LOL Interwebz: Dying to Self in an Age of Decision-Making Engines

Each week in LOL Interwebz, Luke T. Harrington explores the quirks and foibles of Internet culture from a Gospel perspective.

We’ve all been there: we can’t decide whether to buy the chateau in Paris or the ranch in SoCal.

Actually, none of us have ever been there. Maybe one person, at most, has had to make that decision. But, if you do have the misfortune of finding yourself in that predicament, the Internet is now more than happy to make the decision for you.

Something Pop—so named because it aspires to make something pop among your array of choices (see what they did there?)—is now open for business at SomethingPop.com and patiently waiting for you to ask it what house you should buy, what you should have for dinner, and whether you should buy a pet llama or a pet zebu. (According to the couple behind it, they devised the algorithm when they were deciding among apartments in London—so feel free to read the rest of this post in a cockney accent.)

I played around with it a bit myself and found that it’s actually designed fairly intuitively, allowing you to first define your priorities (so if you were deciding on a job, you might enter “salary,” “location,” etc.) and rank them on a sliding scale of importance; following that, you define your options (janitor, dolphin trainer, etc.) and then grade them with regard to each priority on an A-F scale. After you enter in all the info, it shows you which option is the optimal choice based on the parameters you’ve defined.

And now, thanks to Something Pop, you know that taking that job at the sweatshop would be a bad idea. Congratulations.

I have to admit that from the moment I read about the service, it bothered me—though I’m honestly still trying to decide why. Maybe it’s the “rich, spoiled people” vibe the whole thing gives off (“I’ve been offered two jobs—waah, my life is so hard!”), or maybe it’s the site’s weirdly clinical approach to decision-making, as if every aspect of life can be boiled down to some numbers (“Just follow your heart!—no, wait, Something Pop says do the other thing.”).

I think, though, that the real source of my annoyance was the message inherent in such technology—”How can you get what you really want out of life?” It’s a message that could only arise in the modern world, where all of us blithely assume that we’re entitled to live exactly as we want, where we want, with whom we want, doing what we want—that there could be no better source of guidance than our own desires and priorities, confused though they may be. (And, if we have to resort to Something Pop, those priorities are certainly confused.)

As Christians, we are told otherwise, of course. Paul writes that we were “bought with a price” and are not our own (1 Cor. 6:20). In Luke 9:23, Jesus says “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” In exchange for this, though, he promises life “more abundantly” (John 10:10).

As to how that plays out in the real world, though, I’m probably not the one to ask (I’m actually pretty egocentric myself—Lord, have mercy). What I do know is that if my life is not my own, then I probably ought to be using a better means of making my decisions than a weighted average of my own desires. Perhaps a preferable rubric would consist of (1) Where has God placed me? and (2) How can I best serve my neighbor from where I am? Is it difficult to approach life this way? Sure. But no one said following Jesus would be easy. Something Pop definitely didn’t.

None of that is to say that using a service like Something Pop is inherently bad or sinful, but I would encourage readers to at least give a thought to the social and moral implications of the technology they use. If you’re making decisions based on the core question of “What do I want out of life?” instead of “How can I use my life to serve God and humanity?” you’ve been simmering in 21st-century ’Murica a bit too long.

photo credit: garrettc via photopin cc