When the Empire Changes Hands
The response to Musk's impending Twitter purchase is more in-line with a response to an unstable change of power in a nation than it is a mere business transaction.
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 one will be brief; by now, you’ve likely heard the news that Twitter’s board has approved Elon Musk’s $44b dollar bid to purchase the social media platform. While technically not a done deal yet (the board simply approved the proposal; the shareholders still must vote on it), it was a significant about-face after weeks of public drama between Musk and Twitter regarding the company’s ownership. Here is a good (albeit technical) thread explaining what the next six months will look like and addresses some of the alternative scenarios that are possible, but unlikely to happen.
Normally, events that happen on Twitter stay on Twitter, but this spectacle has transcended Twitter and spilled over to the social media ecosystem at large; I’ve seen more conversation about Twitter on Facebook over the past several days than I’ve seen in the past several years. Musk is a polarizing figure, and this impending purchase has evoked a wide range of polarized emotions, especially within Twitter itself. Half of my feed is vehemently outraged that someone could be this rich and use their money in this way, and are prepared to walk away from the platform in protest; half my feed believes that the Golden Age of Twitter is right around the corner and that, as Constantine did for Christianity in Rome, Musk will do for Christianity in Twitter1. Again, if you’ve been on any major platform over the past several days, you likely have seen this (or contributed to it) yourself; I don’t need to explain to you what you’ve seen with your own eyes.
What I can’t help but notice (and the reason I am writing this newsletter) is the fact that I’ve seen a public response on this scale before. In fact, I tend to see this kind of comprehensive and thoroughly polarized response on a predictable cycle, once every four years coinciding with the election of a new U.S. President. There is something oddly familiar about this whole spectacle, but the timing is wrong - it’s not an election year, so why is everyone responding as though an election, or other major political event, has just occurred?
A response of this scale and intensity would be out of place for responding to a regular business transaction; companies change hands all the time with very little public outcry. It is not out of place if that platform was actually an empire and, consciously or not, we saw ourselves as citizens living within it watching an unstable transfer of power take place before our eyes.
There is already precedent for seeing these platforms as transcending the category of being a mere business and becoming something larger. Notice how Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang report Facebook’s own description of themselves in the recently published An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination:
“As a private global company, Facebook did not want to engage in geopolitical skirmishes, and it certainly didn’t want to be in the middle of contentious national elections. Facebook was, above all, a business. It was a line of thinking that came directly from Zuckerberg. In Facebook’s earliest days, when their office was still a glorified loft space, “Company over country” was a mantra the CEO repeated to his employees. His earliest speechwriter, Kate Losse, wrote that Zuckerberg felt that his company had more potential to change history than any country - with 1.7 billion users, it was now in reality already larger than any single nation2.
Twitter’s userbase is significantly smaller by comparison, hovering around 330~ million users at the turn of the year. But even then, the analogy of Twitter as being it’s own nation-state holds up just fine when you consider that the population of the United States is around 332~ million people. Granted, Twitter’s userbase is a worldwide userbase, but much like the common ground Americans have with each other as being citizens of the United States, Twitter users also share a common ground: they interact with the same platform regardless of where they live.3
And what if, like the citizens of a nation respond with a wide range of polarized emotions at a transfer of power in a nation, the response we see to Musk’s plans to purchase Twitter is likewise a response to a transfer of power - in a different kind of nation?
The premise of this entire Substack is that we should see our participation in the social media ecosystem - whether the industry as a collective or a platform like Twitter individually - as participating in a kind of empire. But, while sociopolitical analogies of “nations” and “empires” are good and helpful, I think we can go further than that: these empires are spiritual kinds of empires, and their spiritual connection can be made from the Christian Scriptures. In my foundational piece for this idea, I argue that:
[In 1 Peter 5:13a], Peter is using Babylon is a stand-in for the nation of Rome, whose wickedness and oppression of the church in the New Testament is comparable to Babylon’s wickedness and oppression of the people of God in the Old Testament. Later on in Revelation, Babylon will be used to represent not just a single nation, but the entire collective force of the kingdoms of the world under the rule of Satan, all of which will be destroyed once and for all at the coming of Christ. “Digital Babylon” can refer to both realities and uses of Babylon in Scripture; it can refer to individual social media ecosystems of Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok as a parallel to the individual nation state of Babylon, Assyria, or Egypt [in the Old Testament], or it can refer to Babylon as the composite result of all the companies, services, institutions, and tools that form the global technology and media ecosystem we live and interact with today.
And, when we examine the effects of this social media ecosystem, we come to see that those effects transcend what a simple digital service could possible cause, and are the byproducts a kind of spiritual empire could cause. Some highlights from that piece include:
Cultural effects: Digital Babylon has become both a means of participating in cultures and communities of all types and sizes and an end as a culture itself to participate in, privileging those with power, resources, and wealth over those without.
Political effects: Digital Babylon’s role in facilitating the fracturing and division of politics at all levels is well documented at this point. . . Our political, judicial, and civic institutions must constantly respond to the presence of Digital Babylon and its potential to negatively impact the stability and trustworthiness of our political systems and officials.
Spiritual effects: Despite often thinking of technology and media as purely material or “secular” subject, Digital Babylon has inflicted immense spiritual harm to Christians and the church. Under Digital Babylon’s allure, Christians are distracted, confused, suffer from a myriad of addictions created or promoted by Digital Babylon, divided and polarized along secondary or tertiary issues and topics, and more. . . .Ultimately, Digital Babylon is a type of principality and power, one that facilitates the spiritual blindness and bondage of countless men and women.4
These kinds of effects are not something a straightforward digital service could cause by itself. These kinds of effects are at a scale that only a nation could sustain long term. While I focus primarily on Christians and churches in my writing, make no mistake: the response we are seeing from all sectors of society, from Christian and non-Christian corners alike, is a response that is only appropriate to the uncertainty caused by an unstable change of power within a nation, regardless of whether you believe there are spiritual factors at play.
My whole point for this newsletter is to point to this current spectacle and ask: what exactly are we dealing with here? What if we are dealing with a bigger reality than we think we are? And if we are dealing with a bigger reality - if we are actually dealing with an empire of some kind - how should we as Christians live in that empire? Thankfully, if that’s the question we begin asking, we have a place we can go to for guidance and wisdom for ourselves and for our people on how to live as God desires his people to live: the Word of God.
Thanks for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. It didn’t even take me a full month to put out my first “sporadic newsletter” after announcing a break in the prior newsletter, but I just couldn’t resist writing on this situation. There is another sporadic newsletter already in the hopper: I am planning writing a follow-up on a ministry workshop with the American Values Coalition called “Speak the Truth: Guiding Christians Through Our Information Crisis” (taking place tomorrow!), and I have high hopes of having some encouraging stories to share then.
Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon,
Austin
As someone who studies and teaches church history in a layperson context, and whose favorite era of church history is the Patristics era, I cannot describe how unbelievably shallow and naive those takes are, and those who make them tell on themselves as to how little they understand what they’re dealing with.
Frenkel, S. and Kang, C. “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination.” New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2021. 123-124
I know that, technically, this isn’t the complete truth - like many companies, Twitter does controlled roll-outs of new features or tests in target countries/areas before rolling them out worldwide. I don’t think that defeats my broader point, but I am aware of the nuance on that claim.
Admittedly, the idea of Digital Babylon being a “principality and power” is new and foreign to me, and a particular angle I need to study further myself. I must give credit to my pastor, David Ritchie, for demonstrating how much our Western culture de-emphasizes the spiritual realities that Scripture emphasizes; he put this on my radar in his new (excellent) book Why Do The Nations Rage? The Demonic Origins of Nationalism.