Rich’s sermon this Sunday was … dense. We could probably spend a couple of weeks on reflecting on the issues raised by the Christian “at work” particularly the ways work has evolved in this fallen world. For me the thing that probably sticks with me the most is the work that went into the things I have.
Back a few years ago, when I started blogging more regularly, I did a series of posts on how the technology I use every day gets assembled. I’m kind of a gadget freak. While I may not be an Apple junkie, I have several computers, tablets, eReaders, and am always interested in assessing the next piece of technology. And to be fair, I use most of this stuff for my work, be it the writing or my day job. But still, I’m able to sit here writing to you on a cheap laptop because the parts were assembled by someone making a dollar or two an hour.
Some of the tech jobs in low cost countries are a step up, but I feel that in many ways that’s just a way I can make myself feel better enough to ignore the issue completely. Even though I wrote about it for several months, and still care about how my stuff gets made, I stopped writing those posts when it became clear they weren’t getting read anymore. It’s not like I really changed my buying habits. There are no fair-trade computers as far as I know.
And I think sometimes about my job, and how it affects the world at large. I write software for data-centers. Data-centers are the backbone of the net, really of our culture. Everything that’s happening in today’s culture, from social media, to smart phones, to predictive marketing, is all made possible by the data-center (and in some very small part, me). There’s nothing inherently bad about the Internet, just a lot of the things we choose to do it. And admittedly a lot of the data being collected invades our privacy, tries to get us to spend money we don’t have, or just titillates us with the next bit of media or porn.
Nothing I do every day is directly harming the world, and yet in some way I am culpable (if slightly) for contributing to the world we are becoming.
When I was writing about these issues a few years ago, I found it hard to suggest tangible things for people to do about technology. This is one of those things I feel bad about from time to time, but really don’t feel motivated to much about. It would change so much about my life to put away technology (it is literally something I’ve been training for since Highschool and probably before that). It would be infinitely harder to thrive as an indie author without the net, and even this blog wouldn’t survive without being hosed somewhere.
So how am I as a Christian to act?
I think for starters I need to not ignore the work costs precipitated by the way our world does business. I need to be making conscious choices, and if something really goes against what I feel God is calling me to, I need to trust that he can provide. Right now I do feel called to working and writing about the technology center, but you have to be careful to not become to much of the culture in places like that. Fortunately my particular group of co-workers is all believers, so if we do have problems, it’s never hard to talk about them.
This is one of those things I’ll be figuring out for a while. And in the meantime I can at least help by not always buying the new, but figuring out ways to keep the old working (like *shiver* Linux).
Going Deeper 