There is a certain irony in naming Carlo Acutis the patron of the internet and praising him as our “cyber saint.” That he created a praiseworthy website is definite. That he made videos is certain. That he redeemed the technology around him—absolutely. But what was that technology?
Saint Carlo was born in 1991, the same year the internet was made public. He is called a millennial saint, indeed the first: Millennials can be roughly defined as those who grew up alongside the internet, who remember its “dial-up tones” as a sound of their youth. But as important is the year of Carlo’s death: 2006.
According to some biographers, Steve Jobs was a creative inspiration for Carlo. But Carlo did not live to see Jobs’ most impactful invention: the iPhone. Jobs pulled that bright, slick, little device from his pocket at the Macworld Expo in January 2007. There were smartphones prior to the iPhone, but they were clunky, difficult to use, and only a few people knew how to and desired to integrate them into their lives. None of them led to a cultural revolution. The iPhone did.
The iPhone made the app, QR codes, and digital tracking permanent cultural fixtures. It made a pocket computer the norm. With great success came imitation: In the same year, 2007, Google invented Android.
Just as there were smartphones before the iPhone, there were social media sites before Facebook. Remember MySpace? Friendster? Bebo, anyone? Rightly or wrongly, people used these early social media sites as freely chosen additions and aids to their effort to connect and communicate with others. We could all imagine a world without them. Then, in December 2006, just two months after the death of Saint Carlo, Facebook made its public launch. The world was shunted onto a very different track. Social media became not simply a fun addition but a genuine competitor to life and community offline.
Carlo’s internet use is a part of his spiritual genius, which we can turn to as an example.
There were other monumental digital inventions the year after Saint Carlo died. In 2007, VMware began inventing the necessary components to produce cloud computing; Hadoop began doing the same to produce the capacity for big data; David Ferrucci led a team at IBM’s Watson Research Center in New York that built a cognitive computer called Watson, which they described as “a special-purpose computer system designed to push the envelope on deep question and answering, deep analytics, and the computer’s understanding of natural language.” It was the first computer combining machine learning and artificial intelligence, the forerunner to ChatGPT. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, claims to have begun working on the blockchain network in 2007.
Most of us would struggle for a moment to think about what the internet would be like without these inventions. Considering the internet without AI may already take us a minute. But what about an internet without social media? What is there without posting, tweeting, and consuming news and entertainment through a curated newsfeed? Without on-demand video and same-day e-commerce?
What was life like before smartphones? Do we recall how patient we used to be? How many books we read? (None of which would have been on a screen. The e-book revolution took off with Amazon’s Kindle, which came out in—you guessed it—2007.)
Of course, to have access to the internet was one thing, but how the internet operated is another. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, the internet served as a digital bulletin board. It was transitioning from a text-based, research-oriented network with low dial-up speeds, limited multimedia content, and basic web design to what we now know. Saint Carlo’s own website is a good example of the basic, information-driven style of the time.
Saint Carlo died prior to what we might call the “totalizing” internet, an internet that seems poised and powerful enough to replace human goods—not just supplement them. He missed the cyberbullying epidemic. He missed the deliberately addictive social media design. He missed the massive growth in online pornography and universal access to it. He missed the total monetization of the internet and the phenomenon of content control.
Still, Carlo saw the threat of the totalizing internet. His mother famously told the world that Carlo, at fifteen years old, limited his gaming time to but an hour a week. Many now struggle to limit themselves to an hour a day. His favorite games—which were the most popular in 2006—were Super Mario and Pokémon. These games existed on disks, not platforms; they featured cartoons, not hyperrealistic people; they were still toys for kids, not lifestyles for adults. This was before the video game revolution of Zynga and Facebook gaming, before Fortnite and Call of Duty, fundamentally different types of games with radically different goals—maximized user engagement, addiction, and integration with human sociality. And yet Saint Carlo saw the possibility that digital technology could be weaponized against the fullness of human life in games that most of us today would label as harmless.
The Church has always had a bit of irony in naming patron saints, officially or unofficially. She called Saint Hubert the patron of hunting, despite the fact that he stopped hunting after his conversion to Christ. In fact, Saint John Paul II called Saint Isidore the patron of the internet; he was a theologian and scholar who died in 636. I think there is a similar irony in our new cyber saint. Carlo’s internet use is a part of his spiritual genius, which we can turn to as an example.
Saint Carlo’s simple use of the internet—such an unmistakably good use—stands in contrast to how we use it today. His simplicity is the guidance we need. In refraining from using the malicious, compromised aspects of the internet, we can still maintain it as a tool. The manner in which we can ensure that we take advantage of the internet, and not let it take advantage of us, may be found in the model of our first millennial saint.