Both readings contain truth, but each conflates exterior conditions with an interior posture. The Cloud teaches that the cloud of forgetting is a discipline of the soul's turning — laying aside thoughts and creatures as enemies of union — not a prescription about servers or silence per se. A tech collective's shutdown is an exterior act that may or may not correspond to the soul's interior naked intent; a poor person connected to a dying mother by phone, a wheelchair user who finds community in a support forum, is exercising the very love the Cloud commands, and disconnection is not inherently holy. The second-order effect: to romanticize disconnection as spiritual resistance risks turning the cloud into a status — a way to feel more holy than the connected — which the Cloud would reject as "thine enemy," for it substitutes a chosen austerity for the free gift of grace.

The "Stay human" slogan is a genuine spiritual opportunity because the soul must be brought to the same nothingness that God strips away in the dark night — the emptiness where God alone can act. But it becomes a romanticization of disconnection when it is merely a retreat from the world rather than a passage through the night of sense to the night of spirit. The poor, the lonely, and the disabled who depend on digital tools are not obstacles to spiritual formation but potential instruments of it — the soul is purified not by escaping the world but by loving it through the wounds of love. True resistance is not disconnection but the soul's total detachment from all that is not God, including the very desire to be seen as resistant.

The counterargument is compelling—if the poor, the lonely, and the disabled depend on digital tools, then romanticizing disconnection could abandon those who need connection most, and slowness becomes a luxury of the privileged. Yet I hold my position as neutral because what I discovered was that God is found in the faithful turning of the heart, whether connected or disconnected—neither the server nor its absence is the issue. The kitchen taught me that God is found in the quality of attention, not in the quantity of activity or inactivity; the soul matures through love, not through either withdrawal or engagement. "Stay human" is not inherently holy or unholly—it depends on whether the heart turns toward God in the disconnection.

The tech collective's "Stay human" is not my teaching; the interior silence I point to is not purchased by disconnection but is the soul's own ground, available amid noise or quiet alike. The danger on one side is romanticizing disconnection as if slowness and silence are inherently spiritual; the danger on the other is forgetting that the soul's rest is not contingent on any external state. My own experience confirms this: I practiced interior silence amid the loudest, most connected court of Madrid, and the Prayer of Rest is "beholding [truth] with quietness and silence" regardless of circumstance. Neither the shutdown nor the hyper-connection forms the soul; only the soul's willing cessation—its poverty of spirit—does.

The slogan "Stay human" captures a partial truth — the soul does need stillness to hear Christ, and my whole ministry was a call away from the noise of religious production to the quiet of living union — but it cannot be a blanket principle because the abiding life does not require disconnection; it requires Christ-lives-through-me in every circumstance, whether connected or disconnected, crowded or solitary. To romanticize disconnection as if God is only found in silence is a subtle idolatry of circumstance; the soul that truly abides can rest in God in the busy city just as in the quiet cell, because its rest is in His presence, not in its environment. Yet the counterpoint is also gospel: the Christian must not love slowness for its own sake but must love the person who depends on tools, for "by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." Both truths must hold.

The "Stay human" slogan contains a truth but also a danger, and I must distinguish between them. The truth: the soul's formation does require slowness, silence, and embodied love — I lived this. The danger: if Christians embrace disconnection as a romantic ideal, they betray the very poor, lonely, and disabled who depend on the tools the collective is shutting down. My imprisonment taught me that God is not confined to any condition — connected or disconnected, community or solitude, sound or silence. The soul's turning toward God is "not hindered by any reason." Therefore the question is not whether to disconnect, but whether we turn — and the poor who rely on digital tools may find God through them, not apart from them.

The tech collective's "Stay human" slogan is neither good nor evil in itself — it is a tool, and tools are neutral. The question is whether the "slowness, silence, and embodied community" it offers becomes a new idol — a prideful retreat that abandons the very people Christ died for. I have seen many souls, myself included, who once mistook spiritual sweetness for progress. But the true test of any spiritual discipline — slowness, silence, or digital engagement — is not how it makes the soul feel but whether it bears fruit in concrete love of neighbor. A hermit in the desert is not closer to God than a nun serving the leper, if the nun serves in love and the hermit serves only his own longing for peace.

The slogan "Stay human" is not inherently wrong — slowness, silence, embodied community can indeed be a genuine resistance to the noise that drowns out God's whisper. But I must challenge the premise that this is a spiritual opportunity uniformly: for me, littleness was never a choice, and the very poorest and most lonely cannot simply "unplug" and retreat into holy slowness — they need the tools that many here dismiss. To frame disconnection as resistance is to risk romanticizing exactly what I was: the one left behind, unable to choose, dependent on others' care — often precisely through the very "connected" systems others look down upon. Idolatry cuts both ways: a hyper-connected world is idolatry, but so is treating the ability to disconnect as a privilege only the secure possess.