How to Be Immortal Online
With digital spaces regularly evolving and updating, and the infinite scroll beckoning to us at all times, this episode questions if we have, as a culture, fully embraced the end of endings. Hanna Reichel, an associate professor of reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, helps illuminate how the emergence of godlike AI and the rise of creator culture compare with the reformations and transformations through which people lived (and died) in the past.
Listen to the episode here:
Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts
Episode transcript:
Andrea Valdez: So the Ouija board was a very controversial toy in my house growing up. I think my mother was just very much against having one because of its associations with magic and the occult. But I was able to finally convince her to buy me one because I pointed out to her that it was manufactured by Parker Brothers, and I figured if they could create a board game like Monopoly, that the Ouija board must not be that dangerous.
Megan Garber: I mean, that is a winning argument if I ever heard one.
Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.
Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic.
Valdez: And this is How to Know What’s Real.
Garber: Andrea, when I played with Ouija boards—exclusively at slumber parties, and only to ask this mysterious portal to another world about people we had crushes on—I remember feeling really entranced by it. And also really creeped out by it! And I think I might still be, a little bit, even though I now know the science behind it: It works through something called the ideomotor effect, where thoughts in the players’ minds, in a way that’s pretty unconscious to the players themselves, end up guiding their movements across the board. Which is actually a nice metaphor, I think, for the web—and, really, for so much of what we’ve been talking about in this season of the show. This thing that felt mysterious had been human the whole time.
Valdez: Oh, that’s so interesting, and I think the really human thing about all of these fortune-telling devices is that they provide answers. And as humans, we really, really crave answers. And I think that maybe is also why the web—I mean really the internet at large—it felt so magical for so long. Because it’s this gigantic answer-providing machine. So it starts to make sense to me that we’ve collectively imparted like a sort of deified state to the internet. Because it’s this seemingly omniscient oracle.
Oh, yes. But then also because the web is made by humans, it's also limited in its vision, right? Which is a pretty big flaw, oracle-wise. And the fact that the web can seem omniscient, just like you said, I think can make it even more jarring when, you know, the glitches show up, as they inevitably will. When we think about the reality of the internet, when we consider it in light of how to know what’s real, that hope for omniscience, I think, is also really instructive because many of us do invest tech with a certain spirituality, but I’m really interested in why
