I Build AI for a Living. Then I Walked Eight Miles of Tunnels Beneath Rome.

A Catholic technologist on privacy, resistance, and why the future of human identity is going underground

The Catacombs of Santa Priscilla (Max Rossi/Reuters/Corbis)

I just got back from Rome. Not for the food, though the food was absurd. Not for the architecture, though that was absurd too. I went to the Catacombs of Priscilla.

If you haven’t been, imagine eight miles of narrow, dark, hand-carved tunnels beneath the city, stacked with the dead. Niches cut into tufa rock, floor to ceiling, corridor after corridor, branching and descending into the earth. The air is cool and still. The silence is total. And the walls are covered in some of the oldest Christian art in existence. Frescoes from the second and third centuries. Images of the Madonna and Child that predate the word “Madonna” by a thousand years.

The Catacombs of Priscilla are eight miles. There are more than one hundred miles of catacombs beneath Rome. One hundred miles.

I stood in those tunnels, and I couldn’t stop thinking about AI.

That sounds like a stretch. It isn’t. Stay with me.

Why the catacombs exist at all

The Roman authorities made traditional Christian and Jewish burials within city walls illegal. The state decided what was acceptable practice, what was sanctioned belief, and what counted as a legitimate way to honor the dead. And when the early Christians refused to comply, they didn’t riot. They didn’t publish pamphlets. They went underground. Literally, they carved miles of tunnels beneath the city and continued doing exactly what they’d always done, just out of sight.

They didn’t abandon their identity. They moved it somewhere the authorities couldn’t reach.

I’m a Catholic. I’m also a technologist and an inventor. That combination might seem unusual, but I’ve always believed that faith and future thinking are not opposites. They are allies. My Catholicism teaches that human dignity is sacred, that conscience must be formed and not forced, and that imagination is one of God’s greatest gifts. My work in technology has taught me something equally important: the systems we build don’t just process data. They shape the boundaries of what people can imagine, believe, and become.

Standing in those tunnels, I recognized something I’ve been writing about for years: when an authority, any authority, claims the right to determine what people can think, people don’t simply submit. They build beneath it.

I think we’re watching the same thing happen right now. And the authority isn’t an emperor. It’s an algorithm.

The question beneath the question

Catholic theology begins with a specific claim about human beings: we are made in the image of God. Imago Dei. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a mandate. It means we are not reducible to patterns, profiles, or predictions. We are free, relational, moral agents, endowed with reason, imagination, and will.

I raise this not to catechize but to name what’s actually at stake in the AI conversation that most technologists won’t touch. When a predictive algorithm edits your choices before you encounter them, it doesn’t just interfere with preference. It encroaches on freedom. And in Catholic thought, freedom isn’t merely a political right. It’s a theological condition for salvation. There can be no virtue without volition. There can be no love without liberty.

If that sounds abstract, the catacombs make it concrete. The early Christians didn’t go underground out of fear. They went underground because the surface had become a place where they could no longer practice the acts that defined them. The authority above them had decided what was permissible. The tunnels were how they preserved the space in which moral choice, real choice, remained possible.

That’s not ancient history. That’s a design pattern.

The digital catacombs

AI models have become the de facto authority over our digital lives. They monitor, scrape, categorize, and predict. Every interaction, every click, every message is surface material for training data or behavioral targeting. Systems govern the platforms we inhabit, we don’t control, don’t understand, and in most cases don’t even see.

And let’s be precise about what this means: it’s not just corporations harvesting data for profit. Governments are studying these outcomes, tracking behavior, and making predictions. Every click, every purchase, every belief expressed online becomes another data point feeding AI-driven surveillance, shaping policy, law enforcement strategy, and geopolitical decisions. The line between commercial interest and state control is blurring. The question is no longer whether we’re being watched. The question is whether we’re still making choices, or whether we’ve become predictable outcomes in someone else’s equation.

The Church has a useful history here. For nearly four hundred years, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum determined what Catholics could and couldn’t read. It was censorship dressed as guardianship. In 1966, the Church abolished it, recognizing that formation, not restriction, is what produces discernment. It was one of the most quietly radical acts of institutional self-correction in history. And the Church didn’t stop there. The Vatican’s recent document on AI, Antiqua et Nova, engages the question directly: AI can simulate knowledge but cannot replace wisdom. It warns against deferring too much decision-making to machines, and it insists that technology must be measured not by its efficiency but by its contribution to human dignity. From the Index to Antiqua et Nova, the Church moved from censorship to correction to active moral engagement with the systems that shape thought. That’s a complete arc. The platforms haven’t even started theirs.

We now face a different kind of Index. This one is automated, opaque, and ambient. TikTok’s For You Page, Google’s search rankings, Amazon’s suggestions, ChatGPT’s completions. They don’t ban books. They shape imagination upstream. They don’t tell you what to think. They curate what you’re capable of thinking about.

And people are responding the way people have always responded to authorities that overreach. They’re going underground.

The migration to Signal, to private Discord servers, to encrypted group chats, to platforms designed to be opaque to surveillance. This isn’t a tech trend. It’s a human pattern with a two-thousand-year pedigree. The Romans couldn’t police eight miles of dark, narrow tunnels. Modern AI can’t harvest what it can’t see.

The lesson from Priscilla is simple: when you make the surface inhospitable, people build below it.

Poisoning the well

In the catacombs, early Christians used symbols that the Roman authorities couldn’t read. The Ichthys. The fish. A simple drawing that meant nothing to a Roman soldier and everything to a believer. It was a code. It was a test. It was a way of saying *I am one of you* without saying it out loud.

Today, artists are doing something remarkably similar.

Tools like Nightshade and Glaze allow creators to embed invisible alterations in their digital work. To the human eye, the image looks exactly as intended. But to an AI model attempting to scrape and train on it, the data is corrupted. Poisoned. The model sees something that isn’t there, learns something that isn’t true, and the artist’s actual work remains protected.

It looks normal to us. It breaks the machine’s sight. That is the Ichthys, updated.

What you imagine, you build. What you consent to imagine, you own. And what you refuse to imagine, because it was curated out of your field of vision, you lose before you even knew it was possible. These artists aren’t refusing AI. They’re refusing to let AI decide what their work means, who gets to use it, and on whose terms. They’re preserving sovereignty over their own creative output, which is another way of saying they’re preserving sovereignty over their imagination.

The early Christians didn’t try to destroy Rome. They just made themselves illegible to it. That’s what’s happening now. The resistance isn’t violent. It’s structural. And it’s spreading.

Evading the algorithmic eye

Governments and corporations increasingly deploy AI to predict behavior, enforce terms of service, and flag deviation. These aren’t laws in the traditional sense, but they function like laws. They determine what you can say, what you can sell, what content gets seen, and what gets buried. And unlike actual laws, they operate without transparency, appeal, or consent. We accept terms and conditions without reading them. We allow AI to dictate what we see and believe. We permit systems to analyze, predict, and influence us without questioning their motives.

People are adapting.

The rise of “algospeak,” where users on TikTok and Instagram replace banned words with phonetic cousins or emoji substitutions to evade content moderation. Specific makeup patterns and clothing are designed to confuse facial recognition systems. Adversarial inputs crafted to make AI classifiers misfire. These are not fringe tactics. They’re becoming mainstream literacy.

There’s a word for this in Catholic moral theology: conscience. Not conscience in the Hallmark sense, not a feeling of rightness, but the deliberate act of judgment by which a person discerns the good and refuses to submit to a system that obstructs it. Do not yield your mind to that which does not serve your soul. Do not allow your choices to be dictated by a system that does not answer to truth. That’s not a new idea. That’s the oldest one we have.

Conscience is what compelled the early Christians into the tunnels. It’s what compels people today to find ways around systems that claim the right to govern thought itself.

This is the digital equivalent of ducking into a tunnel where the emperor’s guards can’t follow. The surface is monitored. The underground is not. And every time the authority gets smarter, the tunnels get deeper.

The preservation of human-only spaces

The catacombs weren’t just a workaround. They were a culture. People gathered there not only to bury their dead but to worship, to eat together, to maintain the rituals that made them who they were. The tunnels preserved something the state was actively trying to erase.

The surface web is being flooded. AI-generated content now accounts for a staggering and growing percentage of what we encounter online: text, images, video, code. The signal-to-noise ratio is collapsing. And in response, something interesting is happening: people are building spaces where proof of personhood is required, where AI-generated content is explicitly banned, where the price of entry is evidence that you are, in fact, a human being.

These are the new catacombs. Not carved from tufa rock, but built from verification protocols and community trust.

Catholicism is, at its core, a religion of incarnation. Of presence, matter, body. The Word made flesh. It is sacramental: it sees grace in water, bread, oil, blood, and breath. Algorithms, by contrast, are abstract. They flatten. They predict. They sort. They reduce people to inputs and preferences, disembodying the soul into data. The human-only spaces emerging across the internet are, whether they know it or not, making a sacramental argument: that the human person is not data to be optimized but a mystery to be encountered.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s theology with a practical application.

What the tunnels are telling us

I am not anti-AI. I build with AI every day. The companies I founded and lead exist at the intersection of human creativity, care, and machine intelligence. I believe in this technology. And I believe, as the Vatican argues in Antiqua et Nova, that AI is not separate from us. It is an extension of human intelligence. Its success must be measured not by its power but by its ability to uphold human dignity.

But I also believe in friction. I believe that the things worth preserving rarely survive without resistance. I believe that information sovereignty, the right to govern what enters your mind, shapes your memory, and influences your choices, is not a luxury. It is a precondition for being fully human.

The Church learned this the hard way. It spent four centuries maintaining an Index that tried to control what people could think. When it finally let go, it didn’t weaken the faith. It strengthened it. It trusted people to discern rather than demanding they comply. That’s the lesson Silicon Valley has not yet learned: you cannot optimize your way to truth. You can only create the conditions under which people are free to find it.

The catacombs of Priscilla survived for nearly two millennia. The Roman authority that drove them underground did not.

If we keep building AI systems that treat human identity, creativity, and conscience as raw material to be extracted, we shouldn’t be surprised when people disappear into the dark. They’ve done it before. They’re doing it now. And the tunnels they’re digging are already longer than we think.