To me, beauty is the face of what we like to call God, a beacon in the turmoil of the mind that brings us home to our better selves and helps us become more than we are. A world without art is a world without vision.

“The danger of the past was that people became slaves,” wrote Erich Fromm, “The danger of the future is that people may become robots.”

My writing and photography burnish my soul, lift my spirits, and make me want to be more than I am. I hope they can do that for others. It has never mattered to me what I am like. It matters what I can do.

A friend asked me recently why people are more angry and suspicious now than they were a generation ago. As someone whose life spans both times and has lived in the world of media, new and old, the answer is simple: computers.

When I was writing for Wired Magazine at the dawn of the Internet, we all felt that there was something profoundly spiritual about the Internet. We were idealistic and believed that information would finally be accessible and available to everyone, not just the CEOs, corporate moguls, and opportunists who live for profit and market share.

We were foolish, naive,  blinded by our enthusiasm. We never guessed that CEOs and corporations would take over this astonishing new reality, its new technology, and make it all about profit and manipulation.

This is America; money is our faith, and nothing is more substantial, even Jesus.

The Internet, a tsunami of unwanted and unfiltered information and a cesspool of hatred, misinformation, conspiracy, alarm, and confusion, has replaced a rational and trusted source of information – plain old newspapers and TV – and made it all about money, a playground for billionaires seeking to control more of the world than they already have.

The crank who wrote unhinged messages to editorial pages are now the Troll Kings And Queens of the Internet; the fact-checkers who terrorized journalists have been replaced by Billionnaire Man Child Elon Musk’s crackpot armies of hatred,  gathering on what was once Twitter and is now called X, for reasons no one knows or understands.

Sydney Harris wrote that the danger was never that computers would begin to think like people but that people would begin feeling and thinking like computers. We wish. As we see, computers don’t feel at all; they manipulate what humans think.

Our civic nightmare shows us that computers have separated people from one another, just as the animal rights movement seeks to separate people from animals. In the age of alarm, people are always too dangerous to deal with one another.

Computers never really had a chance of bringing us together; they are set at keeping us apart and keep us buying.

The corporate desecration of our environment is separating the farmer from his farm; computers of one kind or another are the primary source of news and infomercials.

Computers now threaten democracy, truth, civility, compromise, promise, and negotiation.

Never mind Nazis’ gathering around Leon Musk and his website; computersters do it automatically and without assistance.

There is no longer a need to know our neighbor, talk to our political opponent, call our elected officials, or get our mail delivered safely by people with good pensions.

In the corporate nation, companies are spending billions of dollars to embrace even more disruptive technology to ensure we no longer have to speak to a human or get to the people in charge..

We are lucky if we get to talk about AI software and phone trees and then call it customer service.

It’s never about people, only about money; there is never enough money or power to satisfy a corporation or billionaire. There is no act of imagination or empathy stronger than profit.

We are dehumanizing ourselves.

Is it hopeless? No, not for me. Hope is my faith and my guide. There is always hope when there is creativity and art.

A world without art is a world without vision or humanity. The corporate big lie is that “we care about you; please tell us what you think.”

The translation is simple: “Give us your e-mail and phone number so we can keep track of what you buy while pretending to care what you feel.

That is the spiritual depth of the Computer age.

Novelist Max Frish says technology is “the knack of arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it,”

He was sadly prescient. In the computer age, humans mean much less than technology and computers. Never in the history of the world have the greedy one percent made so much money and everyone else so much less.

In the computer age, we are learning to hide from life, not to understand or accept it.

How can we deal with this and retain our sense of humanity and love of beauty?

Creativity and art are my choices for survival and peace of mind.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote about the artists’ mission to bring color and emotion into the world. I’m in.

Beauty is a beacon on the mountain of the mind that brings us home to our best selves.

I am proud to be a creative artist who embraces the idea that beauty brings with it the realization int, in the middle of struggle, hatred, violence, and the depth of darkness, in the throes of uglies and division, that the best of life is whatever is possible and attainable.

I feel this every time I take a beautiful picture. Creativity makes me happy.

My flower photographs have become central to me; they symbolize the great struggle of the computer age, the battle for something beyond money, for beauty that touches the soul and life. And makes me feel human. Maria feels the same way.

Several people have chosen to die with a photograph of a beautiful flower on the walls of their hospice room. No one has asked to pass with a picture of an Amazon warehouse corporate CEO on their wall.

Computers are pulling us apart. The future struggles to know one another again rather than hate from behind our machines.

Art and creativity can unite us. It was once more powerful than money.

Joan Chrittister wrote that beauty is the antidote to hatred and alienation. When we identify, respond to, and cultivate the beautiful, experience becomes synonymous with being celebrated.

Before computers, cameras, and televisions, artists were the only touch people had with the other world, the elsewhere, the world of imagination, feeling, and dreaming. Artists and creatives are our only connections with our underlying values and lives.

Beauty has been replaced by spectacle and lies. Computers can figure out everything but the things in the world that don’t add up, and computers have not made that world any clearer, safer, or more rational. Nor have they made the vast majority of human beings any richer.

Computers can not save the world from the ravages of climate change, as the news makes clear. Only people working together can do that.

I am no Luddite. The Internet makes my life possible, and I appreciate its many gifts to me and my work. But it is so wildly out of control, regulation, or supervision it is eating our society alive, as are the political monsters it spawns and supports.

I choose to make my stand with art, what some have called the sacrament of awareness, a trumpet call to every soul, a way back to life and humanity again. Christian Theologian John Cash said the highest spiritual intention “is one of celebrating beauty.”

Decades after Campbell’s declaration about color and light, the Computer Age has made artists more critical than ever.

I aspire to be one of them.