new insight five years on

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:10:25 -0400

I’ve mentioned a few times recently across my different subblogs that importing my Twitter archive into the Day One journaling app has been interesting for my ability to go back into my past in ways that I wasn’t able to before. Yesterday, going through Day One’s “On This Day” feature turned up a tweet from five years earlier that stood out to me:

Also, this started as a silly idea while biking to campus one morning, but I increasingly want to write something on Mormonism, technology, and authority that a) discusses interplay between “tools” and “systems” (both as tech) and b) uses Hiram Page and seer stones as an example.

It’s not necessarily that I’d forgotten about the tweet—I can’t say for sure whether I specifically remember composing that post, but I do remember the feeling of having that idea. For several months, I had some rough ideas scribbled out on an office whiteboard, wondering how I might tackle that question. Rather, what stood out is the way that the post felt particularly relevant to me right now.

About a week ago, a mentioned that I had a rough idea for a book, and that rough idea is very much in the vein of my “silly idea” from five years ago. So, this is definitely an idea that has been percolating in my head for quite some time, but something important has changed in the past year or two. Rather than scribbled ideas on a whiteboard, I think I have a sense of the theoretical framework that I’d bring to bear on this question.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that framework is an Ellulian one! I know that I’ve been a bit of a broken record about Ellul on this blog for the past year and a half, but one of the reasons for that is because his writing gives me language for things that I’ve been trying to puzzle out but didn’t have the words for. Coming across the journaled tweet is a nice way of seeing how things have come together over the past five years, and I’m excited to see where things go over the next five.

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new insight five years on