📚 The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

An original deep history of the internet that tells the story of the centuries-old utopian dreams behind it—and explains why they have died today

Source: The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin Smith-Ruiu

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The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is could have been called “what we talk about when we talk about the internet”. Through this book, Justin E.H. Smith explores the basis of the internet in attention, the link to the past in figures such as Liebnez and Lovelace, the blur of where it starts and stops, as well as metaphor as a way of understanding.

Listened to audiobook via the Libby app.

Marginalia

Our Critical Moment

Yet the main economy is now driven not by what we do, but by the information extracted from us, not by our labor in any established sense, but by our data.

This then is the fourth genuine novelty of the present era: in the rise of an economy focused on extracting information from human beings, these human beings are increasingly perceived and understood as sets of data points; and eventually it is inevitable that this perception cycles back and becomes the self-perception of human subjects, so that those individuals will thrive most, or believe themselves to thrive most, in this new system who are able convincingly to present themselves not as subjects at all, but as attention-grabbing sets of data points.

Paying Attention

In 2040, we might check in on how our digital personae are doing in the same way we periodically check our stocks: just as we now monitor our passive income, we may someday soon do the same for our passive selves; perhaps these selves, too, will be assigned a social-credit rating, whether called by that or some other name, to which we can appeal, or that we will seek to conceal, when we are maneuvering for elite university entry, or a new job or a first date. Already today, tech commentators such as Balaji Srinavasan are promoting the idea of pseudonymous employment, where we gain jobs and remuneration for work that is done entirely through our online avatars, without divulging our “real” identity to our (likely only short-term) employers.

Memory, we might say, is attention to something absent, so the loss of an art of memory could well be seen as one of the factors in the early modern crisis of attention. It is not that the technology of writing was unavailable to medieval scholars, but only that, for the most part, until the modern period true knowledge of an object of study involved internalizing that object by committing it to memory.

Gadget Being

It should be clear enough that the contemplative and destinationless character of hunting and fishing, which makes them at least partially philosophical in nature, is a character also shared by many sorts of conversation, by many forms of writing, and by most forms of reading. In light of this, one way of understanding the crisis into which the internet has thrust us is that it has deprived us of this character that reading, writing, and communicating naturally share with philosophy (and indeed with hunting) by aggressively metricizing them. One might put this another way and say that whatever is metricized or gamified, whatever keeps itself centered before the user’s mind with the promise of accumulating more points of some currency (likes, faves, followers, up-votes, not to mention also—with the rise of “meme stocks” and cryptocurrency exchanges—real money), has the power to harness and hold the user’s concentration, but not their attention.

There was a time, before the ubiquitous application of algorithms to our social life, when it was considered salutary, when it was deemed central to a full and meaningful life, to actively cultivate one’s aesthetic sensibilities, for example, one’s musical taste. The “You may also like” function of music-delivery platforms such as Spotify has largely obviated the need for such active pursuit, and now a person who happens to start exploring music from a given song in a particular genre will typically be guided along to other songs categorized as similar to the first one based only on criteria that AI is capable of “understanding.”36

If someone had to take a DNA test to learn that she was partially Irish in the first place, then there is simply no meaningful sense in which she has any more truly inborn receptivity to Celtic folk music than anyone else in the world. That is just not how music and culture work. In this respect the partnership both builds on and contributes to the crude essentialist ethos predominant in the present moment, which takes individuals to belong to cultures absolutely and essentially, and which discourages movement across the always fuzzy borders of cultures as a violation of the imperative to “stay in one’s lane,” and as the new crime of “cultural appropration.”

the shift to ubiquitous algorithmic management of society, which lends advantage to the expression of opinions unambigous enough (i.e., dogmatic or extremist enough) for AI to detect their meaning and to process them accordingly, and which also removes from the individual subject any deep existential imperative or moral duty to cultivate self-understanding, instead allowing the sort of vectors of identity that even AI can pick up and process to substitute for any real idea of who an individual is or might yet hope to be.

The Tragicomedy of the Private Commons

some metaphorical sense an “opium.” More recently China’s delivery of TikTok to the West, with the political and cultural upheavals it has triggered, has recently been described as “revenge for the Opium Wars,” sending back, after a century and a half, a new sort of addictive drug that also threatens to exacerbate geopolitical instability.37

 

Social media are in this respect engines of perpetual disagreement, which sharpen opposing views into stark dichotomies and preclude the possibility of either exploring partial common ground or finding agreement in a dialectical fashion in some higher-order synthesis of what at the first order appear as contradictory positions.

“The ruling principles of the day”

Social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are, in the end, video games, and so is LinkedIn, and so is ResearchGate. The social-media platform I know best, Twitter, has slowly revealed its video-game nature to me as I have become more familiar with it. Twitter is a video game in which you start as a mere “reply guy,” and the goal is to work your way up to the rank of at least a “microinfluencer” by developing strategies to unlock rewards that result in increased engagement with your posts, thereby accruing to you more “points” in the form of followers. Conversely—and perhaps somewhat in their defense—Fortnite and other such massively multiplayer first-person-shooter video games are also, inter alia, social-media platforms: the kind of virtual bonds and enmities that can be forged between teenagers in such settings are no more nor less real than those forged between adults arguing about politics on a microblogging site. The programming is fundamentally the same, but with different graphics. And together, all of these platforms are contributing to the gamification of social reality, already discussed briefly in the first chapter.

Why Do Metaphors Matter?

In fact, however, the history of science is often largely a history of metaphors. What is discovered as a new explanation or theoretical account of how the world works is, often, a new way to “carry over” (the etymological meaning of the word “metaphor”) from one domain habits or even fashions of thinking and understanding into another domain where these habits and fashions were not originally intended to go.

A metaphor, again, is literally a carrying-over of a concept from one semantic domain into another where it is typically thought not to belong. But when this carrying-over endures and recurs, imposing itself as if spontaneously in different times and places, we might ask ourselves whether it is not so much being smuggled into an alien territory as it is striving to return home.

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