In 2006, I served as Summer Minister for the Community Church of New York in midtown Manhattan, and a large part of my role then was supporting lay preachers who were leading Sunday services downstairs in the air-conditioned Fellowship Hall. The only summertime sermon I can now recall, twenty years later, was an impassioned plea delivered by a beloved pillar of that community, who titled her sermon simply “Cell Phones and Me.” In retrospect, it was as much screed as sermon; it was a powerful protest against the encroachment of mobile phones into every imaginable city space, including the crosstown bus and the corner bodega, spots near and dear to her heart. The preacher made no secret of her annoyance at the shrinking of what we might call the commons, those public places we simultaneously inhabit, where we could have chance encounters with strangers and neighbors alike. Why were her fellow New Yorkers so insistent on having conversations with people elsewhere, she wanted to know, instead of with one another? If her sermon had a subtitle, I imagine it would have been “Hang Up, Already”.
No one did, though. I cannot remember what kind of cell phone I carried at the time; it could have been a slide or a flip phone or a Blackberry complete with it own miniature keyboard; I had one of each of those at some point in the early Aughts. What I did not have — what none of us had then — was a smartphone, since none were commercially available. The first iPhone was not brought to market until 2007. Siri appeared on it 2010 and ChatGPT in 2023. What I do not think our impassioned lay preacher could have imagined that summer before smartphones appeared on the mass market was that soon people would be speaking not to other people elsewhere, but to the phones themselves. Today live in a period of both astonishing technological innovation and profound social isolation. The latest estimates are that Americans spend four to five hours a day on their phone, with the majority of those surveyed saying they believe they use their smartphones too much.
This June, to mark the start of summer, The New York Times ran series of four weekly series of articles in its “Touch Grass Challenge.” The Times encouraged readers “to ‘touch grass’… to put down your phone and reconnect with the real world”, and strategies to facilitate that, such as taking daily walks outdoors and reading actual books at bedtime. Summertime gives each of us a marvelous opportunity to experiment with and even embrace different rhythms and gentler ways of being human. It might be the best time for each of us to try to “touch grass” — and far fewer of our devices.
At sleep-away summer camps across the country, young campers have been asked to surrender their smartphones and other digital devices for weeks at a stretch, much to their parents’ gratification. People planning their summer vacation have begun seek out remote rental cabins that have been intentionally kept off the grid from companies with names like Unplugged, which makes a promise alongside a pitch. Recently, a woman told me how delighted she was when she discovered, while away at a retreat center, that she had forgot her phone charger. She said the letting her battery die proved to be the most renewing thing that happened while she was there. Imagine! Outdoor outfitters have taken to touting the appeal of an “analogue summer” and increasingly, people seem sold on the notion.
In a viral 2015 post she titled “Every single thing I know, as of today,” spiritual writer Anne Lamont joked: “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” Yet unplugging is getting harder and harder for all of us to do these days, with the proliferation of digital devices, remote working arrangements, an endless 24/7 news cycle, the ubiquity of social media, a continuous expansion of our screen time, and the rapid advancement of AI. So we live in the midst of a real dilemma. We have to ask ourselves, what might allow us to power down and open ourselves up to a different sort of connectivity — to truly connect to ourselves, to others, and the very ground of our shared being. Is it the encouragement of our loved ones? Is a deep devotion to nature? Is it a personal commitment to regular spiritual practice?
In the face of serious digital addiction — and such a thing does indeed exist — none of these alone or even all in combination might feel adequate. This March, a California court ordered two tech companies to pay a combined $6 million in damages to a 20-year-old after the ruling found that their platforms were designed to be addictive for users. Younger users seem particularly vulnerable to compulsive overuse. For decades now, the Monitoring the Future study has surveyed teenagers and young adults about their state of mind, and it has consistently found a sharp rise in their levels of mental distress since 2008. The persistence of that trend is seriously concerning.
In the 2017 essay titled “Eliminating the Human” that he published in the MIT Technology Review, musician and artist David Byrne asked readers to join him in interrogating “the new norm” around our adoption of technology. “There are other possible roads we could be going down, and the one we’re on is not inevitable or the only one; it has been (possibly unconsciously) chosen,” he writes. “I’m not saying that many of these tools, apps, and other technologies are not hugely convenient. But in a sense, they run counter to who we are as human beings.” He points to the ways that he sees the rise of digital music is eliminating human interaction. With musical downloads and streaming services, he notes, there is no longer any need to make trips to the local music shop, and admittedly no need to confront highly opinionated store clerks who might make and even communicate unfavorable judgments about our selections and favorites. Now that algorithms make personalized recommendation, we no longer have to ask friends for recommendations. We really do not need to discuss music at all anymore. “Is the function of music as a kind of social glue and lubricant also being eliminated?” he asks. Very possibly. I suspect that might provide a better explanation as to why my young nieces and nephews have begun insisting on buying album at recored stores, a better explanation certainly, than the warm sound of vinyl.
As the front man for the Talking Heads and the marquee star of the Broadway show American Utopia, Byrne has a penchant for leading exuberant ensemble acts and singing rousing anthems everyone can join in on quite easily. He is a supremely and unapologetically pro-social musician who aims to lift the spirits of those in his orbit. In the single off his new album called “Everybody Laughs”, he sings an enthusiastic verse about “Every mobile phone/And every restaurant/ Everyone we know/ And everything you want” that scans very differently in the music video he made to accompany it. In that video, Byrne sits in a crowded restaurant surrounded by tables and tables of people looking at their phones instead of one another. Some are taking selfies, others are taking photos of the food their plates to post online, but none are them are relating to anyone else, with the notable exception of servers going about their business more or less frantically. No one is laughing there. As the diners peer down in to their screens, they all look either bored, harried, or worried.
Of course, this is an all-too familiar scene to many of us by now. Increasingly, I despair about how much this has become our new normal. Decades ago, the preacher of “Cell Phones and Me” railed against the one-sided and frequently banal conversations surrounding her in maddening cacophony. I wonder how she would greet the eerie silence of people staring at screens as they all follow separate feeds. In his 2017 essay, Byrne laments the loss of “real connection” and “real interaction”, the really real that we can only find when we countenance each other IRL. Like him, I truly believe we have to voice our preference for the actual over the virtual whenever and wherever we can.
On a podcast I reluctantly overheard not too long ago, a researcher reported some initially promising study findings about an AI-assisted chat therapy program. Once randomized study participants learned that they had been counseled by AI instead of another individual, though, he explained, they tended to downgrade their therapeutic insights and gains. He complained of these participants harboring what he called “a bias against AI”. I immediately disputed this characterization and began talking back to this disembodied voice, to a man not in any kind of dialogue with me. “Don’t you mean that they have a preference for the human?” I asked the speaker. “Isn’t it better to say that they prefer being counseled by a human, being human themselves?”
This is glaring instance of the phenomenon Byrne described as technology displacing the human element. In May, Pope Leo issued his first papal encyclical titled “Magnificent Humanity.” Its subtitle reads “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence”. While he recognizes — as so many of us so — the tremendous potential AI holds to “alleviate suffering and open up new possibilities”, Pope Leo still urges caution. “Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress,” the pope wrote. “Instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family.” It says something about the curious moment we find ourselves in that a popular musician and the Holy Pontiff find themselves in such accord.
We want to take every measure possible to guarantee that artificial intelligence does not undercut our natural intelligence and that newer technological capacities do not undermine our greatest human endowments. Otherwise, we are faced with the chilling prospect of raising up future generations of youth whose first loves and best friends may well be chatbots and whose most intense and intimate relationship may indeed be with their smartphones. According to the latest estimates, Americans check their smartphones upwards of 200 times a day. However much our smartphones are in our hands, it seems they are always on our minds. Our digital dependence in correlated with worsening mental health, yes — with increased rates of depression, anxiety, and insomnia — but also with cognitive decline, with a lessened ability to remember and concentrate. Most of us are probably overdue for a digital detox.
When I discuss that option with the individuals I see in spiritual direction, I tend to use different language. I recommend they consider attempting “a media fast” or take “an e-sabbath”, unplugging for a morning or afternoon or evening or day. I am conscious that this particular terminology borrows from wisdom teaching, religious observance, and spiritual practice. These all provide us time-honored approaches to dignifying our own humanity. “Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, in things best known to you, finding the best, or as good as the best,” American poet Walt Whitman wrote, “happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place — not for another hour, but this hour.” To be present to our place and time and to those humans sharing both with us is truly a spiritual accomplishment; it requires us staying both centered and grounded.
When Whitman first published his poetry collection “Leaves of Grass” in 1855, the advice to “touch grass” was not in everyday parlance, but effectively, that was precisely what the Good Gray Poet advocated. The things we mention casually and even glibly these days are honestly not things to which I ever want to be become accustomed: doom-scrolling, binge-watching, AI brain-fry, bed-rotting. They all sound terrible to my ear and additionally, I believe the human costs of each are considerable, that the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual toll are substantial. I understand that my objections to them can make me sound like one of “the olds”, as kids today would say. Yet the perspectives that our elders can offer us are valuable. The lay preacher of “Cell Phones and Me” had a clear sense of the human elements that were quickly getting lost in the city she loved. Yes, her sermon that Sunday sound awfully cranky, but then, so much of what is powerfully prophetic does.
Our fear that our machines are becoming too human should be matched by a fear that humans not become too mechanistic in a misguided attempt to keep pace with what looks like progress. The best preventative measure that we can these days take is to unplug, already. Instead of eliminating the human dimension, we might consider embracing it. We can do this by subordinating our technology use to our highest ideals, in a determination to “keep fresh” before us what the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman called our “moments of… high resolve.” There are various protocols for digital detoxes, varying from 10 to 14 days, from 24 to 72 hours, but this summer, any of you here are free to devise your own remedies for whatever ails you, with a healthy appreciation for how it might ail you. There’s obviously no denying the advances and opportunities that technology has brought us in recents years — I enjoy quite a number of those myself – but we dare not overlook the dangers of our tech-saturated age.
“Everybody’s going through the changes,” Byrne sings on the single off his newest album, “every complication…” We do live in complicated times, don’t we? The world is constantly changing and we are continuously adapting ourselves to it. But we ought not underestimate the role that every single one of us can play in either resisting or creating what he calls “the new norm” of technology use. What if the new norm became something like “analogue summer,” with regular reminders to hang up and unplug and go touch grass, in this season especially but also in the other three, as well? What if it meant our committing to take e-sabbaths and media fasts and yes, even digital detoxes as indicated? What if it meant our eating in restaurants where diners looked at one another instead of the feeds on their smartphones? We live in the midst of an era where everything is accelerated, but we cannot continue to live at inhuman pace, and we cannot forget our deepest human hungers for meaning and connection. The Fellowship Hall where I listened to “Cell Phones and Me” no longer stands; it was demolished after Community Church sold its campus to a New York real estate developer in 2024. But the hopes it held certainly remain in the state and country where we now live. How will we inhabit it, alone or together, individually or collectively, wired and unplugged? We shall see.
The Reverend Dr. 