Seeing the Power and the Glory in Digital Technology
Re-imagining tech safety at the Great Divide
Where do you turn when you experience something so extraordinary that you lack the vocabulary to explain it, even to yourself?
I felt that way last week when pedaling my bicycle with a week of luggage over America’s Continental Divide at eleven thousand feet. Surrounded by mountains, snow, and streams, I remembered the Puritan colonist William Bradford’s first words upon sighting the continent: it was “a hidious and desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts and wild men… [with] little solace or content.”
In 2025, Bradford could easily be mistaken for describing our digital environments, on topics from smartphones to AI. Like the Puritans who left religious persecution for the cold and starvation of a different place, we are also told by venture capitalists that the risks of being left behind are greater than the dangers of systems they cannot reliably manage. When people face pressure to populate the digital frontier or else, it’s reasonable to worry about the dangers, especially when technologists downplay the risks. And it’s not surprising that fear can drive us, like Bradford, to ideas that de-value our fellow humans as “wild men.”
many people would agree that our digital environments have become ugly and risky
How can we turn this around? As I stopped my bicycle on the Fremont Pass and enjoyed the view in the cold morning air, I thought of all the people who flock to the Rockies out of love rather than fear. Centuries after Bradford, Americans now find peace and inspiration in a landscape that the colonist viewed as hideous and desolate. As Phil Ochs wrote in the 1964 song “Power and the Glory” (famously covered by Pete Seeger):
Here is a land full of power and glory
Beauty that words cannot recall
Somehow over 400 years, the inheritors of colonization have learned to love the glory in nature and not only fear its power. We now spend 55.6 billion dollars annually to enjoy and preserve our National Parks alone. Nearly three million young people each year participate in Scouting America and the Girl Scouts, which encourage adventure alongside care for nature and community. Love for the land, in all its complicated history, is one of the things that unites Americans, even if we sometimes disagree on how best to do so.
Looking down from Fremont Pass at the fourteen thousand acre molybdenum mine that probably supplied the ore for my bicycle frame, I thought about how the Pilgrims and today’s Americans manage fear by seeking to control and exploit what we fear. In this view, something is to be enjoyed when it has been tamed or put to work. Yet even as we try to calm our fears by controlling nature, we have come to mourn how much gets lost along the way.
Fighting fear with control is happening everywhere right now as governments consider banning smartphones and social media for young people. In the American West, engineers tamed the landscape with dams, mines, and underground nuclear detonations. These projects tried to control nature for safety and profit, often before the consequences were fully understood. Scientists are now being asked to do the same for technologies of human thought and connection, often before the science is ready or fundamental freedoms have been taken into account. Comparing the history of natural resources to the tech industry, I see a common thread in the drive for unbridled development — which heedlessly pursues growth and responds to public concern with more of the same.
As a scientist-organizer, I understand the value of fear, anger, disgust, and outrage. In healthy doses, these powerful emotions can motivate change. But they also burn out quickly and can leave us desensitized — they’re an unsustainable fuel for care and maintenance over the long term. That’s one of the great lessons to learn from broad-based initiatives across the conservation movement, which balance outrage with love, wonder, and community.
Standing with my bicycle at the Great Divide, I faced a choice: to continue over a legendary, stunning climb to Independence Pass or take a shorter route to Utah through the canyon at Glenwood Springs. This shorter route would give me several hours to support a group of deeply-committed parents who are working for safer social media in the long term. Weighing this decision, I remembered the next lines in the song by Ochs:
Her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom
Her glory shall rest on us all.
In this deceptively simple song, Ochs is asking us to look on our fellow humans with the wonder and love that we have learned to offer to nature. If we can do that, the song implies, we can find a way to maintain and protect people with the same care that many of us offer to our rivers, forests, and mountain peaks.
As a scientist who works alongside the public to study and improve our digital environments, I regularly get to witness the power and glory of people working together out of love. To name a few that CAT Lab has worked with, I’m inspired by Jefferson Kelley, whose love for his son led him to transform how Reddit’s algorithms depict Black fathers. I’m also grateful to the hundreds of volunteers who helped sustain public knowledge by sending thank-you notes to thousands of Wikipedia editors — as well as clean up vandalism on the site. And I’m deeply moved by the enduring commitment of parents who have campaigned for better science on social media and AI after the deaths of their children.
No complex system, from waterways to digital safety, can be protected with a single tool, whether it’s the law, science, or design. And while fear, outrage, and a demand for justice can often get us out of our seats, nothing healthy can be cultivated over the long term when those emotions replace rather than motivate cooperation.
Instead, movements built on wonder and love have the capacity to become greater than the sum of their parts. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly twenty-six thousand people were working in conservation science and forestry in 2022. That’s less than one tenth of the three hundred thousand volunteers who contribute more than 6.5 million hours of service to the park system annually. We desperately need the professionals who maintain our National Parks, and many Americans are angry that so many have been fired without cause this year. Also, volunteers are stepping up to support the land we love at a time when these public goods are especially at risk.
Balanced on my bicycle with the chance of a once-in-a-lifetime view just fifty miles away, I took the shorter route instead. Independence could wait for another day. I didn’t want to miss the chance to witness and support the glory of human love.
In 2025, many people would agree that our digital environments have become ugly and risky. For some the solution is to escape. For others, the answer is to control. There’s a third way that many have already taken: a path of cultivation, science, cooperation, and love. If you haven’t tasted this yet, I invite you to experience and create this glory together.
