How to Be Immortal Online

With digital spaces regularly evolving and updating, and the infinite scroll beckoning to us at all times, this episode questions if we have, as a culture, fully embraced the end of endings. Hanna Reichel, an associate professor of reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, helps illuminate how the emergence of godlike AI and the rise of creator culture compare with the reformations and transformations through which people lived (and died) in the past.

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Episode transcript:

Andrea Valdez: So the Ouija board was a very controversial toy in my house growing up. I think my mother was just very much against having one because of its associations with magic and the occult. But I was able to finally convince her to buy me one because I pointed out to her that it was manufactured by Parker Brothers, and I figured if they could create a board game like Monopoly, that the Ouija board must not be that dangerous.

Megan Garber: I mean, that is a winning argument if I ever heard one.

Garber: Andrea, when I played with Ouija boards—exclusively at slumber parties, and only to ask this mysterious portal to another world about people we had crushes on—I remember feeling really entranced by it. And also really creeped out by it! And I think I might still be, a little bit, even though I now know the science behind it: It works through something called the ideomotor effect, where thoughts in the players’ minds, in a way that’s pretty unconscious to the players themselves, end up guiding their movements across the board. Which is actually a nice metaphor, I think, for the web—and, really, for so much of what we’ve been talking about in this season of the show. This thing that felt mysterious had been human the whole time.

Valdez: Oh, that’s so interesting, and I think the really human thing about all of these fortune-telling devices is that they provide answers. And as humans, we really, really crave answers. And I think that maybe is also why the web—I mean really the internet at large—it felt so magical for so long. Because it’s this gigantic answer-providing machine. So it starts to make sense to me that we’ve collectively imparted like a sort of deified state to the internet. Because it’s this seemingly omniscient oracle.

Garber: Oh, yes. But then also because the web is made by humans, it’s also limited in its vision, right? Which is a pretty big flaw, oracle-wise. And the fact that the web can seem omniscient, just like you said, I think can make it even more jarring when, you know, the glitches show up, as they inevitably will. When we think about the reality of the internet, when we consider it in light of how to know what’s real, that hope for omniscience, I think, is also really instructive because many of us do invest tech with a certain spirituality, but I’m really interested in why we do that and, and especially what the consequences might be. So I spoke with Hanna Reichel, who is an associate professor of reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Professor Reichel has a particular interest in what they call theologies of the digital. Which means, basically, that they take one of the core interests of theological thought—questions about how humans interact with a higher power—and apply it to digital technologies like social media and AI. Professor Reichel thinks really expansively, but also with remarkable nuance, about tech as a form of faith. And their insights are clarifying, I think, for anyone who is grappling with technologies that are made by humans—but that can feel, at times, beyond our grasp.

Hanna Reichel: If the 20th century was the century of power, we might say the 21st century is the century of knowledge. People often talk about data as the new oil, the new gold. This whole question of technology and the kind of superhuman power it affords, and how that intersects with human freedom and agency seems super interesting to me, and actually is something that theologians have been thinking about for a long time, right? Centuries, probably going back to Boethius in the sixth century, to think about, like, if there is someone who knows everything about you, what does that do to human freedom? What, how can we still think about the openness of the future? Is everything predetermined or not? And theologians have, of course, thought about these questions in relation to God, and here we have a long tradition of thinking through these questions. That might also serve as a resource to think through some of the versions in which these questions appear in a technological age.

Garber: What are some of those versions, in particular? What are some of the connections you’re seeing, right now, between religion and tech?”

Garber: You’re reminding me of that great line from Arthur C. Clarke, “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” Which captures so much—not only about tech itself, but also about the human power dynamics you’re talking about. Because magic is something that, almost by definition, we can’t control. It’s just there. And I think that’s part of why magic is invoked so often almost as a sales pitch with AI—with branding that treats the tech not just as a new consumer experience, but also as a new existential fact. That this is just reality now. So I guess to question the magic—how should we be talking about AI right now? Is it a force? An agent? How do you think about AI, in linguistic terms?

Reichel: That’s a very good question. I think one of the key theological terms that applies would be that of a creature, a created being. And one of the interesting things, right, if in a theological imaginary, we think of God as the ultimate creator and creatorship as a divine quality, we think of ourselves as creatures, as being in our being dependent on that creator, having been generated by that creator, but also kind of continuing to have our being from that source. But then as human beings, we’re in this unique position that we’re kind of created co-creators. The Christian tradition uses the language of the Imago Dei, of kind of seeing our own capacity to create as reflecting something of that divine creativity. But so there’s now an iteration of an iteration where we see ourselves capable of creating beings that now also have the capacity to create things. And so that becomes kind of an uncanny chain, right?

Garber: And there are so many different links in that chain! Because with AI, we are very directly creating other beings in our own images, trying to make these pieces of tech that very self-consciously resemble us as humans, but we’re also doing something similar, in a less direct way, on social media. There’s a kind of aptness to the fact that we talk about “content creators” and the “creator economy”—we talk so explicitly about creation there, except, with our videos and selfies and posts, we’re not creating other beings. We’re just re-creating ourselves.

Reichel: The desire to make oneself transparent and to share everything and to be seen and to be recognized by the big and small others. Maybe in a religious terminology, we could also say, right, to achieve some sort of permanence, right, to write one’s name into the book of life. If I see the sunset and have this meal, did it even happen if it isn’t, you know, written into some sort of record and shared with others? So there’s also almost like a frantic work on fashioning and curating a self and a persona out of these bits of our self-presentation.

Garber: And you know, there’s so much anxiety right now about social media and the kind of cruelty, really, on social media and the fact that forgiveness seems to be such a hard ethic for people to embrace right now. And I just, I wonder what you think about that. Does that ring true to you?

Reichel: Yeah, I mean, there have been—so partially, right, if there’s an urge to preserve one’s memory or to have things recorded, there’s obviously also the terror that comes from things then also being preserved and not being able to change them anymore. This pertains to our relationship to time, of course, right? Things, things, things are kind of set into this record and other people can see what we did last summer or the thing that we said in an unwise moment to someone very quickly. And there have been even, right, legal processes now in the European Union to say we need to achieve a right to be forgotten, not just the right to be remembered. Because it seems that even our humanity or our ability to have a future that is in some ways different from the past that we have already lived and produced, it needs to be safeguarded. And that’s also, to me, a very interesting iteration on this idea of divine judgment, where memory kind of reproduces who you are, and that maybe a kind of cut of who we have been yesterday or three years ago is sometimes a means of grace of being able to become a different person.

Valdez: I’m so glad Professor Reichel brought up the right-to-be-forgotten laws. You know, they’ve been introduced in a few countries. They’re probably most famously enforced in the European Union. And they aim to do as they say. If a person has some information about themselves on the web that they want to be taken down, they can request that that information be taken down. And there are lots of caveats about what exactly you can request to be deleted. And in fact, some people in the U. S. have wanted these laws, but, you know, the big argument here against them has to do with the tension between our First Amendment law and some privacy laws. Ultimately, the reason right-to-be-forgotten laws are so interesting to me is they’re trying to codify into law this ancient and sort of religious notion of mercy.

Garber: Oh, that’s such a good point. And especially because mercy isn’t just a religious concept, right? It’s also a more broadly cultural one. And the fact that it’s both, both religious and cultural, I think forces us to clarify things for ourselves. You know, in the sense of, religions have concepts like confession and reconciliation and atonement. They have rituals and rites that if you do believe in them, basically offer you a kind of clarity when it comes to mercy, you know, in those ideas: It is God who gives you mercy, and this is how you can seek it. And, you know, the right to be forgotten, for all of its legal and ethical and, like you said, pragmatic complications, I think is an effort to bring some of that clarity to a secular context and to the web. It’s trying to answer this very broad and quasi-religious question of, you know, when the web remembers everything, how can we create mechanisms on it that will encourage us to forget, which is also to say, to sort of give each other and give ourselves grace?

Valdez: Yes. And in many religions, the dual force to mercy is justice, and the internet, and technology more broadly, it has certainly been a tool that’s allowed for more justice with various social movements, and you can capture injustices on camera. But I think the difference is in a pre-internet era, human laws, cultural constructs—they used to allow people to seek justice and receive mercy, and then we could collectively, for the most part, move forward. I mean, we were imperfect at moving forward to be sure, but in a digital world now that we live in, in which the mantra is everything on the internet’s forever, we don’t seem to get those same resolutions.

Garber: Yeah, the web, in so many ways, really does bring “the end of endings.” Structurally, it’s this constant collision between permanence and impermanence. In one way, it’s made of all these seemingly endless feeds and loops and streams and infinite scrolls. And that can, I think, make a lot of the stuff we share about each other and learn about each other seem extremely temporary and, and almost disposable, right? You see it and then it disappears. But then, just like you said, the internet is forever. The internet never forgets. And I think that helps to explain why, like Professor Reichel said, the feelings the web evokes in us can align so naturally with spiritual ideas, because the internet gives us a form of immortality. Or, at least: It seems to.

Garber: Professor Reichel, we’ve been talking about the web as an idea, in large part, and now I want to ask you about the web as a physical place and a physical thing. It’s easy to talk about it as something endless. And it can feel endless, in so many ways—but it’s also a very finite thing, right?

Reichel: The technological resources, we should not forget that they’re also limited, right? A lot of these metaphors that we have of the cloud, they seem like these are disembodied, almost spiritual, transcendent structures, but they rely on very concrete material resources, rare earths, server plants, metals. Energy. There are hard stops to the expansion of that economy. It’s probably already got to be pretty unsustainable in our lifetime, just in terms of the energy and the resources that it needs, let alone, you know, questions like climate effects and social and political inequalities and instability that it produces. So maybe this promise of, like, eradication of uncertainty and overcoming of finitude turns out to be more of an illusion at the end of the day.

Garber: Even though “the cloud,” in reality, is a series of hulking server farms scattered across the landscape, we experience the data it holds as almost metaphysical. And humans, every day, live out a version of that disconnect: We want to be more than our bodies, whatever the “more” might mean for us. But we have to do that wanting while knowing that our physical lives are also, in their own way, limited resources.

Reichel: Religion is fundamentally about grappling with contingency, right? With the fact that we have limited control and that we have limited lives and that religion is kind of what provides mechanisms and practices and frameworks to not overcome that, but to come to terms with that. So we could think more generally about religion as having to do with this attunement to our finitude that is temporal and in so many other ways also expressed. What of course is interesting is how technology itself, not just its creators but the technologies itself, becomes an instrument of faith or even an object of faith, right? That tech will make us better, will achieve perfection, will overcome all these things that kind of—like, tech will save us from all the things, as a religion in and of itself that I think many of these founding figures actually believe in.

Garber: Which I think goes back to the problem of definitions—because when we’re told that tech will offer us a form of salvation, it’s not always clear what, precisely, we’re being saved from—or, for that matter, what the “tech” in question actually is. And that’s partly because the tech itself is evolving so quickly and so chaotically. But I wonder whether it’s also because we haven’t fully articulated what we want the tech to be doing for us—and where its limits should be.

Reichel: You know, regardless of the questions of actual interiority and consciousness and so forth, which I do think might probably not be so close as we think, but we actually build meaningful relationships with artificial beings, right? You know, I don’t know whether we will ever be able to upload our minds into the cloud and live forever. Probably not. But we can, you know, train a machine to talk to us like the deceased loved one, if we just have enough of their letters and recordings and they will look and sound and talk like them. And we will feel like we relate to that being. And there’s all these debates about what AI can do better than humans and what it can not, in many ways it’s maybe alien intelligence more than artificial intelligence. So we need to artificially make the appearance that this is artificial when it’s actually, you know, programmed and and fed and trained by human beings who have to make distinctions and data sets and so forth. So sometimes, and we know this also, right, there’s a lot of reproduction of the same kinds of things that we see in human knowledge that comes out of AI and is sometimes even amplified. So all the biases and the original data set in our assumptions and expectations get reflected back to us.

Garber: And then there’s the question of what happens when those reflections keep going and the biases keep scaling—and at what point we meaningfully lose control over them. So many religious traditions have considered that question of overstep, basically, in the context of humans’ relationship with the divine. And I wonder whether they might have insight when it comes to the relationship humans are building with our machines. How can we check this power that we’ve unleashed?

Reichel: I mean, I think you see this actually as a trope in many religions. So you have the story of Daedalus and Icarus, who harness the power of, you know, technology and fly too close to the sun and get burned. You have the idea of Prometheus who invents fire, right? You have the story of Pandora’s box. Very ancient ideas that there’s an unleashing of a power that is a created power that spirals out of control. And I think so many of our contemporary debates around technology ask this question, right? Like, should we try and have that power? It’s a question that we ask around atomic power. It’s a question that we ask, and I think it has something to do with this law of Melvin Kranzberg: We always overestimate the short-term effects and underestimate the long-term effects. We are actually not capable of really estimating well the actual consequences that some changes in technology will have. We just see that there are these landslide moments and when that happens, it’s difficult to put the genie back in the box. In the Jewish tradition, you have the legend of Rabbi Loew who creates the golem, right? And you have Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster. You have Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s legend of the magician’s apprentice who bewitches the brooms and they start cleaning for him. And then there’s just, you know, he can’t control them anymore. They’re good creative powers, but they can kind of spiral into ungodly forms, which has less to do with, like, violating concrete moral codes or religious codes, and more with this understanding of, like, leaving this position of what it means to be a creature. That then does not result in punishment from God, but the thing itself creates its own punishment. Right? Like the genie that runs out of control, the atomic power, the bomb, like the thing that we created enslaves us.

Valdez: What Professor Reichel just said, that’s the big fear, right? That we create something to solve a problem—or just create something cool!—and its consequence is more sweeping than we imagined. For me, one of the technologies I’m convinced will have wider ramifications than we’re aware of is this idea of resurrection. Like, Megan, do you remember that hologram of Tupac performing at Coachella?

Garber: Oh, wow. Yes, I do.

Valdez: Yeah, yeah. So, this happened in 2012, and since then we’ve had a few other performing holograms of performers who have died. For example, Selena, I think, performed as a hologram. And, I just have to say, these things really creep me out. As you were talking about with Professor Reichel, these tools where you can re-create a person who died using images, videos, recordings of them, they just feel very ethically dubious.

Garber: I mean, even the way you said that, “re-create a person,” oh my goodness. In one way, those are really rarefied ideas, right? I mean, very few people will be converted into holograms, but I think they’re also questions that we’ll all need to grapple with in one way or another. And especially so with the rise of AI and the chatbots that Professor Reichel mentioned, which, you know, claim to allow their customers to quote, unquote “chat” with their departed loved ones. But then chatbots, like humans, can be error-prone, you know, especially in their earlier iterations. And there’ve been stories recently about those types of bots that seem to have a problem with glitchiness. And one woman who was “chatting,” again, quote, unquote, with her deceased former boyfriend was told by him that he was in hell.

Valdez: Oh my gosh. How awful. Well, you know I’m just very intrigued by this idea of, you know, who gets to define or own a legacy or the memory of a person?

Garber: Yeah.

Valdez: When you’re thinking about someone’s memory, it feels pretty harmless to theorize about what a person might say or think or do, you know, like, if they were alive today, you know, that sort of thing. In the case of these, say, holograms, you know, they’re attempting to push your fantasy onto a literal projected reality. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s one thing to daydream, and it’s quite another to make those daydreams a manifested reality.

Garber: And questions about how we treat the dead, I think, are often really questions about how we should be treating the living. And I think that’s part of the fantasy idea that you’re talking about. It’s really easy to imagine a world where peoples’ legacies become subject to so many of the things that we’ve been talking about throughout this season of the show—to misinformation, to confusion, to this uncertainty about where the person ends and where the tech begins. Because I think, as with those other questions, a lot of this will come down to our ability to clarify the risks we’re facing, and maybe even more importantly, to clarify the kind of world we want to live in before those risks become a reality.

Garber: Professor Reichel, this season of How To has taken on a question that might seem purely philosophical, but I think is also becoming, in very practical ways, ever more urgent: How can we know what’s real? How can we build a reliable sense of the world? We’ve looked at ways that new technologies are blurring the lines between fact and fiction—in our relationships, in our informational systems, in our entertainment, and in our daily lives. And I want to end by asking you how the question of what’s real relates to spirituality, whatever form it might take for us. If we’re looking for meaning in the chaos, how can we know what’s real?

Reichel: Yeah, that’s a very good question. I mean, “What is reality?” is also one of the oldest questions of humanity, right? What is real and what is illusion and how do we even know that we don’t exist in a matrix or in a cave and it’s just ideas, right?

Garber: I just assume we’re in a matrix all the time.

Reichel: So. I mean, one important question would be like, what difference does it make? I mean, you know, there’s a tendency sometimes, right, to talk about the virtual as—or there’s different meanings of the term virtual. Sometimes we say virtual as in, not quite real. Right? Like, I was so close, I was virtually there. Or as make-believe, right? It’s not quite that, or it’s just pretend. Sometimes we talk about virtual as like, in distinction from material. And I think that’s how sometimes this distinction now gets used when you ask, like, is this real? Because it seems disembodied. But maybe in that sense, we need new techniques to better connect the materialities and the virtualities, right, the hardware and the software, and to kind of make visible how and where they connect. Because things are actually not disembodied, they’re just often more spatially extended in their embodiment.

Garber: Oh, that’s so interesting. Yeah.

Reichel: Yeah. And in many ways, right, the virtual experiences, even what we think of as, like, their disembodied forms, are very real, right? They’re actual experiences. They’re actual relationships that I have formed on social media with people who, you know—actual professional collaborations and real friendships have emerged with people that I have never met. Yeah. And never touched. Yeah. I would say “real” is what has an impact, what makes a difference in our lives. And reality in that sense can have different dimensions, right? It can be more physical, material, spiritual, intellectual. And typically all these things at some point will connect again in the way that they make a difference.

Garber: I love that. It occurs to me too that, though we’ve been talking primarily about religion as a way to connect to a higher power, religion is also about people connecting to each other, right? It’s community. It’s faith, in whatever form, turned into something collective. And I wonder if that’s part of the lesson here, too. Community itself—and the relationships we build with each other—are reality, in this very direct and tangible and reliable way. They’re the things we can trust, even when so much else can feel unsteady. Images can be faked, information can be wrong—but other people, in this very basic way: They’re there. They’re real.

Garber: I’m thinking back to our first episode when we talked about Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about media as extensions of man. And one thing I’ve been thinking about this season is whether extensions of man, as radical as that idea was in its time, actually might not go far enough. You know, because in philosophical ways, but also in really bluntly practical ones, I think it is becoming harder to know where we end and the web begins. And that isn’t necessarily a problem. It’s simply the reality. For millennia now, people have tried to make distinctions between the physical world and the spiritual and between the sacred and the profane and the body and the soul. And now we’re trying to understand the connection between our bodies and our data.

Valdez: I really like that. And Professor Reichel said—and it’s worth repeating—that what is real is one of the biggest questions of all. And where we fit into things, that’s what spawned a hundred religions, a thousand works of art. I mean, and at least one podcast.

Garber: But it’s so true that that drive, I think, is such a powerful part of just who we are as humans, as a species. And because of that, it can be tempting to treat the world as its own kind of Magic 8 ball—basically, you know, to keep asking the same questions and, you know, even if all we get is a, you know, reply hazy or an ask again later, we keep going. You know, I think in a way that insistent curiosity and that drive to keep asking and wondering and trying to figure out our place in the world, it is so core to us. And it’s one way that we try to make peace with what’s probably one of the hardest parts of being human, really, which is, you know, we’re finite beings who want so deeply to know what infinity feels like. And I think that desire helps to explain why it can feel natural to approach the web, this machine, in spiritual terms. It answers our questions, it responds to our desires, and it gives us a chance to be, in a way, immortal.

Valdez: Hmm. Well, you know, since this is our last episode, Megan, it has me thinking about endings. And you know, to what you were just saying, one of the biggest trends in Silicon Valley right now has been this obsession with living forever. You know, the very famous technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, he famously talked about uploading our consciousness to the cloud. So even if that doesn’t happen, it’s this limitlessness, this idea of forever. That’s what’s so appealing. Yeah. And, I mean, I get it. But there are so many sayings that suggest it’s completely unattainable. You know, nothing lasts forever. All good things must come to an end. Even the idea of the internet as forever, I mean, that’s not quite right. There’s a move to legislate forgetting. We’ll run out of literal server space. The world and its resources, they’re simply not infinite. Maybe something is real, not because it’s tangible or material necessarily, because it will end.

Garber: That’s all for this episode of How to Know What’s Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Valdez: Thanks for listening to this season of How To. If you like what you heard, share this season with a friend, post a link on social media, or leave a review.

Garber:How To will be back with you before too long.