Where There is No Love, Put Love: Rethinking Our Life with Technology
Authors:   , Mackh David Paul 
Published: December 2023

The bedrock of this dissertation is the idea that our patterns of thought, speech, and action can be distilled into two distinct approaches defined by (1) the use of things on one hand and (2) the relation to persons on the other. That first approach is represented in our life with technology and has expanded to the point of omnipresence. Being so ubiquitous, technology largely goes unexamined in the way it functions, the effect it has on us, and the effect it has on our neighbor. In this manner, the technological approach is an over-extension of the manipulation of things to the negation of the relation to persons. As a result, our capacity to relate to persons outside a narrow scope had been atrophied. This work is an attempt at renewing the relational approach within contexts shaped by and shaped for the manipulation of things, i.e., technically minded society. To that end, it is necessary to first explore the work of thinkers who have written on relationality in ways which address the over-extension of the technological approach. The thinkers I have chosen in this endeavor are Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Ivan Illich, each of whom wrote thoughtfully about relationality as community, which I am naming to be the heart of the relational approach, as expressed in hospitality as the embrace of strangers as neighbors. Likewise, it is necessary to understand the true nature of technology, which is remarkably difficult for those of us who live in contexts shaped by and shaped for the manipulation of things. The thinkers I have chosen to draw from in exploring technology as a pattern are Ivan Illich, Albert Borgmann, and Lewis Mumford, each of whom carefully and thoughtfully explored the nature of technology beyond the obvious form of devices. I then apply the community approach to our life with technology by exploring ways in which individuals and communities can reorient their patterns of thinking and technology in their lives in order to place the manipulation of things into service of the relation to persons. In doing so, I advocate for the inversion of our life with technology through the embrace of freedom and creativity rather than causality and slavery, as well as the choices to reuse and obtain devices used, educate ourselves and others on how our devices and institutions actually work, repair our devices rather than replace them, liberate our devices by "jailbreaking" them, and sharing our devices freely as acts of technological hospitality. There are, however, technologies which cannot be satisfyingly inverted due to their production of morally abhorrent commodities, extractive nature, or some combination of the two. These I call unspeakable, and the task of renewing the relational approach in our lives necessitates we distance ourselves from these through conscious choices of thought and action. Choices I explore to this end are the embrace of voluntary poverty in our life with technology, taking regular sabbatical rest from technological patterns, and fasting from technological patterns of living altogether. It is my argument that, should we undertake these efforts together with like-minded persons and the willingness to break a few rules, we may yet find ourselves able to carve out spaces for relational (communal) living within contexts bent toward the manipulation of things.