Curious Christian

Every now and then someone makes a comment that makes me realise just how differently we see the world. For example, someone had a computer problem the other day, which I fixed, and found was most likely triggered by a patch. They said, “People shouldn’t be playing with our computers at night. And shouldn’t they be notifying us when they make changes?!” This made me realise, they actually seem to imagine humans are micromanaging this. And that the changes are occasional enough that notifications wouldn’t overwhelm them.

I see computer networks and their end points as more like an ant colony. Constantly churning, largely automated, with humans only intervening when problems get big enough to be escalated to us. Humans are still in the loop, but the loop is stretching more and more all the time, and this is only getting more extreme with AI. It’s clear that some people don’t realise how automated society is already. There are still people designing, governing, and setting boundaries for these systems, but most of the time they are guiding processes rather than directly controlling each action.

I think this may be one reason why some people are attracted to conspiracy theories. It can be more comforting to imagine someone is in control, even if they’re a hostile actor, than to contemplate the unsettling alternative: control is more distributed and harder to see than we would like. At times, we can feel like ants in a colony too complex for any one person to understand.

Maybe part of growing in this kind of world is learning to be comfortable with limits. Recognising that we were never meant to hold everything together. As a Christian, I don’t find my security in the idea that systems are under control, or that we are. My hope is that God is not absent from all this complexity, even when it feels that way. There is freedom in letting go of the illusion that everything depends on us, and instead trusting the One who sees what we cannot and holds what we never could.