Digital Raptures
Exploring what happens when you separate the wheat and the tares in online spaces
Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
Matthew 24:40-41
Long COVID and the Online Support Group
In January of 2020 I was the sickest I'd ever been. It started off feeling like the flu. My wife was nursing, which meant sleep wasn't bountiful. In the moment, it made a lot of sense to sleep in the other room so her and the baby could be healthy and rested. By the early morning hours I had come to regret that decision as I lie there focused on each individual breath. I felt that if I didn't give every intake my utmost focus, I wouldn't fill up my lungs enough to keep living. Reaching my phone seemed impossible, much less my wife in the other room.
So I simply existed
one breath
at a time
About a month later COVID "arrived" in the US. In another month I guessed COVID was likely what had left me feeling so mortal. Around this time I also came to grips with something that had been lurking in the shadows of my mind, waiting for me to accept it.
It had been months, and I hadn't ever really recovered.
Certain symptoms had gotten better, but others had gotten worse. By May, I was constantly out of breath. My heart would pound going up the stairs. Sometimes I had to sit and rest halfway up. By June, I was sometimes napping halfway up the stairs. I went to one doctor after another.
"The bloodwork looks good. Sometimes aging just creeps up on us."
"You probably aren't getting enough sleep. Try to get to bed a little earlier."
"Things are really stressful right now. Maybe you could focus on your hobbies a bit more."
Before getting sick, I had been running 3-4 miles every other day trying to build myself up for a half-marathon. Afterwards, I was walking 3-4 blocks then calling my wife to come pick me up with the car. I felt as if I had aged 40 years in 40 days.
I remember the moment I reached a breaking point. As the weather warmed, our church moved from virtual to outdoors. After the service, I carried the camping chairs up the hill to the parking lot. About 40 feet from the car I got worried I wouldn't get there. I focused on every step, willing my legs forward inch by inch. By the time I got to the car, I was drenched in sweat and gasping for air. When we got home I sat in the car for a long time. I was too tired to get out of my seat. My wife was inside with the kids trying to feed them while I sat in the garage. Both of us were wondering if I was dying.
I did what I later learned a lot of people do when they have some chronic condition and the doctors can't or won't do anything to help: I started devouring every anecdotal story and promise of a cure I could hoover up from internet forums and blog posts. I tried supplements I had never heard of, stopped eating certain foods (namely, almost all of them), and made potent concoctions that tasted as bad as I felt.
Through my searching, I came across people who were on the same frustrating journey as me, and all of us coalesced enough that people had to come up with a name for what we were feeling:
Long COVID
I joined an online support group for people who got COVID and never really got better. It was mostly more of the same approach of throwing stuff at the wall and praying something stuck, but at least I knew I wasn't crazy. Some extra sleep or taking a few days PTO wasn't going to fix whatever this was.
Fast forward two years and while I had some lasting damage, I was mostly back to normal functioning. I had found a functional medicine practitioner who ironically thought COVID was all a sham, but she was militant about running lab work until we got to the bottom of what was going wrong. There were setbacks every once in a while, but more days than not COVID wasn’t on my mind. By chance, I stumbled back into my Long COVID support group. Instead of a place of encouragement and sharing of ideas, it had turned into some sort of conspiracy-addled pit of despair.
Most of the group had given up on ever getting better. When a piece of research was shared, the sharer and the researchers were assuredly selling snake oil. There was no hope to be found anywhere. I thought about sharing my recovery and progress to try and nudge things in a positive direction, but it felt like I would just make everybody even more upset.
No matter the reason for existence, online support groups face a common set of challenges that can leave the communities desolated. They function almost opposite of survivorship bias. Instead of only seeing examples of the "planes" that survived, you see only the ones that didn't. The groups usually get far too large for community. You couldn't possibly get to know everyone in the group. The ones you do know are make up 2% of the group population, and post 75% of the content. There is 24/7 asynchronous access to struggle and sorrow. You are separated from each other in body and time. You have information and little else.
Compared to an in-person support group, online support groups are basically just the pamphlets on the table. Only there are thousands of them.
We've talked about technology as an extension before and how when technology overextends it begins folding back on itself. Instead of swiftly carrying you to the mountains, the car traps you in a concrete corral. Instead of communicating with family, the smartphone pulls you from the family dinner to a world oblivious to your existence. Many online support groups (particularly the large ones) don't just fail to support over time, they actually begin to crush people into further despair.
It's how long COVID groups go from avenues for hope and healing to waiting rooms for the walking dead. It’s how nofap groups that fight for freedom from sexual addiction and a misogynistic industry end up dominated by incels degrading women. The algorithm craves continual engagement, and getting better and leaving isn't continual or engaging.
When support groups overextend themselves they lose, rather than gain community, and when there is no community to stay for, the people who find healing and success drift away. They might not even mean to. They just stop checking so often. They mute it from their feed. They get better and start spending more time offline and less time doomscrolling for answers at three in the morning. When you are sober long enough in an AA or NA group you might become a sponsor for others. There is a set place at a set time, with the same faces to keep you tethered. These are the people that picked you up from the bar and drove you home. The ones who cried with you at the funeral for the group member who overdosed. Online groups without the tether to time, place, and presence turn into something else entirely.
A digital rapture.
Dead Internet Theory
This overextension of community is not limited solely to support groups. The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk set in motion a great migration of social media. At first people wondered what the next Twitter would be. Mastodon users were posting daily new user counts. Then came Bluesky and Threads. When the dust settled it turns out that most users hadn't migrated to any of those platforms. They had simply stopped going online. It's not just Twitter either. Facebook is a ghost town. Instagram is an advertising platform for people who want you to keep thinking you know them. TikTok is full of content, but content isn't socialization.
Many tech commentators are sharing ideas that could all be grouped with an idea that started as a conspiracy theory, but is being taken more seriously every day: The Dead Internet Theory. This theory suggests that over time the internet has been and will continue to become a place that is largely populated and produced by bots and generative AI rather than humans. Rachel Haywire on Default Wisdom predicts by 2027 "less than 15% of the population will actively participate in the digital world unless it's for work." Sam Kriss has declared "The Internet is Already Over". In borrowing an idea from Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem, Yancey Strickler has suggested that we are headed toward a dark forest approach to the internet, in which small private communities will engage within each other and hope they never reveal themselves to the rest of the internet.
On some level I think most everyone who has spent a lot of time online realizes the internet is decaying. It has overextended itself and its promise of community has reversed. Our communities were hijacked by algorithms and sponsored postings so much that many of our friends and family decided to just leave. We may not have noticed most of them doing it because virtual spaces are much easier to exit quietly than real ones, but it's true. If you are still there, take a look at your friends list on any platform. How many of them still post regularly? How many of the ones still there post actual content from their lives? How many of them respond to you? Whatever the answers here, my guess is it's significantly lower than it was six or seven years ago.
The Wheat and the Tares
While the idea of the rapture has captivated creators of fiction for a long time, it's scriptural support is lacking. Its common basis comes from passages like the one in Matthew 24 where Jesus is telling people that his return will come suddenly. He likens it to people out in the field and one is taken and the other left. From there the idea has been extrapolated to mean that suddenly all of God's chosen will vanish, and the wicked will be Left Behind™. This runs contrary to how the idea of Jesus' return is developed further in the New Testament as a final culminating event rather than one last chance after the righteous are redeemed.
From online social groups that have experienced a form of digital rapture we can see the problems with a real one. How does the good news of Jesus transform lives when everyone who experienced it has left? How different would the parable of the lost sheep go if instead of the one leaving, the shepherd suddenly took the 99 somewhere else?
As social media and the internet begins to fold back on itself Christians will have to think deeply about what it means to remain in these digitally raptured communities or to leave them. While the dark forest theory makes for entertaining science fiction, it doesn't necessarily make for great evangelism. On the other hand, remaining inside of a dead internet at the expense of embodied communities that are full of life isn't necessarily healthy either. I don't know that there is any one right path for all of us, but I think Scripture can help guide us through some important questions that will be posed in the extension section below.
“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
“‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”
Matthew 13:28b-30
In this parable of the wheat and the tares, Jesus tells of a man who plants a crop, which is spoiled when an enemy plants weeds amongst it. Rather than try to sort out the two, the master tells his servants to let them grow together until harvest. According to the parable, the appropriate time to sort is at the harvest, not before.
The rapture doesn't work as theology because it promises a sorting before the harvest. A rapture doesn't work in community because it destroys those left behind. As social media fractures into ideologically driven platforms with heavy-handed algorithms which try to separate the wheat from the chaff, Christians who remain in these spaces are reminded that it is not our job to separate and destroy but to be seed planters.
I don't know what will become of the internet, but I know that as long as there are people on it, someone will need to plant seeds there.
On My Mind
This post had quite a number of references. Rather than add to them here are some snippets of a choice few that couldn't fit within the main flow of the article.
The dark forest theory of the internet by Yancey Strickler
The Web 2.0 era has been replaced by a new Web² era. An age where we simultaneously live in many different internets, whose numbers increase hourly. The dark forests are growing.
The dark forests grow because they provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there. Compared to the free market communication style of the mass channels — with their high risks, high rewards, and limited moderation — dark forest spaces are more Scandinavian in their values and the social and emotional security they provide. They cap the downsides of looking bad and the upsides of our best jokes by virtue of a contained audience.
Offline is the New Online by Rachel Haywire
So I decided to nuke my account, erasing my entire following in the process. Years later, I questioned whether I had made a mistake, as I now found myself disconnected from the community with which I had the greatest intellectual connection. My engagement dwindled faster than a roller coaster on meth. I suppose I could have brought back my Facebook account where I still had 5k followers, but Facebook was so irrelevant at this point that it would have felt like self-mutilation. I also couldn't migrate my followers off Facebook, no matter how hard I tried. Not to Discord, not to Telegram, not to anywhere else at all. They were prisoners who were never leaving Facebook, and that was that.
Deciding that it wasn't worth it to be trapped on an irrelevant platform, I accepted my new fate as a lowbie and began wondering if I would ever have any real online engagement again. I saw no genuine way to build a new following from scratch. My time as a main character was over, and there was nothing unique about this trajectory. My experience was part of a wider picture. That wider picture was this: as social media federated after years of bot farms, we began losing important connections to our friends.
Extension
Questions for the Digital Rapture era:
Have you found yourself spending more time on the internet than five years ago? Less? About the same? What impact has that had on your life?
Are your friends and family generally spending more time on the internet than five years ago? Less? About the same? What impact has that had on your life?
In what ways are you planting seeds in online communities? In what ways are you planting them in embodied (offline) communities?
How does the process of planting seeds in each community differ? In what ways might it be the same?
Next time* on Redeeming Technology
Aliens, Obama, UFOs, Congress, and the rise of American techno-gnosticism
*maybe!