Technology, Wonder, and Attention / Aaron Cline Hanbury

Technology, Aaron Cline Hanbury suggests, is never a purely neutral tool. But the history of ethical thinking about technology shows that as long as there's been technology, there's been anxiety about it. Or perhaps more accurately, anxiety about what we might do with it. And increasingly, what it might do to us.A journalist, founding editor of Common Good magazine, and author of Wired for Wonder, Hanbury came of age as the internet entered the home and has spent his career reporting from the places where technology, faith, and everyday life collide. Rather than offering another list of screen-time tips, he asks a deeper question: How do we relate to the things we make?In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Hanbury wrestles with what it means to be human when the machines we’ve made can do more and more. He criticizes the seduction that we should embrace technology simply because it is inevitable. He explores how connection, efficiency, and unrestrained technological freedom quietly became unquestioned goods, why our powers of attention are eroding in real time, and wonders what it might take—personally, communally, and structurally—to reclaim our humanity through presence, and the rough ground of embodied life.About Aaron Cline HanburyAaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and editor whose essays and profiles have appeared in The Atlantic and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Common Good and a past editor of RELEVANT. He writes about the places where technology, faith, and ordinary life meet. His book, Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, breaks open the tired binary between tech optimists and Luddites in the context of memoir, ethics, journalism, and theology.Helpful Links and ResourcesWired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, by Aaron Cline Hanbury: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889833451/Wired-for-WonderAaron Cline Hanbury's website: https://aaronclinehanbury.com/Aaron Cline Hanbury's Substack: https://aaronclinehanbury.substack.comAaron Cline Hanbury on X: https://x.com/achanburyCommon Good magazine: https://commongoodmag.com/author/aaron-cline-hanbury/Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo23186480.htmlThe Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/bookHannah Coulter, Wendell Berry's novel: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/Show NotesAnxiety and technologyPatient zero for life online—coming of age as the internet entered the homeLow-church tradition, quick to adopt and ask questions laterJournalism as a front-row seat to three decades of changeEarly adopter or Luddite? Rejecting the spectrum's false endsThe device paradigm—technology as pattern, not neutral toolA hammer's telos, and why misuse cuts against a tool's designMade things have a maker—intentions baked into what we buildThe inevitability argument—get on board or get run overResistance is futile? The Borg, Cannes, and defeatismProgress as reversion—tobacco bans, ocean dumping, processed-food rollbacksFamily Guy, satire, and pulling tech ethics out of the esotericThe class and income divide the internet promised to eraseOnline radicalization vs the promise of mass educationChildren as the guinea pigs of early adoptionChromebooks, daycares, and offloading discomfort onto kidsTesting tech on the vulnerable—Jonathan Haidt on teen mental healthSocial media vs attention media—commodifying human focusThe plug-in drug—parents, screens, and pacified kidsFocused attention and the feeling of being fully aliveConnection, efficiency, freedom—goods we stopped questioningDunbar's number and the real limits of friendshipOnline ties without public accountability, and bad formationEmbodiment, particularity, and getting back to the rough groundWe