De Libero Occultorum
Or, "On the Book of Hidden Things," about the theological implications of the surveillance state
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
— The Apocalypse of John of Patmos, 20:12-15 (KJV)
I.
The internet is in an interesting situation at the moment. The web sites are disappearing, and our posts are disappearing. The things we consciously wanted to put online for posterity are going away. A recent study found out some interesting things:
38% of webpages from 2013 are no longer visible
23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link
54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
This ought to contrast heavily with the promise popularized long ago that what shows up on the internet is there forever; that it’s on your “permanent record,” like in high school. For, as we see, the actual data that goes online often disappears quite rapidly. In the world of print, ten years is nothing. I consider ten-year-old books of literature and academic scholarship “recent” and frequently refer to them as such. But in the world of the internet, ten years is more than a lifetime… quite literally.
Yet the same cannot be said for our metadata. Even as web sites disappear, social media posts go away, message boards wind up defunct, and few of the sites wind up getting archived on third-party archiving platforms, we also know that many big corporations and quite a few governments are storing copious amounts of our metadata. Tons upon tons of it. Pretty much all of it, in fact. Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath extensively documents just how much a corporation can learn about someone based simply on metadata — like, for instance, “likes” and other buttons being clicked on social media, web sites being visited, search engine inquiries, and times and frequency of web site usage. The book came out in 2015, which as we’ve mentioned is a lifetime ago in internet years, but since its release, I don’t believe anything too radical has happened vis-à-vis metadata hoarding. No major court cases have been won that could prevent such rampant data-collecting and storing from happening. It’s simply just something that lingers on in the background. Your information is kept in various giant computer databases that all assume a corporeal form somewhere, maybe in hard drives systematically catalogued and stored away in some seedy underground computer room that you’ll never see. But despite that, what you voluntarily place online is still subject to total disappearance.
II.
In Umberto Eco’s essay collection Chronicles of a Liquid Society (2017 — which isn’t very good, I’m sad to say), he brings up an interesting point from his pal Javier Marías. Marías argues that the exhibitionism people engage in on social media must owe at least partly to the loss of their faith in God. With God, people could feel that they’re being watched by at least one primary spectator. But once God exits the picture, people seek the witness of society in general. So, for example, in Matthew 6:3, Jesus says that if a man donates to the poor with his right hand, he should be so discreet about it that even the left hand is kept unaware. And elsewhere, Jesus insists that no one should be praying in public. Essentially, he’s against “virtue signaling.” And today, in our Godless society, people practice virtue signaling online all the time. When God isn’t there anymore, it’s society that should observe and reward one’s righteous deeds. And Marías’s point might also extend to the truly strange things that people do, like make videos of themselves screaming and crying over political events. If there is no God, someone should take stock of their suffering!
While the theory is compelling, I admit I don’t buy it. Or at least, I don’t think it factors into the equation enough to make a difference. Virtue signaling is a basic defect of man’s fallen nature, and it has always been with us. And although the manner in which people record themselves freaking out is a bit more complicated, I think God has little to do with it.
As I discussed in this post from a couple weeks ago, computer devices (including cell phones) are paradoxical insofar as they’re both maximally private yet maximally public simultaneously. You have an audience of potentially anyone, yet you’re thinking thoughts that could only occur to someone who feels alone, sitting there in solitude, unburdened by the need to behave respectably as when surrounded by people in a shared three-dimensional space. Essentially, when you’re submitting a video of yourself behaving like a spaz, you’re looking for an audience of people who feel exactly the same way you do in this intensely emotional private moment, and people do in fact sometimes resonate with your exhibitionistic display, themselves off in their own isolated headspaces. Just don’t expect all these people to get along with you if you were to invite them to a big party.
But all the same, in the back of people’s minds, they do know that they are Being Watched in a much deeper sense, a sense that extends beyond whatever they choose to submit to their faceless audience of wayward onlookers. People know that everything they do is being monitored by higher forces in both the public and private sector. This deeper sense of knowledge isn’t intrusive, either; in fact, advertisers and the government go out of their way not to remind people of it.
An ad company can easily determine if a woman is pregnant based solely on her engagement with social media and search engines, but the same company won’t deliberately bombard her with ads specifically about pregnancy. Instead, it will prepare an array of ads with maybe one about diapers here, another one about baby toys there, and they’ll be placed strategically so as to be visible without feeling invasive. Yet invasive they are, and people know it. If you were to ask the pregnant woman being targeted, “You know that companies are recording everything you do online, right?” she’d answer in the affirmative and probably even be aware that this is why she’s getting baby-related ads. We don’t mind being recorded, just as long as we don’t have to be reminded about it and forced to endure the shame that must accompany any serious reflection on such a state of affairs. That’s why software companies that emphasize privacy, like Signal or Tor, tend not to be especially popular. Even being reminded that privacy is a good idea in the first place is unpopular, since it forces us to think of why we might need it. Essentially, we haven’t been coerced into accepting the reality of 24/7 surveillance and data mining, but we have been massaged into it.
III.
What we consciously know and have come to accept about the internet, I think, has more to do with God and theology than how we actually behave on it. What’s available online forms a collective memory of everything that has happened in the world, and so it should come to us as no surprise that web sites are disappearing. What would the last ten years amount to if world history were adjusted to represent a single individual’s lifetime? A few minutes? A few seconds? Understood that way, it’s not surprising that we flush all of these recent things down the collective memory hole. I can’t remember what I was thinking about ten minutes ago, but I can certainly remember my first time driving a car onto the highway, or my first time attending a music concert. The internet has plenty of information about the big stuff, the important stuff that has taken place in the life of mankind, but the small stuff is as vulnerable as ever… at least in terms of what’s retrievable.
However, there’s also the hidden history of everything man has done and thought, right down to the most ephemeral of minutiae — the history that only exists from the God’s-eye-view — and this is where theology comes into play. The corporations and government who keep permanent records of our metadata have become omniscient and mostly invisible, like God, and we’ve entered into a domain in which they could, if they felt like it, put together comprehensive biographies of our lives based solely on the metadata that they collect and sit upon. This perhaps ought to be frightening from a secular civil rights perspective, but it is also a notion that has been with us for a very long time. It’s a notion we’ve gotten used to accepting.
In medieval theology, there’s a little-known concept called the liber occultorum, “the book of hidden things,” or, idiomatically, “the book of secrets.” It comes from Revelation 20:12-15 (see the flourish above), in which John of Patmos in his vision encounters the Book of Life according to which all men are judged. Apparently, in this text, God has a library of books that record each man’s works and deeds on Earth, but only the ones who are saved are entered into the Book of Life. The Book of Life is the VIP guest list, and only a select 144,000 are hip enough to get into the club. Everyone else goes to the Lake of Fire, which is a literal lake of fire and not the name of an even better club.
Now, the original text makes it clear that God is recording man’s deeds rather than his thoughts. The original Greek word for what’s found in God’s record books is ἔργον (ergon), and it quite unambiguously refers to external actions. Yet this did not stop the church fathers and theologians of late antiquity onward from conceiving of God’s records as more internal than external (and to be fair, they had plenty of theological justification for doing so). Saint Augustine interpreted all of these books in that quotation as collectively one book, the liber occultorum. He identified it as the book of man’s secrets, the closed book of man’s conscience and memory, and when the rapture happens, this book will be opened by a divine force (see Patrologia Latina vol. 41, 680). Alain de Lille, following Augustine, further commented hundreds of years later that these books contain all things hidden in each soul (PL vol. 210, 837). And Hugh of St. Cher also added that the liber occultorum is not just the book of consciousness but also a “book of the heart” (libri conscientiarum vel cordium) to be read at the end of time (cf. this chapter from a work of literary criticism).
In the post-liberal state, the liber occultorum is our online metadata.
Again, this is a somewhat obscure concept, but the fascination with God’s assessment of our inner thoughts and feelings certainly didn’t end with Augustine and his intellectual descendants of medieval Europe. Martin Luther, as everyone knows, pioneered the doctrine of sola fide, and as soon as he did, a trace of the concept lived on through all of Protestantism, with its moral implications even broadened and intensified. The Calvinists took it even further.
Historians would love it if they could somehow write a history of man’s subjective thoughts and private concerns, but the closest we can get to them is through records of dreams, which have only been written with concern for accuracy within the last couple centuries. Only God can truly know what we were thinking in the distant past. But now, in this era, it’s quite easy to tell what people are thinking through their online metadata. Man and computer have become fused together so perfectly that we can build a profile of just about anyone’s inmost concerns at any given moment in his life simply by looking at a record of his search engine entries. Pace Javier Marías, I wonder if people so readily accept the surveillance state not because of the death of faith in God, but rather because of the traces of faith that survive in people’s basic predisposition toward life, manifesting sometimes in their various attitudes and opinions. In other words, I think we’ve become accustomed to the idea of being silently judged by distant forces that we can barely understand.
After all, we don’t really use all this metadata for anything too serious. I don’t know much about China, but I hear that they supposedly have a complex system in which people are held accountable for their online behavior within the lives they currently lead. With us, there’s only the faint suggestion that at some point, the seven angels will blow the seven trumpets, a divine force will open up the Book of Life, and the righteous will march onward to the celestial city of Jerusalem.
Let’s hope that the katechon who restrains the antichrist isn’t somehow prevented from letting another force of an insidious nature blow it open first.
11/24 update: I made some minor edits for smoothness and clarity