The following essay was written as a theme reflection for a service held at Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church in the summer of 2025 focused on technology and spirituality.
Beware:
All too often,
We say
What we hear others say.
We think
What we’re told that we think.
We see
What we’re permitted to see.
Worse!
We see what we’re told that we see.
Repetition and pride are the keys to this.
To hear and to see
Even an obvious lie
Again
And again and again
May be to say it,
Almost by reflex
Then to defend it
Because we’ve said it
And at last to embrace it
Because we’ve defended it
And because we cannot admit
That we’ve embraced and defended
An obvious lie. …
Thus, without thought,
Without intent,
We make
Mere echoes
Of ourselves—
And we say
What we hear others say.
From Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
In March 2020, like everyone I know, I was glued to my phone. 6 months pregnant with my only child and desperate for any kind of clarity over what was happening and what it meant for my family, I was the poster child for doomscrolling – as much as we all were.
As the pandemic wore on, I decided to leave my job as a teen librarian to stay home with my newborn. We stayed pretty isolated, and I didn’t put my phone down. It was a lifeline that started to feel like a weight around my neck. It was how I documented and shared so many of my child’s firsts during those 8 months, the three of us alone in a house in a suburb of Denver where the only people we really knew were my former library colleagues.
The internet was my connection to anything resembling a community of other parents and often my source for advice on sleep regression, teething and starting solids. Between feedings, during naptimes, and at night, I worked on my master’s in information science. As I read more about how bias in the technologies we use can amplify injustice and oppression, I also began to notice how my Instagram feed was…changing.
From scratch baby food recipes were intermingled with anti-vaccination posts, warnings about the dangers of electromagnetic frequencies, and then – subtle yet unmistakable – eugenicist views on neurodivergence. Pro-natal propaganda. Veiled (and then less veiled) White supremacy. I had stumbled upon the crunchy mom to alt-right pipeline.
In 2022, an article in The Atlantic discussed the place of women in recruiting others to the White power movement, and how that plays out in social media content. Once I saw how quickly my feed could be manipulated toward radicalization, it became hard to unsee. It also made me question how much, to that point, my views had been shaped by propaganda. While I might like to think I am immune, that I possess the critical thinking skills necessary to spot when I am being hoodwinked, this experience made it clear just how insidious social media could be.
It took a few more years, and a move back to Kansas, but eventually I declared social media bankruptcy. I got rid of my online accounts one-by-one in favor of in-person connections. It started with asking my best friend to live with me. Then, it was Queeraoke, a group of folks singing out their rage at anti-trans policy on Wednesday nights. It was getting together a Weirdo Book Club, reading science fiction, fantasy, and horror in an attempt to cope with the horror of our current reality. Finally, when my sister came to live with me, it was joining her for our first service at SMUUCh. Alight with the warmth of community and without an infinite feed, I was no longer doomscrolling.
That doesn’t mean I don’t still feel too attached to my phone. It has become a joke in my house that if I am crying silently with phone in my hand, it must be because I am reading long form journalism. But when I made a conscious decision to go to AP News first for all my news, my relationship with it changed. It’s not that I don’t still get angry when I read the news. That happens now almost daily. But I no longer feel manipulated by the news. That anger is mine. And when I am being manipulated, it feels easier to spot.
My relationship with technology is as complicated as anyone else’s at this current point in history. I have lived and worked in Silicon Valley, but in my tech-adjacent role in a research non-profit, I learned that tech is only as good for humanity as the goals of the people who make it. And even then, there is no guarantee it won’t be co-opted to serve other aims. My generation has seen our dreams for truly transformative technology sacrificed in favor of capitalism and state violence, transformed into tools for surveillance, disinformation, racial profiling. We have seen how tech has been deployed to enact genocide.
In their essay We Need to Rewild the Internet, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon write that “[o]ur internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine”.
The future I hope for isn’t about tools, but the people who use them and what they use them for. So I turn my vision toward better futures, better worlds. In these visions, innovation isn’t the luxury of self-driving or flying cars, endless cities full of glass penthouses. It is more efficient farming, preserving ancestral grains, cleaning waterways, and recycling everything in a way that reduces human impact on our world to a level that is currently beyond imagining. It is a world that is more connected, more thoughtful, more just. It is a world where we grapple with the violence of our history with transparency and humility.
As I stumble forward into the future, what I will try to ask myself with each new technology I encounter is this: how does this tool get me closer to a vision of a world that I want to build for our children? What am I giving up for convenience, and what do we have to gain by trying something different? Because I know that beyond technology, we will need true, radical innovation to meet the future that we are racing toward.
What we are all really asking—what Octavia was asking—was how do we, who know the world needs to change, begin to practice being different?
How do we have to be for justice to truly be transformative?
Not them, that massive amorphous ‘them’ that is also us, in our heads and hearts, or that loves us, or that is tired of this [stuff] but is family to us… Not them, because maybe they don’t recognize yet that these changes are the key to human survival.
But us, us who are awake and awakening.
How do we need to be for Black lives to matter?
What do we need to heal in ourselves in order to offer a future of any real peace?
Or to become the protagonists of this human story – and earn the flip of the page of all the sentient life in the universe? To claim the future as a compelling place for our miracles?
This is everything.
Science fiction is not fluffy stuff. Afrofuturism is not just the coolest look that ever existed. The future is not an escapist place to occupy.
All of it is the inevitable result of what we do today, and the more we take it in our hands, imagine it as a place of justice and pleasure, the more the future knows we want it, and that we aren’t letting go.
From Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown
Further Reading & Resources
Non-Fiction, Research, and Organizations
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiyah Umoja Noble
Algorithmic Justice League & Gender Shades project
Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)
Essays and News Articles
As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies from AP News
Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto by Adam Flynn
Fiction
The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys