A Nation of Technoserfs

I cannot, indeed, understand the way you live, and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it; a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone, with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh, but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there is warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit. (Merlin, in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength)

Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point USA and Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire recently triggered a firestorm on social media with a post about how burritos shouldn’t cost so much. The $20 Burrito Tweet touched a nerve with many, and it quickly became its own Rorschach test.

As some had it, the $20 burrito is a figment of your imagination—the ingredients to make burritos at home cost significantly less than $20, so if you just cook the thing yourself, whiny Zoomer, you won’t have to pay $20. Furthermore, wasting your money on eating out is what makes the economy seem so tight.

But many agreed with Kolvet’s and Walsh’s sentiments and pointed out that prices for basic items that Americans enjoy, like the occasional fast-food burrito, have skyrocketed over the past few years. Yet, when anyone draws attention to higher prices, the content of what they’re saying is ignored and they’re labeled as a whiner; lazy; ungrateful; or just plain stupid.

So, who’s right? Is the $20 Burrito an invention of lazy Zoomers or is it the metric of hard economic times?

I present to you a third possibility. The internet has stumbled upon an uncomfortable truth about modern economic life, and it doesn’t know how to process it. What’s more is that, though this truth is becoming more noticeable with time, it isn’t new. C.S. Lewis discovered it in 1945, and Hilaire Belloc wrote of it over a century ago.

Essentially, it is this: modern man is neither rich nor poor, neither a lord nor a hermit. He is both; he is neither. He is a Technoserf.

A Technoserf is best defined by what he has, which is a lot, and what he lacks, which is also a lot. Much like the Lewis passage quoted above, these haves and lacks come in pairs.

For example: Modern man has a supercomputer with the combined knowledge of every library in the world in his pocket, but he lacks the wisdom to verify the truth of basic moral precepts. He has a house—if he’s lucky—but he lacks ownership, as the bank truly owns it and the county taxes it every year. He has a corporate job, but he lacks security because they can fire him at any time, for any reason; and if they do, he loses the house. He has more than enough food, but it lacks nutrition. He has more than enough water, but it’s filled with chemicals. He has a dozen apps with which to order gourmet meals on credit, but he lacks a loving spouse to make him so much as a grilled cheese sandwich. He has a grand city to live in, but he lacks the basic safety and cleanliness that his tax dollars are supposed to provide. He has the natural drive to stand up for righteousness and defend the weak, but he lacks a cause, so he uses video games as an outlet. He has a thousand social media followers, but he lacks a friend.

Essentially, a Technoserf has wide access to technological enhancements and advantages that, in theory, will make him smarter, healthier, and will help him live much longer. Yet, he lacks the basic goods that make life worth living. Thus, in many ways, he is poorer than the poorest serf.

This is the crisis that nobody wants to touch and that nobody (until now) has had a word for. A whole society of people seem well-off and yet are in massive amounts of debt and truly own nothing. Multiple generations have had stolen from them the transcendent goods of life that make even the poorest person happy and have received the passing comforts that make even the richest people miserable.

C.S. Lewis warned us. In his masterpiece That Hideous Strength, he brought Merlin to postwar England and just had him notice things that, as the wizard put it, were of no importance. But all the same, he noticed. And as we should have expected from the mythical prophet, he saw the Technoserf phenomenon coming long before we did. Present were technological innovations that made life incredibly comfortable; yet all the flavor and joy was sucked out of them so that life’s real riches were traded for trinkets.

The “real riches” to which I refer are those goods that people aspire to universally: Ownership of property—and by this I mean real ownership, not mortgage debt. In-person friendship. Marriage. A safe place to raise kids. Quality time with your family. Security in knowing that you can provide for your family. A vibrant culture that produces art, music, and beauty. And, perhaps most importantly, the ability to practice your faith and to say no to unreasonable demands.

Hilaire Belloc spoke of a threat to these basic goods in The Servile State. As he had it, property ownership is what makes people secure. When you own property, you have the necessities to provide at least a subsistent life for your family. If worse comes to worst, you can grow crops and eat. You don’t have to worry about making a Fortune 500 company happy in order to keep your house or secure your next meal. But these basic goods are under threat when a whole society of men—and women—need to keep companies happy in order to keep eating. If there’s any doubt whether that describes our situation today, the vaccine-mandate panic of 2021 can cure us of any illusions to the contrary.

So, what do people do in the face of such insecurity? According to Belloc, they trade their freedoms for security. They surrender the goods that make life worth living for those that keep life going.

We see it often. When people can’t afford more than a studio apartment, they turn to a dozen streaming apps to make the nights bearable. When they have no family get-togethers, they turn to TikTok and Instagram for socialization. When they can’t have a home-cooked meal prepared with love, they turn to fast-food burritos just to have the experience of someone making them food.

I would encourage readers to take a second look at these common habits. If you’ve interpreted them as laziness or wastefulness, instead see them for what they are: desperation. Contempt is not the Christian way to answer the concerns of desperate people. Yet, at its core, desperation is not an economic phenomenon, but rather, a spiritual phenomenon with economic symptoms and consequences. After all, if transcendent goods are what’s missing, then a large part of the solution must be spiritual. Pope Benedict XVI had it right: in working to solve problems of moral and fiscal poverty, “progress of a merely economic and technological kind is insufficient.”

It must also be noted that modern technology and the technological worldview are at the heart of this problem, and we will get nowhere until we acknowledge that fact. Pope Paul VI was as prophetic as Lewis and Belloc when he predicted that “the reign of technology—technocracy, as it is called—can cause as much harm to the world of tomorrow as liberalism did to the world of yesteryear.”

Whether or not burritos are more expensive than they were a year ago (spoiler alert: they are, and it’s a bad thing), the affordability discussion is just the tip of the iceberg. The real questions are these: Why and how have we let technological comforts take the place of the goods for which we all long and were created for? For how long have Americans been Technoserfs? And how much longer will we continue to be?