A dreadful confusion of forms has emerged. These forms no longer have roots in life and its essential content. We build theaters in the form of temples, banks in the form of cathedrals, apartment complexes in the form of palaces. Working days and Sundays merge into one another.
—Guardini (1994), Letters From Lake Como, p. 59.
Introduction: The Need for an Apocalyptic Imagination
Part I ended by connecting liturgical signs to the AI age on the basis of the philosophy and practice of interface design. While the question of design inspired by liturgical signs will be taken up again in Part III, this section of the book relies on the ideas of two outstanding theologians to afford new entry points into the project of a Catholic cosmotechnics founded on the twin qualities of liturgical signs—epiphany and asceticism. The theologians in question are Romano Guardini, to whom this chapter is devoted, and St. John Henry Newman, the Church’s newest Doctor, whose work is taken up in the next.
To recapitulate: the previous chapters identified two essential qualities of liturgical signs: they are epiphanic (disclosive of a ground) and ascetic (self-limiting through juxtaposition, refraining from capturing the whole). These twin characteristics prevent liturgical signs from becoming “formal signs”—mediations that hide in plain sight, collapsing the ground into the figure and thereby foreclosing alternative possibilities for action. On that basis, the present chapter sets out from the sobering possibility that to live in a technologically-mediated world might be to live in a world dominated precisely by such formal signs. It follows that the very possibility of a Catholic cosmotechnics hinges on the ability to (re)gain awareness of technological mediations that are ordinarily hidden in plain sight. This is where Romano Guardini’s critique of technology plays a pivotal role. In particular, Guardini (1994) stresses the apocalyptic value of technological “accidents.” Here I use “apocalyptic” not in the popular sense of catastrophic destruction, but in its root meaning of unveiling or revelation. Technological accidents, in this sense, reveal the finite and fallible character of new technologies, making visible once again the work of mediation they actively undertake: they only disclose particular experiential possibilities at the cost of foreclosing alternative modes of perception that are rendered inaccessible, right when they could provide traction for questioning the deeper telos of a particular technological path.
Following the French Catholic theorist Paul Virilio, I will show how technology’s accidents are not mere failures or glitches, but they point to constitutive features of the process of technological change. Where Virilio focuses primarily on spectacular crashes, I want to press deeper into what might be called the “perceptual” accident: the tendency of technology to “hide in plain sight” its own work of mediation, leading to an imperceptible—if decisive—collapse of ground into figure. “Perceptual” accidents are rooted in what Guardini, and McLuhan with him, identifies as abstraction: the isolation and privileging of one mode of perception at the expense of others that gives rise to a “formal sign” (i.e. one that gives an impression of immediacy while actually hiding its shaping effect on perception).
The most vivid historical example of this pattern appears in the transition from cathedral to book, which marked a shift from the multimedia richness of liturgical worship to the privileging of a single medium. Reading Guardini alongside Marshall McLuhan reveals how this transition does not amount to a mere change in the “channels” of communication but embodies a veritable transformation of consciousness itself. As we observe in chapter 4, the cathedral maintained what Newman called “separate but concordant” (Loss and Gain, II, chapter 20) modes of perception—visual, spatial, acoustic, tactile—all working together without merging into uniformity. The printed book, by contrast, “abstracted” and amplified the visual sense, reshaping human consciousness around private reading and linear conceptualization.
The stakes extend directly to our contemporary moment. If we are to develop what we call here a “Catholic cosmotechnics,” an approach to interface design rooted in liturgical wisdom, we must first understand how technology shapes perception through abstraction—and this requires attending to what makes it visible in the first place: its accidents. Only then can we imagine genuine alternatives: interfaces that resist single-medium dominance and preserve the multimedia vibrancy of liturgical signs.
Technology’s Apocalyptic Accidents: From Crash to Perceptual Paradox
The development of any new technology includes what Paul Virilio calls “the accident” (Virilio, 2007). The invention of the train, for example, includes the invention of the train’s derailment, and the invention of the airplane necessarily includes the airplane crash. In Virilio’s telling, the accident is not simply a description of the shadow side of technology, but a philosophical term connected to the essential nature or substance of technological change. Accidents are typically understood as non-essential attributes of a substance (the color of a chair, for instance), but in the case of technological change, accidents are integral to its substance. The popular claim that technology is a neutral tool and that our ethical task is to avoid its misuse fails to address this essential character of technology as an “accident waiting to happen.”
Yet we must press beyond the spectacular accidents Virilio emphasizes—the derailments and crashes—to recognize a more insidious form of accident: perceptual abstraction. This is the feature of technology whereby it manages to hide its own work of mediation in plain sight, presenting itself not as one possible way of doing things but as the only conceivable way. When a technology achieves this status, it has succeeded in collapsing the ground into the figure, eliminating the space for alternative significations that liturgical signs so carefully preserve through their “ascetic” multimediality.
Guardini (1994) identified this perceptual accident with remarkable clarity in his Letters from Lake Como, quoted in the epigraph. “A dreadful confusion of forms has emerged,” he writes. “These forms no longer have roots in life and its essential content. We build theaters in the form of temples, banks in the form of cathedrals, apartment complexes in the form of palaces. Working days and Sundays merge into one another” (p. 59). This confusion of forms parallels precisely the liturgical critique we encountered in earlier chapters: when any form of mediation loses its epiphanic connection to reality—i.e. when it ceases to function as figure pointing to a ground—it becomes engulfing. It appropriates the entire field of perception rather than providing access to a richer ground of experience.
It is by attending to these perceptual accidents that the “apocalyptic” revelation of the nature of technological change comes to the surface. Apocalypse in this sense does not refer to a revelation of the destructive potential of technology but of the ways in which any technology reorients perception in service of its uptake. We come to see the world differently because new technologies suggest alternative ways of relating to nature and to one another. The automobile is not merely a new tool; rather, it embodies an entire mechanized mode of relating to the world that requires a new infrastructure of highways and suburbs and homes built for housing and caring for mechanized beasts of burden. What is performed in these moments of dramatic change are tacit assumptions about what it means to be human, what constitutes a flourishing society, and what the telos of our innovative impulses is actually directed toward.
The sacrifice of 4,000,000 people at the altar of the automobile since its invention has been deemed a calculated risk, implying that the good of motorized transport outweighs the human and environmental costs (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2025). More traffic regulations, safer cars, and caps on carbon emissions are prudent interventions, but they do not address the deeper structural transformations that remap our relationship to each other and to nature. The logic of speed and efficiency has become a cultural imperative for transcending embodied limits that impede human “progress.”
Digital networks and artificial intelligence systems transcend both physical and psychological limits in new ways. Reams of data being processed and delivered at the speed of light introduce a new mode of knowledge creation and transfer that is no longer fully dependent on human ingenuity and inspiration. The shift is epistemic as much as it is technological. Moreover, globalized information networks and semi-autonomous AI systems raise the specter of unforeseen consequences reverberating on a planetary scale, for instance in the form of global economic collapse, geopolitical instability, or environmental catastrophe. Such dystopian scenarios have fueled increased anxiety over these powerful systems and led to a rush of ethical reflection. However, embedded within modern ethical judgment is the idea that the possibility of progress is superior to the absence of progress. Technological “accidents” are thus seen as unintended consequences that can be averted or controlled through more progress. This introduces the perceptual paradox we have been tracking: the possibilities for action with a new technology are constrained by the prevailing structures of thought and moral reasoning of the era in which they are being created. Chief among these constraining structures is the very concept of “progress” itself, which shapes how we understand technological accidents—whether as unfortunate setbacks to be overcome, or as revelations worthy of sustained attention.
Progress is a uniquely modern concept based on linear, cumulative advancement. The ancient Greeks understood that technical progress was often at odds with ethical, political, or spiritual progress. For the Greeks, progress was multifaceted and centered on the human person (Postiglione, 2020). In modernity, the calculus shifted to what is good for “society” as defined by those who have the political and economic resources to develop transformative technologies. Taking the existential risks of technology seriously is impeded by a failure to transcend the impoverished account of human dignity and anthropology inherited from the dualistic philosophies of the Enlightenment that separate body and soul. The cultivation of the human soul has become a private affair distinct from the material concerns of the body. The modern scientific and technological mindset brackets out humanity’s spiritual nature in service of material progress. Ironically, technology has taken up a spiritualized rhetoric that offers mythologized narratives about the manifest destiny of human creative power to neuter the natural world (Robinson, 2013).
Philosophical and political questions about the proper use of technology for serving material ends and avoiding significant harm predominate the discussion. This is understandable, but it fails to move outside the “immanent frame” in which technology is imagined (Taylor, 2007). The immanent frame avoids the question of what technology is for (i.e. asking after the kind of human form of life it enables, and how) and turns it instead into an absolute and absolutizing reference. In the “immanent frame,” technology resides within a matrix of political, economic, and philosophical commitments aimed at evolutionary progress (Kelly, 2010). In this context, questions of cosmological and eschatological significance are treated as vestigial remnants of an unenlightened age. As a result, at the very moment technology poses serious risks to a planet in crisis, the theological categories best suited for addressing existential crises are crowded out by a return to the progress narrative that elides the possibility of “reversing” the abstraction of perception that is coextensive with any technological evolution.
Contemporary ethical responses to digital technology have ranged from calls for stricter AI regulation to reactionary solutions that seek an escape from the system (Kingsnorth, 2025). On the one hand, stricter regulation attempts to apply ethical norms to a technological infrastructure that is already largely determined by the philosophical, political and economic commitments that led to its creation in the first place. To complicate matters, the astronomical cost of AI data centers and the resources required to power them have limited AI development to a handful of companies that must privilege profitability over morality. On the other hand, seeking escape from such a system also requires escape from the broader neoliberal infrastructure that powers the global economy. This has given rise to romantic neo-Luddite movements that begrudgingly make use of centrally-controlled social media platforms to promote their views. Even if one chooses to go “off the grid” entirely, there is still the practical reality of living inside of a thoroughly technologized environment that has already reshaped the surrounding culture. Thus, both regulation and escape fall short of addressing the structural tension at the heart of highly-technologized society.
This is not to say that prudent policy decisions or romantic returns to simpler ways of life are entirely irrelevant. On the contrary, they serve to reveal the structural tension already noted. What these decisions have revealed is that the institutions once charged with mitigating the threats posed by unfettered scientific and technological development have lost the cultural authority and confidence to respond to the historical moment of the technocene, discussed in the Theological introduction. The Catholic Church, once the paragon of spiritual and historical cohesion, has ceded significant ground to the bureaucratic domain of democratic institutions and corporations. At the same time, the democratic institutions and corporations that promised a renewed social order without the theological baggage of the Middle Ages have undergone their own process of dissolution at the hands of the so-called “democratizing technology” of the internet. Online tribalism and the political and religious in fighting that characterize online discourse is one such illustration of this dissolution. So who will save us?
Retrieving an Apocalyptic Imagination in Times of Crisis
The apocalyptic imagination is never more active than in periods of dramatic social change when the world “as we know it” is coming to an end and a new world is coming into being. One can think of various paradigm shifts in human history, particularly in the sciences, when new discoveries undermined prior assumptions about the nature of reality. Galileo’s heliocentric observation that the Earth was not, in fact, the center of the universe, had profound implications not just for science but for theology. The modern age experienced a series of these upheavals that made it increasingly difficult to square medieval cosmologies rooted in the ontological frame of Revelation with the emerging scientific consensus that came to dominate knowledge systems in the centuries to come. The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution reimagined the divine order of the cosmos in empirical terms, and in so doing, dismantled the edifice on which the premodern mind was structured. This cosmological downshift also threw into question the privileging of humanity as the pinnacle of God’s creative work. Closer to us, the concerns about the anthropocene, the destabilizing effect of the acceleration of technological development on the Earth’s bio-geo-physical processes (Thomas, Williams & Zalasiewicz, 2020), cast humanity as the villain in an apocalyptic unfolding of technological accidents that are crippling the planet (Francis, 2015b).
Thus, the task at hand is to interrogate the perceptual framework through which we have imagined and deployed these new technologies. Doing so requires an ability to step outside the immanent frame of progress and harm reduction and into the apocalyptic and eschatological frame that reckons with the telos of human creativity. This sets the stage for Guardini’s crucial intervention: to understand technology’s accidents not merely as technical failures but as “apocalyptic” revelations of how technology reshapes human perception through abstraction. It is at such junctures that the question around which modes of perception a given technology enables or disables has a brief window of being asked in all its import. To illustrate Guardini’s mode of technological critique that retrieves this richer form of questioning, the historical transformation from cathedral to book provides a helpful case study.
“This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice,” declared the archdeacon Claude Frollo in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo, 1831). Hugo explained the archdeacon’s comment this way:
It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable (bk. 5, ch. 2).
Here we see the way in which the forms that preserve and transmit knowledge are implicated in the restructuring of knowledge and experience. The cathedral was a multimedia architecture—with visual, spatial, and acoustic signs working together in unmerged ways, creating vibrant thresholds that do not hide in plain sight. The advent of the printed book at the dawn of the modern age marked an epistemic shift away from the communal experience of objective truth revealed in stone, glass, and liturgical acts toward a private experience of individualized introspection and a newfound subjectivity. For Guardini (2001), this transition from cathedral to book represents not merely a change in information technology but a wholesale transformation of the “world picture” itself.
The elevation of one liturgical sign—text—above the multimediality of the cathedral had momentous consequences, which Guardini examines in his book The End of the Modern World (Guardini, 2001). While the title sounds apocalyptic (the cover of the ISI edition is an image of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement), it is not about the end of the world. Instead, it is a theological account of the “world picture” being altered by the introduction of a new cosmology that superseded older ideas. The first occurred in the transition from the world of antiquity to the Middle Ages when Revelation, the divine truths revealed by God, displaced the mythological world picture held by the ancient Greeks. As the Renaissance demonstrated, there is a critical period of transition from the old to the new that attempts to synthesize what has come before with the coming age. Pagan thought was taken up by Renaissance thinkers who incorporated ancient ideas and aesthetics into the Church’s pedagogy. Platonic ideas about the ascent of the soul toward the Good became a Christian ascent toward God. The goddess Venus in Botticelli’s work became a symbol of divine beauty meant to lead the soul upward. The Renaissance thus maintained a metaphysical continuity with the age that came before it. Yet this synthesis proved fragile; the very tools that enabled Renaissance learning—particularly the printing press—would ultimately dissolve the unified cosmology they had temporarily preserved.
The shared metaphysical horizon of antiquity and the Middle Ages was lost in the transition to modernity. The domains of science, politics, economics and religion that previously exhibited a unity of purpose, to promote human flourishing, were reimagined as autonomous and self-referential pursuits. Science had no need to consult religious authorities, and politics dispensed with the divine right of kings and the spiritual authority of the Church (Gregory, 2015). The hierarchical cosmos of unified symbolic meaning that found its center in Christ, the Logos, was swept aside by new discoveries that expanded the scope of the world picture to reveal an infinite universe of possibilities and unexplored territory. The role of new technology in this shift cannot be understated. The advent of the printing press provided the kindling for the explosive growth of mass production, first with books and then with the mechanical production of all manner of goods. However, the significance of the printing press and its capacity to accelerate the transmission of knowledge and the growth of commerce paled in comparison to its capacity to transform consciousness. This represents precisely the perceptual accident I have been tracking: not a spectacular crash but a subtle—if decisive—reorganization of the sensorium that privileges one medium over others until that medium becomes “the only conceivable way” of accessing divine truth. The book became the medium that is the message. Print did not merely add a new option to the cathedral’s multimedia array; it fundamentally restructured the hierarchy of the senses and, with it, the modes of knowing available to worshippers.
The Protestant Reformation, a harbinger of the metaphysical crisis to come in religion, was the first indicator of this shift in consciousness. The private reader of Scripture, no longer bound to the authority of the Church’s interpretation of holy writ, could proceed by way of sola scriptura to formulate his or her own magisterial framework. What is worth noting here goes beyond doctrinal debates and extends into the realm of consciousness itself. The multimedia openness that preserved the ascetic quality of liturgical signs gave way to monological figuration under a single dominant medium. In particular, the experience of reading dictated by the form of the printed book allowed private reading to become a gateway for introspection and the birth of the modern individual. Free of corporate knowledge systems, the modern individual could cultivate a distinct personality. Those who were most successful at cultivating personality through the acquisition of knowledge could ascend to the level of genius, the new measure of human value (Guardini, 2001, p. 34). The modern individual traded the sense of being a participant in an established objective order in exchange for a more tenuous subjectivity that granted him the freedom to be master of his own destiny. This new consciousness contained the simultaneous thrill of self-definition and the anxiety of losing “a ‘real’ and symbolic place in reality” (Guardini, 2001, p. 35).
Coming at it from the angle of media studies, Marshall McLuhan (2017) also articulated this transformation with characteristic precision. A cathedral differs from a book because the cathedral requires different conditions of attendance than the book. Certain senses are heightened while others are diminished. The book is a primarily visual medium whereas the cathedral engages all of the senses. To dwell in a cathedral suffused with symbols and liturgical acts is phenomenologically distinct from trying to apprehend concepts on a printed page. However, for McLuhan, the real transformation of conscious experience does not happen at the level of concepts (a well-written book could certainly describe the same conceptual realities embedded in a cathedral’s architectural form) but at the level of percepts. The oral and communal culture that built the cathedrals wasrooted in acoustic and shared experience while the print culture that emerged in the early modern period favored detached conceptual abstraction. McLuhan and Guardini both point to abstraction as one of the formal features of modern technology that breeds a sense of “strange unreality [. . .] coming over human beings and things” (Guardini, 1994, p. 20).
McLuhan echoes Guardini when he talks about the process of abstraction that followed the invention of the printing press. Print abstracts experience by isolating the visual sense and breaking apart the acoustic-tactile unity of oral cultures. The printed word becomes a substitute for lived presence by disembedding meaning from communal performance. The “strange unreality” lamented by Guardini and analyzed by McLuhan is an experience of losing the sense of participation in a shared cosmos by absolutizing conceptual distinctions relative to nature and reality. In Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como, he labels each letter individually: abstraction, artificiality, mastery, and dissolution of the organic. McLuhan would call these the formal effects of technology. They do not describe the content of the technology, the words on a page or images on a screen, but the new context or environment they create. While many ethicists focus on the particular algorithms or outputs of AI, the real transformation is more totalizing; it is the disclosure of a new environment that gives rise to new modes of perception. If technological abstraction contracts the multimediality proper to liturgical signs under a single style of signification, then recovering the vibrancy of liturgical perception becomes an urgent task—not as nostalgia for a lost past, but as a resource for imagining technological futures that preserve rather than eliminate the conditions for genuine disclosure of reality (epiphany).
The Quest for Renewing Perception in Catholic Cosmotechnics
Guardini’s liturgical theology provides a helpful framework for thinking about the challenges posed by the new technological order. The modernization of society and culture in the early twentieth century raised fresh questions about forms of religious worship rooted in ancient rites and texts. The birth of mass media technologies like film, radio, and television contributed to an exponential increase in the speed and quantity of images and information. Guardini understood this cultural shift as a transformation occurring at the level of the symbolic order.
In the liturgy, the faithful continued to read along with the liturgical texts but were losing their ability to see the deeper meaning symbolized by the material and spiritual acts of worship. This was not so much a problem of the presentation of the sacred rites but a lack of individual formation at the level of body and soul. The modern mind, formed as it was in radical subjectivity and individualism, had succumbed to creeping rationalism and a reductionist view of reality. The dualist conception of body and soul that began with Neoplatonism and Gnosticism found deep purchase in modern thought, most notably in Descartes. This in no way led to the disappearance of spirituality; rather, it separated the interiority of the soul from the external expression of the body. Spiritual perfection belonged to the individual soul, and the imperfect medium of the human body stood in the way of its flourishing.
Reading Guardini’s liturgical theology in light of technological change recovers the eschatological dimension of human existence and overcomes the artificial split between soul and body. In Guardini’s view, the rise of technological progress has spiritual implications because it alters the very embodied perception of liturgical acts. This is not mere coincidence; rather, it points to a shift in the symbolic order of human culture that swapped religious formation for technological formation. The irony is that technological rhetoric has taken up the same religious and salvific tone that once belonged to faith in God and the eschatological character of the created order (Robinson, 2013). In both views, the desire for transcendence is present, albeit in different ways. For the technologist, the goal is to transcend natural and human limits in support of a tenuous freedom from toil and suffering. For the liturgically minded, the goal is also transcendence, but one in service to a more enduring vision of communion with God and Creation.
Each time the liturgy is celebrated, humanity’s desire for transcendence is taken up in the material aspects of the sacramental order. Natural elements are not seen as inert matter for exploitation and extraction but as mediums for transformation and renewal. Water, wine, bread, and oil are signs that point beyond themselves toward an eschatological reality made manifest in the liturgy and sacraments of the Church. Baptismal water does more than cleanse the body; it rejuvenates the soul by healing the primordial wound of original sin inherited from our first parents.
Here the unity of substance and accident takes on a different character than that of technology, where accidents of an unwanted kind become the defining feature of technology’s existence. In the theological view, the substance of water retains its natural properties while its accidents—washing, refreshing, even drowning—are left unchanged. However, through the intention and form of the sacrament, water is elevated to an instrumental cause of grace. The liturgical act of “drowning” under baptismal waters symbolizes death to sin and emergence to new life. The grace of new life conferred by the sacrament is not added to the water as a property but to the act in which the water is used. It is in this material, embodied, and spiritual way that God saves humanity through matter, not abolishing nature but perfecting it.
The eclipse of this theological perception has been hastened by the superhuman forces of the technological order that seek to perfect the natural order by removing the “sin” of material suffering. The undeniable benefits of modern medicine and the tantalizing encounter with machines that promise unlimited knowledge serve to reinforce the idea that science and technology offer a more expedient means for transcending the limits of the natural world—not by elevating the stuff of nature but by subduing it through experimentation and force. This techno-logic forms the tech-faithful to subscribe to a man-made “invisible reality”—one that hides in microscopic forms like nano-scale silicon chips that power the vast digital infrastructure required by the internet and AI systems. Faith in manufactured systems becomes a new religion in which the promise of infinite knowledge and immortality is brought down to earth and incorporated into humanity’s evolutionary destiny (Robinson, 2013).
The substitution of religious faith in modernity by faith in human progress offers a counterfeit transcendence that ends up serving as an anti-liturgy (on this point, see also the Theological introduction). In this anti-liturgy, the material world is significant only insofar as it is useful and subject to mastery. For Guardini, this development was not a rejection of the religious worldview to make way for a secular one. Rather, it was the insidious reform of religious sensibilities in the modern era that shifted the focus from the oral, communal and participatory world of the cathedral where human fulfillment was found in glorifying God to an interior spirituality of concepts and schematics that paved the way for religious life as ethical exercise (Guardini, 2022, p. 38). As McLuhan (2017) rightly notes, the phenomenology of print and literate culture created the environmental conditions for this perceptual shift from the exterior world of embodied things and persons to the interior world of ideas and formulas.
At the same time, Guardini’s agenda is not the stoppage of technological progress and a return to premodern existence. Rather, it is an observation that modernity has dramatically altered human perception in ways that have skewed our sense of moral responsibility in the face of dramatic technological change. Invention has outpaced moral introspection. The eschatological horizon of the Church—in which humans are invited into the infinite and immortal life of God through embodied liturgical acts—has been usurped by a technological horizon where humans are invited into a programmable escape from material constraints through virtual means.
Moreover, Guardini’s approach is not strictly theological but also sociological and psychological. The implications of his view that modernity has led to a dissolution of human perception can also be found in the work of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was a practicing Catholic, but his analysis of media technology brackets out theological concerns and focuses on the transformation of human perception accelerated by modern means of communication. Beginning with the printing press, McLuhan (2017) has shown that changes in media forms also bring about changes in conscious awareness. New structures of thought and expression emerge by mirroring the mediated forms that give them expression.
What both Guardini and McLuhan help us see is that noticing technological forms and the environments they create requires an ontological awareness in addition to an ethical one. To ask what a technology is in terms of what it does is to focus almost exclusively on instrumental cause and effect. To ask what a technology is in terms of how it reshapes our relationship to the world of real things makes room for considering its formal effects on perception. Both instrumental and formal effects raise important ethical questions, but the primacy of form precedes the instrumental particulars of the tools themselves. New forms induce new social and cultural patterns that transcend the particular uses of a technology. For instance, mobile devices are more than sophisticated communication technologies; instead, they alter the rhythm, rituals, and relationships of everyday life. Attending to these new patterns of existence and perception opens up a much broader ontological horizon that privileges questions about what it means to be human in the first place. This is precisely where a Catholic cosmotechnics enters the conversation: not primarily to regulate technology’s uses but to interrogate and reimagine the forms through which technology mediates human experience.
Technology can be revelatory, as Virilio shows, when we consider the technological accident as inseparable from its substance. The apocalyptic scenarios that have emerged in the age of AI represent far more than displaced dystopian anxieties. They are occasions for insight where the possibility of existential collapse reveals the true face of our technological pursuits. This is where we arrive at the constructive insight: awareness of technology’s apocalyptic accidents—its capacity to reshape perception through abstraction—invites not an attempt to craft other totalizing media that try to (re-)capture the entire ground, but rather a strategy of restraint through the layering of multiple media without trying to homogenize them under a single mode of signification. Just as liturgical signs maintain their epiphanic quality precisely through their mutual juxtaposition, so too might interfaces be designed to sustain rather than collapse the tension between different media.
If Virilio shows us, through catastrophe, the moment of ontological disclosure inherent in technological development, Guardini and McLuhan reveal the moments of perceptual transformation that do not change the world as much as they change the ways we see and experience the world. As such, Guardini—and McLuhan with him—embody a style of technological critique that seeks to undo the perceptual abstraction in order to reopen certain fundamental questions around the ultimate ends of technology: What kind of world do our technologies presuppose? What kind of human being are they forming? And, crucially: How might an apocalyptic imagination around technology’s accidents guide us toward interfaces that embody liturgical restraint rather than totalizing capture?
While Guardini and McLuhan inoculate an apocalyptic imagination to invite technological developments that are not just “more of the same,” John Henry Newman begins to unfold a constructive thread by helping flesh out the mentioned qualities of liturgical signs (epiphany and asceticism) that distance them from the kinds of “perception-distorting” mediations Guardini and McLuhan warn against.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Catholic Cosmotechnics for the AI Age.
Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer