Aren’t the Efficiencies Technology Promises Good for Humanity?

Efficiency is not a virtue in itself. It is a relational concept — we become efficient at something. Efficient communication may help a working team, but the same efficiency applied to spiritual formation can dismantle it. Prayer, contemplation, Scripture meditation, and friendship are not efficient practices. They are slow, iterative, and resistant to optimization, because faithfulness is not the same as productivity.

Edward Tenner calls the unintended consequences of our optimizations “revenge effects” — the ironic ways that gains in efficiency produce new losses elsewhere. Email made communication faster and produced inboxes that fragment attention. Streaming made entertainment endlessly available and made deliberate engagement scarce. Christians cannot avoid trade-offs, but we can refuse to evaluate technology by efficiency alone. The deeper question is what kind of person each efficiency forms us into.

Key Takeaways: Efficiency as Means, Not End

Scholar: Edward Tenner on “revenge effects” of technological optimization.

Scripture: Practices like prayer, fasting, and Scripture reading are deliberately inefficient (Mt 6; Lk 5:16).

The “So What”: Christians who let efficiency drive their decisions will find their formation reshaped by velocity rather than by virtue.

James Spencer, PhD, is a theologian, author, and host of the Thinking Christian podcast, where he writes and speaks on Christian formation, political theology, and technology. He holds a PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and completed the Institute for Educational Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He serves as President of the D.L. Moody Center in Northfield, Massachusetts, as adjunct faculty in Wheaton College’s MA in Leadership program, and as an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Christianity.com, and Sojourners. His forthcoming book is Discipleship and Discernment in the Digital Age (InterVarsity Press, Fall 2026). Learn more at jamesgspencer.com.