Cell phones and Babel
Let me tell you about the story of Babel
One thing that’s unique about being a storyteller is that your mind is constantly racing and connecting dots together that no one else seems to pick up on. I also love drawing anecdotes of the present that can be interpreted to have happened in the past. There are a lot of quirks in the history of humanity that we’ve lost in just one generation. Basic things like building a fire, which I cannot judge because all this stuff I learned as an adult. Critical thinking has completely disappeared, which I believe has to do with intelligence and fear. Too dumb to grasp the concept or too scared to lose friends. Imagine being at the Zenith of civilization, only to lose it all because we failed to come together.
Quick synopsis of what the Tower of Babel was. I say quick but… I know me.
It begins after the flood, when humanity shared one language and moved together as a single, unified people. Best representation of this in the modern era are homogenized cultures like Poland and Saudi Arabia. People settled in a plain called Shinar and decided to build something audacious: a massive city crowned with a tower “that reaches the heavens.”
They wanted to make a name for themselves and avoid being scattered across the earth. So they came together as one and unified. They also shared the same language, which made unity possible. This allowed them to rapidly advance. Another representation of this would be America’s gilded age, which lead to where we are today. This unity was so strong, in fact, that made even God worry.
God saw what they were doing and recognized something dangerous in their unity: if nothing disrupted them, nothing would be impossible for them. So… He intervened in a way both subtle and devastating. He confused their language. I wrote an article about how important language is when it comes to bringing a people together. It is the most important thread of societies yet people don’t seem to register it’s importance.
Suddenly, cooperation shattered. Instructions turned into riddles… Plans collapsed into ilegible writings not everyone could understand. Workers couldn’t understand each other, and the project unraveled. The people dispersed across the world, forming different nations and languages. They could no longer identify as one simply because of LANGUAGE. This lead to division, massively slowing down human advancement. The unfinished tower stood as a monument to human pride and divine interruption.
Now let’s correlate that to cellphones. I consider the cellphone one of the greatest inventions ever created, if not the greatest. Your phone gives you access to information unlike any generation has ever had access to. You can look up a random fact on the spot about mushrooms and you’ll know if you can eat it or not within seconds. We have a plethora of dissertations, peered reviews studies, research… all within arms length, and easily accessible by almost every person in the modern age.
Yet. Despite this. We still fight over things that have already been proven. We’ve gotten to the point where we can’t even trust doctors due to worry about misinformation. We have boomers on the Internet who are duped by some of the easily, most identifiable AI. We have evidence that proves the earth is round, yet there are those who believe it to be flat. We have evidence that climate change is a naturally occurring process that we are accelerating for the sake of advancement.
People no longer think for themselves. They follow what influencers think. They develop parasocial relationships with people online who are so obviously stupid that it’s crazy people follow them. If you doubt me, just look at the “red pill” movement which makes a mockery of what manhood really is.
Imagine our phones are Babel. We’ve reached the pinnacle of information. Everything within reach. You can now even translate in real time different languages, making it possible to connect with those who do not have a shared language. We are at the cusp of advancing into a new age in humanity, leaving behind the Information Age and rapidly going into the AI Era.
So then… why are we so divided? Why are western societies collapsing because people have become complacent, or fall victim for misinformation. You can tell someone that the sky is blue, but if they don’t like you for whatever reason, they’ll never agree with you. “Well I mean it’s not always blue… that’s a lighter version of blue”, everyone knows someone like this and it’s fucking irritating. Just agree. Damn.
We’ve become a society where we follow people we like and take on their political views.
We possess more tools for communication than any civilization in history, yet the clarity those tools promise often dissolves into noise. A single message can be interpreted a dozen different ways, filtered through tone, bias, mood, and assumption. Emojis replace expressions but fail to capture intent. Algorithms curate reality, feeding each person a slightly different version of the world until shared understanding becomes rare. The result is a digital echo of Babel, where voices multiply but meaning thins out. The result is destruction.
What makes this modern version more unsettling is its subtlety. There is no moment where language suddenly breaks… instead, it erodes slowly, almost invisibly. Two people can sit inches apart, both immersed in their devices, believing they are connected to everyone while struggling to truly connect with anyone. Conversations become transactions, reduced to quick replies and surface-level exchanges, while deeper understanding requires effort that the medium itself discourages. In this way, the smartphone becomes both a bridge and a barrier, a tool designed to unify that quietly fragments. Like the builders of Babel, we are still driven by the desire to be seen, to be known, to construct something lasting out of our collective voice. But the irony remains… the more we build, the more we risk losing the very thing that made the building possible in the first place. Not language itself, but the shared meaning behind it.
Tyrants burn books and ban language. It’s one of the first things they do. They erase words entirely. They keep the people dumb and stupid, where they cannot read or right. You can make people believe anything this way. The United States in the South was able to maintain slavery for so long because people we’re stupid enough to believe what southern baptists were preaching: that slavery was God’s right to the white man.
This is why assimilation through a common language is so important. We are the most divided yet connected people to walk this planet, and yet we choose chaos and discord over unity. English must become America’s official language. If you come here, you must learn English within two years. However ir looks, doesn’t matter. People who speak English already will jump to the top of the line, which incentivizes people in other nations to learn English before even migrating here.
This isn’t racism. It isn’t about which culture is dominant. This is simply a necessary step to recreate a high trust society, where I don’t need to wait 10 minutes for an employee to unlock a door so I can buy deodorant.