The Unholy City

[from 2026]

Postscript

    So I thought and wrote then, and so I think now, with this difference: then, I saw the City, emerging on the horizon; now, I write from within the City.
    Much has happened, of course. When I first observed the City, it was a young, brutish thing, fueled by fiber optics and the blinding screen of the television. It fed on appetites and sought to reduce man’s freedom to a mere choice between products. It has turned out that the ambitions of the City were far higher than that.
    The City whose foundations were being built 25 years ago is now complete. Of course, this is just the first version of it. But the architecture is clearly visible, the domain is secure, and the direction of growth is evident and fixed. The movement that has produced the City is inexorable, it is destiny, and no force imaginable can alter its course.
    So, let us consider an unimaginable force. The first step towards that goal is to name the evil. That is the purpose of this book and the goal of all the arguments presented.
    Let’s begin with a walk around the City, to see what we can see, to observe how the trends that were visible twenty-five years ago have matured, to note the trajectories of the movements and see where they have landed today. We shall look at a succession of phenomena:
A Matter of Choice & The Choice Made

Mass phenomena

Reduction to economic quanta

Broken feedback loop

Tolerance

Appetite satisfaction

From television to social media

Objectification

The City limits

Media as mirror

Captivity

Moral relativism

    Beyond these topics, there are many more implications to be drawn from the City’s architecture and evident aims to be explored. But before going further, I want to disarm one rather obvious critique: many will insist that the essays overlook the good things that technology can do or has already delivered. First, that aspect of progress in technology never needs boosting; the benefits are obvious, I don’t deny, and trumpeted from every portal—that is why the costs need critical examination. Secondly, this is exactly how temptation works: the thing being offered has manifest benefits, but concealed within are snares that need exposing. For,
...what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? —Matt. 16:26a (AV)

© Copyright, 2001, 2003, 2026, by Robert McAnally Adams.
The Unholy City is licensed in its entirety under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/