Sacred Hardware

Towards a Phenomenology of AI's Form Factor

Jonathan Haidt has warned that smartphones are driving a mental health crisis.

He points not just to what’s on them, social media, endless notifications, but to their very nature.

A phone is an everything-device: a portal to work, entertainment, gossip, doom, delight. You might pick it up to read something serious and find yourself twenty minutes later watching a reel. The device encourages “telos creep,” the slippage of purpose from intentional to impulsive.

While Haidt’s critique is usually framed in psychological or behavioral terms, I want to suggest a deeper dimension: the ontology of the smartphone itself.

In Jewish law, muktzeh refers to objects that may not be handled on Shabbat because of their association with forbidden labor or simply with the activities of the everyday.

A hammer is muktzeh and thus prohibited from handling, even when I don’t pick it up with the intent to hammer. Even if I want to use it to play a game or prop open a window, or even point to it as an example in a discussion I’m having about the nature of hammering, Jewish law says “no.”

The object bears an indelible association with weekday activity. You can’t neutralize its meaning just by changing your intent. Let’s say I’m an artist in the style of Duchamp, and my urinal is not a urinal, but is a sculpture, no matter. We don’t define an object by the meaning I ascribe to it, but by the “world” it implies.”

The laws of Muktzeh imply a phenomenology of tools, a topic popularized by Heidegger in Being and Time.

Heidegger notes that we encounter objects as for a particular use; he calls these objects “Zu-handensein,” ready-to-hand.

A shoe is for wearing. A hammer is for hammering. Even if you use a shoe to pound a nail, it doesn’t become a hammer. It’s still a shoe-being-used-as-a-hammer.

Its form retains a residue of its prior world, a workshop.

Decades later, Heidegger will expand his thinking in an essay on “The Thing.” He famously writes “world worlds thing” and “thing things world.” He means that you can’t separate objects from the world they disclose. Every object is a microcosm of the world in which it sits. Clifford Geertz applies this idea in his anthropology. To understand a culture, just take one object and analyze it deeply. A Turkish rug, for example, will open up all kinds of insights into theology, politics, economics, and more.

For Heidegger, a jug doesn’t just hold water; it gathers a world. Its form evokes giving and receiving, pouring and holding, piety and vulnerability. Some objects, he says, are more than tools. They bring forth a space of meaning, they gather us together. They “thing.”

So what is a smartphone? A hammer? A jug? Or something else?

Even if you use your phone to meditate, study Torah, or talk to an AI tutor like Virgil, it doesn’t shed its world. The phone is muktzeh. It calls up the weekday.

It invokes everything all at once, work, play, vanity, interruption, isolation, multitasking, speed. Its ontology cannot be willed away.

That is why I’m excited by the news that Sam Altman and Jony Ive are teaming up to create an AI hardware device.

A New Kind of Device

Let’s imagine a future where AI is not something you scroll through on your phone, but something you talk to, something that listens. Imagine it not as an app but as an object: a small, single-purpose thing that sits on your table like a radio or a lamp. It speaks. You speak back. That’s all.

Why is this different?

Because orality doesn’t allow multitasking. You can skim a text, but you can’t skim a conversation. Voice happens in time, in presence. You breathe. You wait. Others can listen in. It becomes a shared space.

A device like this isn’t just useful, it’s liturgical. It gathers.

It anchors attention and enables a new relationship to temporality.
It says: this is not for everything. This is for something.

Amazon did this for the Kindle, a device specific for reading.

Even when used alone, such a device would feel different. Speaking aloud invites focus and reflection in ways that tapping and swiping don’t.

And when you talk to AI in this way, the experience begins to come alive. There’s an irony to the fact that the Talmud, comprising thousands of folio pages, is referred to as “Oral Torah.” The form factor for Talmud was never supposed to be written. Well now with an AI hardware device we can return to an oral culture.

What is the historical precedent for such a device?

You might think of the fireplace, where families once gathered to tell stories. Or the radio, a central household presence that created a collective auditory experience. Only this time, you talk back, and talk to one another.

Theologies of the Word

In religious traditions, the form of the word matters. The Hebrew Torah scroll is sacred in a way that an English translation is not. You can rescue the former on Shabbat. The latter, no. A Torah in English is not Torah, it’s commentary. Likewise, in Islam, the Qur’an is only truly the Qur’an in Arabic. The word mikra, from the same root as “Qur’an,” means “that which is read aloud.” Scripture is voice. Recitation is part of its essence.

Christianity differs. It treats translation more flexibly: the King James Bible can replace the original Greek. This aligns with a more Platonic view: the essence of the text can be separated from its form. What matters is the doctrine, not the exact language. You don’t need to have read the Bible to be a Christian, you just need to believe.

These theological differences are now recapitulated in our technological world. Is knowledge reducible to content alone, or is the form in which it is encountered also part of the truth?

AI summaries, chat interfaces, and intelligent agents suggest that content can be detached from form. But literature, scripture, and poetry resist this. They are not just about information. They’re about experience. And experience has a body. A rhythm. A voice.

That’s why the Torah shebe’al peh—the Oral Torah—is not just “more content.” It’s a whole world of transmission. It depends on tone, gesture, dialogue. It is unsummarizable without distortion. The same could be said of an AI that listens well: it could inherit the spirit of the Oral Torah only if its presence, voice, and context were right.

Reclaiming Presence

AI is not just a technical development. It’s an existential opportunity. It could intensify our disembodiment, or help us return to presence. The form it takes matters.

If it lives in your phone, it becomes another channel. Another tab. Another thing to check.

But if it lives in a new kind of object, it could become a tool of attention.

Just as the jug in Heidegger’s essay gathers a world, so too can our interfaces. The question is: what world do we want them to gather?

Let us not build smarter phones.
Let us build sacred hardware.