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 Human 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, and what kind of world we actually want them to build.
I spent thirty-five years in emerging technology, at Coopers & Lybrand, Oracle, C-Bridge, and American National Insurance, first as a consultant, then as Executive Vice President of Strategy and Marketing and Chief Revenue Officer, and I finished as Executive Chief Information Security Officer. I helped build the systems I now ask questions about. More about that here.
The Hallucination and the False Self
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.
Fourth and Walnut
On 18 March 1958, a monk on an errand stood at a street corner in Louisville, Kentucky, and was overwhelmed by the realization that he loved every stranger on the sidewalk. Thomas Merton had entered the monastery seventeen years earlier to leave the world. On that corner he saw that he had never been separate from it. He wrote the moment down in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday, 1966).
That is the true self. It is not built from what we perform, own, or are scored on. It is found, and it is found in common. The false self needs an audience; the true self needs a neighbor.
This is why the four tests are not a checklist. People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity for everyone are what the true self looks like when it goes to work, in a career and after one. A system that feeds the false self will fail them every time, however good its numbers look.
- People. Who does this make larger, and at whose expense?
- Planet. What does it cost the ground we stand on, and who is sent the bill?
- Purpose. Does it enlarge what a person is for, or narrow it?
- Prosperity. For everyone, or for a few?
Every Revolution Asks This
Marshall McLuhan argued that a new medium reshapes us before we have finished arguing about its content. The printing press did not only spread books; it remade authority, then religion, then the nation. The factory did not only make cloth; it remade the family, the town, and the hour. Each time, the people living through it had to ask what kind of human the new order was producing.
The autonomous revolution is the third of these, and it is moving faster. I have worked hands-on with new technology since the 1980s, and my training is in history and philosophy, not engineering. History is the only laboratory we have for a change this large. It tells us that the technology is never the whole story. The values a society brings to it are.
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 False Self Takes a Flag
Merton’s false self is not only private. It can be organized. It can borrow a nation, an enemy, and a crowd to confirm it, and that is the working machinery of Christian nationalism: faith fused with national power, and a story of what the country has always been that turns out to be recent.
Its defenders deserve a fair hearing. Many hold it as gratitude for a moral heritage, not a wish to exclude anyone. The question is what the fusion does in practice, and history is plain about one thing it has done. In 1838 the Maryland Jesuits sold 272 enslaved people to keep their institutions solvent. Black Catholics were here from the beginning, and Augustus Tolton, the first priest recognized as Black in the United States, had to be ordained in Rome in 1886 because no American seminary would take him. Cyprian Davis, OSB, who directed my graduate work, told that story in The History of Black Catholics in the United States (Crossroad, 1990).
In April 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned that a church may have to do more than bandage the victims under the wheel. It may have to jam the wheel itself. Today the wheel has an engine. Recommendation systems reward outrage, and generative models can manufacture a national myth on demand.
Protecting democracy now means two things at once: watching the machines, and facing the false self in ourselves.
A Rule for Ordinary Days
In about 530, at Monte Cassino, Benedict wrote a short rule for people who wanted to live well together. Fifteen centuries later it still works, and it was never only for monks. Four of its chapters answer the four tests.
- People. Receive every guest as Christ (chapter 53). Hospitality is the first measure of any system.
- Planet. Treat every tool and possession of the house as if it were a sacred vessel of the altar (chapter 31). Stewardship, not consumption.
- Purpose. Idleness is the enemy of the soul, and prayer and work belong together (chapter 48). Work has a meaning beyond the paycheck, and retirement is a change of work, not the end of it.
- Prosperity. Give to each according to need (chapter 34). Enough for everyone, not abundance for a few.
The Rule also asks the abbot to call the whole community to counsel, because the youngest often sees what is best (chapter 3). That is as good a definition of democratic habit as any.
See, Judge, Act
The method here is See-Judge-Act, which I borrow gratefully from Joseph Cardijn, who gave it to the worker movements of the 1920s. It is how ordinary people turn conviction into change, at work and at home.
See: The Algorithmic 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. Somewhere in a recommendation system there is a data-ghost you, made entirely of predictions about what you will buy, watch, and believe next.
Then those versions start shaping the original. You post a joke that flops. Five likes. You post a sunset. Two hundred likes. Slowly you begin performing for an invisible audience, shaping yourself toward whatever gets rewarded. When did we start thinking of ourselves as having a brand?
Judge: What Is Really at Stake
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.
And they do not only predict. They decide who gets the interview, who pays a higher rate, and who gets flagged as risky. Trained on data that already carries human prejudice, they amplify it and dress the result as objectivity. Measured against the four tests, the cost shows up as lost autonomy, lost connection, and lost dignity.
Act: What We Can Do About It
- Notice when you are performing. Ask whether this is who you want to be or who the system rewards you for being.
- Protect your data. As a former Chief Information Security Officer, let me be plain: use privacy tools, delete old accounts, and understand what you are consenting to.
- Keep a rule. Digital sabbaths, embodied community, and work held together with purpose. Benedict would recognize all three.
- Ask institutions to answer the four tests. Audit algorithms as we audit finances. Protect the right to contest an automated decision and to human review where the stakes are high.
- Vote and organize as if the machines matter. They do. Democracy is now partly a question about who governs the systems that shape what citizens see.
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. He also named the way out: a true self that does not need the audience.
The choices in front of us are not finally about budgets. They are about values. 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?
- What would your true self want from your work, or from your retirement, that no system can measure?
- Where have you seen faith and national identity fused, and what did the fusion reward?
- Which line of Benedict’s Rule would change your Monday if you kept it?
- What would real accountability look like for the systems you use every day?
These questions work well in a group, and everything on this page ends up at the same four tests: People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity for everyone.