I’ve tried writing this one a few times. Typically I write in single bursts, put it out, don’t edit, and move on with my life. Perhaps it’s adjusting to a new work style. Perhaps it’s the noise of the environment seeping in through my ears despite trying to put on white noise for my own cognitive safety. Perhaps it’s a new kind of fear that emerges when an alien intelligence seems moments away from a digital disclosure day that already feels here if you’re close enough to ground zero.
It’s been 206 days since I’ve written you. 206 days of contemplation, new work, celebration of friends, family gatherings, disagreements with friends, doctor visits with my pregnant wife, discussions of fatherhood, discussions of faith, moving to a new apartment, stresses of a new apartment, a new commute, building a new team, frustrations of competition, frustrations of creativity, ecstasy of creativity. And that’s all that’s needed in way of a life recap.
This is my last attempt to write this piece. It might be an absolute train wreck of a piece but the shape of it is something like this: the first deception in the garden was a shortcut to be like God, now we have a new shortcut promised to us through AI, its promises are enormous, but it’s a shortcut feels a lot like CS Lewis’s hell in “The Great Divorce”, so we must maintain a long road communal vision of progress so as not to over rotate on the shortcut.
Sunday. June 14th, 2026. Brooklyn, New York. Knicks Chip.
When Satan tempted Eve in the garden, what did he present her with? Riches? Fame? A clear path to sustainable success?
He tempted her with the immediacy of likeness to God.
“For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Genesis 3:5-7
The first deception of man came in the form of short term gains. The immediacy of likeness with God. The shortcut. Divorced from the relationship that already existed, in which they walked with God during the cool of the day. Instead, Satan was able to inject the source of his own fall from Heaven, into man. Envy, lust, pride.
In desiring a shortcut in likeness to God, one believes they can take the very gifts of God to replace him through themselves. And in accepting the shortcut, receiving the instantaneous punishment of it. Short term gains often result in immediate repercussions.
Out of envy, lust, and pride → shame of themselves, blaming each other, an introduction of distance in their relationship.
The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
Genesis 3:21
The first blood sacrifice is made in an act of restoration of man. An innocent animal killed to clothe the guilty. This would be repeated until the ultimate blood sacrifice would be made for all through Jesus Christ our savior. This repetition, the repetition of sacrifice for restoration of relationship. To close the distance between us and our Heavenly Father. The very opposite of immediacy.
It is through our Heavenly Father’s wisdom that we see time as a tool for transformation. This is not to say that immediacy is not a tool of the Lord. We see throughout the gospel many healed instantaneously by the touch of Christ. But unlike the fall, it is never left on its own, and it is never for us to determine when immediacy is an appropriate timeline. The immediacy of a gift is always met with maintenance. To go and sin no more. To tell others of what has been done to them. To sell their possessions, and follow Him.
The ultimate punishment of the fall, the punishment all of us still live in to this day, is banishment. Eden represents the unity of God space, and man space. A living temple we were called to expand. Banishment is the destruction of that unity. And final punishment, is a banishment that cannot be repaired.
Hell is the absence of God.
Earlier this year, the Stripe founders said that we’ve already entered the singularity. That we will look back on this time as the start of some defining epoch. I completely agree with them. And nothing has confirmed that belief more than tracking the METR task-completion time horizon of software tasks (link).
The implications of this take off cannot be overstated in my opinion. Our measurement tools are already broken. Models are beyond our waking capacity. As Roon famously said before, “not enough people are emotionally prepared for if it’s not a bubble.”
We are presented with a new infinite horizon. Where, riffing on what Stewart Brand might say, we are finally getting good at being gods. This is the new shortcut.
The temptation is not in the tool itself. But in the surrounding belief of what it means for progress. When Peter Thiel said “AI is communist” back in 2018, it’s important to deconstruct what that really means as it relates to a theory of progress.
It comes back to a centralizing force that gets applied in a sort of radiation effect outward. An electric priesthood class, nestled in San Francisco, developing a super intelligence that is going absolutely vertical in its capacity. It can observe all that pipes into it, build both planning and infinite solutions from that observation point. (for more interesting reading on cybernetic central planning I recommend this 2014 New Yorker piece ~ link) And, somewhat most interestingly, it doesn’t take that much effort to steer it.
As a result, this priesthood has shaped an incredible amount of belief, capital, and culture. All coming together into a set of behaviors and memes the industry grapples with daily. My daily paranoia is that we aren’t interrogating what these behaviors and memes are promoting as a way of life. The underlying values that are being embodied, either consciously or subconsciously by their designers/promoters.
We (people/culture) became something new as a result of each age of progress we self-ushered. No one better narrated this arc than Marshall McLuhan. So the question remains, what are we becoming now?
The trouble is they have no Needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality, of course) by just imagining it. That’s why it never costs any trouble to move to another street or build another house. In other words, there’s no proper economic basis for any community life. If they needed real shops, chaps would have to stay near where the real shops were. If they needed real houses they’d have to stay near where builders were. It’s scarcity that enables a society to exist.
— The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
In C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce”, Hell is an ever expanding gray town where your thoughts render your needs sufficiently. Not in any luxury sense, but in the true definition of sufficient. Its inhabitants, having resigned themselves to this place, have fully embraced this lifestyle. And in not needing others, continually push out the boundaries of Hell, so that even previous friends live centuries of walking distance apart.
Recall the fall, and the shortcut to be like God. Not merely to know good and evil, but to stand as God stands: needing nothing, owing nothing, sufficient unto Himself. The theologians call it aseity. God is from Himself. He is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything (Acts 17:25). He is the one being in all of existence who requires no other.
This is the deepest cut of the serpent’s offer. Not knowledge. Self-sufficiency. To need no one is to be like God, and to need no one is the entire architecture of Hell.
Because what is Lewis’s grey town but that wish granted? A people who need nothing, and so drift centuries apart. The serpent’s promise and the grey town are not two ideas. They are the same sin, seen from its first morning and its last.
Hell is grown by people pushing each other away.
I keep coming back to Lewis’s depiction of Hell daily. It feels precise to the current moment. With each passing day, the humming environment around me seems a tad bit more convenient. Before I leave the house I run my Matic robot. Apartment vacuumed and mopped. On my way home from work I order dinner for the wife and myself. Perfectly timed warm bag sitting at my door waiting for me. While watching the game I dangerously skip permissions allowing my agents to complete some evening work on my behalf.
A cybernetic dream machine tuned to my needs and desires from a universal remote that sits comfortably in my back pocket with 16 hour battery life in a brushed aluminum (pronounced in the British style) enclosure.
Hell is an efficient highway with no off-ramps.
To get very specific, with just one example… The persistent silicon valley obsession with ruthless efficiency of organizations by leveraging machine intelligence. Most crystalized in the meme of creating “the single person billion dollar company”. Which is to functionally elevate the efficiency of machine intelligence above the human experience of work as a social good and collaborative glue. Goes directly against human flourishing.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book “Life Together” talks about the necessity of Christian community as a way to experience the Christ that is alive in others. Expanded even further, any vision of future flourishing that does not include stronger visions of community, is against the joy that is provided through the Imago Dei. Surrounding one’s self with machine intelligence, made in our own image, is a new and profound form of self-idolization.
The problem with this truth is that it cannot be prompted into existence. It demands slowness. It demands narrative arcs. Forgiveness that puts selfish desire or “rightness” aside. It demands tension, loss, rest, revival, and rededication.
If hell is the absence of God, expanded by pushing each other away, and embodied through our distorted fusion with idols. The solution becomes very simple: right relation with God, drawn together through communal life, and directing our tools towards those ends.
For another specific example… When I say social media algorithms are our first mass market misaligned AI, what I very simply mean is that those products are optimized for short term rewards and division. The very definition of hell.
Hell is an endless feed.
If hell is the absence of God, then heaven is His presence. The garden restored, God-space and man-space made one again. If hell is grown by people pushing each other away, then heaven is grown by people drawing each other in. If hell is an efficient highway with no off-ramps, then heaven is the long road, and the whole point was always the walking of it together. If hell is an endless feed, then heaven is a long table. A feast you are being called towards.
That is the destination worth pointing to.
This 1997 graphic from the Long Now Foundation randomly found its way to me. It exemplified the a profound joy and peace in long term belief and alignment. It’s only when we can point to that true destination, that the present makes any sense. Where we find patience for one another and ourselves. And trust compounds instead getting spent across several short term, high stakes games.
If I could encourage you towards one thing through this piece, it’s to not allow the speed of the environment to change the shape of your values. We are in the most important battle ground of our lifetime today. How these next couple of years shake out is not just some conflated question of a permanent upper or lower class. It is a cage match for how we might think of ourselves.
Will we bend for yet another shortcut?
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
Much love.
Live in the light
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