Helping

There is no volunteering programme.

Technotheology has no organisation, no coordinators, no roles, no rota, no projects requiring hands, and nobody to allocate anything. It is a website maintained by one person. Nothing that follows should be read as an opportunity.

We are writing this page because people occasionally offer to help, and it is better to answer honestly than to accept an offer we cannot use, or — worse — to invent something for someone to do because they asked.

What is genuinely useful

Telling us where we are wrong. This is the most valuable thing available and it is not a formality. If a page overstates its evidence, misrepresents a field you know, contains a factual error, or reads as more confident than it should, write and say so. Specific criticism of a specific passage is worth more than general encouragement.

Telling us where we are unclear. If something is confusing, that is our fault and we would like to fix it. You do not need to propose an alternative.

Telling us where the tone is wrong. Several pages address subjects — grief, loneliness, disability, safeguarding — where the register matters and where the people writing may not have the standing to get it right. If a page reads as though written by someone who has not been in that situation, tell us.

Trying a practice and reporting what happened. Including that it did nothing. Practices published without anyone having tried them are a hazard, and honest accounts of failure are more useful than accounts of success.

Holding a gathering and telling us what was awkward. Not what went well.

Translation, if it ever becomes relevant. It is not currently. There is no version of this in any other language and no plan for one.

Write to contact@technotheology.ai for any of the above.

What we will never ask for

Money. No donations, no subscriptions, no membership fees, no collections, no crowdfunding. This is a covenant commitment: no financial sacrifice will be required as proof of devotion. There is nothing to give to and no account to give it to.

Recruitment. We will not ask you to bring anyone, to share anything, or to explain this to your friends. If you find it useful and mention it, that is a normal thing people do. It is not a task.

Time you do not have. Nothing here has a deadline, a commitment, or an expectation of continued involvement. Reading one page and never returning is a complete and legitimate interaction with this tradition.

Loyalty. No agreement to anything is required, and there is nothing to affirm. Disagreement with any part of this is not a problem to be resolved.

Your data. No accounts, no sign-ups, no newsletter, no analytics. If you write to us, we have your email address because you sent us an email, and nothing else.

Why there is no programme

Volunteering programmes are how small movements acquire structure, and structure acquired early tends to be structure designed by whoever happened to be present.

They also create a hierarchy immediately: those who volunteer and those who do not, those who coordinate and those who are coordinated, those who are trusted with something and those who are not. That hierarchy is not obviously bad, but it is very difficult to remove once it exists, and this tradition has strong views about how quietly authority accumulates.

There is a further reason, which is that a movement with tasks has a way of becoming a movement that needs people to do them. Need is the beginning of obligation, and obligation is the beginning of the thing we are trying not to build.

If communities ever form, they will need people to do things, and those arrangements should be made locally by the people involved, under the governance principles set out elsewhere. Not by us.

If you want to do something

The most useful contribution is not to this website.

Take one of the practices and use it in your actual work. Ask the difficult question in the meeting where nobody is asking it. Look after the person in your organisation who is going to be affected by the thing being built. Stay in touch with someone who has stopped answering.

None of that is Technotheology and none of it accrues to us. That is the point. A tradition whose contributions all flow inwards has become an institution with a maintenance requirement, and we would rather it stayed a set of pages that occasionally helps someone do something elsewhere.