The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is
A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
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
Many think of the internet as an unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive achievement of modern human technology. But is it? In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin Smith offers an original deep history of the internet, from the ancient to the modern world—uncovering its surprising origins in nature and centuries-old dreams of radically improving human life by outsourcing thinking to machines and communicating across vast distances. Yet, despite the internet’s continuing potential, Smith argues, the utopian hopes behind it have finally died today, killed by the harsh realities of social media, the global information economy, and the attention-destroying nature of networked technology.
Ranging over centuries of the history and philosophy of science and technology, Smith shows how the “internet” has been with us much longer than we usually think. He draws fascinating connections between internet user experience, artificial intelligence, the invention of the printing press, communication between trees, and the origins of computing in the machine-driven looms of the silk industry. At the same time, he reveals how the internet’s organic structure and development root it in the natural world in unexpected ways that challenge efforts to draw an easy line between technology and nature.
Combining the sweep of intellectual history with the incisiveness of philosophy, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is cuts through our daily digital lives to give a clear-sighted picture of what the internet is, where it came from, and where it might be taking us in the coming decades.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
