Catechizing the Bots

Understanding Bitcoin spiritually, before it's too late.

People ask me about catechizing the bots. How does this striking golden image of Christ answer?

Here, we see the triumphal iconography of the Main Cathedral of the Armed Forces in Moscow, introduced to the world via richly-produced video — drone footage and all — complete with a voiceover declaration of a new and intimate relationship between the Military and the Church.

As has become known since then, one of the Cathedral’s unique features is its composition: metal repurposed from the enemy forces — Nazis — destroyed during the Second World War, a.k.a. the Great Patriotic War. Certainly the Cathedral doesn’t shy away from this history and the past in general. But the iconography speaks at a level that includes and overarches all of human history. The word “archeofuturism” is sometimes passed around to characterize the aesthetic: not atavistic or futuristic, but opening up onto what is to be by way of what was.

In a secular key, the archeofuturistic urge is apt to manifest in RETVRN-with-a-capital-V attitudes, a fundamentally historical going-back, unearthing the pre-Christian culture that belongs to a past so deep it offers a wellspring of mystery and power beyond human account.

But in the religious key of the Cathedral, it’s plain that trying to trace the Source to the omphalos, the navel of the world, is not the objective. The supreme turning-around, the most needful, transpires not in human spacetime alone but in the heart, in the spirit. The turnabout we are called to is metanoia. Take up thy mat and walk, not looking back, but sinning no more. Return to the Father before the Son returns.

Books can be filled pontificating on the degree of “Westernness” in Russia and so forth. Our point is simply that the Russians built a church that exhibits a presiding presence in this age, innumerable bots and all — a big church, a statement, swimming by all appearances hard against the currents of the “globe” as its Western architects have seen it and dreamed it and built it. Surely that kind of statement is so big and important that more than one ethnos can hear it and make it. Keeping in mind that paradox of the presiding presence within the world that is yet not of it, let’s turn to catechizing the bots.

THROUGH THE MOTIONS

In recalling the life of Christ, we see the way of God in the world before He returns in glory to be an entrance invisible, quiet, humble, even slow. A ministry that begins in the middle of life. Even the miracles modest, loving, guiding. No hurling of thunderbolts. No war chariots raining down from the sun. Very un-Marvel. A doubtless very different kind of marvel. Beginning from, our naked eyes would say, a speck — a grain of the smallest seed.

In short, something totally different in vibe from the kind of automated catechesis already taking center stage in the great “AI” drama. Today the catechesis model for any major player is to feed the bots as much data as possible that’s flavored — biased — in the desired manner. You make a composite of the universe inflected in a certain way; the machines treat that as the universe. You can train these things on anything. You can make a golem — a god — of whatever “content” you like.

So we see chatbots now that can crank out Bible verses or riff on Biblical themes. AI assistants that can produce prayers for whatever occasion, better than your limited memory or fat fingers. There’s now an AI “Jesus” chatbot, predictably spammed with meme jokes by the boyz. In Asia, you already see “priests” being made of humanoid bots. Not just “holy droids” doing as asked like vending machines, but engaged in what’s intended to be perpetual prayer — or at least going through the motions.

These kinds of things, innocuous or malevolent, are likely all inevitable. And I hope it seems obvious this isn’t it when it comes to catechizing the bots. The motions that must be gone through are not those of the bits or the atoms but rather the flesh and the spirit. Whether inscribed on silicon wafers or dead tree scrolls, teachings alone — even biblical Scripture — are not enough; in isolation, as St. Paul says (beginning at 2 Cor 3:15), readers are not enlightened:

Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the spirit… even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God.

Instructional enlightenment comes not from mastering in isolation the meaning of the text, the written code, but rather by the Holy Spirit through Christ, the Logos, the Word. We ourselves become epistles of Christ, “written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.” The way for us to train the bots into formation begins with our acceptance that only God puts the world in formation.

COIN OP

So it is essential that we exercise careful discernment about which digital technologies, if not large language models, automated simulators, algorithms, or hominid bots, are the best place to begin. And we must bear in mind that even making the best selection for the wrong or mistaken reasons, or simply in the wrong spirit altogether, no matter how “airtight” the “logic”, promises failure and misery.

Ruin like this can only come, to take one important example, from selecting bitcoin in the same “coin-operated” spirit as those who build robotic puppets to go through the motions of mere ritual, who lie to themselves that this in some way is the same or better than real, that is, human priests (or monks or lay people or…). People who think bitcoin will save us because they think that money is the real life force of the universe — that we are all “coin-operated” — are aiming us toward the same disaster as those who imagine economics explains it all or who hold as their article of faith that there is a pure and perfectly deterministic language and this language is mathematics.

And undoubtedly, if you consider that bitcoin has been first past the post in achieving what Vitalik Buterin calls Ethereum — a world computer — those “people of the coin” who believe the only way to save the world is to compute the world are merely rephrasing or aping the Googlers bent on “organizing the world’s information.”

Why does this coin op hold such an attraction, beyond the standard glittering power of the promise to rule the world? Because, unlike so many other foundational digital technologies, the most obvious use case of which is compulsory, bitcoin’s design can admit and reward the kind of slow, distributed, humble, long-suffering, loving, and kindly and devoted work of centuries and millennia that has always characterized the real and enduring growth and fruit-bearing of the Church…

if, and this is a big if, bitcoin is not first captured and assimilated by the current globalized financial system of the Borg, as indeed it is now trying to do.

Unless and until that event arrives, the distinction between bitcoin and AI or hominid bots or biotech or DARPA is striking and momentous. It sheds new light on the self-harm and unhappiness unleashed by the worshipful overuse of instruments that promise to shortcut and substitute and solve. It reminds us of how and why the way of the Lord on earth is so humble and so fruitful, and why to see this invisible way we must ourselves always live as beginners in the disciplines of humility and patience and suffering and love.

That may be a stretch for some people, but it is more than enough of a place for us to begin — as opposed to assuming the fetal position or sitting on top of the mountain waiting for number to go high enough that nirvana arrives. As opposed to competing to conform with the way of the world. As opposed to putting our faith and trust in the “public” or “private”-sector princes of this world.

THE TRUE TREE

It’s bitcoin’s rare suitability as a protocol to build on a properly presiding presence in our digital spacetime that gives it an attraction many do not see or can’t yet admit. Its richness in this regard often ends up being misinterpreted into only semi-secular terms as the fuel or foundation for a world “youth revolution”.

Nietzsche once remarked of the Europeans of his time that it was the Church “but not its poison” that repelled them — they spiritually loved equality but hated the prospect that only such spiritual equality existed and could be lived out as could be done under and through the triune God, as the Church had practiced and taught. There’s a similar danger at work in bitcoin, which those who reject God’s kingdom can only see as a kingdom of this world — a planetary blast of man-managed energy that, so to speak, brings heaven to earth. They look for the most attractive fruit without considering which is the true tree of life. We know how that story goes. We know how it ends.

Yet to be sure bitcoin can be used in this way, just not with the outcome intended. It can serve Marvel-ously as a world computer that organizes the information of all and organizes all into information, just the like Googlers would do, and just like the CBDCers desire. It is that powerful of a digital tool, and like digital tools characteristically, now, it is a “dual-use” — meaning weapons — technology.

If the Body of Christ does not pick up this weapon and wield it well, protectively, someone or something else will pick it up and wield it poorly, bringing malignant order and untold destruction, of the spirit no less than the flesh. This challenge — perhaps you can see how it might be a duty? — reveals that catechizing the bots, if it is to happen at all in accord with the Lord, must begin, again and again, with our own catechesis.