In a world where every aspect of identity will be…

“In a world where every aspect of identity will be completely customizable, celebrating a received identity will be radically countercultural - but it will be life-giving.

The church may be the last place that accepts you as you are, not as you’re projected.”

@ianharber and Patrick Miller

When I first drew this picture 3 years ago, the discussion was VR. The Meta Quest was selling pretty well, VR and AR were interesting technologies and the Apple Vision Pro hadn’t been released yet so we were on the cusp of this, what I thought was going to be, a mainstream acceptance of VR devices and everyone experiencing this new way of interacting with our devices and each other.

A lot has changed in 3 years.

The Meta Quest, while still a pretty neat device, isn’t mainstream at all. The Apple Vision Pro is a really neat way to watch 3d movies for rich guys and YouTubers and that’s about it. And while VR and AR are still really interesting technologies, the real thing that’s having us question what’s real and what’s not is AI.

I like VR a lot, but I use AI all that time. I keep a chatgpt tab open all day. In my programming work, it’s way better than stackoverflow or google at providing info and code samples that I feel like I’m working with another *smarter* developer. I used to joke “I don’t need to learn regular expressions, I’ll just make friends with a guy who does.” Now I don’t need any friends. Sadly.

But it’s really hard to know what’s authentic anymore. Did a person really say that? Did a person really do that? Is that even a real person? The audio can be faked. The video can be faked. The images can be faked. The comments and reactions can be faked. The YouTube reaction videos can be faked.

My question: Does this same sentiment, that the church is a refuge for something that is real, apply in a world where everything can be faked?

I think it does, I’m not sure what it looks like yet though. 🤔 What do you think?