The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

January 1, 2022
A professor of history and philosophy of science casts a stony eye on the liberatory promises of the internet. When most people talk about the internet, they're really talking about the tiny slice that is social media. It's a "reverse synecdoche, the larger containing term standing for the smaller contained term," writes Smith by way of introduction to his central argument. These social media, he argues, are fundamentally enemies of human liberty. Employing that reverse synecdoche, he shows how the internet "has distorted our nature and fettered us" by, among other things, turning users into addicts (in the strictest terms) and serving as a surveillance device that often limits our political freedoms. We are bent by our technology, unable to concentrate on reading and no longer remembering anything without Google's help. Of course, as Smith points out, this is a charge leveled against previous information technologies. When Gutenberg printed the Bible, people could simply read it rather than having to memorize it, which many critics at the time considered to be a diminution of human intelligence. Smith is not quite so doctrinaire about print, but he makes a good case that the computer of Gottfried Leibniz's dreams more than 300 years ago was not the personality-shaping machine of today. Leibniz imagined something whose workings, in modern terms, "can be performed without 'strong AI, ' without any internal life or experience of all the calculative operation it performs." Leibniz further held that human thought is an instrument of excellence, whereas those who shape algorithms today seem not to think much about human thought (or excellence) at all. The best parts of this thoughtful book-length essay link those algorithms to the "gamification of social reality," of which a strong example is the down-the-rabbit-hole entity called QAnon. A worthy critique of a technology in need of rethinking--and human control that seeks to free and not enchain.

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May 30, 2022
Smith (Irrationality), a history professor at the University of Paris, draws on centuries’ worth of philosophy to examine the pervasive reach of the internet in this enlightening survey. Smith begins with a look at literature on the “philosophy of attention,” explaining how “the internet is an impediment to the cultivation of attention,” and characterizes the lack of “attentional commitment” required in scrolling through Twitter for hours as a “moral failure on my part, and... on the part of those who contrived to reduce me to this condition for profit.” Elsewhere, Smith considers the internet as a possible example of the Greek philosophical idea of a “world soul,” a force connecting all of nature, and explores the notion that reality is a simulation (people who think so probably wouldn’t if “the video games in question were, say, arcade consoles featuring PacMan”). He pulls from an impressive collection of thinkers, such as Kant, Francis Bacon, and lesser-known “cybernetician” Norbert Wiener, and though his angle’s a fascinating one, the book has its wobbles, notably with the occasional whiff of pretention (one chapter is titled, for instance, “How closely woven the web: The Internet as Loom”) and jargony sentences. Philosophy students and seasoned readers of the topic, though, will find Smith to be a capable guide to why what’s online is there, and how it came to be.