the message that someone took the judgment for your participation in this industry upon himself so that, by faith in him for your salvation, the might give you his perfect record of sinless righteousness. For those who cannot fathom the amount of porn they have consumed, the message of the grace of Christ and the promise of full forgiveness and pardon is the most important message they could hear, even if it accompanies other messages about the evils of the porn industry along the way.

The AI porn industry will tell you “good news: porn doesn’t harm real women anymore.” Jesus tells you “good news: “‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10 ESV).’”

This quick piece came as a follow-up to my appearance on The Reconnect with Carmen LaBerge earlier this morning. There was more I could say on this subject and wanted to get this down in writing because I believe it is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed. My bi-weekly segment is live every other Thursday (next one is Nov 6) at 6:08AM CST wherever MyFaithRadio is carried, online, or in the podcast version released later in the day.

I have a new article coming out for The Gospel Coalition on the church and AI. At the moment it is scheduled to release on Thursday, October 30, but that could change. I will write a newsletter about the article itself and some additional commentary whenever it releases.

Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon.

Austin

I have a new article out on The Gospel Coalition (my debut at my employer) about something that churches need to take seriously yesterday. Zuckerberg was in the news recently for claiming Meta’s AI can replace your missing friends, but he knows that was a distraction. Their Ray-Ban smart glasses are the most successful thing the company is working on by far and he wants to keep that a secret until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Here is the situation:

Ten years ago, Apple released the Apple Watch. What was once considered niche and experimental eventually became nearly as common as smartphones; a decade later, the smartwatch market is booming, with a myriad of options from dozens of competitors.

Smart glasses are on a similar trajectory. In contrast to bulky VR headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, smart glasses are an affordable improvement on the glasses people already wear. Reading a text message or taking a photo using glasses is much more appealing than the awkwardness (and danger) of wearing a computer on your face in public.

Currently, Meta’s smart glasses dominate this new market. They’re available on Amazon and in big-box tech stores, and they can be purchased with or without a prescription in numerous colors. While Meta created these glasses for general consumers, they’re finding unexpected success among disability advocacy groups. Sarah E. Needleman’s recent piece in The Wall Street Journal described how the glasses are a game-changer for visually impaired consumers, with an executive director of the National Federation of the Blind saying, “It’s giving significant accessibility benefits at a price point people can afford.”

Unfortunately, the key features of these glasses that are enhancing lives in one demographic can be exploited by others with harmful intent.

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Here is the danger:

Like with other AI-enabled devices, an individual wearing a pair of Meta’s Ray-Bans can say “Hey Meta” and give numerous voice commands, including calling someone, taking a photo, and recording video. You can even ask the glasses to give an AI-generated description of what you’re seeing. This feature is proving most valuable to visually impaired wearers.

When you take a photo or record a video, an LED light embedded in the glasses’ frames turns on. In some ways, this feature makes recording with the glasses more obvious than holding up your phone in front of you to record. But a quick Google search for “how to turn off Meta Ray-Ban light” reveals dozens of results for how to disable that light, with solutions ranging from using electrical tape or black epoxy to cover the light to advanced modifications such as precision drilling into the light to disable it. This is a clear signal that wearers find the light annoying and want to be able to turn it off.

Thankfully, Meta’s smart glasses seem resistant to tampering and modification. If the light is blocked or disabled, the glasses won’t record, and no clear-cut way to get around this has emerged. Yet given the strong demand from consumers to turn this feature off, it’s only a matter of time before a competitor enters the emerging market with a pair of smart glasses that can discreetly capture photos and videos without an indicator light. It’s only a matter of time before an individual uses a pair of smart glasses to prey on children or other people’s privacy in church.

Here is why churches need to take smart glasses seriously:

To keep attendees safe on Sundays, we must first acknowledge a scary truth: An individual with harmful intent only needs to succeed once to create a lifetime of suffering. Thankfully, churches can take these three steps to greatly reduce the risk of a predator using smart glasses to harm people who come to church.

My three steps are as follows:

1. Include specific language about smart glasses in your church’s photography policy and standard operating procedures (SOP) for security.

2. Educate volunteer teams about your church’s policies.

3. Proactively ensure that visually impaired people are welcomed and served by your church.

Go deeper on each of those three steps (with resources on how to do them) in the article.

Thanks for reading. Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon

Austin

In my Digital Babylon framework, there are three ways to think about the term “Digital Babylon”:

• An event: the sudden and rapid ascent of immensely powerful technology and media companies.

• An empire: the cultural, political, and spiritual forces those companies and their tools/services exert on us individually and collectively.

• An epoch: the period of time where individuals, families, and churches must live as wise and faithful exiles amid God-ordained cultural and spiritual opposition.

Of those three key terms, two of them share a common theme: Big Tech. The coming of Big Tech is both an event and is itself an empire that exerts unfathomable pressure on those living in its shadow. It is hard for the average consumer to fathom the extent to which Google (which was just found guilty of illegal monopolization), Meta, Amazon, and others among the largest companies to ever exist have attained their status through erasing their competition and making life miserable for those who want to live and operate apart from their systems and services.

Antitrust law is complex and boring. I am not an expert on it and will not try my hand at summarizing a case that full-time writers like Matt Stoller have been covering for more than five years. Instead, I want to cut to the chase and explore what would happen if, after all is said and done, the Department of Justice finds Meta guilty of illegal monopolization and orders Meta to divest of one of it’s major companies, likely either Instagram or WhatsApp. Would that mean social media becomes less pervasive in our lives?

The answer is almost certainly no. Whatever happens to Meta in this trial, Digital Babylon still wins.

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Scenario One: Meta Found Not Guilty

If Meta comes out of this trial without being forced to divest any of it’s major companies, Digital Babylon wins because the status quo remains unchanged.

Contrary to public sentiment, Meta is doing just fine. Facebook (the platform) and Instagram remain two of the three biggest social media platforms in the world with billions of users. WhatsApp is still the de-facto texting app of most of the globe outside the US. Llama, Meta’s developmental AI, is not a household name like ChatGPT, but it doesn’t need to be one to still be immensely profitable for the company—and its proving integral to Meta’s new AI smartglasses.

I have a piece in the works elsewhere (hopefully coming out soon) that goes more into this, but one of the most underreported tech stories of the past twelve months is that Meta has broken the barrier on wearable tech with their Ray-Ban AI smartglasses. Virtual reality headsets like the Apple Vision Pro were never going to see mass adoption—the last ten years of VR gaming’s failure to break into the mainstream was the best test-case anyone could ask for. But smartglassses are a different story. Asking people to wear bulky ski goggles on their head in public is a hard sell. Asking them to upgrade the glasses they already wear to be able to take photos, have AI, or have built-in translations? Turns out there is a significant amount of demand for that for both able-bodied and visually impaired users, which is the National Federation of the Blind recently said in a Wall Street Journal piece, “It’s giving significant accessibility benefits at a price point people can afford. . . We would like to see Meta continue to invest in this.”

Meta would not be going anywhere if ends up being found guilty of illegal monopolization. If Meta is not found guilty, even more so. With their Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp trifecta, they will continue to rake in more money than any normal person can possibly comprehend, allowing them to pivot into new markets any time they sense an opportunity. We have not reached peak Big Tech.

Scenario Two: Meta Found Guilty

If Meta is found guilty of illegal monopolization and, in sentencing, is forced to divest of one of its major companies, Digital Babylon wins because a weakened Meta will open the door to new American competition the likes of which we have not seen in a decade.

I’ve been following this story for years. Part of what gave birth to this whole Digital Babylon framework was my study of Zuckerberg and Meta for Breaking the Digital Spell. I am by no means an expert on the man, but everything I’ve seen from Zuckerberg over the past year in interviews suggests this man is ready for a new challenge. Algorithmic-driven social media is in a stalemate. Meta’s ad business survived its more potent assassination attempt at the hands of Apple and came out even stronger. Zuckerberg could coast from here on out and live comfortably for the rest of his life regardless of what happened with his social media companies, and that notion of kicking back and taking it easy is his kryptonite. The man lives for the fight.

But it’s hard to move on from the current game without a new challenger getting in the ring.

Meta (then Facebook) facilitated the rise of TikTok because only a foreign superpower could compete with an American superpower. If Meta’s competitive grip on the industry is weakened from within, it will trigger a new gold rush of American investors, companies, and platforms waiting in the wings for their chance at a slice of the pie that Meta has controlled for the last decade—even more so if something also happened to TikTok in its current drama. If the wave of new platforms over the past two years felt overwhelming to you, it would likely be nothing compared to what would happen if the legion of Meta’s potential competitors smelled blood in the water.

An additional consequence that would likely attach from this is heightened scrutiny on any future acquisitions Meta attempts to make. Knowing the deck will be stacked against them, Meta will likely drop the “buy the competition” move from its playbook, double-down on “copy the competition” move, and continue to invest more in emerging markets, like their new AI smartglasses. I know I talked about this already in the previous section, but I need to reiterate: if you’re not paying attention to what Meta is doing with its smartglasses and the quietly explosive success they’re having, you are missing out on the future of the company. But not only is Meta in a position to move on from algorithmic social media, they would have disincentives to not pursue other social media companies that may arise in its wake.

In short: monopolies stifle competition. Breaking up monopolies is a means of stimulating new economic and technical competition. If the DOJ gets its way, it will result in more, new social media, not less than before.

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Understand the Empire to Live in the Epoch

Of the three ways to think about Digital Babylon, its easiest to talk about Digital Babylon as an event and epoch. Writing about Digital Babylon as an empire entails writing about big business and antitrust law and media ecology and many other topics that most people think “so what, who cares?”. It’s far easier to focus on the life we had before the Internet and how do we live faithfully for Christ when all the world is scrolling themselves to death.

But one of the things I personally have benefitted the most from this framework is the way that Event, Empire, and Epoch all reinforce each other. It’s true in the climax of the Old Testament story with Babylon and it’s true here as well. In order to understand one, you need to understand the other. In order to understand “how then shall we live?”, we need to understand “what empire are we living under?” and “how did this empire get here?”. Taking the time to understand Big Tech can be technical and dry at times, but its only when you understand the playing field that you’ll have clarity on how to play the game. God has called us to live wisely in a foolish age, which means we must understand the age we are living in to some degree.

But even though we live under the glowing gaze of Digital Babylon, it is not the only rule we live under. For those who are in Christ, his reign is not just over our lives, but over the kingdoms and empires of this world—Digital Babylon included. Our hope should not be in a change in our present circumstances, welcomed as that may be. Our hope is that just as God preserved his people in the Old Testament while living in the shadow of Babylon, God will preserve his church as they minister in the days of Digital Babylon. When we start from what we believe about God and his sovereign purposes and work outwards to our present circumstances, we can readily admit the situation is dire and confess because the Lord is in control, we have no reason to be afraid.

Thanks for reading. To all the new readers here after reading my Brick piece: welcome! The framework I mentioned at the top of the piece is the foundation of this Substack and what most of my writing flows out from. If you want to go deeper on that, you can read the “what is Digital Babylon?” piece and the “Why Digital Babylon?” piece. Both are outdated on a few points, but still capture the essence of my work well.

The piece I am working on next is something that I have alluded to in Notes for some time now and finally have the courage to tackle: Substack is social media, and it’s time to stop pretending otherwise. Look forward to that hopefully sometime next week.

Remember, together the people of God are passing through Digital Babylon into life,

Austin

I do not want my son to grow up with a father addicted to his phone.

The challenge is being addicted to my phone is an unavoidable occupational hazard.

As a social media manager in a remote working environment, the line between using my phone for my job and for everything else is a very thin line. The Internet never sleeps, and most social media managers don’t either1. For the platforms you work with (and I work with most of them), you need to know both the technical back-end and the front-end user experience, including some measure of being able to think objectively about your own addiction to swiping the same app for the dozenth time that day and how that changes how your perfectly-crafted content lands in the minds of those giving it nary a second of thought. Garbage men pick up trash, plumbers deal with toilets, and social media managers get some degree of digital brain rot.

During working hours, my phone is a vital tool for the vocation the Lord has placed me in. Outside working hours, it is effortless to take the time I ought to give to my family, my friends, and my church and continue giving it to my phone. I’ve tried numerous strategies over the years to create some walls of separation between myself and my phone when it’s not needed—“Set up filters!” “Leave it in your bedroom!” “Go greyscale!”—but each of these gave me a jolt of inspiration only to fade as quickly as the addictive cue of notifications came.

With a Brick, however, that wall of separation is now stronger than a brick wall. After three months of daily use, I am never going back to life without one.

What is a Brick?

Brick was founded by two Gen-Z college students who recognized the most addictive apps and features keep them from doing the things they wanted or needed to do in life. Switching to a flip phone solved this problem, but created several others. Smartphones are integral to life in Digital Babylon, and Digital Babylon will make life difficult for those who can’t or won’t participate.

Instead of resigning themselves to defeat, they created a novel solution: a 3D printed plastic brick that serves as a physical key for a smartphone app that restricts other apps in your phone when enabled. To block distracting apps on your phone, you open the app and tap the Brick. To unblock those apps, you open the app and tap the Brick again. If the Brick isn’t physically nearby, you cannot unblock the apps you have blocked.

It’s a simple twist that makes all the difference.

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At the end of the workday, I walk to the shelf in the living room where my Brick lays. I open the app, and tap the Brick. All my social media apps (including Substack!) and my work-related apps become unaccessible and stop sending notifications. I don’t want to call it a Severance chip, but the physiological shift of functionally “clocking out” of digital work life is immediately noticeable. Unless there is an emergency, I won’t unBrick my phone until it’s time to start working the next morning, and my time in the real world has never been richer for it.

Physical Proximity: The Secret Ingredient

Software solutions for restricting your phone are better than nothing, but they have an inherent weakness: you can undo those restrictions anywhere your phone is.

Focus filters and password-restricted screen time controls are easy to set up and easy to circumvent. By adding a physical dimension to a software solution, Brick makes circumventing your restrictions a physical task, not just a digital one2. As simple as it sounds, this one twist makes all the difference, because physical proximity is a key factor in our tech and media habits. When we are bored at work, or stuck waiting in line at the store or in the doctor’s office, our phone is the first thing we turn to in order to distract us. But if your phone is Bricked, and your Brick is miles away from you at home, using your phone to distract you becomes a non-option.

Of course, you may still end up using your phone while it is bricked. But since you are self-selecting the apps that you want blocked, all that’s left for you to use are apps that are genuinely beneficial. My Greek vocabulary has never been sharper, I’ve discovered more new music this year than I did all of last year, and I’ve spent more time reading directly on websites that I support because in the moments where I could just be mindlessly grazing social media or refreshing Slack messages, it’s just not an option. The key to unlocking those apps is miles away. The temptation is just gone.

Life-Changing Benefits

I do not want to oversell Brick as the magic cure-all to all your problems. And yet, I’d be lying if I tried to downplay all the benefits I’ve seen in my life after three months of using a Brick on a daily basis:

• My baseline anxiety has plummeted. Significantly plummeted.

• My work/life balance is the best it has ever been.

• My weekends are more restful, especially the Sabbath.

• My focus and productivity has gone through the roof.

• I have already read more books this year than I did all of last year, seminary included.

• My time with my family is more meaningful.

• My short-term memory is sharper.

• My long-term thinking is clearer.

• My social media work - both professionally and personally - is stronger than it ever has been (how’s that for a counterintuitive benefit?!)

The brick itself has a one-time cost, but there is no subscription for the app. Right now it is only available for iOS, but they are working on an Android version. The only even slightly negative thing I could say is that the app can be a little unstable when you’re building your profiles (you can have up to five different profiles with unique block/allow lists), but that’s it.

If you care about your tech/media habits, and all your efforts to date have yielded mixed results, get a Brick. You will think it is too good to be true and that this can’t possibly give you control over your phone. But once your phone is Bricked, you won’t want to go back.

Thanks for reading. I’ve learned the hard way not to promise a cadence of writing, and so I am not about to do that here because the second I do, some curveball will come my way and any consistency I thought I may be able to attain will get claimed by something else. That said, I do have a couple shorter pieces in the works that should come out sooner rather than later. I’ve had to learn the hard way that I am at my most successful when I am ruthless in curtailing my ambition, so maybe some long-promised/always-underdelivered consistency will come through that.

Remember: together, we are passing through Digital Babylon.

Austin

This time two years ago, a TikTok ban was looming in the States.

Two years later, on this coming Sunday, it looks like that may finally happen.

Or it may not. President-Elect Trump has signaled a possibility of swooping in and saving the platform somehow. Whether he will actually do that remains to be seen. Both Elon Musk and Mr.Beast have expressed interest in buying the platform, despite ByteDance’s refusal to sell. But even though the Supreme Court’s decision to not block the law forcing the sale of TikTok or banning the platform is a welcomed decision (and a rare example of #CongressDoYourJob), I need to be the bearer of bad news and say that what happens to TikTok the platform is irrelevant at this point, because the heads of TikTok’s hydra have already spawned and are here to stay.

I’ll reiterate what I wrote on this topic the last time it was in the news:

There is a sense of hope that “if this platform can just get banned or blocked, it will slow the corrosive effects of this digital fentanyl on our society and our younger generations”. This piece is going to throw a wet blanket on that implicit optimism: even if TikTok the platform gets banned, TikTok as short-form video and as a cultural force is here to stay. Even if the Chinese Communist Party gets the boot (as it should), numerous other problems remain as two other heads of short form video - YouTube and Instagram¹ - take its place.

Suffice to say, in the two years since I wrote that paragraph, both YouTube and Instagram have made significant gains in implementing short form video. Even if TikTok survives this, both have become legitimate competitors to TikTok’s once-held dominance. But it’s not just YouTube and Instagram that have spawned as TikTok hydra heads. Meta as a whole has integrated short form video successfully into Facebook, and provided synergy between two different platforms in a way TikTok can’t compete with. Even LinkedIn recently rolled out a short form video feed for its creators. Short form video is everywhere, and it is here to stay.

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Again, from two years ago:

Taken together, when we talk about “banning TikTok”, it ought to be clear that even if the platform TikTok is banned, TikTok as a type of content and as a new cultural force is not going anywhere.

If TikTok the platform were to get banned, it immediately raises the question: where does all this gargantuan amount of creative energy and consumptive focus go? That supply and demand has to be picked up somewhere. The 80 minutes that people spend on TikTok per day (on average) will not just reduce to 0 minutes just because the platform is inaccessible; it will just get spent elsewhere, and right now, that “elsewhere” will almost certainly be YouTube and Instagram.

That distribution of creative energy has already happened. I see it from the perch I sit on for my job. That creative energy is also growing. There is more short form video content being made today than there was two years ago, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Again, from two years ago:

In short: if you’re concerned about the negative mental and spiritual effects of TikTok and its content (as I think you should), the battle is not won just because TikTok the platform gets blocked. The problems created by TikTok now transcend the platform itself and will continue onward even if the platform itself is gone.

Or even if the platform stays. I am writing this on a whim after hearing news of the Court’s verdict. This story is likely far from over with twists and turns that remain to be seen. My point is that, from a media ecology standpoint, what happens to TikTok at this point will largely be irrelevant. I am not saying there are some unique dangers to TikTok. It’s algorithm is hands-down the most effective and powerful social media algorithm to date, as is its ability to be uniquely destructive to those who use it. I love the thought of giving the Chinese Community Party the figurative boot. But just like the chapter in this saga is also far from over, short form video’s presence in social media is far from over too.

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But regardless of what happens, this doesn’t change:

The need for media literacy education will remain as paramount as ever, as will the need for brave influencer-evangelists to descend into hell to be salt and light amid an incredible darkness - whether that darkness lives on TikTok itself or one of the heads it spawns after its demise.

God has called some of us to participate in Digital Babylon whether we want to or not, yet we are not sent there alone. As with preaching, teaching, and evangelism, we plant and water, but it is God who gives the growth. If our confidence in our work is tied to our preferred forms of media ecology, but not in the Spirit as the true source that gives our words power in those ecosystems, we can and should despair that social media grows more powerful.

But the Spirit is the Lord, even over the algorithms of man. We can and should rejoice that an incredibly destructive and harmful social media platform is being defeated, but the Lord’s purposes will not be thwarted no matter how powerful Digital Babylon continues to become.

Thanks for reading. Happy 2025! I hope your year has started off strong and that you haven’t fallen off from your New Years resolutions (or that a certain blizzard hasn’t given you a false start in getting your resolutions off the ground).

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

- Austin

On December 21, 2024, a YouTuber named MegaLag published an exposé that broke the Internet.

Honey, an incredibly popular website browser extension with more than 17 million users that scours the Internet for discount codes for nearly any product (and to use on nearly every website), has been stealing affiliate revenue from websites, businesses, social media influencers, content creators - basically anyone who uses the Internet for commerce - and defrauding consumers by quietly working with major retailers to pre-determine the kind of discounts that Honey will “find” for people using the service. The technical specifics on how Honey does this are complex, but the evidence in MegaLag’s exposé is overwhelming, undeniable, and indefensible. Popular legal YouTuber Devin Stone, aka Legal Eagle, has launched a class action lawsuit against PayPal, the company who owns Honey, on behalf of anyone who may have had affiliate revenue stolen from them by Honey. His explanation of Honey’s actions are brief, but very simple and clear for anyone to grasp:

The scale of Honey’s deception cannot be overstated. Commerce is the backbone of the Internet and Honey’s scheme touches any and every corner of the market; we are discussing billions of dollars in potentially stolen revenue. This scheme:

• Defrauds anyone who uses affiliate links as a means of generating passive income from partnerships and promotions with other companies.

• Defrauds anyone who wants to support their favorite website or content creator by using an affiliate link to purchase a product (and then used Honey to try to find any additional discounts).

• Defrauds anyone who uses Honey by claiming to find the best discounts on the Internet when those discounts may have been pre-selected by businesses ahead of time.

• Defrauds businesses who distribute affiliation links as part of their marketing efforts from collecting accurate data on how beneficial those partnerships and sponsorships are.

• Defrauds businesses by tempting them with an opportunity to lie to their customers rather than build their trust through quality products and services at competitive prices.

All of those points are significant, but its perhaps that last one that grieves me the most. Honey is owned by PayPal. PayPal is one of the most important financial institutions in the world. We are in the midst of a significant crisis in institutional trust, and this scam will not only amplify this trust crisis, but will cause it to reverberate far beyond PayPal and the businesses who partnered with them to defraud their customers. The last thing our culture needs are more reasons to be suspicious and distrust the institutions who are supposed to give us the peace and stability we believe we are losing. This scam will donate years of free kindling to those who want to burn “the system” down, with no vision or plan for an alternative and not fully aware of the true horrors that follow with total institutional collapse.

But that’s not what I want to focus on here. Instead, I want to talk about what this scam means for Christian content creators specifically (and the people who support them).

For most Christian content creators (and by that, I mean Christians who are creating content about God, the Bible, the church, theology, or other subjects pertaining to Christianity), content creation is a side-hustle, not a day job. Whatever equipment or services you need to create your content comes out of your own pocket. You do it because you love it, but doing it on the side and maybe making a few bucks in the process is the ceiling the majority of us will ever reach.

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Affiliate programs and/or brand partnerships are an important stepping stone for content creators for two reasons. One, it can be an easy step for a creator can take if they want to earn income from their work. You may need to reach a certain audience threshold as a prerequisite, but that is a goal you were likely working towards already. Second, if you’re doing content creation just on the side, the threshold for breaking even on your expenses is usually very low. At the height of my biggest creative endeavor, my former music review website/podcast Another Ascending Lark, I think my monthly expenses totaled around $80-$100 month (not counting one-off purchases) for a custom Wordpress website and domain, podcast hosting, stock images, music and software subscriptions, and more. Your monthly expenses might be higher. They might be lower. In both cases, the revenue from affiliate programs and/or brand partnerships might not pay your water bill this month, but it might recoup your baseline expenses for your work.

For the biggest YouTubers in the world, Honey’s fraudulent scheme may have deprived them of serious money from their affiliate programs and brand partnerships. However, the biggest YouTubers in the world aren’t dependent on these programs to survive. Their operations have diverse income streams, as do other large organizations who use affiliate programs to generate additional funding. The same cannot be said for smaller content creators. For people creating content on the side or trying to get off the ground, that revenue is the difference between taking their work to the next level, or making their work sustainable over the long haul. Creating content is hard work. Wanting to create better content without the funds to do so is hard. Wanting to create content over a long period but wondering whether you should invest $1,000 a year (or more) into something that amounts to little more than a hobby is hard. Any income your work generates lessens that burden, and gives you encouragement to keep going.

As bad as this scam is for creators, I think it’s even worse for those who support them. I’ve bought numerous products from friends over the years using their affiliate links, often because I wanted to buy whatever product they were promoting and because I wanted to support their work in a meaningful way. For however long this scam was going on, fans and supporters thought they were chipping into their favorite content creators, and if they were using Honey at the same time, they were unaware that they too were being robbed from.

That’s what makes this scam so insidious. It steals from multiple parties, and in multiple ways. It inflames our suspicion and mistrust of organizations we depend on and the world we share at a time when we need confidence that our sacrifice and support of others makes a meaningful difference.

We need more Christian content on the Internet. We need more ordinary, normal Christians creating content about the Gospel, theology, evangelism, apologetics, and more in any and every format and corner of Digital Babylon. But that work takes time and, often, money. $100 in affiliate revenue is a rounding error to the largest YouTubers in the world. $100 in affiliate revenue is an answered prayer for someone pouring their heart out into their work and who needs to justify the expenses to get off the ground or keep going. I shudder to think about the amount of income Christian content creators have lost as a result of Honey’s scam, and what a potentially life-changing difference it could’ve made for them and their work.

Needless to say, if you have Honey installed on a web browser, you need to uninstall it and encourage others to uninstall it as well. It steals money from those who have legitimately earned it and lies to you in giving you the savings it claims to give you. If you are a Christian content creator, or work for an organization (Christian or not) that does content creation and makes heavy use of affiliate programs or brand sponsorships, consider looking into the Eagle Team’s class action lawsuit (obligatory “I am not a lawyer” disclaimer here). If you’re a content creator who participates in affiliate programs or brand partnerships, consider looking into other routes for monetization. If you’re a big fan of a content creator, be sure to look into other routes to financially support their work. The affiliate link/brand partnership system is about to be violently shaken once the breadth and depth of this scheme truly sinks in. If you can diversify, you need to do so.

Regardless if you’re impacted by this scandal or not: if you’re a Christian content creator, keep creating. Digital Babylon is a dangerous and unfair field, but your work is not in vain. The Spirit is pleased to work through many diverse means to accomplish the ends of God’s plan of salvation, and your presence and suffering for causing an increase in the word of God is glorifying to him.

Thanks for reading. I’ll keep an eye on this story and write on it again if anything significant develops from it. For my next post I hope to start a yearly tradition doing something that all of us should feel comfortable doing: admitting some of the things that I was wrong on over the past year or two.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

- Austin

I started writing album reviews as a hobby in 2010. Over the next several years, I would go from writing on a free Blogger.com blog to creating a pretty high-caliber website where, along with some friends, we published multiple album reviews a week in both articles and podcasts from both the Christian and secular markets. Sadly, my attempt to turn a hobby into a potential side-gig never panned out. My love for album reviews, however, has endured to the present day, and I still spend at least a couple hours a week reading reviews over at Jesusfreakhideout1, Sputnikmusic, Angry Metal Guy, The Progressive Subway, and more.

In 2020, I began experimenting with Instagram microblogging as a new format for writing reviews. I would write them for Instagram, under Instagram’s limits, and then publish them on both Instagram and my (now defunct) personal website. The clickthrough rate on those website reviews was actually 0.0%, but the Instagram versions got a small amount of traction. For this year, I decided to publish all these reviews as zero-click-content on all my main socials and got significantly more engagement than I ever did trying to get people on my personal website. Turns out giving away your content in the spaces where people are already at actually gets their eyeballs on your work and hearing to what you have to say.

What follows are all those reviews collected and published in one place. A critical distinction between the albums and the books I picked for this list is that these albums all released in 2024, while the books are not. If you’ve got a best-of list that you wrote and published somewhere, put it down in the comments below and I will check it out.

Hope you enjoy, and see you in 2025!

5 (Albums): Foxing, by Foxing

If Bo Burnham made an emo alt-rock album, it would be Foxing’s “Foxing”.

There would be differences, of course. Burnham’s sardonic comedy, which effectively masks his Ecclesiastes-tier despair under the veneer of catchy synth-pop bops, would have to give way to weeping and gnashing of teeth. There is nothing funny about “Foxing”, and it certainly isn’t very pop-y, but you know exactly where this album is going when Conor Murphy cries “Throw out all the joy and show me metrics for my failures / I live in modern times give me a modern sense of worth” a few minutes into the album. The ensuring laments of numb anxiety and the yearning to feel something, anything, again would make both Burnham and Solomon proud.

Foxing’s long-lauded mastery of multiple genres continues in full strength on their fifth album, as does the breadth of Murphy’s vocal range. The ability to go from blitz paced emo-core (“Hell 99”), to drenched post-rock soundscapes (the end of “Greyhound”), to nu-metal (“Dead Internet”), to U2-esq stadium ballads (“Hall of Frozen Heads”), and several other musical destinations in between is nothing short of jaw-dropping, made even more impressive by the fact Foxing’s sound never as though its swerving too hard in a new direction. Murphy himself embodies this in his ability to go from soaring highs to the faintest of frayed wailing seemingly in the same breath - see Song of the Year candidate “Gratitude”. The consistency amid the diversity is breathtaking.

“Foxing” is a bleak album. It beautifully captures the angst of our present cultural moment, and it captures the quiet cracks beginning to form in the innate yearning for something more. As Murphy channels his inner Bono in the final musical peak of the album, "I’ve been harboring resentment / Meant for lack of eventfulness in divine sense / I wanna be Saul to Paul in Damascus / Awakened above the masses / The last gasp of god before the rapture / Chariotted high above a glass earth / But instead / I’m tiptoeing the fractures / I’m obsessed with what if it shatters / Or doesn’t matter.”

Thankfully, it does matter.

5 (Books): Biblical Critical Theory, by Christopher Watkin

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book like this before.

No, that’s not true. I know, with certainty, that I’ve never read a book like this, and I’m more than willing to bet you haven’t either. Whatever your impression of what this book is judging by the title cover, I can guarantee you it is not what you expect it to be. What is it, then? It’s a commentary on the entire Bible. It’s an apologetic barrage against every -ism you’ve ever heard on every point of the culturasociopolitical spectrum. It has pictures. It’s drenched in humor, joy, and hope. It covers science, history, medicine, government, education, media, technology, and dozens of other topics, sometimes in the same chapter. I promise you’ve never read anything like this, because there really hasn’t ever been a book like this.

As impressive as that is, the most impressive aspect of the book is Watkin’s humility in handling his subject matter, often acknowledging that he is not an expert in every subject and inviting others to come in and critique and expand his project. Watkins spent 15 years (his “15 year itch” as he calls it in the prologue) working on this book, and he concludes this 600+ page work with a recognition that he has barely scratched the surface. What he has laid out is a vast map, with dozens of Xs on the map indicating more treasure to be found - but rather than hoarding those treasures for himself, he invites others to join the gold rush. 3 years into my own 15-year-itch (a likely timetable at this rate), and Watkin’s lasting exhortation is not towards himself and his own insights, but the insights yet to be uncovered. With your gifts and talents, you may be able to discover these insights yourself.

This book is not for everyone. Despite Watkin’s ability to write clearly (and often humorously) for a popular-level audience, there is a density here that can be intimidating. For those willing to take the plunge, though, they may find the book reads much quicker than they anticipated. When they finish, I’m confident they too will say they’ve never read anything like it.

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4 (Albums): Voidkind, by Dvne

This year’s Dune was very good.

Sorry, you must’ve thought I meant “Dune: Part Two”, the sequel to 2021’s cinematic blockbuster starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. While yes, that Dune was great, I was talking about this year’s new album from Dvne (pronounced “Dune”), a rising star in the prog metal world. Their previous album, 2021’s “Etemen Ænka”, solidified themselves as a serious force to be reckoned with, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Mastodon and The Ocean. This year’s release, “Voidkind”, powerfully crystalizes the band’s psychedelic sludge-metal (along with the band’s cryptic dark sci-fi epic storytelling) into a sound that is familiar, but powerfully distinct from their peers.

Huh. Releases in 2021 and 2024. Psychedelics. Sci-fi. I’m sensing a theme here.

Dvne’s sound is without equal in their corner of the prog metal world, but if you’re not a fan of harsh vocals, dissonant riffs, or non-traditional song structures, you need not apply here. The numerous instances of beautiful ambiance and atmospheric bliss will not be enough to overcome the fierce energy the band brings to the majority of the album, and the album’s story - buried underneath a large Spice deposit of vibes - will not entice you either. But for those with an appetite for that kind of feast, “Voidkind” will leave you stuffed and then some. In a year where several established prog titans dropped the ball (looking at you, Leprous and VOLA), Dvne rose to the monumental expectations the scene had for them and surpassed those expectations with flying colors with “Voidkind”.

My only gripe (if I can even call it that) is the band opted for a more “garage-grunge” approach to production, rather than continuing the lusciously epic soundscapes that made their sophomore release stand out so much. For the heavier sections, this approach works quite well, but it does dampen the legitimately good atmospheric approaches the band takes throughout. A minor complaint, however. Dvne, like Paul Atreides, is the Duke of their respective house - and possibly the rightful heir to the throne.

4 (Books): The Faithful Executioner, by Joel F. Harrington

Sometimes surprising insights come from surprising places.

The story of Meister Franz Schmidt, a professional physician, torturer, and executioner who lived in Nuremberg during the Protestant Reformation, is one of the most strikingly illuminating stories about modern life I’ve ever read. Had you told me that up front, I wouldn’t have believed you. But it’s true. I learned more about my own society, and our own modern notions of justice, vocation, endurance, and compassion, than anything else I’ve read on modern life in a long time.

Schmidt, who was forced into a ghastly profession through unjust circumstances, resolves that he will not let his future family suffer the same fate. An official outcast in a “dishonorable” profession, the rest of “honorable” society is hopelessly dependent on his unique skillset, even though they want nothing to do with him outside of the times his services are required. Rather than let this identity lead him into a life of immorality with his fellow dishonorable outcasts, Schmidt resolves that he will life a live of unscrupulous excellence despite the stigma he carries. He vows to avoid alcohol (something virtually unheard of in his day) and goes on to fulfill his vocation so well that he not only becomes a highly sought-out expert in his own day, but an enduring individual of historical significance. His journal, thought to be the only historical document of its type, does not paint the man as a bloodthirsty monster, but one who was deeply religious and wrestled with how to be a compassionate healer - which he always believed to be his true life calling - while fulfilling the role of the government’s sword.

But does Schmidt succeed in breaking his family out of the cycle of the “family trade” of torture and execution? I won’t spoil how the story ends. I will say, though, that sometimes the best way to understand our present world is to understand the world that came before it, or in this case, nearly 500 years ago.

PS: the commentary about Franz and social media management will have to wait for another day.

3 (Albums): The Last WILL and TESTAMENT, by Opeth

You never forget some moments in life:

Your wedding day.

Graduating from college.

Getting the dream job.

The birth of a child.

The return of Mikael Åkerfeldt’s signature growls on an Opeth track 16 years after they were last heard on 2008’s “Watershed”.

One of those is not like the other, but if you’re a prog metal fan, you will likely never forget the moment you pulled up “§1” to hear a sound you’d given up on ever hearing again. Opeth was back.

Or was it? Åkerfeldt has long stated that he couldn’t care less about the opinions of his massive global fanbase, and that he will make the music that he wants to make and will make him happy. While 2011’s “Heritage”, the band’s first foray away from death metal towards classic prog rock, was wildly controversial at release (and now universally acknowledged as the band’s worst album), the band’s subsequent releases found themselves dialing in a second sound that stood on its own, chief among them 2014’s “Pale Communion” and 2019’s “In Cauda Venenum”. The Oldpeth/Newpeth debates assumed that Opeth was talented enough to live in two distinct genres; was it actually necessary to go back and pretend this extended prog-rock detour never happened?

Thankfully, no, it wasn’t. “The Last WILL and TESTAMENT” is the perfect fusion of Opeth’s trademark death metal with their modern revival of classic prog rock sensibilities, and the result is one of the most creative albums in the band’s 30+ year history. Åkerfeldt’s growls do not feel out of place any more than Jethro Tull vocalist/flutist Ian Anderson’s spoken word narrations and complimentary flute solos, and new drummer Waltteri Väyrynen injects youthful energy back into the band’s sound thanks to his extreme metal background. Contrary to the album’s title, this is the birth of a new Opeth, one that combines both eras of the band’s sound into something that is freshly reinvigorated.

Opeth’s future has never been brighter. Oldpeth will always be the cornerstone of my prog metal palette, and Newpeth was fine for a time, but I gladly welcome Neopeth with open arms.

3 (Books): The Reformation as Renewal, by Matthew Barrett

I am a Protestant because I love catholicism.

The notion that the Reformation was a clean schismatic break from one continuous unified church is a caricature that is long overdue for retirement. As Eastern Orthodoxy continues its surprising ascent in the West, reintroducing a long-overlooked third category of global Christendom (and an even greater division than the Reformation) to those who only knew of the Catholic-Protestant binary, the Reformation is also being re-examined with a new set of eyes. Does the popular level myth that the Reformers were entirely opposed to everything branded as “catholicism” and wanted to hit the reset button truly have any merit?

When you read the words of the Reformers themselves, an entirely different picture emerges. Rather than leave catholicism entirely and starting a new church from scratch, the Reformers saw themselves as the ones going back to a biblical, apostolic catholicism that Rome had left behind. It is a subtle distinction, but one that brings a tsunami of implications. Barrett’s massive tome (800+ pages!) is an exhaustive examination of the Reformation that emphasizes both the continuities and discontinuities of the Reformer’s beliefs and teachings with the apostolic and medieval church, rather than exclusively magnifying their discontinuities in a shallow us-versus-them examination of one of the most important movements in history. The divergences, as codified in the Solas, are important. The convergences, as highlighted by everything the Solas do not address, are arguably just as important, and have been neglected for far too long.

Contrary to most Protestants today (sadly, even Reformed Protestants), the Reformers wanted more catholicity than what the Roman church was offering, not less. The history of the catholic church - up to a particular point! - is the history of every Christian. We have nothing to lose, and immense treasure to gain, by seeing the Reformation as the renewal it truly was.

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2 (Albums): Absolute Everywhere, by Blood Incantation

“What if Pink Floyd made a death metal album?”

“That’s a stupid idea,” you may be thinking.

You’re right. That is a stupid idea.

But hear me out: what if someone did just that, and contrary to every gut reaction you may have at the words “death metal Pink Floyd”, it was actually good?

And not just “good”, but “so good it has won Album of the Year awards from numerous metal magazines” good? Not just “this is way better than it has any right to be” good, but “this is a steroid shot in the arm for an entire genre” good?

With “Absolute Everywhere”, Blood Incantation have found a way to force oil and water to mix together. By the time you’ve finished the first part of “The Stargate”, one of the album’s two 20 minute long songs, any lingering doubt about the band’s ability to excel in two wildly different worlds will be completely dispelled and leave you slack jawed at the band’s technical and creative prowess. What begins as sharp and precise death metal (with shockingly good production values for a genre infamous for often being a wall of indecipherable noise) quickly morphs into a synth-driven classic rock groove culminating in a soaring guitar solo with a drenched shimmering wetness that David Gilmour would be proud of before snapping back to pounding riffs like the 70s fever dream bridge never happened. And that’s just the first ten minutes of the album. Trust me, you just have to hear it to believe how well it works - and if you like it, there’s 30 more minutes where that came from.

In a world where my Album of the Year didn’t release this year, I would join the legions of metal fans proclaiming it the best metal album of 2024. “Absolute Everywhere” is an instant classic, and one that will infuse explosive new inspiration and creativity into a genre that has been stuck in a musical rut for some time. On paper, the question “What if Pink Floyd made a death metal album” is a stupid idea; in reality, that death metal Pink Floyd album is nothing short of a groundbreaking masterpiece.

2 (Books): Neo-Calvinism, by Cory Brock and N. Gray Sutanto

“The forms of our godliness are not the source of our power.”

A lightning bolt struck me one spring day in 2023. Having spent the better part of the last five years writing on media literacy and Christian discipleship (culminating in producing my dream project Mending Division Academy) I had to confront a simple but disturbing fact about myself and about my work: I was emphasizing the wrong thing.

Embedded in Paul’s admonition to avoid those “having the appearance of godliness but denying its power” (2 Tim 3:5a ESV) is the seed of freedom from the tyranny of misplaced emphasis. It is possible to write about Christian discipleship and emphasize forms of godliness, thinking that the forms of godliness are the source of our power. But the forms of our godliness are not the source of our power. It is the Spirit, not your media habits, that empower you to live a life bearing fruit for Christ and his kingdom. To riff on Lewis: aim at media habits and you get neither good habits nor the Spirit; aim at the Spirit and you get both.

I didn’t know it at the time, I had stumbled my way into a critical distinctive of Neo-Calvinism: the difference between forms and the essence of orthodoxy. I cannot do better than what Brock and Sutanto summarize on this early in their groundbreaking new book: “The forms of Christianity might look different from age to age, and from place to place, but the essence remains the same. Conservatism clings to a dead form while forgetting that the essence can live on through new cultural, linguistic, and philosophical dresses. It mistakes the forms for the essence. . . . Precisely because the Christian faith is truly universal, it can utilize and reshape any culture, philosophy, and place, and is not tied down to any one culture, philosophy, or place.”

Eureka. The tip of the iceberg.

This isn’t to say that everything I’ve done over this period is false or unhelpful. Far from it. But while I have been wrong on somethings for some time now, I praise the Lord that, through Brock and Sutanto’s work, I am freed from Postman’s ghost.

Album of the Year: Charcoal Grace, by Caligula’s Horse

What does the end sound like?

We won’t know what the end of all things sounds like until Christ returns. But for the endings to seasons in life - in this case, four year-defining endings during the first half of this year - some sounds give voice to the grief, sadness, and retrospection that appear when chapter(s) close better than what words can do alone. Just as they did in 2020, Caligula’s Horse narrates an even bigger period of transition in my life with “Charcoal Grace”, and for the first time in the 14 years that I’ve been reviewing music Caligula’s Horse are the first band I’ve bestowed two Album of the Year awards to.

If 2017’s career-defining “In Contact” was perhaps a hair too bloated, and 2020’s “Rise Radiant” perhaps a hair too optimized, “Charcoal Grace” is safely inside the Goldilocks zone of the band’s signature modern prog metal sound and style (albeit with an extra side of dreamy delays and reverb). Leaning back into their penchant for lengthy, sweeping epics - but wisely dividing them into four distinct tracks - the titular mid-album suite (a bold choice in a genre known for its grand finales!) is a harrowing tour-de-force dealing with some of the very subject matter that fueled my work with American Values Coalition in producing Mending Division Academy, one of the many capstones to these past four years. But a four part, 24-minute song is but one peak on this mountain; three other songs break the 10 minute mark, but none of these carry even the smallest amount of wasted space. Musically, “Charcoal Grace” is the best of both albums that came before it, but transcends the emotional depth of the two prior albums combined. I thought Caligula’s Horse raised the bar dangerously high with “Rise Radiant” in 2020; they have surpassed that bar with ease and set a new height for what the band is capable of.

All good things come to an end, but sometimes good things must end so that great things can begin. My life, as I long knew it, is now over; a different life, a better one, is here. So on I sail, those cliffs behind.

Book of the Year: Words of Radiance, by Brandon Sanderson

It wasn’t even close.

In the 90s and 00s, it was Rowling’s world. In the 10s, it was Martin’s. In the 20s, it’s now Sanderson’s world and we are all living in it. “Words of Radiance”, the second entry in the criminally overlooked fantasy epic Stormlight Archives, is not only my new all-time favorite work of fiction (sorry, Anna Karenina), it is one of the greatest sequels of all time, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as The Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and more. Shardblades are the new Lightsabers and I will not hear otherwise.

Trying to summarize this book is impossible, and given that it is a sequel, I wouldn’t try even if I could. The breadth of Sanderson’s writing is…how do you describe it? The man is one of the clearest and plainest writers I’ve ever read, with world-building that rivals that of Tolkien (especially in later books), and unlike Martin, does not rely on needless sex and violence to create characters and events that will become paradigmatic for future fantasy authors. The scale of the story is breathtaking, as are the locales it takes place in. The conflicts are simple to grasp, but deeply complex, with multi-dimensional dynamics that explore the psychological depths of each of the main characters and their conflict with allies, enemies, and the forces of the world they live in. The last 300 pages of this book alone is one of the most riveting, enthralling, and truly apocalyptic climaxes I’ve ever encountered, and if Stormlight Archive were to receive a “The Legend of Vox Machina” level animation treatment, it would immediately become the biggest media event since the Harry Potter films or Game of Thrones HBO adaptation.

I wish I could forget reading this book so that I could go back and experience it anew again. While I reserve my right to criticize issues in the series as they appear later on, I could not think of a single negative thing about “Words of Radiance” if I tried. Of all the things I read in 2024, this was my favorite by a billion miles, and it wasn’t even close.

If you made it all the way down here, thank you so much for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

- Austin

“You’re fishing where the fish are.”

This line didn’t come from a commentary on Matthew 4:19, but near the end of Rachel Karten’s excellent piece “Legacy Media Companies Need a New Social Playbook”. Karten, who runs the wildly successful (and tremendously helpful) social media management Substack Link In Bio, argues something that social media managers have intuitively recognized for some time: the relationship between websites and social media platforms have changed, and using social media to drive web traffic (or “clicks”) is now a declining strategy. Something else must take its place.

For the first 15 years of social media, the relationship between social media and websites was straightforward: you used social media (Point A) to get people to your website (Point B). You couldn’t publish an entire article in a Tweet, or upload an entire video to your Facebook or Instagram feed, but you can give people enough of a teaser to convince them to click on your link and engage with your content. For media organization who leaned heavily on their website, social media was a dream distribution channel, one that was quick and easy to use with effective results. Social media companies, however, realized that they didn’t want to be a means to other ends; they wanted to be both the means and the end. They wanted to be the only destination, not just a stop along the way.

To do this, social media companies had to make two simultaneous moves. First, they had to dramatically increase their capacities for text, image, and video. Gone were the days of 140 characters or less and other limitations. Second, they had to increasingly penalize any attempts to “link out” of the platform (unless you were willing to pay to have those penalties removed, of course). Each platform made these two moves in their own way and on their own timetable, but the end result is this: nearly every platform now lets you upload an entire article’s worth of text as a social media post, or publish a YouTube length video to your account, and every platform penalizes you in some way if you try to take people elsewhere. Clicking, as a necessary step to overcome a technical limitation in how much content you could publish to a social media platform, was made unnecessary. Point A now supports the kind of content you used to get a Point B - and social media companies have every incentive to keep you at Point A.

“Zero-click-content”, first developed by social media veteran Amanda Natividad in 2022, is the idea that using social media to get people from point A to point B to engage with your content is no longer the most effective way to use social media. Rather than using social media to drive web traffic, Natividad argues the more effective strategy is to take your content and publish it to where people can engage with it without requiring a click to get it. You’re penalized for including links to your article, and most platforms let you publish an entire article’s worth of text, so why not take your content from Point B and give it to people in Point A? Is you goal to get clicks, or is the goal for people to read or watch your work in the place they spend all their time anyway?

(As an example of this, check the comments of this Substack post to see how I published this post natively on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Threads, BlueSky, and Instagram stories. You’ll notice I handle each platform differently, but I still point back to my Substack at the end. That’s a post for another day.)

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Naturally, this is a controversial strategy, and like it any strategy, it has its pros and cons. The biggest con, of course, is that whatever little Point A-to-B web traffic you were still getting would be eviscerated. While social media reading/viewing is a popup-free and ad-free experience (ask yourself: how many times have you had to tap away at something while reading this?), it is also a terminal experience with a self-contained endpoint unless you get creative on how you point people to a next step. The biggest pro is that if your content is truly valuable to people - if your content is inspiring, educational, entertaining, or convicting and appeals to real interests - you are removing every barrier to people encountering that content and removing penalties that throttle your content’s reach in an algorithm. And, as marketers know well: if people like your stuff, it creates a desire for more of it, and the more desire you create, the more people will naturally seek out what you have to offer. Instead of an all-or-nothing proposition, where you either click a link in Point A to get all the content in Point B or get nothing at all, zero-click-content tries to get people’s awareness, attention, and affinity inside of Point A in the hopes they’ll eventually go to Point B because they can’t get enough of what they want in Point A.

“That’s all good and fine”, you may be thinking, “but what does any of this have to do with the incarnation?”

If Christianity is true, the biggest problem that you and I face is that God, the creator and sustain of all things and the source, fountain, and fullness of all goodness, joy, peace, and love, is in Point A. At one point, humans were also in Point A with God (in Eden), but because of our disobedience and sin, we are now in Point B, and separated from the righteous and holy Lord. How do sinful humans who have broken the Lord’s laws get made right with God? How do we get from Point B, where we are alienated and hostile to God and sentenced to the just decree of death as his enemies, back to Point A, where we enjoy fellowship and communion with the Lord as his adopted sons and daughters forever?

There are no shortage of ways where we have attempted to get ourselves from Point B back to Point A. If God is holy and cannot tolerate the presence of sin, we must be made holy ourselves. The problem is that we, in our own wisdom and power, cannot make ourselves holy. We are not just guilty of sin as a legal matter; as a spiritual force, it pollutes our entire being as well. Our bodies, hearts, minds, and souls are prone to any and every evil we can conceive of, the greatest evil of all being our willingness to call “good” what the Lord has called “evil”. We may try to clean ourselves up, get our act together, or do enough good things in an attempt to become holy, but our sickness goes much deeper than anything our beliefs and behaviors can cure in ourselves or in others. If we cannot get ourselves from Point B to Point A in our own efforts, our only hope is that the holy God himself comes down from Point A to meet us in Point B and save us.

Which is exactly what Christ did.

The incarnation, as a non-negotiable Christian teaching, is the final and definitive answer to the question “can humans get themselves from Point B to Point A?”, and the answer is once and forever “No”. Jesus Christ, in taking on a human nature and being born by the virgin Mary, is not only God’s way of decisively proving that we cannot save ourselves - it is also the beginning of the incredible lengths God himself will go to redeem his creation from the curse of sin’s tyranny. In the Gospel, Christ does not tell us to ascend, in our own wisdom and willpower, to his heavenly throne in order to find salvation. “Try harder” is not good news. No, in the Gospel, Christ tells us that he has come to us to seek us and to save us in the places where we are lost, and the incarnation is the first step of the Christ’s redemptive work of coming to Point B to bring us back to Point A.

“That’s glorious and makes Christ worthy of all our love and devotion”, you may be thinking, “but what does any of that have to do with this ‘zero-click-content’ stuff?”

I want to stress up front that I am very aware of the limitations of this comparison. There are some Christian terms that can get overused or stretched too far, and the word “incarnation” is one of those words. I do not want to suggest that social media strategy and one of the most important events in human history (second only to the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ) are fully identical to each other. They are not. All analogies break down somewhere and this one does as well. The point I want to make is that zero-click-content, as a social media content strategy, illustrates one aspect of the glory of the incarnation, and the incarnation, as an act of divine grace and hospitality, illustrates a major advantage of zero-click-content, especially for Christian writers and creators.

That point is this: Christ did not tell us to ascend to his heavenly throne in order to be saved. He left that throne to come to us, and accomplished our salvation in our midst. In the same way, zero-click-content does not ask that you click a link in order to be enriched by our valuable content on our crisp and pristine websites. Instead, it takes that content and generously and sacrificially gives it away in the space people now spend the majority of their (digital) time. Just as Christ left Point A to meet us in Point B to bring us back to Point A, we can do the same with our work.

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Want to take the point deeper? A major argument in Athanasius’ On the Incarnation (one of the greatest theological works ever written) is that the purpose of Christ’s incarnation - to secure redemption for his people - necessitated that the incarnation take place in a way that was indisputably and unmistakably visible and present in the sight of all that lived during his life and ministry. Had Christ been incarnate and then later crucified and resurrected off in an obscure corner somewhere, or in a way that minimized his humiliation in his life and death, the incarnation would lose much of its decisive power. In the same way, zero-click-content takes content that is usually published somewhere in a (digital) corner and makes it visible in the (digital) sight of all. Instead of the power of your work only being realized if people come to your spaces to experience the wisdom and power of your work, you’re demonstrating the wisdom and power of your work in their spaces, with unmistakable social proof of the words you’ve said and the things you’ve done.

This may sound as though I’m calling for you to debase and devalue your work and cheapen it by contributing it to the social media content void. But I don’t think that is the case. For one, few things are more discouraging than pouring your talents into something and sharing it with the world, only to be met with a collective “meh” as people swipe by your URL post. Karten writes about this in a case study of her own work:

At a very small scale, I have tested this with my own “media company”—this newsletter. I initially tried promoting it with links across Twitter and LinkedIn. It got embarrassingly low engagement and zero subscription conversions. So I changed my strategy. In a Twitter thread where I broke down a newsletter about Reformation's influencer strategy I didn’t include any links, instead I delivered the insights where people were already scrolling. The thread took off and led to one of my highest newsletter subscriber days ever at the time. People sought me out. Awareness led to conversion. As the saying goes, "fish where the fish are."

Tactically, there are multiple routes you can take to do zero-click-content well. Natividad’s original approach is different from the route I currently take with The Gospel Coalition and its content. However you do it, the goal is still the same and your work isn’t devalued in the process. To briefly go back to the incarnation: it did not devalue or debase the divinity of Christ to take on a human nature in his person as a necessary step to accomplish our redemption. Rather, his humiliation is what led to his victorious exaltation (Phil. 2:5-11). Humbling yourself in how you share your work does not ruin your work. If anything, it can actually make your work more successful. Karten again:

“Clipping a podcast or breaking down a full story on a social platform doesn’t devalue journalistic work or cheapen a media company’s brand—it simply meets people where they are. . . [quoting Dave Jorgenson] ‘People are on TikTok, YouTube, Reels, and all kinds of places. They aren’t necessarily looking for a paper subscription, so why not grow trust with them on platforms where they’re already active?’”

It’s okay to not like this emerging shift in the Internet landscape, and not all website content can be adapted easily to a zero-click-content strategy. Websites will always be able to do things social media platforms will never be able to do. At the same time, though, we need to stare this new playing field in the face and respond to it soberly. As I say often in my role in The Gospel Coalition, the future is not website or social media; it is website and social media, whether we wish that were the case or not.

“But social media is dangerous”, you might be thinking.

“It’s full of horrible people who don’t care what you have to say or will read you in the worst possible way. It’s ruining our society and our churches and Christians should be trying to get people off social media, not trying to reach people inside of it.”

I agree. This Substack is called “Passing Through Digital Babylon” for a reason. Some (perhaps most) Christians would benefit by drastically cutting their time spent on social media or leaving it altogether. But here is the thing: if Christ was willing to leave his glorious throne to take on human flesh, and live as a sinless human in a world full of sin, and eventually be falsely accused, mocked, beaten, and eventually crucified to save us in Point B, I respectfully submit that we do not have any room to object to going to places we do not want to go to as part of using the gifts God has given us to fulfill the callings he has laid upon us. Jesus was not Jonah. Jesus, more than anyone else, knew exactly the dangers that laid in store, “but for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame…” (Heb 12:2) so that he might take us from Point B back to Point A.

There is more I could say here, and I will revisit this topic again around Easter to explain how the incarnation and zero-click-content converge further in the crucifixion and resurrection. But I will close with this: God has called some of us to participate in Digital Babylon whether we want to or not, yet we are not sent there alone. As with preaching, teaching, and evangelism, we plant and water, but it is God who gives the growth. If our confidence in our work is tied to our preferred forms of media ecology, but not in the Spirit as the true source that gives our words power in those ecosystems, we can and should despair that social media grows more powerful. If driving traffic from social media back to our websites is the only way our work can serve and bless people, we have every reason to fear the future.

But the Spirit is the Lord, even over the algorithms of man. And it is our confidence in the Spirit, not our confidence in our ability to drive web traffic, that ought to give us courage to take our Point A to where people are in Point B. Because of Christ, we too can fish where the fish are - and know our efforts won’t be in vain.

Thanks for reading. Two weeks from now I’ll be sharing my best albums and books for the year. I’m already slow-dripping these on my personal socials but will publish the final list here in full. I am eager to see 2024 come to a close and to begin a new year of writing.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

- Austin

Q1: What is your only comfort in life and in death?

Answer: That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death— to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

The first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism instructs Christians that the our lives do not belong to us, and this is wonderfully good news. Contrary to the messages and pressures of the world, the individual Christian is not the center of their own universe. In losing their life, the individual Christian gains the precious reminder that their entire existence is held secure by the unchanging and unstoppable power and love of the Creator and Sustainer of all things.

Christian discipleship consists of many things, but at their core all of the challenges and struggles of discipleship revolve around reminding ourselves, constantly, that we are not the kings and queens of our existence. Our authority and stewardship over our lives - be it work, family, marriage, finance, food, drink, fitness, the very words we speak to one another on a daily basis, and countless other aspects of living - is not ultimately for our gain, but for God’s glory. Every day, every dollar, every drop of water that comes from the sky comes from the Lord for our blessing and benefit that it might result in praise to the one from whom all things flow.

Social media, by design, tempts us with the belief that we can be the kings and queens of our existence - or at least, a small slice of it. We create accounts thinking that these are ours to command however we see fit, and treat them as though these are ours to use for whatever purpose we deem good and right. But if our lives belong to the Lord, and with it all the features and realities of living, our social media accounts are no exception. Our social media accounts are not our own, but belong to the Lord.

How would that change the way we use them? I can think of four ways.

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First, if our social media accounts are not our own, it should immediately change how we treat others using them. Christ does not treat us the way Christians often treat each other, and if our social media accounts are truly under Christ’s ownership, we ought to be compelled to treat other Christians the way Christ treats us. I could copy and paste a slew of ethical exhortations from Scripture on this point, but it goes without saying: if Christians were truly discipled on their tech and media habits, we would be the most distinct people on the Internet.

Second, if our social media accounts are not our own, it should raise the question of why we have these accounts in the first place. Just as God has given members of the body unique gifts for unique purposes, God has placed some people in Digital Babylon to where social media is a vocation itself, or a necessary aspect of fulfilling a vocation. Social media is not mandatory for everyone, and using social media “just because” isn’t an appropriate answer. In the absence of a clear and compelling reason for why you have your account, maybe you should consider logging out of it1 so you can tend to things God has truly given you to steward.

Third, if our social media accounts are not our own, it should cause us to see our social media presence as being driven by the Lord’s purposes instead of our own. To be clear: there is nothing wrong with using our social media accounts to promote our work, sell our products and services, or swap memes and Reels in Instagram group chats. But if our social media accounts are not our own, those cannot be the primary purpose for using social media. God’s cause is that his name be glorified throughout all the earth; what would it look like for your social media usage to reflect this even while enjoying other lesser benefits from social media?

Fourth, if our social media accounts are not our own, we should understand suffering on social media for the cause of Christ as a legitimate category of biblical witness. 1 Peter speaks plenty of the kind of suffering that can legitimate count towards following Christ and the kind of suffering due to foolish or sinful behavior. Much “suffering” from supposedly bold and outspoken Christians falls into the later category. But suffering for proclaiming Christ and his Word, in spaces hostile to the Gospel, while walking in the fruit of the Spirit is not a meaningless waste of time, whatever arena it may occur in. “He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to the one who judges justly” (1 Pet 2:22-23)

Your finances are not your own. Your job is not your own. Your education is not your own. Your family is not your own. Your health is not your own. Your hobbies are not your own. Your life is not your own. Neither are your social media accounts. All of it belongs to the Lord, because as the rest of the answer from Heidelberg Q&A 1 states:

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,

and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.

He also watches over me in such a way

that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven;

in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life

and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Thanks for reading. This one has been sitting on me for a while as I continue to think through the implications of my Digital Babylon framework to the Christian life. There are ideas in here that I know I need to flesh out separately, but those will just have to wait.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

- Austin

A little over a month ago, and just a few days after I re-launched this Substack, one of the most unexpected things happened to me again - only this time, it doesn’t have a happy ending. The situation itself is long and complex, but not the focus of this piece (especially since the individual in question is likely to read it). All you need to know is from that phone call came a dark new chapter in my life, and a slow moving hurricane of confusion, anger, sadness, and betrayal has battered my family and my church ever since.

The book is on pause. Again. The margin that I had to work on that has now been reclaimed by my church as I step into some new service roles created by this situation. The exact details are still being ironed out as of the time of this writing, but the grief of deciding to leave my ministry role earlier this year is nothing compared to the bittersweet anguish of having to come back, even in a very limited capacity, to take over something that you always dreamed of being able to work on but never being allowed to do it. I know I am being vague on details. Maybe later down the road I will elaborate. But again: all you need to know is that from that phone call came a new dark chapter in my life, and a consequence of the slow-moving hurricane of grief is that doors I thought were closed for good have reopened to things I have long wanted - just not like this.

The more I’ve learned about the situation, the more I have re-litigated cases I once thought were closed for good. It’s one thing to mourn something that happened, and it sucked, and you eventually move on from it. It’s another thing to mourn something that happened, and that thing sucked so much it triggers a re-evaluation of the past nine years of your life as a precondition to being able to move on. It is another thing even still to mourn something that happened, re-evaluate nearly a decade of your life, and have to live in the grey zone of acknowledging that you were never crazy for the constantly disorienting frustration of wasted time on unwanted pursuits and there were more genuinely good things that happened during that time, and good things that came out of that time, that you can possibly wrap your mind around.

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Social media managers have some of the highest burnout rates in the broader media/marketing industry. It happened to me once and I know it could happen again. I can’t tell you the last time I took the entirety of Thanksgiving week off, but not only was it a good time to take a break, Thanksgiving is the appropriate holiday to do something I’ve not been able to do well since this crisis started: to hear myself mourn and to hear myself respond in gratitude. Circumstances have forced me to bury my anger and sadness to focus on the task(s) at hand, thankfully which provide more than enough static to scramble the signal of pain. But having unplugged from Social Babylon1 for the week, there is little static to block out the heartbreak, which means there is little static to block out the sound of thankfulness amid that heartbreak.

The Psalms are the proof that grief and gratitude can often accompany one another, and that the latter helps us withstand the former. The Psalms often begin in darkness, but resolve towards joy and peace; when read through as a book, this cycle moves back and forth over and over again. One moment the Psalmist (whoever it may be) is suffering, the next they’re delivered; another moment the next Psalmist (could be the same person, could be a different person) is lamenting, the next they’re exuberant. The Psalms never pit these two emotional states against each other. If anything, the Psalms assume that you will move between both ends of the spectrum, sometimes repeatedly, and that its okay to do so.

What isn’t okay is living in one end of the spectrum as a means of ignoring the other end. Wallowing in your grief is one of the worst strategies for being able to move on from it, as evidenced by the slow-turning tide against therapeutic culture that encourages a fixation on your brokenness to the point it becomes an identity that defines who you are and how others should see you (which positions healing, growth, recovery, or any positive movement as something to avoid lest it take away the thing that helps you know yourself). Neither is using gratitude to avoid grief altogether. A faux gratitude which uses thankfulness to fly-swat anything that threatens the image of an idyllic illusion isn’t even a budget version of the real thing; it is a counterfeit, one that has the appearance of virtue while being worthless in power.

Remembering reasons to be thankful can be painful. Sometimes there are precious few things worth celebrating. Sometimes the situation is an unfolding darkness in progress that light hasn’t begun to shine through yet. Thankfully, my situation is not that. Thankfully, I can name plenty of great things that happened this past decade. Thankfully, the Lord has been powerfully at work even in the midst of the growing void of a relationship that is no longer there. Thankfully, thankfulness makes the disappointment, the hurt, and the sorrow more bearable.

But I know that may not be you. The holiday seasons are among the darkest of the year for those mourning the loss of a loved one, or with ongoing trials and wounds where relief is still nowhere in sight. But grief need not be your only burden. Count your many blessings. Name them one by one. See what God has done - and see how gratitude can help you not just endure your grief, but find a way to thrive in spite of it.

Thanks for reading. This wasn’t something I wanted to write, and the speed at which I wrote it manifests itself in just how sloppy it is, but I hope there is something beneficial to you in it all the same.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends. And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

Happy Thanksgiving,

- Austin

This post is the official re-launch of Passing Through Digital Babylon. After nearly a year and a half of absence - for good reasons that will be explained below - I am not only ready to resume writing, but resume writing for the long haul. What follows here is a brief summary of where I’ve been, what I’m currently doing, and the new plans for this Substack going forward.

The most out-of-left-field thing that’s ever happened to me

When I last wrote in April of 2023, I thought I had the rest of 2023 clearly lined out ahead of me. Mending Division Academy was still in post-production, and once the material was complete, I would begin marketing the course and eventually assume a director position of the program (pending funding). All along the way I’d continue my seminary degree while holding down my two quarter-time roles at my church and chipping away at a book via this Substack as time allowed. The trajectory of my year and the next steps of my career seemed, at the time, fairly stable and secure.

But God had other plans.

The story of how I went from two quarter-time roles at my mid-sized Texas Panhandle church to The Gospel Coalition is a lengthy story for another time, but to say “I didn’t have that on my bingo card” is an understatement for the ages. Since August 2023, I have had “extreme ownership” (per my boss, drawing from the book of the same name) of all TGC-US branded social media accounts wherever they may be found. Outside of ensuring that the organization’s social media needs are met, the majority of my work so far has been behind-the-scenes. Managing social media at this scale requires large infrastructure and clear systems for planning, scheduling, publishing, monitoring, and evaluating content, and I’ve spent the better part of the year R&Ding some new systems and scaffolds that will make TGC’s current social output stronger and give us bandwidth to consider new approaches for content, strategies, campaigns, and more. Managing a small team of incredibly talented contractors has been another major source of work, and I am eager to see that team grow and expand over the years to come.

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I had once sworn that when the time came for me to leave my social media role at my church that I was never managing social media again, so to go from “I’m never doing this again because social media is awful and terrible and I hate what it has done to the world” to “Sure, I’ll just make social media management for a large digital ministry my full-time career” is a genuine work of the Spirit. I’ve long seen my duality of being a hardcore Postman-ite working in social media as an irresolvable contradiction, and my work on my Digital Babylon framework as an attempt to create a coping mechanism to relieve that tension and justify talking out of both sides of my mouth. With this role, that sense of contradiction has been transformed into a sense of equipped purpose, and my Digital Babylon framework has become the grid through which the Word strengthens and encourages me in this work. I am not exaggerating when I say that all my work on tech/media discipleship, from the first season of Breaking the Digital Spell in 2018 to the work I’ve done with this Substack, feels as though it were all building up to this season of my life and to a job I never saw coming in a million years. Nothing has gone to waste.

As if all this weren’t enough by itself, here are several other major life updates that have happened over the past year-and-some-change:

• Mending Division Academy released! Here is a YouTube playlist with roughly 2 hours of some of the best material from each of the courses.

• I graduated seminary! I started my M.A. in Biblical Studies at Reformed Theological Seminary’s online campus in the fall of 2019 and, barring a year off due to a family medical situation, was full-time before, during, and after the pandemic. Seminary was the biggest obstacle to me writing on this Substack on a consistent basis, and since I am truly “done” with school for the first time in my life, I am able to commit to writing on this Substack as the only writing I have to do1.

• I ended nine years of bi-vocational ministry at my church. When I began my role with TGC I kept my associate youth minister role on the side, but as I got deeper into the TGC role, it became clear that I would not be able to continue giving my ministry role the attention it deserved. With a young and upcoming leader in the church ready and able to step into my shoes, I made one of the hardest and most painful decisions I’ve ever made and stepped down to pursue this work with a single-minded focus. The new journey of learning how to be a normal layperson in a church you’ve worked at for nearly a decade - with coworkers you’ve long considered some of your closest friends - has been slow, and often excruciatingly lonely and disorienting. However, I am very thankful to give my family a level of presence and attention that I’ve not been able to up to this point.

• I am now a cohost of What Would Jesus Tech? alongside Andrew Noble and Joel Jacob. It’s been an absolute blast to talk about tech and media discipleship in the church with two brilliant sharp dudes with wildly different backgrounds (two Canadians, one Texan) and experiences than my own. You can find WWJT? wherever you get your podcasts, on YouTube, or here on Substack!

• Last and most recent: my wife Melissa and I welcomed our son, Moses Basil Gravley, into the world on June 12th. We went “old school” on whether we were having a boy or a girl, so the moment we learned that we now have a son is among one of the most joyful moments of my entire life.

  

  Adjusting to working and writing with a newborn has been difficult, and yet I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Being a father is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s unquestionably the best.

A new, permanent chapter for Passing Through Digital Babylon

I created this Substack to slowly chip away at a book on my Digital Babylon framework while I finished seminary. Now that I have graduated, I am ready to begin working more intently on the book. I have never been more confident in the future of this project, and I now have all the ingredients I need to make the book come together and give it a legitimate shot at life.

Because of this, PTDB will have a shift in focus. The Digital Babylon framework has been my lifeline for my work with The Gospel Coalition, and most of what I write going forward will relate to Digital Babylon in some way. However, I want to expand the scope of my writing with this Substack while I work on the book separately. Specifically, I plan to write more on:

• Shifts and changes in the social media landscape. You think the past two years have been tumultuous and chaotic? You have not seen anything yet.

• Social media management and the church’s role in discipling a new generation of digital workers with a strong work/faith ethic.

• Observations on Christian social media culture (based on my experience with the cumulative 1.55-million-plus global followers of TGC’s social media accounts).

• Internet culture as a byproduct of Digital Babylon. There are plenty of Christians writing about the Internet’s impact on culture, but there are not many Christians writing on Internet culture as a unique, self-contained phenomenon, especially when it comes to Internet fandom and gaming culture. My recent article for Endeavor on Internet culture was only just the beginning.

• The current state of tech/media discipleship discourse, and the current blind spots that need to be address and opportunities to take the conversation deeper.

• Social media’s inflation of political/cultural polarization and the church’s continued opportunity to break the social media prism.

Posts from here on out will likely be shorter than what I’ve published in the past, with minimal formatting or flare. This will allow me to publish something with regular consistency, and let this Substack serve as my release valve for writing about things I have things to say on but maybe aren’t destined for the book. Following this post, I will also adopt the same content strategy I’ve pioneered with TGC and adopt a zero-click-content approach to my work, sharing entire posts in the spaces people are at rather than trying to funnel them to one single source. If you’ve seen that and have wondered if that works - trust me, it’s working very well.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

- Austin

You’re reading “Passing Through Digital Babylon”, a newsletter of insights and reflections from the digital empire while journeying towards the heavenly city. If that sounds interesting to you, please consider subscribing!

This is not the official re-launch of PTDB. That will happen in the subsequent post. The good news is that I’m about to return for the long haul. The better news is that I have some wild updates from the last year and a half on life, the book, the Substack, and more. It’s gonna be big.

What I wanted to do here is share my newest standalone article, When Internet Culture Becomes the Culture, published over at Endeavor. With this piece, I want to highlight a problem, an opportunity, and a framework for how Christian writers could begin capitalizing on that opportunity.

The problem is this:

In Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, he sternly warns those who think they can shield themselves from television’s impact on culture by not watching television: “Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world where the vast majority will not turn off. If we don’t get the message from the tube, we get it through other people.”

Internet culture is, for most people, the most attractive thing to do at any time of the day or night. When the majority of Americans are addicted to smartphones and social media, they are not turning them off. Even if you personally participate little in internet culture, your neighbors are likely being reshaped on internet culture’s terms without even realizing it. Sooner or later, you will encounter the formative effects of internet culture in your life. Are you prepared to share the Gospel, defend the Christian faith, and make mature disciples of Christ against a backdrop of the fraternity, fandom, and fantasy that internet culture provides?

The opportunity is this:

The secular world recognizes that internet culture exists, and a new generation of writers and content creators have found immense success by trying to answer the question, “What do we do about it?” In contextualizing events and artifacts of “internet culture” for the masses, writers like Charlie Warzel, Casey Newton, Taylor Lorenz, and Ryan Broderick have created enormous audiences for themselves by taking the weird, niche, and/or dangerous aspects of internet life seriously. Dozens of highly successful YouTubers have followed suit, such as Tiffany Ferguson, Jenny Nicholson, Kurtis Conner, Wendigoon, and Supereyepatchwolf—just to name a few.

Christian thinkers and writers recognize the power of the internet and have been at the forefront of writing about the dangers of smartphone addiction, excessive social media use, and internet pornography. But where secular internet culture writers often approach their topics from a live-from-the-scene-of-the-crime perspective, Christian writers are frequently on the outside looking in. Both perspectives are important, but if we want to seek and save the lost where they are found, we cannot approach internet culture solely from the safety of the sidelines. Someone needs to call an ambulance, like a lifeguard team rescuing a drowning swimmer. Someone needs to be prepared to do CPR, but none of that matters if someone isn’t willing to dive into the water to bring the victim to the surface first.

The framework is this:

One way scholars study “religion” is to look for common categories that religions share despite their differences. Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are all mutually exclusive religions with beliefs that are incompatible with each other. Still, each has a category for “holy texts,” “sacred spaces,” and even a “goal” to work towards. These categories can stand independently and overlap with other religious categories. 

We can take a similar approach to “internet culture”, and the nearly limitless internet sub-cultures. Though far from exhaustive, we can better understand “internet culture(s)” by examining three categories: fraternity, fandom, and fantasy.

Read the piece for yourself and subscribe to Endeavor if you’re not already. Patrick Miller and are doing cutting-edge work on the intersection between the Internet and biblical Christian ministry. It was an honor to be able to write for them on such an urgent topic.

Thanks for reading. Next time on Passing Through Digital Babylon: the most out-of-left-field plot twist my life never saw coming.

Austin

Highlights

☕ I read the most in the morning

💌 I subscribed to 9 new Substacks

❤️ I liked 37 posts

💬 I left 7 comments on posts

📜 I scrolled 81 meters in Notes

🕵️ I discovered 31 new posts via Notes

Top Substacks

Digital Liturgies by Samuel D. James

Evangelical reflections on theology, books, technology, and society from Samuel D. James.

Top post this summer: The Disney Princess Whose Heart Isn't Worth Following

Back Again with Ian Harber by Ian Harber

Reflections on faith, life, and finding our bearings in the world's first post-Christian culture from a millennial neo-evangelical.

Top post this summer: Cage-Stage Comerism

You Are Not Your Own Substack by O. Alan Noble

Articles, short thoughts, and podcasts about faith, culture, secularism, and identity from O. Alan Noble

Top post this summer: Why Voting for Harris Can't Save Conservatism from Itself

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You’re reading “Passing Through Digital Babylon”, a newsletter of insights and reflections from the digital empire while journeying towards the heavenly city. If that sounds interesting to you, please consider subscribing!

For the last installment, I wrote about “Where Has God Placed You in Digital Babylon?”. For this week, as I continue to chip away at a book manuscript, I am going to tackle the section immediately following the previous section, simply titled “The Providence of God’s Gifts in Digital Babylon”. Stay tuned for a programming note at the end.

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Another way to discern where God has place you in Digital Babylon is to ask yourself: what are the skills, knowledge, and resources God has given me, and how might I use them in Digital Babylon?

When I was in college, pursuing a degree in radio and television production, the smartphone era was just beginning to take off. Many of my classmates had iPhones, but as we did our filming labs in the studio of our local PBS affiliate, we knew that our iPhones were no match for the high quality cameras and microphones that the professionals used. But almost a decade later, the gap between the phone in my pocket and the bulky professional cameras I learned how to use has shrunk immensely. Now, instead of having to go to college to learn professional videography or editing, an entire generation is getting their filming and editing reps through the same phone they talk to their friends on. As one industry analyst put it, the TikTok editor has effectively replaced industry standards like Adobe Premiere Pro for an entire generation of creative artists, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down.

Reading this, you might think that I am about to say that if you have a smartphone in your pocket, God is calling you to use it in Digital Babylon. To be sure, there is now an entire arena of creative communication that is driven by everyday technology that both endlessly distracts us and empowers us to be creative in ways that used to be inaccessible to most people. But let me be clear: even though we may live, work, play, and create in Digital Babylon, this does not mean God has gifted us equally in how we live, work, play, and create in Digital Babylon. Instead, we need to see where God has placed us in his body, and how that part of the body ought to conduct itself in Digital Babylon.

Paul’s admonition that “the body does not consist of one member but of many” (1 Cor 12:14) is a critical passage for understanding how God has organized his church to work and operate. But while we normally think of that passage as being about the church, we can also see this principle at work in the Old Testament too! Just as “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (v.18), God called some of his prophets to prophecy a lot (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) or a little (the minor prophets). Some prophets focused on Judah and Israel, some prophets focused on Assyria and Babylon, and some prophets focused on both. Some of the exiles were sent into Assyria, some into Babylon, and even some chose to flee to Egypt. Just as God has not called every Christian to serve as an elder, deacon, pastor, or evangelist, God did not make every prophet an Isaiah, or every exile a Daniel or Nehemiah. If everyone was a Daniel, where would Ezekiel be? If everyone was an evangelist, who would do the teaching? If every Christian on social media were just on Faithbook (yes, this was a real thing), where would the Christians on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok be?

In the same way, God has not called every Christian to live, work, play, and create in Digital Babylon in the same way - but for those who have been placed deep into Digital Babylon by God, he has given us what we need to glorify him as we bear witness to his Gospel. Maybe you have a strong desire to work with computers or technology - you find them fascinating and want to understand how they work. Maybe you have an inclination towards digital community, and enjoy connecting to people over social media or Discord. Maybe you have a craft you’re passionate about and want to improve on, such as writing, podcasting, graphic design, making videos, or some other creative avenue. While it’s possible that these desires and interests can arise from living under the shadow of Digital Babylon’s influence, it’s also equally possible that God has given you these interests so that you can glorify him and serve him in Digital Babylon.

What does it look like to grow those gifts? Maybe it involves dedicating yourself to training and education in your skill, or practicing your creative craft. Maybe it involves networking with others in your field, prayerfully asking God to put you in the role or organization that He wants you to be in to be an ambassador to a group of people who need to hear the Gospel. Maybe it involves taking stock of your current equipment and resources and committing to use them to declare and display the Gospel to your neighbors and nations. God does not call us to serve him in these ways, and leave us to scrounge up the resources or brute force the opportunities to serve him. He equips those he calls with the gifts and opportunities to fulfill those callings well!

And the good news is that if you don’t have those desires or inclinations, there is an equally good chance that God isn’t expecting you to glorify him in these ways. Not everyone is cut out to be an influencer-evangelist on social media. Not everyone will enjoy working with computers or other technology. Not everyone will care about creating digital media. God does not call every one of us to the same tasks, nor gift us with the same interests and opportunities to perform those tasks for his glory. But rather than insisting that all Christians do one thing or another, we ought to ask: what has God gifted you with, and if God has gifted you with skills and knowledge to live, work, play, and create in Digital Babylon, how are you going to steward those gifts?

Thanks for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. Going forward, at least through the summer, I can no longer guarantee weekly posts, and I need to revise my goal downward from “weekly” to “as I am able”. Admittedly, it is frustrating that my time and energy for writing is being providentially hindered by other matters, but at the same time, if the Lord is calling me to tend to those things, I need to do so and let side-projects like this not get in the way.

Next time, I will begin writing on the chapter tentatively titled “Christian Identity in Digital Babylon”. Some of this will cover material that I’ve covered in my series on Chris Bail’s Breaking the Social Media Prism for Breaking the Digital Spell, and some of this will be new insight based on subsequent work for Mending Division Academy.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends or on your personal social media channels! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

Austin

PS: I’ll probably use Notes during this downtime, so perhaps I’ll see you there!