Tl;dr: I don’t use either, and that’s on purpose.

In 2011, I was working for Pensacola Opera in Florida. I was staying in a house and driving a car owned by opera patrons who’d taken a four-month cruise around the world, fulfilling a lifelong dream and helping out a few young artists in the process. On those daily drives along the bay, from the house to the opera center and back, I breathlessly followed the evolving news of the Arab Spring, awed and inspired by the seemingly unstoppable power of idealistic young people courageously demanding better, freer nations, and organizing on Facebook, right under the very noses of the repressive regimes they sought to overturn.

Lots of latter-day skeptics point to this moment as the zenith of social media’s long-promised capacity to change the world for good.

But even in 2020, during the uprising electrifying the streets of my city, much of my engagement with my neighbors happened, or was at least planned and communicated, on social media. I’ve personally referred to the winter of 2020-21 as “peak meme.” When we all waited an eternity for Nevada’s mail-in ballots to be counted? The Evergiven stuck in the Suez Canal? Bernie Mittens?! It was a hilarious time to be online.

So I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool luddite. These platforms had me and they lost me.

You know all the reasons: doom-scroll-induced-depression; the comments section morphing from meanness to something a lot like neo-Nazism and then moving from Twitter to the White House; the constant surveillance and litmus-testing by friends and strangers alike (aka “cancel culture”); doom-scroll-induced-carpal-tunnel-syndrome; more ads than “content;” the reduction of every human endeavor to “content;” the reduction of every human being to “personal brand,” etc., etc., etc.

It was a departure years in the making. The final straw for me was seeing all those Attention Billionaires arrayed on the inauguration dais in January, many having flipped their politics and sunk their dignity to be there, glad-handing with a brutish and unethical expression of incredible power.

I have no illusions that any technology — or at least, any communication medium — is all bad, or that any new medium in history has arrived without a cost to the way things were. Social media were created by humans, they’re used by humans, and humans and our creations are complex. But it became very clear to me that, on a personal level, social media was doing me more harm than good. These platforms rewarded parts of myself that I don’t like, and demanded that I muzzle some of my highest values, chiefly curiosity and compassion, unless I wanted to suffer the fury of the righteous.

On a communal level, I saw discourse unfolding in ways I found disingenuous and counterproductive, and I watched nasty conversations go from occasional to the default state of the internet. Over the years, I was — and I know we have all had this experience — hurt by people I knew in real life being unkind to me on the internet, failing to give me the benefit of the doubt, scoring snark points by treating me as an enemy. And I probably hurt other people in the same way.

Morally, it became clear to me that our engagement with these platforms was not just degrading our discourse, our relationships, and our well-being, but was feeding some of the most destructive forces on the planet. The environmental toll of social media use is nothing to sneeze at. Neither is the harvesting of our data or the manipulation of our information intake. Nor is the consolidation of incredible power in the hands of a few unaccountable billionaires. Nor is the rise of authoritarianism, the fall of the rule of law, or the collapse of an international order that understood, at least theoretically and sometimes practically, that human beings have rights even in the face of the might of their own or someone else’s government.

And now these same billionaires are some of the people creating and selling us on AI; certainly, they’re all from the same clubhouse.

I don’t claim to have a profound understanding of AI. If I’m being honest I’m not particularly curious about it, and I have a fair amount of fear about it. I’m not proud of this attitude. I would like to be someone who is open-minded about new technologies, and who keeps pace with the times. I want to be cool when I’m old (whether or not I’m cool now). And I know it has genuinely revolutionary, truly useful uses. One of my favorite initiatives in the world is Project CETI, which I can talk to you about for half an hour without taking a breath, and it would not exist without AI.

But I guess I learned my lesson from social media.

I don’t trust the people pushing this on us. I don’t like the way they got their data. I don’t like how they’re making their money. (I contributed my knowledge and my unique voice to training these programs without my consent. I have not been compensated, and I am not profiting now; have you seen any money for your contributions? Were you asked permission?) I don’t trust their intentions. I don’t even trust the results of commercially-accessible AI, which is supposedly what it’s good for. I don’t like the way AI uses our planet’s scarce resources. I don’t like that no one asked our collective permission to take those resources it has taken and keeps taking, or to unleash this technology on us.

Above all, I do not believe the promise that this will relieve human beings of burdensome labor and free us to do better or higher things. As far as I can tell, that’s been the promise of every mainstream technological innovation of my lifetime. What I have seen instead is that humans are asked to become more and more machine-like, and the exercise of our souls is met with greater disdain, even punishment, from the forces of power.

Creation is soul-work. Creation is not regurgitation or imitation or conglomeration. Creation is relationship. Creation is collaboration. Creation is divine.

Listening is soul-work. Listening to a friend who needs advice, or a patient who needs expertise, or a writer who needs an editor. People who need to be heard need to be heard by human beings.

I know AI is coming. I know AI is here. If I haven’t yet (and I probably have), I know I will benefit from AI.

But I am still here, too. And so are you. And we benefit from each other when our hearts sync up as we watch a play together, when we stay grounded in reality just by being around one another, when our bodies flood with good feelings when we know we’re being heard, or when we hear someone else’s story, or when we stare into our siblings the trees. These kinds of intelligence — body intelligence, soul intelligence — are so difficult to monetize that tech bro billionaires don’t even call them intelligence. I’m not trying to be tech-phobic, but I want our technologies to work for us — for human beings and for the rest of the creation we are indivisibly a part of — which, for me, means (as best I can) refraining from using technology whose sources and uses I don’t trust and have good reason to believe are doing us harm. It means investing in older, more tested technologies, like candlelight, ritual, communal singing, and bound books, alongside technologies tested with scientific rigor and whose ends have clear, understandable benefits, like modern medicine, wind power, and streetcars.

I won’t get my use of technology right all the time. Maybe not even most of the time. But I believe I’m called to listen, to use my gifts to help my fellow humans shape and share their stories with other humans. This ancient kind of work — a mentor of mine calls it “soul work” — will not save us time, smooth the frustrations of complex relationships, or alleviate the arduous labor of deep thinking. But it may liberate us a bit from the cycles of addiction and exploitation we seem to be trapped in, and from the crises of meaninglessness and loneliness that have hollowed out so many of our societies. This slow, nuanced work may nurture in us some of our better qualities. This work may make us more human. And, despite the cynical age we live in, I’m still betting that human is just exactly who we ought to be.

And you can take my em-dash away over my dead body.

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For further reading . . .

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Superbloom by Nicholas Carr
The Reenchanted World: On Finding Mystery in the Digital Age, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Olivia Lasky & Damon Searls, Harper’s Magazine
Ways of Being by James Bridle
Five Reasons I’m AI Sober by Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive Substack