Digital Death
And the resurrection of Nature
To all my new readers: Thank you for subscribing! This article is not my usual news or journalism about our food system. Nor is it a story about farming. It’s a deeply personal story about what I believe is the way we must be intentional about our choices in these early days of AI. I hope you get something from reading it. I share with love. Edit: in case it is not obvious from the content of this story, I oppose generative AI, LLMs, and the like. I do not use any generative AI in any of my writing, ever. My graphic designer very occasionally used AI in graphics, but that practice is over. Again, all my writing and content here and anywhere else I publish, is my original content except as properly cited.
Death (Impermanence)
I gasped trying to breathe as the uncontrollable sobs shook my body, my heart again shattering into millions of pieces.
The reality saturated me with wave after wave of grief as I choked out words between the sobs of despair. (I’d called a trusted person for help and, in retrospect, I can’t imagine his first thoughts upon hearing this cascade of grief.)
It started a few days prior as a routine battery replacement on my Macbook.
I’d waited three days before calling to see if the computer was ready after being assured it would only take 1-2 days, and later arrived for pick up at the Apple store with its carefully curated user experience.
As she handed my laptop back to me, the technician casually informed me that there’d been a problem and they lost everything on the computer.
Everything. Gone. In that one sinking moment, it was all I could do to not cry right there in the store.
I had back ups, didn’t I?
Why was this impacting me like news of a sudden death?
She reassured me that I should just download my saved items from the cloud and I'd be up and running.
But, there was some sort of glitch with the download and I lost all my data.
It’s hard to describe what I went through as drips of realization increasingly revealed what I lost.
My mind kept flipping back to a series of short videos of my grandfather—a trained singer with a voice like Pavarotti—holding my newborn babies, gazing proudly into their eyes, and singing lullabies to each of them as they arrived.
Each song carried with it the boundless flow of love carving memories through the generations.
These were moments deeply etched into my soul. Moments that I recognized the significance of as they occurred.
These videos were a shadowy facsimile of a life fully lived, of irreplaceable moments, yet, they were treasures I was not ready to let go of. My grandfather had died a few years prior and I missed him every single day.
But the feelings of grief were puzzlingly strong. I was re-experiencing the acute grief of when my grandfather died. But there were more layers on top of this loss. I hadn’t just lost data, I’d failed—failed in keeping the family legacy, failed my children in storing important and precious memories, and I’d failed my grandfather.
Realizing how much data was lost was one thing, but wondering if it was my carelessness that led to it was a whole other thought. Had I improperly backed up my data? Or was it an unknown technical mishap? There were no answers to these kinds of questions, but an indulgence in personal guilt and condemnation.
Wave after wave of grief consumed me.
I desperately searched for all my backup harddrives, found the most recent and plugged it in, only to watch it, in real time, corrupt.
The files were there, but inaccessible.
Was this series of events an unexpected and most unwelcome lesson in spiritual surrender?
Were these unfortunate events a “gift” from God—an opportunity to practice detachment?
I obstinately refused to accept it.
A quick google search and I tearfully called a local tech shop known for repairing corrupt hard drives.
A few days and several hundred dollars later, I had the videos of my grandfather back. I’d restored, not just data, but a modicum of self-respect and had dug myself out of my own grave of failure.
Sure, I’d lost some trivial work, but what mattered was there—my grandfather's singing, pictures of my children growing up, and troves of my old writings.
But the strangest part of this whole ordeal was witnessing myself roller coaster through it.
While I knew that I was still grieving many recent losses, I hadn’t quite realized until this experience how deeply my nervous system was connected to the pixelated versions of the ones I loved.
What was I actually clinging to?
And that’s when I realized how much a digital loss feels like death.
A famous Buddhist mantra teaches us:
All things are impermanent
They arise and they pass away
Being in harmony with this truth
Brings great happiness
Christian teachings encourage us to detach from the things of this world.
Accepting these ideas of impermanence and detachment seems antithetical to the structure of our 2020s ideologies.
Storage facilities, estate sales, auctions, antique stores, and our homes overflow with things that don’t matter—niche “collector” items, stuffed animals, branded handbags, plastic toys—while we destroy things that do matter—soil, ecosystems, animals, and people…
Now, we’ve added electronic memories—and the vast infrastructure needed for those—to the wasteland. We take pictures and bank them, instead of strengthening our memories of the moments—feeling the love and sharing the experience. We write and publish, eager to put our thoughts into the vast web of ideas sparking artificial synapses. We build shrines to our fake, digital identities in the form of huge data centers and energy infrastructures that consume our natural ecosystems and ruthlessly gobble up our human communities.
Can we live without proof of our existence? Do we pretend that somehow, we can escape the realities of impermanence, of death?
Ironically, clinging to artificial identities erodes our actual self.
What was it with those lost (and found) videos that I clutched so tightly? What was this roller coaster of grief, of bewilderment?
I realized that I went through similar waves when I left social media a few years ago—
Questions poured through me as I tiptoed away from those sites, torn from the presence I’d built, the people I had and hadn’t met…
Would anyone miss me? Would they care that I was gone? Where and how would I connect and stay in contact with those who I wanted to? What would I miss out on?
Gone was Descartes’ philosophical pondering: “I think therefore I am.”
Replaced by new questions:
Do I even exist if I have no digital presence? Who am I if there’s no algorithmic avatar? Do I matter?
There was nothing to prove my experiences; nothing to validate who I was, who I am; no footprint to reaffirm my own sensory experiences.
Nothing but my own precarious memories of fleeting moments as they arose and passed away.
Perhaps I was a hologram, blinking as it slowly, silently disappeared.
Life (Bodies)
Come with me on a quick trip through history.
When books first became widespread, there was alarmism. Concerns rose about how books would harm our children, opening them up to unknown and potentially scary ideas. I understand the natural trepidation that comes with something new.
But widespread access to paper and the written word inarguably changed our brains. We forgot how to remember full things, instead using our brains to remember only where we “filed” important information.
The poet and author Homer memorized vast amounts of verses and phrases in his work The Odyssey. Young Buddhist monks memorized entire volumes of the Sutra. Jewish youths memorize expansive portions of the Torah. Farmers knew where they planted and could go directly to their crops in the fields with no written farming plan in place. Members of native tribes everywhere could walk in their ecosystem and identify the plants and animals growing and living around them; they knew how to use them for food, fiber, fuel, and medicine. They had this knowledge the way we know how to send an email, read a road sign, or recognize a logo—images and symbols unconsciously connected to an algorithm of other meanings.
While I love and value books, they changed our brains from reliance on ourselves and our memories to storing the knowledge somewhere else we can find it. Shared oral stories around a communal fire diffused into assorted tales, penned for diverse audiences.
The written word forever co-opted our neural pathways, changing how we interact with nature, each other, and our creator.
Knowledge of our ecosystems is almost extinct, cultivated and learned primarily through the pages of books, photos, apps, and only the occasional tutor or wise elder who learned it all as a child and is now passing their ancient wisdom to us.
Today’s unnerving acceptance and rise of AI is once again reshaping our brains and this time our natural world too.
We’re trapped in two existences. And to live today, we must face the complex duality of both.
One world has an environment, bodies, feelings, and love. The other existence simply doesn’t. It shows us a holographic mirage of what we experience. Yet, we cannot escape this artificial world without major social, physical, and emotional repercussions that most are unwilling to endure.
Author Madeline L’Engle wrote the beloved children’s book A Wrinkle in Time.
In this story, the hero, Meg, must travel to a distant planet, with the guidance of 3 angelic beings, and free her dad and brother, Charles Wallace, from enslavement by the disembodied brain named IT that runs the whole planet via mind control. The story is a prescient foreshadowing of our current AI colonization.
Meg is underconfident in herself and her abilities. She’s not as smart as her brother, not as pretty as her mother, not as cool as her other brothers, and she doesn’t know how she can possibly free her father and brother from the chains of this absolute mind control, especially, how she could do so without succumbing to it herself.
The 3 angelic beings can’t go with her, but they send her with a bit of final wisdom. “You have something IT doesn’t have,” they tell her.
In her final encounter with IT, she wracks her brain fighting to keep the pulsating control out of her mind as she tries to figure out what she has that IT doesn’t have in order to succeed in her mission. And in a final attempt to get her father and brother back, she realizes how much she loves her brother. She really, really, loves him. She also realizes that it’s love that she has, and IT doesn’t. IT can never have love.
Today, we are all like Charles Wallace—trapped in a reality not of our making by a power we cannot control and that threatens our true self, our very existence.
And we are all like Meg—doing our best to resist the evil of that mind control, to keep our sense of self strong, and to fight like hell for the ones we love.
From the moment we enter this very real life, we’re immersed in a digital-bureaucratic prison. Do we even exist if we don’t have a birth certificate?
Our basic physical needs are inextricably linked to our ability to navigate ever-changing digital infrastructure. Can we eat, sleep, or live without reliance on global financial institutions intertwined with governance?
In-person social structures rely on our artificial identities. Are you really who you say you are? How do you know? And we’re all worse for it.
Simon and Garfunkel warned us as they sang “and the people bowed and prayed to the neon gods they made…” Now those neon gods are trapped in the algorithm with us, beckoning our attention, our life force, our very minds as they manipulate and contort the hearts of humans.
Is it Divine will?
Free will?
The will of the algorithm?
We are living breathing beings.
Yet, this digital bureaucratic prison can’t acknowledge that. In that prison, we have no lives, we are not bodies, we’re merely identities. Therefore, we cannot escape.
As time separated me from my initial distancing from social media, I witnessed my brain change. I wasn’t approaching experiences with how they might look later on. Or on how they would position my digital identity. Gone was the enormous pressure to capture key moments and to falsely shape and narrate them. I could live in them—breathe them in to remember them, not paint over them with contrived meaning.
The farming and food advocacy work I did became behind-the-scenes with no flashy social media presence and staged photos of the celebrities and politicians I met with or how I was spinning it to prove my own success or advertise my “humble authenticity.” Cooking became nourishment for the bodies I fed, not flashy scenes for posting. Caring for and nourishing my family was filled with a love that no digital empire could touch.
Going outside wasn’t performative. Identifying plants, milking cows, growing my garden, teaching classes wasn’t about what could be seen or proven after. These moments were about connecting with the dirt, animals, and humans and alchemizing them into something else the way only love can do….
I learned, again and again, to accept the waves of impermanence, that life and death danced together in every moment, that something untouchable beckoned beyond the digital algorithm.
Resurrection (Love)
“What are people for?” This question, posed by farmer and poet Wendall Berry, is a vitally important question as we witness AI taking over and data empires colonizing our minds and bodies in ways that are utterly destroying us.
For millennia of human generations, our bodies built homes, grew food, hunted, foraged and fished. We made love and nursed our babies. We whispered secrets to each other, and we said goodbye to loved ones as they died in our own homes or disappeared into the wilderness for their last moments. We were part of nature. We lived and died without a single photograph for remembrance. No algorithm created a fictional version of a being that isn’t real to cling to.
What ARE we for?
What are our minds for?
What are our bodies for?
It was 1930 and the British colonization of India was untenable. The new British salt tax was both utterly absurd and completely revealing of the level to which the British control had worked. The Indians were required to pay taxes to import something so real, so basic, and so vital to human life.
Salt.
And Gandhi said no, and he said it with a deep, abiding love.
Thousands of people joined him in saying no and in the peaceful 240-mile march to the salt flats of India to kneel and make their own salt in opposition to the hubris of British rule.
That same hubris is ours to oppose today. That’s what people are for. That’s what our bodies are for.
The tech empires have colonized our minds. They have deeply rooted themselves into our psyches. These companies are the antithesis to life and love. They are artificial representations of what people are for.
The tech empires, now with a focus on AI, are destroying our relationship to the earth, to our creator, and to each other. They are the digital overlords in a fiefdom of electronic doom.
They have contorted natural truths under layers of dependence and lies, layers of bureaucracy and ideology designed to separate us from nature, from our spiritual paths, and to remove us from the very basic foundation of what makes us human.
No tech, however fancy and complicated whether run by seemingly-altruistic humans or evil ones, can provide us with what it means to be human. With an answer to those ever-present questions:
“What are people for?”
“What do you have that IT doesn’t have?”
We must exist outside of that digital world we’ve built.
Like the super computer from A Wrinkle in Time, the tech companies and their false God of AI don’t want you to know the these truths:
You are part of nature.
We belong to God and to each other.
Love is the power you have over tech, especially AI.
Your body is divinely designed to heal itself.
Recognize that the earth wants you here. Remember that you, and only you, are responsible for your food security, your mind, and true human connections. Know this–the latest and greatest new tech empire can’t make your food secure, or reshape your grief—AI can’t grow food, cook a meal, or gaze lovingly into your babies’ eyes while singing a lullaby.
These digital tools are not real in the way our bodies are real. These tools are the thorny path to the digital gulag that we’re all approaching at breakneck speed.
Yet, every step towards our creator and the natural world is a step away from that digital prison enmeshing us all.
No influencer, no preacher, no amount of posting on social media, and most certainly never AI, can take the place of the shared or individual experience of working with the earth for yourself, or of gathering together in community for your daily nourishment—physical and social.
That’s what people are for. That is what our bodies are for. That’s what we have that IT doesn’t have.
And in the moments of silence, or stillness that seems to wrap around to choke us, let us breathe in the love, taste the salt, and embrace the impermanent, fleeting realness of a sweet lullaby.
Thank you Liz. I sit here in Los Angeles, 2627 miles from our farm in Maryland. The purpose of my trip is to attend the opening of a photography exhibit featuring pictures I've taken around our farm, focused on our East Friesian dairy sheep. I learned there is a movement away from digital photography, back to pictures taken on physical film, printed large on physical paper. I spoke to many people about our farm and our sheep, hoping my physical photographs might inspire them to visit an actual farm, touch the wool of a sheep, smell healthy living soil, eat the fruits, commune with insects, birds, trees... and leave behind, for a time, all things digital.
Liz, thanks for churning some thoughts in me around our place and role here as humans. I am reading and listening a lot to Stephen Jenkinson this year. He talks about belonging, how the word originally invoked a sense of doing our duty to a place or community - rather the felt sense we think should fill us.
I think of what it might mean to be in service to our place, to our time. How might we love these with the kind of love that sets the stage for the beloved to live up and into their highest? I see you living this in so many layers.
And I’m so grateful you could get the files back. We are human, we grasp. These things can be security blankets. I think about how they are all temporary- the photo albums of me and my mom, the digital files of my kids… but I’m still very attached!
Also the — always reminds me of emails from my mom. She used that and … generously!