Podcast: Are We Scrolling Ourselves to Death? (Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

It's Not Whether You're Addicted but What You Can Do About It

In this podcast, Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa discuss the changing world of technology, how it competes for our attention, and how Christians should engage with something that has proven to be so addictive. They address how who we are is formed by what we give our attention to and how we should think about our capacity as humans in a world of AI and overwhelming technology.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• Sounding the Alarm
• Technopoly
• Digital Syringes
• The Finite Resource of Attention
• Disembodied Relationships
• Artificial Intelligence
• Balancing the Benefits and Pitfalls of Using Digital Tools for Ministry
• Lightning Round
• Life-Giving, Screen-Free Habits

00:30 - Sounding the Alarm

Matt Tully
Today I’m speaking with Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa. Brett serves as a senior editor, and Ivan Mesa as editorial director for the Gospel Coalition. They co-edited the new book Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age from Crossway. Brett, Ivan, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Brett McCracken
Thanks for having us.

Ivan Mesa
Good to see you.

Matt Tully
In 1985 Neil Postman famously published a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And that book is pretty foundational to the book that you two served as editors on (you worked with a number of contributors on different chapters), and it even was the inspiration for the title of your books, Scrolling Ourselves to Death. So I wonder, Brett, could you summarize what Postman was saying? What was his main thesis in that book, and how did some of his ideas influence what you two are trying to do with this new book?

Brett McCracken
Neil Postman was, broadly, just a critic of media and technology, kind of one of the leading voices in that genre in the twentieth century. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman is really sounding the alarm in terms of what he was observing as some pretty significant changes in the way that we were talking to one another, the way that we were thinking, about ideas, the way discourse was happening because of changes in technology. Primarily, he had television in view, so he was basically saying we had shifted from being a print-based culture or literate culture—reading things in newspapers and talking about that—to being a TV-centric culture. And the medium of TV does certain things and prioritizes certain things, namely, entertainment—keeping people amused and hooked to their TVs by any means necessary.

Matt Tully
He was already seeing this back in the mid-eighties.

Brett McCracken
He was writing in the mid-eighties, yes. He published in 1985, so long before anything we have today—the internet, etc. or smartphones—were even a thing. So he was very prophetic at that time, in the eighties, in terms of calling out how the technologies of that time were changing the way we were communicating, the way we were thinking, the way discourse was structured. And that book has really stood the test of time and proved to be prescient and prophetic in terms of where we are today. Because if we were “amusing ourselves to death” in the eighties, how much more so are we scrolling ourselves to death today in similar ways to what he was talking about, but obviously with slightly different technologies. So we wanted to put together a book that took some of his best insights from that book forty years ago and apply that wisdom to the changing technologies of today.

Matt Tully
Ivan, I’d imagine some people could hear this and hear that his focus was on television, and it almost sounds a little quaint. We think of television as, compared to the internet and compared to the media landscape that we live in today, as just so much more tame and so much less compulsive or addicting. Do you resonate with that? Is there something just categorically different about even the nature of the issue that we’re facing today than what Postman was referring to?

Ivan Mesa
Yeah. He was speaking prophetically about something. He was sounding the alarm for the culture at large. In these kind of conversations, figures like that tend to be viewed as Puddleglums, a voice in the wilderness sounding an alarm, maybe overreacting to something.
And so in a sense, he was speaking really prophetically about something that would only get worse in the coming years. So you fast forward forty years later and of course you see that in contrast, yeah, it seems quaint, what was happening in 1985 versus what’s happening in 2025. A sea change has happened even in the last decade or two in terms of the acceleration of some of these trends that were happening over decades in Postman’s time. Now it’s every year or every few months. The pace of change is happening a lot more quickly. And so you’re just having to catch up with what’s going on to think critically about that.

Matt Tully
Do you think he understood the extent to which these new media technologies, not just television, but maybe things that would come after television, the power that they would really have? Because, again, we look at some of the newer technologies that are in our smartphones today and the way that even some of these have been gamified by companies to make them more addictive. Is that something that he predicted too? Did he have a sense that we might be heading in that kind of a direction?

Ivan Mesa
Brett might know a bit more about that, but I would say the fundamental things that have not changed is in Neil Postman’s day, you have TV, you have commercials, you have these advertisers who are paying for spots on TVs in the middle of a news broadcast. So his whole argument is saying you have here a news report, that 100,000 people have died in some sort of battlefield out there, and then you cut to a break with a commercial for jeans. And so the contrast there, again, companies are trying to make money. You are the product. Your attention is being devoted. You want to make the news entertaining to get your eyes glued to that so that you can watch the commercial. So the business model there in Postman’s day, there’s a perverse incentive. And so in similar ways, fast forward forty years later, you’re seeing the same dynamics. So I don’t know if Postman would’ve predicted the exact nature of a TikTok generation and six second videos, but I think the fundamental thing that has not changed is companies that want to use you to advertise and to make money off of you with your attention.

Brett McCracken
Just to add to that, I think central to his argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was the profit motive and the commercial structure of media. And he talked about television as the point of television is not to get people to think critically. The point of television is to gather an audience for corporations. When you have an audience gathered, you can earn more money with advertisements. So the more eyeballs that are there, the more money there is to be made. And the way that you get eyeballs is a different thing than the way you get people to think critically. So amusements and diversions and trivial things, that’s what gathers an audience. And that’s what he was bemoaning. So that aspect hasn’t changed and it’s only gotten worse, as Ivan was saying. The profit incentives are still very strong in terms of the name of the game in media is gathering an audience. It’s a more crowded atmosphere than ever before. There are more people vying for limited attention, and so the incentives to have lurid, extreme, heightened rhetoric and all these wild clickbaity things are greater incentives than ever, because the attention economy is so fiercely competitive. And so I think what he was onto in the eighties, his thesis is proving to be vindicated and correct forty years later.

07:51 - Technopoly

Matt Tully
It’s like this arms race of vying for our attention. And you’re right, as these technologies have evolved and as just even our own consumption habits as humans have changed over time, it takes more and more strategic thinking on the part of these advertisers or companies to hold our attention and get us stuck on it. Brett, another question on this. Postman had this concept that you talk about in the book of the technopoly. And that was a really helpful way to think about the ways that these technologies change and the ways that they affect us and can lead to certain undesirable outcomes. What did he mean by technopoly, and how does that relate to this conversation?

Brett McCracken
Technopoly is actually the name of another one of Postman’s most famous and influential books, and actually, I think it was the first Postman book I read before I read Amusing Ourselves to Death. And his idea with Technopoly is that the tools of technology that we initially use as tools end up using us. They become a more powerful thing in terms of we lose our agency and our power over time, and we become unable to resist their power. We don’t have the power anymore to just use them on and off, turn them off, put them in the right place. Our lives are now subservient to the technopoly, the authority of technology. And if you’re not careful with technology, he argues that always happens with technology. Something that initially starts as this practical tool that we think we’ll be able to control as we need it ends up becoming this all-consuming thing in society where you can’t live without it. We can see how that’s happening with so much of digital technology. Something like Wi-Fi. If you’re in a place without Wi-Fi, you might as well not have oxygen. We can’t live without Wi-Fi anymore. If you go somewhere and you forget your smartphone, think about the panic that you have in your mind. For ten minutes I went on an errand and I don’t have my phone! That shows you the extent to which these aren’t just optional tools anymore. They’re these all-important apparatuses that are extensions of our very being that we feel like we’ve had a appendage severed if we are separated from it. So that’s the technopoly idea.

Matt Tully
So someone could hear that and maybe their response would be, “Well, is it really that different from other technologies that we’re used to that we’ve built our lives or built our society around?” I think of electricity in our homes or running water or a car. Those don’t strike us as it being a problem to rely on those things or to even have fundamentally assumed those things being present for the operation of our lives. So maybe the question is, Is the situation actually different today when it comes to digital technologies like smartphones? Or is this really just the same thing that’s always happened with new technologies?

Brett McCracken
I would say that one difference is certain technologies are addictive. You get to a point where you have addictive behavior, in terms of you can’t not use it. So with something like electricity, I wouldn’t characterize our relationship to electricity as one of addiction. If the lights go out, that’s unfortunate, but I’m not going to go into withdrawal. Whereas with smartphones and certain digital technologies, I think you’re starting to see some like legitimate addict-like behavior being on display throughout culture. So I think that’s one thing that’s changed. There’s psychological dynamics at work with certain digital technologies that are unique among other technologies. And in fact, they were designed that way. If you look into the history of social media platforms and smartphone interfaces and whatnot, a lot of times they hired behavioral psychologists to help tweak the interfaces and the dings and the lights and the sounds so that they could be as addictive as possible. So they’re intentionally created to create addicts, and it’s connected to the profit motive, again, because the more time people spend on these platforms and the more unable they are to resist grabbing for their phone all day, every day, that is more money for these companies. That’s more advertising revenue. So there’s a lot that’s working against us in terms of our ability to resist these technologies, because there are so many incentives to make us as hooked as possible.

12:13 - Digital Syringes

Matt Tully
Ivan, in one of the chapters in the book, Patrick Miller, one of the contributors, describes our phones as “digital syringes.” He likens this compulsive use of our phones to a drug addiction, and he uses that kind of language. In keeping with that metaphor, Ivan, how did we get so hooked on these devices? What’s the mechanism in our brains that’s leading to that? And to keep with that metaphor of drug addiction, what might a detox look like for us as we think about our lives as Christians?

Ivan Mesa
I picked up the iPhone a little late. I was a little late to the party. I think it might have been 2010 or 2011. And at that point, I mean it was just amazing. It’s hard to think about this in this manner, but back when we were younger, we had SMS texts and you had to click on certain buttons to get certain letters to appear on your phone.

Matt Tully
And you only had so many you could send a month. You had to pay for each message.

Ivan Mesa
Limitations.

Brett McCracken
Oh my goodness. I forgot about that.

Matt Tully
You could run up that bill real quick.

Ivan Mesa
And so in the beginning, you start seeing these new features of texting and calling and then listen to your music. And none of us are Luddites in the sense that we don’t benefit. We both have iPhones. We both are on social media. So we’re not saying here that this is all bad, but there is a point where you start seeing, like the proverbial frog in the kettle, you’re just getting warmed up over time, and then you realize you’re checking your phone every six seconds. You pick up your phone, you feel the sensation of notifications when there’s none on your phone—that that’s an actual thing.

Bret McCracken:
Ghost notifications.

Ivan Mesa
Yes, exactly.

Matt Tully
It feels like it’s buzzing in your pocket, but it didn’t.

Ivan Mesa
I feel like it’s buzzing right now, and I don’t even have it on me. So I think over time you start seeing—back to the profit motive here with companies—just the way that these are created to be addictive. And you asked about ways to detox from that. Addiction, personally, I’ve had seasons where I just take a break from all social media, take a break from different notifications. I turn that all that off. I think Cal Newport, his whole stuff on deep work, has been so helpful for me, and his book Digital Minimalism. He’s a productivity guru, and I just appreciate that so much, and he advocates for that pulling back on media. Another thing is just, personally, one thing that I do is on Sundays I just take a break from all things on my phone. And that’s just a weekly thing, where it’s not this emergency situation where you’re just over your head with social media or technology in general, and it’s a good way to just hit the reset button on a weekly basis.

Matt Tully
So you’re just not using your phone all day long? Is that how it works?

Ivan Mesa
Yeah. My job requires me to be on my phone, be present, making phone calls.

Brett McCracken
I can attest to that as his colleague at TGC. He doesn’t text or bug me. As my supervisor at TGC, it’s nice to know I’m never going to be bugged on a Sunday, because Ivan doesn’t use his phone.

Ivan Mesa
And some people just maybe should not be on social media, or have a dumb phone. And this is all a matter of prudent and wisdom. There’s not a one right way approach to doing this, but I think what we’re trying to do in this book is bring these people together to have words of wisdom for this generation that are so addicted that we are scrolling ourselves to death. And when you think about just attention, we have limited attention in our lifetime. Our lives are finite. We have a certain amount of time. And when you think about just over the course of a day, a week, a month, years, a decade, when you think of that attention being given over to some other company to make money off of you (for a company) it just puts things in perspective. And so Tony Reinke’s book on technology has been so helpful here—12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You—even non-Christians are talking about this. There’s a book called Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, and it’s just super helpful. Attention is the currency of our age, and we want, as Christians, we think our attention matters. Where are we putting the main focus of our attention? Is it ultimate things? Is it the Lord? Is it the church? Is it God’s word? Is it people? And sometimes I think some of these technologies distract us from what ultimately we should be putting our attention on.

16:25 - The Finite Resource of Attention

Matt Tully
Brett, in Christian circles, it’s not uncommon to speak of the finite resources that God has given us and wanting to use those resources wisely, whether that’s our money or our time. But why attention? Why is attention distinct from just time? And why would you want to focus on that right now?

Brett McCracken
I think because attention has a spiritual formation component. Where you give your attention, it matters for how you’re being formed. What you attend to in life is what is feeding your soul. That’s what my book The Wisdom Pyramid was all about. We need to be careful about what is feeding our souls, where we are giving our attention, our limited amounts of attention. Because if you give your attention mostly to TikTok and mostly to Netflix and mostly to this kind of digital junk food out there, you are going to be formed in a certain way. But if you give your attention to the more transcendental sources of wisdom and truth, if you give your attention chiefly, of course, to God. And that’s one of the things that’s so critical for Christians in this whole conversation is what we’re really talking about here is a world where there is less and less attention being given to our creator, to God. One of the major side effects, practically, for Christian life in the digital age is that we just have less and less time in our lives to be quiet, to be still, and know that he is God, to be devotionally quiet with the Lord, with Scripture, just in prayer. I feel like we probably don’t pray much anymore because we fill all the gaps in our day which we might have used to use those opportunities to pray or just to be still and reflect with gratitude on the gifts of God. Now we just fill all those gaps with something on our phone, anything on our phone—text messages, notifications, social media. And so I think the degradation of our attention, the depletion of our attention, has huge spiritual consequences, because you are not going to have a vibrant spiritual life without that relationship with God. And any relationship, whether you’re talking about a marriage relationship or a friendship, you need time. Time is an essential ingredient. Time together is an essential ingredient to a healthy relationship. And that’s true of our spiritual relationship with God. We need time with him, and we need to give our attention to him and to listen to his word and to pray and to seek him. And that’s why in an attention economy, it’s a spiritual economy as well.

Ivan Mesa
I would also add that’s the vertical dynamic at play; there’s also the horizontal. And so my worst moments as a father is when I am on my phone and not paying attention to my kids. I care about far-flung issues and the outrage of the day on social media or what’s going on in this part of the world, and the ironic part is that I cannot affect change in some of these areas that are way above my pay grade. But when it comes to the children right in front of me—diapers to change, a book to read, a discipline conversation, like all these things—I am tempted to care more about things that I cannot change than the things that are staring me right in the face. And those are moments that I’ve had to repent. So, yes, the vertical dynamic of attention toward the Lord, but also at the horizontal level—just attention to where the Lord has placed me and called me as a father, husband, church member, as a neighbor—what are the things there in front of me that I can do by God’s grace? And I think that conversation on attention has immediate implications for our day-to-day experience.

19:57 - Disembodied Relationships

Matt Tully
Ivan, keeping with that horizontal dimension that you just brought up, another thing that is highlighted throughout the book is just the effect of these disembodied interactions and relationships that we tend to have online, mostly in social media, but there are probably other forms of that disembodied dynamic that we experience. Ivan, how would you describe the effect that the very common experience that we have of doing a FaceTime call with somebody, or even worse, just sending someone messages online without ever even seeing the person, how does that affect us and how we think about each other, for both other Christians and other believers but even non-Christians? How would you boil that down?

Ivan Mesa
All these tools are great. With my parents and our children seeing their grandfather, it is great to FaceTime when you are separated by distance. So I think these technologies are great in insofar as it allows you to see people that you wouldn’t see otherwise. I have coworkers at TGC that I get to text with, Zoom with, be on the phone with. With my children, for seeing their grandfather, it’s great to FaceTime. So those are all good things. At the same time, these technologies can give you an illusion of intimacy when it’s not there. So much of our day-to-day experience with friendships with people that we know, like neighbors, there are things that can happen only when you see someone face to face. And so sometimes, like I was just saying earlier, you can be tempted to think these digital friendships, these connections you have, are the most important things in your life when they’re not. Those are good to have, those are blessings, you wanna steward them well. But at times they can pull you away from the embodied relationships that we were created for by the Lord himself. So I think it is just growing in the awareness of that and allowing you to be focused in on what the Lord has called you to right there in front of you.

21:44 - Artificial Intelligence

Matt Tully
Brett, let’s talk about another big issue, a very hot-button issue in the digital world today. That would have to be AI, artificial intelligence. It’s one of these things that over the last couple of years has just been thrust into the forefront of the public consciousness in a way that maybe wasn’t the case before. Obviously, there have been especially filmmakers thinking about AI and the effect of AI on our culture on society for many, many decades. But it’s only recently that we’ve begun to see the fulfillment of some of these fantasies actually coming to fruition right in front of us. And I think it’s been a shocking but also exciting, exhilarating, confusing kind of thing for many Christians. And I think in particular for Christians, we can sometimes have a little bit of a sense of unease, because we have a certain view of humanity and what it means to be a human. We have a view of life and what the good life is in God’s economy. But we also don’t know of any Bible verses that talk about AI. And maybe it feels like very few even come close to addressing something as novel as artificial intelligence. So help us start to think about that. What would be some basic principles that Christians should hold onto when it comes to trying to engage this AI conversation?

Brett McCracken
This is the new frontier of technology. I think we’re just beginning the discourse and the critical evaluation of AI, and I think in another decade it’ll be interesting to see how the conversation shifts and how culture is changed. I think it’s probably going to be the next internet in terms of think about how radically our world has been reshaped in the last thirty years by the internet. That’s what AI is going to do for every aspect of society and culture. So it’s definitely good for Christians to start thinking about it. To go back to Postman and just this whole conversation about how every technology is not innocuous and neutral. There are things that it allows us to do that we couldn’t do before that are maybe good and helpful, and there are ways that it changes things in perhaps negative ways that we need to be alert to and on guard to. So obviously with AI we can already see some very helpful, practical ways that it can help, just with efficiency in every industry. Even as a writer, sometimes I’m writing an email now, and the AI finishes my sentence and I’m like, That’s actually what I was going to say. Thank you for saving me two seconds. And that sort of thing is happening in every industry, the way that AI can kind of supplement in an administrative assistance sort of way. And that’s helpful. At the same time, I think we have to start asking questions about where is the line in terms of what we’re going to be okay with robots and AI replacing in terms of human capacities? When it starts getting into mimicking human creativity—like, I’m a writer, and I’m a little disturbed by how good AI writing already is, and we’re in kind of the dial-up era of AI technology. It’s a very rudimentary.

Matt Tully
Yeah. We’re still just at the very beginning.

Brett McCracken
We’re still at the beginning. So if it’s this good already, we’re going to have a William Faulkner AI soon and a Shakespeare in terms of quality of writing.

Matt Tully
I just actually saw some talking about Shakespeare and poetry. I just saw some study that was done recently where they actually showed different, I think to college students, different poetry samples, and they didn’t tell them where they were from. And consistently, the AI-generated poetry scored better among these students than the actual real poetry by a human.

Brett McCracken
That’s disturbing. So that’s the sort of thing that I think we have to think about carefully. What is it going to mean for culture when some of the most beautiful written, visually created things are no longer the product of humans? How do we then think about our capacity as humans who have the image of a Creator God? We are creators by our nature, but AI doesn’t bear the image of God, and yet they are creating in a way that kind of glorifies a Creator God. And so it’s just weird to think about that, and I think there’s a lot of theological questions that we’re going to have to wrestle with when it comes to anthropology and the nature of humanity and the image of God. And precisely how does AI mimic certain human capacities that we used to think were the unique domain of humans? One thing that I’ve been thinking about recently that I find problematic about AI has to do with the instancy of results with AI. Like on ChatGPT, you can ask a fairly complex question, and you get an instant, fairly good in-depth answer. You can give it a prompt, like compose a symphony in the style of Beethoven about this theme. And in like in five seconds it will produce something. There’s something obviously really cool about that in a shiny-new-object-toy sort of sense, but there’s something disturbing about that, because patience and time and creation is part of the joy of it. As a writer and as a creator myself, the way that I glorify God as a writer—or as a painter glorifies God, if you’re a Christian painter, or whatever your vocation—is not just the result; it’s the process. It’s the painstaking work and consideration and attention. To go back to the precious value of our attention, when you attend to your task, it takes time. So it demeans that when you can snap your fingers in two seconds and AI produces something that would take you a year to produce.

Matt Tully
It seems to cheapen it in some way.

Brett McCracken
It cheapens it. And so I think that that’s a question that we’re going to have to wrestle with is just the cheapening of content and ideas and art and culture. I could go on with that because this is, as someone who cares about the arts and beauty, this is pretty concerning to me, but that’s a conversation probably for another day. But there’s a lot that we need to be thinking about with AI.

Matt Tully
Ivan, when it comes to AI and the future, as Brett said, there’s a good chance, probably very likely, that we are still just in the very early stages and that there are developments to come and applications to come that we’ve maybe not even imagined yet. Would you say you’re more on the optimistic side about all the good that it’s going to do, that on balance it’s going to be a really positive development? Or would you be more pessimistic about the effects of AI on our culture?

Ivan Mesa
I’m naturally pessimistic, as Brett knows, and so even hearing debates with Elon Musk and OpenAI controversy, I tend to be more on the Elon Musk side of I think this presents potentially an existential threat to humanity. But take it with a grain of salt. I’m naturally a Puddleglum. But I think on the whole, my contrarian take on AI stuff at times is not building new stuff per se; it’s building off a pool of data that humanity has created. So, yes, in some ways it’s new content—derivations of what we’ve created—but it’s based on what humanity has created.

Matt Tully
So it’s fundamentally not possible of being original, truly original.

Ivan Mesa
Yeah, I think so.

Brett McCracken
Just to push back on that, though, because I’ve thought about that. Every human created work of art is the same thing. Every human creation is building off of what has come before. And every artist will say so. The most original musician who created the most original sounding music came from the influences that they heard growing up with music. The Beatles were not wholly original. Elvis was not wholly original. He was building on all these influences of music. So that’s what human creation already is. It’s a remixing of existing raw materials of culture. So it isn’t clear to me how what AI is doing is all that different from what humans actually do as artists.

Ivan Mesa
And we’re still in the beginning of this conversation. So I think while this book is not specifically on AI, we might need a book ten years from now called AI’ing ourselves to death. We just need more wisdom.

Brett McCracken
Just five years from now.

Ivan Mesa
Yeah, the acceleration of change and the pace here is just so quickly happening that Christians tend to be a few steps behind the culture and new technologies. And so we’re just trying to catch up with where the culture is at right now and bring the best thinkers, the ethicists, to really wrestle with this. And so I think this conversation is, in microcosm, what a lot of Christians are discussing and debating about—the role of AI within art, creating, even spiritual wisdom. That’s a whole different category, but AI cannot create wisdom. It can create content, but there are certain things about the church, about God’s word, about the Christian experience, the Holy Spirit in dwelling believers that AI cannot replicate. And we’re just going to have to wrestle through a lot of those things in the future.

30:31 - Balancing the Benefits and Pitfalls of Using Digital Tools for Ministry

Matt Tully
And that’s one of the things I love about this book and what you guys are doing is assembling this team of thinkers to help us process this. As you said, things are changing so quickly. It can feel so hard to keep up, as a normal Christian. I think of people listening right now. Maybe it’s a pastor who’s just working away on his sermon every week, or there’s a stay-at-home mom who’s just enmeshed in the life of diapers and lunches and taking kids to different events, and it can be really hard to keep up with the constant stream of developments that we read about. And so having a resource like this book just helps to distill some of that down and help us to think very carefully along with others who have spent more time than we can spend on some of these things. Another quick question. Digital platforms, in general, whether it’s a streaming video or podcasts or social media sites, they have been such a powerful vehicle for ministry over the past twenty years or so. And there’s probably no better example of that than the organization that you two work for, the Gospel Coalition, which arguably wouldn’t really be what it is today without the advent of the internet and digital technologies and digital content that we all can get on our phone anytime we want. How should we think about this as individual Christians, as people in leadership in a local church, or even as Christian organizations, just balancing the incredible ministry potential of these tools versus the dangers and the pitfalls that can also come with these tools? Brett, let’s start with you.

Brett McCracken
This is a question that I’ve thought about and wrestled with a lot, because I tend to be a techno-skeptical borderline Luddite when it comes to these things, and yet I work for an online digital ministry known as the Gospel Coalition. And so even in my own vocation, I sometimes wrestle with this question of am I just adding to the problem, or am I just contributing to the glut of content that people are just consuming and scrolling through on their phones? And what I say and where I’ve come to is just this idea that technology can be redeemed. Even technologies which in the sum total are probably a net negative for culture, there are still ways that they can be deployed for redemptive ends. And that you see that with almost any technology in history. And so I think the key for Christians is first to go slow when it comes to adopting and deploying technologies, to not just rush and whatever new technology comes along, you’re just like instantly, “How can we use this for our ministry and our mission?” But you just think carefully about it and consider the costs and consider not only the things that it affords for you to do but also the things that it changes for the worse. So go slow in how you do it, but also be hopeful that the Holy Spirit can use even deeply broken platforms and compromised spaces like the internet. And of course, if you think more broadly about Christian mission throughout time, it’s always been true that Christians don’t shy away from the places in the world geographically that are hostile or dangerous or disease ridden. You still go there as Christians, because you have to bring the gospel there. You have to bring the redemption of Jesus to these lost spaces. And so we might look at the internet like we look at Ebola-stricken West Africa. Christians still go there. Christians are still present. We are faithfully present in the spaces of the internet and social media, because we believe that there are people dying. There’s a spiritual sickness that is endemic on the internet, and if we’re not there, if Christians aren’t there, if for our own piety and the purity of our spiritual lives we run for the analog hills, so to speak, and live offline, then we’re just abandoning this space. We’re abandoning these people that we really believe are being malformed in powerful ways. And so I view what we do at the Gospel Coalition as trying to be a light in the darkness, bringing health to a generally unhealthy space. And hopefully, if people are scrolling through their devices anyway and maybe consuming a lot of junk food, they come across some healthy items from places like the Gospel Coalition and many other Christians who are providing healthy things online.

Ivan Mesa
That’s a great missionary perspective. I would also add a discipleship component here. The reality is Christians are going to be engaged online. They’re going to be on platforms. They’re going to be on social media accounts. Some may not, and that’s fine, but we want to create a culture in which we use and leverage these tools to get people back in their context in their churches, in their small groups. We want to use content online to help encourage Christians to be faithful in their lives. So the end goal was never to create content so that they can live on that content. We create and leverage the content to turn around and say, “This is how you be a faithful husband, as a church member, as a faithful member serving the needs in your community.” So we want to create content in that way to basically be faithful to God’s word so the church can be the church. That’s really our goal at the end of the day.

Brett McCracken
We often talk at the Gospel Coalition internally about how we never want to be a replacement for the local church. Nothing on your phone can ever be a replacement for the local church. So if you pay attention to our output in terms of our resources, they’re mostly actually sending people to offline realities, whether it’s the local church or Christian community or their families or various things. So I think that’s one redemptive use of technology is to remind people of the health and the beauty and the wonder of the physical world that God created.

Matt Tully
So maybe that’s the main application after someone finishes listening to this conversation is put your phone down, stop listening to podcasts for a little while, and go do something outside.

Brett McCracken
Yes.

Ivan Mesa
Amen.

36:17 - Lightning Round

Matt Tully
Maybe a couple of lightning round questions for you both. I’d love to hear both of your answers to each of these. If you had to delete all of your social media apps on your phone, Ivan, except for one, which one would you keep and why?

Ivan Mesa
Well, I have none on my phone right now. So I’m living my best Neil Postman life. I would say I think X, formerly Twitter, would probably be it. I like a text-based app with words mostly. I know it has other things, but the short-form conversations, little chatter conversations and updates, I enjoy that.

Matt Tully
But you’ve chosen not to have that on your phone?

Ivan Mesa
Nope.

Matt Tully
Is that just because you didn’t find it helpful? Was it becoming too all consuming for you? What was behind that decision?

Ivan Mesa
I’m an editor of a book called Scrolling Ourselves to Death, so I think I would be living hypocritically if I was just endlessly notified, scrolling everything. I mentioned Cal Newport earlier. I’ve been so helped by Cal Newport in terms of just productivity, and If I’m trying to be faithful in my calling and my nine to five job at TGC, as a husband, as a church member, creating curriculum for teaching on a Sunday morning, if I am continually bombarded by this platform and that platform, it would just make my life really difficult to be faithful in all those areas. So it’s one practical way that I just try to be faithfully present in what the Lord has called me to in my life.

Matt Tully
Brett, how about you? If you had to delete all of them except for one, what would you keep?

Ivan Mesa
Instagram.

Brett McCracken
Yeah, you’re right. I probably would keep Instagram, and it’s because I think as much as there’s lots of problems with Instagram, I actually like seeing photos of my friends and family who live in other places of the world and just getting little glimpses of their lives and their kids. As a parent of three cute little kids, I’m biased, but I think they’re really cute. There’s something that’s not terrible about our impulse to want to share photos of children. Children are gifts from God, and they’re precious, and it blesses people. I know it blesses my parents, who live far away from me, to see photos of them. And I like to text people directly more photos than I post publicly on Instagram, but it’s still a way that you can keep in touch with people. And I find it to be a generally more edifying social media platform than some of the other ones.

Matt Tully
Brett, my next question for you: Do you use ChatGPT? And if so, how do you use it?

Brett McCracken
No, I don’t use it. So that’s my answer. I’ve played with it here and there, but yeah ’m a little bit just scared, honestly, about the potential, as a creative, connecting to what I was saying earlier about just creativity and the threat that AI poses.

Matt Tully
Are you scared that it would sap you of your creativity? Like you would become too dependent on it, or something else?

Brett McCracken
No, I can’t see myself ever relying on it for my own process, but just something about it weirds me out in terms of that idea that a complex question or a fairly complex human prompt that I take years to process and think through can be so rapidly mimicked in a decent way. So just for my own mental health, I’ve avoided even being aware of those potentials.

Matt Tully
How about you, Ivan?

Ivan Mesa
I taught a Sunday school, and I created an outline for a passage. I think it was 1 Samuel 18 or 19. I love alliteration, and I could not find the one word that had alliteration with the two other points. I put it in ChatGPT, and it gave me the right word. I forget the outline now.

Brett McCracken
That’s a practical usage of ChatGPT.

Ivan Mesa
Desperation, deception, deliverance. I had my three points for my class.

Matt Tully
You just needed one more D word.

Ivan Mesa
Exactly. It was like every word was "de," and ChatGPT gave me the one word that I was missing. One other time I helped my wife. She has a business that she runs, and it was a complex mathematical formulation for a product—how much it cost her to buy that product, how much she was selling it for, what she needs to sell it for to make a margin. So I just put that in ChatGPT, and it gave me the correct answer. And you can probably Google that maybe, but ChatGPT just took all that information and gave me the answer in a matter of seconds.

Matt Tully
My favorite use case for ChatGPT relates to Excel formulas, where you can go in and, in natural human language, explain what I’m trying to do, and it will create this complex formula that almost always works perfectly. It is amazing. Those are examples, I think, of augmenting things that we’re doing, simplifying things that we’re trying to do, without really replacing us in the driver’s seat of that role.

Brett McCracken
Yeah, I think the way that AI augments search has already proven to be helpful for me. Now, when you Google a question, it gives you that AI summary at the top, and I find that to be helpful a lot of times. Recently, I’ve been Googling things like “best examples of revisionist westerns,” because I’m teaching this faith in film cohort with TGC, and I’m doing genre studies on different genres. And the AI summaries have been really helpful, and it’s reminded me of, Oh, I didn’t remember that film, and I didn’t remember that one. And so I think as an augmenting tool to the natural algorithms of search, it’s super helpful.

41:29 - Life-Giving, Screen-Free Habits

Matt Tully
Maybe a final question. And Ivan, you’ve already given us a little glimpse into something that you do along these lines, but maybe there’s something else that you’d mentioned. What’s one screen-free habit that’s had the biggest impact on your own spiritual life, your own family life, and your own church’s life, as you think about being intentional with these technologies?

Ivan Mesa
Oh, that’s an easy answer. I think books in general. I cannot summarize and tell the story of my conversion apart from books. I cannot tell the story of my discipleship and growth in Christ apart from books. I’m an editor of books. I work for an organization, the Gospel coalition, that produces books. I work with Crossway as well. I did this book. So I think books in general have been kind of my secret sauce to work against and mitigate against the onslaught of social media and technology. It’s sit down with a book that’s not beeping at me, notifying me of emails and crises and a text message. So I think the book itself, the artifact of beginning a book, seeing the argument from beginning to end, chapter to chapter, page to page, has helped me in this age of social media, technology, and AI to just focus in on those things that matter most. So whether it’s Christian books or even non-Christian books, in terms of common grace and benefiting from a good book of fiction or poetry, those have all been a means of grace that the Lord has used to help me to be a better human and a more faithful Christian.

Matt Tully
That’s helpful. Brett, how about you?

Brett McCracken
I would say two (I think maybe that’s cheating): the church and nature. And if you’ve read The Wisdom Pyramid, you know that those are two of the prominent, foundational things that I advocate. But in terms of a non-screen moment of my week that I look forward to, it’s going to church and being in the embodied presence of the saints and singing in an embodied way and hearing actual voices, and shaking hands in a physical way. And all of that is just so recalibrating for me, because I spend so much of my week working on a device for the digital ministry of the Gospel Coalition.

Matt Tully
Would you then advocate for or do you tend to bring a physical Bible with you so you don’t have to be looking at your phone?

Brett McCracken
Yes. As often as I can remember to bring my physical Bible, I do. Sometimes I forget, and I have to use the ESV app for my Bible reading. So the church and then nature. Living in Southern California helps, because it’s nice all year round, but going on walks in the middle of my day has been really helpful for me just to have screen-free time to process. I’m a big believer in the importance of space to think, which is an increasingly rare thing in a hyper-productive, optimize-every-moment mode of living that technology allows us to do. But when you try to optimize every moment—every five minutes, every sixty seconds of gaps in your day—you end up having no space to think and to critically connect dots and make connections of what’s happened in your life in the recent history. So going on solo walks in my neighborhood or family walks with my kids has been so helpful just to not only have that space to think and to reflect but also just to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation in a way that cultivates gratitude and worship.

Matt Tully
Ivan and Brett, thank you so much for taking some time today to help us think through these complex issues. But they’re ever present. They’re all around us, and we can’t really escape some of the challenges that we discussed today. And I think this book in particular is going to be such a helpful resource for so many Christians as we try to be faithful in the midst of an increasingly tricky world to navigate on these fronts.

Ivan Mesa
Thanks so much.

Brett McCracken
Yeah, thank you Matt.

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