Screens are Anti-Sacramental?
They are - and that should be exciting for Christian designers.
Recently, I had the pleasure to attend a conference hosted by New Polity called “Should We, Therefore, Destroy the Servers?” - the theme of the conference being, naturally, technology. New Polity has been a very strong influence on my thought: To Till and To Keep is a re-phrasing of one of their influential essays narrowed to computing.
One of the lines I recall from D.C. Schindler was a rather offhand remark during the closing panel that “screens are anti-sacramental.” This was one of the sharpest criticisms of technology as such at the conference. There was certainly a lot to say about our worship of technology and the bad cosmologies and anthropologies that lead to great and powerful errors in our technological lives, but criticisms of technologies as such were fewer than I expected. The second-closest criticism was Marc Barnes’s explanation of one of the difference between the screens and books: screens, because they show different things at different times, require a round-trip to some other place where the content is stored, and so create a perpetual relationship between the server and client. Webpages are a further extension of the screen paradigm, and downloaded-PDFs, being locally stored, are screens but a step towards books.1
I didn’t follow-up on the remark with Schindler himself, unfortunately, but on the drive home with my fellow FST co-author Aldo, we expanded upon this remark in a way that let several tensions about technology fall into place. Rather than the question of technology being one of goodness and truth, as it often seems to end up becoming (is X technology good or bad for us?), the question of technology is one of beauty, order, and kingship. This is partially described in In Summary but certainly needed more fleshing out.
To begin this argument, it fits the question to begin with a discussion of what is sacramental. The characteristic that appears to me most salient is the participation of some material in the sacrament: as Augustine describes, the waters of Baptism, having a natural cleansing effect, are endowed with spiritual cleansing by Christ at his own Baptism.
This characteristic is one of participation and is easily visible across the designs God has crafted. Participation is visible in the cosmological hierarchy, as minerals participate in the life of the plant, and the plant in the animal, and all in the life of man, and ultimately to the worship of God. It is present in Christ's call of his apostles and the resulting hierarchical structure of the Church. It is present in subsidiarity when it is thought of not simply as a policy recommendation, but as an ontology.
I would argue that participation, in the senses above, is God's aesthetic. In the modern sense of ‘aesthetic’, this may appear profane, but even considering that beauty is a transcendental should indicate to the Christian there is something far deeper to beauty than sales. Beyond that, though, I have picked up from listening to Andrew Willard Jones that there is a continuity among aesthetic, design, law, order, and beauty. (I regret that I am not well-read enough to know the tradition of this idea; it seems implied rather than explicit in Jones's writings.) Considering the sacraments as divine law, this continuity would argue it is fitting for a law to have (or rather be) an aesthetic.
The screen is anti-sacramental because its aesthetic is not God's aesthetic - it is not fractal and participatory. The screen is flat, not simply in its physical shape but in its lack of hierarchy and fittingness. The end - the worship of God - is not built into the screens or how they are used. Screens are designed to display arbitrary color values in grids, implying that the fulfillment of a screen is illustrated best by the Gallery of Babel (hence the thumbnail today). Screens cannot participate anywhere near as much in the goods they provide because they are not designed to provide those goods.
What this implies - and why Schindler’s statement produced a train of thought so hopeful to me - is that the problem of screens is an aesthetic problem - in other words, we're using screens because we haven't found something more beautiful and fitting and participatory and integral yet. This claim is a claim I find very heartening as a challenge and a call for Christian designers and technologists. It is as if someone has pointed out to us that we, being a warlike people, have been using our battle-axes to chop down trees and our war-hammers to drive in nails. Not only would our houses - the inferior goods we seek now - would be better served with lighter, safer, smoother tools, but we would also glorify God better in leaving behind our pagan, bloodied tools in service of the even higher goods we ought to seek.
One could be pedantic and argue that books require relationships and infrastructure too, even in their use: they must be kept free from fire and water, and eventually paper does rot. I think this is a fair critique - it’s the exception that proves the rule. In societies and settings where the book cannot be protected as such, it’s rare or perhaps even silly to rely upon books. Oral tradition develops before written tradition for these reasons - it could be unjust to rely upon books when the relationships that protect books are not there or not just.