How tech harvests our humanity

The second in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

In the first article, I painted a picture of the ordinary person using modern technology, for example, social media on a smart phone. I noted that advocates for modern technology seem to have two basic principles: that technology is natural and neutral. In this next article I want to introduce the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and show how he pushes against these two basic principles and invites us to think again about modern technology. Heidegger’s instinct, as a twentieth century philosopher, is to be suspicious that things are not as they seem, he casts his suspicious gaze over modern technology and sees a way of being that technology encourages that exists underneath the technologies that we use every day.

What Heidegger wants to show us about modern technology is not related to specific concerns about particular technologies but instead a general suspicion about the ‘essence’ of technology, or, you could say, the spirit of technology. He doesn’t want us to immediately jump to pragmatic questions about how to use technology, as if the primary question is how to make any given technology better or more moral. Instead, Heidegger wants us to take modern technology together as a whole and ask, “What is the essence of this?” Heidegger’s contention is that “technology is not an object or set of objects, nor a way of handling objects with tools, but a form of being the world. It is not something we choose to refuse, but the environment in which modern humans come into existence.”

Heidegger argues that underneath any piece of tech that we might use in our day-to-day lives, technology at its core has already completely changed the way that we as a society understand and interact with the world and everything in it. We live in a technological age and as members of a technological society and so we have been shaped by (to use Christian language, we have been ‘discipled’ by) the spirit of the age to see the world around us. Heidegger suggests that we now see the world as broken down into useable bits that can be categorised and reformed to suit our needs. As Mark Wrathall puts it, the essence of technology is to train us to “experience the world as calling on us or drawing us. To transform everything into stock pieces, so that they can be placed into a vast inventory of options.”[2] Growing up in a technological society means that we see the whole world as an Amazon warehouse a place of seemingly limitless options that can be called upon depending on our needs and quickly delivered.

A piece of technology such as the smartphone points to a wider ‘spirit’ of technology which intends to position everything, even human beings, as replaceable resources within a larger system.

The central word that Heidegger uses to describe the essence of technology is gestell which is not an easy word to translate into English, but two possible translations would be ‘positionality’, or ‘enframing’. His point is that the essence of technology is to remove objects, people, and things from their natural environment and position them so that they might become useful, a resource, available for our manipulation. When Heidegger says that the essence of technology is gestell he is pointing to the way that modern technology extracts objects from their contexts and turns them into a quarry to the plundered. There are of course obvious ways in which humanity has always extracted resources from the natural world: we have always quarried for energy (coal, oil etc) or chopped down forests for wood. By claiming that the essence of modern technology is gestell, Heidegger wants us to notice that in the modern world, it’s not just quarries or forests that we mine for resources but now anything and everything can be turned from being a singular object in the world into a recourse for extraction. Everything has become what Heidegger calls “standing reserve.”

Think again of a smartphone, it is just one of the billions of devices that sit on shelves or, having already been purchased, live in someone else’s pocket. Inside each device are thousands of transistors and circuit boards each of which again are stockpiled in warehouses ready to be replaced if needed or used for some other purpose. Your phone is connected to a network of nodes each of which can be replicated or replaced if needed, no node is unique. Your latest phone has no unique or prize relation to you, it’s just the latest upgrade which will be recycled in a year or two when the next upgrade becomes available. The person from whom you bought the phone is equally replaceable, just a faceless employee completing a set of controlled and pre-arranged tasks that are designed to be completed by anyone and no one in particular. Likewise, you as the consumer are considered to be little more than “standing reserve” by the companies that supply you with your smartphone and access to their networks. One of many millions of nodes in their system that has been analysed so that your preferences can be expertly mapped to the range of services that they provide. Within that system, you are completely replaceable. A piece of technology such as the smartphone points to a wider ‘spirit’ of technology which intends to position everything, even human beings, as replaceable resources within a larger system: “Every item within this standing reserve is reduced to a position, actively waiting to be called on. Heidegger insists this is no judgment on the radio, the internet, or the smartphone user. It is just the way in which the essence of modern technology interacts with humanity… Heidegger provides a diagnosis of our modern age and the way in which we humans have placed ourselves under the sway of modern technology, as a resource standing within a network which seeks, ultimately, to place, represent, and think of every entity as an object within an all-encompassing system.”

Let’s return to the original thought experiment at the start of the first article: a mother playing with her child, who immediately reaches for her phone to capture the moment when her child does something particularly cute. An advocate for modern technology, like Steve Jobs, may look at that interaction and see only the benefit: a mother wanting to remember a beautiful moment with her child extends the capacities of her brain using a digital tool to aid her memory. But Heidegger would be more suspicious, he would look at that moment and argue instead that the essence of technology is to turn everything, even a precious moment with a cute baby, into a resource to be used at a later date. The unique moment of joy and delight between parent and child becomes caught and codified such that it can be found and replayed at will or easily replicated to send to others. At the extreme end of the spectrum are so-called content creators who reduce themselves to just another resource to be harvested on social media.

So that is Heidegger’s diagnosis of our technological age, in the final article in this series we will consider Heidegger’s solution and consider what a particularly Christian response to Heidegger’s diagnosis might look like.

Article

Art

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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