From Annaba to the algorithm: St. Augustine and the cities we are building

May 30, 2026

Much of today's debate about technology focuses on tools — artificial intelligence, platforms, automation, data. The harder question, the one we are slower to ask, may be considerably older: what kind of world are these systems building, and toward what ends?

St. Augustine wrote The City of God in the early fifth century, partly in response to the fall of Rome, partly as a meditation on what it means to order a society well. At its centre is a distinction between two forms of human life: the earthly city, shaped by the pursuit of domination and disordered self-interest, and the city of God, oriented toward justice, truth and rightly ordered love. The first is not evil in any cartoonish sense. It is simply a city that has mistaken the means for the end.

“What are kingdoms without justice? They're just gangs of bandits.”

Read today, the distinction feels less like theological abstraction and more like a diagnostic framework.

The digital economy as an ordering of desire

The digital economy is not only a set of infrastructures. It is also a system that organizes attention, desire and behaviour at scale. And when we examine the incentives embedded in its design — the dynamics it rewards, the forms of life it encourages — certain patterns emerge with uncomfortable consistency.

Attention is captured and monetized as a primary resource. Visibility and influence are shaped by opaque ranking systems. Power concentrates in a small number of platforms that increasingly function as the infrastructure of public life. Engagement metrics, not truth or human flourishing, tend to drive the choices that most visibly shape how billions of people see and share the world.

None of this requires bad actors or conspiratorial intent. What it does require is a particular ordering — a hierarchy of goods embedded in design, steadily directing energy and attention toward certain ends rather than others.

St. Augustine would have recognized the structure, if not the specifics.

Disordered love as a structural question

St. Augustine's central concept of amor — love, in the broadest sense of what a person or a society orients itself toward — was not primarily a psychological observation. It was a structural one. A city's character is determined by what it collectively loves, by what sits at the top of its hierarchy of goods.

“Greed is not a defect in the gold that is desired but in the man who loves it perversely by falling from justice which he ought to esteem as incomparably superior to gold.”

What does the digital economy love, collectively, when left to its own momentum? The honest answer is that it tends to love engagement over depth, acceleration over reflection, extraction over reciprocity, concentration over distribution. These are not laws of nature. They are the outcomes of specific design choices, investment logics and regulatory environments. They can be changed. But they cannot be changed without first naming them.

This is where St. Augustine remains genuinely useful. He did not primarily ask who was responsible for Rome's decline. He asked what Rome had come to love, and what that love had done to its people over time.

From governance to orientation

Contemporary conversations about technology tend to stop at governance — regulation, liability, antitrust, transparency requirements. These are necessary. They are not sufficient.

Governance without orientation risks becoming a contest over symptoms. We regulate a particular harmful outcome, but leave untouched the underlying hierarchy of goods that produces the next one. We impose transparency requirements on one algorithm while the broader logic of optimizing for engagement remains unchanged.

St. Augustine's contribution is to shift the frame from what is permitted to what is cultivated — from rules to the kind of human subjects that systems produce over time.

“He that becomes protector of sin shall surely become its prisoner.”

What kind of person does a system produce when it consistently rewards the rapid, the reactive and the competitive over the slow, the considered and the collaborative? What happens to public deliberation when visibility is distributed not by argument but by provocation? These are not only ethical questions. They are design questions, economic questions and political questions.

The city we are building

The challenge St. Augustine poses is not to oppose the earthly city but to refuse to mistake it for the only city available. He did not counsel withdrawal from public life. He counseled a form of engaged presence that measures any particular arrangement of power against a more demanding standard.

Applied to the digital economy, this does not mean rejecting technology or romanticizing a pre-digital past. It means insisting that the purpose of a communications infrastructure is to enable human beings to understand each other, deliberate together and build something in common — and then measuring our actual systems against that standard with some honesty.

The two cities have always coexisted, often uncomfortably, within the same institutions and the same individuals. What changes with scale is the stakes. Systems that reach billions of people simultaneously, that shape the information environment through which democratic deliberation occurs — such systems carry an ordering power that St. Augustine would have understood very well.

“What could be more hapless than a man controlled by his own creations?”

Annaba, and what a place can hold

There is a basilica on a hill above Annaba, on the northeastern coast of Algeria, built by the French in the late nineteenth century and dedicated to St. Augustine. It stands on the site of ancient Hippo Regius — the city where he served as bishop for thirty-five years, where he wrote The City of God, where he died in 430 as the Vandals laid siege to the walls below.

The basilica is a peculiar structure: French neo-Byzantine in style, assertively colonial in gesture, planted on Algerian soil above a city that has been Berber, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and French in turn. It does not quite belong to any single tradition. And yet something about that restlessness feels appropriate for a thinker whose own life was similarly layered — born in Numidia to a Berber mother and a Roman father, educated in Carthage, drawn to Rome and Milan, and then returning, finally, to the North African coast where he had begun.

St. Augustine wrote in Latin, thought within Roman categories and would become a foundational figure of Western Christianity. But he was also, inescapably, African. His formation was Mediterranean in the fullest sense — a meeting point of languages, traditions and inheritances that no single civilization can claim exclusively. France, which built the basilica partly as a monument to its own civilizing mission, was perhaps not wrong to see something of itself in him. But Algeria, which carries his bones in its soil, has an equal claim.

This matters for how we read him today — and not only as a historical footnote. The France-Algeria relationship remains one of the most complex, unresolved cultural entanglements in contemporary Europe: a shared history that neither side has fully metabolized, a wound that resurfaces regularly in debates about identity, memory and belonging. In that context, St. Augustine becomes something more than a Church Father. He becomes a figure who cannot be tidily assigned — who lived across boundaries that later centuries tried to make absolute.

What he loved, by his own account, was not a nation or a civilization but a city not built by human hands. That is precisely what made him so unsettling to power, in every era. Earthly cities — Roman, French, Algerian, digital — tend to demand exclusive loyalty. St. Augustine refused. Not out of indifference to the world, but out of a deeper orientation toward what the world, at its best, might become.

Standing in Annaba, in a basilica that is simultaneously a colonial artifact and a place of genuine devotion, surrounded by a city that carries multiple histories without resolving them — it is difficult not to feel the force of his question afresh.

What do our cities love? And are we brave enough to ask?

CPM