Present Day, April 2026
In Florence’s churches, the light arrived through stained glass and fell on stone floors that had been worn smooth by centuries of people coming to stand in the light. The quality of that light was specific: colored, diffused, carrying information about the season and the time of day, connecting the people standing in it to something larger than the room they were in.
The light from the screen is different in almost every measurable way. It is generated rather than received. It is constant rather than variable. It asks for something rather than offering something. It is designed to direct attention rather than to expand it. And yet it performs a function that is structurally similar to the function performed by the colored light falling on the stone floor: it gives people a place to direct devotion, a surface that reflects meaning back at them, a shared experience of being in the presence of something that is larger than the individual moment.
I am not making a simple argument against technology. The printing press transformed Europe and the transformation was, on balance, worth the disruptions it produced. Every technology is a double edge. What I am observing is that the particular technology of networked screens has produced a form of devotion that has the structural features of religion: the compulsive return, the community organized around shared content, the definition of identity through affiliation, the management of anxiety through ritual engagement. Crown of Wires. Static Saints. The Geometry of Ruin. May 22.