Will "You" Survive Digital Babylon?

You cannot take your digital self with you when you die. Do you want to wait until you stand before the Lord to know who you truly are?

Photo by Михаил Секацкий on Unsplash

The title here is misleading.

Digital Babylon–that “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)”–likely won’t take your life anytime soon.

But it may be taking something else from you slowly, and in real time: you.

Who even are you? Do you really know? If you strip out as much of Digital Babylon’s presence in your life as much as possible, what remains of your life? Your beliefs? Your personality and interests? How much of you truly exists in you, and how much of you only exists through a drip-feed augmentation of algorithms and outputs?

I am not asking these as hypothetical questions. These are questions I have asked myself, repeatedly, over the past six months as I’ve undergone my first true social media sabbatical from leaving the social media management industry when I left The Gospel Coalition.

Getting to the point where I could even ask these questions was hard enough. Finding out the answers–and learning to live with them–is even harder.

From Missionary to Monk

Of all the various ways to describe our relationship to the Internet, Ian Harber’s “Monk or Missionary” framework is one of the better ones. It applies primarily to social media, but can be expanded to include our entire relationship with the Internet as a whole. All of us live in relation to the Internet and the various technologies the Internet makes possible. The question is not if, but how much, of my life is built on it.

For the last years, my life was built mostly on the Internet. Between social media management (which includes my own terminally online habits that comes with the territory), being a student at an online seminary during the pandemic, and gaming as my primary hobby, I spent most of my life on the Internet. Invariably, that meant that the Internet became a non-negotiable to understanding who I am, what I believe, and what I care about. This time a year ago, I could tell you what those things were, and if you traced the roots back to where my care for those things came from, it inevitably passes through the Internet.

In stepping away from social media–with the primary exceptions of Substack¹ and the Mere Orthodoxy Discord server– for the past six months, I’ve also stepped away from other aspects of the Internet as well. When we took the TV out of the living room, we slowly began dwindling our YouTube habits, and now neither Mel or I hardly watch anything on there these days. I have stopped playing video games altogether². Even the computer I am writing on gets used less and less as I slowly shift to more analog forms of personal management. Compared to how much I was using my computer and phone this time a year ago, the contrast is substantial. I went from being a missionary to being a monk.

Taking this break was entirely by choice. I always said that whenever I got out of social media management that I would take a month off for each year that I worked in the field. Ten months for ten years is an appropriate counterbalance. But what wasn’t by choice was how being a “monk” forced me to confront things about myself that I did not want to confront.

Who am I?

For someone who lived and breathed Christian Twitter for more than a decade of his life, and whose job it was to know social media better than anyone else, the amount of things that I have stopped caring about or paying attention to is hard to put into words.

I’m not just talking about the individuals and groups who used to be thorns in my side. I am also talking about the things I used to believe and care about.

For about five of the ten years I did social media management, I also had a blue-collar job as a pest control technician. I spent eight years in that line of work altogether. Podcasts were my lifeline, as was social media in between job visits. My political beliefs, my theological commitments, and my personal hobbies and interests were are mediated by the heavy presence Internet.

When I took the Internet and reduced its presence in my life as much as possible, what I found was not that those things changed.

What I found was how flimsy they were–and how flimsy of a person I was as a result.

What do I believe? I don’t know. My theological commitments on paper have been Presbyterianism, but removed from the Presbyterian voices on social media I used to take for granted and my online seminary program that I’ve now graduated from, I think I am actually an Anglican in denial about being Anglican. What are my politics? I used to consider myself reasonably center-right, but removed from my “tribe” and their antics, perhaps that grumpy Wendell Berry streak in me was bigger than I thought. What am I interested in? Reading? Music? Working out? Board games? I guess. Those are things I’ve always done. But without the Internet to passively propel those interest onwards, I’ve had to ask how much I truly care about those things. Thankfully, in those instances, I can say that I do care a lot about those things. But countless other things that I used to be interested in have evaporated.

But more importantly: who am I? Take away my life on the Internet, take away my career on the Internet, take away as much as I can from the Internet in order to help me understand myself, I am a perfectly average husband, father to two kids under two, and youth pastor who lives in Amarillo, TX. I live in a cozy, but unremarkable, home in an old suburb that is adjacent to dilapidated rental duplexes where the homeless and addicted frequently pass through. I’ve attended the same non-denominational church for 14 years and have watched it grow from 200 people to 800 and am now helping guide it through the biggest crisis it could ever face. I’ve dabbled in music. I’ve dabbled in writing. I’ve dabbled in podcasting. I’ve dabbled in a lot of things, and have excelled in only few of them. I am small³, ordinary, and in the big picture of history, completely insignificant.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface about the deeper parts of me. What are my wounds? What are the things that truly keep me up at night? What are my anxieties? What makes me want to laugh? What makes me want to cry? When I’m not constantly refreshing a social media feed to give me new things to upset and anger me, I am forced to return to old things to upset and anger me, and perhaps those old things aren’t actually “old” at all but have always been throbbing underneath all the self-inflicted wounds of caring about the much more serious and urgent things the Internet tells me I should be up in arms about. What do I truly dream about? What do I truly fear? What am I actually committed to? What do I actually belong to? It’s not the fact that I am asking these questions that is difficult. It’s the fact that I struggle to answer them at all that is difficult. The Internet has long given me easy answers to questions I don’t want to face, and as I continue to face them I realize how much the Internet has robbed me of the tools I need to answer them.

All this to say: if you had asked me to answer “who am I?” a year ago, my answer would have been radically different. It would’ve been much more epic, grandiose, and suffocatingly arrogant. But take away the Internet, and this is all I have. This is all I am.

This is the person who will stand before the Lord to give an account of his life. And now, for the first time in a long time, I am starting to get acquainted with him.

Will “You” Survive Digital Babylon?

We take nothing with us when we die. We carry nothing of our possessions and provisions when we stand before the throne of Christ. All we will have is ourselves. Not the “ourselves” as we understand it to be through our carefully curated social media presence or disembodied Slack personas or cares, interests, and ambitions that require the Internet to sustain. Underneath that digitally mediated layer of “yourself” that exists at the front of your mind as you read these words on your phone or computer, there is a person that exists without the Internet telling them who they are.

Do you know that person?

Because the good news is that Jesus does know that person. Jesus did not die for your projections of yourselves that others. He died for the person that he will one day pronounce as righteous before God by faith. Jesus knows that person perfectly and completely. That person will endure into eternity.

The person that can only exist through the Internet will not.

There will come a day when you leave your digital self behind. Your Substack profile, your Instagram account, your writings, videos, animating drives and desires, anything that requires the Internet to sustain will end when you die at the very latest. You could lose it due to a mishap or action from the empires of Digital Babylon that keep you from realizing your digital self. All you truly have, and all that will truly endure to the end, is the person you are that you take, embodied, to your grave.

Do you want to wait until the end of your life to be able to know who you truly are?

I sure don’t. Because regardless of whether I get back on social media after these ten months or not, I don’t want to live as a citizen of Digital Babylon. I want to live as a citizen of the kingdom of heaven–a kingdom where I am renewed and restored, as I am, as I exist, not the digital version of myself. And if I am just passing through Digital Babylon and journeying towards the heavenly city, why would I want to wait to know that life? Even if it is not yet fully here. I can know it already–but only to the degree that I know who I am apart from Digital Babylon telling me who I am and me voluntarily consenting to live as that person.

Will “you” survive Digital Babylon? It depends. But don’t wait until the end to know who “you” truly are.

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Thanks for reading. This was something that I meant to write about in June, but as I hinted at in this piece, my church is currently going through an unimaginable nightmare. I will write about it at some point, but for now, I appreciate your prayers.

I am looking for someone to design some assets for Passing Through Digital Babylon! Substackers, if you have someone you’d recommend to design a logo, wordmark, etc, please comment with a lead! If you’re a graphic designer, shoot me a DM with your rates. I want a human to design these and am willing to pay to do so.

I will be at the THINQ Summit 2026 in Nashville on Oct 1-3 representing What Would Jesus Tech?. I’m excited to join Carmen LaBerge’s entourage and looking forward to good conversations with the others in her group. If you’re planning on being there, I would love to connect. Shoot me a DM and let me know.

Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon.

Austin

1. Substack is absolutely a social media platform at this point and anyone who pretends otherwise is in denial or is driven by a holier-than-thou elitism towards the places non-writers use.

2. There will come a day when I look forward to Moses and I being able to play Mario Kart, Smash Bros, and even Halo together, but after being the primary hobby of my life, I am taking a multi-year break from it.

3. Metaphorically; I’m a big dude in real life.