My daughter bemoans her Yoto story player “dying.” Coworkers address ChatGPT as “him.” We call the microphone's graspable handle its "neck."
We name things, our tools, with the same language we name other embodied beings.
Most think little of the consequences, if there are any visible enough to think of, and in their haste to say something consequential have spoken too quickly and done something that cannot be undone.
Will we continue to love that which was meant to be used? Have we made in our image what is only intent on reflecting our most utilitarian parts? Are we too prone to the kind of "self-naming" that undid every generation before us?
This practice is clearly not confined to merely our current era of digital technology. It parallels millennia of tool-wielding cultures alongside our own technopolistic one today.
It sours the stories we find in ancient texts as domineering gods and humans seek to act outside their tale's created order. In the primordial tale of the tower of the kingdom of Babylon (which tradition named Babel for its lasting effect on the tongue), we see the hope of every tech CEO and inventor of our age in the minds of the ancients.
As one theologian and ethicist puts it, "Whereas God named Adam, and Adam named the animals, the peoples of Babel want to be their own authority, which is what is meant by their stated desire to be self-namers."
This act of counter-creation, of "seeing and taking", is the act of redefining reality and pointing our tools in a new, uncertain direction.
The characters in this story, like many cautionary tragedies from this time, show how this self-naming is "the material form taken by their dreams of immortality and displays why, to fallen humanity, death is the final nemesis of technology."
And death is the final direction technology points itself. Its own. Our own. Death's own.
As we name, identify with, and "adopt" (a deeply upsetting loan-word to our technological vocabulary, for those with that most human of experiences) new technologies, we affirm its life-cycle, its evolution, its need to breathe.
Certainly before this moment, in at least the biblical narrative, tools were used for good, named for their generous provision from their inventor's garden.
This tale displays a shift on a darker path to create and name. A passage we still live and love our technology inside of. A page we turn only to find the same words written, age after age after age.
~ references credited to Brian Brock, Joining Creation's Praise