Catacomb Resident Blog

Anti-Net

14 December 2021

I'm not hostile to the Internet; I'm deeply cynical about it.

Any kind of social milieu that rests on virtual community is a problem. It's not evil or even useless, but it's a very poor substitute for the real thing. So I made it a point to study the technology of the Internet and computers, and the social psychology of how people interact on the Net and with the Net. My intent was to help people keep track of what really mattered: face-to-face human fellowship.

In that sense, then, I seek to garner attention online for the need to go offline.

All the more so do I pursue this path when you consider the fast approaching end of civilization. Yes, I really do believe that we face CMEs and solar flares rising to the point of a micro-nova from the sun, within the lifetime of some reading this. Sometime in the near future, this blog will end service, and it's anyone's guess whether it will be from censorship or technological collapse, or some mixture of things. But that our time is short is the one sure thing. If nothing else, the weakening of earth's magnetic field will reach a crisis point in about two years, and the magnetic poles will have shifted dramatically by then.

God has not seen fit to place a date or time frame for the end of this prophetic ministry, but I'm sure I'll be alive when it happens. So there's a strong urgency here to encourage people to prepare, but of course, I give the strongest emphasis to moral preparation. All your estimates and plans for what is likely can be completely wrong. Nobody really knows what it's going to look like or feel like. The only form of preparation that cannot fail is internal to your own soul. Making a firm connection to the Holy Spirit is never a mistake.

But it's also in the nature of divine service: His Kingdom is one of hearts. It's always been a matter of people meeting face to face. Our communion with covenant family and our witness to outsiders has always been a matter of a moral presence in time and space. The power of the heart is a matter of its field of influence across a limited physical distance. This has been clinically measured to about 15 feet or so for most people, though it's also known to taper off into infinity, depending on the sensitivity of what measures it. Your heart on its own wavelength can sense the moral quietude of spaces where humans are absent.

So this is a good time to think about how everything that you really need to do that can be done manually. All it takes is another Carrington Event to fry every electronic and electrical appliance you have, and shut down the power grid for a very long time, especially if it hits when our magnetic field goes down. (Tech note: The CMEs produce low frequency waves that heat up long wires, but the flares that sometimes accompany them are high frequency and will fry electronic components.) If you write a lot, stock up on paper, pens, pencils and maybe a manual typewriter. If you use power tools, start looking at human-powered alternatives and all the techniques that go with it. Go local; reduce your dependencies on anything not on hand already.

But the most important thing is learning/relearning your social graces in face to face communications. You aren't going to have the insulation of virtual anonymity. You'll have to deal with the inconvenience of actual human variation. Worse, the effects of virtual communications has created a host of socially inept flakes, and they will be utterly lost without their devices. Can you recall a time in your life when instant communications were simply not a part of the calculus? There's nothing you can do about it except prepare yourself to train folks who don't know how to live that way. Make sure you understand the dynamics of personal interactions well enough to explain them to others.

Most of all, make sure you understand how the miracle power of God works without the filtering effect of the Net. I'm not a Luddite, but all this stuff we have is just tools with a very limited life-span of use in our world. Time is shorter than you know.

If I were trying to lead any kind of movement now, I'd be emphasizing pulling away from reliance on the Internet. Sure, I know that this would vastly reduce my influence to a tiny audience, probably loaded with weirdos. That's the way it goes. God has chosen to work with whomever will commit to His revelation. The gospel message relies on the personal touch; that is how it spreads from one heart to another.


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