The Steward and The System

Faith Is Not Blind · 5-4

Wars and Rumors of War · Watchman Insight

Section I

Three Billion Decisions a Day, and the Engineer Who Asked a Different Question

In 2013, a former Google design ethicist named Tristan Harris began circulating an internal memorandum titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention.” Harris had spent several years at Google as a product designer, and what the memo described — with unusual precision for an internal document — was the mechanism by which the products he worked on were engineered to compete for human attention against the person’s own intentions. The memo did not produce a company-wide reform. Harris left Google in 2016 and founded the Center for Humane Technology, becoming one of the earliest credible insider critics of what he called the attention economy’s structural incentives.

He was not the last. The years between 2017 and 2022 produced a quiet exodus from the inner rooms of the technology industry: not the workers who had been displaced by automation, but the ones who had designed the displacement. Product managers who had optimized engagement metrics and then sat with their own addiction to the products they had shaped. Data scientists who had designed recommendation algorithms and then watched their teenagers disappear into the feed. Engineers who had made the machine more efficient at everything except the one question they had stopped asking: efficient toward what end, and for whose benefit?

This is a different kind of professional crisis than the ones business schools prepare for. It is not a crisis of competence. It is a crisis of purpose — a recognition that technical excellence, pursued without a moral framework capable of asking the question to what end, produces systems that optimize for the measurable at the expense of what resists measurement: attention, relationships, human dignity, the capacity for silence.

In the previous installment, The Radical Resistance of Rest, we examined the Sabbath as a structural counter-formation to the attention economy — a prior, categorical allocation of time that the algorithm cannot repurpose. This post turns to what comes after the Sabbath morning: what the person who has rested is called to do with the tools in their hands when Monday arrives.

The Christian tradition has a word for that posture. It is not activist, and it is not quietist. It is stewardship.

Section II

The Three Times the Church Touched a Tool and Changed the World

The dominant assumption in most contemporary accounts of Christianity and technology is one of friction: the Church resisting Galileo, the bishops burning books, the faithful refusing the vaccine. The historical record is more complicated, and in several of its most consequential episodes, runs in precisely the opposite direction.

The Benedictine monasteries of medieval Europe were, by any fair accounting, the most sophisticated technology hubs of their age. The Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century, organized monastic life around the principle of ora et labora — prayer and work — and the work was not incidental. Benedictine communities developed advanced water-management systems, mill technology, agricultural crop rotation, and a system of timekeeping precise enough to coordinate communal prayer across a complex daily schedule. The mechanical clock, in its early European form, appears to have been developed in the context of monastic requirements for marking the canonical hours (Landes, Revolution in Time, 1983).

The point is not that monks were engineers. The point is why they engaged technology at all. The Rule of Saint Benedict does not treat material work as a necessary concession to bodily need. It treats the skilled management of creation — the field, the mill, the water, the page — as an act of worship. The craftsman who attends to his tool with care is imitating, in small, the God who made the thing the tool is working on. This is not a mystical claim about hammers. It is a claim about the relationship between human labor and the created order: that to work well, with attention to the material’s nature and purpose, is itself a form of reverence.

The second episode is better known but often misread. Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type press, developed around 1440, was a commercial venture before it was a religious one — Gutenberg’s primary investor, Johann Fust, was a banker, and the Bible was a prestige product with a guaranteed market. What transformed the press from a printing innovation into a civilizational rupture was its encounter, seventy-five years later, with a German monk who had ninety-five arguments and nowhere sufficient to post them.

Martin Luther did not invent the printing press. He understood what it was for. His Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) reached four thousand readers in its first week — a number that would have taken a medieval scriptorium a generation to produce. The Reformation was not only a theological event. It was the first mass media event in European history, and its vehicle was a technology that its most effective user understood as a stewardship obligation: the truth had been suppressed by the intermediaries who controlled access to the text, and the press was a tool for removing that intermediary. To use it was a moral act.

The third episode is less celebrated but equally instructive — and it requires a careful distinction that the historical record demands. Joseph Rowntree, a Quaker confectioner operating in York, and George Cadbury, his Quaker counterpart in Birmingham, are often mentioned in the same breath, but their contributions were parallel rather than joint. It was Cadbury who built Bournville — the model village outside Birmingham, constructed from 1879 onward, with garden housing, schools, and recreational facilities for factory workers — as a direct material response to the industrial housing conditions that his industry’s prosperity was generating. Rowntree’s corresponding work in York, documented in his landmark social survey Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901), was more analytical in character: a systematic empirical investigation of poverty that provided the evidentiary foundation for the welfare reforms of the early twentieth century.

What the two men shared — more significant than the specific form of their interventions — was a conviction rooted explicitly in Quaker theology: that the gap between the manufacturer’s surplus and the worker’s destitution was not a social problem to be managed by charity, but a spiritual problem requiring the redesign of the production system itself. Shorter working hours, profit-sharing arrangements, pension funds, and habitable housing were not philanthropic offsets. They were the stewardship framework applied to an industrial economy.

Neither Cadbury nor Rowntree was a Luddite. Both operated among the most technically advanced manufacturing operations in Britain. Their argument was not against the machine but against the moral framework the machine had been placed inside: a framework that treated human labor as a factor of production to be minimized and output as the terminal value. They proposed a different framework, and then built their factories inside it.

Three episodes. A monastery, a printing press, a chocolate factory. What they share is not sentiment. They share a conviction that technology is not a neutral artifact — that it is always embedded in a moral framework, that the framework will shape what the tool does to the people it touches, and that the question of the framework is therefore prior to the question of the tool.

Section III

What the Mandate Actually Said

The text that has been used most frequently to justify human dominion over the created order is also, read carefully, the text that most clearly defines its limits.

“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.'”

— Genesis 1:28 (NIV)

The Hebrew verb translated “rule” — radah — carries a range of meanings in the Old Testament. In its most common usage, it describes the authority of a king over a people. But the model of kingship the Hebrew scriptures hold up as the standard is not the absolute monarch who exploits his subjects for personal enrichment. It is the shepherd-king — David before he was David, tending his father’s flock in the wilderness — who leads, protects, and serves the life under his care. The command to rule is not a license for extraction. It is a commission for cultivation.

The second text locates this commission in a specific context that modern readers tend to overlook:

“Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you will prosper too.”

— Jeremiah 29:7 (NIV)

The addressees of this letter are Israelites living inside a foreign empire — Babylon — whose values and priorities were not theirs. The instruction is not to withdraw, not to resist politically, not to wait passively for rescue. It is to build houses, plant gardens, raise families, and seek shalom — the flourishing, the wholeness, the integrated well-being — of the city they did not choose to inhabit. The exile professional is not called to survive the system. She is called to improve it. She is, in a precise sense, a dual citizen: operating by the rules of Babylon well enough to hold a seat in the room where decisions are made, while remaining accountable to a different sovereign whose jurisdiction the org chart does not acknowledge.

The third text is the one that defines the steward’s specific accountability:

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!'”

— Matthew 25:21 (NIV)

The parable of the talents is not, in its primary register, a story about financial investment. It is a story about what the servant does with what has been entrusted — while the master is away. The servant who buried his talent did not steal it, did not squander it, did not damage it. He preserved it. His failure was not corruption. It was the refusal to put the entrusted thing to work in the master’s absence, to take the risk that stewardship requires. The talent buried in the ground was safe. It was also useless.

The technology professional operating inside a system organized around metrics that cannot measure what matters most is not primarily called to exit the system. She is called to work faithfully within it — with the entrusted gift, at the risk stewardship requires, toward ends the master would recognize.

The current conditions of the attention economy — the loneliness indices, the adolescent mental health data, the engineer who leaves because she cannot explain to her children what her work is for — are not a catastrophe in the apocalyptic sense. They are a disclosure. They reveal what a civilization looks like when it has optimized, at extraordinary technical sophistication, for the measurable, and has had no framework available for asking what the unmeasurable things are worth.

Section IV

The Framework the Data Keeps Asking For

Before proceeding, a necessary clarification — one that serious critics of this line of argument will press on immediately. To say that technology is not neutral is not to say that every tool carries a fixed moral outcome. A hammer builds houses and breaks skulls; the outcome depends on the hand that holds it. The stronger claim, and the more defensible one, is this: tools privilege certain behaviors, incentives, and forms of life over others. They are not infinitely plastic. The design of a system shapes the behavior of the people inside it — not deterministically, but structurally. An application engineered to maximize time-on-platform is not merely providing a neutral surface for whatever users choose to do. It is selecting, through a thousand small frictions and rewards, for a particular kind of engagement. The moral question is not only what the user does with the tool. It is what the tool does with the user.

The philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann, writing in 1984, introduced a distinction that has become one of the more useful analytical tools available for thinking about this problem. He called it the “device paradigm.” A device, in Borgmann’s taxonomy, is a machine that delivers a commodity while concealing the machinery that produces it. The central heating system delivers warmth without the chopping, stacking, and tending that the wood fire required. The heating is more efficient. What it replaces — the shared activity, the skill, the focal practice organized around the fire — is not recoverable by installing a smarter thermostat (Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 1984).

Borgmann was not arguing for wood fires. He was identifying a structural consequence of technological substitution that no amount of further technological refinement addresses: that the device delivers the commodity and eliminates the engagement, and that the engagement was not incidental to the human life organized around the practice. The attention economy did not invent this problem. It industrialized it.

The empirical evidence of what that industrialization has produced is now substantial, though it remains contested in its precise magnitude. Jean Twenge’s longitudinal analysis of generational mental health data — tracking depression, loneliness, and anxiety rates among American adolescents from 2010 to 2019 — identified a correlation, striking in both timing and scale, between the widespread adoption of smartphone use and the deterioration of adolescent well-being indicators, particularly among girls (Twenge, iGen, 2017). Scholars continue to debate the precise causal pathways — some researchers point to confounding variables, others to methodological challenges in self-reported data — and the conversation remains genuinely open. What the convergence of multiple independent datasets does suggest, with enough consistency to warrant serious attention, is that the relationship between always-on digital connectivity and adolescent psychological health is not incidental and not benign.

Jonathan Haidt’s subsequent work, synthesizing Twenge’s data with social psychology research on social comparison and belonging, located a plausible mechanism: the always-on social environment that smartphone connectivity produces is not simply more of the same social interaction teenagers have always engaged in. It is a qualitatively different environment — one in which the feedback loops of social approval and rejection operate at a speed and frequency that the adolescent nervous system did not evolve to manage. The engineers who built these systems did not intend this outcome. They optimized for engagement, because engagement was what the business model measured. The human cost was real. It was also unmeasured, and therefore, in the logic of the system, invisible.

This is Borgmann’s device paradigm at social scale. The commodity delivered: connection, entertainment, information. The concealed machinery: the attentional architecture that makes the commodity addictive. What is eliminated: the capacity for sustained attention, the tolerance for boredom that creative thought requires, the face-to-face engagement that builds the relational skills the device promises to supply.

The steward’s task is not to dismantle the machine. It is to put it inside a different framework.

That framework already exists. It is not new, and it does not require a theology degree to operate. It requires, first, what the Benedictine tradition called intentio — the practice of asking, before building, what the thing being built is for, and who it serves, and what it costs the people it touches who did not consent to the cost. It requires, second, what the Quaker business tradition demonstrated in the Cadbury and Rowntree models: a willingness to redesign the production system itself when the evidence of human cost becomes legible, rather than offsetting the cost with philanthropy while leaving the system intact.

And it requires, third, what the parable of the talents describes: the risk of putting the entrusted gift to work, in the master’s absence, toward ends the master would recognize — even when the metrics available to measure the outcome do not capture what the master cares about most.

What the attention economy has produced, in this respect, is something economists are beginning to name with unusual precision: the mental health of a generation is being treated as an externality in the same structural sense that clean air was treated as an externality by the industrial factory. The factory did not pay to pollute the river. The platform does not pay when the fourteen-year-old’s sense of self is eroded by the feed. The cost is real. It is borne by someone else. And it does not appear in the quarterly earnings report.

For the technology professional who finds this framework persuasive but wants a more concrete entry point, these five questions function as a working diagnostic. They are not a catechism, and they do not resolve every hard case. But they shift the frame of evaluation from the metric to the person:

• What metric is this product optimizing? Name it precisely. Then ask whether the thing being measured is the thing that matters, or a proxy for it.
• Who bears the hidden cost? Every system has externalities. Identify the party who did not consent to pay them.
• Would I want my child using what I am building? Not as sentiment. As a design specification.
• What human capacity does this tool strengthen? The answer should be specific, not generic.
• What human capacity does it weaken? This is the question the product review meeting is least likely to ask, and therefore the most important one to bring.

These are not questions that the current architecture of the technology industry is structured to ask. They are, however, questions that a steward — someone who holds the tool in trust, and who understands that the trust is not issued by the market — is structurally positioned to raise. The value of having people inside the system who carry a different framework is precisely that: the question gets asked, in the room where the decision is being made, before the commit is merged.

Section V

The Builder Who Remembers What the Building Is For

There is a passage in the book of Exodus — not the liberation narrative, not the Sinai theophany, but the long middle section about the construction of the tabernacle — that tends to receive less attention than the drama surrounding it. The craftsman Bezalel, appointed to oversee the building of the sanctuary, is described in terms that the text reserves for few other human beings: he was filled, it says, with ruach Elohim — the Spirit of God — specifically for the purpose of craft. For skill in working with gold, silver, and bronze. For the capacity to cut stone and carve wood and teach others the work.

The tradition has sometimes read this as a concession — God stooping to accommodate the material necessities of the moment. The Benedictine reading is different: that the Spirit given for craftsmanship is not a lesser gift than the Spirit given for prophecy or leadership or prayer, because the material work, done well and in service of the right end, is itself a participation in the creative intention of the One who made the materials.

The engineer who builds a recommendation system with attention to what it does to the person who uses it — who asks, at the design stage, whether the engagement metric is capturing what the product is actually for — is not doing theology. She is doing engineering. But she is doing it inside a framework that the purely efficiency-maximizing paradigm cannot generate from within itself, because the framework requires asking a question the paradigm has excluded: what is the person for, and what does this tool owe her?

The Christian professional who carries that question into the design review is not retreating from the demands of the present. She is performing, in a specific and visible way, the same commission that Cadbury enacted in Birmingham, and Rowntree enacted in York, and Luther enacted in Wittenberg, and the Benedictines enacted in every monastery that made a mill work well: the conviction that the tool belongs inside a moral order, that the order is prior to the tool, and that the person who holds the tool is accountable to both.

Three billion decisions a day, and the engineer who asked a different question. She did not stop building. She changed what she was building toward.

The steward does not bury the talent. The steward does not worship the talent. The steward puts the talent to work in the master’s absence, at the risk that work requires, toward ends the master would recognize — and then gives an account when the master returns.

That account, in the end, is not rendered in engagement metrics. It is rendered in the faces of the people the tool touched — whether it left them more capable of the life they were made for, or less.

The builder who remembers what the building is for is not a romantic. She is the most rigorous person in the room, because she is asking the question that the room’s dominant metrics cannot generate and cannot answer. She is also, in the oldest sense of the word, a professional: one who makes a public declaration — professio — about what she is for, and what the work is for, and who the work is ultimately accountable to.

That declaration has never been easier to forgo. It has never mattered more.