William Gibson coined the word cyberspace in a short story called Burning Chrome, published in Omni in July 1982. He wrote it on a Hermes 2000, a manual typewriter he had inherited from his wife’s step-grandfather. He called it a very Ernest Hemingway sort of war-correspondent-for-the-Spanish-Civil-War machine. In 1981 he did not know a single person who wrote on a computer. When the Hermes finally broke past repair, he bought an Apple II, because the shop told him a replacement typewriter would cost more.
The man who named the digital world had never used one. He was guessing.
And in Neuromancer, two years later, he defined the thing he had named as a consensual hallucination. That is not an engineering term. It is a claim about what happens to human beings.
What Kind of Humans Are We Becoming?
We have been living inside one novelist’s guess for forty years, and the guess turned out to be about the self.
Technology is changing faster than our ability to understand its consequences. Every new system promises efficiency, convenience, and progress. Almost none of them are asked what kind of people they produce.
So I ask a different question here. Not what artificial intelligence, social media, or digital systems can do. What they are doing to us.
Practical wisdom over predictions. The common good over the cutting edge. Not utopia, not dystopia, just the old question of what it means to live well, applied to the tools we have built.
I spent thirty-five years in emerging technology, at Coopers & Lybrand, Oracle, C-Bridge, and American National Insurance, first as a consultant, then a Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President, and I finished as Chief Information Security Officer. I helped build the systems I now ask questions about. More about that here.
The Hallucination and the False Self
Gibson was not the only person working this ground, and he was not the first.
Twenty years before Burning Chrome, in New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1962), Thomas Merton described what he called the false self: a self assembled out of experiences worn like bandages, performing constantly for an audience, and finally more convincing to its owner than the person underneath. He did not mean it as a metaphor. He meant it as a diagnosis.
A consensual hallucination and a false self are the same observation from two directions. A constructed self that comes to feel more real than the real one.
Merton was closer to this argument than most people realize. In 1964 he read Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and reviewed it in Commonweal. He corresponded with Ivan Illich. His own annotated copy of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media survives at the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. He was reading the technology critics of his day with a pencil in his hand, from a hermitage in Kentucky, while the machinery was still being assembled.
What follows is the argument he was working toward, tested against the equipment we actually have.
Technology Is Anthropology
Technology is not systems and code. It is people. Every digital tool reflects and then reshapes human culture, behavior, and relationships, which makes it a subject for anthropology before it is a subject for engineering.
The method here is See-Judge-Act, which I borrow gratefully from Joseph Cardijn, who gave it to the worker movements of the 1920s.
- See. Look at how people and communities actually live with these systems, before deciding what they mean.
- Judge. Weigh what you found against something that does not move: human dignity, justice, the common good.
- Act. Do something at whatever scale you actually have.
Four Principles
1. Technology reflects our values. What we build reveals who we are. The smartphone’s ubiquity is not a fact about engineering. It is a statement about what we decided to want.
2. Technology shapes human interaction. Social media has not merely connected us. It has changed how we relate to one another, and it did so without asking.
3. Development is a cultural process. Building something involves more than solving a technical problem. Social norms, organizational power, and unexamined assumptions all get compiled in. Facial recognition both reflects existing bias and hardens it.
4. Context determines impact. Like any cultural artifact, a technology cannot be read in isolation. Its meaning comes from how people use it and what they build around it.
Pope Leo XIV made the same argument with more authority than I have. In Magnifica Humanitas, promulgated on 25 May 2026 and the first papal encyclical devoted to artificial intelligence, he holds that technology is never neutral in practice, because it carries the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.
The Algorithmic Self
Every time you open an app, post a photo, or let a system recommend your next video, you are not just using a tool. You are being shaped by one. What follows works that claim through See-Judge-Act.
See: Looking at Our Digital Reality
Think about the last thing you posted. A photo, a thought, a professional update. Before you hit post, did you pause? Did you think about how it would look, how many likes it might get, whether it fit your brand?
Here is the real question. When did we start thinking of ourselves as having a brand?
The Multiplied Self
You wake up. Your phone already knows you are a night owl who watches cooking videos at two in the morning, that you are probably thinking about a new laptop, that you pause longest on posts about climate anxiety. There is a professional you, a curated you, a private and messy you, and somewhere in a recommendation system there is a data-ghost you made entirely of predictions about what you will buy, watch, and believe next.
The Feedback Loop
Here is where it gets strange. Those versions start shaping the original. You post a joke that flops. Five likes. You feel the sting. You post a sunset. Two hundred likes. You feel seen. Slowly you begin performing for an invisible audience, shaping yourself toward whatever gets rewarded. Teenagers describe feeling on stage all the time. Adults find themselves crafting stories not to share an experience but to harvest engagement.
The Cultural Kaleidoscope
This is not happening in a vacuum. A teenager in Lagos navigates family expectations, global Black identity politics, and a K-pop fandom at once, while an algorithm tries to work out which version of her to feed. Diaspora communities keep virtual homelands alive in group chats, holding languages and rituals across oceans. We are producing an identity that is simultaneously more diverse and more homogeneous than any before it.
Researchers of digital culture call this liquid identity, after Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (Polity, 2000): identity that flows and changes rapidly, no longer anchored in stable communities or physical places. Others describe the algorithmic self, the habit of anticipating what the system wants. Content creators talk about speaking to the algorithm. We have internalized the machine’s logic.
These are not neutral tools we pick up and put down. They are the water we swim in.
Judge: What Is Really at Stake
So what is the problem? Isn’t it remarkable that we can explore identities, connect across borders, and find communities that accept us?
Yes. And also no.
The Reduction of Personhood
Right now, dozens of systems have compressed you into categories. They don’t see you as a whole person. You are a cluster of predicted behaviors. Users like you click this, buy that, believe these things. The system takes a rich, contradictory, changing self and flattens it into a statistical profile.
And here is the part that should stop you. These systems treat their prediction of you as more real than your own self-understanding. This is Merton’s false self, industrialized. A recommendation engine is a machine for finding and feeding it, and it does so better than any institution in history.
That is not a metaphor. That is a description of the product.
The Discrimination Engine
These systems do not only predict. They decide. Who gets the interview. Who pays a higher rate. Who gets flagged as risky. Trained on historical data that already carries human prejudice, they amplify it. Facial recognition that works poorly on darker skin. Credit models that penalize a postal code. The people-like-you logic that seems harmless in entertainment becomes oppressive in housing, employment, and justice.
What makes it insidious is that it arrives dressed as objectivity. It is not objective. It is the automation of existing inequality, made invisible and much harder to contest.
The Cultural Flattening
When a system optimizes for engagement, it privileges whatever is most popular and most advertiser-friendly. Minority languages, non-Western aesthetics, and difficult perspectives drift to the margins because they do not fit the dominant pattern. Indigenous creators find traditional knowledge flagged as misinformation. The result is a slow pressure toward conformity, enforced not by force but by visibility.
Be like everyone else, or be unseen.
What We Are Losing
Autonomy. When a system constantly predicts and steers, you stop exploring. You stop surprising yourself. It optimizes for engagement, not for your growth or your capacity to change. Ask yourself honestly: how often does your feed show you something that genuinely challenges you?
Connection. We have more connections than ever and report being lonelier than ever. Mediated connection is not embodied presence. You can have five thousand friends online and no one to call at three in the morning when you are frightened.
Dignity. When a system treats you as a cluster of data points rather than a person with inherent worth, you become a means to an end. Engagement, profit, control. Never an end in yourself.
Hear me on this. It is not that technology is bad. It is that these systems are designed and deployed in ways that do not respect the whole reality of a human person.
Act: What We Can Do About It
We are not going back to a world without this technology. That ship has sailed, and if I have said that once, I have said it a million times. The question is what kind of technological future we build instead.
For Individuals
Notice when you are performing. It is fine to do it. Do it consciously. Ask whether this is who you want to be or who the system rewards you for being.
Diversify your information diet. Follow people who challenge you. Read what the algorithm would not recommend. Visit the library. Talk to humans who are not filtered through a screen.
Practice digital sabbaths. Not only for rest. For remembering who you are without the metrics.
Protect your data. As a former Chief Information Security Officer, let me be plain: use privacy tools, delete old accounts, understand what you are consenting to. You cannot opt out entirely. You can reduce your exposure considerably.
Cultivate embodied community. Invest in people you can see. Your digital life should supplement your embodied life, not replace it.
For Designers and Developers
Include the affected communities in the design. Do not assume you know what people need. Homogeneous teams build homogenizing systems. Give people meaningful information about how they are being categorized, and a real way to contest it. Stop optimizing solely for time on the platform, and ask what success would look like if it meant helping someone reach their own goals rather than keeping them scrolling.
For Institutions and Policymakers
We audit finances and environmental impact. We should audit algorithms. Self-regulation has not worked. It did not work for Cain and Abel, so what makes us think it works now? Protect the right to contest an automated decision, the right to an explanation, and the right to human review where the stakes are high. Fund alternatives that aren’t advertising-funded or engagement-optimized. And teach digital literacy, from elementary school through adult education, because the autonomous revolution is arriving faster than the curriculum.
For All of Us
Stop thinking of these as neutral tools. They are practices that shape us, social systems carrying values and power. Do not only ask whether it works. Ask what it works for, who benefits, and what it assumes about what a human being is. Not can we build it, but should we. Not is it legal, but is it good.
Back to the Typewriter
Gibson guessed. He sat at a machine with no electricity in it and imagined a consensual hallucination, and we spent forty years building the thing he had imagined, mostly without asking whether we should.
Merton was not guessing. He had watched what a technological order does to a person, and he named it before the equipment arrived.
When you finish this and open your phone, pause and ask: who am I when I am online? Is that who I want to be? And if not, what am I going to do about it?
Technology does not determine our future. We do. But only if we stay awake.
Questions for Discussion
- Where have you noticed an algorithm shaping how you present yourself?
- Which trade-offs between convenience and autonomy feel worth it to you, and which do not?
- How do we balance individual responsibility against the need for systemic change?
- Where have you seen technology designed well, for flourishing rather than engagement?
- What would real accountability look like for the systems you use every day?
These questions work well in a group. I give this as an hour called The Algorithmic Self, live or by Zoom, for parishes, schools, senior groups, and retreat settings. It is listed with the other talks, and everything on this page ends up at the same four questions: People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity for everyone.