The Offering
Sabbath rest and work in the information age
In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.
- Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance
It has been a little while since I wrote here. I had plans when I started writing, about writing ahead of demand and keeping drafts in reserve to post on slow days, about regular, algorithm friendly rhythms. I am learning that most of that planning was useless. There is no way to game the system, no way to keep pace with the age of information.
I have been thinking about what it means to rest and resist in the attention economy in which we live, which incentivises noise and busyness and disincentivises silence. The algorithmic systems of social media incentivise regularity and immediacy. It tempts us to prioritise regularity and immediacy over quality, to say the first thing that comes to us as quickly as possible in a mad dash to be heard amidst the crushing roar of information, as if a few dozen drops of water into the river will be more noticeable than three or four. In an attention economy we become the product, our lives and experiences and social interactions the commodity which is being bought and sold. When tragedy strikes, when war breaks out or economies collapse or public figures are killed, our systems of communication reward those who speak most quickly and with the least thought or self-reflection, and punishes those people who take time to form their responses. The algorithm takes those few hours of reflection which give our souls dignity and turns them into an opportunity cost, a missed opportunity to grow an audience. It is a relentless sort of siege warfare being mounted against the walls of our souls.
You humans have so many emotions! You only need two: anger and confusion!
- The Good Place
The words above are spoken by an actual demon, but I can quite easily picture them being spoken in a board room in Silicone Valley. It is a remarkable thing to think about, that having run out of easily colonisable and expropriated land the business leaders of our age have found ways to colonise and expropriate our conversations, our relationships, our thoughts and our feelings. The rage bubbling under the surface of our world, bleeding through in our politics and our media every day, that flood of cortisol and adrenaline is the spoil, the chemical runoff which is the by-product of the strip mining of our brains. I have heard people say that we are living through the wild west days of the internet, but I think it is more like the time of the East India Company: wild exploitation in every direction, and hardly anyone willing or able to hold the corporations to account.
Talking about social media in this way is very complicated, because it is not just one thing. Like every market place it is at the same time a place where things are bought and sold and a place where communities are formed, a workplace and a social space and a political campaign ground. Even the economy has layers: the artists and charities and local business plying their trades in the online space are not the same as the corporations expropriating every quiet second of our day. This is why abstinence doesn’t really work, even though it is probably wise to touch more grass than we are naturally inclined. The town square may be owned and operated by corporations, but the things we say and do in it will affect our neighbours much more than they do the CEOs, who have probably established themselves at a distance. It would be easy to say ‘this thing is unhealthy, best to avoid it’. The whole world is unhealthy. What is much harder is finding a new and more ethical way of living in an unhealthy world.
‘I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect.’
- Romans 12:1-2 (NRSVA)
There is a risk when we talk about sabbath rest that we talk about it in wellness terms, like a buffer zone to protect a little part of our lives from the exploitation which consumes the rest of it. It is not that; it is more than that. It is not a bulwark designed to protect a little part of our lives from corruption, it is a sacrificial act which is meant to transform the rest of our lives. The choice to rest while everyone else is still running is a choice to run the race differently, to believe that pace alone is not enough to finish well. When we take sabbath rest we are choosing to believe that it is not the work that sustains us but the grace of God freely given. Once we choose to believe that, the way we work changes. It splits open a little door in the world, an alternative way of being which does not conform to the demands of a marketplace or the pressure to survive but instead allows to act freely and according to our own conscience. The point is not to retreat slowly from an exploitative world but to transform it.
It is easy to say that this is what we should do and hard to say how we should get there; it feels like the difference between pointing westward over the coast and crossing the Atlantic Ocean to reach the Americas. I keep thinking about what it means to engage in the digital world without playing into the endless game of commodification and dehumanisation. What if our online footprint was not an attempt to grow an audience or build a market but an offering, freely given into the world? What if my rest was a weapon more than a retreat? What if my silence was louder than my speech? What if when we did speak we said only what we meant, and then thoughtfully and gently and with purpose? I do not know, exactly, what that would look like, but I would like to find out.