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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.… (more)
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Current dilemmas of Internet experience are addressed in the chapter "A Sudden Acceleration," which discusses the ways in which social media and other functions of the 'net are hostile to the quality of attention, as well as subject to arbitrary dynamics of power and exploitation.
In "The Ecology of the Internet," Smith not only questions boundaries between the Internet and other human inventions, but between human invention and the expressions of nature more generally. The mood here is both iconoclastic and heartening.
I found a little fault with Smith's antagonism in "The Reckoning Engine" for what he called the "simulation argument," in that he did not effectively distinguish between the simulation of consciousness and the simulation of its objects, sometimes falsely accusing expositors of the latter to be claimants for the former. I'm all for denigration of the "You might be an NPC" views of Elon Musk (who might be a boss monster), but I don't think that's the position reluctantly conceded by Neil deGrasse Tyson (90). This chapter also entails some discussion of "artificial intelligence" that alternated between useful insights and a few remarks that made me wonder whether Smith really understood why and how contemporary technologists distinguish "AI" from earlier forms of automation.
The final two chapters "The Internet as Loom" and "A Window on the World" are a return to strength, taking the angles of philosophically-informed cultural history and informal phenomenology respectively. The curiously upbeat ending reminded me a little of the Talking Heads song "Television Man" while addressing givens similar to those of Bo Burnham's Inside.