My Seven Laws of Technology

In 2021, Joel Jacob convinced me we should start a podcast together. To prep for the podcast I began reading Christian books on technology. One book was a collection of articles from Michael Sacasas and it began with a retelling of Melvin Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology.

After a couple years of quoting them, I began to realize I didn’t always agree. I had one exchange with John Dyer who helped confirm some nuances. Kranzberg’s laws remain very helpful. And for my course at Heritage College and Seminary, I have the students read Kranzberg’s own account of them. But it’s not what I tend to emphasize. I have begun to gravitate toward seven points; my own “laws,” if you will.

Like Kranzberg’s, my seven laws are less like commands and more like a set of norms which function as a framework for thinking well about technology. If you master these, you will be better equipped to lead others and make disciples in a technological age. They summarize my approach to technology.

1. All technology is good and cursed.

Because we were created by a Creator to create, and because of the cultural mandate in Genesis 1, technology is a good gift from God. And yet, the blessing is mixed with burden; “cursed is the ground” from which all technology is made.

2. All technology changes you.

The formative effect of technology is underappreciated. We must recognize that after using any technology we become a different kind of person, as certain vices and virtues are inculcated through habit.

3. All technology is God’s.

To riff on a phrase from Abraham Kuyper, there is not a single technology in this world that God cannot point and declare, “Mine!” As the biblical prophets teach, even weapons of war are the Lord’s. God is in control of technology and oversees it with his wisdom. He’s not surprised by Nuclear Weapons, Facebook, or Artificial Intelligence. He is the ruler of all things.

4. The telos of tech is true, good, and beautiful.

Technology has a purpose beyond functionality and efficiency. Technology ultimately must be made to reflect the transcendentals found perfectly in God: truth, goodness, and beauty. Technology should not be made to be deceptive, immoral, nor ugly.

5. Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.

This law was crafted by Andy Crouch, not me, in relation to Jesus’ summary of the greatest commandment. I repeat it here because I often repeat it. It’s essential anthropology for our technological age. The great commandment implies what humans were made for. We were made to love with each of the four aspects of what we are.

6. Every human person is masked by machinery.

One of the first inventions of Adam and Eve was clothing, made to cover up their shame. Technology has a concealing effect; whether through tinted windows, headphones, or social media beauty filters, technology not only extends what we can do but displaces how we appear.

Another aspect of this law, worth remembering, is that there is a human behind every machine. No AI output comes without human input. No battery, laptop, smartphone, or toaster exists without the involvement of people. It’s easy to forget this, since modern technology is so good at hiding the human element.

7. Every human person must consider, critique, and create technology.

As a summation for my whole project on discipling others in light of modern technology, Christians must take a careful yet active posture. Call it faithful presence, if you’d like. We must reflect on technology, including how it is designed and how it shapes us (its affordances), to properly use it. And we must all build. For we were not made to merely consume creation but to cultivate it for the good of others.

I don’t expect to update these laws. They seem to me to be some of the most essential aspects of Christian technology criticism in the 21st century. If I do change them, I’ll update you here.

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Parenting and Technology

I recently spoke to a classroom full of Christian parents about Artificial Intelligence. I’ve attached a pdf of the slides here and the handout here.

I have overcommitted myself at times but I am glad to share that two new Teaching Fellows have joined the WWJT team. If you’d like to invite an excellent speaker on a Christian view of technology, social media, or AI, please send an invite to Obadiah or Michael here.

On the topic of parenting, I also had a great conversation with Nathan Sutherland recently on the WWJT podcast. I took the transcript from the episode and asked Claude Opus 4.8 to summarize the key points of what was said.

The full episode is here but you can read the AI summary below.

AI Summary of Parenting and Video Games, with Nathan Sutherland:

Nathan Sutherland is back. He last sat with the show roughly three years ago, and in between he has kept building Gospel Tech, a podcast on parenting in a digital age that is now past 300 episodes. This time all three hosts are at the table, and all three are gamers of one kind or another: Austin a former Halo esports competitor, Joel a lifelong real-time-strategy player who spent countless hours inside Civilization, and Andrew, who keeps a console out of the house entirely and plays online chess instead because he knows how easily it takes him. Andrew opens with a parlor question. If Christian parenting were a video game, what would it be? Joel’s answer sets the tone for the hour: we are living in an RPG where we just try to be more like Jesus.

What follows is a conversation that refuses both easy moves. Nathan will not demonize games, and he will not excuse them. He steel-mans them first, the work of gifted storytellers and artists and composers, an experience he puts on the same shelf as Tolkien’s argument for fantasy, the prisoner who looks through the bars and imagines a better world. Then he names the catch. A good game can take you somewhere. The problem is that it promises to keep you there. The rest of the episode is the practical, pastoral work of telling those two things apart, for a spouse, for a kid, and for yourself.

Key Insights

There is no single Christian verdict on gaming. The line is a person, not a rule. It depends on the kid, the game, and the heart behind the controller. Nathan has not played in fourteen years, not because games are bad but because he used them to cope, celebrating good days and stuffing down hard ones until nothing was actually processed. He keeps his beloved Zelda console literally locked in a safe. Andrew can sit in the room while his kids play Smash Bros and feel fine in the moment, then unsettled two hours later. Individual ethics differ, and that is not a failure of conviction. It is the shape of wisdom.

Play with friends, not for friends. Nathan’s rule for his own children is a single phrase with a lot packed into it. You can play with friends, but you do not join a platform in order to manufacture friendship, because needing the game to have friends makes you convenient, and convenient makes you disposable. If the friendship is already real, go play Mario Kart. Andrew immediately recognizes it as something he can hand to his own kids: we do not play video games so that you can have friends.

Many games are built to keep you, not to be won. A real game has a challenge, a rule set, and a victory condition. A growing share of modern titles quietly drop that last one. Nathan walks through the machinery: prestige classes in Call of Duty that double your playtime over and over on a sunk-cost loop, the fact that Halo was the first game to put a behavioral psychologist on the team, the slow slide of a health bar tuned so you can stomach the damage. Minecraft is not Legos, he insists, naming it the most addictive game one Seattle researcher had seen for kids. Even Duolingo runs on operant conditioning: you came for fifteen minutes and it talks you into twenty.

The real category is overstimulation, by design. The danger is not screens as such but a pace of reward that real life can no longer match. Nathan splits technology into tool tech, which helps us create, and drool tech, which is engineered to take our time, focus, and money. Microsoft Word does not text you to write a haiku together; a game is built to keep you in the loop. When a child is genuinely overstimulated, his fix is a thirty-day reset, the same window a nutritionist gives the body, after which real life can start to feel fun again. The rule that comes with it: replace, do not just punish. A kid who does not know how to have fun at the pace of real life will not be helped by a puzzle in a dark room.

RESET is a five-question diagnostic. Nathan’s most portable tool is an acronym: relationships, emotions, sleep, enjoyment, time. For any technology, gaming included, you ask whether it makes each of those five better or worse. The work is teasing cause from symptom. Is the game making a kid mean to his sister, or did he just want thirty minutes and she was standing in front of him? Does he merely enjoy it, or does he need it to self-regulate, so that canceling tonight’s turn makes the wheels fall off? The same words work on a spouse who calls gaming their way to recharge: then you should come back more present, and if you come back more distant, that becomes the conversation.

What we worship, we come to resemble. Andrew turns the practical wisdom theological. Psalm 115 says those who trust in idols become like them, and Deuteronomy 4 and 28 and 29 trace the blessings and curses that follow idolatry. Whatever takes the God spot in our hearts re-forms us in its image. Nathan reaches for Matthew 5, where Jesus says nothing is off the table if it causes us to stumble: the game, the app, the job, all of it expendable next to the soul. The flip side is the hope. A game can stay a genuine blessing as long as it does not become the thing we trust.

AI is the new overstimulation. Joel surfaces the parallel that lands hardest. He has started feeling the same pull he used to feel toward games, but now toward AI and code generation: speak to the model, watch it build, and you are inside a creation dopamine loop with no natural end, much like Minecraft. He calls the people staying up all night to code AI vampires. Andrew adds the tell that Claude’s token limit resets at two in the morning, a mechanic Austin recognizes immediately as a holdover from the earliest smartphone games, where your lives refilled in four hours unless you paid to skip the wait. Tool tech, it turns out, can grow drool-tech instincts.

Anchor Quotes

I have seen amazing kids who play video games. I have yet to meet a kid who is amazing because they play video games.

— Nathan Sutherland

Video games didn’t break the world. Sin did. But video games encourage you to make decisions you didn’t intend to make.

— Nathan Sutherland

If we elevate technology, we become like it. Or if we worship Christ, we become like him.

— Andrew Noble

Going Deeper

The thread the episode opens and cannot close is Joel’s question: why is there still no genuinely good video game that tells the story of the gospel? Nathan has watched fifteen years of attempts, Reddit dreams of a Skyrim set in Jesus’ time that keep collapsing into platformers. He thinks the wall is storytelling, not game design. The people who try usually come with an axe to grind and end up preaching, and players can feel it, so the thing reads as cringe rather than honest. The better path may be the oblique one, the way Tolkien and Lewis told the truth without a one-to-one Jesus, or the way horror fans find grace in grotesque pictures of sin and rescue. But honest games tend to be made by one-to-three-person teams, and funding dries up, and studios reskin popular games with Bible verses to survive. Andrew closes with the only answer the hosts can offer for now: not a product but a fellowship. The Inklings worked because they were friends in a pub, so the invitation is to come build in the open together, online and in person, and see what an honest Christian game might become.

This image was made with Gemini (you can tell by the small diamond/magic watermark in the bottom right). However, Gemini image creation wouldn’t be possible without a ton of human input and craft. See law 6, above.

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As an aside, I’m increasingly against the idea of AI helping me write in any way other than fixing typos. This doesn’t mean that I believe it is wrong for others. But I don’t like it for myself and I don’t like what it’s done for my writing. Clearly, I believe AI-generated text is morally permissible for some cases, if properly disclosed, as I’ve written about before.

So, why am I mostly against using AI in the brainstorming, writing, and feedback of my writing? To open oneself in intellectual exploration (through the medium of writing) without proper restraint of generative inputs is to exercise a kind of self-destruction of the mind. I am pursuing the craft of writing and the service of others. I must use my mind, soul, body, and strength in that craft or else I risk the atrophying of the very muscles God gave me to grow.

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Podcast Links

Once again, here is a link to all the recent episodes of the two podcasts I record. I discuss my seven laws of technology with Pastor and Theologian Jon Cleland in Thinking About It.

Thinking About It | Season 5: Live Like a Christian (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Should Christians Use Social Media?

• Four Ways to Evaluate Ethical Decisions

• A Biblical View of Technology

• Seven Laws of Technology

• Living the Spiritually-Disciplined Life

• Rejoice and Weep

• Love God with Your Mind

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• Parenting and Video Games, with Nathan Sutherland

• How Should Pastors Use AI?

• Is SEO Dead? The Evolution of Googling

• The Pope Said THIS About AI, with Wyatt Graham

• Does God Care if AI Does My Job?

Thanks for reading and listening.