Bo and I came in hot this week. We kicked off with some important life updates — Five Iron Frenzy is playing in Greensboro tonight and I’m bringing my brother and our high school theology reading group buddies, so if you hear a grown man scream-crying “Every New Day” later, that’s me. We also got into a surprisingly heated Chick-fil-A debate (Bo is wrong, for the record), traded In-N-Out orders (three by three, triple pickles, and yes, a youth group kid once taught me you can roll up with your own nacho cheese), and Bo catalogued the things southern Idaho doesn’t have, which apparently includes comic book shops, cigar lounges, and bottle shops. Priorities.

Then we got into it. I’m working on a book about the digital colonization of the self — a liberation theology for the algorithmic age — and I’ve been putting together ten thesis statements for a talk I’m giving to an undergrad religion department. I threw the whole document into an AI slide maker without any direction and we’re looking at the results for the first time live. The slides are out of order and the AI apparently thinks it knows my argument better than I do, but we got through the first five theses and it turned into one of the most electric episodes we’ve done.

Thesis One: The algorithm has invaded the last colony — the human mind. Previous empires colonized land, labor, and resources. This one colonizes attention, desire, and our capacity for self-direction. Nick Couldry calls it data colonialism — the appropriation of human life so value can be continuously extracted from it. The territory being mined is no longer land but mind. Jesus said go into your inner room to pray. That assumes there’s a door. The algorithm has picked the lock. Decolonizing the mind when the colonizer has been internalized — that’s the spiritual challenge of our age.

Thesis Two: We have been seduced into becoming entrepreneurs of our own exploitation. Old empire ruled through coercion. This empire rules through seduction — and that’s why we don’t recognize it as empire. No one forces us to check our phones 150 times a day. We craft our Instagram personas freely. The platforms don’t need overseers and whips when they have mirrors. We surveil ourselves, discipline ourselves, optimize ourselves for the algorithm’s benefit, and call it self-improvement. Byung-Chul Han’s point: we moved from a disciplinary society to an achievement society, but the achievement is always for someone else’s profit.

Thesis Three: The face of the other is disappearing, and with it the possibility of both ethics and love. Levinas argued the face of the other is where ethics begins — vulnerable, demanding, irreducible. But the face is also where love becomes possible. Screens shield us from both. Others become pixels, usernames, content we scroll past. Tara Isabella Burton calls it the NPC phenomenon — we treat others as non-player characters in our own personal game. It’s not just a moral failure; it’s a structural inevitability when the faces we encounter no longer truly meet us.

Thesis Four: Our brains are being physically restructured for capture rather than contemplation. Evolution spent billions of years developing top-down attention — the capacity for deliberate focus, contemplation, moral reasoning, prayer. The algorithm hijacks the older bottom-up system: threat detection, survival instinct. Red notification badges exploit our evolutionary coding for urgency. Autoplay exploits reflexive attention. Neuroimaging studies show gray matter reduction in the prefrontal cortex of high social media users — the regions responsible for impulse control are physically shrinking. But neuroplasticity cuts both ways: eight weeks of mindfulness practice increases gray matter in the affected regions. We can change it, but there are limits on what we can do as isolated individuals.

Thesis Five: We are starving in the midst of infinite abundance. The infinite scroll is engineered to trigger wanting that never arrives at having. Robin Dunbar’s research shows genuine social bonding requires endorphins released through physical touch, synchronized movement, shared laughter, eating and singing together. Screens don’t transmit endorphins. Every hour on screens is an hour not spent in embodied presence — the day doesn’t get longer. James Coan’s social baseline theory: the brain evolved to assume physical proximity to others, and isolation triggers emergency responses. We’re surrounded by simulated connection while our nervous system keeps registering that we’re alone. As Norman Wirzba put it: imagine scrolling through pictures of food while your stomach remains empty. That’s what we’re doing to our souls.

Bo got under conviction live on air and committed to stop calling in pickup orders so he can stand in line, be around humans, and maybe strike up a conversation. We also had a genuinely moving exchange about spirituality versus religion — Bo says he’s not spiritual but deeply religious, and I pushed back that his entire week of sermon preparation, manual labor, bike repair, and communal life IS the contemplative practice he thinks he doesn’t have. The origin story of the “inner room” framing for the book came out of a conversation with a progressive Christian influencer friend who’d stopped doing quiet times because he felt he needed a divinity degree to read the Bible. I told him that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard — Jesus didn’t debate whether you should have a contemplative life, he just said when you pray, go into your inner room. Every wisdom tradition says this. If you opt out of that, you’re opting out of everything that gives everything else value.

We also went on a significant detour about dating apps, evolutionary psychology, the disappearance of in-person flirting, the rise of ED prescriptions among people under 40, and how the conditions that used to domesticate human beings for genuine relationship have been stripped out by algorithmic matchmaking. Bo had never been on a dating app and called it “elder maxing,” which I’m keeping.

We’ll do the other five theses next week. Also: process theology book recommendations for the curious — Bruce Epperly’s Process for the Perplexed, Robert Mesle’s intro, the Cobb and Griffin intro (buy it now, read it second), and Andrew Davis’s upcoming book through his course at whiteheadsuniverse.com.

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Seduced into Self-Exploitation: Liberation Theology for the Algorithmic Age