There was a time in my life when I could have recited Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments from beginning to end. That, Ben Hur, and a collection of Veggie Tales and Little House on the Prairie episodes constituted most of my childhood films, all available only on shiny pieces of plastic shoved into a slot on my Mom’s computer.
At the time, my siblings and I found the whole system rather limiting. Most of our 30-some DVDs were scratched to such a degree that whole scenes had been excised. The experience was more frustrating than romantic; the occasional DVD acquired at the local library was a welcome relief from the boredom of watching a film you had seen 20 times. (READ MORE: Have You Tried Turning Your Brain Off and On Again?)
Hindsight tends to paint experiences in the rosy hue of nostalgia, and so the internet, specifically the young internet, has suddenly decided that physical media is trendy. Video rental shops have suddenly started reporting record months as Gen Z kids decided (at least for now) that popping in a physical disc was better than endlessly scrolling on Netflix. And the trend hasn’t stopped with DVDs.
Knitting, painting, coloring, sewing, pressing flowers, doing puzzles, small house renovations — all of it is making a comeback. You could, hypothetically, spend hours scrolling through videos of women (and yes, for some reason it’s usually women) showing off their “analog” basket or bag as they assure their audiences that they’re really trying to put down the digital in favor of the physical. This, after all, is “analog summer,” and it’s taking the internet by storm.
Obviously, there is a fair bit of irony here. The point of the whole analog trend is to make a break from the digital world: phones, endless scrolling, social media destroyed by AI copycats, etc. But for a generation that grew up on social media, there’s an irresistible urge to digitize even our break from the digital. That irony suggests it’s temporary: it’ll have a bunch of 20-somethings picking up knitting needles only to drop them as soon as they realize that it actually takes an absurd number of hours to knit something worth wearing (and that the dopamine hit isn’t quite as high). (READ MORE: Would the Whiff of AI Have Panicked Harold Ross?)
And yet, perhaps there’s something a bit deeper here. We live in a world where 70–90 percent of the images and videos we consume on social media are produced via artificial intelligence. But it’s not just social media and entertainment; the bots are threatening to take our jobs. Just as during the Industrial Revolution there was a temptation to see the man working in an assembly line as little more than a cog in a machine, so in our own age of digital revolution we are tempted to sometimes view the human typing on his keyboard as nothing more than an “intelligence” — one perhaps less capable than the artificial intelligence we’ve crafted out of pieces of code.
The result? We’ve had to wrestle with a philosophical question many of us are woefully unprepared to handle: What exactly does it mean to be human?
We could talk about the philosophical differences between the God-given intellect man has been endowed with and the “intelligence” Open AI’s ChatGPT claims to possess. But while those differences are critical to properly answering the question of what makes us different from our creations, they don’t form the part of the answer that the internet, with its “analog summer,” has unwittingly stumbled on.
Humans, unlike artificial intelligence, are made up of flesh and bones. Not only do we possess intellect, we take up physical space and enjoy manipulating it. We like taking raw materials and turning them into something new and sometimes useful. We relish in the delight of making. We, like our Creator, get real joy out of admiring a thing we’ve made and determining that it is good.
Like it or not, it is impossible to truly appreciate the depth of this odd instinct we have to get off of our devices and pick up a practical craft without appealing to the “Word become flesh.” That, of course, is something Pope Leo XIV had no issue in doing in his encyclical, published earlier this week, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity).
“At the heart of everything is the mystery of the Incarnation, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us,” Leo wrote. “Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history. This human face is the fullness toward which history is moving. It is the mystery of ‘recapitulation’: the certainty that the Father has decreed to bring all things, those in heaven and those on earth, back to Christ, the one Head (cf. Eph 1:10). In this plan, nothing will be lost that is authentically human.”
Do the influencers showing off their totes full of half-completed crafts really understand what they’re doing? It seems rather unlikely. And yet, perhaps as a consequence of that innate human tendency to search for truth, they’ve stumbled upon something: If becoming fully human meant that God took pleasure in crafting a table with fleshy hands, perhaps it’s worth reconnecting with our humanity by trying to do the same.
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