4 Plough Quarterly • Winter 2018 the myriad ways it has reduced misery and enhanced the quality of human life? What about the printing press and electric lights and antibiotics and instant global communication and cancer drugs? It’s a valid point. No one, from Apple engi- neers to Amish farmers, wants to return to a tech-free world of fifty-percent child mortality and surgery without anesthetics. The urge to invent and use tools, to pioneer new frontiers of ingenuity, is part and parcel of being human and has brought astounding benefits. To Christian eyes, this inborn inventive- ness reflects the Creator himself and corresponds to the task that he gave to humankind in the Book of Genesis: to be master and steward of creation on his behalf. Still, this doesn’t provide much reassurance when new technologies are rewiring the brains of today’s children and will likely soon be used to edit the genomes of those to be born. We’re living in a radically new situation. How do we stay human? We can start by taking Elon Musk literally: “With artificial intelligence, we are summon- ing the demon.” Whatever Musk meant by these words, they fit with strange precision into the New Testament’s view of reality. As the biblical writers saw it, the major social systems that shape human communities are not merely impersonal. Rather, such systems – which include the state, religious institutions, and today surely also the technological structures that govern modern life – operate under the influence of distinct spiritual forces. The New Testament uses a range of names for these spiritual powers, among them daimonia: “demons.” It’s an awkward word. Yet in view of Silicon Valley’s fascination with transhuman- ism and rationalist ideology (pages 20 and 26), to speak here of demons may be all too apt. Recognizing that uncanny forces lurk within technological structures doesn’t require us to flee the Information Age. But it does mean Christians must stop pretending that technological products are just neutral tools (page 49). The example of social media proves the point. Sean Parker, a founding president of Facebook, recently admitted in an interview that Facebook was designed to be addictive, adding, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” Actually, even without special revelation, we already know: studies of teenagers show a strong correlation between heavy social media use and anxiety, depres- sion, and suicide, as documented by Jean Twenge in the Atlantic. This is not what human ­ flourishing looks like. For Christians, mental health risks are not the only concern. In Christ’s service we are pledged to spend all our energies doing good to our flesh-and-blood neighbors, building up a living symbol of his coming kingdom here on earth in community with others (page 44). This calling is incompatible with spending hours in thrall to a screen, not-quite-voluntarily chasing the next dopamine hit. More often than not, then, the best social media policy is also the simplest: abstinence. Even those with strong reasons to post and tweet – keep up the good work, Plough social media editors! – need to set themselves firm guidelines. Plough’s house rule, for example, is to avoid social media outside of work hours, especially since many of us have young chil- dren at home. (The bonus family time can be spent in the great outdoors, reading or singing together – or building harps, as Maureen Swinger describes on page 18.) Nobody wants to return to a tech-free world of surgery without anesthetics.