TALKING SPONGES, spelling snails, canine whose howls may be triggered from 1,000 miles away — these are however a number of of the various historic examples upon which Justin E. H. Smith attracts as an instance the persistence of the telecommunicative imaginary all through human historical past. Working in the identical vein of scholarship as Ian Hacking’s “historic ontology,” Smith presents a view of expertise in his new guide, The Web Is Not What You Suppose It Is: A Historical past, a Philosophy, a Warning, that’s the precise antithesis of a lot modern continental theorizing. In contrast to a Kittler or Virilio — who see the technological object as forming the human topic who is available in contact with it, instructing her or him tips on how to use it, its operation and worth not explicitly designed however latent inside its kind, ready to be found — Smith sees expertise as a prosthesis, designed to satisfy steady wishes: “[N]otwithstanding the large adjustments within the measurement, velocity, and group of the gadgets we use from one decade or century to the following, what these gadgets are, and the way they form our world, has been considerably the identical all through the course of human historical past.” In Smith’s view, the technological object is just not “a discursive product without end trapped throughout the confines of a single epoch’s epistēmē,” however somewhat a continued striving towards what he presents because the dominant finish of human technological innovation: the facilitation of communication.
A family tree of this striving takes up a large portion of this guide, with recurring references to the works of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom Smith identifies as one of the outstanding prefigurers of the web, each in his designs of never-realized machines (such because the succinctly named “An Arithmetical Machine wherein Not Solely Addition and Subtraction However Additionally Multiplication and Division Are Carried Out with Just about No Effort of the Thoughts”) and in his philosophy, which serves as a utopian theorization of the ur-internet, in addition to a mandatory corrective to the technophilic algorithm worship of Silicon Valley. Inveighing towards Elon Musk and all these different victims of the Californian Ideology who insist that we reside in a simulation constitutes a considerable a part of the guide. Whereas this part appears tangential at first, Smith demonstrates that their error is indicative of a elementary misunderstanding not solely in regards to the web but in addition, and maybe extra tellingly, about cognition and what it means to be a considering being. In Smith’s compelling account, the simulation theorists have fallen sufferer to a mystification whereby both the human mind turns into an inert mechanical factor (a view Smith considers discredited by Leibniz’s Mill argument, which states that even when we may enlarge the thoughts to the scale of a mill, in order that we may freely transfer inside it and look at it, “we’ll by no means discover something to elucidate a notion”) or else our view of machines regresses to an “understanding of human artifice that finally belongs to the pre-scientific period: one which takes our probing into nature, and our channeling of the forces of nature to our personal functions, as one thing that’s finally magical, an unleashing of mysterious forces.”
These techno-mystics — be they recreation theorists, adherents of simulation concept, or tech moguls — are the supply of lots of the issues Smith lays out within the guide, and so they’re, in a method, his preferrred viewers. In his closing chapter, discussing the alternatives offered by the web through the first section of the COVID-19 pandemic, Smith makes clear that his critique is just not of the web as such; telecommunication, in spite of everything, is just not some unnatural factor however somewhat a element of our species-being. Furthermore, the web — and Wikipedia particularly, that “infinite guide wheel” and “cosmic window,” with the alternatives it affords for a stroll by means of the archive of human information — is its personal small utopia. The issue, as Smith argues in his first chapter, is social media — which, although it represents solely a small fraction of the unwieldy, unindexed, gesamt web, is the section nearly all of us use. Social media, he writes, “are the place the life is on the web.”
This “life” is a hell of bots and people indistinguishable therefrom, replete with corrupted consideration and misinterpret intention. We’ve got witnessed, within the ascendency of Fb, Twitter, and their epigones, the consummation of an extractive economic system that rivals the oil trade by way of its built-in misanthropy. Whereas the perils of the web don’t equal the destructiveness of local weather change, we are able to a minimum of say of the oil economic system that its environmental harm, and consequent destruction of the human world, is simply an epiphenomenon, whereas for the web, the destruction of the human is itself the supply of worth. “If we may put [the internet] on trial,” Smith writes in his introduction, “its crime can be a criminal offense towards humanity.” The primary chapter then affords 4 principal antihuman transformations wrought by social media: first, “a brand new type of exploitation, wherein human […] lives are themselves the useful resource”; second, a resultant constraint on “human thriving” by means of the regular impoverishment of our capacity to concentrate, to take care of issues (for Smith, a philosophically privileged exercise); third, “the condensation of a lot of our lives right into a single system,” an intensification of the primary two adjustments; and eventually, the discount of human beings to knowledge factors. This fourth change is maybe most elementary — not solely are we diminished by the gaze of the extractive machine, however the internalization of this algorithmic logic reduces our personal self-conception as nicely:
[I]t is inevitable that this notion cycles again and turns into the self-perception of human topics, in order that these people will thrive most, or consider themselves to thrive most, on this new system who’re ready convincingly to current themselves not as topics in any respect, however as attention-grabbing units of knowledge factors.
This isn’t an intrinsic fault of the web, Smith asserts, nor of telecommunication applied sciences extra usually, which truly encode an admirable dream of human interconnectedness. “[T]right here doesn’t appear to be something in regards to the expertise itself that may clarify this failure,” he writes. What does clarify the failure of this dream is predictable, but no much less true for that: capitalism. Many critics have argued that social media, and the so-called platform capitalism they specific, are primarily antihuman. That they’re degrading and destroying our capacity to take care of issues is, at this level, past doubt. I’ve but to search out anybody who demonstrates the validity of this critique as succinctly as Smith does right here. To disagree with this account of the baleful results of our up to date web appears to be attainable provided that you disagree with Smith’s philosophical axioms: that centered consideration is vital and that people have an innate potential it might be a disgrace to squander.
If I’ve a quibble with The Web Is Not What You Suppose It Is, it’s not with Smith’s condemnation of social media and its extractive logics, neither is it along with his technique of “zooming out,” a type of historiographic pointillism that, admittedly, can at occasions produce a considerably vertiginous impact. (I might be mendacity if I didn’t acknowledge that, whereas studying a few fanciful Seventeenth-century report detailing using speaking sponges by residents of South Seas islands to speak over distances, I puzzled how, precisely, this pertains to the issues of social media.) My quibble, somewhat, is with what appears to be a failure to handle the important thing concern of expertise itself. The online of the spider, the clicking of the whale, the tropism of fungi are all adduced as examples of Smith’s salutary de-anthropocentric view of telecommunication applied sciences. But to equate these disparate actions appears to elide the central conundrum of our species, which is itself maybe the situation of chance of the disaster Smith is addressing: expertise, and particularly the web, is from us however not of us. Whales click on by way of flap valves, spiders spin by way of their spinnerets, however we tweet by way of our telephones. These items might resemble one another insofar as they’re all applied sciences in a capacious sense, however there’s a clear, important distinction. The cellphone is just not of us in the way in which the spinneret is of a spider, and whereas it might be true that the urge to tweet is pure, the capability to tweet is just not.
I don’t imply by this to “refute” Smith’s argument; I believe situating human telecommunication in its ecological context is helpful and mandatory. The web, in lots of senses, is just not a rupture from the human and pure historical past that preceded it: now we have all the time wished to speak, and we aren’t the one beings that may. Smith wonders:
Isn’t it attainable that the newest outgrowths of our personal species-specific telecommunicative exercise […] are actually one thing extra like an outgrowth latent from the start in what now we have all the time finished, an ecologically unsurprising and predictable expression of one thing that was already there?
This can be true, and The Web Is Not What You Suppose It Is gives a compelling case. This, nevertheless, doesn’t eradicate the query of expertise, a mechanism that’s separate from us somewhat than an inherent element of our corporeal being. The web is akin to a world prosthesis, permitting entry to huge reserves of information and near-perfect planetary communication. However it is usually ruining us. Justin E. H. Smith has instructed us in nice element the way it bought this manner; another person should inform us tips on how to repair it.
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Joshua Judd Porter is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York.
