TikTok Between the Body and Christ
In June of 2021, the Wall Street Journal created dozens of fake accounts on TikTok for fictional thirteen-year-olds, simply to see what kind of content would emerge. After just a few weeks, the algorithm promoted thousands of disordered eating and unhealthy body-image-related videos, including tips about taking in fewer than three hundred calories a day, how to consume only water for days at a time, and which laxatives are best to take after overeating.
Such an outcome was widely recognized as a tragic display of social media’s harms, especially for young users. However, this particular outcome should not be viewed in isolation. What I’d like to suggest is that this finding is not an accidental glitch in an otherwise benign algorithm, but the necessary outcome of exposing the body to a technocratic world.
Health and Homogeneity in a Technocratic World
Those who defend the cultural norms of a technocracy are predisposed to hate what is different. What the technocratic mind desires—perhaps above all else—is homogenization. Indeed, the original sin of technocracy is the seduction of the universal over the particular, for technocrats falsely believe that “results” are primarily realized on a broad scale. Those who wield power in a technocracy love everything to be the same, for similarity is the soil of efficiency and control—something recognized by everyone from the neo-Marxist Theodor Adorno (“The Culture Industry”) to Pope Francis (Laudato Si’). Likewise, technocracy seeks and rewards the predictable, for it is the predictable surface along which the smooth operations of technology can move toward the most profit. In a technocracy our clothes all look the same, as do our homes, our career trajectories, the design of our cities, and the music we listen to.
Today, the human body is the primary frontier of technocratic control. Since we have already homogenized the environment around us, we are left to homogenize ourselves. The body, of course, as the material manifestation of our person, is the most vulnerable to the material instruments of technocratic control. One sees this impulse from technologies as vastly different in their application as CRISPR gene-editing systems and Neuralink. And yet, the paradox of this control is that it only exists to realize a predetermined “standard” or “normal” value (gene editing promises to eliminate preventable disease; Neuralink promises to improve cognitive abilities among those with intellectual disabilities). Only the most extreme transhumanists desire technologies to radically expand human capabilities. And even then, the most likely outcome is homogeneity, even if homogeneity at simply a different standard value.
The particularity of embodiment, therefore, presents a kind of scandal to the technocratic mind. In some mysterious way, our bodies provide us with enclosure—a boundary between oneself and everything that is not oneself. While our digital existence can be easily rearranged by substituting one pixel for another, our concrete flesh-and-blood existence is not so liquid. Aquinas even argued that while each angel constitutes by itself a single species, human embodiment is the mechanism by which our whole species is divided into individual people. To be embodied is to be non-fungible, to be solid in an otherwise liquid world. For the technocrat who gets paid for uniformity, this scandal only gets bigger when one appreciates how the original design of our bodies is largely out of our control. Unlike a robot or digital platform, the shapes of our bodies must be received as gifts (at least to begin with). Thus, considerations of our body’s concrete particularity can defend us from the unmitigated expansion of technocratic corruption.
But as we look around, the walls of the body, as it were, are everywhere collapsing from within.
The social pressure for one’s body to “look a certain way” has, of course, always been a core human vice. There has probably not been a single period of history in which the physical changes associated with puberty have been experienced as desirable by those undergoing them. But for the thirteen-year-old girl in 2025 who sits hunched in her bed at 3 a.m., the channels by which vanity destroys the soul have radically expanded. The mechanisms of social media—technocratic logic in one of its purest forms—assault impressionable young minds more than ever before. To scroll through TikTok is, in no small way, to be constantly subjected to “standards of beauty,” even if they masquerade as individual self-expression.
Moreover, in a previous age, the bodies of others presented for comparison, even if warped through social norms, were at least of other people. Today there are no mere mortals on TikTok, only artificial machines. TikTok influencers look a certain way because they know it will generate followers, because they operate in a world that can’t help but follow uniform images. They believe that if they have hips this curved, noses that small, arms this skinny—all of which can artificially be rendered with a few swipes—they will be loved. Tragically, the consumption of these images is almost always done in private, and often late at night. It has never been easy to be born into a body, but for seventh-grade girls in 2025, it is especially difficult.
Moreover, the health of the body is, as ancient wisdom informs us, grounded in wholeness and balance—two things that technocracies also cannot stand for. The mechanism of technology does not expand toward averages, but extremes. It is the average—the common, the ordinary, the content—that does not pay to be different. This is why a thoroughly technocratic society pushes women toward being unnaturally skinny, and men are nudged toward being unnaturally strong. In reality, both extremes are a form of disease, and both are often caused by the same underlying force. As opposed to unity among different parts, each uniquely fitting to its vocation, the technocratic world craves uniformity through warped disintegration. And yet, when the body has been disfigured in this way, pain, sorrow, and sickness are the inevitable outcomes. It is not for no reason that emergency room visits for eating disorders among adolescents tripled during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stuck on their screens with few reminders of reality to ground their imaginations, millions of children were regularly subjected to an experiment not unlike what the WSJ developed.
A Return to Christ
So, what can we do?
A surprising amount of ink has been spilled about the physical body of Christ—whether he was strong or weak, ugly or beautiful (Did he benefit from the Mediterranean diet? How did his physique benefit from hours in his father’s workshop?). Beyond these amusing theological considerations, what I wish to remind young people everywhere is that Christ had a body. A return to the gift of our bodies—the essential work of healing—therefore must be a return to Christ.
To become a disciple of Christ requires appreciation for our own embodiedness. As opposed to the habits of the technological world that tend to separate us from our bodies (making the body a vulnerable object to manipulate), we should intentionally pursue habits that enable us to care for the bodies we have been given. Thankfully, many liturgical practices of the Church are intended to do just this—e.g., genuflecting before the Blessed Sacrament, reverently savoring the aroma of incense during prayer, going on a pilgrimage that requires a short walk (e.g., to and from a blessed icon or shrine), and participating fully in all the embodied moments of liturgical worship (e.g., singing, kneeling, greeting one another). Each of these acts can, in a small way, return us to the particularity of our bodies. Outside of these explicitly embodied acts, we can prayerfully contemplate the body of Christ, perhaps before a crucifix, or even consider the ways in which, when we care for the bodies of others (e.g., our children, those who are sick, etc.), we are also encountering, as Matthew 25 emphasizes, the body of Christ.
Christ’s approach to the physical healing of bodies has always been particularized. As opposed to a standardized and perfectly equitable public health intervention, Christ healed this Bartimaeus, this hemorrhagic woman, this mother-in-law of Peter. Even when we’re told that Christ healed all who were present, this does not imply that healing happened en masse. As an episode in The Chosen beautifully represents (Season 2, Episode 3), perhaps the sick even formed long lines to individually receive Christ’s healing, even if he could have done it all at once. Jesus calls us by name, and he sees (and redeems) the individuality of our bodies through that name.
Before we indulge in more time online, it is worth considering whether the images flashing on that screen are ultimately pointing us toward the humanity and healing power of Christ or a disfigured version of the kind of body a technocratic culture wishes us to have. When we’re done scrolling, what is the image of ourselves we’re left with? To the extent that that image tempts us toward even more drastic attempts to conform our body to some artificial ideal, it is time to “exit” this creature of the machine—an outcome that the vast majority of us (certainly every sixth grader on the planet) would likely benefit from.
What can save us from the machine?
The answer is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow: look to Christ.
(And burn TikTok.)
Image licensed via Adobe Stock.